Two Months of Accidental Skin Whitening…

So at the start of my program (2 months ago) my roommate and I went to a nearby supermarket to load up on all the essentials, one among which was body wash. After sifting through a sea of Chinese brands that I didn’t recognize, I came across some Olay body wash that smelled decent enough (pictured below) and opted to buy it. Fast forward two months(last week), I finally take a close look at the bottle and for the first time take note of two crucial characters…. “美白”－“beautiful white.” Of course, I had heard of this phenomenon before, and even seen on several bottles the English “bright white” or other descriptions to that effect. However, for some reason I was under the impression that brands like Olay, Nivea, and the like wouldn’t have bleaching agents, but upon a second trip to the supermarket to replace my body wash I realized that it’s actually pretty hard to find body wash that aren’t 美白。Light skin, as in many parts of the world (Japan and the Middle East for example), is considered a class marker, distinguishing oneself from those who make a living working in the field. This distinction is especially salient in Beijing where (illegal) rural farmers and Beijing residents coexist everyday.

People typically use name “Beijing” in reference to the urban area of the city, though in reality it encompasses a much larger land area of 14 urban and suburban districts and 2 rural counties. The urban portion of Beijing in reality only constitutes a tenth or so of the land area, though I mean not to downplay its size – urban Beijing is HUGE, almost unmanageable sometimes. These suburban districts completely diverge from an American conception of “the burbs”, characterized by a largely poverty-stricken farming culture in which average income often doesn’t exceed 20USD each month. In order to make marginally more money, many of these rural workers regularly commute to urban Beijing in order to sell fruit, street food, etc., though due to Beijing’s complicated residential “hukou” system they are not allowed to purchase or rent homes, and are subsequently marginalized to the fringes of urban Beijing society. Phenomenons like “美白” really bring to light Chinese culture’s longstanding preoccupation with saving face, and highlights the increasingly severe poverty gap in China.