Travel Fabrications

A dear old friend of mine once told me about how he lied when he was on airplanes and people asked him what he did. He would tell them that he was a successful lawyer or businessman. I asked him why he did that, and he said that it was better than the truth: that he was an unemployed 30-something chain-smoking alcoholic who lived at home with his parents. Nice old ladies--and attractive women--don't like to hear that. (Note: he doesn't live at home anymore.)

My mom does a similar thing. She's not a pathological liar or anything, but she doesn't like strangers knowing too much. "They'll ask questions otherwise, " she says. Um, if you fabricate too much, won't they still ask questions?

So in Thailand we were on this tour with three other people: the Lins, a middle-aged couple, and Mrs. Chen who was traveling alone. Mrs. Lin liked to talk. A LOT. She is one of those people who seems not to get out enough. She will interrupt conversations and just talk louder to get peoples' attention. This is rather annoying when you are driving around an island in a passenger van. There's nowhere to hide and I can only listen to my headphones so loud.

I should mention here that Taiwanese people are very friendly and chatty. More so than your average Midwesterner, actually. We were at a restaurant and my aunt burnt herself on the tea pot because she's having problems with a tendon in her hand and the waitress comes over and talks for about 10 minutes about how she had the same problem and she had surgery and it was much better. This is one of the less personal conversations with random people that occurred.

Anyways, mom didn't want our travel companions to "know too much" so she would fib and withhold information. Thus, the basic story was this: My sister and I are Taiwanese born and bred (not true) and she sent us to the U.S. to live with relatives and go to school at a young age(also untrue), which is why we speak English. She mentioned that I understood Taiwanese (true), in the hopes that they would just speak Taiwanese to me, but they took it to mean that it would be better if they spoke Chinese to me. So the whole time they would speak to me in Chinese. Which is fine since I understood enough, but not ideal since I understand it the LEAST of the three languages.

Oh, what a tangled web of lies we weave!

sigh.

Then last night, my sister found herself doing the same exact thing to the scallion pancake cart guy. They were talking (in Taiwanese) about her being from NY and he asked how much a house was there and how much her salary was, etc. She totally lied about it, and almost told him that all four of them worked (her, my brother-in-law AND the two children under the age of 5) but caught herself.

It must be genetic...