After the translation and posting of The Five Stupid Questions Foreigners Ask Chinese last week, I felt it only right, proper and fair to write a response opinion piece of my own to share with the good Netizens of China. If you’re a laowai and you have even the slightest contact with locals on a regular basis, you will inevitably have had some amusing, baffling and downright annoying conversations in your time.

While it is of course unfair and totally incorrect to assume that all Chinese possess an extremely stereotyped and twisted view of foreigners, the solid majority of locals in the PRC often show a remarkable lack of knowledge and understanding of anyone who looks different to them. That is not to say that, in my native Britain, for example, people do not stereotype and generalize about people different to ourselves all the time. However, the major difference being that on the whole these dumb and ridiculous fallacies are not waved in the person’s face and preached in total seriousness.

Here are just five of the questions that Chinese people have asked – and yes, they have all been asked with a straight face:

1. Do you like Chinese food?

This has to be number one, as after a lot of Chinese people have asked where you’re from, this is a very popular second question. Indeed, if you’re anything like me you’ll have had to put up with a million and one annoying Chinese comments on how terrible foreign food is. This will then usually be accompanied by the person proceeding to ask whether or not you like Chinese food. They then stand there with a look of hopeful expectation on their face, partly genuinely wondering if you do, and partly assuming that you must, and if you don’t then you are clearly a cretin.

Of course, the answer that comes out of most foreigner’s mouths at that point is a ‘yes, I love Chinese food.’ To which the inquisitor will smile broadly, safe in the assumption that Chinese food is the only food really worth consuming on this green earth.

The topic of food is a massive can of worms when it comes to Chinese/laowai interaction. It is true that most laowai will eat a great deal of Chinese cuisine. Frankly, unless you’re the most diehard ‘stupid expat’ who sticks to steak and pasta every day then you will have plenty of Chinese meals every week. However, the crunch comes when foreigners have to listen to Chinese people lecture them on how terrible and third rate Western food is. The joke (if you’re still able to laugh at this point) is that we all know that Western food is slightly more varied than pasta, steak and burgers, and that maybe, just maybe, the Western food served up in Chinese eateries is not quite the same as the stuff ‘Momma used to make’ back home.

2. You eat 5 bananas a day, don’t you? All foreigners do!

Yes, strange though this sounds, I was actually asked this once by a twentysomething Chinese career woman. This question expresses the phenomenon that a lot of Chinese people display when talking to foreigners, that of taking a fact concerning a small percentage of people in this world who are not Chinese and then applying it to all of us, regardless of race, creed or color.

The woman in question had read somewhere (probably on the internet), that since foreigners discovered the nutritional qualities of the banana, we have been stuffing our faces with the yellow fruit to the tune of five a day ever since. The concept that I only eat the occasional banana actually shook her to the core with shock and disbelief. It’s lucky my sister wasn’t there too, she hates bananas!

 

3. You’re American, do you have a gun on you?

Yes, this is a little extreme and not such a common question, but still a real example that an American friend once recounted to me. If anything, this type of question is very much related to question two, above, however this time the inquisitive Chinese person was clearly able to narrow down and tailor their question to suit the audience.

No one can deny that America has extremely high gun ownership, and that many of the homicides and other deaths on American soil are gun-related. Chinese people are not alone in stereotyping Americans as being gun toting maniacs.

 

However, the problem comes when some Chinese fail to see the difference between an American in the USA, and an American walking down the road in Beijing. The idea that a foreigner might in anyway be able to detach themselves from the reality (or stereotyped reality) of their home country and adapt in anyway to their new home, China, seems lost on some people. The simultaneous messages to both ‘understand and adapt to the Chinese way of doing things’, but yet at the same time ‘you’re a foreigner, you can never understand China’, is a blinding contradiction that continues to baffle me. No, Americans generally don’t carry guns, especially when in Wudaokou and not Wyoming.

 

 

 

4. Why aren’t you married with children yet?

This question starts to be a problem for laowai as they reach their mid-twenties onwards. It is especially difficult for female laowai from that age up, who will sometimes, I have been told, feel bombarded by these types of questions by accusatory Chinese people who claim that as it is normal to be married and even have a family as early as one’s mid-twenties and that they find it incredible how liberal us laowai are when it comes to dating and marriage – slack even.

The reality, of course, is that many Chinese people, especially city types, are putting marriage and a family off until they are into their thirties. It is even quite common to hear Chinese people talk about never having children. Naturally, this is the kind of reality that many simpler minded Chinese choose to ignore when faced with a foreigner, who as we all know, are sexually depraved and morally bankrupt compared to any Chinese person throughout the whole course of 5000 years of golden history.

5. Can you use chopsticks?

This question on its own might seem perfectly natural to ask. Indeed, I have asked it myself to friends on their first day visiting me in China as we are sitting down to have our first Chinese meal together. However, it is when this question is asked, again with a straight face by a Chinese person who has either seen you eating with chopsticks before, or equally stupidly, when they know you have been in China for some considerable time.

It is not beyond the realms of possibility that you might have lived in China for three years and still not mastered the ancient and baffling Chinese art of eating with chopsticks (yeah, right!), but it is pretty unlikely you would be that stupid. Nevertheless, you are a foreigner, and this is China, so for many Chinese people it is completely reasonable to assume that even the simplest knowledge on things Sinological like how to use chopsticks, ride the Beijing subway or know who Chairman Mao is will remain beyond your laowai understanding and grasp.

These are just five of a multitude of questions that myself and friends of mine have been asked during our many combined years in China. The questions are not merely an indication of how ‘stupid’ a lot of Chinese people are, but more they cast light on just how inflexible, rigid and set in our ways they assume us to be.

The same, as we saw in the China Netizen’s post last week on questions asked by foreigners, can be said for our own stereotypes of the Chinese. I think it is important that both sides remember the old maxim of ‘to assume, makes an ass out of u and me’.

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Related Links

The Five Stupid Questions Foreigners Ask Chinese
The Secret Life Of The Laowai
How I Came to China and Fell in Love with Da Shan

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