Karma

At the heyday of xenophobia in Singapore, foreigners who neither spoke English or spoke it not very fluently were often the target of snide remarks and jokes among the local population. As the service industry occupations started being filled more and more by foreigners, one could frequently hear complaints about the difficulty in communication with the foreigners. One common scenario was for example me buying some mixed rice at the food court and the China born sever would state the cost in Chinese. It would irk me.

"Do I look Chinese to you".

Or if he caught me on a bad day,

"Don't know English, why come here?"

Of course I would not say it out, but that would be the chain of thoughts in my head, something I would follow up with my friends when I joined them later at the canteen.

Now that I am in Germany, the role has been reversed. My German is elementary at best and my efforts at speaking it out has been hindered by almost total incomprehension of what was said or total inability to respond in a comprehensive manner. What makes me more afraid is I know that while I try to put words together to form an intelligible sentence, I know he is probably thinking exactly what I used to think.

"Verstehe nicht Deutsch, warum bist du hier?"

In other words, "Don't know German, why are you here?"

And that, my friends, is called karma.

PS: As my Ghanian friend stated, that is why (real, not the touristy kind) travelling makes you compassionate. You were in their shoes once...