The unsettling truth is that East Asians do all sorts of on-the-spectrum things. This isn’t to say that they literally have millions of undiagnosed autism cases on their hands – just that they have countless millions with what appears to the laymen’s eye as odd and perhaps, somehow, in an unsettling manner, mildly autistic.
They do all sorts of things that are incomprehensible to the Western mind. Attempting to work through the logic of this or that cultural institution, more often than not, just compounds the confusion. It’s best to just nod and go along with things so as to save face and avoid social conflict.
Case in point: the nurse at the Lao Cai, Vietnam hospital, as part of my blood testing to make sure I didn’t have syphilis as a prerequisite for a work permit, handed me this vial with a diameter the size of a chopstick. She told me to pee in it, substituting hand gestures for words. I asked her how. She replied with a nonverbal look that meant “figure it out,” stupid.
I didn’t ask any more questions and went into the bathroom where I dribbled all over my fingers to fill ‘er up.
Things get weirder when it comes to local aesthetics. Whereas the (overly) analytical Western mind is obsessed with finding the “meaning” in everything, the Eastern mind merely concerns itself with visual or other sensory aesthetics.
To illustrate, I traveled along a highway back in 2011 with some Taiwanese colleagues on our way to an amusement park in the middle of the forest with various attractions featuring unlicensed Disney™ characters. Along the side of the highway was a factory of some sort, with a pair of smokestacks issuing putrid-tinted yellow smog into the air. On these were painted scenes of unicorns frolicking through crystal-clear blue skies.
I laughed at the spectacle; they asked me why. I explained the irony of painting such a pristine scene on an object emitting such palpably gross pollution.
“They want to make it pretty,” they explained, visibly confused, incapable of appreciating the irony, which they have no sense of in any kind of context.
I could give way more examples of Alice-in-Wonderland-style nonsense, but won’t for the sake of brevity.
It was recently brought to my attention that a pair of former work colleagues (a Ukrainian and an Egyptian), still in my former adopted home of Lao Cai, Vietnam, had a baby there. Like most babies, this one didn’t have any hair. So a family friend gifted them a hairpiece for her to be used for photoshoots.
The mother accepted graciously.
The thought process is like:
- Baby has no hair
- Baby should have hair
- Fasten fake hair to scalp
Problem solved.
There’s apparently enough of a demand for baby hairpieces that a cottage industry has emerged to supply it.
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Above: via the Amazon of East Asia, Shoppee: “Baby Wig Braid Hairband Children Fake Bangs Head Buckle COS Hair Accessories Baby Princess Hair Design”
Ben Bartee is an independent Bangkok-based American journalist with opposable thumbs. Follow his stuff via Armageddon Prose and/or Substack, Patreon, Gab, and Twitter.
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