Taste Cheese With Chopsticks

The weather is so nice these days. After a long lasting winter, no one on campus can wait to put on spring apparel! Battell Beach takes over the role of the gym, and tables outside of Proctor become the new place to sit, replacing Proctor lounge.

It is interesting to see how people love to expose themselves under the sun around the campus. Frisbee suddenly becomes the most popular sport on campus, and Battell Beach is packed with students running around, a scene distinctly different from the snow-covered isolated atmosphere in the winter.

In the late afternoon, it is quite a scene for me to see people dressed in shorts and bikini, with their sunglasses on, lying in the sun, face down in the lawn or the picnic cloth they brought.

I wrote a tweet in Chinese saying that “spring is coming and the sun is shining. People surrounding me are obsessed with [it]: slackline in the sun, get tanned; play Frisbee in the sun, get tanned; chat on the lawn in the sun, get tanned; read books in the sun, get tanned; wear as [little] as possible, get tanned.” I got a fair amount of retweets and my Chinese friends who are studying abroad seem to resonate with this.

I don’t understand why tanning one’s self is the social norm here. I enjoy the sun, and I don’t mind gaining some vitamin D by walking between the buildings on campus. But when I was having some tea with friends outside for 15 minutes, the sun got too shiny and hot for me to stay longer.

It must be the same awkwardness for American students to see how most of the Chinese girls escape from the sun in the summer. Instead of getting tanned, most of us are obsessed with getting as pale as possible.

The most recent instance I realized this difference was when comparing the skin care lines of the same brand in the U.S. and in China. Whitening line, as the most popular line which appears on the home page of the Chinese website of that brand, does not exist in the U.S. The most equivalent line I can find on its U.S. website is the uneven skin tone line. Not surprisingly, it is also hard to find tanning lotion in China.

You may ask then what do most Chinese girls do in this nice and warm weather. I cannot represent all of them, but I can tell you what I am planning to do this summer. I will try to stay in the shade – if not the air conditioned rooms – as long as possible. I will get myself a cute sun-protective umbrella and stock up on sunscreen. It is not the sunlight that I don’t enjoy, but more of the heat and humidity the sun brings with it in the summer. Thus my favorite activities in the summer include hanging out with my friends in air-conditioned shopping malls, karaoke, restaurants and cafes. There is a joke in Hong Kong that the only time of year when girls wear sweaters is in the summer due to the low preset temperature of the air conditioners.

I am ready for my adventure of meeting the sun as little as possible this summer, and wish you all the best hanging out in the sun even without my company!