Guaranteed a non Asian person took this photo. I don’t even have to check.

I can’t even look at it, it’s so ingrained in me not to do this

Nothing screams "laziest photo choice on a China story" than "rice bowls" and nothing says "we have zero cultural insight" like this specific photo.

Since this is blowing up I just want to say I should own how I know this: I made this mistake myself when I first moved abroad

My friends, in horror, QUICKLY educated me. You only make this mistake once. Hopefully not in front of an auntie w/the power of The Disapproving Glare.

I studied a lot about the culture I was moving into but still made plenty of mistakes. This was Thailand & a lot of the mistakes involved me doing things like closing drawers w/my foot, stepping over things I shouldn’t, sitting impolitely, pointing at things w/hands. I learned.

Cultural literacy is hard. Not trying to let the photo editorial process off the hook here. I suspect they just don’t know about the chopsticks issue. That’s cringey, maybe worse. But “rice=china” is *particularly* bad in a time when bamboo fibers are being hunted for on ballots.

Anyhow, my own cultural boneheadedness knew no bounds when I first started working with the uni in Thailand.

A situation that stands out in memory:

I was producing an interactive CD-ROM (look it up kids) on classical Thai puppetry...

The team from the anthropology center & I went out to film a หุ่นกระบอก (hun-grabog, a specific type of classical puppet) performance. The classical Thai musicians had just stopped and I was about to cross the "orchestra pit," carefully stepping over the traditional instruments..

The videographer, a very quiet and gentle guy (really lovely fellow) camera still on his shoulder, whipped out his free hand and grabbed the back of my belt, arresting my forward movement.

I stood there, back foot on the ground, front leg straight out, suspended in mid-step forward.

It was a comic, looney-toons visual moment but would have lacked that humor if I'd completed the step.

He'd thankfully stopped me from committing the offense of stepping over the instruments, venerated in their own right. Stepping over them would have been bad. Stepping over *anything* can be at best gauche and at worst deeply offensive depending on object and context.

We were able to do the interviews with the band and things went smoothly. The CD ROM was amazing and I believe was never mass produced due to lack of budget after the late 90s financial crisis :(

An update to this:

@natashaskassam looked up the photo on shutterstock and found that the explicit description is ‘Putting chopsticks vertical in rice meaning death in Japanese culture’ so entirely possible this was a deliberate, if cringey, choice https://twitter.com/ethanschoonover/status/1390533559073480706?s=20