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It's darker than you think.
I remember a Cantonese joke about a villager who came back to the village wailing that another villager's wife was killed by lightening.
It turned out he was wrong, and that the one killed by lightening was not the man's wife, so all the other villagers beat and ridiculed him.
Hilarious right? But what did not occur to the joke teller, and would not occur to other Chinese is... what about the other dead woman?
The background thought is "we don't know her, she doesn't matter."
The girl who told me the joke was incredibly intelligent, gifted in language, and tried very hard to understand Western ideas, but the fact the joke completely omitted the death of an outsider mattering was telling and she was deeply disturbed.
The dead woman simply did not matter, not as a thought, nor as an afterthought. She was nothing but a humorous device.
That's just the beginning. The religious, philosophical, and legal principles of the West may have their problems, flaws, and even defects, but, things like this are reason to understand we have come a long way, and that those ideas and the history behind them should be very valuable to us.
Before this post from you I had typed that there was a saying in Chinese culture about not treating strangers with compassion and empathy because those are traits reserved for family and friends/people you know. I couldn't remember the details of the saying so didn't include it in my last post. You have essentially said the same with the joke you recal.