Comments on a news article

I was just reading the entertainment page of MingPao, and by entertainment it means the news of the Hong Kong entertainment industry. There was a striking headline, which runs something like this:

"Causes disgust" "Scares little kids" Yan-Yee acts as Snow White receives 171 cases of complains.

The rest of the revelant parts of the article runs as follows:

Yesterday the Department of Advertisement Management received 171 cases of complains concerning yesternight's broadcast of "Hong Kong Disney World Opening Celebration" from telephone calls, the main complain is concerning Yan-Yee in the show's acting as Snow White performing various songs and dances, that it "causes discomfort", "causes disgust" and "scares little kids", etc.

Yan-Yee (I forgot her English name) is the daughter of a famous Hong Kong celebrity, who actually is attending UBC in the faculty of Arts (or was it Fine Arts?). For much of her youthful years she has been known to be the "fat baby". Her mother is the "fat lady", and indeed Yan-Yee is quite obese. Recently she had trimmed her body up considerably, and now she actually doesn't look all that bad: while she is definitely not skinny, she is not even close to being obese either. She had actually published a book on her experience from the fat girl to the non-fat one (but I won't get into that). And she is not all that bad looking, although certainly she is no Venus (the Goddess of Love, not the tennis player).

Of course, the really key question here is: why these complains? What is it about her in the show as Snow White that makes her so revolting? Is it because she is a celebrity's daughter, and that people are jealous? Some people, maybe; but that would not trigger the comment "scares little kids". What is it about her as Snow White that might possibly scare little kids?

Well, let's ask another question first, then we will come back to this. What scares little kids? Given in the context of children's literature and entertainment, monsters, witches and evil people scare little kids. In a sense, I think what's happening is that Yan-Yee for some reason does not conform to the general image of Snow White, and because of this distortion, it causes some people to think that she will scare little kids.

This is a very round about way of saying that Yan-Yee is fat. Snow White is not fat. Snow White is not of ordinary looks. And perhaps (subconsciously) Snow White is not Chinese. The wonderful innocent Snow White has been distorted, and of course people find it revolting. A 171 complains is quite a big number; Hong Kong usually don't care to call about things unless it's pretty big, and this case proves to be the big thing.

This sets up a very interesting phenomenon in Hong Kong culture. Innocence is equated with physical beauty. That image makes us all warm and fuzzy and smiley. Yet this is an exact reflection of just how demented the culture has became. People do not at all want to see reality - the reality that there are fat kids, and that there are ugly kids. There is also a kind of Western worship: if Yan-Yee was white, I am convinced that this would not have happened. Hong Kong culture is becoming extremely bipolar: everybody is obssessed with the ideal and strives to be the ideal (like Yan-Yee's body trimming), but everybody is doomed to fail (like Yan-Yee's performance). Yet everyone keeps on trying anyway because the ideal image myth is everywhere: TV, advertisement, posters, etc, and everyone is possessive about these images: any attempt to (un)intentionally change the image is attacked.

Of course, at the end of the day hardly anybody in the world cares about what I've just written. Even I don't care, because I cannot answer the question "so what?" So what if everyone worships this cruel ideal image and lost touch with his or her own bodily reality? We don't have to worry about that, because we can actually and continually change our own bodily reality (plastic surgery and weight lost programs). And so what if there are political (by that, I mean in terms of race, class and sexuality) implications from this (what Naomi Wolf calls) the "Beauty Myth"? Disney World will run on, and so will the Snow White image.

So what now?