If you didn’t want to be interrogated, why bring it up?
Maybe it’s because it started off with an innocent formality of shaking hands and I definitely did not want to shake hands with someone who I didn’t want to get to know. Why can’t I just bow?
And even worse be asked whether I was doctor. I simply said that I don’t like being touched. Bodily autonomy in other words. Gah!
But then she starts on this innocuous topic of how her husband really likes mangoes. and how he goes around to buy the best and cheapest mangoes. And how he cuts mangoes really well. It went on and on. Maybe it was no longer than a few minutes. So of course, I naturally have questions: Where did he get the mangoes? Who eats them? Does he have a particular farm that he prefers? How about other mango products? Does he do anything with the mango? How is this cutting so special?
It was all meant to be small talk to fill the space. But I thought that it was superfluous. Because it turned out to be just the joy of eating. Which is fine. But there wasn’t any attention paid to quality.
So at the next event, I saw a mango on the coffee table and I asked…can you demonstrate the cutting of the mango. It was clear though that she didn’t want to do it and he didn’t want to do it. But then suddenly the energy turned and they, out of politeness, had to do it. Why not say that you didn’t want to do it?
You made such a big deal about the mangoes so did I embarrass them? I’ll have to think about this more about why I did it. And I know that I did it in a way that may have come off as celebratory, but was shaming them at the same time.
In some way, I realized that I drilled in deep, made them too conscious of something that was just barely a passion…did they really enjoy mangoes? Or was it a passing subject?