Colourful musings

[tabouli at unite.com.au]

Aargh, this is the third time I've started this post, I keep on 
pressing some button which makes my message vanish!  Apologies if the 
button I accidentally pressed was send and you're hearing this stuff 
for the third time...

Anyway, as I keep trying to say, I'm always fascinated by the 
physical cues people of different race use to distinguish people from 
each other.  Being half-Chinese and half-white (Anglo/Celt mix) which 
a lot of exposure to Asians from a range of countries, I've never had 
any trouble telling Asians apart.  However, after living in China for 
a few months, strange things started happening to my perceptions...

I confess, with some embarrassment, that I discovered that my 
(Japanese) then boyfriend's TV's cable channel had the Australian 
soap opera Neighbours, and did something I'd never have done back 
home in Australia: started watching it!  To my amazement, I realised 
that all those foreigners Really Did All Look The Same!  They all had 
light hair, pink skin, round eyes and big noses!

It was all quite disturbing.

Another curious thing was the way the Chinese responded to me.  In 
1994, when I was in China, most of the locals I met had never seen a 
Eurasian before, and found it very hard to believe that my mother was 
Chinese.  "You look COMPLETELY foreign!"  they would exclaim.  One 
friend mentioned my "yellow" hair, which I found more bizarre yet.  
*Yellow*??  Like most Eurasians, my hair is dark brown, with a slight 
reddish tinge, dark enough that a lot of Caucasians insist that it's 
black.  When I pointed this out, she said that though my hair was 
only a little bit yellow, it was of course yellow, because all 
foreigners have yellow hair.  Made me wonder what the connotations of 
the word "huang" (usually translated as "yellow") are for a native 
Mandarin speaker.

In Australia, on the other hand, about 70% of people (including a lot 
of Chinese people!) are convinced I'm Mediterranean (usually Greek, 
as I live in Melbourne, which has a large Greek population.  People 
address me in Greek and Italian on the streets!).  The remaining 30% 
are divided between those who immediately see the Asian blood and 
can't *think* how anyone could miss it, and those whose theories span 
the globe from Tunisia to Russia to the Pacific Islands.

Another China anecdote along race lines is my sadly botched attempt 
at heroism in the Beijing General Post Office.  So there I was, 
sending parcels home, by this time comfortably using Mandarin after 
about 6 months in the country.  Lo and behold, some *black 
foreigners* came into the post office!  (btw, I'm assuming 
that "black" is an appropriate adjective: please correct me if this 
offends anyone).  Now, as all mainland Chinese know, all foreigners 
speak English, so the post office staff valiantly dug out their 
broken English (the level of English spoken in China in 1994 when I 
was there was poor, as a rule, except for students specialising in 
English at university, for whom it was quite incredibly good: I 
assumed one student I met was American).

Alas, within minutes, it became clear to me (if not the post office 
staff) that these particular foreigners were from French speaking 
Africa, and spoke next to no English, and no Chinese whatsoever.  
Now, French was my best subject in high school, and prior to coming 
to China I spoke French much better than Chinese.  On hearing the 
poor "foreigners" conversing together in dismayed French I felt a 
surge of trilingual pride and strode up to them to offer my services 
as a French to Chinese translator.  I opened my mouth to explain, and 
my French turned into Mandarin in mid-sentence!  Worse still, the 
only way I figured out that this was what had happened was by the way 
the relieved and pleased expressions on their faces suddenly turned 
to blank incomprehension as I spoke.

O dear.

I struggled on, and this happened again and again until I realised 
that I had no link in my brain between French and Chinese, and the 
only way I could do the job was to go via English.  Eventually I 
succeeded in helping them post their letters, but it was a long haul, 
and I don't think they were up for hiring me as their interpreter for 
the day...

Tabouli