These three vignettes have come from three different lots of students.
Marian* and Renate* were doing a stint in China. (*not their real names) Marian has soft features — light brown hair, blue eyes and a charming smile — and of un-intimidating height. In contrast, Renate is less feminine looking: quite tall with more angular features and buck teeth. They’d gone to a photo studio near their dormitory to have some passport-size photos taken — for some application forms (e.g., for permission to travel to places outside Beijing). When Marian, who wore her hair short, went back to collect her photos, one of the girls at the photo studio asked her colleague, thinking these foreigners couldn’t speak Chinese anyway, “Is that a man or a woman?” Another day, Renate went back to collect hers, and heard the girl say to her colleague, in Chinese, “It’s the ugly one, here for her photos.”
When Mark went to a restaurant, the waiters and waitresses took fright, as they couldn’t speak English and were convinced the Westerner couldn’t speak any Chinese. They stood huddled in one corner of the restaurant, shoving each other to go forward and tackle the barbarian, leaving Mark sitting there for half an hour with no-one to attend to him. Finally, the one who’d picked the short straw approached him in trepidation and asked him, in very broken English, what he wanted to eat. When Mark said, in Chinese, “I can speak some Chinese,” the waiter nearly fainted with relief.
Siberian Kristina on her Year Abroad one day needed what the Chinese call “daily use goods” (e.g., soap) and went to a local shop. The shop assistants fled to the back half of the shop as soon as she walked in, and hovered just behind the doorway, timorously peering round the door frame now and then to see if the foreign devil was still there. Eventually, as the barbarian had not given up and gone away, they had to emerge and come out of their hiding and deal with the onerous task of confronting the barbarian.
(China 1980s / early 1990s)
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