Pretty much every­one I’ve met so far has said one or more of the fol­low­ing things to me:

You have a lot of white hair. They see it main­ly in the sides of my head, where it’s short­er and more obvi­ous. It seems like most peo­ple in my fam­i­ly dye their hair black, so my grey stands out, even though I’m youngest.

Are you dat­ing any­one? This is usu­al­ly fol­lowed by, “Are there any girls are after you?”, which is a sort of way of fig­ur­ing out if you want to date, or just don’t have the option.

Is your Tai Chi teacher white? Except instead of white, it’s “guai” or “ghost”. This is the only ques­tion I resent, because I feel like I have to defend the fact that he’s a com­pe­tent teacher, even though he’s a “for­eign­er”.

You’re a hand­some boy. The word for hand­some in Chinese — “leng” — is the same word for pret­ty when applied to girls. This one is good. I like this one. More peo­ple need to say this to me.

Aren’t you cold? It’s get­ting very hot and some­what mug­gy, so I’m wear­ing as lit­tle cloth­ing as pos­si­ble. This is in con­trast to every­one else, who are still wear­ing scarves and coats.

Do your tat­toos come off? Although the lit­er­al trans­la­tion is more like “Do your tat­toos wipe off?”. Many peo­ple here don’t know how tat­toos work, which is under­stand­able, since they’re so uncom­mon. Related to this is, “Did you draw it your­self?”. This ques­tion sur­pris­es me, because the char­ac­ter was drawn by arguably the most famous Chinese cal­lig­ra­ph­er, Yan Zhenqing, and is so beau­ti­ful and per­fect and far beyond some­thing that I could have done myself.