Chifa (Peru)

Going away on holiday is always stressful for me, because tasks cannot be left for finishing off the next day or week, so I found myself reading the guidebook only on the 21-hour flight out to Lima via Bogota.  This speed reading was to have hilarious consequences after my arrival. 

Whenever people asked me in Spanish, “Japon?”  I’d answer firmly, “No.  Chifa.”  I couldn’t quite interpret the look on their faces each time in response to this:  a startled look would accompany the rising eyebrows, then they'd go quiet.  Perhaps they were surprised they’d been wrong in their assumption of my racial origins, as if they felt I should be Japanese instead of Chinese. 

One day, after this had happened a number of times, I decided to check out the word chifa in the guidebook where I thought I’d seen it said to mean Chinese—it turned out to be “Chinese restaurant”.  Then the penny dropped: the Mandarin Chinese for “to eat a meal” = chifan. 

So I’d been going around Peru happily identifying myself as a Chinese restaurant.

(Event happened June 1986)