Hey Erik! Thanks for commenting and reaching out. This was obviously a very hard piece to write and I'm going to go through the comments and reply to everyone, now. But honestly, it's a good question but I think they would pick the former. The worship of paler skin in Asian cultures goes really deep, and I wouldn't even call it internalized racism or whatever woke term we have for it these days. In regards to your other comment, the racist comments I've heard in China are far worse than anything I've heard in the United States. The only reason you don't see more incidents like what we have in the U.S. is East Asian countries tend to be extremely homogenous, whereas America, to its credit, is a pretty diverse country relative to the norm in a lot of the rest of the world. It's really tough to be Black and living in an Asian country. As a teacher, it might be seen as a prestigious profession in China, but not as much as lawyer, doctor, or engineer. Not by far. And this might be a tangent but whenever we compare the U.S. education to Finland and Korea because they are also very ethnically homogenous countries (albeit less and less in recent years). Hope this input makes sense.