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August 27, 2005
How Old am I?
Here is the story of the week. Standing in a room our organization uses for training. It's day 4 â€" the last day of a Business Development Workshop that has gone quite well and done an excellent job of letting me know that my growth in comprehension of a language does not meant that I am at all gaining the ability to speak it. Nonetheless, the only two malae in the room for the whole week have been me and the program manager, both fair-skinned women. It creates an interesting power structure, in a society that often has more tinges of sexism than I have ever seen before, but I need not go into much detail on that. The story is simple, about three seconds long, to be precise, but it really struck me.
One of the participants who has been very friendly to me, and not at all shy like many of the others (asking questions and generally being inquisitive even about material that is not even on the training schedule) came up to me mid-day with one of the women in the program, and shyly asked if he could ask me a question. The question was one we would never get in the states: How old are you? I was taken aback for a second, and then I answered the truth: I'm 23. The young woman started laughing, covering her mouth and looking away as if she didn't want to offend me but still found something about my youth hysterical. I looked at them both, taken aback a bit (I mean, I know I'm young, but still …) when the man explained that she had been too shy to ask, but she just assumed I was much older, and he laughed too and said, "You are so tall, I thought you were older. But I'm 29, so I can call you my younger sister." And suddenly it all made sense â€" they were trying to figure out how to treat me. And the woman smiled even broader (if it was possible) and said happily, "I'm 23 too."
In a town where normally my age is quite an anomaly (few people here are as young as I am), I was suddenly grateful for being young. In a way, I think I can use it, perhaps to let people be more relaxed around me and less formal. Respect is wonderful, but it also creates a lot of distance, and I just want to be able to talk to people. Anyways, not much of a story, but I found it so enlightening that for a moment, it was the last thing in the world that I would think would let people talk to me that gave me my way in. Now all I have to do is make sure I don't grow up.
Posted by storbert at August 27, 2005 1:44 AM
Comments
I have had almost this exact same experience several times (sometimes several times a day). The first question I invariably get asked, by everyone (and I mean everyone) is where I work. When I say "JoongAng Ilbo" they are incredibly (and in my opinion a little unjustifiably) impressed. Then, they invariably follow it with, "How old are you?" And when I say, "21," they have the same spaz-out reaction again times ten, unable to believe that a 21-year-old is working at JoongAng. It's fun to be able to get a reaction like that out of people. I'm just glad that the fact I work at JoongAng seems to overrule considerations of my age. Otherwise I get the feeling no one would want to talk to me. :P
Posted by: Ben Applegate at September 6, 2005 8:13 AM