It's a pet peeve of mine when strangers greet me with "Ni Hao", the Mandarin greeting for hello. Yes, I am Chinese, but no, I am not Mandarin Chinese, so your greeting doesn't win me over. I detest it when strangers do it to get attention. Yeah, I'm really impressed that you can say hello in Mandarin (<- detect the sarcasm), but actually, Cantonese is my Chinese tongue, so try again.
Ok, to be fair, I can speak some Mandarin, but seriously, just because you're Chinese doesn't mean you speak Mandarin. There's bazillion different types of Chinese out there.
That is all.
Saturday, May 19, 2012
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
some punks yelled that at Jayme across 4 lanes of traffic the other day. totally freaked her out. especially as she was pushing Elias.
ReplyDeletei guess you could just respond with 'doh m jue, ngo m sek gong potongwa'. and then just stare at them.
Like I'm gonna apologise! ;)
ReplyDeleteIt annoys me too for similar reasons, though I can't speak any language other than English. (Does that give me grounds for feeling even more annoyed???) It's always annoyed me! Why would someone assume that just because I look a certain way I would speak a certain language?!! Do people assume that fair-skinned people can speak Finnish?
ReplyDeleteI totally get that, too! It happened while I was in Italy as well. I just find it racist & somewhat seedy.
ReplyDelete