Old Summer Palace with students.
What a dumb stereotype, that they all look alike! I spent a year among 1.5 billion Chinese, and every individual looked wholly unlike every other.
We get our impression from the relative lack of feature variety compared to Americans. Skin tone, hair color, eye shape, even stature and weight fall within tighter norms in China than in our own mixed salad of nationalities. But less overall variety doesn’t mean everyone looks alike – not at all.
“Mistah Hobison,” my students complimented me, “your hair is so dark!”
“What are you talking about?” I asked, perplexed. “My hair’s brown – yours is black.”
“No, my hair is not black, it is brown. My hair is more brown than yours I think.”
How could that be? Everyone knew all Chinese had black hair – except the Chinese themselves. Like Eskimos with thirty-odd words for snow, they used more precise terms for shade variations, which made sense: no hair is truly black, only darker and darker shades of brown. Apparently mine was darker than many of theirs, which they found amusing. (Americans were supposed to be Baywatch-blond.)
I couldn’t tell a Roman nose from Greek or Nubian or any other type, but they easily labeled noses, chins, brows, skin tone. It was all so subtle and discerning I wondered if their linguistic precision enabled them to see each other better. My students even described walking styles. “He has a great walk,” they’d comment, “how to say in English …” and trail off in words, then simply imitate the walk, with everyone smiling, “Yes, yes!”
“How do I walk?” I asked, intrigued. Ray thought a moment, then strode across the room. It didn’t look distinctive to me, just walking, but my students applauded. “Yes, you have a good walk,” they said, which made me self-conscious: what else were they noticing about me?
As months progressed and I squeezed through Beijing on buses and subway cars, or rode in thick bicycle traffic, I often played a mental game: could I spot someone who looked like any other Chinese person I knew? Persistently I failed — a testimony to the stunning uniqueness of the human face.
Apparently the game didn’t work the other way – during the first week of class, my students had trouble distinguishing me from my teammates. We were both skinny, thin-faced, with glasses and dark hair. That he stood four inches above me didn’t seem to register. “It was very strange at first,” they confessed later. “You walked out of the classroom and came back, and we wondered how you got so tall!”
Old Summer Palace with students. They informed me that the British had burned it down. They glared at me as they said it. “Hey, don’t look at me,” I told them, “I’m American!”
Old Summer Palace with students.
