In China I have a dear friend who moved her daughter to a different school because of a hat. An American would assume the hat sported a crude phrase, a gang symbol, or most offensive of all, some indication that mother and daughter might possibly be conservative. However, this was a Chinese school, and the affronting object was an unassuming, cotton, wide-brimmed topper intended to keep the sun off her daughter’s head during P.E. Tragically, to be acceptable, every single mother in the school had to be persuaded to buy the exact same hat. Therein lay the rub.

Uniformity reigned in Chinese school cafeterias as well, where brownbag lunches could mean a fight with the administration. I knew one Taiwanese mother living in mainland China who sidestepped the whole ordeal by claiming all her kids had food allergies. Even so, it all got to be a bit much and she transferred her brood to an international school. As a blonde westerner, my own daughter, Abby, was continually stared at and photographed. Consequently, she preferred to eat with her friends, rather than make herself even more conspicuous by dragging American food into her Chinese school, until the day she happened to dig a fish eyeball from her rice. “You’re lucky,” her friend said gleefully, though Abby was a little scarred, and considered herself rather the opposite.

Chinese lefties have worse luck than blonde girls with fish eyeballs. In China it’s bad luck to be left-handed, so a Chinese mother will consciously force her lefty child to use his or her right hand, and once school starts, the teachers get into the act. Abby had a lefty friend who had grown up with a string of teachers rapping her left hand with a ruler whenever she accidentally tried to use it. It’s the P.E. sunhat all over again, but this time all the mothers agreed to buy the right-handed model.

The same lunchroom that produced the fish eyeball served as the scene of a rather more sinister event. All the elementary students were called into the cafeteria to find that the tables had been pushed aside to make room for people in lab coats and 1950s nurses caps. “We have to check for infectious diseases,” they said. Read More