the deafness of prejudice

"He could live days without speech to anyone and it came to be that he might have been  like a stranger lost in all this rushing foreign life.  For not often did anyone even ask a question of him of his own country.  These white men and women lived so enwrapped within themselves that they never cared to know what others did, or if they heard a difference they smiled tolerantly as one may at those who do not do so well from ignorance. A few set thoughts Yuan found his schoolfellows had, or the barber who cut his hair, or the woman in whose house he lodged, such as that Yuan and all his countrymen ate rats and snakes and smoked opium or that all his countrywomen bound their feet, or that all his countrymen wore hair braided into queues.
At first Yuan in great eagerness tried to set these ignorances right.  He swore he had not tasted either rat or snake, and he told of  Ai-lan and her friends who danced as lightly free as any maidens could.  But it was not use, for what he said they  soon forgot and remembered only the same things.  Yet there was this result to Yuan, that so deep and often his anger rose against their ignorance that at last he began to forget there was any rightness or truth in anything  they said, and he came to believe that all his country was like the coastal city, and that all maidens were like Ai-lan."

A house divided - Pearl S Buck