Folklore Form/Genre: Chinese gesture/mannerism       Informant: Joseph Zhu

Name: 白眼                                                                              Place of Origin: China

Date Collected: 10/28/2018

Informant Data:

Joe was born in Cangzhou, China in 1968. He moved to the United States in 1999 and lives in Charlottesville, Virginia, working as a post doctorate research scientist in Biomechanical Engineering at the University of Virginia. He feels strongly connected to Chinese culture and continues to follow and use Chinese media, news, and social media, and often visits China for business and family purposes.

Contextual Data:

Social Context:

Joseph Zhu is my father, and I collected this from him via phone call. He said that a very popular one he knows is eye-rolling. He said that this along with turning one’s head a lot to face away from the person speaking is really rude and specifically shows impatience. He learned this rude gesture in the context of his parents telling him as a kid when he was about six or seven years old, not to do it. However, he says that growing up, it is a relatively common rude gesture and that he actually encountered it recently in a video that went viral in China. He sent me this video that recently went viral in Chinese media because of the blatant negative gestures being displayed by a woman sitting close to the speaker. The video is now censored in China.

Cultural Context:

While eye-rolling is now a more global phenomenon that most everyone associates with disrespect, apparently it was not so widespread until 1980. Instead, for instance, eye-rolling was associated with lust and was in fact used by William Shakespeare to portray lust in his plays. The concept of 白眼, translated literally to “white eye” for the part of the eye that is most showing has been around since 263 AD according to my informant.

Item:

Eye-rolling or 白眼 (“white eye”) is a negative gesture in Chinese that indicates impatience and annoyance at whoever is talking or whatever situation the person finds themselves in.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=iHsH0WtyFMA

Transcript: 

“Here is a famous example. In the news recently, you watch the woman in blue clothing. She is impatient because her eye is showing white and she face the other way. 白眼 is a common insulting gesture in China.”

Informant’s Comments:

None

Collector’s Comments: 

This one is interesting because although it seems really common and globally known nowadays, apparently it is really old and ingrained in Chinese culture. The idea of it was not spread there in a globalizing world but one that existed in China possibly even earlier and has a different name: “white eye” as opposed to “rolling one’s eyes.”

Collector’s Name: Seamore Zhu

Tags/Keywords:

• Gestures
• China
• Insulting
• Eye-rolling
• Face
• Expression