Walk Like an Australian, Finale

A few days ago I mentioned Monica Tan's visual thought-experiment. She is an ethnically Chinese native of Australia now living in Beijing, who put her photo among pictures of eight Chinese-Chinese young women to see if observers could pick out the foreigner on sight. Here she is, the "real" Monica Tan, with thumbnails of the full nine-person slideshow below. (Full-sized photos of all at her site):

 


I claimed (honestly!) that I immediately picked her out, and so did nearly all the readers who wrote in to me about their results. Yes, yes, I know that this sample could be skewed. But with all allowances for possible imprecision in these findings, here are some reader remarks:
 
From a college administrator in the US:

>>Very interesting! I picked out Monica right away. It's something about the way she holds herself. I've never been to China, but I work with Chinese students studying in the US, and Chinese women carry themselves differently than American (or evidently Australian) women. Fun challenge.<<

From another American:

>>I've never traveled in Asia or Australia, but I immediately picked out the Chinese Australian among the Chinese Chinese women in the slideshow at first glance. I looked at the photos several more times to attempt to figure out why it had been so easy, and the best I can come up with is that Monica Tan's smile is bigger, she's standing straighter, and her shoulders are more open.
 
That's not to say I could have identified her as Australian, or even as you say, as someone I could speak English to, but in terms of "one of these is not like the others", it was rather easy.<<

My grounds for judgment were like those of these two readers. It was Ms. Tan's carriage -- directness of stance, confidence of body language, call it what we will -- that set her apart, for me. Another reader had a very nice way of putting the effect:

>>I picked her out, too, easily. It's uncanny. If I were forced to explain why it was easy to identify which woman was Australian, I would say that the other women look ... naive. But that just begs the question, really. Why do I think the others look like they're not streetwise? No idea.

Actually, on second thought, I do sorta have an idea. The other eight women look like they're trying to please the photographer. Monica Tan doesn't.<<

And:

>>So, was it the posture (squared shoulders vs. slumped)?   That's what I saw, although the young woman in the Mao cap was another possibility.  I thought that was a red herring.<<

After the jump, a very detailed exegesis from "a half-Chinese man in his 50s" who has never been to Asia:

>>Monica's the only one with a sardonic cum neurotic expression. The only one who diffidently cum anxiously conceals one arm behind her body; most of the others hold both arms in front, some hold them straight at the sides. The only one, or maybe one of just two, whose hold the arms parallel to the body. One of only two who angle their face slightly away from the camera while the body faces the camera head on; put differently, one of only two whose face is angled differently from their body. (For whatever reasons, five of the eight women from China are shot with the body facing away from the camera.) Monica's the only one who is smiling only with her mouth; she's showing lots of teeth, but in a grimace. The other women, whether their smile is faint or big, the smile is "evenly distributed" across the face.

     I'm a half-Chinese man in his 50s who has lived in the USA my entire life and i've never visited Asia. My Chinese-American father was not a typical Asian, and growing up I had little contact with his family. I have lived in Seattle and San Diego for the last 30 years, where there are lots of racially Asian people on the streets, but I have had only fleeting contact with East Asian immigrants, male or female. Nevertheless, I, too, picked out Monica the instant I saw her, i.e., before seeing the rest of the women. Admittedly, I wasn't perfectly sure of myself until a second pass through the slide show.

     We shouldn't assume that Monica is representative of *Australian* women. Equally likely, her posture and gestures are either idiosyncratic, or they may be the consequence of having grown up self conscious precisely because she a belongs to a tiny racial minority. And if she is also the child of immigrants, even more so.

PS. Now I see that her hairstyle is the most artificial, sophisticated: the feathered bangs, the subtle tapering from top to bottom.<<

Thanks to readers and to Monica Tan for this very interesting real-life experiment.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/07/walk-like-an-australian-finale/241314/