Here she is! For Richard!

I was chatting to Richard Wong recently about a website where you play "Spot that Race" and where no one, not even the most experienced world-traveler, scores better than 25%.  Most people are lucky to score anything at all because the whole point of the site is that it contains images of pure-blooded people of one race who look exactly like ... a different race.

Richard W. said it wasn't possible; that races looked like themselves and that was that, so we argued a little and I told him that I'd seen people on my travels who I couldn't tell what race they were: 

Like, I told him about this frail old man I've seen around Wan Chai, who must be in his late 90s, who dresses like the epitome of an English Gentleman but has fluent Cantonese and very Chinese mannerisms, and who I can't tell - what with the wrinkles and all - if he's an Old China Hand once part of the British Raj, or an upper-class British guy, maybe one of the Jardines or Mathesons, who has lived in Hong Kong all his life, or if he's an elderly Chinese man who was once high up in the British Colonial Service.

And then I referred him to our mutual friend the actress Kat who, when someone was looking for a young Eurasian actress for a role in a film, I contacted her and told her to audition, only to be told she wasn't Eurasian; she was Scottish and didn't have a drop of Chinese blood.  I told her no one would ever guess and she was to audition anyway.

And then I told him about a Hostess in a restaurant in Guangzhou who, from across the room, I couldn't figure out if she was Oriental or Occidental, so I asked Halley to call her over and find out for me. 

And here is the photograph I took of her that I promised to show Richard:

She's 100% pure Chinese and was most offended that we'd ever doubted it.