One day I was talking with a Chinese friend of mine about relationships. At one point she said something that struck me: " It doesn't matter if a guy is ugly as long as he's tall. " I was quite surprised by these words, but I didn't pay much attention to them. As I met more and more Chinese, it became clear to me that "height" was a recurrent theme when Chinese women talked about a suitable partner. Many of my female friends mentioned men's height: "He's good-looking; what a pity he's so short!" "I like tall men" "A guy liked me, but I didn't want to date him. He was short", etc. etc. In her book about factory girls in China , Leslie T. Chang describes this phenomenon: Height was a universal Chinese obsession. In a country that had experienced malnutrition and even famine in living memory, height signaled fortune, and it functioned as a proxy for class. Height was also an advantage for wo