Written by Sheng-mei Ma.
Image credit: Jan Brueghel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens, The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man.
As Genesis has it, a woman and an apple, plus a snake with its silver tongue, caused the fall of humanity into Original Sin. Since its founding, America’s Original Sin began with its settler colonialism, tempted by the promise of a “virgin land,” from which Native American inhabitants were evicted and into which enslaved Africans and Chinese coolies were imported as cheap, disposable labour, or as Marxist means of production both for products and for babies, the latter prominently embodied by Sarah Hemings, housed at the slave quarter below her master Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello. A white caterpillar from Europe gnawed through the apple of an occupied continent, a promised land that beckoned, according to the Statue of Liberty, “huddled masses” to its shores.
On the opposite shore, the collective wish-fulfilment led Qing dynasty translators of “the United States of America” to project their anxiety over a moribund China afar onto a never-never land by cherry-picking the second syllable of “America,” idiosyncratically fashioning Meiguo (美國), the Beautiful Country. The USA’s Original Sin against nonwhites was passed on to China in its flight of fallacy over whiteness.
Given Taiwan’s recent efforts of indigenisation and de-Sinicisation for its own unique island identity, should it not start by correcting past discrimination inherent within the Chinese language? Such biases are hiding in plain sight, surely detectable by and reprehensible to a democratic society based on the rule of law and equality. I would not go so far as to recommend the homophone of Meiguo (the Beautiful Country) as “No Country” (沒國) or “Charm/Ghost Country” (媚/魅國). But at the minimum, we ought to opt for a neutral term, such as “Every Country” (每國) in the spirit of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution where everyman is created equal. True equity for women, enslaved people, and nonwhites would have to come later, if it comes at all. The opposite is true as well. Inheriting Chinese translation, the Taiwanese, rather unthinkingly, continue to render “Africa” as 非洲 (literally, “Non Continent” à la the Dark Continent). This unflattering moniker should be changed to 斐洲 or 菲洲, both homonyms without the “anti” or “non” implication of the Chinese translation. Such linguistic habits could be altered promptly in the same way Seoul is no longer translated as “Han City” (漢城) or Taiwan’s aborigines (原住民 original inhabitants) are no longer stigmatised as “mountain people” (山地人). They dwell in the arid mountains only because the Han settler-colonisers have chased them away from the fertile plains.
The “positive” first impression—or naming—of the USA notwithstanding, this new millennium witnesses the rise of China in the so-called Chinese Century poised to replace the postwar American Century. Paradoxically, the PRC—rather, the XRC—Xi’s, not People’s, Republic of China—manifests a split screen of sorts. Chinese Rambo, the military hero of the Wolf Warrior film franchise (2015, 2017) played by Wu Jing, overpowers white martial artists in the neocolonial expansion of the Sinosphere into Southeast Asia, Africa, even outer space in Wandering Earth (2019). Dispatching Frank Grillo in the mortal combat finale in Wolf Warrior 2, Wu Jing saves and gets the half-white girl played by the mixed-race Celina Jade. This Chinese box office hit enacted hating white men while loving, practically, white women.
Celina Jade is the tip of the iceberg, which is snowy white in colour—a personification of the Chinese entertainment industry’s craze for white-ish beauty, either natural-born Uyghur and other minorities of Central Asian heritage or man-made “artificial beauties” (人工美女rengong meinü). These beauties so populate the screen that the uncanny, unfathomable practice of cosmetic surgery is taken for granted by the Chinese audience. The de-Sinicising Mongoloid countenance of high cheekbones, broad face, and epicanthic folds, among other features, is nationalised, fetishised as de rigueur in Han Chinese ethnocentrism, intimating subconscious, self-inflicted whitewashing.
Countless celebrities, female and, increasingly, male, have thus subjected themselves to plastic surgeons’ scalpels and needles to sculpt their bodies in simulation of stereotypical Caucasian features: double-lidded eyes, bleached skin, high-ridge nose, shaved and trimmed Mongolian cheekbones, long slender face, sharp angular jawlines, pointy jaw, hair dyed blond or tinted, even broken and lengthened legs—nightmares of visceral pain and self-harm for self-realisation and virtual pleasure in the mirror and camera lens. Dreams of happiness and beauty from eighteenth-century America to twenty-first-century China disturb this restless slumberer, whose first name also includes mei or beauty. Mea culpa! My bad! Yet it is named by the father, not the infant, upon birth. Is God-given blessing in and of itself an Original Sin? These stars-cum-patients who endure body mutilation surely think so in resorting to such drastic measures to elevate themselves higher, closer to White Gods.
I hasten to add that even in cases where the skin is not chemically bleached, it is customary to powder the face and neck lily white. Yet profile shots often reveal, behind the ears and close to the collar, where the white “mask” ends and where the sallower, darker hue of the actor’s skin colour begins. Artificial, painted faces they all are—facing the public by defacing what comes naturally.
I also hasten to add that China’s split screen manifests itself in the binary treatment of Uyghur masculinity and femininity. Just as Xinjiang’s Uyghurs are being interned at “thought re-education camps” throughout the northwestern province neighbouring Afghanistan, Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia female actors with striking Caucasian features are luminaries in China, such as Liya Tong, Dilraba Dilmurat, Gülnezer Bextiyar (Gulnazar), and Rayza—joined by the mixed-race of Hong Kong’s Angelababy, Hawaii’s Maggie Q, Wolf Warrior 2’s Celina Jade, Detective Chinatown 2’s Natasha Liu Bordizzo, and many more. To the Han majority culture, minority masculinity, particularly Moslem, is foreign, feral, and to be tamed, whereas minority femininity with a touch of the white race is foreign, exotic, and to be embraced. That the foreign-looking female performers are assimilated and sinologised evinces itself in the perfect Beijingese in which Tong, Dilraba, Gulnazar, and Rayza deliver their lines, all trained at Beijing or Shanghai drama academies. Bluntly put, their white bodies have been groomed and coached to speak our national tongue. If words bespeak the inner core, then external whiteness has been possessed as one of us, the best, the most stellar, of us.
Rather than the biblical apple or the apple of a promised land, the true Original Sin shared by America and China is self-alienation for the sake of self-deception. Either culture blinds itself to the woes one inflicts on the other in order to feel good, even to the extent that that other happens to be this self, or part of oneself. Plastic surgery best exemplifies such self-improvement that is a euphemism for self-harm. There are ample examples of plastic surgery in China’s show biz, all gravitating to beauty defined by proximity to whiteness. I will cite only two from Twenty Your Life On (二十不惑, literally, Twenty No Temptation, henceforth Twenty), a most popular 20-episode Chinese TV series in 2020.
I tremendously enjoyed the series’ twin performers, Pu Guanjin and Wang Anyu, but their cosmetic transformation in recent years shocked me, shaking me to the core (see Figures 1 and 2). What drove these impressive young actors to do that to themselves, to undergo self-mutilation in the hope of improving their careers? In neither case does one detect, post-surgery, any significant uplift of their status in the show biz. If anything, they merely landed some minor and supporting roles with their new faces, formulaically slenderer and longer, skin fairer, with bigger eyes and thinner lips. More viscerally, what they put themselves through in real life goes counter to what they had preached in Twenty. In the preceding sentence, the past tense of “put,” the present tense of “goes,” and the past participle of “had preached” map out the timeline, from the 2020 show that pontificated on staying true to oneself and to others, to a sense of betrayal over surgical procedures to not be themselves, to the present time of secondary roles onscreen. As they age beyond twenty-year-olds, they decide to reverse time and acquire new selves. Plenty of their predecessors routinely and periodically vanish from the public eye, only to emerge from seclusion with an uncanny—familiar yet estranging—face and body. Is the chrysalis of China in the new millennium doing that for/to itself as well?
Curiouser and curiouser, the more China ascends as an aggressive global superpower, the more Chinese performers lay themselves flat, passively, on the operating table in pursuit of whiteness, either gaofushuai (tall rich handsome) for males or baifumei (white rich beautiful) for females. That these maxims on desirable, marriageable mates have entered the Chinese lexicon as a foregone conclusion speaks volumes and does so always with a Beijing accent.
Sheng-mei Ma (馬聖美) is Professor of English at Michigan State University in Michigan, USA, specialising in Asian Diaspora culture and East-West comparative studies. He is the author of over a dozen books, including Chinese Serial (2026); Cultural Bifocals (2025); China Pop! (2024); The Tao of S (2022); Off-White (2020); Sinophone-Anglophone Cultural Duet (2017); The Last Isle (2015); Alienglish (2014); Asian Diaspora and East-West Modernity (2012); Diaspora Literature and Visual Culture (2011); East-West Montage (2007); The Deathly Embrace (2000); Immigrant Subjectivities in Asian American and Asian Diaspora Literatures (1998). Co-editor of five books and special issues, including Transnational Narratives (2018) and Doing English in Asia (2016); he also published a collection of poetry in Chinese, Thirty Left and Right (三十左右).