'Laowai, laowai!' Sometimes you can just catch the words being whispered by one adult to another, and sometimes it gets screamed by an excited toddler to their parents. The rough translation is, 'foreigner', but it probably has more of an effect like, 'alien'. Though not strictly an insult, it is often used in a derogatory sense - a bit like 'gringo' in South America. I hadn't heard it until I hit Luoyang. Since then I've had it about twenty times, and my responses have ranged from a cheerful wave to a barely-concealed snarl, depending on my mood and tolerance levels. The reason I heard it so much in Luoyang was because I was the only laowai there, or at least I was the only one I was aware of. And that's hardly surprising: Luoyang doesn't have
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