She Looks Chinese-ier

I swear by all that I hold sacred this story is 100% true. Even I couldn't make this up.
   I was in the post office this morning, mailing queries for a kid's book my writing partner and I are trying to sell. I was standing in line, minding my own business, inching forward as the clerks took the next people up.
   The lady in front of me, an older white woman, well past retirement age, tapped me on the arm and said - and I quote verbatim - 'You can go next, I want to talk to this person, she looks Chinese-ier than the others.'
   Chinese-ier.
   I guessed in an instant what her problem was, she had something to mail to China had couldn't make heads or tails of the non-English characters. But still... Chinese-ier? How do you measure that? Is it a ratio from 0 to 1, with Seal at 0 and Kim Jong Il at 1 and everyone else somewhere in between?
   She then proceeded to gesture at the other postal clerks, Asians all, and tell me 'Those other ones don't look as Chinese as she does.'
   So now I had a definition of Chinese-ier. Kind of. But, honestly, the clerk this woman was pointing to looked Korean to me. And, sure enough, when the older lady stepped up, the first thing the Chinese-ier clerk said was 'I don't speak Chinese' with absolutely no trace of an accent. So that's one big srike against the theory of Chinese-ier-ness the older lady subscribed to. And I'm still mystified by how she decided one particular clerk looked Chinese-ier than the others, none of whom were probably Chinese at all.
   But this got me wondering: do older Asian people look at me and see a 'white-breadier' version of other white guys? That I'm somehow even less funky than decidedly non-funky frat boys? That I keep pink plastic flamingos in the weedy front yard of my run-down trailer home? That I can't afford to pay my meager rent but somehow I'm always mullet-deep in cigarettes, Jack Daniels and lotto tickets? I'd like to think not, but I know in reality they probably do. I mean, I do watch NASCAR, maybe they can tell somehow...