Lifestyle

What are some real life examples of cultural appropriation?

When my wife and I got married, she decided that she really wanted to wear a traditional red Chinese wedding dress for the ceremony. In Chinese culture, you see, the traditional color for wedding dresses is red instead of white (white is associated with death and mourning and is therefore traditionally worn at funerals), and her dress was very similar to the one in this picture:

[Not my wife, but a very similar dress]

Nothing wrong with that, of course, since the ceremony was being held in a Chinese restaurant. Oh, and my wife happens to be Chinese. Did I mention that?

Yes, here she is in her traditional red Chinese wedding dress:

But, here’s the thing… Once the wedding ceremony and traditional wedding dinner were over, we then had a wedding reception for a much larger group of people and she decided to change into a white dress so as to better fit in with traditional Western culture, despite the fact that she was still a Chinese citizen at that time!

Can you believe that? She actually appropriated the traditional dress of a culture not her own. The nerve of her!

And, yes, the second and third pictures actually are pictures of my wife in her actual dress (and me, of course). I miss all that hair I had back then, but I’m not sad to have lost all that extra weight. She, of course still looks just as lovely 22 years later:

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