Friendly Oriental-looking people (London)

The Chinese, especially the southerners in my own experience, often come across as abrupt (or worse: rude and aggressive).  

I put it down to the Chinese language, especially the southern dialects, having harsher sounds (and intonations for Cantonese), which is jarring to Westerns.  As with accents being transferred to a foreign language (e.g., Spaniards speaking English with a Spanish accent), so this harshness gets carried over to English spoken by a Chinese person, resulting in the speaker sounding very abrupt.

The Chinese are also not always immediately friendly.  They seem to work to two extremes:  unfriendly when they don’t know you, but very warm and welcoming when they do.  This is my own personal generalisation.

The Chinese community centre where I teach Mandarin and English has a group of ladies from Hong Kong who play cards in the morning at one of the lunch tables.  One day, I approached the table as my student Sui was sitting there.  The three ladies looked up.  So fierce and unwelcoming was the look on their faces that I immediately backed off and went to another table.

I have encountered friendly Oriental-looking people, however — on buses, at bus stops.  They make eye contact, smile (which causes me to do a double take), and even say hello.  

Soon, I discovered what they are:  either Filipinos (I look like one myself, or an American Indian when in Peru), who are usually friendly, or Christians trying to get me to go to their church, or follow their branch of Christianity.

(London)