They All Look The Same

Miz UV's recent comment that she is better at remembering names than faces got me to thinking. I'm the other way around: I often run into familiar faces to which I can't attach a name.

In fact, as I get older, my recall of either names or faces is getting both slower and spottier, so I am running into this embarrassing social dilemma with increasing frequency.

Although my circle of acquaintances is shockingly small, and thankfully my job does not depend on the ability to smoothly navigate cocktail parties, I still find this an ongoing problem. As a teacher in a community college that runs on a quarterly calendar, every three months I am required to learn the names and faces of about 60 individuals.

Immigration patterns and the world economy being what it is, most of those individuals are Asian.

And I'm ashamed to admit this, but... They tend to all look the same to me.

There, I said it.

I remember reading somewhere that our ability to identify individual faces is formed very early in life, and is very much shaped by the culture we grow up in. Being of Northern European ethnicity, it's not surprising I learned to rely on variations in hair and eye color to identify people. My Asian students almost invariably have very dark hair and similarly-shaped brown eyes (except for the odd fashion forward Japanese girl who sports bright blue or green contacts). Several years ago, "tea hair" was all the rage, but since they all came out the same shade of tea, hair coloring didn't help me much.

Although this does not entirely explain my problem, because I can easily distinguish individuals amongst other non-Caucasian groups.

It's not just faces we look at, of course: the whole body is evaluated. America is so diverse, we are accustomed to sweeping our eyes over people of every possible physical configuration: fat, thin, tall, short, muscular, weedy, apples, pears... Just catching the briefest glimpse of someone's silhouette out of my peripheral vision will tell me a lot. The diversity is wonderful and amazing.

We do categorize people by their body types. One morning this was painfully proven to me when my boss called me "Judy." Judy and I don't look, sound, or act anything alike, except that we are both relatively short and squat. (Well, Judy's shorter and squatter, even. Not to mention ten years older than I am... Damn.)

When I lived in Italy, it used to irk me considerable to be hailed as American by strangers, even before I had opened my big, fat mouth. "Germans are big and fat, too," I complained. "Si, si," my Italian room-mate conceded, "But only an American woman would wear such ugly shoes."

Even at a distance, I can tell the difference between a North American man and an Iranian man, just by watching him walk down the street (American men lead with their shoulders and don't swing their hips).

Asians are definitely getting taller (Asian students today are a head taller than their parents' generation were), but they still tend to be relatively short and slender (although that, too, is changing with growing affluence and the universal appeal of pizza).

I really struggle, not only to recognize each student's face, but to learn his or her name. I am truly grateful that it is the fashion amongst Chinese students to adopt English nicknames and I'm amused at their choices: boys favor popular actors (one year I had three Keanus), while girls often choose sedate, ladylike monikers (Grace, Jane). I had a boy last quarter who insisted I call him Cone.

The drawback is that, since most of them are still (cognitively) adolescents, they are prone to experiment with new identities. So I made a rule: they are not allowed to change their names halfway through the quarter. In other words, once a Cone, always a Cone. At least in my class.

Once I've learned a student's name "wrong," it's almost impossible for me to ever get it right. It's like a tick, or something. This year I had two delightful young Korean girls in my reading class. They were best friends, which was hardly any wonder since they resembled each other as closely as twins and I am sure shared many other commonalities. They could have worn each other's clothes, and I suspect they sometimes did, just to fuck with me. They always sat together, but unfortunately, they liked to switch positions, so I couldn't rely on "Yeona" always being on the left and "Song Hee" on the right. Everyday, I returned Yeona's homework to Song Hee, and she good-naturedly corrected me. The pattern got so ingrained, I could not overcome it. Toward the end of the quarter, I took to leaving their assignments in a combined pile between them.

Even though they were model students, I wasn't entirely pleased when they both registered for my composition class the following quarter.

It's very easy for me to remember European names and very hard to remember Chinese or Korean names. (Since half of the Vietnamese are Nguyen, the odds are 50:50 I'll guess their names correctly.) I know this phenomenon has something to do with the way data is classified and stored in our brains, and one of these days I'll get buffed up on the theories.

I won't even get into the pronunciation issues here.

I think that as a teacher, I am obligated to at least know who my students are, and where each one is from, and be able to smile and greet each by name in the hallways. It's just basic courtesy. So I try harder each quarter to compensate for my dwindling supply of neural transmitters.

Next quarter I'll take my new digital camera to class the first day; I'll drill myself at home if necessary.

The other issue I'm confronted with, though, is that I have a helluva time distinguishing among Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese. Or between Cambodians, Thai, or Vietnamese. There are certain generalities: Korean faces, for example, are often broader and their bodies more robust and muscular. But I often guess wrong.

Even so, until last year, I was confident I did better than the average Ugly American at recognizing Asian nationalities. Then I tested myself at All Look Same (go to the Exam Room and take Quiz #1). To my surprise and disappointment, my score wasn't much better than anyone else's.

So I am conducting a little experiment. For the past three quarters, I've been administering the same test to my students. I was sure they'd have no trouble at all telling, for example, a Korean face apart from a Japanese one. I mean, I figured the Chinese would at least recognize the Chinese faces.

Guess what? So far, they haven't done any better than I have: just slightly ahead of the curve.