I stumbled upon a website called My Mom is a Fob* a couple of days ago that has completely cracked me up. My mother is not FOB (Fresh Off the Boat) but she writes the same kind of emails featured in that site. Very serious, but very loving and well-intentioned. I love my mum's emails :)
Although one time when I was about 16 and we were in Mandurah, Western Australia, walking down the street, she suddenly stopped and exclaimed, "Oh my god! Why does a rapist have an office!?!?!". **
Puzzled, I looked up.
It was a therapist's office. The word 'THERAPIST' was printed in an arc, and so my mum read it as 'THE RAPIST'. I laughed so hard I almost pissed myself.
* Please note that I am not making fun of anyone, especially not mums. I think it's amazing for anyone to learn a new language and raise a family in a new country. I sure as hell wouldn't know how.
** Sorry Mum, but that is too damn funny not to share :)
5 comments:
Haha...I love your blog! I now that one too! My mom is not Asian, she's Mexican....but we still have moments like these. :-D
Ha ha - too funny...my hubby's first language is not English so I always get a laugh out of some of the mix-ups he comes up with....
Sometimes these mix-ups happen in English when you change dialects... I witnessed a conversation between a Canadian friend and an English friend who we were staying with while visiting Scotland. She was asking if both pairs of her pants would fit in the tiny washing machine and he was wondering why she only brought two pairs of pants on a eight-month trip. One meant trousers. The other meant knickers. I *could* have told them but it was so much funnier letting them figure it out...
Mum is so proud of speaking The Queen's English, I remember when we first came to Perth and she asked the supermarket assistant where the eggs were and couldn't understand the assistant's accent and misheard "aisle six" for "oil sicks". I remember she was stumped for 2 minutes and made the assitant repeat it 5000 times before I had to whisper to Mum that the assistant meant "aisle six". She went, "Ooooooooohhhh! Why can't she say it properly?".
Too funny; I am a Brit living in Canada, and for the longest time I had to be careful what I said!
Even now, after 19 years, I can be talking to someone and mid way through my sentence they give me the glassy eyed stare and I know that either I've said something they don't understand (and yes, we are talking about anglophone Canadian')
or they're going to say "oh I could listen to you talk all day, I just love your accent"! Ha. Wish my (Canadian) husband loved to hear me talk all day. Eh? So, I'm known as ....."you know, that's (daughters name inserted here), she's the British woman!!"
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