Can't you? People throw off subtle cues all the time, and whether they're native born or not is something that isn't hard to pick up from that.

Conversely, take a native born person of Japanese or Indian descent, and send them to Japan or India. The natives there will be able to tell he isn't native born.

Very true; even with the same clothes, body language often varies substantially from culture to culture. With a bit of travel and observation, it's quite apparent.

A friend of mine who traveled to Central Asia was struck by how balanced people appeared; he found Westerners take up "too much space" in their movements, and East Asian people tended to do the opposite. But at least during his stay in Central Asia, he noticed the people there repeatedly showed an unconscious balance in their body language: neither too loud and aggressive, nor too quiet and subdued.

You can see culture, not birthplace. Those are different things.

If you see me on the street, I believe you will see my family culture (Chinese) and where I was brought up (American Midwest). You will not see where I was born (East Coast).

I bet if I saw you on the street, you would register as American to me. (East Coast and Midwest register the same to me.) I would be able to tell you apart from someone who was actually born and raised in China. Conversely, if you went to China, the people there would be able to identify you as foreign-born. Your culture is similar and related to, but very different from, the culture of people still living in China. I might be able to tell you apart from more assimilated Americans of East Asian descent, though.

Me specifically, yes. But I was born and grew up in the same country. I still think it's presumptuous to say that you can at a glance determine a person's place of birth. I have friends- people I've known for some time- that surprise me both because they were born overseas when I thought they were born in the states and vice versa.

And I'm talking about a relatively easy case of Chinese vs American. Are you going to tell me you can tell a Canadian-born person from an American-born at a glance?

Yes, many times you can tell where someone is from because of stereotypical cultural things that are difficult to hide. But to assume you can go for a walk and identify with certainty who is American born and who is not is ridiculous.

Yes, technically if you're born in Azerbaijan but whisked away at age 2 and grow up in America you'll read as American. And technically if you were raised in a culture almost identical to American culture (like Canada) you'll also read as American. That's a quibble, not the main point.

"The gesticulations and facial expressions with which an American will supplement his English are as distinctively American as those of a Frenchman are distinctively French. One can tell the nationality of a stranger by his gestures as readily as by his language. In a vague, general way I had become aware of this before, probably from contact with some American-born Jews whose gesticulations, when they spoke Yiddish, impressed me as utterly un-Yiddish. And so I studied Bender's gestures almost as closely as I did his words."

Abraham Cahan, _The Rise of David Delinsky_, published 1920s, set in the New York of the late 1800s & early 1900s.

I am sorry that part offended you, but I usually can, with pretty good accuracy.

There are studies (see Robert Levine, "Geography of Time") that use normal walking pace as a very characteristic indicator of geographic origin.

The FBI caught Adolf Eichmann in Argentina partly because they noticed his dissonant walking pace :)

Venkat

So you used people's walking pace to determine that most native-born people do not take leisurely walks? ;)

I am not offended, that sentence rubbed me the wrong way. I agree that most certainly culture affects our activities, even to the point of how we do seemingly simple things. But the culture you have and the place where you are born are very different things. Ask anyone who is born into a displaced family that preserves their original culture.

I am an American-born Chinese person that takes walks. When you see me and my wife strolling, at that moment, you are seeing my culture (that enjoys "san-bu") not my birth place.

As far as I know the FBI didn't catch Eichmann in Argentina at all--the Mossad did.

ah, I stand corrected. this is a hazy memory from a Reader's Digest condensed book I read 20 years ago titled "I captured Adolf Eichmann" ... can't seem to find a ref to it anywhere online now.