Distinguishing the Asian Races

[Guo Xiang]

i can usually tell by the clothes they're wearing. mainland chinese, hong kongers, taiwanese, korean, and japanese all dress a little differently.

on the flip side, how many of us can tell the difference between irish, british, french, swedish, german, italian, scottish, welsh, norwegian, belgian, polish, etc.?

I can't. They are all whites to me.

[mind_wander]

Before school was over, one of my team partners kind had this chat with me about Asian culture/races/ and Whites races stereotypes. Further educationing, the minor/major differences between the two. As, you mentioned, all White people look alike; kinda true and false.

If you changed the questions around and asked, "What's your nationality?" then, it would not become a racial thing. But, if you ask, "What's your ethnicity?", then this becomes a racial issue. I did highly emphasized to anyone using this question, who is not 100% sure, what nationality is that person. It reduces the miscommunication with a peaceful resolve.

I am Asian, so here is my labeled by people see me at first glance. Are you Flipino, Japanese, Guangzhou, Korean, must be somewhere from South China? When, I first been asked, are you Japanese? Kinda was blown away because this would be my last one of selected races. If anyone has this kind of experiences, please feel free.

My calm attitude is hey, this is real life. We all make mistakes at first glance, once you spend time and set down with that person and explain the differences. Then, next time this issue would not come up again; I hope. But, Asian does comes in all kinds of shapes, sizes, color, etc. The Asians are very mixed indeed; Asian-Candian, Asian-Austrilian, Asian/Japanese-African [Actually they come out very nice], Asian-Spanish-Malaysian, Flipino, etc.

You kinda get the picture, as someone mentioned, as Asians are all over the globe. We are like colorful flowers poping all over the place

[sha*sha]

It suggests that when we mentally process the appearance of faces different from our own -- in other words, faces that we're not familiar with -- we categorize by race and color and ethnicity. But when we process faces from our own race that we're far more familiar with, we categorize by feature -- by eyes and mouth and hair and eyebrows. That's why the old adage about how all black people look the same to whites (and vice versa) is true: When we look at someone of another race, we're not remembering them by using the kinds of features that make it easy to distinguish an individual. We're just coding them as 'black' or as 'white.'

It could be that we distinguish the race that we interact with the most (was mentioned further on at this website). I agree with him/her!

[bach_ngoc17]

People are just going to have to learn to ask instead of assuming. It's hard to tell, I took the face, building structure, and food exam at that website posted earlier and failed.

[flyingfox2002]

Some are very easy to tell, like you can tell Sandra Oh is Korean. Daniel Dae Kim and the lady who plays his wife on Lost are both obviously Korean too. It's hard to put into words, but usually you can form a first impression. It won't alway be right, especially with mixed marriages nowadays, but it's ususally fairly accurate.

Most people think I am from Hong Kong when they first meet me. I am from Southern China so it's kinda close.