Who Do You Represent?

As this month-long hiatus suggests, I’m in the process of getting my work ethic back after a three-week vacation to Europe. I like to think this little trip to Europe was like a prelude for what I will come upon this fall.

Prior to this I had been out of the country three times—twice to Canada and once to China. My Canadian trips were a road trip and a cruise and China was a ten-day tour of Beijing, Xian, and Shanghai. Much in contradiction to my expectations, Italy was like China in ways I will get to in a later post.

This trip I went with my mom and my little brother. We went to France for about a week (Paris only) where we stayed with and visited family and then Italy for two weeks (Rome, Campania, Venice, and Tuscany), where we were truly on our own.

So over the next couple posts I have chosen certain events to reflect on from this trip. These first two events bring up a point that I have already mentioned early on.

Who do you represent?

In Italy we were checking into our bed and breakfast in Sorrento. We found the owner’s assistant at the check in desk. In Europe, as many people know, there are so many languages, even if one were to only count the official ones. Unfortunately, Italian was not one of the languages I had little knowledge of. Why would you go to Italy without knowing any Italian? Well we tried.

I have reading knowledge of Italian but my speaking abilities are highly constricted. In Italy I found out just to what extent they are. Don’t worry; they improved as we went along. Beforehand I made attempt during school, between classes and clubs.

The short story is that not all went as planned.

Anyways in Europe, because of the plethora of languages, multinational organizations, especially, have to translate from one language to another via a third because of the lack of bilingual translators in the needed languages.

So I spoke Spanish with the hotel owner—and because of her choice of words, I think her competence in the language was less than mine. She called the owner to get us a key.

Now my Italian receptive fluency is questionable as well, so I only picked up the gist of it. She said that you have some clients here, etc.—and then a pause. “…Giapponesi?” she mentioned to her boss. I look at her quizzically, ready to chuckle. She saw me and tried again “cinesi?...” I maintained my look. She was telling the hotel owner that we were Japanese, and then Chinese when I gave her my look.

I don’t know how it really matters what we are, but I suppose she felt inclined to suppose. After she hung up, she asked me, “¿De dónde sois?”

To which I replied, “Los Estados Unidos.”

“Oh. Lo siento. Son los rascos.”

She meant it was our eyes. I guess it was relatively common. Being American (at least without semantic appendages) means being white to most people, including my now former roommate, he himself an Asian American. I guess despite our accents and the fact that we spoke American English, at least initially, we generally are seen as coming from China, or more frequently—Japan.

She had no trouble understanding that we were visiting from the United States. However, another incident, also in Italy, left me wondering just how educated some postal workers are.

Post offices in Italy double as currency counters. So we went into one in Amalfi (in the Campania region) to exchange some American cash for some euro.

We gave the clerk the American money and my mom gave her her passport, which she had to put in the system (probably for the police). Before she did that though, she went bill by bill and checked the security features. Reasonable, as she probably does not see American money every day (although she probably does during tourist season), it took some 25 minutes to count the money (six times) and verify security (with the assistance of two big binders and two additional employees). And in the end, they rejected our worn-out ten-dollar bill and asked us to take it to the bank instead.

Putting my mom’s passport into the system, she needed only to input the information exactly from the passport into the computer. Birthplace—Hong Kong; country—Giappone; I blinked twice. Hong Kong is definitely in China and not Japan. My mom kept saying, “Cinese, cinese” since Hong Kong is in China. And so she changed it to “Cine.”

Beneath she inputted nationality. Despite the fact that the passport has a big “USA” on top of the mugshot, she put in Cine (China). I pointed and said, “Stati Uniti” (United States). She smiled at me and then changed the nationality.

Erasing “Cine” (both in location of Hong Kong and nationality), she typed “Giappone” (Japan) twice—one in each spot. Before I could say anything she immediately submitted all the information. “Finito,” she exclaimed triumphantly.

I suppose she chose her judgment over the passport in front of her and my words to her. The good thing is we got our euro; however, INTERPOL won’t be able to find who exchanged a couple hundred dollars in Amalfi.

So I have postulated two scenarios for myself.

First, I will be accepted as an American exchange student. I will learn about my host culture with courtesy from my hosts, as they understand that I’m in unfamiliar territory. This is probably the ideal situation, especially considering I have about a month to brush up and learn Cantonese; and unfortunately I have made little progress as of recent.

The second is that the students will think I’m Chinese (culturally) and think it’s odd that I don’t understand the way things work. Perhaps I will not be afforded the courtesies host students afford to non-East Asian ethnicity exchange students.

I think that, at least in the university, my circumstances will fit into the first situation. As for travel abroad and any sightseeing I will do, it will be closer to the second…