You All Look the Same to Us
“Which one is Noriko?” my instructor asked me.
“She’s Japanese, ” I responded, “She sits between Katrina and Joyce.”
She looked up at me and grinned.
“We can’t tell you apart, you know,” she laughed. “You all look the same to us. It takes us weeks, even months, to be able to tell you apart.”
Maybe I should have been offended, but I wasn’t. My class was made up of Europeans, Americans, Asians – people from all over the world who wanted to learn Arabic. It was funny to me that she couldn’t tell us apart, but I often have the same problem – I’m bad with faces. When you’re the teacher, looking out at a sea of faces – it takes a while.
But it has become a family tag-line, a joke – “You all look the same to us”.
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I think it’s a fair thing…. depending on where you live. for example, living in Thailand for so long I’m now good at guessing more-or-less correctly whether someone’s chinese, japanese, taiwanese, singaporean, Thai, Lao, Malaysian, and so on. Likewise, working for a while in Kuwait I’m good at knowing roughly where in India people come from, who are bangladeshis, pakistanis, iranians, Saudi (though that’s more to do with attitude!).
But not being able to tell the difference between a European and an Asian – Teach needs specs.
Moocherx – I think our eyes learn to discriminate, in our own culture, from birth, and in another culture just by years of exposure and paying attention. But I know a lot of oblivious people, too, and I am embarrassingly aware of my own shortcomings in this area. It just takes a while, doesn’t it?