What would compel a vacant guest house to turn away a paying guest into the night? Anyone who has spent time in the People’s Republic of China is obviously aware of the sheer number of hotels and sundry boardinghouses located in even the smallest city.

What patronizing Western travelers frequently encounter at the front desk, however, is a sudden expulsion by the proprietor conveying in Chinese that NO FOREIGNERS ARE ALLOWED!

“What could possibly compel them to do something so… wrong?”

This was the question posed by a group of expats sitting around a youth hostel in scenic Huangshan Mountain, China’s beloved mountain range in Anhui Province, discussing the legions of tourists who had disrupted their 72-peak excursion.

As the foreign travelers retell it, what was supposed to have been a heavenly respite turned into an out-and-out circus replete with megaphones, flags and the congestion of untold numbers of tourists with the inopportune desire to see the same thing at the same time.

“He’s from Pakistan.” “No, no! He’s Japanese.” A lively group of Uyghurs orbiting around me at the Hotan marketplace in southern Xinjiang were vociferously debating the nationality of the 196cm foreigner standing before them.

I am in fact a first-generation American of a hybrid Scandinavian-Mediterranean-Hispanic lineage, my dark brown features and unkempt travel whiskers often causing confusion amongst Asians who can’t quite place my nationality. Ironically, Han Chinese often mistook me for a Weiwuerzu someone from Xinjiang.