It's you...I don't like you.

[parasitegirl]

FYI: I go to 15 different schools. If I recognize you and remember that you taught last year at a different school (and which school that was) and you’re not part of my support staff, it means that you managed to make an impression on me. This is even more amazing if you are not a homeroom teacher.

 

Last school year this woman annoyed me.

 

This year…she picked the wrong day.

 

She sat next to me and she WANTED TO SPEAK ENGLISH. She asked me if I could home to an enkai/party for the school but I told her I have plans on Saturday and the ham restaurant isn’t the right place for me anyways. I really did try to keep my conversation to the co-teacher and ignore her comments about how I’ve lost weight and am even prettier. I think I could make a whole ‘nother gaijin if I collected all the imagined weight I’ve lost over these years. Then she horned in on the Istanbul conversation…and then she started back on my looks and how pretty my skin is and do I look like my mother, my mother must be beautiful too. I tried to move us all back to Istanbul but she plowed ahead with my family. I am compressing this a bit because it really was a barrage of questions and talk.

 

Because I am going to Istanbul I wasn’t planning on going to America this summer (although I might go back for Christmas, to Madison!)…sooo…

 

Crazy lady starts in on how this must kill my mother and how it must be making my mother cry, which she also mimes out (my mother crying…repeatedly). I start sighing and say it is ok, really…trying to change the conversation and she keeps on about this crying mother thing…until my hands are both flat on the table in front of me, I am staring at them, and I am repeating “I don’t want to talk about my family. I don’t. I don’t want to talk about my family” in a level voice….and she pushes on about this crying mom, and branches out into how my grandmother must also be beautiful and they must miss me.

 

Because my English isn’t getting through to her and she’s ignoring some serious body language, and I am no longer calm, I go to Japanese and my “calm before I remove your head” voice.

 

“Listen. I. Don’t. Want. To. Talk. About. My Family. This morning? This morning? This morning my mother called me. She wasn’t crying. She was almost crying. I could hear the want to cry voice. My grandmother is dieing. My grandmother will die today or tomorrow. My mother’s mother will die soon. So when I say I don’t want to talk about my family….when I say I don’t want to talk about my crying mother…it is because I don’t want to talk about family. I know you want to speak English, but my private life is private.  I don’t want to talk about my crying mother ANY MORE!”

 

The rest of the table was taken aback, but she wasn’t.

 

I swear, she only gave me a little space before it was a million more questions about my body and things.

 

My support staff tried to shake it off as “international communication problems” but I pointed out to her (my support staff with the not-so-good English) that she could read my gaijin body language just fine. She knew they lady was asking me all the wrong things. It was a problem of someone having a lack of social skills and that being accentuated by, but not caused by, the language issue.

 

Just because you have a range of things you can say and can ask in another language, doesn’t mean they should all be used whenever you can.