Blond Baby in China

Having been born in Japan Lily is used to sticking out. In both Japan and China having blond hair, fair skin and blue eyes is considered the ultimate in beauty. Therefore everywhere we go, Lily gets attention. She loves it. Thinks she is a queen. However, what we encountered in China was over the top.





In China we toured the tourist locations, The Great Wall of China, The Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square, etc. This is high tourist season due to the extreme weather conditions in China during winter and summer. Winters get below zero and summers get above 100 degrees Fahrenheit. The majority of the tourists were from other parts of China. I am assuming here that they were not from places the get a lot of tourism and this may have been the first time they actually met a blond baby. From day one, we had to struggle to keep up with our tour group, struggle to hear what our guide was saying, because Lily was being passed around from one stranger to the next, and everyone wanted to have their picture taken with her.





Imagine being within one of the courtyards of The Forbidden City, an are larger than a football field, filled with so many people you can only see the ground here and there, mostly all you see is Chinese People. Thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, and your baby is being passed from one to the next, getting farther and farther away from you. If I hadn't lived in Japan I would have freaked out and held her tight not sharing her a bit. However, it didn't bother me a bit. We thought it was sweet.





I do think it is funny that, sharing Lily's fair skin, I spent my entire young life trying to get darker. I would lay in the sun for hours, I've tried the spray-on tans, the tanning lotions, the tanning beds, anything to get a little darker. I have always been teased about my neon white skin. Here it is considered a thing of beauty. Here where people are born with darker skin, they spend their money on bleaching their skin. Does anyone else find it odd, that the white people want to be darker and the darker people want to be whiter?


In Japan, if a child is going to be outside without adult supervision they are required to wear their school uniform. Everyone has a school uniform. Anyways, if you see a child in his or her uniform you know they are without adult supervision and you are supposed to look out for him or her. Can you imagine doing that in the States? Putting a big sign on your kid saying, no adults watching. I never even let Mandy play outside without adult supervision. In Japan and China they have much lower crime rates than in the States, but they also have a bit of a different attitude toward child rearing. More of the village attitude than the individual attitude. A child a born into a community more than born into a family.


For example, our Japanese friends came to dinner at our house and their eight year old boy walked across our sofa. His mom asked if this was ok. I said, sure I don't mind. She said that she had been at another American's house and they had told her son that he couldn't even sit on their couch, because couches are for adults only. I know many Americans have beautiful expensive furniture that they don't want to be ruined by the children and they have rules about the children and the furniture. But, everyone in America is a bit different in regards to their traditions and views about children and rules and furniture. Not in Japan, my friend told me that Japanese people let their children play on the furniture. If you have a child you have the expectation that your furniture will get dirty and stained but that the furniture belongs to the family including the children and she was taken aback when told that the American children were not allowed on furniture. See in Japan there is one common idea about children, it is not family specific it is this is the way we raise our children. Same with China. Our tour guide told us that children are born and their mothers take six months maternity leave and then go back to work. At that time the grandparents take care of the children until the child turns two. From two to six Chinese children go to Kindergarten. This is not family specific but this is the way it is done. And in China if a stranger holds your baby they are going to care for her as if she were their own.


Poor Mandy, first she lost her status of only child to a very spoiled little sister. Now she has to endure having her sister worshiped everywhere we go. No exaggeration I'll bet over 100 pictures were taken of Lily on our vacation. One time she was sleeping on my lap on a park bench and people were taking turns sitting next to me having their picture taken with a sleeping Lily. Jeff thinks we should have charged money. We could have made a profit on our vacation.