When interacting with Chinese people, 99.9% of the time the second question they ask me is "你是哪国人 ní shì nă guó rén," or "where are you from?" To keep things fresh and interesting, I always reply "你猜吧," or "guess!" This inevitably makes them incredibly flustered, and they respond along the lines of "Oh my goodness, I can't tell! You westerners all look the same!" Only after some encouragement do I get them to play along. Below is a list of nationalities that people have guessed in ranking order of improbability:
- Korean
- Indian
- Irish
- French
- German
- Spanish
- Italian
- British
- Canadian
- American
If I had to give a rough estimate, I would say that people guess American on the first try roughly 30% of the time. Which is exactly why today's interaction with my cab driver was quite so interesting. It went like this:
Driver: 你们是美国人，是不是？(You guys are American, right?)
Me: 啊，你猜对了！你怎么看得出来？(Oh, you guessed right! How could you tell?)
Driver: 因为你像澳巴吗一样！(Because you look like Obama!)
Me: ...什么呀？？怎么可能？？ (Whaaat? How is that possible?)
Driver: 因为你们都很漂亮！(Because you are both very beautiful!)
Clearly infallible logic. At this point, Aiman (my classmate) and I are laughing hysterically in the backseat. A minute or two later, he amended that perhaps we don't look quite like Obama, but that our 性格一样 (personalities are the same). I responded how remarkable it was that he was able to judge my personality in such a short amount of time! When we got out of the cab, he told us that next time he'd take us to his home to hang out. How very hospitable...
Just for fun-sies, below I'll attach a photo taken at the World Expo in Shanghai a couple of weeks ago. Upon spotting a group of us Fulbrighters, some tourists from Henan requested a photo shoot. Here's one of them:
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| Cultural exchange at its finest: Thanks, US Department of State! |
sexy sexy! :-)
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