I startled a co-worker this morning. We were having a conversation when the phone rang, I politely told her I needed to quickly answer the call. I answered the call, gave a few instructions (my fridge is finally getting repaired after more than a week without one) and hung up to return to the conversation. My co-worker had the strangest look on her face; she looked at me like I had grown a third head or something.
“What was that about?” she asked.
“Oh, nothing just the landlord’s messenger asking me for more details about what’s wrong with my fridge. I also had to give him a list of the food that went bad because he says they’ll replace it all.”
“You said all that?”
Now I was getting confused, “What do you mean?”
“What language were you speaking?”
I was so confused, and then it dawned on me, “Oh, he’s Cambodian so we speak in French.”
“I knew you could speak French, but I had no idea you were so fluent!”
“Oh, I’m nowhere near fluent. I just studied it for a very long time. I wish I had more opportunities to practice, that’s actually why I was hoping to go back to Phnom Penh at the…”
“That seemed pretty fuckin’ fluent to me. The phone rang and you answered it in French and had this whole conversation effortlessly. It didn’t even look like it was that hard.”
At this point I was getting irritated, “Oh no, I was really just repeating everything I’d sent him in a text earlier. I could tell from his long-winded reply that he didn’t bother to read it, which I actually told him while we were on the phone.”
She really wouldn’t let it go until I admitted that I had at least a very high proficiency level (which I already knew, mostly because I had to take the French linguistics test when I was going through the process of applying for work there several years ago).
Then she said the thing out loud.
The thing that is always hanging in the air above my head whenever anyone asks me why I’m in Bangkok. And then what they ask me after I tell them and they say, “Well then why are you still in Bangkok?”
“With skills like that you should be working in France!”
I’m so good, everyone I meet agrees that I’m in the wrong place.
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