Who, me?

I was recently made to remember a time when my American cousin and I were drinking stout in a pub in a small town in East Kerry. We were both just twenty years old at the time. The place was fairly well empty. I had been in Ireland for the better part of the year at school while my cousin was back in Massachusetts, so we were doing some catching up. Our conversation grew animated and I zoned out the rest of the pub while I was getting the real news about each of our friends back home. Suddenly there was a tap on my shoulder. I turned to the person who had tapped me and saw that it was a middle aged Irish man, conservatively dressed- seemed like a normal guy. He said, "Were you just talking about me?" It was obvious that he was agitated and for the life of me I didn't know why. I was too startled to answer with anything but the truth, and gave him a cursory, "No". "That's good," he spat, and stalked out of the pub.

I was baffled then as to why he would have assumed we may have been talking about him. Truthfully, I still don't know. But I have since found myself in situations where I was the only person in a room who could not speak a language common to everyone else. Often, when the conversation gets animated and the participants are laughing I can't help but think that maybe they are talking about me. I wish I could say this is all completely unfounded paranoia, but on too many occasions to be a coincidence I have known enough about a language to know that they were indeed talking about me. Just this February while I was in Korea auditing our bank's branch there I clearly and definitely heard the staff warning each other that I could understand what they said. This happened after I had heard them talking about their boss, who could not speak Korean, and me. One wondered aloud to another if it were bothersome for us foreigners to not understand everyone in the room (this was while we were having a cake for a staff member's birthday). I said aloud that it might bother the boss, but it was OK with me. They were stunned.

This kind of othering I can understand, even though it is discomfitting. The language barrier is often accompanied by other traits, such as physical appearance or notions of speed, that set the participants apart. When this gentleman assumed he was being othered, I wonder by which criterion he made that judgment? Was it because we were younger and he was middle aged, or was it because he was Irish and we were American? There is definitely a matter of degree here. We were different, but not so dissimilar as I am with Koreans or Africans. How different do we have to be to consider ourselves "other than" a generalized other? How big a factor is gender? Sometimes my daughter now laughs when my wife makes pronunciation errors or lays her African accent very thickly over her English words. I can see it upsets my wife, and how much more similar can two people be than to share 50% of their actual genetic makeup?

I guess I could come to this point: While we do not have control over other people's sensitivity to the linguistic and cultural distance between them and us, we do have control over the amount of sympathy we can apply to situations resulting from the exercise of that sensitivity. I felt like that guy had done me a wrong and owed me an apology. He felt as though he were wronged. If he were of the same mind but had been fifteen years younger our collective indignation may have resulted in a confrontation. I should've been cooler about it. His indignation was an indicator that hurt existed for him, and regardless of my initial reaction I should have been able to take a quick step back and offer some sort of solace to his injured condition. OK, I'm sounding really weird now, but the idea takes on new propriety when put in the light of more important interpersonal relationships. Those of you straddling cultural boundaries may know what I mean.