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.
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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.
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