So I ran into this girl from class yesterday. I stopped to chat, partly because she's a nice girl (and no one wants nice girls thinking that they're rude or weird). Also we're two expats in Melbourne and I felt an odd need to create or reinforce a bond, and an even odder compulsion to reach out cross-culturally and somehow, through this one conversation, dispel any negative stereotypes about my people and make tremendous headway in improving race relations.
So we spent the entire conversation dissing Australians.
It was beautiful. She asked me if I planned to go back to America (I'm not American, for the record, I just studied there for a few years) and I said it would be an option if it weren't so far away. She said it sounded like I missed it there and I said yes, I kind of did. She asked if I liked it better there than there in Australia.
I glanced over my shoulder. We were alone.
And I said that well, Australia has its good points, as does every place I've lived in, but Americans, well at least the Americans I met in America, were just... nicer.
She looked at me slightly incredulously, and said, "Really?"
And I said, "Yeah, they're just... warmer. If you look a little lost, they stop and offer to help. When I was in America, no one commented on my accent, or asked me questions like 'How come you guys are never on time, is it a cultural thing?' whereas here it is a rare week when that doesn't happen."
And she said, "And on the tram, they make these loud remarks, Chinese people this and Indian people that... it's not nice but we can't do anything."
I nodded, and then quickly added, feeling a twinge of guilt for the Aussies that I -am- friends with, of course not everyone is like that, it's just that you keep expecting it to happen. And she said, to be fair it's not just the Aussies, the Brits tend to be racist too.
"But not the Scottish people," she said.
"Or the Welsh," I added, thinking of my friend Hannah. "And Irish are nice too, I've never met an Irish person that's not nice."
It looked like we were going to be friends. We had covered nearly all of the white Anglophone world, and concurred on the niceness scale of all but the Kiwis and Canadians. Walking to the tram, I felt warm and fuzzy, and idly wondered if I had been a trifle hasty in my generalisations.
Sure, I thought to myself as I got onto my tram, over half the people I made friends with in America were Americans, whereas here, it adds up to a grand total of two good friends, plus three others I'd like to know better, one ex that I don't talk to but shall certainly talk about at some point, and a handful of acquaintances.
And then some dude on the tram made a loud remark about Melbourne being overridden by bloody Asians, and I thought, ah. I may be wrong, but sometimes it feels so... right.
So we spent the entire conversation dissing Australians.
It was beautiful. She asked me if I planned to go back to America (I'm not American, for the record, I just studied there for a few years) and I said it would be an option if it weren't so far away. She said it sounded like I missed it there and I said yes, I kind of did. She asked if I liked it better there than there in Australia.
I glanced over my shoulder. We were alone.
And I said that well, Australia has its good points, as does every place I've lived in, but Americans, well at least the Americans I met in America, were just... nicer.
She looked at me slightly incredulously, and said, "Really?"
And I said, "Yeah, they're just... warmer. If you look a little lost, they stop and offer to help. When I was in America, no one commented on my accent, or asked me questions like 'How come you guys are never on time, is it a cultural thing?' whereas here it is a rare week when that doesn't happen."
And she said, "And on the tram, they make these loud remarks, Chinese people this and Indian people that... it's not nice but we can't do anything."
I nodded, and then quickly added, feeling a twinge of guilt for the Aussies that I -am- friends with, of course not everyone is like that, it's just that you keep expecting it to happen. And she said, to be fair it's not just the Aussies, the Brits tend to be racist too.
"But not the Scottish people," she said.
"Or the Welsh," I added, thinking of my friend Hannah. "And Irish are nice too, I've never met an Irish person that's not nice."
It looked like we were going to be friends. We had covered nearly all of the white Anglophone world, and concurred on the niceness scale of all but the Kiwis and Canadians. Walking to the tram, I felt warm and fuzzy, and idly wondered if I had been a trifle hasty in my generalisations.
Sure, I thought to myself as I got onto my tram, over half the people I made friends with in America were Americans, whereas here, it adds up to a grand total of two good friends, plus three others I'd like to know better, one ex that I don't talk to but shall certainly talk about at some point, and a handful of acquaintances.
And then some dude on the tram made a loud remark about Melbourne being overridden by bloody Asians, and I thought, ah. I may be wrong, but sometimes it feels so... right.
