Apology ahead in case this is offensive.
This is about everything with hands, not finger food.
Coming from a chopstick culture, eating with hands will always seem unhygienic to me because the logic is simple: It isn't that dirty hands contaminate the food, it's that the food contaminates the hands. It doesn't matter to me when someone says how clean their hands are when they have no problem going deep in the sauce.
Consider finger foods: items held with just the fingertips, leaving the rest of the hand clean. Even when they're messy, people wipe away any sauce the moment it spreads beyond the fingertips. For the sloppiest options, restaurants often provide gloves precisely to keep hands from getting dirty.
Eating with hands, by contrast, normalizes the sight of messy, food-covered hands. Over time, this builds a comfort with handling food using the entire hand, not because it's more practical, but because the discomfort with dirty hands has simply been conditioned away.
The viral video has sparked online debate over stray animal treatment and police response, while authorities said no formal complaint has been filed yet.
Last Night I Dreamed of Peace is a book that comes from a personal diary of a young doctor who volunteered in a battlefield clinic. She was so lonely. She wrote about her mother all the time. She wrote about a soldier she was in love with who never really loved her back, and about the "little brothers" she adopted among the wounded. She kept getting rejected from the Communist Party for being too "bourgeois"... basically, too soft, too sentimental, still the kind of girl who wrote about love. That hurt her, and she wrote about that too.
And underneath everything, the anger. She watched a kid cry over a mom and sister killed by American artillery and wrote: why are there such cruel people who want to use our blood to water their tree of gold? She tried to treat a boy burned by a phosphorus bomb and said he looked like he'd been roasted in an oven.
She was shot in the head at 27 on June 22 1970 by patrolling American soldiers. Her diary was saved by an intelligence officer thanks to a translator who told him to not burn it. Eventually it was returned to her mother in 2005 and her mother said it was so tough to read, she couldn't finish it.
Pretty much every Asian person I know is secular, like even the ones who go to Buddhist temples treat it more as cultural/family practice than serious devotion. So when I meet East or Southeast Asians who are genuinely devout Christians (or sometimes Muslims), I notice I get a little judgemental like they're brainwashed. Even those who are devout to western religion will still practice ancestor worship so it's all mixed up.
Sure we have our own religion but it feels a lot more secular than the western version. Buddhism/Daoism/Confucianism/folk religion feel like the native religious landscape but people aren't... preachy about it. Everytime I meet one that follow a foreign religion, I feel like they're lost.
Yea yea, I know the "foreign religion" framing isn't airtight like Buddhism originally came from India.