China’s national habit: Smoking
Why China seems stuck with it
When I first went to Bangkok and saw the graphic warning labels on cigarette packs at a kiosk. I was shocked by the detailed portrayal of a darkened dying organ, thinking this picture alone is sufficient to turn off a light smoker. By contrast, cigarette packagings in mainland China have one-line text health warning labels, which are easily overlooked by hardened smokers.
When I was a smoker in college, cigarettes were affordable even for broke college students. The cheapest pack containing 20 pcs cigarettes cost about 7 yuan or 1 US dollar. In campus among students, A cigarette was widely held as a symbol of manhood and a form of social lubricants. All my roommates, none of them had been smokers before entering college, took up smoking in the first semester. I was the last one to start smoking, slightly under peer pressure, partly out of curiosity.
The smoking habits were spiralling out of control when graduation loomed. Our clothes and bed linens were permanently soaked in nicotine from the consumption of large quantities of cigarettes to ease the stress of finishing graduation paper in time while juggling a couple of job interviews. The dorm inspector’s face convulsed in disgust at the sight of our room floor littered with cigarettes butts but decided against reporting to administration after a cigarette…
