Saying Thank You For Being Corrected When You Are Right?

In Jenny Boully’s short essay called, A Short Essay On Being she talks about being a Thai woman in America. The reader learns that in Thailand, it is common to say thank you when you are corrected, even if the one correcting you is wrong. We see this first hand when the narrator’s friend corrects her for saying Pot Thai, “I was going to visit a friend from graduate school in Austin. I told her that I would visit and make her pot Thai. She told me, “It’s pad Thai.” And even though she knew I was Thai and even though she knew that I was born in Thailand and had been back numerous times and even though she knew that my mother raised me to speak Thai and still spoke to me in Thai, I thanked her for correcting me.” Her friend knows that she was raised to speak Thai and completely dis-regarded the fact that she could be the one pronouncing the word wrong, and that is how they say Pad Thai in Thai. Instead of the narrator correcting her friend she thanks her and moves on. I can relate to the narrator because whenever someone corrects me and I know they are wrong, I tend to take a step back and watch them do what they corrected me on the wrong way until they are corrected and I just stand there and chuckle to myself.

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