I saw a pretty Chinese woman on the street the other day. Actually, her face wasn’t that pretty, but she didn’t leave much to the imagination with the rest of her body. She was a thin, shapely young lady. Her black hair was tied back in a bun. She wore the shortest pants possible without actually revealing her butt cheeks. She chose to complement these khaki colored abbreviations with a flesh-colored, translucent blouse that revealed the hint of her bra. She slinked past me on open-toed high-heels, the sort that have just enough strap to embrace the ankles and anchor the toes.

I had just come out of our office building after a long day of meetings. I blinked away the heat and humidity the Suzhou summer had mixed with haze. I had my mind set on a cold beer at the local Blue Marlin pub. That’s when I saw this refugee from a fashion runway saunter past me.

Of course I watched her. I’m a guy; she’s a girl. I watched with a mixture of lust and wonder. Lust, well, that’s an easy one to explain: has to do with all the blood draining from a man’s head to his nether regions. The wonder came from the fact that one never saw that sort of thing in Suzhou even two years ago. And certainly, five years before; that sort of “look” would have been out of the question. Indeed, five years ago, the thought of a young woman eschewing those hideous ankle-high nylon stocking socks would have been unthinkable. Now, it is rather commonplace in Suzhou, Shanghai and in many of the larger, wealthier cities in China to see women with naked ankles.

Just days before, in fact, while hanging with some of the Suzhou old timers who’ve been around here seven years, ten years, some even longer, we had talked about how much more revealing women’s fashions had become in Suzhou. One of the fellows, from continental Europe, said, “Yeah, I got two Chinese women in my office who wear those short shorts. And one of them wears a low-cut blouse, so when she bends over my desk to show me some document she leaves little to the imagination.” None of the guys, though, thought it was a good idea to change clothing standards in their offices. All of us, however, considered that Chinese women were completely or almost completely ignorant of the inappropriateness of the dress or of its sanguinary effects on the male libido.

We settled on the precept that Mainland Chinese women are experimenting with themselves; that, ultimately, they still don’t know what they’re supposed to look like nor how to act.

A young Chinese female friend had a different opinion about why some young Chinese women were dressing  provocatively. She was fierce in her conviction it was about a Chinese woman exhibiting to other women in the office that she had the attention of the men in the company. “Do the women know it’s, well, distracting,” I asked her. “Yes,” she said without hesitation, “they wear those kinds of clothes because they feel it gives them some kind of power in the company, over the men; and they want other women to know it.”

I thought again about Short Shorts, the woman who had walked passed me outside my office building. My wonder at the event was trumped only by the two women who were walking behind the first girl, the one strutting her stuff. I didn’t really get a good look at the two women; it only registered they were older than the first girl, though not by much: perhaps in their late twenties compared to the young girl’s early twenties. The two women were dressed far more conservatively; I’d say they were likely coming from work in one of the nearby offices. All the women had passed me as I continued on my way to the Pub when I heard one of the two women say to her friend, in Mandarin, “Those foreigners are all so dirty!” Her friend agreed.

Clearly the two women had seen me eyeballing the runway-wannabe, and they figured I hadn’t understood their snipe. My first sensation was of mild embarrassment, which quickly evaporated with the acceptance of my being a guy who was clearly baited. My second feeling was one of resentment: here was a girl who had dressed extremely provocatively and who had elicited a response from me. I wanted to turn back and confront the two women and tell them in Mandarin, “Hah! When was the last time you got any from your man?” or “Since when did Chinese women in Suzhou decide it was OK to take up the dress of the oldest profession in the world and consider it appropriate office attire?” You know the kinds of snappy retorts: the ones that only occur to you minutes and even hours after the encounter.

I told a Chinese friend about the encounter. He’s lived in Suzhou about five years, and works for an American company. He’s a good friend, and I can always rely on him for a clear-eyed perspective on Chinese society. He offered that, yes, there had been a great many changes in Suzhou culture – indeed, in Chinese society – in very recent years. He put it down to generational differences. I remarked to him that there was not much of an age difference between the first woman with the short shorts, and the second set of women: maybe ten years at most. He simply nodded, said, “Things are changing very fast.”

Another observation I pointed out to my Chinese friend was that the two women trailing Short Shorts were speaking Mandarin Chinese, not the local Suzhounese dialect, which is impenetrable. “I understood what they said,” I told Bob. “And then I said to myself, ‘Hang on a minute, I shouldn’t have been able to understand that!’” In other words, it was very highly likely that one or both of the women were not locals, which led me to believe that social mores outside Suzhou were not evenly distributed.

Days later, while riding a taxi in Shanghai on the way to a morning meeting, the driver and I drove past a woman who too wore short shorts. Actually, her attire would have qualified as Hot Pants:this time, the radar showed cheeks. However, there was nary a pair of nylon ankle socks for miles around.