Still Not Over The Staring Thing

As Jeff and Fresca both said, mere words cannot describe the constant staring in Kafaqu, but I’m going to try anyway. (Sorry to bore the old China hands.) I can understand it on some level, a foriegn girl playing games in your local net cafe might grab some attention. But what’s with the grocery store stares? Surely it’s not a surprise that Westerners also need to eat.

I’d probably never eat at KFC at home, but sometimes I really want to eat french fries that taste like french fries, and ice cream that’s not flavored with red bean. So I ordered, in understandable if imperfect Chinese, and took my food upstairs to the seating area.

Ok, patrons, you’ve all chosen to eatin a KFC. It’s not that surprising that an American would be eating in the only place which serves Western food. At least swallow your burger before staring opened mouthed, ok? And don’t any of you want to resume your conversations? Oh well, I like to enforce a no-talking-while-Meg-is-eating-Western-food rule, and clearly the entire restaurant wanted to abide by this rule.

Hey Mom, remember that advice you gave me in middle school? I remember a whole speech about how it may feel like everyone is looking at me, but really, they’re all too focused on themselves to really be staring at me? Yeah, I know you remember, I made you repeat it often times. It’s not true, as a point of fact.

By the time I got to my ice cream, the autographs had started. I never know what to write when a preteen girl pushes her glitter pen and English book into my hands and mumbles a request. Best wishes from the American who was trying to eat dinner. I can only assume that the girls know that I’ll be internationally famous soon and they plan to sell their signed textbooks on E-Bay to pay for college. Or they plan to take their books to school tomorrow and show their friends the signature of the lao wei who really does chew and swallow, just like real people.