Passport Face

"You have a passport face," my friend Alex informed me (and my mother).  It's true in a lot of situations -- clearly I'm not Chinese, and so sometimes guards don't really bother checking my ID.  It's fairly plausible that I'm a wai jiao, a foreign teacher.

Another advantage of having a passport face is the great reactions from people that happen when I'm least expecting them.  

Yesterday, for example, Mom and I were walking back to our hostel when I noticed a young man dodging through traffic with a plastic bottle of tea in his hand.  He noticed us too.  As he got to the sidewalk and began chugging his tea, he stared... and stared... and stared... and then started coughing.

My sympathies for any of the guys who half-drown themselves on tea because they're so busy gawking at the foreigners are, well, limited.  

Story number two is even better.

So one afternoon in Xiamen (which, you should note, is a pretty hopping metropolis, not a rural village somewhere in western China), Mom and I went into KFC to get lunch.  In restaurants that have picture menus, I almost always get what I was trying to order, because it is fairly fool proof.  So I went to the counter, looked at the menu there, and began pointing to it, telling the cashier (in Chinese, mind you...) how many of each thing I wanted.

He.  Freaked.  Out.  

He took one look at me and instantly began hollering for one of his coworkers to come over and help him, because his coworker's English was better.  His coworker was busy with something and he continued yelling as if I was a bank robber and they should all be instantly dropping to the floor.  After a minute, his coworker finished up what he was doing and came over.  

His English was up to the task of taking my order (two sandwiches, a bowl of soup, and two cokes) and telling us to sit down and wait for tswo minutes.  We got our food and went upstairs.  

As we went up the stairs, I glanced back, and he was standing by the cash registers, hands on his head, clearly in a state of distress and feeling that he had been taxed near to the limit of human endurance.

Sometimes...

I really just don't understand.

I've certainly been in situations where that response would be merited from whoever I was trying to talk with.  (Particularly in taxis.)  

But in KFC... really... that was not one of them.  I can order food.

I hope that he's getting as much mileage out of talking about the terrifying foreigners who came to KFC as I am about the cashiers who freaked out the moment they saw foreign faces.