Take my friend Stu, for instance, who manages our food service at school. He has worked as a cook in a variety of places including an Indian restaurant. Some facts about Stu – he makes a mean curry and butter chicken, is from Australia and doesn’t have an ounce of Indian blood in his body. With a largely  Indian front staff, I remember asking him one day if he was allowed to show his face outside of the kitchen. “Not really”, was the answer and you can imagine the reaction from customers if their favorite Indian dishes were discovered to be prepared by a guy from OZ.

Missing Japanese food and feeling probably a bit bogged down by the sudden change in diet I went into Whole Foods to get some nori maki rolls. The man behind the counter didn’t look particularly Japanese but then again this was North America and he didn’t look Not-Japanese either. At home in Japan, people use fashion and hair style as some ways of helping distinguish between the Chinese, Koreans and local nationals. Overseas I figured my normal tricks of Jean styles, shoes, shapes of glasses, and hair might not give me as much to go on since I’m not particularly familiar with the nuances of Asian cultures outside of Asia. I took the gamble and started speaking with him in Japanese.

In broken English he told me he didn’t speak Japanese and was from Taiwan originally. He said he had learned to make sushi after moving to the US. Earlier in the week on the plane over to the States I had had a conversation with a Japanese/American Sushi Chef who had filled me in on the recent increase of sushi schools and how many people were getting into the art of sushi preparation. Ready with my new conversational repertoire I asked the man working at Whole Foods if he had been to one of the sushi chef schools.

He replied with some difficulty, “Yes, something like that.”

I then asked him if his school was in California or someplace else. He answered again, “Yes, something like that.”

It was at that moment that this Taiwanese sushi chef in Massachusetts taught me something about English. Having been through the learning curve with Japanese my first few years in Japan, I remember learning a number of key phrases that serve two life saving purposes: to effectively answer a question posed to you that you have no idea how to answer and to keep the conversation moving so you can figure out what you are talking about. “Something like that” is one of our gem phrases in English.

After the second round of “something like that” I clued into what was going on with the conversation and dropped it – hopefully taking all pressure off the chef letting him just get on with making my lunch. If his experience in the US is at all similar to my early days in Japan this probably came as a huge relief as he was free again just to go on thinking his own thoughts or something like that.