When Mandarin isn t the most useful language

Added: 2026-05-17

[00:00:00]I ran into a a highly racist situation yesterday at Safeway.

[00:00:08]Um and so I'm standing in line at the checkout and the and the checkout is full. So there's all a line of people standing at the checkout.

[00:00:19]Um all white.

[00:00:21]And um the the checkout person sees my phone number because I type in my phone number for my, you know, rewards or whatever. And he goes, "Oh, Mr. Is that Is that name uh He asked me what He asked me it's like, "Is that Italian or something like that?" And I said, "No, it's Chinese." And he says, "Oh, uh you know, and and then I guess he had taken some Chinese lessons and so he he says, "Well, let me try out my Chinese."

[00:00:45]You know, and he said, you know, he said thank you in Chinese and I said, "Oh, you're welcome and your Chinese is very good." like most polite Chinese people say because even though uh it's utterly never true.

[00:00:57]Uh your Chinese is never really good and your pronunciation is always horrible.

[00:01:02]And but we always say, "Oh, yeah, that's really good." See, you know, Ben Ben she's laughing. It's like, "Yeah, we all say that and we never mean it."

[00:01:10]>> [laughter] >> And so the guy says, "Well, how did you learn Chinese? Did you Did you grow up speaking it? Whatever." And and uh and everybody was so intrigued with that.

[00:01:20]And I said, "Well, and he says, "I've been taking some Chinese lessons and my sister's taking Chinese lessons."

[00:01:25]And I was like, "It's a pretty much a useless language, you know, I'd trade it all for Spanish in a heartbeat." like this if you said, "Would you trade your ability to speak Mandarin for for Spanish?" And they go, "Really?

[00:01:35]Spanish?" I'm like, "Well, yeah, I you know, I I challenge you to find somebody who speaks Mandarin that doesn't speak perfectly good English."