Storytelling Saturday #8: “Common Sense”
Welcome back to Storytelling Saturday, where I share stories about my experiences as an international student and immigrant. What do you mean that you don’t know?
One of the most distinct memories while in the UK is when I first arrived in Heathrow airport. I went for a coffee, and the cashier asked whether I wanted my coffee black or white. I tilted my head and asked, “Isn’t coffee supposed to be black?” And the look on her face – it was probably a drop of stupidity too many she faced in her job – that I wasn’t sure if coming to the UK was a good idea.
(If you are like me and don’t know what she was talking about, a black coffee is milk-less coffee, and white coffee is when you top your black coffee with a splash of milk.)
Another mind-blower was when I overheard a conversation at the said cafe. They were talking about a thing called high-yon-die, and it was such a foreign-sounding word that I couldn’t help but eavesdrop more closely. It took me a while for me to realise that the people were talking about Hyundai, a Korean car company. It’s pronounced ‘Hee-on-day.’
They probably thought I was mad. When I tell this story to others, I even had a person laugh and say, “You’re Korean and you don’t even know how to pronounce your own language!” I am still not sure whether he was joking. On the other hand, I would casually mention things that I consider common sense – the way it’s always been – that absolutely blows the tops off of my UK friends. It’s things like how to hold chopsticks properly, how to store tofu so that it doesn’t spoil, why rice needs to be washed and where differently shaped chopsticks originate from. These are as common sense to me as having fried chicken in Christmas in Japan, or going out on Wednesday nights in Sweden.
The ‘common’ in ‘common sense’ isn’t common to me. But by proximity, the common encompasses me within it. So, no one teaches me this common sense. At the same time, I don’t tell them what my common sense is. Integrating into a foreign, or uncommon, place and culture involves navigating through what my new ‘common sense’ ought to be. It feels like putting my hand into a dark cave – or the bottom of my car seat – and trying to work out what I’m touching. Sometimes, it’s obvious (“ah, there’s my sunglasses”), but more often, it is completely a mystery (“why is there a warm and fuzzy thing here?”).
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