The numbers of Westerners traveling to China has soared over the past decade, so seeing a crazy little white girl bopping around the streets of Zhonguo is not a huge deal anymore. But apparently it is still very strange to most Chinese to see a crazy white girl with an Asian guy. Especially if the Asian guy is Chinese. And much to my surprise, pretty much everyone we meet thinks that Mark is Chinese.

So we get stared at a lot. And the folks we actually get to talk to are always shocked to discover that a.) Mark is my boyfriend, b.) Mark doesn’t speak Chinese, and c.) I do speak Chinese. Our friends from the train as well as the Giggling Tree staff and a group of Chinese guys we met in Yangshuo all told us they had been surprised to see me with a “Chinese” guy. We try to explain that Mark is American and was born in the Philippines, and that he isn’t at all Chinese, but they still sort of expect him to speak Mandarin, and they get a good laugh at my own limited ability to speak the language, especially given that Mark clearly understands even less than I do.

Oddly enough, it doesn’t seem nearly as strange to the Chinese to see a white guy with a Chinese girl….but double-standards are common, I suppose. People will even turn their heads and look back at us as we walk by…multiple times, as if they can’t quite believe what they see. We surprise them. But everyone is always really nice, it’s not like they think we shouldn’t be together, it’s just funny to them. And that’s funny to us.