Are there blonde chinese people

My parents had taken me to rural Mexico many times as a white-haired little girl and I remember the kids chasing me and trying to touch my hair. I also remember being constantly harassed in parts of France and Italy while I studied abroad as a twenty-one year old American. I knew that the continual jokes and come-on lines were usually in good humor and that these men were rather harmless.

They had believed that any American woman with blond long hair was an easy escapade thanks to all those bad Hollywood movies. Yet, my short time spent in India was different. I had never felt so uncomfortable in my own skin in my life. Growing up and living in Minnesota, a place that is home to many people with Scandinavian roots, it was rather unpleasant to be the one who stuck out and was different. Looking back a year later, I realize that it was probably one of the best experiences I could have ever had.

It taught me what it feels like to be different. To be misunderstood. To be the minority. And to stick out. I realized how important it is to have this rather unpleasant feeling.

And how I need to seek it out more. I expected the worst when I went to Morocco last April. I had never been to a Muslim country before and the anti-American tensions were rising all across Islamic nations. What was so funny is that no one even noticed the hair color change. None of my friends said a word nor did my husband. So basically the point was moot. I arrived in Morocco not knowing at all what to expect and was pleasantly surprised to see that no one noticed me at all.

I could walk freely, openly and without covering my hair with no penetrating stares, uncomfortable moments or even harassment. It was a nice change. Would it be like India or like Morocco? Would I be treated as an oddity or just fit in smoothly to the crowds of people? What I discovered that for the most part, no one really cared except the young folks who treated me like a celebrity and wanted their picture with some foreign, blonde stranger, me.

As I was walking along the banks of the river overlooking the glorious Bund on one side and Pudong on the other, I was approached once again by a stranger. It was a young Chinese woman and her friends. But one thing was universal: A camera. I reached out to grab the camera and prepared to take their picture when I saw a smiling shake of the head.

That was not what she wanted me to do. She wanted me to be in the picture. With her. As her blonde, American friend! What else could I do but agree and then ask her friend to take a picture of us with mine? Perhaps the greatest lesson I learned during my travels is what it feels like to not fit in and to be different. That although we may not look the same, we are all the same in our wishes and desires in life. We all want to be happy, healthy and live a life full of love. It is this common desire that makes us human.

Yet our differences is what makes the human race so grand. Why I travel: An insight into why I became the thirdeyemom. How Nepal Changed Me. I get the same reaction and it freeked me out for a while, Indonesian and Thailand girls just love taking photos of me — They yearn to have blonde hair and fair skin whilst I would love to have thick black hair and a darker skin tone.

But would love to! I agree that I would much rather have that gorgeous skin and dark hair! Oh well! Thanks for the comment! It is funny though as the next time I went in May I was prepared and just went with it. Much better. I was the only non-Indian on three of my international flights.

I laughed pretty hard. I lived in Italy nearly 40 years ago. I was 19 and had waist length very blond hair. Rather than having my bottom pinched, my hair was a constant source of fascination. People would pick it up and play with it, seeming to forget that I was attached to it. What got you coming to Italy at such a young age? Waist long blond hair would be so cool. The Chinese-like element may simply be that the proto-Uyghurs were already admixed with the Han populations, or, that that element has a geography-conditional cline where the Yakuts are at an extreme.

In any case, the other components of Uyghur ancestry are not East Asian. This is important, because it is dominant in both the Tuscans and North Italians. On the order of 4, years ago the domestication of the horse allowed for the expansion of Indo-European populations from east-central Eurasia across the steppe.

Eventually they they also percolated into the underpopulated zones between the taiga and the highlands around the Himalayan massif. I believe that these were the groups which introduced nomadism and agriculture to the Tarim basin, and their genetic and cultural impact was a function of the fact that they simply demographically swamped the few hunter-gatherers who were indigenous to the region.

In the period between BC and AD the flow of people reversed. The expansion of the Han north and west, and the rise of a powerful integrated state which could bully, and could also be extorted, changed the dynamics on the steppe and in the oasis cities beyond. But many of these populations absorbed the Indo-European groups, and came out genetically admixed. A clear residual of West Eurasian admixture can also be found among peoples who presumably never interacted much with Indo-Europeans, such as the Mongols, though at lower levels.

The villagers of Liqian are a different part of the story. In the case of tribes such as the Xianbei and Khitan they even did the assimilating themselves, through top-down sinicizing edits. In areas like Gansu these elements contribute a greater proportion of the ancestry, and just as the Uyghur are Turkic speaking, and yet have equal portions of West and East Eurasian ancestry, so the people of Liqian are Chinese speaking, and have equal portions of West and East Eurasian ancestry.

Addendum: East and West Eurasian ancestry seems pretty equitably distributed among the Uyghurs. Thank you for visiting nature. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS.

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Does evolution have a soft spot for blondes? Yet people from the region have the darkest skin pigmentation outside Africa. Now, a study of people from the Solomon Islands in Melanesia shows that they evolved the striking blonde trait independently of people in Europe. This refutes the possibility that blonde hair was introduced by colonial Europeans, says Carlos Bustamante, a geneticist at Stanford University School of Medicine in Stanford, California, and a senior co-author on the study, which is published today in Science 1.

To investigate the genetic basis underlying the trait, Bustamante and his colleagues compared the genomes of 43 blonde and 42 dark-haired Solomon Islanders, and revealed that the islanders' blonde hair was strongly associated with a single mutation in the TYRP1 gene.

That gene encodes an enzyme that influences pigmentation in mice and humans. Several genes are known to contribute to blonde hair coloration in Europeans, but TYRP1 is not involved. By comparing DNA between more than Solomon Islanders and more than other individuals from 52 populations around the world, the researchers found that the TYRP1 mutation is probably unique to the Oceanic region which includes Melanesia. About one-quarter of Solomon Islanders carry the mutation in their genomes, but it is recessive, so an individual needs two copies to be blonde.

It is unusual that one particular mutation would explain so much of a population's observable trait, says Bustamante. The western ideals of beauty are blonde, thin, and blue-eyed just like Scarlet Johansson.

These are the ideals that the western media pushes to the world through their choices of magazine models, brand ambassadors, billboard models, actors and pop stars. This will easily sell since they used a standard definition of beauty for a model to market their products. These western models with their large eyes, light-colored hair, and elongated noses represent the Eurocentric ideal of beauty, an ideal naturally and ethically unattainable by the majority of the Chinese people.

There is an increasing trend of western superstars gracing the covers of Chinese magazines and also marketing the European brands in China. Intimacy and intermingling of the Western and Eastern cultures is observed in the use of western models for uniquely Chinese cosmetic products.

Way before western colonization, certain aspects of western beauty ideals such as fair skin were already ingrained into Chinese society. The Chinese people have historically valued fair skin and associated it with class and wealth. On the other hand, the Chinese people associated dark, tanned skin with poverty and were forced to perform manual labor outside under the sun.