10 Feb Lost in Translation

A guy came up to me at a party the other night and asked if I remembered his name. I told him I didn’t, and a large factor of that may have been because I had never seen or met him before in my life. I do not think I could come up with a better introduction to American culture than this. From the moment I landed in San Francisco no one I have come across has denied me a chat. The security at passport control wanted to know who I was and what I was doing in the country, the woman in front of me at the motel check-in desk talked my ear off about how her house had been flooded and she was now living in said motel, the guy looking at the same shelving unit as me in Target wanted to know how I was getting it home, even the woman in the car park wanted to talk marriage and pregnancy with me– a topic I have been successfully avoiding with my myself for the last nineteen years up until that point. However, the most disconcerting interactions that have happened to me so far are those that take place on public transport.

In London no one talks to each other on public transport. Not unless you have intimately known that person for more than six years do you even attempt to engage in conversation on the tube, train or bus. It is not the law or anything but it may as well be. The tube is where you put your headphones in, read a book, play candy crush, or if you’re one of those people you’ll look at paperwork. The general consensus is that you try not to look up or make direct eye contact with anyone else in or outside the same carriage as you. This is not the case in SF. People in general seem to be a lot more relaxed, and in that sense a lot more friendly. They sit next to you on the muni (tram/light-rail), despite it being otherwise empty and ask you about your day, if you were ever once a basketball player or what your experience of America has been like so far (after finding out you’re not from here). It is sometimes a welcome break to the silence of your journey, and sometimes a not-so-welcome intrusion into personal time on the bus.

Although, this also makes it sound as if I handle these polite, social dialogues with grace and charm. I do not. The conflict of surprise in having been approached in a place I have always seen as ‘unapproachable’ territory, and the ingrained British etiquette of engaging with someone if only to be polite are not always a combination that translate well in conversation. For example, this boy from one of my seminars approached me after the class last week and asked ‘Did it hurt?’ Me, having no idea what he was talking about and thinking I was a lot more clever than I actually was, responded with ‘Yes, it was agony. Hurt like hell.’ He gave me this look of stunned surprise, like he was not quite expecting that level of intensity from the simple question. I realized at that point that sarcasm isn’t quite as commonly used or understood in these parts as it is back home, and there was a reason it is called the lowest form of wit. After clarifying what exactly he was asking hurt, and awkwardly muddling through the confusion I came to grasp that he was simply asking if the transition from British to American culture had been difficult. It was actually a really nice and thoughtful thing to ask, and I had only gone and butchered it by trying to be clever. Nothing ever good comes of me trying to be clever.