Forum trends: When China left me speechless

Boilermaker21 (US)

When I first arrived from the US, my family and I had a 4 hour layover in Shanghai before taking the plane to our final destination. Since we were exhausted from our 14 hour long haul flight, we just decided that we would stay at the airport and rest at the gate. I have a daughter with extremely long brown hair, a daughter with blond hair, and (at the time) a 2 year old son.

Within minutes of us sitting down, crowds began to gather around us and began to take our pictures. Parents were sitting their babies on my oldest daughter's lap. A pregnant woman rubbed her hands on my blond daughter's head, and then rubbed her belly. Adults were trying to pick up and hold my son. It was incredibly overwhelming and not at all what I expected in a Westernized city such as Shanghai. In the past 3 years, we have continued to have all sorts of random attention. An Ayi working at a hair salon once collected my blond daughter's clipped hair from the floor and put it in a zip top bag!

My foreign friends and I laugh about the crazy attention because we cannot imagine what would happen if we photographed minorities for the sake of photographing minorities back in our native homes!