A Bar of Soap

For English class we were told to write about any trip we have taken here in China. Instead of writing about The Great Wall or Tiananmen Square, I wrote about a much more mundane trip.

Faced with the prospect of substandard bodily hygiene, I thought it would be prudent to buy myself a bar of soap. The small bottle of body wash I had brought from home had run out and Beijing’s September heat demanded more than just water to wash the grime off at the end of the day. So I had to buy a bar of soap. But where to make such a purchase? There was, of course WuMart, the Chinese equivalent of Walmart, where you could buy anything from a plasma screen TV to a pair of underwear. I could look in one of the many dedicated pharmaceutical stores throughout the city, but those were mostly full of whitening cream and overpriced lotion. I could visit the city’s many street vendors in hope that one sold a bar of soap, but that might take a while and I was fairly certain that soap was not often sold on the street. So in the end I decided to take my business to a small grocery store my host father had shown me.

Hidden to the foreign eye, I would have never guessed that behind the strips of filthy plastic dangling in the entrance there was an entire grocery store, one that hopefully carried a bar of soap. As I descend the stairs from the entrance (it is the stairs that make the front so deceiving), I scan the aisles for a box which might contain a mixture of pot ash, lye, and ideally something that smelled good. At the bottom of the stairs I turn right into the food section. Oops, probably won’t find much soap here. But I am intrigued. Like many things in China, grocery stores are much different than they are in America. Where I would expect to see rows of ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, and relish, I instead see a myriad of black sauces. Their glass bottles glean like they are enjoying the fact that I can’t understand the characters on the labels. Maybe some of it is soy, maybe some of it is teriyaki, and I bet some of it is what I ate on my noodles last night. Unlike their colorful American counterparts, these leave no clue about what their contents might be. I decide to move on; I am not ready to consider bathing in teriyaki sauce until I am certain that there is no soap around.

I walk into the meat section. Red chunks and slabs are set out on a table covered in white paper. Meat in China is different too. Different parts of the animal are eaten, and they are prepared differently. Pork is often the meat of choice (many like to point out that 家, the character for home, is the character for pig written with the character for a roof over it). I shudder as I remember the pig foot I was offered the night before. The meat was chewy and thankfully did not have a much flavor. Definitely not something you would be served in America. In America pork is typically served naked, a chop on a plate with some vegetables and mashed potatoes near it. Not so in China. Here meat is cut up into pieces (probably more out of necessity than anything else, cutting anything tougher than tofu with chopsticks is a demanding task), and bathed with garlic in one of the aforementioned black sauces. Fish is served with its skeletal structure intact, a stark contrast from the formless fillets served in the States. The head is considered a delicacy, not reason to scream and run out of the restaurant. The smell of raw flesh permeates through the aisle as I decide I have seen enough dead animals for the day. Plus I still need to find that soap.

Away from the meat section, I feel a chill as I move into the refrigerated milk section. Ah, the milk. The first morning I watched bewildered as my host father took a bag of milk from a cardboard box outside of the refrigerator, cut it open with a pair of red handled scissors, and poured its contents into a bowl. And then he put it in the microwave. Needless to say I was a bit confused. After I had ensured that the bowl of milk had not gone bad from sitting unrefrigerated and that the milk had cooled to a safe temperature, I took a sip. Okay, yeah this tastes like it came from a cow, I guess it’s milk. Little did I know that the milk I was drinking contained melamine, an industrial chemical used to produce fertilizer. Somebody thought it would be a good idea to water down the milk so they could sell more without having to buy more cows. But adding water means lower protein levels, so they decided to fool the tests by adding a poisonous chemical to artificially increase amount of protein. Brilliant. So no more milk for breakfast, I guess I can live with that. What I cannot live without, though, is that bar of soap, and I wasn’t finding it in the dairy section.

Whitening cream, toothpaste, and floss, this is more like it. I am getting closer to that elusive bar of soap. Quite the opposite of American trends, the Chinese are obsessed with pure, creamy white skin. This obsession is rooted in classism. Someone with fair white skin is wealthy enough not to work in the fields where you will tan quickly. Look anywhere from the TV to a bus stop and you will find ads for products claiming to make your skin whiter. I’m not how these products work, if they work at all (a generous assumption), but I feel like this must be healthier than the dark brown Americans strive for. For Americans getting the right skin color means exposing your skin to harmful UV rays for a few hours so your skin will react enough to make you beautiful for a week or two. If you are good enough at being beautiful, you get skin cancer. In China you smear some cream on your face and you’re done.

Then there is the toothpaste and the floss. One thing I hear a lot from people when I told them I was going to China was to bring lots of floss, you couldn’t get it there. So image my surprise when I walked into my host family’s bathroom for the first time and found that my mother had a box of mint flavored Johnson & Johnson floss bigger than the one I brought. Of course the stuff is probably made here, so I don’t know why you wouldn’t be able to buy it here too. And then there is the toothpaste. Dental hygiene in China is notoriously bad. I think it’s a cultural thing, people just don’t care about their teeth all the much here (obviously this is a vast generalization, and it seems to be getting better in the younger generation). My host father spends hours massaging, soaking and rubbing creams into his feet every night, but on the few occasions that he brushes his teeth spends less than ten seconds doing so. Us Americans probably have disgusting feet by Chinese standards. Nevertheless, I still find I fully stocked toothpaste section containing all of the major American brands as well as the big Chinese brands. The Crest, Colgate, and Zhong Hua boxes glimmer as I walk by. It seems they have every flavor possible now, cinnamon, orange, vanilla, cherry, spear mint, wintergreen, with Scope, without Scope, whitening, whitening plus Scope, and of course good old mint. I stare dumbfounded like a kid in an ice-cream store with too many flavors. I will deal with toothpaste another time. Today I came for the soap.

A left turn at the end of the toothpaste aisle reveals a great wall of colored bricks and the delectable scent of the soap section. I peruse the shelves, pleased I have finally reached my destination. The bars are stacked neatly, some are in plastic wrap and others remain hidden behind the façade of their cardboard packaging. The first bar is a translucent maroon with little chunks of who-knows-what in it. It smells like old lady, not the one for me. The second one is white with green flecks in it. I take a whiff. Minty, not bad, but not what I want to smell like during the day. The third one is perfect. Not quite as sweet as a lemon drop, this citrusy soap immediately draws me in. This is what I have been looking for. A blue shield with some Chinese characters and the brand name “Safeguard” stands out on the yellow box. It says it’s safe, it smells good and it costs less than a dollar. I am sold. Even though the sauce they put on their meat is black and not red, and the meat they put it on is bite sized, and even though I can’t drink the poisonous milk and my proud summer tan is considered ugly here, I can still get a bar of soap. I cannot read the box though, so the question remains; hand, body, or dish?