I'm laughing with you here because I speak and understand fluent Chinese and I'm black and when I was over there it I was always cracking up at the things people were saying about me right in front of my face because they always assumed I couldn't understand. Sometimes I would make a remark so they knew I understood but sometimes I didn't because it was just so funny.
The most common things I heard:''At least her hair is black" (when brushed down)
"how does she get her hair to do that?" (when it was natural and curly). Once I heard someone reply to this "It's fake--I lived in the US and they do that with fake hair"
"Her nose is not THAT big" (I heard this one all the time).
"Nice eyes; has double eyelid" (This is apparently a good thing; but when they got closer then it was always
"Eww, how creepy, she has green eyes")
"She's not all THAT dark, if she put on lighter colored foundation would look okay."
"I wonder what this, that or the other thing she's wearing cost"
(They were always entirely dissecting my clothes and saying what they liked or did not like).
"My g-d, feet so big. Like man."
"Foreigners are big in the bust, aren't they".
Another common thing I'd hear was people discussing where I could be from. they knew I wasn't American because "ALL Americans have golden-yellow hair"!
However to my face when people knew I understood, I never heard any of these things. Then it was always, "Oh, you speak such good Chinese, how amazing" (with no shame at all about whatever they had just been saying);
"oh, you're so pretty" "oh, you're so smart".
However, no one ever thought I was stealing anything. And only children ever followed me, in the countryside (usually yelling 'big eyes! big eyes!" until their mothers grabbed them and pulled them away)
And you should have heard what they had to say about my friend who is about five foot ten with long red hair and very pale (who was ALSO fluent in Chinese). However when they knew she understood them, they would ask her let someone take a photograph with them and her. They never asked me that. Apparently I was strange, but not so strange that they wanted to preserve me forever for friends to stare at in the family photo album.
This was 30 years ago--I've heard that people are more used to foreigners now and much more sophisticated. They were the nicest people by the way--treated me very kindly--I don't mean this to sound as if I thought they were awful or didn't have a good time.
And even here in America when I speak Mandarin to someone you should see their jaw drop to their feet. Usually the coversation goes like this, I say hello and they start saying how great I speak Chinese, because a lot of foreigners can say 'ni hao' and they're not really surprised at that, then I start really talking and they go into total shock. It's really very funny (but of course I don't laugh to their face).
Whenever I see her name, I know I'm in for some excellent reading!