Take Five: Communication

by Mary McHugh

Did you ever notice how easily most women connect with each other?

     We can be in line buying a movie ticket, or standing at the rail of a whale watcher boat, or buying shoes and before we get the ticket, see the whale or pick out the shoes, we know all about the woman standing next to us.  Where she lives, how many children she has, whether her husband is still alive, if she’s divorced, what she eats for lunch. 

     This applies even if we don’t speak the same language.  Maybe it has something to do with interpreting a baby’s needs and wants before she can talk. Somehow we intuit what another person means, without words. We use gestures, smiles, a touch on the arm, a nod to make ourselves understood to the other person.  Almost every woman I know has a story about communicating with a woman in a foreign country when neither of them speaks the other’s language, except for a word or phrase or two.  Here’s mine: 

     In Kyoto on a crowded bus I sat down next to a Japanese woman about my age.  I'd lost sight of my husband, but knew he was somewhere nearby.  The Japanese lady and I smiled at each other, and I looked out the window to get an idea of where we were, my body language signaling my anxiety.

     The lady said softly, "Kyoto Station." I realized she was reassuring me that this bus was going where I wanted to go - most Westerners headed for Kyoto Station because it was near the main hotel district.

     I answered her with one of the three Japanese phrases I knew.  “Domo arigato,” I said,  thanking her for her helpfulness.

     "American?" she asked, smiling.  

     "Hai," I said, meaning yes.

      This friendly lady assumed I spoke Japanese  because she asked me
a question in her language.  I didn't know how to tell her, "I don't speak
Japanese." But it occurred to me she might have asked where I'd been in Japan.  Even if she didn't, it was a way of continuing our conversation, so I said, "Tokyo, Nikko, Kamakura, Nara, Kyoto."

      "Ahhhh," she said nodding.  “I,"  she said pointing to herself. 
"Washington, Canada."

     "Oh,"  I exclaimed,  “You’ve been to Washington and Canada?"

     "Hai," she said and launched into what seemed to be a very funny
anecdote in Japanese about her visit to America and Canada.

      I managed to laugh in all the right places, and we had connected.  We could have been two women anywhere.  We didn't need the same language to communicate.  By the time the bus got to Kyoto Station, we were friends.  As I got up,  I turned to her and used my last fragment of Japanese, "Sayonara.”

      She smiled and said "Goodbye."

      As I got off the bus, my husband came up behind me and put his arm around me.  "You speak Japanese now?" he said, laughing.  "I was watching you from two seats back."

     "It was wonderful," I told him excitedly.  "We had a whole conversation without understanding more than a few words, yet we understood each other perfectly.  I had such a good time."

     "I could tell," he said.  "It was a funny thing.  Because you didn't know I was watching you, it was like seeing you in a movie.  It was almost as if I were looking at a stranger.  It's hard to explain.”

     "Try," I said, stopping to face him.  "Please try."

     "Well," he continued,  “when we’re together and you start talking to someone you don’t know, I get impatient. I feel like you’re wasting time, always stopping to look at things that don’t matter, talking to people you’ll never see again. I don’t get the point. But when I watched you and that lady laughing together, it was as if you gave each other a gift of friendship or something.”

      I smiled.  “Aren’t women lucky?” I said.

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