I was very young when I visited China. We were in a remote port city called Qingdao. It was the late 2000s, before easy access to the internet.
I remember the locals staring at us because we looked so different! We were the only Indians they had probably seen in their lives up to that point. I think China is cut off from the world like no other large country even now, so you can imagine how it would have been back then.
Someone staring at you in a foreign country can only mean bad things today, but back then, these people were genuinely curious. We didn’t share a language, but they smiled and looked curious when they saw my sister’s and my large eyes. They had never seen people with such eyes (and we hadn’t seen such small eyes either)!
Years later, when I worked with Chinese colleagues, we went on a trip to Malaysia. We were a group of twentysomethings sitting on the beach drinking beers, and I remember thinking how different we were, but also how similar we were, even though we lived very different lives.
My theory about China being pretty isolated from the rest of the world was proven true when I talked to my Chinese friends who lived outside China. They were very different and more homogeneous with the rest of the world. Similarly, people in Taiwan are more worldly than my Chinese friends.