White people shi hen hao!

One thing I'll probably never understand about Chinese is their infatuation with white people and white skin.  I remember my first visit here was with a lot of white girls from Delta.  Every Chinese guy I saw was looking at them wide-eyed!

On Saturday, some of the staff went to Mo Mountain near East Lake.  I think every white person in our group was asked by a Chinese person to be in a picture.  Below you see my buddy Dave getting "celeb status" treatment by 2 Chinese youth. They took photos of him as if he were a zoo animal. It was like reverse Orientalism. It was kind strange to see.

Some Chinese guys being really friendly to my buddy Dave because he's white.

Well, things white don't really end there.  Today, during my ICT 11/12 class, a girl was presenting her Photoshop project to the class.  She said that Chinese like white skin, so she photoshoped a thin layer of white on a famous Chinese pop singer's face to "beautify" her even more. Now things went from just ridiculous to plain f--king weird.

But then I remembered good ol' Professor Henry Yu talking about this phenomena in his courses at UBC during my undergrad. It's got to do with modern Chinese ideas of beauty and health.  A really quick internet search shows that there's a fear against getting a tan here in East Asia, especially amongst girls.

But, just as fast, another quick internet search shows that many dermatologists and doctors warn against being scared of tanning and the glorification of attaining pale-white skin.  Hmm...

On another completely separate note, my buddy Mitch had a boy's night.  Poker and beer night to be exact. I lost 100 kwai.