The 狐臭: On Body Odor and Mate Selection

A brunch discussion with my parents on one of my aunts' obsessions with critiquing the attractiveness of everyone else, as vain people are wont, that turned into one about which people on which sides of the family are attractive--my eldest paternal aunt and my maternal grandmother, apparently--eventually turned into my father reflecting on how people choose marriage partners as he drove me back to Wellesley. (This particular aunt had made the peculiar and generally disapproved of choice to marry her first cousin, a paternal uncle of mine. Thus, she often inspires topics of genetics [is that why the son isn't too bright?], attractiveness and notable personalities when she comes up in discussions.)

Father: ...when I was sent to the countryside, I learned that the farmers had a few major taboos on marriage. One was diseases. You know...sexually transmitted diseases...Another was 狐臭.
Me: Eh?
F: Huchou, you know, "body odor" (he said that bit in English). Pure Chinese people won't have it so you can tell who has a little "Turk" in them. The village neighboring the one I was staying at was known for having daughters with really white skin. And of course, if your daughters have white skin, people are definitely going to come and try to marry them. But they also had the 狐臭. The white skin probably came from having some Uighur blood in them, which is also where the 狐臭 came from.
Me: huh.
F: You've got to be careful of that stuff. It's spread matrilineally, you know. No one could take the risk of having children with the 狐臭. Similarly, there was this one farmer, his family were carriers of that sexual disease that Columbus brought back. He managed to finally get a wife by doing a sister swap--you marry my sister, I marry yours--with another family. His sister was fine and had many children. The poor girl who married him caught the disease and died within a year. He was alone until he managed to get paired with this "very retarded" (again, en Anglais) girl....