All Chinese people look the same – it’s not just fact, it’s legal, so much so that one can use it as a legitimate defense in creating reasonable doubt. Imagine the possibilites, and I’m not just talking about the Chinese, but the advantages for all you Forumosans. If you have a local SO and you’re caught in bed with another local, just invoke this court case and state, “Oh darn! Sorry honey, I thought s/he was you! You do know that you all look the same right?”
This is the reason why foreigners get asked time and time again why they date ugly local girls, as discussed in this thread. Obviously, they can’t tell the difference.
Conversely, Taiwanese folks who haven’t spent much time around white foreigners have similar problems telling them apart. Of course in the West, this ‘looking the same’ business feeds into a number of the common stereotypes about Chinese people.
So much for the Judges in Scotland? Sorry you scots out there, but this judge makes your judicial system seem rather ridiculous. What an amazing story!
Bodo
When viewing a novel group of stimuli, be it a pile of jackfruit or a group of Eskimos, we tend to focus at first on the overall shared characteristics of that group, rather than noticing what in fact may be rather subtle differences between them. Only after we spend a significant amount of time with repeated introduction to the stimuli do we tend to start seeing the detailed differences. So in time, we gain a greater ability to see the differences between the Chinese, or whites, or whatever.
I don’t think it’s prejudicial or wrong to acknowledge such perceptual phenomena, but it can certainly be done in a way which sounds less ignorant and prejudicial. “Folks who haven’t seen a lot of any particular ethnic group sometimes might think they tend to look similar and this can on occasion lead to mistaken identification of individuals.” Better?
People say that, but common sense tells you that white people have different hair and eye color and come in a wider variety of heights and body shapes than Chinese people. Chinese people all have the exact same hair and eye color, and are generally of a similar height and body shape. It’s pretty easy to tell a short, chunky, green-eyed redhead apart from a tall, boney, blonde with blue eyes.
Lazy judge, lazy witnesses is all. If Chinese are the minority race, there’s a tendency for a witness in such a case to recall only the most obvious – “the guy was Chinese. Uh, he had black hair. You know. Chinese” – whereas if it was a white person he was trying to identify he wouldn’t have that convenient marker and would have to try harder with hair colour, clothing, build, etc.
I’ve seen it loads of times and you can see it in the media too. Whereas 20 years ago it would have been quite sufficient for a witness to describe a suspect as just “black,” when you read such accounts in the paper these days, “black” just doesn’t cut it any more and people are expected to remember more than just skin colour – and they do.
I think that’s what the judge was trying to say in her ignorant and ham-fisted way.
Quentin, are you seriously telling me that you can’t tell Chinese people apart?
No, I’m not saying that “they all look the same”, I can easily tell the difference between different Chinese people. I’m saying that white people look more different from each other, if that makes sense. White people have different hair colors (black, brown, red, blonde) and different eye colors. Chinese people all have the same hair and eye color. White people have curly, wavey, or straight hair, while Chinese people have only straight hair. To point out the obvious.
I didn’t do very well last time I tried it [/quote]
Interesting test. I scored 12 out of 18 on the faces. The faces are 1/3 Chinese, Japanese, and Korean and one is supposed to guess which nationality is each face. I got 100% correct for the Chinese faces, but onlly 50/50 on the Japanese/Korean faces. Not surprising really given the number of Chinese people I hang out with.
People say that, but common sense tells you that white people have different hair and eye color and come in a wider variety of heights and body shapes than Chinese people. Chinese people all have the exact same hair and eye color, and are generally of a similar height and body shape. It’s pretty easy to tell a short, chunky, green-eyed redhead apart from a tall, boney, blonde with blue eyes.[/quote]
Yes, it’s easy for us, white people raised in Western countries. It’s not so easy for Asians, evidently. I guess we all look the same to them.
Examples: I am tall and fat with long black hair and brown eyes. My sister, much thinner and shorter than I am, has short light brown hair and blue eyes. Size and shape of facial features - very different. No Canadian has ever said we look alike - in fact it has often been remarked that it’s hard to believe we’re related. In China, people would exclaim about how similar we were. In photos, they couldn’t tell us apart. Same at my Chinese school here in Taipei - here my teacher and Japanese classmates would comment on how much I looked like another student - a foot shorter than me, with completely different coloring. I don’t know what they were looking at, but it wasn’t coloring, height or size.
I agree with a previous poster - because coloring, height and size tend to be very similar in Asian countries, they look to other things to differentiate. In the West, coloring, height and size vary widely, so we can base our differentiations on those factors.
I’m a pale skinned, balding redhead, and have been told by a Taiwanese woman that I look “just like” Clint Eastwood. I hope she is refering to his younger days.
we used to sit the cafeteria at the university of hawaii (there are lotsa local asian and exchange student asians there) and play "guess the nationality game. we got really good at it. if they had really high cheek bones, they were koreans. if they had really whitened skin they were japanese. if they were chinese, you had to look at their clothes. mainlanders dressed like midwesterners but without the brand names. hong kongers dressed with alot of style and calvin klein logos and thones who just looked like dorks were from macau or taiwan.
in reality it was much more subtle and nuanced. you shoulda seen how angry the south chinese girls got when you told them they looked like they were from the philippines or gasp- indonesia.
[quote=“skeptic yank”]
in reality it was much more subtle and nuanced. you shoulda seen how angry the south chinese girls got when you told them they looked like they were from the philippines or gasp- indonesia.[/quote]
Well, then what things do they look to then? When I was a newbie I laughed when someone asked me if I preferred big or small eyed girls. But I guess when everybody has the same eye color, eye size seriously does become a differentiating factor!
