On the other side stands a shouting woman
In Istanbul, at the last flat I lived in before we left Turkey in 2008, my upstairs neighbour- a middle-aged woman in a house dress and slippers- used to ring my doorbell repeatedly at all hours. If I was in the shower, she’d keep ringing it until I was out and dried and dressed. Sometimes she was content to keep her finger on the doorbell for a good ten minutes before I answered the door.
Whenever I opened the door to her, she’d launch into a very fast, very loud tirade about…something. But I was never sure what because, well, I couldn’t understand her. My Turkish abilities were good enough to understand her had she bothered to slow down and stop shouting, but my scrunched up mystified face only made her shift into even more clipped, shouty tones. I’d stand in my doorway, in my PJs or sopping wet or with dinner rapidly cooling in the kitchen and she’d shout at me, a wall of sound that seemed to go on for ever, increasing in density and impenetrability.
What was she shouting about?
According to my landlord, whom I’d then call for clarification (the woman was a distant relative, it seemed), my doormat was too dusty or I’d placed my garbage out on the curb at the wrong time or…something. My deer-in-headlights facial expressions and pleas for her to slow down and repeat what she’d said more clearly fell on deaf ears. Shouting was the way to go.
She wasn’t the only neighbour who barraged me with finger-to-the-doorbell mystifying shoutathons over the years. I actually thought it was a Turkish thing for neighbours to find something to yell at each other about across the threshold. I came to dread the sound of the ever-present bird-call doorbells in my various flats. If it rang, especially if it kept ringing after the first push, I knew I was in for a long, complicated, shouty lecture.
But it isn’t just a Turkish thing to ring doorbells and shout at your foreign neighbours who stare wide eyed and incomprehending at the barrage of barely understood verbiage.
Oh, Shanghai, Shanghai.
As you may know from previous posts, my Mandarin abilities are pretty basic. They are a lot less basic now that I’ve completed my 80 hours of intensive study over the past month but really, they are still pretty basic. I’ve demonstrated this lack of ability in the lifts going down to the lobby when neighbours have tried to engage in small talk and I just stood there smiling like an imbecile, repeating the few phrases I could remember, nodding politely. Most of our neighbours have given up on the elevator pleasantries- I get a brief nihao then silence.
Here, it isn’t the immediate neighbours who shout at me across the threshold. No, the woman across the hall with the appalling snarling beady-eyed mutant mini-dog has ceased trying to talk to me when her dog runs out to the hall every morning to bite my ankles. She knows I’m far too stupid to talk to.
Others haven’t realized the extent of my stupidity and keep trying to shout.
A few weeks ago, our doorbell rang at around midnight. I was asleep. The doorbell kept ringing. And ringing. I woke, thinking perhaps the building was on fire or a neighbour needed help or we were being evacuated or something similar, and so I got up and padded out into the darkened living room, peered through the spy-hole and saw a woman. I opened the door to a barrage of shouting. Apparently I’d ordered food. She thrust bags full of styrofoam food containers at me and berated me for…something. I had no idea what was going on. She waved a piece of paper in my face, as if the blur of densely written Chinese script would clarify anything. I kept repeating my stock phrases of I don’t understand and This isn’t my food at her but she was fairly adamant that increasing the speed and volume of her argument would help me to realize that I had indeed ordered food and would now kindly pay her for her services. If only I would just stop being so difficult.
Last night, our doorbell rang and an older woman in a cotton nightie and fuzzy slippers stood there with a clipboard and stern arrangement of facial features. She shouted at us for a few minutes while we explained repeatedly that we had no idea what she wanted. The more confusion we displayed, the louder and faster she spoke. I caught a few things- something about 150 and television. The rest was just an elided blur of tones. My brain ached. We finally speed dialed our landlord and shoved the phone at her and she stood in the middle of our living room in the thin cotton nightie and anklet socks (slippers left politely at the doorstep), barking out her frustrated needs to him. Ah, we had to pay for our cable TV. Ah. Right then. We paid, thanked her, and she left.
I’ve reached a point where I don’t want to open our door to anyone unless I’m actually expecting someone (hello New York Pizza!) or answer my phone unless the caller display shows someone I actually know. EZ Window Solutions offers secure windows and doors. I’ve had too many years of being shouted at, as if the increasing volume and speed of the conversation will help to overcome my fundamental lack of comprehension and crucial gaps in vocabulary knowledge. It makes me feel tired and stupid.
In my Mandarin course last month, I learned about likes and dislikes, shopping, fruits and clothing, numbers, furniture and rooms, measure words, family members, and jobs. I would have appreciated a unit on possible doorbell dialogues.
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Totally identify with the last bit — I always thought my Turkish courses were sorely lacking in things like arguing with taxi drivers, setting up utility accounts, and negotiating with moving men.
There is something heartening, in a strange way, though, about knowing it’s not just Americans who think speaking louder will get someone to understand.
Oh god yes- it took me years to figure out the vocabulary/phrasing necessary for dealing with the above people you mentioned! My taxi Turkish was pretty fluent by my 3rd year, but only thanks to a lot of prying/querying/experimenting by myself.
My lone Turkish teacher that year (I think I attended classes for about, oh, 2 months before giving up out of frustration) insisted on sticking to the syllabus even when the students had pertinent questions about local realities, like getting your water turned back on after Iski accidentally had you shut off, or how to shout from the back of a dolmus where exactly on minibus yolu you wanted to be let off, or how to tell an emlakci what kind of flat you want and the rental terms you’re willing to accept. She insisted those topics would be dealt with in time (never saying when) and would go back to teaching about family relationship names (hala veya teyze) or about the proper prepositions for getting on and off of boats or trains or cars and whatnot.
I gave up after those two months of trying very hard to be a diligent student and went back to my grammar books at home and listening to everyone around me, hoping to pick up the magical words and phrases that would allow to world to make sense.
As for speaking louder to get someone to understand you when they don’t speak the lingo, yeah, it’s not just Americans who do it. It’s definitely a semi universal thing.
Wow. I guess I should be happy that this kind of thing never happened in Japan. Oh, no my neighbors were way too polite. Instead, if they had complaints, they would send them to the school office where I worked and we’d get an email every couple weeks listing the various things we had done wrong. I’m still on that email list, despite having left my job 6 months ago, so I still get gentle reminders telling me to keep my TV volume down and not to wear shoes in my apartment.
The gently whispered corrective emails definitely sound less stressful but I can still see the cumulative effect being a big mess of passive-aggressiveness that you grow to dread finding in your inbox… I have a heart-sinking Pavlov’s dog reaction to doorbells now- answering them rarely comes to any good end, unless I’m definitely expecting someone (and I rarely am because I tend to go out to see friends rather than them coming to see me).
Do you still enjoy keeping your TV volume turned up whilst stomping around the flat in your shoes? 😉
We seem to be much more fortunate. When we open the door to our Turkish neighbours we have a brief nasil sin / iyi im conversation (they know not to tax my feeble language skills much beyond that) and then they give us food.
Maybe it was where I was living and the fact that they thought I could understand their rants? When I was in Kayseri for 2 years and spoke very little Turkish I had no problems…in fact, I just got the two daughters coming over asking for help with their English homework and the mother occasionally complaining through mime that our cat was peeing in the plants she kept in the stairwell. It was only later in Istanbul when my Turkish was much better and I was living on the European side (Harbiye and Osmanbey were the worst for neighbours) that things went a bit weird.
Hilarious! Love your description of the doorway yellers….in our first weeks in Shanghai I recall a series of neighbourly yellers all trying to get the same message across…a small girl in our lane wanted to play with our kids but we were too gormless to figure it out until the mother arrived, deposited her in our living room, and left. She stayed for five hours and ate us out of all our precious Ikea cookies.
Oh god- not the Ikea cookies! That’s another thing I’ve never been able to deal with when living abroad– people’s lack of awareness of how very very precious stupid things like Ikea cookies are. In Istanbul, visiting neighbours would casually help themselves to the last of my valuable cheddar cheese, smuggled in from Bulgaria on an awful 12 hour overnight train ride. An ex boyfriend in Istanbul once casually drained the last of my rare, rare Amarula cream liqueur, a gift from a friend who had visited from South Africa. In my first flat in Turkey, the cleaning lady my flatmate occasionally hired used pages from the English magazines (so rare!) that I’d hauled all the way back from the transit lounge at Schiphol airport as shelf liners…ugh.
My condolences for your Ikea cookies.
I was having terrible Japan flashbacks the whole time I was reading this. I agree with the annoying passive aggerssive “gentle reminders” that the previous commenter talked about. We were the first foreigners to live in our flat in a small village near my university in Japan and so we got all the salesmen, etc. Because Japanese has so many set phrases for particular occasions, we could always get through the pleasantries (therefore misleading them into thinking we knew what the hell we were doing) and then they’d launch into their schpeel (no idea on how to spell that) about whatever they were selling…which we could never figure out and most likely did not want. Yes, we got to the point of not answering the door, but since lots of Japanese people do that they either accepted it or just came back later. Once the people we actually needed found out there were freaky gaijin living in the flat, they would sneak up and pretend they tried to contact us and then skitter away so they wouldn’t have to deal with the foreigners. So annoying when you are waiting for parcels! One more than one occasion I caught our postman filling out the “You weren’t home so pick up your parcel at this impossible to find place in town that you have to cycle to in the snow” form to leave on our doorstep. We took pleasure in busting him with a polite smile on our faces. I can play the p.a. game, too.