Hello Health,
I read a reply of yours to WolfishMusings in which you opined that one of his proposed possibilities was unlikely. And, perhaps a demographic statistician by profession would hypothetically be able to provide studies and numbers that support your opinion.
Nonetheless, such “unlikely”s do exist in this diverse world. I myself am coming to Orthodox Judaism after discovering maternal family roots from two generations ago — unlikely, but…here I am. Some posters here in my threads on that subject have even suggested the possibility that, if my maternal family roots can be validated sufficiently to establish that I am Halachically Jewish, no conversion would be required.
Perhaps the wife of this man has a similar situation as my own — i.e., maternal Jewish roots, perhaps even enough so that no conversion is required. In fact, one could not tell solely by looking if this woman just happens to have one maternal grandparent of, say, Ashkenazic Jewish ancestry, while her other three grandparents are not of any known Jewish background. This situation is, again, my own, and I am very familiar with people (Gentile and Jewish) explicitly or implicitly telling me that I don’t “look Jewish.” Perhaps this woman in the restaurant is mistaken for a woman of full Chinese, non-Jewish ancestry, whereas I am taken for some kind of Anglo-Saxon Protestant.
Any given individual that any of us comes across may seem more or less “unlikely” based on statistics, or perhaps based sheerly on the internal, conditioned, unspoken categories of “types” of people that all of us carry around to a greater or lesser extent as a framework for the world — i.e., who we think or guess that people are, what various groups of people are like, etc.
However, when anyone observes the woman whom you described and then asks if the Geyrus was good, what we really end up with are a lot of assumptions, which can not be corroborated on such scant information, placed upon a complete and total stranger. In essence, we learn nothing definitive about the stranger — ironically, what we learn definitively concerns the individual making the assumptions. For no apparently redeeming value or purpose, and with no discernible provocation other than surface appearances and assumptions being out-of-sync in the eye of the viewer/writer, these assumptions became the fodder of negative speculation against a human being by way of the original post.
I and others here have suggested alternative possibilities to your assumptions. You reply that at least some of these possibilities are “unlikely.” As an “unlikely” myself, I am not overly fond of assumptions about who I am based on appearances, especially when those assumptions are then used to imply some negative characteristic on my part (in this woman’s case, the negative implication is that her conversion is/was not valid, because how likely is it that a Chinese woman would be born a Jewish woman, especially to a maternal line of born Jews). To be further dismissed as a unique person by being pegged “unlikely” when the assumptions are challenged adds insult to the initial injury done to this woman by the original post.
I have read enough here in the CR for upwards of a year to know that I am in the company of a couple other “unlikely”s, including one African American convert to Orthodox Judaism from a Christian background. The kinds of assumptions contained in the original post are unkind and unfair to the woman in question, and, from at least the perspective of this “unlikely,” these assumptions hurt others as well.