The Shy and the Not So Shy

Generally speaking people are pretty shy in China. The biggest problem I have with my class is that people  never want to be the first one to do something or to speak up. There are some students that I have never gotten to speak above a whisper. But on the other hand I meet a surprising number of people who are really outgoing. Anyone whose spent much time in China knows that sometimes when you are sitting down people will just come up to you and talk to you. America is, as a whole, a much more outgoing country than China, but if I was just sitting in a food court eating I don't think it's very likely that someone I didn't know would come up and sit across from me and strike up an conversation. But at lunch today that's just what happened. I was getting some food from a Sichuan place when one girl and her cousin came up and sat across form me asking all sorts of questions about America. It turned out that she was a student at Guangzhou University, and that her family also owned this Sichuan restaurant where I had gotten my food. The questions she asked where pretty standard, but it got me thinking about why, in a country that is for the most part extremely introverted, do I so often run into really outgoing people. I think it has something to do with the fact that foreigners are still something of a rarity in China so when the more outgoing people see them they jump at the chance. Also in any college area there are a surprisingly large number of students who are interested in English, but didn't have the chance to study it. That combined with the fact that there are just so many people in China means that even if most people are shy the ones who aren't make themselves known.