"No Farsi"

If there's one thing visitors to Iran swear by, it's the hospitality.

One German tourist I met on a tour to Persepolis said he became friends with an entire family in Esfahan who were picnicking next to the river. An Italian woman I had breakfast with at my guest house in Yazd spoke of a similar experience, where she was taken out for dinner by a group of Iranians she had met at a café.

Me? No such luck.

Maybe I look arrogant, something I've been accused of several times (yes, the problem with first impressions). But as it turns out, they (the Iranians) thought I was one of them.

By the time I reached the desert city of Yazd towards the end of my trip, I had gotten used to being taken for a local. Virtually everywhere I went, people would speak to me in Farsi until I convinced them I have no knowledge of the language. Many times they would refuse to believe me. One guy at a train station even looked at me in disdain.
'Oh, no Farsi!'

He probably thought I was a foreign-returned Iranian for whom speaking Farsi had become uncool.

But Farsi wasn't entirely foreign to me. Hindi and my own mother tongue, Punjabi, owe parts of their vocabulary to the language. For example, some numbers are similar, which made learning them that much easier. I was also told that many Iranians watch Hindi films and though they may not know the language, they understand the gist of the dialogues (a little bit of trivia here: the 1975 classic, Sholay, is wildly popular in Iran).

On some level then, maybe I wasn't a complete stranger to Iran, and visiting the country felt like returning to a faraway homeland. It made travelling to Iran that bit more special, never mind the countless incidents of mistaken identity, one of which puts a smile on my face even now.

In Yazd, I was walking to guest house a Swiss couple I had met in Shiraz were staying at. The road was a narrow one, with a vintage car parked on one side. A group of four to six tourists were blocking the path. Two were posing next to the vehicle, one was armed with a camera, while the others stood by. I managed to vaguely identify the words that escaped their lips as I slowed to a halt a short distance away to let them finish. Judging by their appearance alone, I narrowed their origin to Malaysia or Indonesia. But the vocabulary was not Indonesian. As I waited for them to finish, I concluded they were from Singapore or Malaysia.

Walking alongside them, I contemplated being friendly. As if on cue, one of them smiled, giving me the sign I was looking for.

'Awak semua dari Malaysia (Are all of you from Malaysia?)'
One shot back a look of horror, another stopped dead in her tracks.
'How do you know Malay?'
'Oh, I learned it while I was in school. I'm from Singapore.'
'Ya Allah! We thought you're one of them!'

You're from Singapore? But...

'Where are you from?'

'Guess?'

'Hmm. I don't know.'

'If you can't get it right, I get this coffee, free!'

He laughed nervously and refused to hazard three guesses I so generously gave him. When I eventually told him where I was from, his eyes remained fixed on me in disbelief. It can't be, he said, you don't look Chinese. Your eyes, your skin..

Initially I used to be amused, but it's since given way to an indifference masked by an attempt to explain the makeup of Singapore. Still, it would draw confused looks. My recent favourite exchange was as follows:

'Where are you from?'

'Singapore.'

'Oh!' (interest piqued) 'How are things there now?'

'Erm..the way they've been. Nothing extraordinary.'

'But what about the protests?' (he was referring to Hong Kong)

Such follow-up comments and questions unfortunately point to one thing: ignorance. But I can't expect people to know where I'm from, particularly since my country of origin is a blip on the world map. At times they think I'm from all sorts of other places -- some of which I've never been to (the UK, some parts of the Middle East). The closest they've ever gotten to nailing my background is when I'm asked if I'm from India. Well, my grandparents were, so I tell them they're right -- to some extent.

But not everyone from Singapore takes too kindly to such labels, only because they want to distance themselves from the lands of their ancestors. This is especially the case among the Chinese and to some degree, Indian Singaporeans. So many times I've heard Chinese friends express their annoyance at being associated with mainland China. You could say the Singapore government has done a good job in forging national identity (a topic for another day).

On one hand, I can't blame them. Chinese tourists are gaining notoriety (if they haven't already) for being rude and loud. I personally experienced this on at least two occasions in Croatia and Greece. But having said that, I've also seen well-behaved Chinese tourists. The problem is that the majority etch themselves in people's memory much more easily than the quieter ones.

On the other hand, people will always make assumptions. Stereotyping happens all the time, all over the world. People will base their ideas of you on what they know. Chinese people come from China, etc. An Australian Chinese friend of mine received puzzled looks in Singapore when he said he couldn't speak any Mandarin -- the assumption being that if you grew up in Singapore, you'd have learned your mother tongue in school at the very least (that is, if you come from an English speaking family).

So the bottomline is this: you can huff and puff the whole world down for not knowing where you're from, but it's not going to change anything. Instead, try educating the people you meet. Laugh with them when they realise their mistake. They don't really mean it as an insult.

The only person who thinks of it that way, is you.