A Curiosity in China

This man sort of sidled up to me with a great grin and tagged along for a while as I walked down the street in Shanghai. I could tell he just wanted a good look. This kind of curiosity regarding foreigners is still very much a part of China. It's very common to catch someone taking a sneaky picture of you with their cell phone, or sometimes they have their friend take a picture for them as they get in next to you. You have to wonder who's scrap book you have made it into after spending any time in China. But, when it really sunk in that I was a physical anomaly here, was when I woke up on the train to find a girl tugging on my arm hair and making monkey gestures to her friends. I forgave her - it was probably her first close look at a hairy albino like me.

A big part of this curiosity is likely due to the tiny ratio of foreigners in China today relative to the enormous Chinese population. It is very easy to feel like the the odd drop in a sea of over a billion. But it's also due to the fact that up until pretty recently China was practically closed off to foreigners. I remember that when my next door neighbors visited China in the late eighties it was a very big deal to go to China then. They had to have a government minder with them at all times and their interaction with local Chinese were very restricted.

Historically the Chinese have a right to be a little suspicious of foreign influence, particularly Westerners. There was a time when foreigners took parts of china by force and in many cities in China you can still see the remnants of these concessions in the foreign quarters. In light of this period, when China was carved up into different spheres of influence by the west, it's understandable, if not excusable, that the word for foreigner in Mandarin is yangguizi and in Cantonese it's gweilo. Both mean devil.