Nothing can dampen the process of falling in love quite like a bad kiss. That first kiss that you’ve imagined over and over in your head to be nothing short of perfection. A teeny-tiny orgasmic lip lock. But then, as you bob your head to go in for the kill, lips pursed in anticipation of making your dreamy kiss a reality; you’re met with a soggy mouth full of disappointment. The dream is shattered, rose-tinted spectacles shaken and blurred.

It really has been a while since I enjoyed some decent lip action – a kiss that gave me butterflies in my tummy, and made my right leg kick back with a pointy toe. I can’t help but wonder whether this has something to do with the fact that I have limited my lip locking over the past few years exclusively to Chinese men…

Of course it would be uncouth of me to generalize; just because the Asian men that I’ve kissed came at me like a starving man at a giant ice cream cone, it doesn’t mean that every single man in Asia would do the same. However, it does pose the question as to whether different nationalities have their own preferred kissing styles. I mean, just because I don’t get off at being suffocated during a kiss, it doesn’t mean to say that another girl somewhere else in the world might think it totally hot.

In my, albeit limited, experience, I have found European men to be the superior kissers. And my research may offer some theories as to why this may be. We might assume that kissing is a universal trait of human beings. Some may call it an animal instinct, and they could have grounds in doing so, seeing as Chimpanzees have been known to touch lips, and bonobo apes enjoy the delights of tonsil wrestling.

But if kissing really were an animal instinct, then that would mean that people the world over should be doing it. And this is just not the case. Although kissing may be something we have come to regard as habitual human activity, like waving, clapping, and mooning, in some parts of the world it remained non-existent until European explorers appeared in their villages one day, and said “wanna make out?”

In fact, even as late as 1990, Chinese people still considered kissing as more of an “I want to eat your face” meaning, rather than feeling an “I fancy you” vibe.
As mentioned in this fabulous article featured in the NY Times,

“In 1990, the Beijing-based Workers' Daily advised its readers that "the invasive Europeans brought the kissing custom to China, but it is regarded as a vulgar practice which is all too suggestive of cannibalism."

Hmm, cannibalism, you say? Suddenly my ice cream metaphor isn’t looking so far-fetched, hey?

So if kissing is still a relatively new custom in China, could this account for the lack of skill I may have encountered? Are Europeans really better at kissing because they have had a whole lot more experience than other places around the world?

But hang on a sec…who am I to preach the rights and wrongs of kissing? I mean, I didn’t invent kissing, so how can I say who is good at it and who isn’t? The Eskimos kiss by rubbing their noses together, and in some tribal cultures the equivalent of 'kiss me' is 'smell me.' Could my search for the greatest kiss in China be doomed to fail due to a simple clash of styles? Or maybe, MAYBE, it’s just me who has the problem? “Yeees!” you scream. “Shush”, I say.

In a world as wonderfully varied as ours, we are subjected to a constant stream of images, information, and emotions. They fill us to the brim with expectations, ideals, and standards. In the west, we have become overloaded with sexualized images in magazines, advertisements, and TV. In China, however, porn is still illegal, public displays of sexuality are frowned upon, and television is about as raunchy as a flip-flop. There’s a kind of innocence about China that I think we can all appreciate. So whereas us Western lot have played witnessed to the tonsil-hockey shenanigans of our favourite soap stars, elder siblings, parents (ick), and people at the back of the bus, since we were old enough to peek; the post 70’s and 80’s Chinese generations haven’t.

Kissing is still a relatively new thing being brought to the streets of Chinese cities by this passionate young generation. You’ll never see their parents so much as peck each other on the lips in public, let alone enjoy a full on game of tonsil tennis. But these daring young Chinese are so into performing PDA’s, that a competition to show off the weirdest kissing positions was even held in Tianjin earlier this year.

Living as a foreigner in China, we need to be able to adapt to a whole load of things, such as eating incredible amounts of rice, using chopsticks, dodging lugeys on the pavements, and embracing public nose picking, to name a few. And just like I have adapted to all these things, I guess I could be persuaded into giving another serving of Chinese tongue sushi a shot too. Just not so much suction this time, ok?