The Consumption of Color and the Politics of White Skin in Post-Mao China

Abstract

It is dusk in the Miao mountains of Guizhou, China, September 1993a quintessential site for Western ethnological and Chinese nativist imaginings alike. A wedding is under way. The couple being wed are educated local youth with good jobs-she an elementary-school teacher, he the manager of the subcontracted state dry goods outlet in the Miao market town of Xijiang. Amidst firecrackers, the guests are arriving bearing shoulder poles of gifts-pork, sticky rice, home-brewed liquor, quilts, fabric. The bride stays in the nuptial chamber while guests are received at a long table in the central room of the groom's house and are offered a simple meal and some shots of home brew. Languorously, the bride makes up her face with powder, blush, lipstick, and eyeliner, then dresses in Miao finery-a full-length pleated skirt layered with a circle of embroidered bands, a jacket laden with brocade, applique, and silver panels, chokers and chain necklaces of delicately handwrought silver. Her hair is thickened with extra strands and combed upward into a topknot dense enough to support the weighty silver ornaments that will complete the ensemble. Just then a group of city friends arrive, classmates from the days when the couple attended high school in the prefecture seat. The firecrackers they set off are so noisy as to put the local village guests to shame. Then, the piece de resistance-the gift borne on shoulder poles. It is an ostentatious yard-long framed wall hanging behind glass, a photographic decoration slated for the walls of the nuptial chamber. The picture, in a bizarre juxtaposition with the bride, even upstaging her, is of a blonde model in a hot-pink G-string bikini supine atop a snazzy racing car. Lovingly, the hanging is given front center placement among the other gifts-heaps of quilts and household goods-on display in the nuptial chamber for guests to review. Upon completion of her ethnic adornment, the bride poses with the thing. As representations of white women continue to deluge the globe, an initial task of this essay is to explore how such renderings mean within particular contemporary Chinese contexts. The account above suggests that the erotic codes through which most Westerners read the exposure of female-gendered flesh may be idiomatic. That a young woman of China's Miao minority would, in the midst of her own beautification as bride, Louisa Schein