I caused another near-miss accident on my power walk this morning. I’ve mentioned before that white people get stared at a lot in my little Chinese city of 7 million people named Wenzhou.

The residents here don’t see too many loawai (literally old foreigner) and so when they do, they tend to look very carefully as they may never see another. This is even more true of country folk who come to the big city to work. I encounter a disproportionate number of them in the mornings as they make their way to the market to sell their produce or to the construction sites littering this boom town.

The better-off residents drive cars, motorcycles and scooters while those of lesser means are on bicycles or pedicabs. Living here, you develop a sixth sense about people staring at you and you pay particular attention when you feel that they’re distracted from their driving. You always want to know where their wheels are pointing to make sure they don’t run you over with their vehicle as they’re busy staring.

A walking beauty

For some reason, I must have looked particularly beautiful one hour into my morning walk. Surely my hair was frizzed by the 80% humidity and I had sweat running down my face and back in the 90F. degree heat. Maybe it was my inner beauty shinning through. I must have been glowing. No, wait. That was sweat.

A man headed on a bicycle in the same direction I was walking felt compelled to turn to look at me as he passed me. He stared for such a long time that he was about to collide with a woman on a pedicab coming at us. The only thing that averted the crash was my pointing to him to watch where he was going.

The driver of the pedicab reprimanded him well saying, I imagine, things like: “Idiot, watch where you’re going. Haven’t you ever seen a laowai before?”

It didn’t stop the man from stealing another glance at me after he’d safely passed the woman and her pedicab to see me laughing.

[View with PicLens]

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