Last winter, my mum and my sister had laser hair removal for their armpit hair. As they told me, laser hair removal is the easiest way to get rid of armpit hair once and for all with only a small amount of money. Sounds like a great deal.

My attitude, however, was this: I gave them full under- standing and support, but when it comes to myself, there’s no way I’m doing it.

Due to my principle of ‘peaceful coexistence’, we lived in harmony with each other all winter. Then, summer came and I appeared in front of them in sun- dresses. The armpit hair I kept was exposed, wittingly or unwittingly, to my mum, which ultimately irritated her.

“As a girl, your underarm hair is so unsightly and dis- graceful. Let’s get it done by the laser removal.”

“I don’t care,” I refused immediately. “I won’t do it because it’s not an issue to me.”

In fact, as an ordinary girl, I do shave my underarm hair every summer for sleeveless summer clothes, but I just don’t like it and I never remove my hair from the root. And sometimes I don’t shave and am indifferent to whether the armpit hair is visible or not. In a nut- shell, I never feel ashamed of my armpit hair. Maybe that’s because I’ve had thicker body hair than other girls since childhood and have long been used to the reactions of others.

I’ve always had thick arm hair. In primary school, there was a boy, one of my closest friends, who in jest nick- named me ‘gorilla’. I reacted angrily, but was never truly bothered by it because I knew that he didn’t mean any offence. That’s the environment in which I grew up: people freely talked, or even joked, about my body hair without any malice. Yet at the same time, they sometimes said as a consolation that girls with hairy arms would become beautiful after they grew up.

I myself was never worried that my body hair would cause any impairment of my beauty or do any harm to my personal image. All I knew was that body hair was an indivisible part of my body and a native part of myself as a ‘being’ – for me, to hate my hair is to hate myself. But I cherished the ‘being’ of myself so much that I was willing to accept all of its inborn defects. As for the opinions of others, what’s the point of befriending someone who can’t even accept a little body hair of yours? And if they are not a friend, what’s the point of caring so much about how they judge you? Ultimately, for me, the meaning of body hair de- pends on how I see myself, but not how others see me. For this reason, I sometimes made fun of my arm hair but had never thought about removing it.

Not until my armpit hair grew.

I finally yielded to the popular aesthetic standard that keeping and exposing underarm hair is disgraceful, and even vulgar. As all of the girls started shaving armpit hair, I had my first try too.

I will never forget when I tried to remove my under- arm hair for the first time. After I spread the depilatory cream over my armpit, those little black things soon fell down on the skin faintly and groggily in a puddle. I thought of the corpse of some kind of animal. If armpit hair has its own life, then these are its corps- es. I was the murderer of my own armpit hair, who shared the same life with me. Thinking about this, I scraped off all the hair just like removing hundreds of thousands of dead bodies from the battlefield, with my stomach churning and teardrops uncontrollably falling.

Afterwards, I gradually got used to it and became a cold-blooded murderer of hair. The vivid impression of my very first experience of hair removal, however, has long stayed alive in my mind. Generally speaking, I’m not a conservative person. The strong aversion to hair removal comes from my guilty conscience for what I’ve done to my own body.