Age: 53 Performance Date: 04/19
“Every year on March 7th — the day before International Women’s Day on March 8th — people started calling it 女生节, Girls’ Day. That’s when the guys in class buy gifts for the girls. And then on November 10th, the day before Singles’ Day on the 11th, that becomes 男生节, Boys’ Day, where the girls are supposed to buy gifts for the guys. This has been going on for maybe ten, fifteen, almost twenty years now. It’s just one of those things everyone does.
And there’s another thing that goes along with Girls’ Day on March 7th — the guys in class will make these big banners. Like, they’ll write stuff on them about how great the girls in their class are, how much they like them, and then they put them up all over campus. That’s always been part of it too.
I think it’s a nice tradition. It’s a way for guys and girls to show appreciation for each other, which feels meaningful. And it’s kind of fun. I think people genuinely like having a day like that. It’s already become semi-official at this point. Kind of like how in Japan, Valentine’s Day became this thing where girls give chocolate to guys — it grew into its own custom over time. I think this one will stick around too.
As for whether it goes beyond Tsinghua — I honestly don’t know. I can only speak to what I’ve seen on campus.”
Context: This account was shared in a casual recorded conversation with a college student who attended Tsinghua University. The informant spoke entirely in Mandarin, recalling these campus customs in a relaxed and reflective tone. The interviewer prompted the informant to share their own thoughts on the tradition and whether it might evolve further, which led to a brief comparative discussion touching on Japanese Valentine’s Day customs and the semi-official status these days have already taken on within the university community.
Analysis: The campus holidays described here — 女生节 on March 7th and 男生节 on November 10th — represent a grassroots form of calendar folklore, where unofficial commemorative days are created by students to mirror and playfully subvert existing holidays. Girls’ Day slots itself in just before the officially recognized International Women’s Day, reframing a political holiday into something more personal and celebratory among peers. Boys’ Day, meanwhile, carves out space the day before the wildly popular Singles’ Day shopping holiday, turning a commercial phenomenon into a moment of reciprocal social gesture between genders.
The banner-hanging tradition tied to Girls’ Day is especially worth noting — it transforms private sentiment into a public, communal performance, filling the campus with visible declarations of appreciation. This kind of collective display is a hallmark of student folk culture, where participation in the ritual matters as much as the content of the message itself.
The informant’s comparison to Japanese Valentine’s Day customs reflects an awareness of how gender-coded gift-giving traditions can evolve organically into something institutionalized over time. That these days have already achieved what the informant calls “semi-official” status at Tsinghua suggests they are well along that trajectory — beginning as informal student invention and gradually becoming part of the campus’s cultural calendar.