The old man in Chinatown (London)

Being very early for a job interview in Chinatown, I was walking around to kill time when I spotted an old Chinese man with a white stick heading up a ramp which ended in a vertical drop.  

So I went over and asked him in my best Cantonese where he was going, to which he replied, in Cantonese, that he was going to XYZ Chinese supermarket.  It was in the opposite direction, I told him, and he happily allowed himself to be herded away from that ramp by the elbow.  

We reached the edge of the kerb, which I hadn’t anticipated, so I instinctively called out in English, “Mind the kerb!”  The old man stopped abruptly as if I’d slapped him in the face, and said, in Cantonese, “啊，你係鬼婆！ (Oh, you’re a Westerner!—literally: You are devil old-woman)”  He then yanked his elbow out of my grasp, as if I was an untouchable or too disgusting for him to come into contact with.  I said, once again in Cantonese, “No, I’m not a devil old-woman.  I’m from Singapore.  It’s just that I’m a Teochew [dialect] speaker, so my Cantonese is not very good.”

He visibly relaxed and once again allowed me to steer him by the elbow for the onward journey towards XYZ supermarket.  

He asked if I was a student, to which I said, “No, I’m a teacher.”  He stopped in mid-track, and clapped his hands like an excited child, beaming from ear to ear: “啊，你係老師！(Ah, you are a teacher!)”

(London, late 1990s)

See also:  https://piccola-chinita.blogspot.com/2022/08/the-status-of-teacher-in-chinese.html