Being Foreign

The Hair
I expected more off-the-wall things to happen; however, I am starting to believe that Beijing is like the New York plus Washington DC....that people are a) interested in the world, yet b) not too surprised or interested when foreigners come to their neighborhood.

That is not to say that our team of four students and one ridiculously tall and white professor are not easily-noticed in Beijing. We get stares (especially me). People are a little surprised by our group dynamic. One teamate, who I call Boxer in this blog is Vietnamese. She is always mistaken for Chinese by Beijingers and cab drivers always begin talking to her. She then quickly passes the buck to me since (with a towering 7 weeks of study) I am the dean of Chinese language for our team of 4. Oh you should see the shocked looks....and I barely know anything about the language...just enough to get us places.

But, some of the extraordinary experiences of some personal friends, who are both tall black men who speak flawless Mandarin and Japanese languages have not befallen me in this one week....

They have crazy stories
-Being mistaken for Michael Jordan
- Being mistaken for "Morpheus" aka Lawrence Fishburne
- Parents bringing their babies up to them to have their pictures taken
- Teenagers at comic book / animae fairs coming to take pictures with them in Taiwan

I have two stories that are weird, but not nuts
- The white scarf story (see the first blog entry)
- Tianamen Square old man scratching my head.

So there I am, purchasing a (ridiculous) trinket from a vendor while walking about Tianamen Square with my colleagues yesterday. In front of the Great Hall of the People, many people gather for photos. You can tell where they are from by how they all count to three. I heard "Satu Dua, Tiga" and knew that Malaysians or Indonesians were around. Ubiquitous was the sound of "Yi, Er, San" of Chinese from the "green acres" coming in to the "big city" to walk their capital streets.

Ubiquitous also are what I call "old mens clubs." Really old Chinese guys, wearing matching baseball caps, bickering better than the stars of that movie "Grumpy Old Men." But in Chinese, everything sounds louder to me, so the old guys may only be talking about the weather, but it sounds like deep philosophical disagreements are being had.

So as I am purchasing this trinket, I feel what I think is a bug in my head and no, its an old guy's finger. I was a bit paralyzed and about to double over in laughter, but contained myself well enough to accept complements "your hair is very beautiful" spoken in English and my reply Chinese reply "na.li na.li" which literally means "where? where?" .... considered a more polite way to appreciate a complement than saying outright "thank you, you're right, my hair is awesome."

I recall the same curious complements in East Timor from my Thai doctor and friends in my neighborhood...complements followed by questions: "Is it all your hair?" etc...

So, since no Chinese person has begged me to take a picture with their family out of an interest in the exotic-haired guy....maybe I should have asked that old man to take a picture with me. Just when I had gotten up the nerve to ask just that, he had run off to watch (what I think was) the changing of the guar on the side of the square near the giant portrait of Mao.