Photo by “freakapotimus”.
Click the photo to see it on its Flickr page.
Earlier this year, the Ginger Ninja and I were driving along the Mass Pike. We stopped to pay at the toll booth, where the attendant, a white guy, took one look at me and said “Ni hao!” — “Hello!” — one of a very few Mandarin phrases I know.
“Hey there,” I replied, and gave him some bills.
“Xie xie,” he said with a smile, and handed me my change. I also knew that one: “thank you”.
“Have a good one,” I said, and drove off. Only after we pulled away did I remember the Mandarin “you’re welcome”: bu yong xie. All told, the entire conversation and my afterthought account for most of my conversational Mandarin.
“He’s off by a few hundred miles, isn’t he?” asked Wendy.
“Yeah,” I replied, “but I just helped him live out his ‘citizen of the world’ fantasy. Why rain on his parade?”
3 Comments
I thought you were going to complain at his assumption of your language, but you handled it well. Excellent way to look at it!
@Daryl: Thank you! Or should I say, Xie xie!
He was trying to be a good host, and I figured that I should reward him for his effort. It would’ve been perfect if I’d been just a little quicker and remembered how to say “thank you” in Mandarin!
As for not being able to identify me a Filipino, that’s okay — even a lot of Asians get it wrong. The Korean folks at my local video store have asked me what my background is, people in Japan typically assume I’m either Japanese or Hawaiian, Hawaiians assume I’m hapa haole and the Chinese folks on Spadina Avenue never speak to me in Cantonese and always switch to English before I even open my mouth — they think I’m Korean. Maybe I should be used for one of the questions in the All Look Same quiz.
Click the photo to see the article it came from, Races and their Faces, 1906-style.
Classic.