Excursus...

About the 麻烦-ness (inconvenience) of being left-handed in China

The concept of lefties seems to be totally foreign to Chinese. I had already realized that the first time I was in China, but spending so much time with Chinese now makes me have to deal with this issue (or, say, they make it seem like an issue) almost daily. The comments range from “Wow, look, she’s writing with her left hand!” with either an admiring or surprised connotation and an admiring “you must be smart”, to disbelief and thinking that I’m crazy. I tried to find out if people are aware of the fact that to some people it might simply come more easily to use the left hand for daily things, but so far everybody told me that there are no left handed people in this country. Does anybody of you know anything about that?
Anyway… Once I was advised to use my right hand in order to be able to write Chinese characters more easily. Apparently it’s my left handedness that makes Chinese so difficult for me!
Yesterday, at the post office, one of the customers told her friend to come closer to me and have a look at how I write. First, her friend stared at my writing hand from about a 20cm distance, and then she looked into my eyes and said something like "how on earth can you write with your left hand?" Not in the admiring way, though, but rather making it sound as if I was just in the process of committing a crime. I told her that that’s the way I was born. I think she thought that was rude, but what other way is there to explain why I don't write the way the 1.3+ billion Chinese (or the literate part of that) write?