Foreign (Dis)Advantage

Being in a foreign country has its advantages. Especially if you live in a country that knows nothing about American culture and assumes its culture to be more advanced. This is true for East Asia. Up until the 1500s, the Middle Empire was the most advanced culture in the world, and today the people tend to... how to say... hang on to the past. They assume that their culture is still the most advanced in the world, and certainly more advanced than the Wild West. This is all from a culture where it is acceptable for children to urinate and defecate anywhere outside or in, they have to do propaganda campaigns to get the people to stop wearing pajamas outside and to step up to the urinal in the men's restrooms to keep the drunk men from peeing all over the place, doctor's smoke in the x-ray room, and every company and government organization records things on tiny paper notebooks as their official records.

Because of this assumption of cultural superiority, East Asians, in their hospitable nature, often assume that white faced foreigners would lose their heads if they weren't attached to their shoulders, and they are there to help with everything. This often leads to them treating us like dumb children. For example, yesterday we boarded a plane back to the city where our friends Aaron and Stacy live. The flight attendant, always ready to help a dumb whitey, said to me: "The numbers for your seat are right here (pointing to the seat numbers printed on the aisle). They are in order and you can find your seat from the number on your ticket." She didn't explain numerical order or the matching game to any East Asian on the plane, only to the foreigners, prompting a number of sarcastic responses in my mind such as "You mean like the seat assignments A, B, and C which comes from MY alphabet!?" or "Your plane smells like urine, probably because someone urinated on a seat 2 hours ago." Knowing that her English was limited to the words "Coffee," "tea," and "turburents (turbulence)" I settled for "Ohhhh, so that's how it works!" prompting a laugh from my friend Graham and a dirty look from my wife who always has more patience for such situations than I do.

However, sometimes I play the dumb foreigner thing to my advantage. You do this in situations when you don't want to stand in line or you are trying to beat an incredibly slow system of some sort. I once got out of having my scooter impounded this way. The cop assumed that I could not read characters, and thus it was natural that I wouldn't know the parking spot was too convenient to the train station to be legal. The truth is that I didn't see the sign and there were others scooters parked there. Had I seen the sign, I could have read that it was illegal parking. However, by playing the dumb foreigner, the police did not feel it was right to impound my scooter.

This situation also happened this morning when Aaron and I were dropping our friend Graham off at the airport to fly back to the US. It was 5:50am as Graham headed through the security line and Aaron and I headed out to find a cab back to his apartment to catch some more sleep before sunrise. The cab line at the arrivals gate at this airport is atrocious and often 45 minutes long. We decided we would try to catch a cab in the departures drop off area since we were already upstairs. No East Asians ever do this, so I was assuming that it was illegal, but it was worth a try. If it is was indeed illegal, then the cab driver wouldn't pick us up. So we walked out and flagged down the first cab dropping someone off. The cab driver yelled at us to get in as fast as possible. Once we were in the cab, he was trapped in by someone dropping a passenger off and a police pointed at our car and started walking towards us. The cab driver immediately said "Noooo, he is going to give me a ticket." and then started yelling at the police officer, "FOREIGNERS, THEY ARE FOREIGNERS. I TOLD THEM THEY CAN'T GET IN THE CAB HERE. THEY ARE FOREIGNERS. LOOK AT THEM!" We both played dumb like we didn't know what was going on, even though we clearly knew that we had broken a law about catching cabs in the departure area. This country is so consistently inefficient that it would only make sense that the only place to catch a cab would be in a 45 minute line. The cab driver yelled at me "FOREIGNER YOU CANNOT GET IN THE CAB. FOREIGNER YOU CANNOT GET IN THE CAB!" It was all a show. I didn't want to get the cab driver in trouble, so I started to get out of the cab. He grabbed my leg to keep me from getting out. The policeman, seeing that the cab driver was dealing with two dumb foreigners who could never understand the intricacies of inefficient laws that oppress a billion+ people and keep a country behind in development, passed by without giving the cab driver a ticket. The cab driver drove off laughing. "I knew that you were foreigners, so I knew that you would get special treatment. I told you to get out of the car so he would think I was following the rules, but I knew you would get special treatment because you are a foreigner." We had used our backwards American culture to beat the system.

Except it came back to bite us. On the way back, I noticed that the driver was taking a while to get his cab going. He was moving at a slow 15 miles an hour when we got on the expressway. When we hit the expressway, he only sped up to 20. Then I noticed that in the dark morning, he did not have his lights on. I asked him if his lights were broken, to which he replied "No they aren't broken. I'm just not shining them." He then turned on his high beams to prove that they were not broken, but still no lights came on. The next thing we noticed is that his defoggers were not on and the windshield was fogging up horribly. Now we were doing 17mph on the airport expressway with no lights and no visibility from the front windshield. As we approached a barricade that I was scared we were going to hit, I asked Aaron "are we going to hit dog, cat, or human on the way home?" He replied "well you get a free pass if you hit an animal, so my guess is 2 out of 3." I then turned to see our cab driver start to doze off and catch himself. At this point I was legitimately scared. I asked him if he was tired, at which point he told me that he wasn't very tired at all. He has hit his maximum speed of 37 at this point and we are getting off the expressway to get on the loop road to Aaron's apartment. We slow to a 15mph crawl for the loop road. The few other cars on the road, mostly cabs, are flying around us. Every time we approached an intersection we slammed on the brakes to 5mph while he honked his horn like crazy to warn any cars of our approach and subsequently wake up everyone within a 100 yard radius. I was scared that we wouldn't be able to catch another cab at this hour, so I hesitated to have him stop and let us out early. In retrospect, that would have been the right thing to do. After about 10 minutes of this stop and go on the loop road, he confessed to us "I am a little sleepy. I get off work at 8am and I started work yesterday at 8am. I have been driving for 24 hours and I have had close to 1, but not 2 hours of rest. That is why I am driving so slow." The road to Aaron's house was in sight, which meant that we only had 20 more minutes in this dangerous cab at our snail's pace. We arrived to Aaron's house at a slow record of 45 minutes with no traffic (it should take 20-30). It was both the scariest and safest cab ride I had ever had, because had we hit anything at the lightning fast 11mph average, we probably would have bounced off with no damage. As we got out of the cab, I told the driver "you really should get some rest." and Aaron invited him in to sleep in their apartment for a little bit, lest he kill someone falling asleep behind the wheel. He turned down the offer and drove off. We went into the gate of Aaron's apartment complex, looked back, and he had only made it 30 yards down the road. We figured he would run into a tree at 5mph before too long and then fall asleep until someone woke him up. It would be better for him than taking anymore passengers. We should have stood in the cab line. We would have gotten to Aaron's apartment faster. Stupid foreigners.