Lin Qingyin was surrounded by a group of enthusiastic people. Some of them wanted to do fortune-telling, some wanted to be an apprentice, and some simply came to see what the Fortune-Telling Master of China looked like. Who knows if it was just a coincidence, but the group of people who came today seemed, can’t speak Chinese well. Aside from their super-fast English, their Chinese have different accents and tones. When Lin Qingyin heard of it, she felt her head swell with headache. She also immediately remembered the fear of being dominated by English in high school.
Just when she was thinking about the risk of teleporting away, Jiang Wei, who came out of the library, happened to see the aggrieved little master who was squeezed by a group of foreign students. He rushed over to squeeze the crowd away and guarded the little master behind him.
“Little Master, are you all right?” When Jiang Wei saw Lin Qingyin’s aggrieved expression, he almost couldn’t hold back his laughter. So he quickly coughed a few times and controlled his smile: “What’s going on? Why there are so many people?”
Lin Qingyin was also at a loss, but she could guess that these people must have been brought in by that Flowerbell. She sighed and angrily said: “Jiang Nanzhou brought an American to ask me to do divination. I guess these people were introduced by that American.”
“Then do you want to do fortune-telling for them?!” Jiang Wei turned his head to look at Lin Qingyin: “I think most of the people here are looking for you to do fortune-telling.”
“Really?” Lin Qingyin said unhappily, “I never thought of doing fortune-telling for foreigners. I study English for exams, not for fortune-telling.”
Jiang Wei was Lin Qingyin’s first tutor. He knew very well that Lin Qingyin’s English was a slag at that time. Jiang Wei couldn’t help but laugh when he saw Lin Qingyin’s bitter expression: “I can see that they are so enthusiastic and they will not be easily persuaded.”
Lin Qingyin looked at the excited faces of the people. Even if they were different from the Chinese people, she could see the enthusiasm in their eyes. They looked no different from those uncles and aunts in the Public Park.
“Isn’t your English very good?” Lin Qingyin reached out and poked Jiang Wei’s shoulder: “Come on, translate it for this master, tell them to line up for an appointment. Five thousand per fortune-telling, no discount.”
Jiang Wei looked back at Lin Qingyin in surprise: “Little Master, did you raise the price again?”
Lin Qingyin’s expression was very serious: “The price must be raised, who makes me upset when I hear English.”
Jiang Wei gave the willful little master a thumbs up and translated Lin Qingyin’s rules into English. Many people just came to join in the fun after watching the video. When they heard that it was possible to do fortune-telling, many people didn’t know what it was for a while. Some of them just wanted to verify whether the video on the Internet was true or not.
Since there were rules for fortune-telling, those who want to do fortune-telling obediently made an appointment. Jiang Wei knows Lin Qingyin’s character, so he only arranges for two international students every day. They were arranged in the back row according to the order. Soon people got their number of appointments. The corner of Lin Qingyin’s lips couldn’t help but twitch when she saw one client with a black complexion. Fortunately, this person wanted fortune-telling. If this person ask something else, she was powerless. After all, except for the white in this person’s eyes, anywhere else was black.
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At the end himmmm.
Racist much?🙄
Right! That’s always an aspect in these Cnovels. Racism and colorisn
Well, China is very rassistic. Not so much against white people, but according to some black people who visited China/live in it, all Chinese people whom they encounter on the street always stop what they are doing and stare at them like animals in a zoo.
Google “racist chinese detergent advertisement” where a black person gets stuffed into a washing machine and becomes white.
There is a million dollar industry in Africa of black people calling themselves inferior, savage stupid and so on in chinese (without knowing what they are saying) in videos.
This is probably the dumbest thing one can write, there are a lot of foreigner especially black people living in China for years and none of them describe stupid things like what you say.
Oh my god, my good feelings for this novel turned negative in these last two chapters.
🙄 People shouldn’t apply their own values to stories from another culture. It’s not racist to say that someone is black – as it previously mentioned, she can’t read the face of someone that isn’t Chinese. It relies on reading certain facial features (the distance between features, as well as discoloration or marks on the face would all have meaning) and she has zero experience with anyone outside her own ethnicity. That greatly affects her accuracy, so she would have to guess and she won’t compromise her reputation like that.
And yes, culturally speaking, Asians tend to prefer white skin as a beauty standard. Don’t be xenophobic, accept that different cultures have different norms and stop letting it ruin your day. IIRC it’s traced back to the time when only wealthier people could afford to not work in fields and get tan, so it was a symbol of wealth. If anything, it’s rooted in classism, not racism.
It seems you are unable to read the obvious racism in between the lines. You shouldn’t apply your own lacking cognition to excuse racism.
Lol. Stooping to personal insults just because you don’t agree. Sorry, I don’t let my emotions rule when I read, so I don’t read into the text to make up issues where there are none. Not everyone is as race obsessed as you are. Guessing you’re from the US, that’s the most common culture for seeing racism everywhere.
Btw, I didn’t say that Chinese people aren’t racist – that would be silly as most countries, particularly with a fairly homogenous people (and super nationalist pride as in China) are racist to varying degrees. But what is said here isn’t racist when judged on its own, without adding your personal feelings to it.
To each their own, I’m sure you’ll say I’m racist and excusing racism because of it, but 🤷🏻♀️ It surprises me how many people continue to read Asian novels when they’re this sensitive.
I agree with Tenshineko here.
There’s nothing racist here
China is racist and Chinese people are 100% racist, especially against black people but I’m not sure that the last few lines are racist. She’s already stated that she can’t do face readings for other races (in previous cases it was white people but it makes sense that it also applies to black people) and from what I’ve seen there’s also an aspect of certain parts of the faces being certain colours (eg dark forehead/acupuncture point, yellow under eyes/cheeks) so everything she knows about colour on the faces, which I think she has used in previous chapters, could maybe be applied to a white person whose skin is kind of similar coloured in that it’s light but a black person’s skin is completely different
Actually, to add to my previous comment, this bit really doesn’t make much sense if you spend some time thinking about it, and the author really should have thought things through before adding it to the story. That Lin Qingying is rejecting foreigners so vehemently just makes Lin Qingyin seem shortsighted, narrow minded, and worse, unskilled.
Lin Qingyin originally came from the world of cultivation, and had lived there for at least a thousand years. She reached the absolute pinnacle of divination and the entire world fought over being able to hear her fortunes. Are we supposed to believe that there is only a single language and race in the entire cultivation world? A world that’s likely to have many times the population of Earth due to how long cultivators can live?
Yeah. Not very likely, is it?
Even if the cultivation world is against all odds populated exclusively by Han Chinese, there is also the immortal world she was trying to ascend to. Seeing as dragons and illuminated spirits are a thing, there’s no way there won’t be tons of different races there. Since Lin Qingyin actively refuses to learn how to read the fortunes of foreign races, does that mean she’s content at being mediocre after she becomes an immortal, and only read the fortunes of her own race?
So, in short. Because of the above, author did a pretty good job of making Lin Qingying appear narrow minded because she’s spent over a thousand years only caring about honing her skill in reading fortunes for her own race, short sighted due to her lack of preparation for her future ascension and the eventual culture shock of multiple races, and unskilled because of her abject refusal to improve herself on these two matters now that she has the chance to. Good job, author.
The earlier comment doesn’t seem like it takes into account the actual world building in the story. The world of cultivation doesn’t seem to be another world, it is just 1000 years in the past and people have forgotten the way to cultivate, and spirit energy is much less, usually implied to be because of modernization making the world impure. The dragon bones and spirit stones etc exist in this life as well, so you can see they aren’t different worlds. Don’t add details to the story just because you imagine the fictional cultivation world to be a certain way – I don’t think I’ve read a single cultivation story that had anyone other than Han Chinese type people in it. The whole genre is Chinese and written solely from that POV. If you read any cultivation stories, becoming immortal is extremely rare (hence her own failure) and once someone ascends they seem to mostly leave this world behind, so no there aren’t tons of immortals around, let alone foreigners. Not to mention that it doesn’t matter how long they *could* live, most cultivation is dangerous and cultivators frequently die (look at how many evil cultivators have died just in this story). From my dabbling in the genre, generally most people do not cultivate, and those that do rarely live long because their lifespan is dependent on the level they can attain and if they fail to pass a tribulation they die. So only very, very talented people ever reach a long lived status.
Also, the little master was sequestered in her sect for nearly her entire life, and her disciples and peers brought occasional important people to her, she didn’t go out. It mentions many times that she never experienced the world, not even eating and sleeping after she stopped needing to, which is one reason she is so interested in eating and getting involved with more people in this lifetime. Not having rich emotional experiences is one reason she probably failed her tribulation. So she’s sequestered, and 1000 years ago there wasn’t exactly globalization. Where would she be meeting foreigners?
Besides the differences in facial features making divination difficult, she brought up a good point about time of birth. Chinese fortune telling is very much based in your 8 characters, which tell the exact time of birth and relates to astrology and other factors. If you are born in another time zone, how does that affect the calculation? She was very concerned about that, which makes a lot of sense. If you go by the lunar calendar vs the Gregorian, you may be born in different years if you happen to be born in January/February.
Very heated debate on racism. I am not saying there is no racism in China, it’s the same every where, but I don’t think this story is racist. Lin Qingyin has a very simple personality, and she is lazy. Fortune telling is an easy money making business for her, but she has no ambition to broaden her customer base outside Chinese people because it’s too much efforts! Why bother with new type of faces, new language, new culture to learn? Lazy MC is lazy. That’s why she does not like English, and she never tries to study Caucasian or African or other races faces. No racism, just laziness.
Yes , she justs to learn money from Fortnite telling just for cultivation resources
I don’t agree that this is racist. Face reading is so specific to features and Asian faces are a limited scope – nose shapes, eye shapes, cheekbones etc. What would be averagely considered a high nose on Asian faces would likely be considered just an average height or even below average height on someone of a Caucasian or African descent. What is considered big eyes in Asian faces would be small for Hispanics and so on.
Considering it from a mathematical view of how she supposedly calculates from their facial features, then it’s like having her work with a range of data she is completely unfamiliar with. It’s not racist for her to say her current abilities can’t calculate non-Chinese faces. I’m a Chinese girl who immigrated from China and was raised in the states. I still can’t tell some white actors apart simply because I grew up in a predominantly Asian community and had limited exposure to a wide range of faces. I personally don’t think that’s it’s racist to have a hard time with faces. It’s like my brain is a computer that has only worked with specific variables and is slower to process unfamiliar data. People say they can’t tell Asians apart – it’s not inherently racist but more to do with lack of exposure. Just like when I went back to China some girls would fawn over a Westerner and say he looks like so and so actor and is handsome. Because I had seen more than them I could say that person did not look like the actor at all.
Let’s not all be so quick to judge based on lack of experience. MC is not turning them away because she’s prejudiced by saying Chinese people are better than foreigners, she simply knows this is outside of her expertise and it gives her a headache to communicate or calculate. She’s lazy as other commenters have pointed out.
As for the cultivation world lacking other races being a plot hole is something I can somewhat agree with. But who’s to say that each god realm isn’t different and subjective to each culture. Each culture has their own mythology and ‘cultivation’ – Nordic gods, Roman gods, Chinese gods, Japanese gods, Hindu gods, Voodoo gods, etc. The current scope of this cultivation realm has only pointed to East Asian mythology – dragon, phoenix, tortoise and tiger were noted. It’d be unrealistic to say African cultivators would follow the same mythology when they have their own mythical creatures. They also have their own ways of fortune telling. Some Native American tribes utilized smoke for divination. Some (I forget the culture) use tea leaves – like in Harry Potter. Different cultures have different methods – it doesn’t make it racist that some methods are not as easily applied to other cultures. We know what we are familiar with. It’s only racist to be prejudiced against what we are familiar with. She’s not insulting them because they’re foreigners. That in my eyes makes it that MC is only inexperienced in this direction.
Just my two cents. If you don’t agree you don’t agree, let’s not make it personal. Don’t make negative assumptions about my character if something I wrote touches on a personal issue of yours. That’s called being petty rather than righteous.
You know it’s racist when the author can only see black on the black person because for sure what set race apart is the skin. And every race knows, what hold the physical body is the soul and for her being a fortune-teller is very sarcastic 🤌 ( the irony).
I think it would have been a wise choice for the author to stick with the race she/he has knowledge of.
I believe when you talk about heave and dragons and fantasy, you must have a gap to know there more things out there you can’t explain. It’s better to say you don’t know than giving one opinion your not sure of, cause I never knew black people have black soul that you can’t see anything which is so low even for a racist.
I agree – being able to tell apart faces is mostly based in exposure to different types. Our brains work on patterns and also tend to only retain info that is pertinent to us. I don’t think people realize just how often our brains will actually “fill in” details so they make sense to us – and sometimes the filled in info is actually wrong 🤷🏻♀️
Idk what China’s stance actually is with regards to the title but as far as I can tell, it is clearly stated why Mc has trouble reading foreigners. Be it white, black, and what not. I don’t really see racism here but rather just expanding horizons whilst giving a reasonable background to them.
Here, Mc’s influences reaches foreign countries but then is shown how hard it is for her to properly read them. It also shows multi cultural facets such as a black person and white person costumers, so so. Indeed, I’d say it’ be hard to properly read a black person’s face given she has to pay attention to the lines and Aura or so. This is not used in derogatory terms but rather simply used to explain the facts or so in the WN. If one with lighter colors is already hard cause they are different from Chinese people which is actually the real usual setting of these things, then with the complications of shadows and such on a black person’s face on top of that, yeah.
That’s my take on it anyways. I don’t really find anything too radical nor offensive here. No racial slur but rather simple statements.