5 Examples of Americans Thinking Foreign People Are Magic

5 Believing In Superstitions Just Because They Are Foreign

Everyone knows superstitions are dumb, like throwing salt over your shoulder if you spill some, never opening an umbrella indoors or wearing a helmet while riding a motorcycle. If you tried to start a business teaching people how to hang horseshoes over their doors and avoid black cats, you would be on welfare pretty soon.

But bring the superstition from a foreign culture, and suddenly you are in business. You can apparently still convince a shockingly large portion of the population that you can see the future if you're doing it with Tarot cards. They come from the gypsies after all. Of course, these same people would slap you if you offered to tell their fortune from a standard card deck.

Wear a turban and call yourself Madame Zarisha, and a client will get a chill up their spine when you tell them they are going to die. If you took off the turban and admitted your name is Nancy, you'd get hit with a restraining order.

But now in this global era, Americans are increasingly lumpimg gypsies in with Europeans, and Europeans aren't exotic. People who really want to believe in stupid superstitions have to look to places like China, which has feng shui (sounds more like "phone shway" than "fang shooey"). Feng shui is a really really complex bunch of rules for organizing your house or business or sex dungeon or whatever.

Some of those rules are practical but blindingly obvious, like, "Put some thought into your house and don't fling your crap all over the place," and, "Don't block your door," but most are about how facing your front door east or painting it certain colors will increase the flow of "chi". Or if your house is getting too much "chi," you can put a mirror outside to reflect it away. Really.

Despite being pretty stupid, feng shui got particularly hot in the 90's, with Donald Trump, Oprah, and firms like Salomon Smith Barney hiring feng shui consultants to maximize their chi. Of course, this is the equivalent of a Chinese Executive pinning 4-leaf clovers all over his office.

4 Blindly Trusting Foreign Medicines

Hypothetical question. Suppose that someone handed you a jar of moldy tea and told you to drink it. How fast would you run away?

What if instead of asking you to have some moldy tea, they said it was "kombucha," an ancient Chinese remedy that could cure cancer and cleanse you of toxins? If you are one of millions of American health food nuts, apparently you will chug it, nevermind that it probably doesn't come from China and it's given people food poisoning.

Likewise, because you just can't trust boring American doctors, but can trust rainforest fruits that Amazon tribesmen have been eating for centuries, you have the latest craze: acai.

Although most research seems to indicate that acai is about as healthy as non-exotic berries, Oprah and health fad opportunists are jumping all over it because Brazil. Tribesmen.

Imaginations ran wild and soon it was marketed for weight-loss, and anti-aging, and penis enlargement, because why not. This would be a harmless, stupid fad, if it hadn't driven acai to 60 times its normal price so that those traditional Brazilians can barely afford their own staple food anymore.

Another thing people are (literally) swallowing wholesale is hoodia, a plant product that the San (or Bushmen) of the Kalahari use to suppress hunger on long trips and Americans use to try and stop being fat.

Tell American customers it's "natural" and chewed by a tribe that talks in clicks, and people are so completely hooked they won't even bother to pay attention to quality of the hoodia pills you hand them, many of which are apparently just made from whatever random crap the manufacturer could find lying around the factory.

But peddle the same customers an American weight loss pill and they'll start clucking about their distrust of "drugs" and "Western medicine."

Anyway, if you really want to put your faith in ancient exotic medicine, you know what ancient Chinese emperors actually did drink for longevity? Mercury! Try that!

3 Treating Foreigners as Having Unearthly Wisdom

The recent movie Eat, Pray, Love was about a lady that lost her passion for life or something, and went on some vacations all over the world until she found it again. It's based on a real story which hopefully is not that stupid and oversimplified, but some of its audience will definitely be people who believe meditating with a random nonwhite person in a foreign country will solve all your spiritual ills.

As Salon.com's Sandip Roy puts it, "I couldn't help wondering, where do those people in Indonesia and India go away to when they lose their passion, spark and faith? I don't think they come to Manhattan. I wonder if there could be an exchange program for the passion-deprived, a sort of global spark-swap." Imagine it ...

At first glance, this might look similar to people who go volunteering overseas with the Peace Corps or a church or whatever, and come back gushing about how much they learned, but there's a not-so-subtle difference between learning what life is like for other people in the world by actually working with them, and acting like those people were placed there like stations in a bird watching obstacle course designed to restore your Western pluck.

If it actually sounds appealing to have your spiritual enlightenment mapped out for you, you can book a number of different meditation tours to Thailand or Peru (or for the budget conscious, the "there are lots of non-white people there so it's sort of exotic, right?" Arizona tour).

What it's hard for some people to grasp is that in any culture, there are wise people and stupid people, positive lessons and negative lessons, tacos and Montezuma's revenge.

Some random tai chi instructor might really be a Mr. Miyagi type who has a lot to teach you about how to not let your possessions possess you, or he might have flunked tai chi instructor training and moved to Kansas City, where people wouldn't ask to check his license. Chinese culture has a lot to teach us about respecting the elderly, but could learn a lot from America about how to not turn gift-giving into a grueling test of character.

If picking and choosing sounds too complicated, there's an ancient Chinese proverb my grandmother passed down to me that should do the trick: Don't believe someone has something deep to say just because they have a funny accent.

2 Acting Like Foreign Text Has Mystical Power and Beauty

You know how it's been trendy for a while for white Americans to get Chinese or Japanese characters -- sorry, "Hanzi" or "Kanji" -- as tattoos? The idea seems to be that if you get the English words "STRONG" or "BEAUTIFUL" tattooed on your arm, you look like a bragging retard, but if you get it in Japanese, it is suddenly meaningful.

By no means am I discouraging wannabe exotic kids from continuing this practice, because it leads to hilarity like a man proudly showing off a tattoo he thinks says "spirit" but actually says "gas". Or a guy thinking he's wearing his daughter's name in Chinese when it actually says "woman healthy flow".

Some people might protest that they don't get Asian characters JUST because it's foreign, but because the characters are artistic and beautiful, unlike plain old English. Well, some Chinese teens think differently, getting exotic English tattoos that say things like "PrayGod" or tattoos in Greek they don't understand. As one girl says: "I think it says, 'I'll love you forever.' I didn't have any particular reason. I just liked the way the Greek letters looked." Sub "Japanese" for "Greek" and that exact statement is being uttered somewhere right now on an American college campus.

Ascribing deep meaning to Asian characters where none exists isn't confined to teens and hipsters. For years, motivational speakers and the like have been touting how the Chinese word for "crisis" is made of "danger" and "opportunity," which (1) is bullshit and (2) is a little insulting as it implies Chinese words were created to teach lessons, unlike any other culture where words are created because you need to say that thing.

What would you think if you saw a Chinese motivational speaker teaching his audience that female family members cannot be relied upon to keep their heads in a crisis because the English word for crisis is made of "cry" and "sis"? You laugh, but considering there's 1.3 billion Chinese, someone's probably doing it.

1 Making Yourself Look Wise and Exotic Via Cultural Name-Dropping

Finally we have the people who remind you at every opportunity that they have traveled to foreign countries, or have read things about foreign countries, or are very much aware that foreign countries exist.

See if any of these phrases seem familiar:

"It's just starting to get popular here, but everybody was playing it in Japan when I was there."

"You know, the Balinese have a saying..."

"I once had an authentic version of this dish in a street market in Hong Kong."

"That is just terrible about the Chilean miners. I talked to my friend from Peru, which is near Chile, and he thinks it's very sad."

Sure, someone saying one or two of these things occasionally wouldn't be too terrible, but if this is actually a pattern in your life, that's when you need to learn to find new friends. If you find yourself saying it, you should learn a lesson from the Trappist monks I encountered when visiting La Trappe Abbey when I was in France: Shut up.