China apologizes to Mexico for tough swine flu stand – China News
www.google.com — This one slipped by me until I did a search for swine flu-related articles today. This acknowledgment seems to be surprisingly out of character for the Chinese government, but maybe that's just an impression I have that's not born out by actual fact.
Apologies are something I haven't seen a lot of coming from ... well, anybody in my 3.5 years living in China, so this is a little surprising to me as well. I got hit by a car once (not hard, just knocked down), and the dumbass driver apologized profusely until I waved him on, but other than that, I can't remember hearing a dui bu qi or bu hao yisi.
I rather despise the 不好意思's you get in the service industry. Such a non-committal apology. "Sorry you just spent 40 minutes for your food to be ready, but turns out we're out of meat. And vegetables." It sort of has the tone of "I'm apologizing, but you're the dumbass that made the decision to come to this restaurant in the first place."
Am curious if that's the apology they issued to Mexico: "Sorry about being so hard on you guys, but if you took better care of yourselves and didn't get sick in the first place, we wouldn't be having this problem."
Or maybe I'm just jaded.
Ha. 不好意思 definitely ranks up there with 马上, 没办法, and the ubiquitous and automatic 小等一下. And around feeding time I sometimes get a little intense. I care so much more about my stomach than the 服务员's face. Unfortunately, it seems I am definitely in no danger of assimilating any time soon.