So I’m sitting in MacDonalds, just killing time.
Two Chinese young women join me and tell me they’d like to be my friends. They say they’d love to talk. I can’t reply cos my mouth’s full so I say nothing, just keep chewing as they look at me expectantly.
After a second or two of silence they glance at each other, lean in across the table and say to me very slowly and very loudly;
“Do You Speak English?!”
1000 Days In China 
I would really love to know how you’ve made genuine friends, after 3 months in China I was super paranoid that Chinese people only wanted to be friends to practise their English and I’m usually not a paranoid person!! and I stuck around purely with other foreign people which was fun but I felt like I missed out on really living in China.
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It’s true that most Chinese people view you as ‘what’s in it for them?’ Be it practising English or making money, but having said that they also seem to view each other the same way. In almost 4 years I can count the number of Chinese friends I call genuine on one hand. Those friendships began and continued to grow with mutual like and shared interests. In my first two -three years here I consciously lived ‘like a Chinese person’ which I think helped a lot in weeding out the users. These friendships are worthwhile and will, I hope, last a lifetime, but it wasn’t an easy thing to do.
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