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[Roger]

"Do you know Dr Mengele? You know the doctor who experimented on Jewish and Gypsie patients? A German. Hmmmmm. German, germs... I will always remember Germany. Maybe they invented the germs there? Perhaps the new SARS germ as well?" So reasoned the missus at breakfast time.
Then it was on to the Iraqi people:
"How clever they are! They put the dead in stone boxes. Not like us dumb CHinese... we use expensive wood... not only does the wood rot, the dead also rots away... A total waste..."
"It's to do with climate," I hasarded, "look at the clever TIbetans..."
"The Tibetans? The Tibetans EAT their dead... yes, clever, they don't waste dead people..."
Lucky my time was up. I have had more such entertaining dialogues with not just one but two times a dozen Chinese girl friends, not always as macabre, but definitely always edifying.
There are some 600 million CHinese females, and slightly more males, most of whom sharing rich folklore and ready to share with us the ignorant outsiders!

[TEECHER]

YEAH, YEAH, YEAH,............But what I really want to know is.....who were you eating for breakfast? Bye for now

[Ferne]

Hi Roger...such a breakfast experience must not be good on the digestive system. I myself had to hear things like that in China--and you know what: mostly from foreigners!! So don't worry, it's a global thing (although your experience I think was definitely one of the tougher cases). You will come across ignorant savants like this in just about any place on this planet...I can only hope that Jupiter or Mars might be a bit better

I never heard anything bad about Germans when I was in China, only from my Russian colleague and later a so-called Oxford alumni. I was surprised to find out how many people in China know our German football/soccer heros, and often I had taxi drivers proudly pat the dashboards of their little Volkswagens: De-Guo! De-Guo! That was at a time when the war had just begun in Iraq and I was too nervours to say that I am actually German-American...I just left out the American part which in the end proved well (especially after one taxi driver once proclaimed how much he hated Americans--and he probably didn't even have a reason...that was the same man who later shared how much he liked French women though he had never met one--now isn't that one global statement?). But that might have been the same case had I been sitting in a US taxi, just the other way round. There's a whole psychology behind stereotypes and prejudice and hateful remarks--as humans, it is a way to lighten our "thinking" load by putting things in easy-to-retrieve drawers of our minds. Those who never have the chance to review and re-evaluate their drawers, well, they just have to live with the fact that Germans invented the Germs and Tibetans eat their dead...just guess how far these ideas will get them in their life!

Geez I am ramblin...sorry, I am just bored. An interesting topic for me though.