Originally Posted by
Peter Hessler
And Fuling was a frightening place because people had seen so few outsiders. If I ate at a restaurant or bought something from a store, a crowd would quickly gather, often as many as thirty people, spilling out into the street. Most of the attention was innocent curiosity, but it made the embarrassment of my bad Chinese all the worse - I'd try to communicate with the owner, and people would laugh and talk among themselves, and in my nervousness I would speak even worse Mandarin. When I walked down the street, people constantly turned and shouted at me. Often they screamed waiguoren or laowai, both of which simply meant "foreigner". Again, these phrases often weren't intentionally insulting, but intentions mattered less and less with every day that these words were screamed at me. Another favorite was "hello", a meaningless, mocking version of the word that was strung out into a long "hah-loooo!" This word was so closely associated with foreigners that sometimes the people used it instead of waiguoren - they'd say, "Look, here come two hellos!" And often in Fuling they shouted other less innocent terms - yangguizi, or "foreign devil"; da bizi, "big nose" - although it wasn't until later that I understood what these phrases meant.
The stresses piled up every time I went into town: the confusion and embarrassment of the language, the shouts and stares, the mocking calls. It was even worse for Adam, who was tall and blond; at least I had the advantage of being darked-haired and only slightly bigger than the locals.
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