In one area I used to live in the general "proper" behavior when you are approached by street vendors or beggars was essentially 3 phase.
1) Ignore unless you intend to buy or give. This means you do not reply to anything they say or even make eye contact.
2) Engage verbally or even just visually. This means you intend to buy or give. Now you will be pressured and given an aggressive sell/ask.
3) If it was a mistaken engagement or you don't reach an agreement you MUST aggressively exit. This often means yelling, possibly swearing, and in some cases even putting your hands on someone and even verbally threatening in bad situations.
I spent a significant enough amount of my childhood growing up in this type of culture. My wife was always from a small city. When we later moved I explained to her that this was a big cultural difference than she was used to and the expected way to behave in these situations.
Being from a small city she thought this was disrespectful and continually made things, putting it lightly, more difficult for us.
Eventually it actually put us in a situation that escalated to being dangerous. A seller that she responded to with small talk became very angry that she had wasted his time. He then got in her face, put a hand on her shoulder and started screaming at her.
At that point I ran over, pushed the man off of her and said, "She doesn't fucking want anything. Now get the fuck out of our faces before I have to kick your ass."
After that happened she finally took my advice.
Only if you operate under the assumption that they share your values. They may be accosting you because they see you as weak, and you may be representing your country or ethnicity poorly in their eyes.
There's been times where I've had hawkers and hasslers continually pester me, where I would ignore them or politely decline while walking away, yet they would begin touching me or continually follow me, leading to attempted pickpocketing, robbery, and sexual assault.
Some will touch you on the shoulder, others will maintain some distance and continually get closer to you only to make a swipe at your pocket then try to run away with your cell phone or wallet (happened to me twice).
One trinket-selling "monk" followed me into a building and grabbed me, but I managed to get back outside.
Another person followed me into three different public bathrooms, which I kept having to exit after he continually followed me and went to the urinal next to me so he could look over at my penis. Eventually he stopped only after I walked by a security guard and yelled about what he was doing.
It is 100% OK to yell at any hustler whom you are walking away from but is still following you. Not doing so was always how the aforementioned scenarios began.
They know your vulnerability is your politeness, your "ambassador" mentality. Don't remain vulnerable when they cross the line and keep following you.
> I wonder what these people think about you
If they're acting at all as GP described, then it's obvious they see you as another mark to aggressively try to extract money from.
Caring about what some bothersome strangers think about you and where you're from takes a distant backseat to standing up to aggression.
I am.
I'm the guy who wrote the story, maybe I did a bad job. It's not like they're getting violent or "trying to extract money from me" - jeez, when you do buy something you can just hold out a handful of money and they'll take the right amount - extremely, extremely honest.
In reality, they're just trying to sell their stuff, I don't understand why someone would react by yelling and getting angry.
You're describing routine purchases in (perhaps) a market in West Africa, probably with few tourists around. The hawkers aren't making any money from dishonest sales to tourists, and sales are probably reasonably consistent. Repeat customers are common.
The others are describing very popular tourist areas in poorer parts of Europe. All their money comes from tourists, sales rise and fall frequently, there are no repeat customers, and there is strong competition between hawkers for the best places, and possibly efforts to keep newcomers out of the trade.
Out of curiosity, if they weren't trying to sell you anything, but were behaving like that (hissing/kissing/blocking your path), do you think getting angry would then be an appropriate response?
In that case what you're doing seems to be significantly worse than saying "fuck off".
Maliciously wasting their time vs making it clear you aren't interested?
FWIW, I don't think there's anything wrong with what you're doing. I just think it's objectively worse than "yelling and getting angry".
At first we suffered in silence, thinking "well that's just the way they behave in their country", but towards the end we were very direct and to their face when being rude to finally get them to stop.
