In which I can't pass up an easy shot
Posted by David on Thursday, October 27, 2005 at 1:05 PM.
On the bus this morning, a couple of young Chinese women were sitting behind me and chatting. The bus stops, and people get on.
One of them leans over to the other one: "Look at that guy's coat!"
"Which one?"
"The blue one!"
"Oh, wow, that's really ugly!"
"Yeah, foreigners have such bad taste sometimes!" (laughs loudly)
"Shhhh! Don't talk so loud!"
I can't resist. I turn around a bit and say, quietly, in my terrible American accent, "It's OK. Nobody on this bus speaks Chinese."
In the horrified silence, I turn back to my book. They get off a couple of stops later and glance back at me as they walk off the bus. I smile at them.
Savannah, on Thursday, October 27, 2005 at 4:32 PM:
An old friend of mine in high school who had spent a semester in France told me the following story: when she first arrived with her host family, she felt disoriented and overwhelmed, and failed to speak any French. She kept totally clammed up. The teenage daughters of her host family came to the conclusion that my friend did not speak French, and began to talk freely around her. At that point, remaining silent became a strategy. The girls got cattier and cattier. The dam finally burst, as I recall, after one of the girls said of my friend, "She had the nerve to wear jeans into town." (French folks, at least twenty years ago, appear to have been a little more formal about that stuff.) That tore it for my friend, who burst out at her host sisters in perfect French. Being French, however, they only got about half as embarrassed as those Chinese women, even though they had done approximately fifty billion times the damage over a far longer period of time, and based on a much more tenuous assumption (that my friend, though she had arrived through a student exchange program, somehow spoke no French (at all*). My friend told me that they all proceeded to have an "honest" exchange, and things got better from there.
Sarah, on Friday, October 28, 2005 at 9:41 AM:
That is just too awesome.