Panty Flags

I was unprepared for the amount of panties I see everyday in China. I don't mind panties, I think they are quite cute, but I'm used to them being a private or semi-private thing. Not so here. It's one of the lovely paradoxes of China that this quite socially conservative culture displays its undergarments so freely. (It is also possible to buy panties on the street like you would a baseball hat or purse.) It's popular to say that in China there is no sense of privacy, but I didn't understand all the ways in which this concept manifests itself here. Publicly hanging up your underwear is one such way.

A bit of backstory: clothes dryers aren't used here, you have to hang your wash to dry. Most people choose outside drying and many apartments have special bars outside the windows on which to hang laundry. Those that don't have them make their own drying lines (pictured above). As a result, you constantly see cute, fancy panties hanging in windows and outside doorways. (And a lot of it is red, a lucky color here.) If I knew the whole world would be looking at my underwear, I'd make sure it was cute too! As a joke, we call them "panty flags" because they inadvertently announce where the people with cute underwear live.