What's with the long pinky nail?

Westerners, with their short, evenly trimmed fingernails, will notice something about Chinese men, particularly cab drivers, immediately: many of them have extremely long pinky fingernails - sometimes ½ an inch or more! Some Chinese men keep all of their fingernails long, but the incongruously long pinky nail is rather more common. Any woman who’s ever had a professional manicure done knows just how difficult it is to get anything done with fingernails that long; they get in the way and make it hard to grab things, and if you should happen to break such a long nail it’s often painful. So why do Chinese men grow their nails that way if it’s so clearly inconvenient? And why just the pinky nail?

If we give into temptation and apply Western cultural norms, we might be tempted to think that these long-nailed cab drivers all do cocaine. But if that were true there’d be an absolutely astonishing number of cocaine users in J&J! Alternatively, a little observation might make us decide that Chinese men grow their fingernails so long for the express purpose of picking their noses or cleaning out their ears. But, while the utility of the long pinky nail for these purposes is undeniable, that’s not why Chinese men grow them so long in the first place.

The custom is a holdover from China’s dynastic days. One of the ways that high class Chinese of centuries ago let it be known that they were not laborers was by growing long pinky fingernails. One can hardly wield a hoe or work stone or do any other type of backbreaking labor with a long pinky fingernail. It would be virtually impossible to so much as wield chopsticks with five long nails on a hand, so I assume they chose the pinky nail to leave uncut because it’s easy to simply hold the pinky out of the way when you’re trying to grasp something.

Though the last Emperor is long gone, the pinky fingernail is still a relevant and widely understood cultural cue. Cab drivers are not laborers. Driving a car is the opposite of manual labor in fact. So, in order to make sure everyone, inside their cabs and out, knows that they don’t work with their hands, many cab drivers allow their pinky fingernails to grow extra long. It’s a point of pride.

Supposedly, the long pinky fingernail has begun to go out of fashion as contact with the West increases. Wikipedia claims that the association with high status has begun to change, that Chinese people have begun to associate long fingernails with drug use and unsavory habits like nose picking in much the same way that we do in the West. But whether or not that’s true, fading isn’t gone, and long pinky fingernails are still very much a visible part of Chinese culture.