Another of those axes

I just got back from seeing a movie, which can join my backlog of movies to review.

Before the ads started, I overheard a conversation that included a part that really pissed me off. The people behind me were referring to another conversation going on in the theatre in which two young Chinese women were speaking to each other in Chinese. These two guys commented to each other---and they were very easy for everybody to hear given that there were a total of something like 8 people in the audience---were that they [the women] were in America so that they should speak English. What the Hell? They were talking to each other! They can speak whatever fucking language they want to each other! Sheesh. They can always speak in English when they need to talk to somebody who doesn't know their native tongue.

In graduate school, two of my housemates were Thai and, in fact, for the majority of the time I was in grad school, Thai was the primary language spoken in my apartment, followed by Japanese/Chinese (which one depended on the year because it depended on the identity of the roommate), followed by English. While this wasn't the ideal situation for me, I can certainly understand why somebody who has to speak in a non-native practically all the time will have a desire to speak in their native tongue as part of relaxing. (I would sometimes practice my Spanish with Hispanic friends in grad school, but when I was tired or stressed out, I was most definitely not in the mood to be doing that.) This unfortunately did have the effect that I felt left out---I couldn't enter conversations (though they were really surprised a couple times when I figured things out based on context and briefly did anyway!) and ultimately we almost never talked to each other (well, one of them was an asshole and I almost never talked to him; the other guy was a nice guy, so when the first one moved out, things got a lot better)---but their choices were extremely understandable ones and I can certainly see myself making the same choice given the same circumstances.

Attitudes like that is why the rest of the world hates us. And, for the most part, they're bloody justified!