glumshoe:

A young lawyer from Singapore is staying in my house this week so he can attend Gencon. I met him this afternoon and, over dinner, he asked me what I knew about his country. I described its location, named its current president, recited the dates in which it was under British colonialism and Japanese control, the year of its independence, and the percentage of land mass that is occupied by nature reserves.

He started laughing and said he was amazed by how much I knew about Singapore, but not surprised after his conversation with my mother.

Except. I actually don’t know SHIT about Singapore. Last night I read the Wikipedia page because I was insecure about my American education and didn’t want to ignorantly put my foot in my mouth. I will forget everything I read by the end of the week and none of it is connected by any central experience. Prior to last night, all I knew about Singapore was that it’s part of the native range of Pteroptus vampyrus, which I learned in middle school when a classmate told me he’d lived there with his military family and therefore it was his favorite animal and I had to pick a different species to be my favorite.

So. Now I am stuck in a house with a man who thinks I have broad and specific knowledge about his home country because I infodumped the wiki page at him without considering the consequences. What if he like… tries to talk to me about it? References political situations? Compares cultures? How do I tell him I’m a poorly-educated American who happens to be good at regurgitating information from short-term memory?