A China Man

It seems that Chinese masculinity is defined in very different ways to the Western idea of 'what makes a man'.

 

I am still tickled whenever I see a man carrying a pink glittery handbag with Hello Kitty on it - at first I thought the Chinese man bag was just a bit different from our UK-style - but soon learnt that the bag belongs to a lady, and he's just carrying it for her. It's seen as polite to carry your girlfriend's bag for her, the equivalent of carrying someone's books home from school. However, I'm pretty sure that if my book bag had been lilac, sequined and had butterflies all over it, it would have been up to me to carry it! I 

hope that when Sam arrives this week (I am aiming, of course, to avoid telling the taxi driver about my beloved's masturbation habits), he will adopt this practice so that I can laugh at him carrying my ladybag!

 

Another quirk of Chinese fellas is that they don't seem to mind wearing matching T-shirts with their girlfriends/wives.It's common place among younger people to see couples strolling around in matching pink tops with kittens/monkeys/bunnies/anything else cute and fluffy emblazoned on the front. There are special his'n'hers glittery matching t-shirt shops all over Shanghai. I asked a friend (who was wearing a pink t-shirt with a bear on it to match his wife's) if there was anything special about this habit - I didn't want to say that at home I couldn't think of anyone who would wear a pink bear t-shirt to match his beloved's and that us foreigners think it's pretty funny that Chinese men do. His answer "Oh, this t-shirt's cute, I like cute things and so does my wife!". I'm not sure what answer I expected, but it wasn't that.

 

Shanghainese men are seen as special in China - they cook, they clean, they run households. In general, Chinese men from other places see Shanghainese men as the inferior Chinese man. However, Shanghainese men pertain that they are the manliest men because they can take care of everyone in the family and have a job etc etc.

 

It's a whole new world of macho.