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.
