Knowing more than 1 language has its benefits— one being knowing when people are talking crap about you. These bilinguals share the time they clapped back on the person who thought they could away with gossiping. Content has been edited.
Not Today Grandma
“So my grandma and I had lot of bad blood (she harassed my mom and so I called her out on that), so she has made it a goal to convince my entire family that I’m autistic. She and the rest of my family live in India, but I’ve lived in America most of my life.
When I was visiting, she and my distant aunt saw me attempting to talk in broken Hindi to a taxi driver. So, took that opportunity to try and convince her of my ‘mental illness’ in my traditional language, Gujarati. I speak that language fluently, but people just assume I’m uncultured trash who can’t.
I then go up to her and tell both of them the story of how my grandma nearly killed my neighbor’s dog in perfect Gujarati. We haven’t spoken since, and we were in the same house for a month after that incident.”
Sneaky Waitress
“My mom speaks almost exclusively English but can understand a fair amount of Cantonese and can read a few common characters.
We were in an almost deserted but very large Chinese restaurant in a neighborhood we are familiar with but don’t frequent. The food is decent but we didn’t finish so my mom asks for some takeout boxes to pack up the food. The waitress comes back with two tiny boxes that were obviously not enough for the amount we had left over. There were giant stacks of these boxes on the back wall near the kitchen so my mom asks for a few of the larger ones. The waitress kinda rolls her eyes, leaves, and grabs a few of those and a plastic bag. She puts them on the table and immediately starts squawking to one of the other waitresses sitting a few tables away from us folding won ton.
My mom leans over and says that the one yelling is telling the other to charge us for the boxes, and says we’re terrible customers. Sure enough, the angry one comes back with the bill and Mom sees a 10-cent charge for each box among the scribbled-out Chinese characters. She then calmly, but firmly says, ‘I heard what you said. I will not be paying you for the boxes, I will not leave a tip, and we will never come back.’
She put cash on the table for the exact amount, minus the charge for the boxes, we got up and left.
The look on the waitress’ face was priceless, as though she had been caught accidentally confessing to murder. I never thought of my mom as a cool mom, but I definitely thought she was that day.”
Angry Pilot
“I’m not fluent in German but I know enough to get by in most cases.
So I was working at the local airport as a ramp employee, fueling airplanes, and other random tasks. We had a Twin Cessna come in, and we were dispatched to fuel him. So, I was in the cart at the time and was there first, and overheard the pilot and passengers speaking in German. Standard pleasantries, the pilot explained he was stationed in Germany and so on and so forth. I interrupted in English to get their fuel load, and my coworker and I went to work.
For the life of me, I don’t entirely remember what we did to set this pilot off, but he started telling his passengers in German that we were both idiots and clearly didn’t know what we were doing and other less-than-pleasant things (For reference, both my coworker and I are pilots, my coworker just passing his instructor ride a few days prior).
So I took the liberty of doing the final fuel receipt for the pilot, and in German told him that we heard everything he said, and asked if he had a problem. There might have been some implication on my part that If he didn’t at least apologize, I would inform my much scarier-looking coworker (who honestly wouldn’t hurt a fly, the dude was a former cop and still had the build) of what he said.
So yeah, to watch the blood drain from the dude’s face was pretty freaking priceless. That he would happen to run into another German speaker far from any major German population areas. The added tip and apology didn’t hurt either.”
A Low-Life Father
“So just a little background for you:
In India, there’s a major white complex. It’s a huge inferiority complex that one feels to those who are white. Basically, even after the British left and we had our independence, the vast majority of the population still views the average white person as superior. They’ll stare, admire, try and imitate, emulate, and lust after the white man and/or woman.
This being said, there are lots of average Indians who will try to take advantage of any foreigner. It’s just the way they’re made.
Now I’m an Indian, but I look like I could be a foreigner, and the fact that my English is far ahead of my Hindi (or any of the other Indian languages) with a slightly polished accent that isn’t very Indian-English, I get mistaken a lot for a foreigner.
I live in a part of Bombay that is relatively a hot spot for tourists, and lots of ex-pats also settle here. So I get loads of people trying to take advantage of me.
One beautiful time was when I was walking home from the gym, and a cyclist saw me, stopped, stared for a minute, and walked over in the best accent he could come up with (think the Indian dude from The Great Gatsby) says, ‘HELLO GOOD EVENING CHAP! I CAN SHOW YOU WHERE YOU GOING.’
Now I have a warped sense of humor, and I wanted to see if the guy was actually trying to be helpful or not, so I replied politely saying thank you, but I know my way around.
He replies saying, ‘OH OK, VERY GOOD. YOU ARE SMART! YOU KNOW, I LIKE YOU! I TELL YOU A SECRET TRICK IF YOU USE A DEBIT CARD.’
Now, this is the point where his son (I guess he must’ve been about 12 years old) asks him what he’s doing, and he briskly replied (in Hindi), ‘Shut up, smile, and let him take his card out, I’ll hold out his card while talking to him, slyly write the number on your hand, I’ll get the code from the back of the card, and I’ll buy you a present with this idiot’s money.’
I’m smiling and trying to look as blissfully ignorant as I can, and I feign interest in all that he’s telling me after this. After a few random lines about how I should be careful, and how people take advantage of a single person traveling from abroad to India and their card information, he says, ‘SHOW YOUR CARD, I WILL TELL YOU IF YOU ARE SAFE OR NO’, and mumbles to his son in Hindi, ‘Get ready, we have to be quick and not let him notice we’re getting the number.’
As I pretend to look around for my card, he says to his son in Hindi, ‘This guy looks as stupid as that guy from Monday,’ and that’s when I lost my cool.
I grabbed him by the collar (took him totally by surprise), pushed him up against the wall of the building where we were standing, and growled at him in Hindi, “This is the way you try and use your half-brain to scam foreigners?! You don’t know who you just messed with, I’m about to slap you so hard your dead mother is going to feel it!’
At this point, the look on his face is just too good to forget, and he totally starts peeing himself (not literally) and fumbling for words. His son totally freaked out and just stood there frozen. I kept my grip on this dude’s collar with one hand pinning him to the wall so he couldn’t run and took a photo of his license (name and address on it). I then explained to him that I’d be sharing this photo of my uncle (who has since passed away but at the time was very high up in the Crime Branch) and that if any foreigner got ripped off in the area, we’d come after him.
Obviously, I wasn’t actually going to do anything like that. I wasn’t even furious, just putting on more of a show, but I wanted to put that fear into not only his head but his son’s. There isn’t much you can do to change the mind of a 40yr old, but a kid is impressionable.
He has the chance to put his head down, study, go to college, and make something of himself rather than follow in the footsteps of his low-life petty-scammer-father.”
