Web Exclusive

Chinese pink

By Rachel Terry (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2011-06-15 09:22

Explore any American toy store and you will find at least one aisle that is devoted to the color pink: pink dress-up clothes, pink sparkly princess tiaras, pink baby dolls, and stuffed pink ponies. You may see some four-year-old girls wearing pink tutus and carrying pink fairy wands.

Rachel Terry with her husband and children. [Photo provided to chinadaily.com.cn]

Somewhere around the age of 10, American girls turn their backs on the color pink and they never look back. These girls turn in their ribbons and bows for plain knit shirts in blue or black. They wouldn't be caught dead in pink ruffles. "Pink ruffles are for little girls," they explain. Adult American women aren't much different. At the beginning of last summer when I was thirty-five years old, I had shirts in my closet a dozen shades of gray and tan.

Imagine the surprise my daughters and I faced when we arrived in Xi'an last summer and saw university students and full-grown women wearing sparkly high heel shoes, pink ruffles, and carrying (gasp) parasols! At first we didn't know what to think. Were they all dressed up for a holiday? Were they all going to church?

My youngest daughter, who turned eight while we were in China last year, fell in love with the feminine Chinese women and girls. She admired their shoes and began drawing fashion designs on any scrap of paper she could find. My older daughter, who was 12 at the time, was a bit more skeptical. And so was I. At first.

While in Xi'an, my husband and I taped a couple of television talk shows. I bought a dress for one of the tapings and a white blouse for the other. When we showed up at the television studio, the producer looked over my bland outfits and tilted his head, as if he were thinking hard. I was wearing a plain white blouse and a plain black skirt, although I had bought fancy Chinese high heels to go with my skirt.

"Don't you have any jewelry?" he asked.

I shook my head apologetically.

"A pin? Something?"

I had nothing. He shrugged his shoulders at the hopeless case before him. When I sat down on the set across from the gorgeous Chinese television host I understood the producer's despair. She was lovely. She had long curled hair, impeccable makeup, and beautiful clothes. She had an easy, intelligent confidence that made us feel comfortable and soothed our nerves.

This episode got me wondering about the differences between American woman and Chinese women. I wondered if American women don't feel that men people will take them seriously if they look feminine.

I asked my older daughter about this. She said that in 4th grade, she wore a dress to school one day. Some of the kids made fun of her, so she didn't wear dresses anymore. I asked her if it was the boys who made fun of her or the girls. "The girls," she said.

But the girls in China, the ones wearing lace and holding parasols, don't have to apologize or face ridicule for showing their femininity. Their high heels take them to their computer engineering classes or their teaching or accounting jobs. It's refreshing. In China, I could always tell which people were women and which people were men, even from behind. Yesterday, I was on the campus of an American university and was once again surprised to hear a high-pitched feminine voice coming from the person in front of me.

I find it odd that in the United States, which so prizes individualism, androgyny is the order of the day. I never really thought about it until I saw those Chinese women in pink. They looked so elegant and confident. They looked authentically and peacefully female. And those high heels never got in their way.

On Mt. Huashan, I saw women scaling enormously steep climbs, and some of them were wearing high heels. A couple of weeks after we returned to the states, my husband and older daughter and I climbed Mt. Quandary in Colorado, and I had to laugh at the contrast. In Colorado, hikers were decked out in special hiking clothes and $100 hiking boots. I thought back to those Chinese women in their high heels on Mt. Huashan, and all the special hiking equipment suddenly seemed like a racket contrived by the sporting goods industry.

Visiting China last year opened my eyes to many things, but I may have been most changed by the admirable Chinese women I met and associated with there. When I got home, I started wearing my high heels for longer stretches to build up my endurance. I also bought a couple of pink shirts. One of them even has ruffles on it. When I wear it, people compliment me and tell me I look nice. More than the compliments, though, I like how I feel when I dress nicer. Maybe that's part of the confidence I noticed in the women in China. My older daughter says she's going to try wearing skirts to school next year—not every day, but maybe once a week. And my younger daughter? Well, since visiting China, she has accumulated a large number of stunning drawings that she keeps in a folder entitled, "Eva's Fashions." I know exactly where the inspiration came from.

The author works as a freelance writer in Colorado, and she iscurrently working on writing children's books. Rachel and her family spent three weeks in China last summer.

[You are welcome to share your China stories with China Daily website readers.Detail]