I've seen this stated a number of times, but I have never seen it in reality - in fact quite the reverse... As an example, on a recent JFK-HKG in a full First cabin I was in 3K and there was in 3G what I believe was an American-born Chinese lady "of a certain age" (as the French would say - about 50 I guess) who was determined to believe that CX was mistreating her because she looked Asian.

But from my perspective what I saw was:

- She had hit the call button 3 times even before the door was closed and probably more than 20 times during the flight.

- She repeatedly called the stewardess to lift up or get down her hand luggage from the locker above her seat (she was apparently completely able-bodied).

- She complained about absolutely everything. As an example she asked the stewardess to be served breakfast at 06:30 HK time. In a full cabin, when a number of other people were taking breakfast at the same time her table was actually set at 06:35 and the first food arrived at 06:42. This was sufficiently bad for her to demand to speak to the ISM and threaten to write to CX management about the "appalling" quality of service that she believed she was receiving because she looked Chinese.

- But in 20 hours of being one of the most demanding passengers I have ever seen I didn't hear the words "please" or "thank you" pass her lips even once.

Throughout all of this the cabin crew were incredibly polite and smiling and still managing to deliver excellent service to the other 11 passengers despite the fact that this woman almost tied one of the team up full time.

After the breakfast incident I went down to the galley and spoke to the stewardess who had been given the most grief. When out of view she was almost in tears because of the treatment she was getting, so I gave her my card and told her that if the woman did complain formally she should get her management to contact me for the other side of the story.

By the way, I am convinced that a significant contributory factor to the way the woman behaved was that the two stewardesses who mostly served her were of Indian descent. In my experience, I have never seen any difference in treatment of passengers by CX staff which could be attributed to their race, but I have frequently seen ethnic-Chinese passengers (in all classes) be openly very abusive towards ethnic-Indian cabin crew, who invariably maintain the utmost grace under the onslaught.