On Route . . .

A pilot from an American Airlines flight waves a Haitian flag.
Originally uploaded by Official U.S. Navy Gallery

I'm on my way to my mother's motherland. Excited, a little nervous and wildly curious. I'll keep you posted. . . bis bald.

Is PC BS? They All Look Alike

eye (i) Stop Him..
Originally uploaded by elsakawai™

This is a new category you'll be seeing on my blog as I ponder the question, "Is PC BS?" Does PC etiquette prevent true discourse? Is anyone really capable of being PC and honest? I have listened to so many non-PC statements since I've been in Germany that I'm beginning to wonder if PCism exists, if it's on a path toward slow death or if it is regarded as a serious form of communication at all?

I should have started this category months ago but it was a seemingly banal interaction that I had recently, which made me sit down and start writing this.

I met an interesting group of Korean people at a party last week and somehow we got on the topic of people confusing them for being Chinese, Japanese, ______ (insert Asian nationality here). I immediately said I couldn't believe how ignorant some people are.

"Well, sometimes we can't tell either," one Korean woman said to me. "Like sometimes I can't tell between a Japanese and a Korean."

I was in shock, rendered speechless.

Then her Korean friend added in, "And you know what's really hard? Telling apart Germans."

My eyes must have been enormous by this point.

"I swear to you," the friend continued, "my grandmother calls all of my German friends by the same name. She can't tell one blonde person apart from the next." He was serious.

So here I am wondering, "Ok, so true PC behavior says we're not allowed to say all people of one race or ethnicity look a like. For one, it's not true. If one more person says I look like Michelle Obama. . . .but when Asian people say this, then I'm tripped up. Do the rules bend? WTF?

I used to HATE IT when people confused me for a black girl who looked absolutely nothing like me. But then I got to college and people trying to be PC were afraid to say that I was black. They kept referring to me as "the tall girl."

So are we now post-PC?

POP THIS!

Originally uploaded by tommyajohansson

I was on my way to pick-up my children when I saw a woman, maybe in her late 30s and holding a small child's hand, as she walked down a busy street. Obviously happy to have warm spring weather, she put on a short-sleeved t-shirt.

POP THIS. She was walking around wearing that! I felt like pulling over and saying something. How embarrassing? A message like that in the lingua franca. Didn't it occur to her that most people here speak English???

Our cleaning woman once came over with a t-shirt that read I LIKE IT FROM THE BACK and I nearly lost it.

"Do you know what that means?!!!!" I asked her. She shrugged and admitted she had no idea.

"Don't you care?" I insisted. "How can you put on a shirt with words on it and have no idea what it says?"

"It's just to hang out in," she replied nonchalantly.

This is one of the reasons why I never got into that fad of wearing t-shirts with Japanese characters on it. It seems so ridiculous to sport attire that has no meaning to me? I'm sure our old cleaning woman had no idea she was explaining her sexual, er, preferences. . .but she didn't care.

English is so trendy here that people pepper their German sentences with as much English as they can, sometimes incorrectly. I no longer blink when I see ads with the words feeling or emotion printed in shiny letters.

Maybe ads in English sell products faster?

Can English as a second language really make people feel so good?