South China Morning Post: The world's perception of Chinese tourists has changed dramatically
2024-08-11
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Hong Kong's South China Morning Post article on August 3, titled: What do I learn from traveling around the world with a Chinese face? In the 1990s, my family went abroad for the first time and went to Hong Kong. At that time, in a boutique, the clerk probably saw that I was not from Hong Kong, so he asked me in Mandarin if I needed help. Although the clerk's tone was not rude, I felt belittled.
I was born into a Chinese Singaporean family. I have always been proud of my overseas Chinese identity. My family lived in a government housing estate at the time, and I could always hear neighbors chatting in Mandarin, Hakka and Cantonese in the corridor. When I was in secondary school, the teaching languages in school were English and Chinese.
What surprised me was that as China's destiny changed, the outside world's perception and expectations of what Chinese people look like also changed. For a Chinese-looking person walking on the streets of an unfamiliar city, the world around him has changed dramatically in a few decades.
Time passed until 2010, and I went to Turkey and France. In Istanbul and Paris, the vendors greeted me in Japanese with expectation. After 2010, I went to Paris again, and this time I encountered a strange thing at Charles de Gaulle Airport. A man in uniform came up to me and said something to me repeatedly and patiently, but I couldn't understand it at all. My French is only at the entry level, but I knew he was definitely not speaking French. Later, I suddenly realized that he was saying "Hello" to me in very unstandard Chinese and guiding me to apply for a tax refund. At this moment, I clearly realized that Chinese consumers have really come!
Last year, I went to Phuket, Thailand with a friend. One of my friends booked a room at a small resort that Chinese tour groups rarely go to, so as to avoid competing with the tour groups for the breakfast buffet. But her worries may be unnecessary. We didn't see any Chinese tour groups from the resort to the seafood market. Instead, every time we walked past a store or restaurant, the merchants greeted us in Mandarin. The Chinese tourists here were all in groups of three or two, just like us.
The world economy is still in post-pandemic recovery mode, and the identities of my friends and me, as well as the distinctions between Chinese and overseas Chinese, no longer seem to matter. In the eyes of sales and service professionals in Thailand and elsewhere, we are the Chinese tourists who save their livelihoods. (Author Foong Woei Wan, translated by Zhen Xiang)
