A Response to "Welcome to a Chinese Wal*Mart"

[Nast]

So probably some of you can sympathize with being the recipient of mind-numbingly dumb and perhaps even racist chain emails forwarded to you from a relative. Well, tonight I found an email forwarded to my inbox from my well-meaning  mother, which filled me with such annoyance that I had to hit "reply all" and send a brief response, which probably will do no good but at least temporarily relieved the flow of bile that had quickly welled up from depths of my gall badder. The email forwarded, entitled "Welcome to a Chinese Wal*mart" was a series of photos of the interior of a Wal*Mart and the products within in it, focusing on such lurid things as bins of organ meats, frozen crocodile heads, and wacky household products. This in itself didn't offend me, it was the asinine "Hey look at how BARBARIC and WEIRD these furrnerrs are" tone that the commentary on the photos were written in that did it. This was my response:

     While the article brought up a fair concern of lack of sanitation standards in the store (that I won't debate), I found it was mostly pandering to the depressingly common and may I say thoroughly racist depiction of Eastern culture as backwards and wacky, effectively reducing it to an "Other" to merely be gawked at from the comfort of our Western cultural tunnel. The author sneers at food products that are considered dirty and inedible in the West such as organ meats and reptiles, making a spectacle of what is a normal part of these people's food culture. It is an extremely juvenile and culturally insensitive approach, the adult equivalent to a 4th grader making fun of another student's lunch. Clearly our culture has not moved on from the fucking 18th century, when stories of the "exotic Orient" titillated the populace and fed into an inaccurate and imaginary picture of East Asians that made any cross-cultural understanding nigh impossible.

     And if we're going to compare apples to apples, it's no worse than the processed crap foods that American Walmarts are filled with.Hell, at least these people know that the food they're eating was at one point alive, not something brewed in a chemical vat and canned, to later be injected directly into the bloodstream of our precious Honey-Boo-Boo child so that she may continue to entertain us with her antics, while meanwhile, our email inboxes pile up with this sort of unsolicited racist trash.

    Or Kill Me.

[East Coast Hustle]

I fully endorse this fuckery.

10/10

[Cain]

In Europe, we have just plain old "Welcome to WalMart" emails.

Then again, we also have Lidl, so we shouldn't exactly be boasting.

[Q. G. Pennyworth]

Well played, sir.

[Anna Mae Bollocks]

About twice a week I get something on my facebook about CHINESE people rescuing dogs from the meat trade over there. And the comment threads are all about WHAT HORRIBLE THINGS SHOULD HAPPEN TO (ALL) THE CHINESE FOR EATING DOGS.

You can't reason with morons. I guess the only response is along the lines of "Have another factory farmed McRib and STFU".

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I like this.

I like it a lot.