Before mom became too ill to continue, we had this semi-ritualized routine where on Fridays I would pick her up for lunch, then we would go to this cafe for tea, and follow it up with a shopping trip to the Koreatown Plaza Market. The Korean manager there often stationed himself by the door to greet customers, and amusingly enough, he always greeted us in Japanese -"Konnichiwa!".
[Interestingly, this also happened several years before this when we took a trip to Seoul. Shopkeepers at the Namdaemun Market often greeted us in Japanese. And once a group of schoolgirls struck up a conversation with us in Japanese, as they were learning Japanese in school and wanted to practice. I can see how a certain foreignness about us might have stood out in Korea... but in L.A.?]
Anyway, so we made a point of talking to the man in Korean, just to set him straight, but I think that just served to confuse him, because he then started to talk to us in English. I've since read stories about funny mix-ups like this happening to other people as well; I guess when people have convinced themselves of something and suddenly expectation is met by a different reality, the result can be a bit of chaos.
A couple of weeks later, we're back at the market and we see him again, manning a register this time, and he must have forgotten what happened last time because he again said "Konnichiwa!". So this time mom spoke to him in Japanese, bless her heart^^ -- and he asked me, in English, what she said^^. So I told him what little I understood of it: that it was good of him, a senior staffer, to help out on the floor -- and he bowed to mom and said to her in Korean that he helps out however he can when things get busy. Then he said to me, back in English, Thank you, what a nice lady she is, and smilingly bade us goodbye.
What the hey, I think he had so convinced himself we were Japanese that hearing us speak Korean didn't really register, and when we pushed the point it was just confusing -- like, Wait, that sounded like Korean... these Japanese people can speak Korean? Great!
It's kind of like when mom, her gentleman friend and I were together : I spoke Korean to her, she spoke Japanese to him (he was Japanese-American), and he spoke English to me. He told me on a number of occasions how mom's Japanese was excellent, just like a high-class Tokyo native's, must be because she learned "correct" Japanese in school.
EDIT: How could I forget about this! Years after the series of incidents with the market manager, I sent away for an analysis of my DNA sample. It was just idle curiosity, largely a lark, but when the results came back I was flabbergasted -- according to 23andMe, I'm pretty much equal parts Korean and Japanese (39% and 36%)! So that's why people have been telling me that I "look Japanese" -- whatever that would mean -- all my life. Apparently, within the last 200 years or so there was an influx of Japanese genes somewhere in my family tree. There was no other explanation and I never wrote back to ask for a more in-depth analysis, but my guess is it was on my father's side, as his family was based in Daegu, in the southeastern part of the Korean peninsula, which faces Japan and some Japanese merchants lived there even before Japan took over Korea from 1910 to 1945 (but this is pure speculation on my part). And BTW my parents grew up during the period of Japanese occupation, which is why mom spoke excellent Japanese, and was actually more comfortable speaking Japanese than Korean in some ways.
