Before mom became too sick 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 assistant 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, Korea. Shopkeepers at the Namdaemun Market often greeted us in Japanese. I guess a certain foreignness stood out about us 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 then he started to talk to us in English, rather than Korean. 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 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 says to me in English(!), Thank you, what a nice lady she is, and said goodbye in English.
What the hey, I think he had so convinced himself that 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 kind of sounded like Korean... Japanese people can do that? Great!
It's kind of like when mom, her gentleman and I were together : I spoke Korean to her, she spoke Japanese to him (he was Japanese-American), and he spoke English to me.
EDIT: Man, 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, mostly 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. My guess is it's on my father's side, as his family was based in the southeastern part of the Korean peninsula, which faces Japan, and some Japanese merchants lived there even before Japan took over Korea in the 20th century (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.
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