This story is about a versatile turn of phrase.
I was having coffee the other day with two of my friends who are Korean. They are both international students—one is my classmate, the other I met because she needed help with English. As we spoke my classmate expressed her increasing frustration at not being able to communicate complex ideas in English.
“I’m really smart in Korean!” She said emphatically. Pointing to our mutual friend she added, “So is she! She’s really smart in Korean.”
“You’re smart in English.” I insisted. I wasn’t just being nice. Their intelligence is quite obvious to me.
“No!” she insisted petulantly, “I am not international student. I am international stupid.”
Her inventive eggcorn brought a round of laughter.
“At least you’re funny in English,” I offered, “that’s really not easy. Humor doesn’t usually translate well.”
“No!” She banged her fist on the table as we laughed again, “I am international stupid!”
No matter what I said, no matter what evidence I laid out to the contrary, my friend insisted that she was in fact an international stupid. I couldn’t for the life of me convince her that she was, say, an international smart. Our friend agreed with my classmate—she also felt like an international stupid. I insisted their intelligence was obvious and they insisted that I was an oddball and that most Americans found them incomprehensible and frustrating.
I wasn’t surprised by my friends’ remarks. My roommate (the one who wants my cup of suffering for an ashtray) is an international student from Turkey. Her experience here has been of the same sort as my Korean friends’. People have trouble understanding her. A couple of months ago she came home in a huff because she had been trying to buy her favorite tea at a tea shop and the clerk couldn’t understand her for a really long time. After a round of charades and word association she finally got the right tea but not before her blood pressure was through the roof. When she finished telling me the story she demanded—“Tell me what I’m saying: Rose. Tea.”
I shrugged as I got up to go make some tea myself and repeated back, “Rose tea. Obvious.” I saw her eyes widen with outrage as I stepped out of her room.
“Ah!!” She yelled, “This is all your fault!”
“What?!” I bolted.
She ran down the hallway after me with her fists raised, yelling in not-totally-mock anger—“You understand everything I say! This is all your fault, why my English won’t improving!!”
My laughter crippled me before I got to the kitchen. “How is this my fault? What do you want me to do?”
“Be like normal American! Nobody can understand me. What’s your problem?!”
“I don’t know, Sev. You’re not that hard to understand.”
“Stop it.”
“You want me to pretend like I don’t understand you?”
“Okay.”
“No!”
“You’re the reason my English won’t improving!”
“Isn’t.” I corrected her. She stared at me blankly.
“Isn’t improving.” I clarified. She swore under her breath in Turkish and, to my great amusement, sporadically accused me of undermining her progress in English for the rest of the evening.
Around the same time as this interaction I was told second hand that another Korean classmate of mine had been saying how great I was with international students.
“You can say one word and she understands what you mean,” he had said. I was surprised and encouraged by his comment.
The truth is until recently all of my closest friends here have been American. I chose to attend grad school in Boston because I wanted to get to know people from different cultures but it proved to be harder than I expected. My relationships with foreign students remained in the category of casual acquaintance. I found that my awareness of how little I knew of their culture and how easy it would be for me to say something offensive kept me at a polite distance. Their English was difficult for me to understand. I felt bad asking them to repeat themselves multiple times so mostly I just smiled and nodded and didn’t ask too many questions. I had a hard time remembering their names or putting the right names with the right faces. I felt really embarrassed that I couldn’t remember who they were and I was always afraid of hurting their feelings. So we remained distant from one another. I didn’t know how to bridge the gap. Then about a year and a half ago my Sevde moved in. I felt the same toward her—unsure how to behave, anxious about accidentally offending her. But I did get to know her and we became close. As she told me about her experience in America, I realized that my behavior toward foreign students had been more hurtful than helpful. Here I was trying to save them from insult and actually I ended up making them feel that I didn’t have time for them and that they were not important to me or worth the effort it would take to work through the language and culture barriers that separated us. They all felt like international stupids and I wasn’t helping.
So I stopped worrying so much about making people feel bad or showing my own cultural ignorance. Now I try to let people know just how interested I am in their lives, how willing I am to do the hard work of communicating across barriers and even risk making a total fool of myself. It’s not that complicated actually. I shamelessly ask people to repeat themselves. I repeat back what I think I hear and give people a chance to correct me if I have misunderstood. And the closer I get to my international friends the better I am able to listen and understand, not only these particular persons but other foreign people as well. So I was deeply encouraged to hear my classmate’s comment. I have learned to listen a little better this year. :)
And I’ve learned something else—I too am an international stupid. One night, when I was having dinner with my Korean friends, I said:
“There’s this awesome wisteria tree in Korea. I can’t remember where but it’s really famous. Do you know it?”
They didn’t. I then remembered it is actually in Japan. I proceeded to offer up a series of Asian people/places that I thought were Korean that turned out to be, respectively, Chinese, Vietnamese, and Taiwanese. We all laughed at me for committing the absurdly cliché faux paux of implying that all things Asian are the same. All I could think was—Frack. I’m an international stupid.
I think this every time my roommate mentions a country I couldn’t begin to locate on a globe. Or a political leader of whom I’ve never heard. Or when I realize I’ve been speaking in a culturally insensitive way. So yeah, realizing once again that I am an international stupid is a recurring event. But I confess my ignorance and allow myself to be taught by others. Hopefully, with the help of my lovely friends, I’m on my way to becoming an international smart.
