You think that's bad? When I lived in
China,
idiot tourists who came to
China automatically assumed that they were the only
English-speaking people in the country other than their
tour guide. It is really quite
insulting to hear
French Eurotrash talk about how none of us speak
English in the modern world (the
French being some of the most racist people I know) and various
Americans comment on the bad accents of the natives'
English.
The thing that really ticked me off was that they were in China, not America, and yet they still acted as if people were supposed to speak English. I mean, when it is foreigners on their home soil, you can expect some proficiency in English, but they were tourists in a faraway land. Expecting English to be spoken is ridiculous. I can tell some of those people spent a bit too much time in Hong Kong.
I am also amused by the fact that me and my sister's English was probably better than most of the tourists that were complaining about the language problem. Hey, we don't expect the tourists to speak Chinese, they sure as hell shouldn't expect the natives to converse in fluid, American-accented English.
So one day a pack of Brits venture into a popular shopping area of Shanghai known for its counterfeit brand clothing. One of them, after a while of fruitless bargaining and rather prickish insults at the natives for their "horrid chink-English", turned to us (they've been asking around for a bit already) and asked:
"So, do-you-speak-English? Eng-lish?"
I looked at my sister.
"Yeah, I speak this chink-English of yours just fine. Piss off."
He left in a hurry, because I translated for the native Shanghainese and they got angry quite quickly.