TRIGGER WARNING: This story may be considered slightly racist. OK, some people might say definitely racist. But there is still a lesson to be learned, albeit at my expense.
I had thought I had hung up my world-travelling by the time I got married, had kids, and got a steady teaching job. I just lost interest in seeing the rest of the world. But a second marriage to a woman whom I had regaled with my travelling stories changed all that. Jennifer had never seen the world and she had a bucket list, things she wanted to see and do before she died. So started a second round of world travels. Jennifer would pick where she wanted to go and plan the whole thing. I would bitch and moan about not wanting to go, but I went any way.
I didn’t start to get involved until we were on the plane heading there. Then I’d take out my Let’s Go or Lonely Planet guide book and start making a list of all the things I wanted to do when we got to wherever we were going. And once we hit the ground, I was in charge as all my survival skills from my earlier travels kicked into high gear. For an American like Jennifer unfamiliar with travelling in foreign countries, landing in a place where you don’t speak the language is kind of scary. But I had gotten so used to foreign traveling in my younger years, that navigating through foreign countries was like riding a bicycle. It was easy.
In 2009 Jennifer chose Central and Eastern Europe. The idea was to rent a camper and drive all over Central and Eastern Europe, camping out along the way.
It turned out that renting a camper was more difficult than she had imagined. There are many, many campers on the road in Europe. Europeans love their campers. But not many places rent campers and she was a little late in trying to reserve one so there simply were none available as we started getting closer to our departure day.
So in the end we decided to just rent a car and do car camping. We brought a lot of camping gear with us in our. Airlines (at least in 2009) were quite generous with baggage allowances for overseas travel, allowing two 50-pound bags each. We stuff the suitcases with sleeping bags, a double-size air mattress, tent, etc., maxing out our baggage limit. But we still needed more camping gear for the 35-day trip that Jennifer had planned so the first thing we did when we arrived in Frankfurt-am-Main in Germany on June 10 was to go to a big department store to buy other equipment like a propane stove, a camping table and chairs, and other gear that we intended to leave in Germany when the trip was over.
Now I had camped out in my early travels in Europe but car camping was definitely much easier. There are tons of campgrounds in Europe but campgrounds are often on the outskirts of cities and not always easy to get to using public transportation. But with a car it was easy to get to them.
Also car camping was a lot more up-scale than my earlier camping. Traveling by myself I didn’t usually cook my food. I would get take-out and food that didn’t have to be cooked. But Jennifer was intent on making real meals, like the kind she made at home. She didn’t like experimenting too much with the native foods, looking instead for familiar foods that she was used to making, likes steak and mac ‘n’ cheese. A bit of home in the wilds of Europe. Making meals, of course, meant going to grocery stores quite frequently to stock up.
Which brings me to the language issue. I found that very few people in Eastern Europe in 2009 spoke English. I found that kind of shocking because with the end of the Cold War Eastern Europe really opened up and become quite Western.
Back in the summer of 1985 during the Cold War, I had travelled across East Germany. I was amazed that everywhere I looked people were driving the exact same car, a car called the Trabant made in East Germany.
And when you went into a grocery store in East Germany during the Cold War, there was absolutely no variety. There was one, and only one brand of everything in the store. I kept thinking East Germany was like K-Mart (this was before Wal-Mart really took off), but a K-Mart in which you could only get the generic brand of everything.
Compare the cold cereal aisle in a grocery store in the United States where you have not only completely different kinds of cereal but different brands of each kind of cereal with a grocery store in East Berlin in 1985 where the cold cereal aisle had just one cereal, generic corn flakes.
Now to the East German credit there were tons of generic corn flakes. But that was your only choice. And the same was true for every other kind of food.
Contrast this with say Poland in 2009. Everywhere on the major highways we saw large semis hauling goods east and west as the economies of Eastern European countries were taking off.
Soviet influences from the Cold War days were almost non-existent. The heavily concrete Soviet-style buildings typical of Cold War were pretty much all demolished replaced by more Western-style buildings.
Downtown Warsaw
Whenever we saw an ugly Soviet-era building, it stood out like a sore thumb. The grocery stores were now filled with a wide variety of every kind of food you would find in a grocery store in Western Europe or the United States. East Europe had really opened up.
Which was why I found it shocking that so few people spoke English in almost every country we travelled in Eastern Europe from Slovenia to Croatia to Hungary to Slovakia and finally to Poland. I found my smattering of high school German actually more helpful than English for some reason. In the 2000s when English had become the lingua franca in many parts of the world, it was curious how little inroad English had made in Eastern Europe.
Now travelling in 2009 Eastern Europe was easier in many ways than 1985 Eastern Europe. For example, we brought our GPS – a device called Nüvi made by the Garmin company – which we brought with us from home and were able to navigate pretty easily without understanding the road signs. I didn’t have to stop to ask for directions like I might have done in earlier years. Our faithful GPS device made by Garmin Nüvi would even direct us to campgrounds, restaurants, or bed and breakfasts, whatever we wanted without knowing a single word of the local language. Furthermore, in 2009 I had a laptop which I could use to find information about things to see and do wherever we were going.
But with car camping we naturally had to occasionally go to the grocery, hardware, or department store to stock up on supplies. And then we faced a predicament. Sometimes it was hard to find what we needed in the store. In the United States you could ask a clerk where to find it. But the clerk in the United States spoke English and the clerks in Eastern Europe did not.
Little fear. Back in the 1980s I had learned how to navigate in non-English speaking countries back during my first round of world travels using what I called my “international sign language” Now my international sign language has nothing to do with the international sign language used around the world to communicate with deaf people. The closest I could come to describe my international sign language is that it’s like miming with sound effects.
For example, because we often cooked meals in the campgrounds, we naturally had to occasionally stock up on food. But there was a problem when my wife went to the meat counter to get a particular cut of, say, beef or pork. The meat was labeled in the local language and it was often hard to determine, just by looking at the meat, what kind of meat it was.
Now I should say this about my wife Jennifer. She never did learn my international sign language no matter how many times I demonstrated it in action. Maybe it’s because she didn’t travel around the world a couple of time when she was in her twenties. But I got the strong impression that she thought I looked ridiculous when I was doing my international sign language and it would have greatly embarrassed her to emulate me, even in front of strangers that she would never see again. I had no such fear.
That said, I found her approach to dealing with the language issue quite ineffective. If she wanted some help from a clerk, she would simply go up to the clerk and ask, enunciating each syllable clearly, “Do you speak English?”
Anyone could clearly see that the clerk had no idea what she was saying. What we had here, in the words of Cool Hand Luke, was a failure to communicate! But Jennifer would nevertheless continue to speak English in explaining what she wanted while the clerk would continue to shake his or her head and wave his or her hands to communicate that he or she had no idea what she was saying.
When it came to trying to get meat at the meat counter, she would start out in the usual manner, “Do you speak English?” And then, while the clerk was shaking his head, she would point to a particular cut of meat and ask “Is this beef or pork?” The conversation went nowhere. Recognizing a classic case of stalemate, I decided to step in to get some action.
Pointing at the cut of meat in question, I simply did my best impression of a cow. [Do cow impression.] I did not say “moo” because I knew that people who speak other languages have other words they use to capture the sounds that particular animals make.
For example, in English we describe the sound that a dog makes as “bow wow,” “arf,” “woof,” “ruff ruff,” etc. Whereas in French they say the dog goes “ouah ouah” and in Thai they say “hoang hoang” with a falling tone. So if I wanted to describe a dog to a person who did not speak English, I wouldn’t want to say “bow wow.”
Or just put them altogether. [Demonstrate all together.] And the system worked every time. At the meat counter we always got our meat, whether it was [make cow sound] or [make pig sound] or [make chicken sound].
That said my system of communicating with people who spoke no English occasionally broke down. Sometimes when I would ask for something we would be sent to something completely unexpected. Like when we were looking for tent stakes, I did this. [mime pounding in tent stakes]
The clerk got all excited showing me in his own international sign language that he knew exactly what I was looking for. Imagine then how shocked I was when the clerk took us to the umbrellas. How they got umbrellas out of my very clear depiction of tent stakes I have no idea.
However such confusion with non-English speakers was rather rare. Indeed, my biggest problems occurred when I tried to communicate with people who actually spoke a little English. I should have known better.
Case in point, Jennifer and I were staying in Wieliczka, a town in southern Poland about 15 kilometers southeast of Krakow.
Wieliczka is world famous for its underground salt mine with its four chapels and dozens of statues carved out of rock salt by the miners themselves. St. Kinga’s Chapel, the crown jewel of the salt mine, located 101 meters underground, is truly breathtaking. Anyway definitely worth a visit if you are ever in southern Poland.
In Wieliczka, we decided to take a break from camping and kick back in the Eko Motel, a nice but inexpensive motel there.
I remember trying to watch TV in the room and every channel was in Polish with no subtitles.
We ate our meals in this motel restaurant.
Now the reason I am talking about this motel so much is that one of the waitresses in the restaurant spoke a little English, which was a nice change of pace from the almost complete English blackout we found elsewhere in Poland.
The second night we were in Wieliczka, Jennifer got this craving for Chinese food. Back in Galt, California, where we live, Chinese food is one of our favorite take-out foods. There are at least three places you can get Chinese take-out in Galt, population 24, 531.
So I pulled out my laptop and tried to find where the nearest Chinese food restaurant was. But for some reason I had a lot of trouble finding one. When I googled the Polish phrase for Chinese restaurant (that I got using google translate) chiński restauracja Wieliczka I got nothing. I tried Krakow and still nothing. I even looked in the Wieliczka and Krakow phonebooks under restaurants and couldn’t find any restaurant with a Chinese restaurant type of name, i.e., one with words like chiński, Chiny, panda, wok, etc., in the name. In addition, nothing came up with our Nüvi. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. I know google worked differently in different countries so maybe I was just not doing the search correctly.
I went and found the English-speaking waitress to see if she could help me. When I asked her where was the nearest Chinese restaurant, she thought about it a bit and then went to the motel’s computer and did a search. When she found the info, she asked me if I would like her to make a reservation for us. I asked her couldn’t we just get take-out? She seemed quite confused by that, as if restaurants didn’t do take-out. I told her OK then, go ahead and make the reservation. I thought why not. We’ll have a nice sit-down dinner. So she called the restaurant on the phone and, speaking in Polish, made a reservation for 6 pm that evening. She gave me directions for how to find the restaurant which was near downtown Wieliczka.
That evening we got in our rental car and started to follow the directions the waitress had given us. It was only a couple of miles from where we were staying. But when we got to the place she told us to go, we saw no restaurant. All we saw was a park and some buildings, but nothing that suggested a restaurant, let alone a Chinese restaurant. We drove around and around the area quite a few times before giving up and going back to the Eko Motel where we again had dinner in the motel restaurant.
The English-speaking waitress wasn’t on duty that evening but when I saw her the next day I told her about our troubles finding the restaurant. She looked very confused because she thought it would be easy to find. I thought maybe we were having trouble communicating. She seemed confused like maybe she didn’t understand what I was asking for. I asked her if I could see what she had found on the computer when she looked up the restaurant. Unfortunately everything on the computer was in Polish and I couldn’t understand it.
So I dug deep and tried to figure out some way, using all my international sign language know-how, to communicate that what we wanted was a Chinese restaurant. I thought and I thought and I thought until Eureka! I’ve figured out how to say Chinese restaurant in international sign language.
So, making eye contact with the waitress, I put my index fingers to the outer corners of my eyes and pulled my eyes wide into little slits with a wide grin to simulate a Chinese person. [demonstrate] And then I used my right hand to simulate and mouth to simulate eating with a fork. [demonstrate] Clearly “CHINESE FOOD” in international sign language!
I was so proud of myself. The waitress immediately understood what I meant and knew why we had such problems trying to find the restaurant. She said that she had thought I was saying TENNIS, not Chinese.
Now admittedly the Polish word for tennis, pronounced tenis [TEN-ees] does somewhat sound like CHI – neez. I guess I can see where the waitress might have gotten confused because she had probably never heard the way English-speaking people pronounce tennis.
Thinking we had said TEN-ees, she had gone ahead and called the local tennis court where you, indeed, had to make a reservation to play. And that explains why we spent all that time driving around the park area of town looking for a restaurant. I didn’t know we were looking for a tennis court! But driving past the park later the next day, sure enough there it was, tennis courts right where the waitress said it would be!
What a comedy of errors! With that resolved, just to bring some closure to the farce, I asked the waitress, “So where is the closest Chinese restaurant?” She said, quite matter of factly, “There are no Chinese restaurants in Poland.” I said, “None? Not in even in a big city like Krakow?” She said, “None.” Well, I guess that settled that!
I’m not sure whether what she said was true about Chinese restaurants back in 2009. I have a sneaking suspicion she had never been to a Chinese restaurant or just didn’t like Chinese food. But you couldn’t prove it by me because I just couldn’t find one. Just to see whether things had changed since 2009, googling in 2017 I found there are a few Chinese restaurants in Krakow but still none in Wieliczka. As proof here’s a photo of the China Palace Restaurant (RESTAURACJA CHIŃSKI PAŁAC) in Krakow.
Now if this was just a story about finding Chinese food in Poland I would end it there. I’m not sure what the lesson would be. Is that I should have learned a few words in Polish, like the word for Chinese (chiński) or restaurant (restauracja)? I mean if I had just said chinski rather than Chinese there wouldn’t have been a story. But perhaps there is a deeper issue. Is it that I should not expect people who profess to speak English to actually know the difference between tennis and Chinese? Is it that I should put my faith totally in my international sign language and not attempt to speak English?
I don’t believe any of those is the real lesson. Indeed I realized as I started telling my students about this adventure in Poland that while making animal noises to get the proper cut of meat might be amusing, ordering Chinese food might be seen as slightly racist. OK, pretty darn racist. No animal was going to get mad at me for imitating them, but there might be some Chinese people who might not have an appreciation for the difficulties of saying Chinese in international sign language. So which comes first? Getting the food you want or political correctness? Did I have to censor my international sign language or give trigger warnings? Indeed what started as an innocent story about getting Chinese take-out turned into a story about racism and political correctness and raised to the core questions about the very legitimacy of my international sign language – some very serious issues!
Because I believe my stories should be both educational as well as entertaining, I thought I should add some discussion about this question of pulling my eyes into slits to mean “Chinese.”
Let’s start with why I even pulled my eyes back in the first place. I was actually drawing upon something that I used to do as a kid. When I was kid I used to watch a lot of TV, including a lot of old black & white movies from the 1930s and 1940s. Many times on Saturday they would have these movies about a Chinese detective whose name was Charlie Chan.
Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan
I didn’t know it at the time but I learned later that Charlie Chan was actually played by a couple of different actors, none of whom were Chinese at all. The one I remember was an actor named Sidney Toler.
Here’s a collection of clips from movies I remember watching as a kid with Sidney Toler playing Charlie Chan.
Charlie Chan had all these funny sayings. For instance, when talking to his son he would say “Number One son”. And he was always saying “Confucius say . . . ” followed my some bit of pseudo-Confucian wisdom. Indeed, Americans found these saying so funny that Charlie Chan movies generated a whole industry of “Confucius say” jokes, most of them fit only for adult audiences but some which made their way down to kids.
The jokes always began “Confucius say” just like Charlie Chan said it – not “Confucius says” – followed by some typically ungrammatical one-liner like “Confucius say: Man who have last laugh, not get joke.” These jokes were all around us when we were kids.
As a kid I thought these “Confucius say” jokes were hilarious and I started going around saying “Confucius say” followed by something that made no sense. I think there was some comedian at the time who did “Confucius say” jokes and I started copying them. And for some reason when I said “Confucius say”, to make it more authentic, I would pull my eyes back. I don’t know where I learned that, whether a friend did it or I saw it on television. Or maybe I made it up. But when I was little kid that’s what I would do.
Now by the time I was traveling in Poland in 2009, Charlie Chan jokes were a thing of the past. I hadn’t thought about Charlie Chan or “Confucius say” for over 40 years. But digging deep for some way to mime Chinese to a Polish waitress, those old synapses fired away and there I was pulling my eyes back. Voila! Chinese food!
The question is then why did the Polish waitress understand my miming the word “Chinese.” I mean it takes two to communicate and I’m pretty sure she never watched any old Charlie Chan movies. So why did she understand me?
This is an interesting question because there’s nothing particularly Chinese about the eye shape you can make by pulling your eyelids into narrower slits. You can find many photos of ethnic groups who tend to have narrow eyeslits,
like the Bushmen of South Africa
or the Laplanders of Finland.
And there are many famous individuals who are quite recognizable by their narrow eye slits. Like Nelson Mandela. So by pulling my eyes into narrow slits I could have been talking about the Bushmen or the end of apartheid in South Africa.
But the Polish waitress showed no such confusion. She knew I meant Chinese. Why?
I can’t say for sure but in doing some research I found there was a whole craze for pulling eyes back around the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics that happened just before my trip to Poland.
Here’s Spain’s Olympic men’s basketball ball in a publicity photo.
Also the Spanish tennis team
and Argentinian women’s soccer team
Now why they all started making slanty eyes in signaling that they were going to China, I don’t know. All I know is that it happened.
And it caused a furor in the media led by Chinese-American groups accusing these athletes of racism.
They said people making slanty eyes was no different than vaudevillians like Al Jolson who used to wear black face to portray people of African descent.
Admittedly almost all whites and blacks today would find whites wearing black face as offensive as whites using the “N” word. Even wearing black face for comedic purposes is walking a thin between acceptable and unacceptable comedy.
And Koreans shouldn’t wear black face for whatever reason! It’s just too creepy!
Now not everybody thought of making slanty eyes as racist. The Spanish soccer team defended their actions as perfectly innocent. Making slanty eyes meant no disrespect. The Chinese government likewise passed the photos off as inconsequential.
But whether it was racist or not, it is clear that the international media coverage suggests that by 2008 making slanty eyes had fairly universally come to mean Chinese. And both the images of making slanty eyes and outrage at people who do it have continued to the present.
Celebrities have regularly been caught making slanty eyes. In 2009 there was a big ruckus over a photo taken of Miley Cyrus
Here is Miley Cyrus, star of Hannah Montana, with normal eyes
And here is Miley Cyrus getting drunk with some friends.
Weeks after Miley Cyrus apologized, Joe Jonas, the middle Jonas brother pulled the same stunt.
and Kate Gosselin
and Rihanna. What were you thinking Rihanna?!
And all over social media you can find photos of children and young adults, both Asian and non-Asian, squinting or pulling their eyes back with their fingers pretending to be Chinese
Indeed many photos of people on social media use the phrase “chinky eyes” to label any image where people have relatively narrow eye slits, whether due to deliberate squinting, half-opened eyes, or just one’s natural appearance, all without fingers!
Some people have on social media have tried to expose the racism of making chinky eyes by posting photos of themselves making “round eyes.”
So what do you think? If you are Chinese, are you offended by a person making slanty eyes? Are you offended when people refer to these eyes as “chinky eyes”? If you are non-Chinese, does making round eyes offend you?
Personally I am not offended by images of people making “round eyes.” I think it looks kind of stupid. For me the more pertinent question is if somebody made this motion would you think they were ordering American food? Like what? Hamburgers? French fries?
Who knew my international sign language could be so complicated! Frankly all I know is that the next time I want to order Chinese food in some foreign country, I think I’ll order pizza instead. Pizza is the same in every language!
If you don’t believe it, take a look at this video that Kevin Huang put together!
Thanks, Kevin and the all the Country Day students who participated!