White skin = beauty and social status

Early morning yesterday, Zhu and I went shopping.  We went to the expensive mall and the small street shops.  While we walked, Zhu was telling me about protecting her skin from the sun. She said that she thought it was interesting how in the U.S.  girls paid to get good tan. Where as here in China, girls do as much as they can to protect themselves from the sun. They use umbrellas, hats and even buy special lotions to make their skin look whiter.

Not only girls do this, guys do it too.  They don’t only do it because of beauty (at least from what I understood).  They do it because it is a symbol of wealth.  The people who have darker skin are usually the people that work in outside.  These people include farmers in rural areas and migrant workers in the big cities.  So if someone comes from the countryside to study in a university, other students know that this student comes from a rural village because of the tone of his/her skin.  Unlike the Cultural Revolution, people look down on peasants and they’ll do as much as they can to not have their skin color.