I don’t know why I hold such a grudge against the phrase “hey buddy” but I think everyone has one of those phrases that stir up a visceral reaction. A friend of mine reacted violently towards the word “moist” she almost slapped me. She said, “It just doesn’t make sense to use “moist” to describe cakes. It is just not helping the description.” She said. “Just use succulent… wait, that’s actually worse. Nevermind.” It is one of those things we can’t seem to find a logical answer to.
I understand that every place has its own linguistic quirks. In Baltimore, “hon” has become a winking tribute to the city itself, a greeting that has cropped up in films, inspired a restaurant and beauty pageant, and been unofficially appended to one of its highway welcome signs. In 1999 Maryland Baltimore, a lawsuit was filed against the Maryland State Police by a suburban computer analyst who claims that a female state trooper for wrongful arrest, after he called her “Hon” during a traffic stop.
I remember the first time “thanks buddy” has been used onto me. I was the new staff in the cafe that I manage now. B was the person who trained me and introduced me to everyone. He had his shirt half buttoned-down, revealing his luscious chest hair. We were cordial and congenial of course. His “thanks buddy” became an inside joke and we kept on calling each other “buddy” in some hyperbolic ways. I knew the phrase before through textbooks and other people using it, but then to hear it addressing me as a “buddy” irked me in ways I couldn’t quite put my finger on until I recently came across a passage from James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room — when the narrator describes his dysfunctional relationship with his father:
We were not like father and son, my father sometimes proudly said, we were like buddies. I think my father sometimes actually believed this. I never did. I did not want to be his buddy; I wanted to be his son. What passed between us as masculine candor exhausted and appalled me. Fathers ought to avoid utter nakedness before their sons. I did not want to know — not, anyway, from his mouth — that his flesh was as unregenerate as my own. My knowledge did not make me feel mofre like his son — or buddy — it only make me feel like an interloper, and a frightened one at that. He thought we were alike. I did not want to think so. I did not want to think that my life would be like his, or that my mind would ever grow so pale, so without hard places and sharp, sheer drops. He wanted no distance between us; he wanted me to look on him as a man like myself. But I wanted to merciful distance of father and son, which would have permitted me to love him.
Baldwin’s narrator thinks about how the buddying from his father reveals a deeper history that alienates him — that his father’s attempt to make him a buddy represents a violent attempt to make him a man like himself. Reacting to that, the narrator declares his distance away from his father’s expectation — to remain a “merciful distance” in order for him to love his father. I think about how “buddy” sounds so promising yet devoid of any meaning at the same time. This is especially working in the service industry as a POC in an establishment that is catered to a white majority. But regardless of this hyperawareness of language — something that our generation is pathologically obsessed with as a byproduct of identity politics, I think the “thanks buddy” brand of relation hints at how I actually don’t know how to bond with men (white cis-man particularly).
Over the years working behind the bar, I have exclusively heard men use “buddy” to one another. It is never the case within female friends and queer circles (“hey bitch, what’s up with life?”). But queers often articulate through italics (for its campiness) and slanted posture while “buddy” feels forever rigid in place. “Buddy” goes nowhere. When I hear buddy, I hear yes, but no. It feels othering. Growing up I learned the harsh ways of being the "Other” raised in an all-boys Catholic school in Hong Kong, being teased as the feminine, the flamboyant, the too-much. Kids were cruel because they didn’t know they were. Somehow the word “buddy” brings back those moments by saying you’re not one of us, buddy.
At the same time, I don’t think it is my prerogative to police people for using that. I don’t think anyone has any ill intentions with this buddying, or just saying it with hostility. Aside from the conversation with pronouns, I think language is fundamentally gendered and racialized in nuanced ways that do not conform to the archetypal narrative that highlights survival and self-determination. In Cathy Park Hong’s latest book Minor Feelings where she charts out how these minor feelings within the Asian American community explore the trauma of a racist capitalist system that keeps the individual in place. Hong describes minor feelings as a
“range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic, built from sediments of everyday racial experience and the irritnat of having one’s perseption of reality constantly questioned or dismissed.”
I hesitate to write this piece about just a word that “triggered” these dysphoric reactions because I think it is unimportant, minor, and every day. Maybe that is just simply how people were taught to relate and socialize, and they shouldn’t be punished for that? Yet at the same time, my own perception of my body as a visibly queer Asian makes me question my visibility when someone “buddys” me. What is a visibly queer person anyway? Am I comfortable enough in my own skin if I am so easily “triggered“ by a word? At the same time, it is equally sobering to frame such as a minor feeling — less to do with being validated but knowing that there is something slightly irksome about this akin to a papercut on your pinkie. With some maturity, it is sobering to see through the excessiveness and hilarity about being called the “buddy”.
Small Talk & Service Industry
Having worked in the service industry for the past three years has made me internalize a lot of thank-yous, sorrys, hi-how’s-it-going, hi-how-are-you as much as how nine-to-fivers internalize let-me-circle-back-tos. And I don’t think we mean half of the things we say. During covid, hospitality workers in Ontario where I live, are facing hours cut, unpaid sick leaves, unstable scheduling, lack of medical insurance coverage, while having to deal with the increased workload from vaccine passport QR-code scanning, long hours of mask-wearing, screaming through plexiglass shields, to lecturing anti-maskers. And small talk is just the icing on the cake — sacrificing what selfhood is left for “service”.
I was raised in Hong Kong, a city infamously known for poor customer service. In 2019, Hong Kong ranks the fourth lowest in the 2019 Smiling Report, a survey which was compiled based on assessments by mystery shoppers in 29 countries and regions. The smile score, from 0 to 100, grades the quality of customer service. Hong Kong’s smile score was only 56, 10 points lower than its record last year and way below the global average of 80. Despite the attention-grabbing headlines and the general joke about Hong Kong citizens’ coldness, there hasn’t been many advocates for a tipping system and higher minimum wages for restaurant workers in Hong Kong. Customer service is a joke we see through and out. So it came as a shock to me, when I began working in Canada — of how Canadian formalities and small talk often feels put on and only getting more exhausting.
For all its ubiquity, small talk hasn’t come in for a ton of academic study. The first theoretical account is generally traced to anthropologist Bronislaw Malinowski, in his 1923 essay “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages.” He noted that a great deal of talk “does not serve any purpose of communicating ideas” but instead “serves to establish bonds of personal union.” Malinowski termed the exchange of such talk “phatic communion” (“phatic” from Greek photos, for “spoken”). It is speech as social bonding rather than communication.
Malinowski obviously thought of this as a lesser form of speech, describing it as "purposeless expressions of preference or aversions, accounts of irrelevant happenings, [and] comments on what is perfectly obvious.” Often, he said, it was merely a way to fill the silence.
... to a natural man, another man's silence is not a reassuring factor, but, on the contrary, something alarming and dangerous. ... The modern English expression, 'Nice day today' or the Melanesian phrase, 'Whence comest thou?' are needed to get over the strange and unpleasant tension which men feel when facing each other in silence.
Those minor feelings surrounding small talk are accentuated in the everyday service industry. I guess my harangue against this “thanks buddy” phenomenon(?) ties into those formalities that leave people no choice but to believe they are inherently good for us when our reality contradicts otherwise.
I turn 27 today as I write. I’ve never quite considered myself as a man but just a blob of protein operating in this moneymaking world. And “buddy” feels infantilizing and lazy. As much as I want to rant about the almost non-consensual nature of small talk and the invasiveness of being a restaurant worker, I like managing a cafe and showing up my authentic self to those selected few. I yearn for a life forward that is intentional and authentic in the way we regard and language one another. There is inherently so much pressure about being nice (especially the Canadian narrative: we are nice people here up North!) It is not that I am glorifying the lack of service or bad service at all — but hospitality workers are often expected to sacrifice their selfhood for the name of “experience” and “service” to this game that everybody loses. I want to be like Baldwin’s narrator in Giovanni’s Room, sometimes it’s humanly reasonable to draw that distance in order to keep yourself intact.
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I hear you, Jeff! I've tried VERY hard to avoid calling my son "buddy" there's something inherently minimizing about it. Language matters!