A Nihao Intercepted
Nihao!
A man, brilliant in his assessment that I look like I speak Chinese, wants to show me how much of the language he knows. Granted, most racial hecklers seem to figure out that I am Chinese and not some other kind of Asian because no one ever looks at me walking down the street and shouts ‘Sawadeekaaaaa!’.
When I get Nihao’ed, which happens almost exclusively outside of North America, I do some mental eye rolling, keep facing forward and just walk. But today I am with Natasha.
Natasha and her son Zack are brown haired beauties from Toronto. We met teaching in China. Natasha and I lived in the same teacher’s building, which meant we could hop up and down the stairs and be in each other’s flats within seconds. Whenever we needed to work out but still escape the oppressive Wuhan heat and humidity, we would crank up the AC in her flat, roll out our yoga mats and sweat it out in front of my laptop to Shaun T and his Insanity home cardio program.
Natasha had already been in Wuhan for a year when I started at the school. She and Zack then moved to Shanghai and lived there for two more years after I bailed from China. Natasha took many years of Chinese lessons, and by dint of being young and immersed, Zack also learned quite a bit. She had been in China four times as long as I had been as an adult. Foreigners in China get their share of Nihaos (not to mention gleeful ‘Hello!’s) from locals, so Natasha was an old hand at receiving verbal projectiles from gawkers.
*
Today we managed to see each other for a scant six hours. She and Zack arranged to pass through Hamburg on their way to the last stops of their Eurotrip, and I boarded a bus from Berlin to meet them there for the day.
We meandered towards the Rathaus from the train station. The streets around Hamburg Hauptbahnhof are amongst the sketchiest I’ve encountered in Europe. It was on one of these streets that we were Nihao’ed. As the man opened his mouth and fired, I could feel the Nihao come flying through the sound ether towards my irritation, and prepared to commence with eye rolling and forward walking. But before it had the chance to fully impact me, Natasha without so much as turning her head, absent-mindedly intercepted and deflected the Nihao back. She was much more used to these than I was at this point. Radio silence. Shockingly, the man didn’t have any more words in his Chinese arsenal.
We keep walking. She turns to me and asks, ‘How did he know that I spoke Chinese?’. Then she catches herself and laughs ‘Oh right, he was talking to you.’
That we have probably just confused the shit out of this street heckler delights me to no end.
Even more delightful is that two non-Asians just had an interaction with each other in Chinese with the complete non-participation and non-interest of an actual Chinese speaker who wanted nothing but to walk down the street in peace.
Natasha and Zack suggest that the next time this happens, I should just turn on the would-be Chinese speaker in a rush, bubbling in excitement (and of course, in rapid-fire Chinese) that he speaks ‘my language’.
*
In case you’re wondering why being Nihao’ed is like having missiles fired at your head, consider this:
- There is no reason to believe that someone who looks differently than the majority does not speak the local language. A simple ‘Hallo’ would do fine. Not that I would respond to that either on the street.
- There is also no reason to believe that that someone even speaks the language you are throwing at them the way one might sneak an arm through the bars of a zoo cage to throw a piece of bread at an alligator.
- Firing Nihaos at strangers on the street has the exclusive function of saying ‘you look different and that is the only thing that matters about you, and I would like to acknowledge to the world that I notice this’.
- It is not a ‘sharing of cultures’. Nihao is the only fucking thing you know how to say. You are not trying to start conversation. Shouting Nihao is not far removed from shouting ‘Chink!’ (or whatever the German equivalent is) and pointing. Your powers of observation are remarkable. Yes, I am Asian. Please continue announcing to the world whenever you see something that you can identify.
*
Nihaos of course, are not the only missiles fired at people who look different.
I have an ex from Bavaria who when watching sporting events, would point at people of color on the German team and jokingly comment ‘Nicht eine echte Deutsche, nicht eine echte Deutsche… ah, hier ist endlich eine echte Deutsche’ (that’s not a real German, that one either… ah, finally, a real German!). Of course his ‘real’ German was the white skinned athlete.
*
Do you have brainstorms for responding to Nihaos?
Please share in the comments!