When It’s Nyonya Business

It’s a slow weekday morning. I see a woman with a cart full of small gardening hand tools and seed packets, nothing large or heavy, just a lot of small things. She seems to have arthritic hands or mobility issues, and operating the scanning gun is tricky for her. I pop over, offer to help, and I’m beep-beep-boop’ing my way through her basket.

She looks at my nametag and recognizes that my name is of Indonesian origin. We get to talking and she keeps calling me “Nyonya.”

For those of you who don’t speak Indonesian, that word roughly translates as the “Mrs.” used to indicate a married woman. But in actual practice, it’s more of a sorta-polite-but-sorta-informal way of addressing an adult woman whom you don’t know but are being friendly to. Think of how American Southern women use “sugar” or “hon.”

I start speaking to the customer in Indonesian. I speak it fluently and lived in Jakarta for many years. There aren’t a lot of Indonesians in the Pacific Northwest, so we both had fun meeting someone else who spoke the language.

This would have ended up as a nice little wholesome story if it weren’t for the other customer in line who apparently stormed off to find a manager to complain about me “making fun of a Chinese customer’s accent.”