{"id":366,"date":"2008-02-28T15:48:34","date_gmt":"2008-02-28T20:48:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.froginawell.net\/china\/2008\/02\/strawberry-cake\/"},"modified":"2014-08-30T13:38:50","modified_gmt":"2014-08-30T13:38:50","slug":"strawberry-cake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/2008\/02\/strawberry-cake\/","title":{"rendered":"Strawberry Cake"},"content":{"rendered":"

One of my students is doing an honors thesis on kissing. Specifically she is looking at a series of articles from Ling Long<\/a> that explain what kissing is and why Shanghai women of the 1930’s should be doing more of it if they want to be modern women. One of the interesting things about Ling Long is that there are lots of pictures of scantily clad women (usually foreigners) in it. She suggests that the pictures (like the text of most of the issues) was intended to present modern, western ideas about sexuality and the role of women to Chinese people in a way that was both intimate and at the same time foreign enough to not be threatening. Thus foreign movie stars were great subjects.<\/p>\n

It is an interesting thesis1<\/a><\/sup> in part because it is interesting and in part because I think it offers an insight that helps us to understand some aspects the modern Chinese press. Even fairly serious Chinese papers tend to have a lot of cheesecake shots (almost always women. sorry) like this<\/a> set of photos of Jessica Alba2<\/a><\/sup> Part of it is just the idea that this will sell papers, but I find the text fascinating, as they seem to be dressing it up as something that will help us (Chinese readers) to understand the West. Here is the caption<\/p>\n

\u4e2d\u56fd\u65e5\u62a5\u7f51\u73af\u7403\u5728\u7ebf\u6d88\u606f\uff1aJessica Alba\u5728\u51fa\u6f14\u7535\u5f71\u300a\u751c\u5fc3\u8fa3\u821e\u300b\u4e2d\uff0c\u7528\u70ed\u8fa3\u7684\u821e\u59ff\uff0c\u52a0\u4e0a\u6f02\u4eae\u7684\u8138\u86cb\uff0c\u8d62\u53d6\u4e86\u201c\u7f8e\u56fd\u751c\u5fc3\u201d\u7684\u79f0\u53f7\u3002\u4e00\u7ec4Jessica Alba\u7684\u5185\u8863\u6cf3\u88c5\u7167\uff0c\u751c\u871c\u8bf1\u4eba\u597d\u4f3c\u8349\u8393\u86cb\u7cd5\uff0c\u89e3\u91ca\u4e86\u79c0\u8272\u53ef\u9910\u4e00\u8bcd\u3002<\/span><\/p>\n

An overly literal translation might be: Jessica Alba in the film Honey? used her hot and spicy dancing and\u00a0 and a beautiful face to win the title of “America’s Sweetheart”3<\/a><\/sup> In this set of photos of Jessica Alba in her underwear and swimwear she is as sweet and tempting as a strawberry cake, looking both sexy and tasty?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Very weird, in part because it is always hard to really translate some types of language, but also because the ‘serious’ American press does not dress up its pictures of movie stars this way. But as long as it helps you to understand Americans I guess it is o.k.<\/p>\n

  1. Which she explains much better than this ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li>

  2. No, I have not done a comparative study of the frequency of scantily clad women in the Western and Chinese press ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li>

  3. This is the hook for the ‘story’ and it seems quite wrong ↩<\/a><\/p><\/li><\/ol>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    One of my students is doing an honors thesis on kissing. Specifically she is looking at a series of articles from Ling Long that explain what kissing is and why Shanghai women of the 1930’s should be doing more of it if they want to be modern women. One of the interesting things about Ling…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":25,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[165,125,149],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-366","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-china","category-gender","category-post-mao"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p9yoH3-5U","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/25"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=366"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4863,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/366\/revisions\/4863"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=366"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=366"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/froginawell.net\/frog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=366"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}