Everywhere you look, Americans think that they understand this Chinese concept of “losing face.” Any article or essay that you read about East Asian and especially Chinese behavior will involve some author’s delineation of what losing face entails and how that influences how Chinese people act. Mostly, these delineations of “losing face” tend to show up in essays about homophobia in Chinese society or studies on Chinese consumer behavior.
America’s understanding of “losing face” largely grows out of its own sinophobia. Americans think that Chinese people are emotionless robots so they assume that someone who is afraid of losing face is someone who is afraid to express or emote by using their face. They assume that the Chinese people who are so fearful about losing face are prideful and narcissistic, that they must neglect moving their faces at all for the fear of losing it.
Pop sociology tells Americans that China is a “shame” based culture. So, Americans think that Chinese people cannot deal with shame and love to keep their head down.
The reason why Americans think this about Chinese people is largely due to the history of Chinese workers being excluded from traditional labor organizing. Americans think that Chinese people work like robots who don’t care about the rest of humanity so they only see Chinese labor as cheap labor which will bring the standard of human rights down. You will see these western lefty intellectuals decry the East Asians who always seem to break the picket line while wearing clothes made by Chinese workers from head to toe. That’s why the term “losing face” in English has the particular connotations that it does, why it shows an emotionless and reclusive worker who never expresses and just keeps their head down. Because Americans exclude and refuse connection from Asians.
In Chinese, the term losing face is diu lian or 丢脸. If you were to say that someone is afraid of losing face, then you would say “他很怕丢脸.” This Chinese phrase has a completely different connotation than the English term “losing face” because it exists in a completely different cultural context.
When you think of someone who is afraid of 丢脸, you think of someone who always puts other people’s comforts above their own. When your mom is afraid of 丢脸, you see her squeeze the family into one bed whenever relatives come to visit so that the guests can be comfortable and sleep well. If your dad is afraid of 丢脸, then you see him give money to those who need it and make loans to relatives who ask even at the detriment of his own family’s finances.
Someone who is afraid of 丢脸 will allow other people to cut them in line because they don’t want to make a fuss or cause a big issue. If you are afraid of 丢脸, then you are overly giving because you prioritize other people’s well being over your own.
Family members can get irritated at other family members for being too afraid of 丢脸 because they will take from their closer relationships to give to their more distant ones since they are overly concerned with whether their larger community thinks of them as a good person. However, I don’t think that fear of 丢脸 is not necessarily negative. Too much 丢脸 is not good but it’s not inherently negative because it’s mainly about contributing to the larger good.
In a collectivist society, your 脸 or your face is actually just your social role. When you are afraid of losing your face, you are afraid of losing your social identity because you experience impermanence around your belonging in a group. That’s why fear of losing face is associated with women and with people who changed social classes relatively recently.
I recently saw someone write about how the western concept of shame is very different from shame in an Asian social context. I agree.
In an individualist society, shame is very personal. Shame makes you afraid to personally express yourself or be vulnerable so people with unprocessed shame are thought of as narcissistic or reclusive. Western shame has everything to do with pride and control—ego.
In a collectivist society, shame plays the social function of instructing people how and where to give. Being afraid of shame means that you keep feeding people on the outside while depleting your resources on the inside. You may not be afraid of just how much you deplete internally because you are so focused on your larger impact and social identity.
I think that people in the west are also afraid of losing face—afraid of losing the larger role that they play in their imagined community. They’re afraid of losing belonging, of not being queer enough or giving enough or good enough. It’s just that they don’t have a word to express this feeling outside of shame, a word which already has these racial undertones and a self centric framing.
Anyway. Losing face is more like people pleasing and should be translated as such. When people say that they are afraid of losing face, they are trying to say that they have people pleasing tendencies, not that they act like emotionless robots with immovable faces.
Next time you see “losing face” appear to describe Chinese people in an anglosphere context, read carefully to see how they spin it and what they are trying to imply. A lot of the time, the way people use this phrase will help you clarify western feelings about shame, especially around labor, sexual or otherwise, more so than anything to do with any Chinese people.
