In general, Americans have longer legs and shorter torsos than Chinese. I am taller than average in Taiwan, and have long arms and legs, even for an American. When I first came to Taiwan, ready made pants weren't even worth looking at, because they would never come close to fitting. If the waist fit, the crotch would be down at my knees, and the bottom of the pants somewhere on my calf: like Porky the Pig. I tried having pants tailor made, because hand made was not much more expensive than off the rack in those days. In theory, great; in practice, the tailors in my end of town had no experience with foreign frames, and if you went up near the US Army base, you'd come out looking like a color-blind soldier on furlough, hardly what I wanted to look like. So I made do with what I had: a couple pairs of jeans.
Jeans wear out, you know? If you cross your legs a lot, the front of your thigh wears out pretty fast, so after a year or two, my jeans were deteriorating. I became quite efficient with needle and thread, first mending rips, then patching gaping holes with cloth scrounged from other sources, although I certainly hope Dan never figured out what happened to his nice denim jacket, sorry buddy.
By the time I was a junior, the seats on my jeans had gone, as had the fronts of both thighs. They had been replaced by a carefully stitched medley of patches, held precariously in place with the best stitching I was capable of. 好個百衲褲！
I remember very distinctly the day in November of my junior year when I was walking to class on the third floor of the Administration building and the wind came up to blow. It entered through the seat of my pants and exited through the knees, thoroughly chilling me on the way. Something had to be done!
I knew someone whose father was a tailor, and I begged her to help out. One Friday, wearing my dress slacks which I almost never wore, I gave her a bag with the two pairs of jeans that still held together, and on Monday she gave me a bag with the resuscitated jeans. Her father had replaced my collection of patches with one good, solid, windproof patch in each appropriate location, and from then until graduation, every time the cold wind blew, I mentally expressed my gratitude for his generous rescue.
About the time I graduated, my father finally sent me two pairs of Big Ben Gorilla on the Button workpants, thus solving the problem with finality. He had thought I was kidding when I told him I couldn’t get pants that fit.
About ten years after that, it became the very apex of fashion to wear jeans that have been carefully ripped and torn, a fashion that draggles on to this day. But after walking around for years like a ragged starveling, I have never thought very much of paying good money for ripped clothing.
Now they are drying under the stairs, and the whole house smells sublime, if you like the smell of camphor.
