On social class, social skills and 'ni hao!'

Hi there guys, I have just returned from a trip to Spain and you can see all the contents from this trip on my Instagram - I'd like to share one incident that happened on this trip and reflect on it, because I had then chatted with my regular reader Amanda which gave me just a little bit more insight into the situation. So allow me to share this story: I was in downtown Santander on a Saturday night looking for a place to have dinner - there's this neighbourhood called Puertochico which is the downtown entertainment district of Santander with a lot of bars and restaurants. For me, an important part of traveling is to see how the locals live and experience the local culture; thus I wanted to go to a popular tapas bar, crowded with loads of locals for my dinner in town but oh dear, it didn't go to plan. So one feature of this whole tapas bar culture is the consumption of alcohol and whilst I accepted that there would be some drunk people there, I didn't expect them to bother me. We got a table close to a group of young men who were already very drunk and that was when one of them started shouting at me, "hey Chino*! Ni hao! Ni hao!" (Chino literally means 'Chinese'. but it can also be used to refer to a Chinese person.) Of course I heard him as he was so loud but I chose to ignore him, then he walked right up to me, stood next to me and then bowed and then repeated, "Ni hao! Ni hao!" I then called the waitress over and told her (in perfect Spanish) that this drunk man was bothering me, I wanted to be moved to a different table. She quickly moved me is to a different table and that was when I could hear her arguing with that young man - he told her that he just wanted to talk to me, like he wasn't using any rude, racist or offensive language with me, the only words he knew in Chinese was 'Ni hao' and that was all he said. Still she put her foot down and she said that if he kept on harassing other people in the restaurant who did not want to talk to him, she will get security to make him leave at once. 

There was one other waitress who witnessed the whole incident, so she came over just to make sure that I was okay. I explained to her why I hated it when people do shit like that - after all, I'm a British-Chinese tourist who speaks Spanish fluently (since I do work for a Peruvian company, of course I'm fluent in Spanish), yet when a Spanish person knows one word in Chinese like 'ni hao', they expect me to reward them with a pat on the back? I switched to Spanish and said to her, "look, when his Mandarin is as fluent as my Spanish, then I would give him a pat on the back for having mastered a foreign language to a very high standard but for me, the bar is set very high. Don't get me wrong - I certainly don't expect Spanish people to know a word of Chinese, why would they if they have no need to learn Chinese at all? But just don't expect me to be impressed if you happen to know only one word in Chinese." The waitress said, "I am not trying to defend that man and what he did, of course that was  totally wrong, he shouldn't have bothered you in the first place, but I think he was just being stupid - like he wasn't being racist to you. He probably thought it was funny to say ni hao to you and he was trying to impress his friends at that table, like hey look, I can speak Chinese. I'm sure he wasn't trying to offend or insult you in any way at all. I promise you that I'll make sure they never bother you again for the rest of the evening." The fact is I live in London, it is a big city - so I can go into a bar or a restaurant in London and there are so many black and Asian people here that I don't stand out as an ethnic minority - but if I were to go to a smaller town in Europe then sure, I do stand out more as a non-white person: in fact, after I left Santander (population 170,000), I then spent three days in the small town of Reinosa (population 9,000 only) and boy, I hardly saw any non-white people there at all. However, that still does not give of the locals any reason or excuse to bother me like that as that is just plain rude!

So in this case, was that drunk local guy in the tapas bar racist? I don't think so, as the waitress explained, he was just clowning around with his friends and trying to be funny but his attempts at humour had badly misfired. But I made another observation about that situation, his friends were all really quite drunk at that stage so they weren't exactly judging him on his wit or ability to do stand up comedy. In fact, one of them was so drunk that he had passed out and was semi-conscious, curled up in the corner, dead to the world. So if that was the kind of friends he was trying to impress, the bar has been set very low. But such is the nature of working class people: if you're not intelligent enough to be witty, funny, charming and engaging, you simply get drunk; then the alcohol takes over and makes you feel all warm and fuzzy. If you're surrounded by other uneducated people who turn to drugs and alcohol to feel good about themselves, then you don't really have the need to try hard to be particularly clever or witty when it comes to engaging those around you. You could even argue that if I was walking into the local bar where these young men would regularly visit every weekend, I should have been more aware of my surroundings and what kind of place it was. Perhaps this is when I can get overly confident about dealing with locals when I happen to speak the local language. A lot of Singaporeans may look at a situation like that and scream, "I told you Spanish people were racist!" But even I would say that this wasn't an example of racism in Europe - it was the kind of 'conflict' that can happen when you cross paths with working class people. This does remind me of when I was randomly attacked in a working class neighbourhood in Panama whilst taking a video - it wasn't racism, it was a rich tourist walking into a poor, working class neighbourhood that led to the conflict - I really must stop putting myself in such situations by being avoiding such poor, working class areas. 

The reason why this incident resonated with me was because I grew up in a very working class family and I have seen so many incidents where my parents' poor social skills had gotten them into trouble. The only reason why they seem to get away with this was because of the company they kept - they only knew other working class folks who were just as socially inept and also said stupid crap all the time. So if everyone in your social circle is an idiot, then there's no real penalty for acting stupid and by the same token, there's no need to be particularly sensitive, engaging, witty or charming if nobody in your social circles have those qualities anyway. Let's contrast this with a long Zoom meeting I had today with one of the new business partners I am currently working with. My new business partner "Mr Dubai" (as that's where he lives, I am not using his real name) and I look at investment opportunities to offer to our clients, he has had many years of experience with private equity type projects. We went through three different projects in detail over a period of two hours, discussing the pros and cons of each project as we want to only present one option to the client. Instead of giving the clients three options and letting them decide which want they want to invest in, our approach is to tell them, "we have done all the research for you and have concluded that this is the best opportunity at the moment for you, so you can go ahead and invest today." It wasn't an easy process and Mr Dubai was so meticulous as he really wanted to make the right decision for the client. It was his attention to detail, the way he went over the audited accounts, the way he took pride in his decision making because his reputation was on the line - well that was a far cry from the kind of working class folks I grew up with. Mr Dubai earns a lot for his services: so when the client invests, he takes a cut of the deal and that is why he is so rich, but that is also contingent on him always making the right decision with absolutely no room for error. 

I have had the chance to observe Mr Dubai during a business meeting when he had to deliver a sales pitch, in approximately one hour, he has the challenge of convincing the investor to buy into a concept and invest several million dollars. He is sleek, witty, engaging, even handsome and charming, he comes across as intelligent and experienced, thus you would trust him with your millions. You can throw any question at him during the meeting and he would have all the facts and figures at his fingertips, ready to offer you the answer you need. Now that I am working a lot more closely with him, I have now seen the amount of hard work and preparation he would do for days, even weeks before the meeting just to make sure that every single minor detail will go according to plan. Of course, the stakes are very high as Mr Dubai stands to earn a massive commission if the deal goes through and that is why he has to make such a massive effort. I can relate to that as in gymnastics, a typical routine would last under 30 seconds but the maximum is 90 seconds and there is a penalty for going overtime on your routines. Thus you only get a very short time to impress the judges, to earn the highest score and win that gold medal. When there is so much at stake, then of course you're going to make a lot more of an effort because you know your efforts are going to be rewarded. Likewise, imagine if you applied for your dream job with a very famous company and they actually granted you a job interview, then of course you're going to be on your best behaviour and make a genuine effort for that interview, knowing that you get that one chance to impress them to get that job. You would spend ages reading up about the company, doing more background research into the industry - you might even go out to buy a new pair of shoes or an outfit for the interview as you never get a second chance to make a good first impression - you would gladly make all that effort because there is clearly so much at stake. 

Let's contrast this with another incident that happened on this trip to Spain. I spent two days skiing in Alto Campoo - a lovely ski resort in the region on Cantabria and the food in the ski resort is always at a premium and in any case, most skiers would have a bag full of snacks as you can get hungry in the cold when you spend so many hours outdoor in the snow. So like everyone else, we had visited the local supermarket in the valley the night before and arrived at Alto Campoo with a bag full of snacks and we got two cups of coffee from the café. I then wondered if the staff at the café would be okay with me eating my own food there - I had a sandwich in my bag which I had purchased from the supermarket and not from the café, like would they kick up a fuss if I ate my own sandwich with my coffee there? Then I looked around and realized, there were so many people around me were eating their own food and some of them hadn't even spent any money there (at least we bought two cups of coffee). The staff behind the counter at the café simply looked bored, when they were not busy working they just retreated into their phones, scrolling through social media. I remember when I walked up to the counter to order my coffee, the woman there smirked and put down her phone to make my coffee as if I was the one who had disturbed her day. There was a sense of, "I'm not paid enough to walk around this place telling all the customers they can't sit down without first buying something, see if I care. I don't get paid a penny more even if I went out of my way to try to get people to spend more money so I am just gonna sit here and scroll through Instagram until the end of my shift." I'm not saying that customer service is always this bad in Spain but since there isn't a tipping culture (some restaurants may add a service charge to the bill but in the case of fast food restaurants or cafés, you just don't tip and there's no service charge), so that often results in rather poor service. So if you earned as little as that woman in that café, you're never going to take any pride in your work the way Mr Dubai does. 

Looking at that unmotivated woman in the café reminded me a lot of my time in the army, after all it was that same sense of "as I won't get paid more if I tried harder, I have no incentive to try at all and I am going to do as little as possible to maximize what I little I am paid." You might think, okay well that is just the army under conscription, it's a very specific set of circumstances but my parents had the same mindsets as primary school teachers as they were paid exactly the same whether their students all got the top grades at the exams or if the results were dismal; they were on a pay grade that reflected how many years they had been teaching whilst totally disregarding their job performance. Hence that created that kind of mindset where they simply tried to get away with doing as little as possible since they won't get paid a penny more if the students did exceptionally well in the exams, the same way that very bored woman at that café wasn't on commission thus she had no incentive to try to persuade me to spend more money at the café by being polite and engaging. She could have said something like, "hello sir, you're a tourist - first time in the Cantabria region? Have you tried our local cakes? They are delicious and I just so happen to have had a batch delivered from the local bakery in the valley this morning. You have to try it and after spending so many hours skiing in the cold, it will taste so good with your coffee I swear." But no, she was so set in that "I'm gonna do as little as possible" mindset that even when I said "muchas gracias*" (thank you very much) when she handed me the two cups of coffee, she did not even offer the standard reply of "de nada* (you are welcome) - no she was made this sound like 'mmm' to acknowledge the fact that I had thanked her, as if she wasn't even motivated enough to speak. She was just determined to get to the end of her shift whilst doing as little as possible - there was a pile of trash on the table next to me and she just conveniently ignored it despite walking past it so many times. It was evident that she couldn't give a toss, as she was not rewarded for making more of an effort. 

I had a conversation with my reader Amanda after I had returned from London - when I had to end the conversation because I had to go to a meeting and she was curious where I was meeting the client. I told her that I was meeting the client in a 'gentlemen's club' in central London, according to Wikipedia, it is"a private social club of a type originally set up by men from Britain's upper classes in the 18th and succeeding centuries." So my client had purchased a painfully expensive membership at one of these clubs just to be able to take his business associates there for meetings, it is a status symbol to show the other party just how rich you are and Amanda commented that her father used to do the same thing at very exclusive and expensive country clubs back in Indonesia. Whilst what happened in the tapas bar in Santander (that drunk guy harassing me) was unfortunate, one of the ways to avoid such situations is simply to go to very exclusive places like this private club where the ridiculously expensive membership fees would ensure that poor, working class people would never ever set foot in there and thus you could have your meetings in peace. Well Amanda, the meeting was actually not that exciting, it wasn't like the food there was exceptional - we simply sat at a table in the restaurant which was surprisingly empty, we had some drinks and snacks as we discussed several issues but overall, the experience wouldn't have been that different from any other expensive restaurant in London. Nonetheless, after that unpleasant experience at that tapas bar in Santander, I was only too happy to meet my client at a private member's club like that, just to feel exclusive and be treated like a VIP. Mind you, if I had met Amanda at a McDonald's in London on a Saturday night, that same incident of being harassed by a drunk, working class yob yelling 'ni hao' at us could have easily happened as well. Thus rich people spend a lot of money going to expensive restaurants as they simply want to avoid being next to poorly behaved working class yobs like that and if that makes me a snob, then I'm guilty as charged. 

The irony of course is that I grew up in an extremely working class family and my father in particular hated expensive, exclusive places like that - he had always made the assumption that people would look down on him and be nasty to him if he had ever set foot in a place like that. I don't think that's true at all because when I was at the private member's club with my client, the staff were probably working class as they're not paid that much to bring me my coffee and snacks. If I had brought my father along, he would have probably enjoyed the great service and food there, there would be no chance of anyone being rude to a paying customer at an establishment like that. But let's say my father makes a social faux pas like not knowing how to hold a knife and fork properly, well the staff are trained to look the other way and ignore it and even if the other guests did notice it, the worst case scenario would be some silent judgment but nobody was going to march over to the table and lecture him on his terrible table manners. No, rich people would prefer to just mind their own business and just look the other way in such a situation. If that poor working class man has terrible table manners, that's his problem not mine, I don't want to get involved. Ironically, poor working class people like my father would then prefer to frequent much cheaper and more affordable places where he would feel more at home, as everyone else there is equally poor and working class. I do remember this incident at a kopi tiam in Singapore where I went for dinner with my family years ago, it was very crowded so the only table available was one that was outside - that was fine with us as it was dinner time and it was cool enough to sit outdoors. However, the men at the other table were smoking and my sister was asthmatic; when we asked the waitress for another table, one of the smokers (who was very drunk) walked over and started yelling abuse at us in Chinese. He said that it was his right to smoke outdoors and if we didn't like it, we should get lost. We felt so uncomfortable that we left at once. Look I'm not suggesting that this happens all the time at kopi tiams but such an incident would never happen at an expensive restaurant as the working class people would never go there. 

So my father is far more likely to experience harassment and abuse at a working class establishment like a kopi tiam, yet he hates going to a much safer environment like a fancy restaurant despite the fact that he is far more likely to have a pleasant experience there. What is going on here? Well, firstly, there is the element of sour grapes - my father couldn't afford to go to expensive, fancy places on his modest salary as a school teacher and thus instead of admitting that he was poor, he created a narrative that these places were pretentious, hostile and unwelcoming. Secondly, encountering that local drunk yob at the kopi tiam was something unpleasant that we just had to live with as working class folks. Therefore rather than face a threat like that and find ways to deal with it (such as surveying the kopi tiam before entering it and having a plan B if you see drunk people there), instead my father wanted to imagine that the enemies were rich people in fancy restaurants that he would never go to. That way, the 'threat' is far away, not in the local places where he would frequently visit. This is a very similar way of thinking - I did have to explain to Amanda why my father hates white people so much despite only having really met one white person (my husband) in his entire life. In this case, there were plenty of threats in my father's life: he was relentlessly bullied by three people in his life. There was his brother during his childhood, then there was a colleague at work who hated him and went out of her way to make life hell for my father at work, then there was my mother who made sure she made hell for my father at home. The threats to his wellbeing and happiness were right there, in his own home and at his place of work - there was no escape and it all made his daily life so fucking miserable. But did he have the social skills and the resources to deal with those threats? No, he didn't, not at all - so instead, he creates this narrative that the real threats at racist white people who hate Asians but conveniently, these racist white people are so far away from Singapore in places like America, Canada and France so he is actually safe where he is. Therefore he resorts to creating all these utterly illogical theories, just to help him sleep better at night. 

Finally, one other assumption that my parents made when we were growing up was that rich people had poor social skills - that assumption was that when rich parents bought their children expensive toys and other luxuries, the kids would automatically become ill-mannered spoilt brats who would not appreciate these expensive treats and demand more and more. Conversely, they believed that growing up very poor would teach children the value of money: my mother told me this story from her childhood when she received a small bunch of grapes for her birthday from her uncle but she felt obliged to share the grapes with her siblings and thus she was only left with one grape in the end. However, that was the sweetest grape that she had ever tasted - they used stories like that to romanticized poverty and deprivation, that it was somehow better than being rich. But to be fair, yes I have seen some rich kids who are spoilt brats and have very poor social skills but to somehow equate poor social skills with having money is just plain wrong - regardless of social class, all children need to be in a conducive environment to develop good social skills and without the right kind of nurturing, working class kids can grow up with terrible social skills as well. Hence trying to draw a link between social class and social skills is at best a tricky issue - yes I had an unpleasant experience at that tapas bar with that drunk Spanish lout trying to be funny by saying 'ni hao' to me, but I am pointing out that having good social skills is an extremely useful tool when it comes to social mobility. Imagine if that Spanish lout came for a job interview and started off by saying 'ni hao' to me, I'd just say, "this interview is over, you didn't get the job - you can leave now." But if someone as charming as Mr Dubai came to a job interview, heck even if he wasn't right for the job, I would try my best to create a new job for him just to have someone like that on my team as it is hard to find someone with such brilliant social skills. People like that Spanish lout with awful social skills will end up gravitating towards others with equally poor social skills as people like me would not tolerate such bad behaviour and soon, thus they feel like it is normal to behave in such an obnoxious manner. 

So that's it from me on this issue - what do you think? How would you have reacted if some random white (and drunk) stranger came up to you in a tapas bar in Spain and started trying to get your attention by saying 'ni hao' over and over again? When would such terrible social skills cross the line into outright racism? Am I being a snob to say that working class people like that lady in the café have no incentive to develop better social skills and so that's why they lack charm and grace? Can we try to draw some kind of correlation between social skills and social class or is this just too contentious? Am I just a snob? Please do leave a comment below, let me know what you think. Many thanks for reading.