Bilingual People Share Their Greatest “I Didn’t Know You Spoke the Language” Stories

Shocked and Embarrassed

I used to teach in Korea in a fairly small town. Some kids I taught told me about their grandma. She saw a black man at the train station and muttered at him, in Korean, to go wash his skin.

She, of course, assumed there was no way he spoke Korean but he immediately answered back, in Korean, “Don’t hate, grandmother.”

She was so shocked and embarrassed she just stood up and left the station. Took the afternoon train instead.

FookenL