The sting of being misunderstood and unfairly judged for something as fundamental as language pierced through their spirits, revealing a painful truth about how ignorance can breed cruelty. This was more than a miscommunication—it was a moment that exposed the raw edges of bias and the resilience required to face it.
So while waiting for school to start, my friend and I decided take up a part time job by handing out flyers.
One day we were approached by a family of tourists asking for directions to the nearest subway. In my country we don’t use the term subway as a substitute for trains but associate it to the sandwich food chain.
So we gave them directions to the nearest subway and continued with our job.
30 minutes later they came back to us, clearly pissed and scolded us for wasting their time by giving wrong directions, so I pulled out my phone and went to Google maps to show them that there is in fact a subway where I directed them to.
Then they looked at me and said straight to my face “are you stupid, we meant trains, you’ve caused us to be late, learn some better English would you” what they said, to me seems pretty racist because I’m Asian and it sounds like they’re assuming that I don’t know proper English despite English is the first language everyone born in my country learns first.
I tried to calm them down by saying I’m sorry and that we don’t use the term subway to refer to trains here and if they need directions they could’ve ask the tourist information centre right opposite us in the first place.
After that the man just said “damned china people” (although I’m not even from China) and walked away.
Keep in mind that they came to ask directions from my friend and I who are both 16 and are obviously not obligated to help them and also there’s a tourist information centre literally a few steps away and they blamed us.
So AITA here for insulting them back? Cause to me if I didn’t retaliate I’ll be in the right but doing so we’re both wrong
Conclusion
The original poster (OP) felt unjustly targeted and insulted when tourists reacted aggressively to a linguistic misunderstanding, leading to a highly emotional and retaliatory verbal outburst. The central conflict lies between the OP’s belief that they acted reasonably by providing directions based on local terminology and the tourists’ expectation that the OP should have immediately understood their specific English dialect preference, culminating in racist remarks from the tourists.
Given the context where both parties escalated the situation—the tourists with aggressive, prejudiced language and the OP with an angry insult—the debate centers on whether the OP’s defensive, retaliatory outburst negates their initial innocence in the interaction. Should the OP have maintained composure despite the provocation, or does severe verbal abuse justify an immediate, harsh verbal response?
Here’s how people reacted:
NTA – if someone asked me how to get to a subway I’d assume they were referring to the fast food too.
They were incredibly rude considering that they have options – tourist info centre and I’m assuming they also had access to our great data overlords.
They weren’t TA for the initial miscommunication, but they became TA for coming back to give you a serve when you’d tried to help in good faith. You were crass but they were rude first. Fuck em.
Fuck I’ve had my run in with American Tourists, one tried telling me my flight training and degree was worth nothing because it came from Australia rather than America (in a non joking way). He didn’t appreciate when I told him Australia is actually the leading producer of quality pilots, and America is actually hiring Australian pilots by the bucket load.
So they even acknowledge themselves that they were ambiguous.
And then they got all racist.
They are obviously TA; the question is whether you are too?
Well you know what, yeah you could have “been the better person” or whatever, but they didn’t deserve any respect whatsoever after that behaviour, so you can’t be TA for not showing them any, even if I would advise against your response.
Thus NTA.
You suck for not using common sense – you think the average tourist wants to get lunch at a damn subway when they’re vacationing somewhere foreign? You walk in to a subway because there are no other options, not because you want to.
They suck for the racism.
You were justified in telling them off in the end though.
Everyone saying NTA is forgetting that something assholish that is understandable doesn’t mean it isn’t assholish.