The Same But Different

"They all look the same to me."  How many times have I heard that remark spoken by a racist or xenophobe?  So often it is used to imply that an ethnic group are somehow less individual, less important and somehow less human than the speaker and their chosen audience.  And yet, I have to admit to a practical cognitive difficulty.  When I first arrived in Sarawak I felt myself to be in a sea of Chinese and asian faces and I found it very hard to tell people apart.  To a degree people did "look the same to me".  When I started teaching I used name labels for the first three weeks even in classes of three or four students to be sure I didn't make a mistake.  After this initial period I was still paranoid about getting a name wrong and left little notes to myself in the files for some classes like "'X' has glasses" to make sure I didn't confuse her with 'Y'.

Then the strangest thing happened.  A phenomena familiar I'm sure to many teachers.  Teaching requires one to study students' faces very closely and after a few weeks it was as if the students' personalities started to leap out at me through the mask of their faces.  In quite a short space of time I began to see them as individuals rather than as Chinese people.  Now the idea that my students are Chinese rarely occurs to me at all.  "Thian" has become a determined and serious thirteen year old with strong views about life and English and is no longer the Chinese girl called "Thian".  Oddly, I've spent so much time among different ethnic groups that I've started to see myself as a foreigner.  Now I look in the mirror and sometimes I see this strange pink-skinned old man with a high forehead, a big nose and a long square chin.

I think the reason this happens is not because we are bad at reading faces, but because we are actually extremely good at it.  Our vision is not like a radar which sweeps the surroundings with a uniform frequency, it's more like a missile guidance system which rapidly scans the environment before "locking on" to the smallest detail.  We are so attuned to reading faces that we can see powerful feelings communicated in minute changes to our expressions lasting a fraction of a second. Naturally when we are surrounded by people who have small ethnic differences to their facial topography it takes us a while to "tune up" our highly sensitive equipment.

I guess travel really does "broaden the mind", but often in the most unexpected ways.