10 - Cross-cultural gaffes

Summary

I’ll never forget the first time my mother-in-law met my dad. Me and my dad went down to Arab [a small town in Alabama]. We get out of the car at the house. My future mother-in-law walks out and says “Hey” to me. I swear to you all, she looks at my dad and goes, “HEL-LO…MIS-TER…CHO… HOW…ARE…YOU?” My dad's like, “What is she doing?” [I say,] “Well, she thinks she's speaking Korean.”

–Henry Cho

Henry Cho's dad and future mother-in-law come from different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. His dad is Korean, but has lived and worked in the States for many years (at least since the mid-1960s), and has had plenty of time to become quite fluent in English. The future mother-in-law, on the other hand, is a white woman who's spent her entire life in the small rural Alabama town of Arab. She is, in other words, a bit provincial. Meeting Mr. Cho for the first time, she assumes, given that he looks foreign, that he probably doesn't understand English, and to compensate she speaks to him as she would to any foreigner, slowly and loudly (Americans have a reputation for thinking that anyone can understand English if they just speak slowly and loudly enough). Notice by way of contrast, how she greets Henry with the more normal and more familiar “Hey.” As it turns out, however, the joke is on her. When Mr. Cho asks, “What is she doing?” he shows that he can speak English just fine, although he remains a bit puzzled over the mother-in-law's behavior – that is, her attempt, as Henry playfully puts, to speak Korean.