Was she Japanese? Again.

This is a long , grim story not really fit for here. Short version is I saw a girl jump off a bridge the other night and hang herself. I tried pulling her up by the rope and cut up my fingers in the process. Eventually I got the rope cut, pulled her out of the river and she lived. (As far as I know, the cops haven't told me anything.)

Obviously she was the one who needed the attention but I was pretty shaken up too. I didn't need a lot of hand holding but even just a "good job" or even a "how ya doin? you ok?" kind of thing from the emergency crew would have meant a lot.

Instead I got shoved around, not literally, and made to feel like a burden, like I made more paperwork for the cops. I got sent to a crappy late night ER downtown that I didn't really want to go to, and while the med student was brushing dirt and pebbles out of my sores with a disposable toothbrush, I realized that they just thought I was a drunk who fell into a dirty river, as the cops hadn't told them anything.

So I said "Yeah, when I actually saw her jump I couldn't believe it. It was like a dream. And she had taken her shoes off and laid them out carefully, and set her cell phone on the railing carefully. I was so surprised by it all."
So the med student / doctor(?) said "Oh, so you saw her jump?"
"Yeah. It was weird. Before she jumped I knew it was going to happen"

Ok, so guess what he asked me next? Go on... it comes up a lot in this blog.

The doctor, who presumably is a smart guy with a good education, speaks a bit of english, etc etc, asks me: "Was she Japanese?"

I mean, why, why, why, do people always ask that? Of course she was. Just like the doctor is Japanese, and the tooth brush nurse is Japanese, and everyone in the building is Japanese, and the next building, and the taxi drivers outside, and the guy who runs the movie theater next door.

For some reason people thin that since you're a foreigner you exist in a foreign reality distortion vortex filled with foreign food and foreign things only. So anyone else finds a woman who jumped off a bridge and gets her to safety, they'd just go "Uh huh. Wow." But if it happened to me, they'd say "Was she Japanese?"

I told the story to a new large class and about 1/4 of them went "What a dumb question!" and 3/4 of them didn't see the point. They were waiting for my answer like "Well? Dont keep us waiting? Was she or wasn't she Japanese?"

Ok, ok, you're right, I live in a city with a population of 300,000 of which a small fraction are foreign, and after a night out downtown with friends I hadn't seen in a long time, I see a rare an terrible event, a woman almost succeeds in killing herself by jumping from an isolated pedestrian bridge with a rope around her neck, and since I'm american, odds are pretty good she is too.