But the China trip had sensitized me to the virtue of minimizing individualist displays and respecting the desires of those above one in the social hierarchy. Back in Massachusetts, my face recognition system had almost instantly popped back to its normal setting. It turned out that three months of living as the rare Caucasian in Chinese neighborhoods had reconfigured my face recognition system (think of fumbling for words in your native tongue when you’ve been daily using another language). She was a normal woman with a strong nose and cheekbones, characteristically Germanic features. The bony protuberances of her cheekbones made me try to remember the name of the disease that could cause it. Once, during a visit to a local Starbucks, I was startled to see a woman, a foreigner, who appeared to have some sort of facial dysmorphology.
I’d hung out in parks with my laptop, writing my academic papers, observing people playing and exercising, trying to communicate with interested locals who wanted to have their first conversation with an American. My husband and I had lived in rented apartments, and I’d traveled by bus or bike to meet every day with student assistants. One project studied the cognitive processing underlying reading Chinese script, and the other involved interviews and questionnaires on the comfort and frequency of use of the phrase Wo ai ni (I love you). Weeks earlier I had returned from a semester-long sabbatical in China, where I had traveled with my Taiwanese doctoral student for two research projects, both about language, but quite different. They were changed by several things, but the most powerful forces were my readings in social and cross-cultural psychology and my experiences in other cultures. I was also aware that my thoughts about the purple hair incident were very different from what they would have been a few years ago. You are imposing on others by shrieking, “Look at me!”
You are defiantly not fitting in with the group. Inside, however, I was coming down on the side of management, and here’s why: dyeing your hair purple as a 20-something shows a lack of respect to your managers and fellow employees. Like others who grew up in an age of personal freedom, I, too, reasoned, “Back off. The owner of the hair didn’t even interact with the public! The business didn’t have a published dress code! To redye hair, it has to be bleached, and that’s a health risk! The group nodded and rolled their eyes in sympathetic outrage. “Sure, they said my hair wasn’t relevant to my job performance they agreed I did my job well. “Management went apoplectic,” the woman said.
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