While I was in China I met a lot of people. Being a teacher meant that I interacted with hundreds of students every week besides other teachers and random people on the street. As a woman I got to know a few of my female students very well, and we had a lot of interesting conversations together. In class we also had chances to talk about set topics from the book. One week the topic was “Appearance”, and a warm-up exercise was to talk about what people did to make themselves look good. I was surprised when my students asked me what a “suntan” was. I explained that people would lay out in the sun to get darker because they thought that it was beautiful. All the students were surprised! They couldn’t believe that people wanted to be darker; most of the girls wanted to be pale. They would buy skin whitening creams and lotions and wear long sleeves and pants even in miserably hot weather so that they could keep their skin as light as possible. I was bemused more than once when one of my girl students would earnestly say to me, “Your skin is very white!” It took quite a while for me to realize that they were giving me a compliment.
In the city where I lived the sun shines very brightly; as my students would say, “The sun is very strong.” When you walked outside it was almost like the sun was pushing down on the top of your head. It was very common for the girls to carry beautiful parasols lined with black cloth to block the strong sunshine. It was another method of keeping their skin pale. I always enjoyed climbing up to the third story of the English teaching building in between classes and watching the parasols swirl and eddy across campus like a living drift of flowers.
As in much of the world, the girls I knew in China prized being thin very highly. Some of my students were on perpetual diets of fruit and milk, hoping to “become slim”. Once again I was both surprised and bemused by their obsession. I was bigger both in height and weight than almost all of my students, and for one or two of the girl students I was literally afraid of touching them, they were so delicate-looking. One girl in particular always looked very fragile to me; she, too, was always dieting.
While I knew these young women wanted to be thin, I rarely saw them playing on the sports field or doing athletics of any kind. But one night after dark when I went out to make copies at a shop near the sports field, I heard the sound of a lot of people running around the unlighted track. Later, one of my students explained that it was considered unfeminine to sweat or play sports, so many of the girls would wait until it was completely dark to go and exercise. The showers would often be closed by this time, so I was amazed and impressed by these young women’s dedication – even with no prospect of a hot shower afterwards, they were determined to keep up their figures.
Most of my students were very well-turned-out and fashionable; the English department was known as the department with many lovely girls. Yet this beauty was no accident of nature – these women were intentional about keeping up their appearance. Another teacher told me that she was visiting one of her students that was about to meet her financé’s family. The young woman seemed extremely uncomfortable, and when my friend hugged her she realized that the young woman was wearing a corset under her clothes. When she asked her why, the young woman said that she had to – she had to be seen as very thin and beautiful for her financé’s family to consider her acceptable.
I was troubled to realize that most of the young women I taught had no idea of how lovely they were. I did my best to encourage them and tell them the truth – that they were already beautiful. I hope that some of them heard me. Above all, I appreciated how many of them opened their hearts to me; their actions and kindness are what made them truly beautiful.