In past of China dozens years before in Mao's society, Chinese were in circle struggle everywhere, revealing privacy and criticizing the wrong thoughts by public humiliation among each other, worse even arresting the poor guys to prison who may just said something wrong, so it caused Chinese non-confident among each other even in family, and very cautious in public to keep self innocent and to avoid trouble.
That is the environment and education my friend Happyyl received in his grow up, so he had an embarrassed incident happened in a few days when he first came to Canada from China in the mid 80's last century. Upon the arrival of the university town, he immediately went to K-Mart for some necessities. However, he could not find anything there priced within his limited budget ($360 stipend per month) and decided to go on to another store. However, having not gotten used to the Canada's open-shelf style store, he felt really uncomfortable to walk out the store empty handed. After some mental struggles, he went to one girl cashier (he thought he was handsome enough to be good impressed to her) and uttered “I didn’t buy anything”.
She stared at his eyes. Afraid of his poor English, he said the same thing again. Her eyes grew even bigger and rounder. He felt face hot and thought “Gee, is my English that bad? After all my TOEFL scored more than 600 points”.
Quickly checked all his words and grammar, he repeated the sentence once more, “I didn’t buy anything”.
After one minute or so (he guess she had finally realized what is his real meaning), she smiled and said, “I know. Just go.”
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