uncomfortable encounter at parakiore
I just got back from a steam and I'm frustrated at myself that I didn't say more to the girl who was clearly upset and on the verge of tears or to the tone deaf man who was making her uncomfortable.
I was relaxing in the steam room, earplugs in, eyes closed.
I'm in and out of other peoples conversations whether I like it or not.
A man enters and sits down, immediately starts talking to a girl sitting next to us. He asks her 'did you come here from China?' 'no I was born here' 'do you live nearby? where abouts? do you live with your parents?'
I'm barely registering the conversation because it's a faint noise and I'm doing my best to zone out. My mind is doing laps though as I'm forced to confront the nature of these questions, kind of innocent, also very personal and directed.
The China grilling continues, I might be hearing her voice get quavery but it might be my imagination fill in the blanks, it also sounds like they're having a conversation so I stubbornly continue to try and zone out.
After a short period I hear 'I have a thick kiwi accent and I don't know anything about Chinese culture' as he's trying to console her that 'it's not like that, China's done some amazing things technologically' jesusfuckingchrist this guy.
I'm kind of committed to an empty mind at this point and the guy sounds like I guess he's not a white supremacist aiming for blood or at least a bruise so I'm fingers crossed thinking okay he's got to get the picture now, the fool I am.
The conversation doesn't steer, it's a slow motion crash and maybe just maybe he picked up on that because he left. No sorry, no accepting any kind of responsibility for how he's just affected someone.
I mentioned something briefly to her as I left, that I had earplugs in but I caught the gist by the end, that he had plenty of time to recognise his behaviour and she was completely in the right and she apologised to me for getting upset! I essentially gave her a very muted, very unfriendly thoughts and prayers. I cared but not enough to speak up is what came out.
There's so much more I wish I had said or done and I'm deeply sorry that this girl was made to feel so uncomfortable and scared, which I only really put together in retrospect as I was getting changed to leave. I'm a white man so I don't wonder around loaded with expectations like racist people posing physical threats or just aiming to do as much covert emotional damage as possible.
I feel like an idiot for not putting together what happened sooner and I really hope she has the emotional support to talk about that incident with someone because those are the types of people that make me resistant to go back to a public location for r&r.
edit:
Thank you for all the responses, I don't think I can reply to each of them individually.
I will make a complaint to the staff about this person.
I want to add a few things based on the responses here.
I put all of this together in hindsight, all laid out it's easy to backseat in black and white but through earplugs this was a genuinely ambiguous read that I pieced together at a snails pace because it wasn't immediately evident what I was hearing until all the variables crystallised into an image. Peoples conversations are very muffled through ear plugs so I'm cautious that my imagination can fill in the blanks.
I've met a handful of aggressively friendly people in sauna's myself which have left me double guessing future encounters. One of these interactions made me angry that I gave someone the benefit of the doubt only for them to double down on being rude, the next time I thought I had a read on this type of person I reflexively snapped back only to realise after the fact that I'd misread them and they weren't being the rude person I'd started monitoring for, which caused them to leave.
As for the line of questions about where do you live etc., I'm an immigrant, the which school did you go to, what part of town do you live questions are as I understand culturally commonplace here so I was trying not to catastrophise a possibly normal everyday interaction into an offender/victim narrative.
It's easy to judge me for not being more conscientious and decisive but it's hard to read things some days, I don't go in with a clear head all the time, I typically go to the sauna to relax because I'm not relaxed, my own interactions like this have left me prone to catastrophising ordinary things and hesitant to make something out of nothing. You are all correct to point out my privilege, I'll try to pay closer attention to male/female interactions in the future.