A thought occurred to me one morning when, on leaving our apartment, my little boy failed to say hello to the lady who cleans the yard.

"Ayi hao!" I reminded him (hello auntie).

Then he asked, "shouldn't it be nainai (grandmother)?"

The exchange triggered an entire morning's contemplation.

Hmm. When does a child's form of address to an adult they don't know shift from ayi or shu shu (uncle) to "grandmother" or "grandfather"? How do we make the choice?

Earlier than one might expect, I discovered later the same day when, as I stood on the bus, a very pleasant lady asked my 6-year-old boy if his grandmother (who she thought I was) was nice to him.

And the lady was not being rude, she just naturally assumed I was close in age to her, and she must have been in her late 50s.

When my son was a mere toddler, a charming lady taxi driver and I were having a friendly conversation. Then she looked at me wistfully, sighed, and said, "I bet you were really pretty when you were young."

Swallowing my hurt pride, and being just 34 at the time, I asked her how old she thought I was.

Using the Chinese hand signals for numbers, I saw her make a seven, then decide to be generous and change it to a six.

"Not so bad, just two years out," I thought, until she said: "Forty-six?"

If only she had got the right decade, I wouldn't have remembered the incident to this day.

That same day I was taking my toddler to a public toilet. I'd often wondered why people asked me with a raised eyebrow and a quizzical expression, "Is that your son?"

On this occasion, outside the toilet, I was asked again.

This time I answered jokingly, "No, I'm his grandmother".

The eyebrow landed next to the other one as the response came, "Guaibude!" (No wonder) ... with the unspoken half of the sentence clearly being, "I thought you were too old to be his mother".

Now I don't see this when I look in the mirror. My friend Huang Jie is a year older than me and while she is far better looking, I wouldn't say she looks that much younger. To me, we both look our ages. My Western friends agree, but there again the same happens to them, and perhaps they are just being kind. Unlike my dear Chinese neighbors, who often manage to squeeze into the conversation the fact that I must be about the same age as the lao taitai who feeds all the wild cats.

What to do about these frequent knocks to my self-esteem? Should I resort to the knife, Botox, or simply not leave the house?

I exercise, eat healthily, use face creams and get my fair share of interest from the opposite sex, not all of whom are older than me.

But there's something about us Westerners, particularly the white ones, that seems to hang an "old" placard in front of us in Chinese eyes.

The other day at the swimming pool an 8-year-old boy my son had made friends with asked him if he was with his grandmother.

When I tried to share the amusing mistake with his parents, their expression clearly said, "Well, aren't you?"

So I've decided to give up caring and either play along or ignore it, according to my mood.

I am not going to discard all my high-heeled shoes and my sequin purses, nor am I going to stop getting manicures and going to bars, but I shall stop minding.

Except for one thing.

With all the Chinese respect for the elderly that is taught and adhered to through the generations, why doesn't this nainai ever get offered a seat on the bus?

For China Daily