Witty Surprises from Multilingual People That Left Others Speechless

40. The Convenience Fee Vanished Overnight

My mom is half Filipino and half Chinese, and we lived in Hong Kong for most of my childhood before we came to North America, so we’re all fluent in Cantonese. One day, my mom was trying to send money to relatives back in Asia through Western Union. The teller at the desk was a portly Chinese man. My mother had an argument with the man because he was trying to charge her some arbitrary “convenience fee” of $10 that she has never been charged for before. They fight over it for a while in English, going back and forth. Eventually, another employee comes, and asks the teller my mom was arguing with “What’s going on?” In Cantonese. The teller proceeds to say “this stupid b*tch refuses to pay me, I can’t get her chubby *ss out of here”. At this point my mom is livid. She takes a deep breath and calmly answers “well maybe I’d leave if you let me send money to my family, and stop charging me extra so you can buy lunch for YOUR chubby *ss.” Both employee’s cheeks turn red and suddenly become extremely nice, grovelling and praising my mom’s fluency in Cantonese and nervously laughing and repeating “we didn’t know you were Chinese!” over and over. The convenience fee suddenly disappeared.