Fake money
I’m feeling insulted, embarrassed, frustrated and in general angry about the language barrier right now. I had a little bit of a misunderstanding with the office workers at the Kindergarten and was furious about forty minutes ago. My anger has dissipated into frustration and embarrassment by now, and I think I overreacted a great deal. Last week, the Kindergarten paid us our salary for the month of October. We are paid with 100 kuai bills (the largest RMB denomination there is) and I had 11 of these bills plus two 10 kuai bills. This past weekend, I tried to purchase some things Friday night with one of the bills that the Kindergarten gave me. I know that it was one they gave me because I didn’t have any money left from the last payment and I’d already put away all of my money for savings from the salary for October from the main school.
I handed the 100 kuai bill to the checker, thinking to myself that it felt different from the others, but decided it was merely a new bill and hadn’t acquired the character of more used bills. The checker took one look at it, rubbed her thumb across Mao’s red jacket and handed it back to me, shaking her head. Luckily, I’d brought another “yi bai kuai” with me. The woman looked at it for a good five minutes and then grudgingly took it and gave me my change. That was the first embarrassment. I felt as though I’d just tried to scam the store, or that the cashier saw me as trying to scam the store. Eileen pointed out that actually I was the one being scammed because the money was fake and had been given to me by my legitimate employer.
So yesterday, I informed the workers in the Kindergarten office – with a mixture of broken Chinese and English – that I’d been given a fake bill. They seemed, at the time, more curious to see it than anything else. I had left it at home yesterday by accident and felt better about informing them of the situation so they could process it for awhile. Today, after Kindergarten was finished, I walked to the office where two women who speak no English analyzed my fake bill for ten or so minutes. One woman left the room to make a phone call and the other continued to stare suspiciously back from me to the bill and back to me. I started to become a little insulted by the woman’s visual insinuations. And then it became more overt.
A woman who speaks minimal English came into the office to “translate”. She told me that, this time, they would reimburse me, but that this had never happened to them before and that as soon as the money is picked up from the bank, it is distributed to us, so somehow, this had become my fault. And to make matters worse, the woman suggested that in the future, I be careful and check my money before leaving with it. Will someone please tell me why a foreigner, who doesn’t know a fake bill from a good one, should be responsible for making sure her employer is giving her creditable money? Then the woman suggested that I write down the serial numbers of ever bill I’m given. Why is it my responsibility to make sure that the money the school is distributing is valid? They count it out about seventy times before handing it to us – shouldn’t they be a little more alert?
I felt insulted and angry at being told I was somehow at fault for the situation, and furthermore, didn’t like that the Kindergarten expected me to know a fake and to catch such mistakes while grabbing my salary during a ten minute break from my real classes. I also felt like there were big chunks of the story being lost in translation. The woman sitting behind the translator was cutting me very suspicious stares and they kept saying that something like this had never happened. It reminds me of when my apartment was broken into in Seattle. My landlord at the time said that in 16 years, he’d never had one break-in. When people say things like this, aside from expressing shock, there is always a tiny hint at the problem somehow having something to do with the fact that it happened to YOU personally – as in, this never happened before YOU came here.
The most embarrassing part of the exchange was my behavior. I felt like I was being attacked and so I retaliated irrationally and behaved poorly – especially since the only thing my translator could pick up on was the anger in my voice. I think the residual feelings now are shame at my obnoxious behavior. But this is always hard for me: when do you let things roll off of you (and hence act a bit like a push-over) and when do you stand up for things? And, when someone is potentially insinuating shady behavior (I realize I might have been misreading the situation a bit…but the signs of suspicion were pretty clear) in a foreign language, how does one go about explaining the situation without becoming defensive and upset? I’m frustrated. I’m going out with Robyn this evening and hope to discuss the situation with her. Because, if this could happen once, the chances of it happening again are pretty guaranteed and I don’t want to go through what happened today again, ever. Besides, the main school pays each foreign teacher 4,500 kuai or more each month. I think assurances and policies need to be in place if the school balks so grandly at the fact that they have handed out a fake “yi bai kuai”. I might be overreacting, but good might come from my reaction after all…a more thorough payment process whereby the school is completely sure of the money they’re handing out.
