NPR's Anthony Kuhn reported Friday for our Newscast unit about an opinion piece in China News, a Chinese state media outlet, that called Locke, the outgoing U.S. ambassador, a "'yellow-skinned, white-hearted banana man,' whose Chinese ancestors would have kicked him out of the house, had they known about his future career."
| Wishing someone's ancestors pitch him out the gates of the ancestral home must be some kind of obscure Chinese curse, analogous to cursing a man's mustache in the Middle East. Calling him a banana is picturesque. |
| Lots of Americans had ancestors who got pitched out of their homes in England, Ireland, Germany, Bohemia, China, Vietnam, Ukraine, Laos, Nigeria, Italy, etc... |
Early in his posting to China, someone took a picture of Ambassador Gary Locke buying his own coffee at Starbucks in the Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. And, then, later pictures showed Locke and his family arriving at a Chinese airport carrying their own bags.
Many Chinese were incredulous.
"I think people look at him like a hero this time," Chen Weihua told All Things Considered's Melissa Block. Weihua is a columnist for China Daily, the country's national English-language newspaper, and he joked that to many Chinese Locke looked like a "migrant worker."
They were astonished. Weihua explained why in a column he wrote:
To many Americans, there was probably nothing unusual about this. But to most Chinese people, the scene was so unusual it almost defied belief. How could someone who holds the rank of an ambassador to a big country not have someone to carry his luggage, and not use a chauffeured limousine. In China even a township chief, which is not really that high up in the hierarchy, will have a chauffeur and a secretary to carry his bag. Watching this episode, many Chinese people might start to wonder if the people at the US embassy in Beijing in charge of arranging Locke's reception would keep their jobs. 
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