This made me think of a wonderful article titled "While Teaching in Japan, it Took an Enemy to Make Me Feel at Home" [0] which was on the HN front page at the end of 2017. [1]
That article is about the friendship/enemyship between a teacher and a child student, formed by the student’s teasing hostility toward the author as a foreigner.
"When I told a group of kids my eyes were naturally blue (they thought I wore colored contacts), they backed away and whispered, “Scary.” The first time I went to the grocery store, my appearance alone caused a small child to burst into tears."