Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals: #3 Imitating Beauty (东施效颦)
Take a leaf out of the book, but do it wrongly.
This article is one of the “Chinese Idiom Stories for Software Professionals” series.
Story: Imitating Beauty
Xi Shi (西施) was an acclaimed beauty in ancient China (~500 BC). Xi suffered from some sort of heart ailment. Therefore, she was often seen eyebrow knitting slightly walking through the village with a hand on her chest.
Dong Shi, an ugly woman living in the neighbourhood, always envied Xi’s ineffable beauty and she also noticed the beauty’s eyebrow knitting and graceful gait. Therefore, Dong decided to imitate her idol’s manner of walking. She thought that this might help disguise some of her ugliness.
But the imitation only made Dong look uglier. People shut doors or turned away to avoid seeing the unpleasant contortion of her.
note: this fable story is from the classic ‘ZhuangZhi’ book (~300BC), it is not about judging people on appearance.
Meaning
Blindly copying others’ superficial acts only makes oneself look foolish.
