Just Me

I went to have lunch with a friend today at the nearest Subway. I love sandwiches--they're healthy and yummy. At this Subway restaurant, I ordered a foot-long Southwest Turkey and Bacon. I’ve had this sandwich before; the crisp bacon is the best as it gently cracks between the brisk lettuce and bell peppers. The employees must have been new... all four of them. My friend and I watched as they read the list of ingredients for each sandwich that they were making. I didn't mind this, but the worker almost forgot the essential ingredient: southwestern sauce, for that mild spicy kick.

"You forgot the sauce... the orange one," I gently reminded her.

She smiled and added the sauce. As I proceeded down to the register, the cashier--an elderly Filipino woman-- charged me nearly $9.00!!!

"You want the meal, and that was extra bacon," she said in her Filipino accent as she rang up the register.

"Extra bacon?" I repeated. "I didn't order extra bacon. Bacon comes with the sandwich."

"Oh..." She looked at the register. "Which one did you get?"

"The Southwest Turkey and Bacon sandwich. Bacon already comes with it."

So, she rings up the register again, but only the sandwich.

“I wanted the meal, too,” I said shyly. My usual Asian submissiveness kicks in, so I wouldn't appear to be rude.

She does the calculation again, and it comes up to $8.32. I pulled out the debit card to pay. She handed two receipts to me, and I tried to figure out which was my copy and which one I had to sign. At this point, the woman starts to talk in Tagalog to another Filipino employee. I don’t understand Tagalog, but I understood what she said as she spoke to her co-worker.

[In Tagalog]
“She complained about the price, but they’re still the same."

"Is she Filipino?" the co-worker asked.

"Yeah, she’s Filipino.”

Obviously, they were talking about me. I signed the receipt and handed it back to her.

“Salamat,” she said, which is Tagalog for “thank you.”

I knew the respectful and proper way to respond to that, but I decided not to say anything. I was a bit pissed off because they were talking about me. The cashier incorrectly assumed that I was fluent in Tagalog, which I’m not. What if I were Guamanian? What if I were Chinese? I think it’s wrong for employees to talk to customers in a different language unless the customer initiates the conversation first. I hate it when Filipinos assume that I’m fluent, and they start talking to me in Tagalog. Then when I tell them I’m not, they look at me as though I should be ashamed of myself. Well, I’m not ashamed of not being able to speak in my native tongue. I grew up in the United States, and my parents knew that I would be primarily educated in English. They knew that I would not be speaking Tagalog for most of my life, so they never fully taught me the language. They do, however, speak another dialect, which they still use around the house, which I do understand. I’m not totally void of my culture. But that’s what most of these elderly Filipino people think. They think it’s shameful if the young Filipino generation don’t know their Filipino roots, or if they don’t know how to speak the native tongue; they go as far as blaming the parents for this cultural gap, claiming that they let the younger generation be “Americanized.”

It’s called biculturalism. I’ve lived with two kinds of cultures in my life. I can’t fully embrace both—but that itself is a culture. It’s also a skill that my generation has mastered in order to survive in two worlds. I am enriched with culture, and it’s nothing to be ashamed about, but I’m not going to live my life trying to prove that to the older generation.