To celebrate my last night in China, I chose to do exactly the same as on the previous night. Barbecue and foot massage. Only this time, we were accompanied by J, a smart and hard-working Chinese journalist here, who currently works for a magazine for young Chinese women which manages - at least from the pictures - to be about travel to interesting places, and about interesting people, and not about make-up and celebrity and how to pleasure your 13-year-old boyfriend. Guangzhou is another Special Economic Zone of China, like Hong Kong, and it is a long way from Beijing. For this reason, it is the wild west of the South. Gangsters rule. Police obey gangsters. The other night, two of C's friends were beaten with iron knuckledusters by gangsters in a local nightclub. They were eventually taken away by police, who put them in a police cell and laughed at them for a while, until C's friends suggested it might be more sensible to take them to a hospital.
The foot massage place was full, so we walked along the river to another one. The river is dripping with neon. There are neon-lit boats, neon-lit buildings. There are bright green lights in the trees. It's very aglow.
The second foot massage place gave an insight into what the pulverising boys had probably been giggling about in the first massage place. During a conversation punctuated by J's vocal expressions of pain or pleasure (she says the Chinese like to yell during the massage; it's part of the fun), the three masseuses said the following.
“You've got double eyelids.”
“Foreign girls who come here never wear bras.”
“You're so white” (to me)
“You're so brown” (to C)
“How come your face is whiter than your legs?” (to C)
White is a beauty ideal here. As in India, there are whitening creams and potions, and most models are pale-faced Chinese - with fairly Caucasian features - or Westerners who would be D-list models in the West. Two of C's friends went for a facial in the beauty salon downstairs. The facial included a face mask. After the first friend peeled off her face mask, she was horrified to see her Thailand tan had disappeared. She'd been given the standard treatment. A whitening face mask.
When I was in India, I asked Indians to explain the white-skin obsession. They gave various reasons. Historical and cultural: Dark-skinned people work in the fields; white-skinned people do not. Geographical: the northern Aryans are lighter-skinned than the darkies down south. I pointed out that, obviously, Indian women were generally beautiful and didn't need to look like overweight white Westerners, but this provoked a strong rebuttal. “It's not about looking like Westerners,” my Indian friend said, with some nationalist pride.
It is, though. The Chinese are more honest about it by having operations to give them Caucasian double eyelids. C. calls it, simply, self-hatred. A waste of energy, and a source of income for many dodgy eyelid surgeons.