Ok, I have been using the internet for about 13 years now, and I am a veteran of meeting many people off the net. At least among English speakers, I can spot liars right away. I’ve read books on police interviewing techniques, so I’ve made an art out of questioning people, surreptitiously or overtly, to find inconsistencies in their stories. I’ve built levels of trust with English speakers on the net that defy any common sense of “real world” relationships. I’ve been engaged twice.

But man, a lot of techniques that work for English speakers do not work for Asians — they have a different mentality. Mind games are taken to a whole different level. I had an angry 2-hour audio conversation via msn messenger with a Japanese woman on the other side of the planet. She’s like the ghost out of The Grudge. Say one thing, then say the complete opposite the next sentence. She found me equally perplexing, because I’m not “simple” like other American men. I felt like the way chess grand masters must feel when they have their tournaments. The world is still full of mysteries, I tell ya.

For a long time, I wasn’t even sure if she was Japanese or not. The way she behaved seemed way too manipulative for a white person, but then she’d stumble on Japanese vocabulary, asking me what a word meant. Sometimes she was joking, other times she really didn’t know what a word meant. After having the audio conversation, it’s apparently because she really is a Japanese person who deliberately speaks poor Japanese, to stay away from other Japanese. She wears shoes in her apartment, doesn’t bow, has never said hi to her neighbors, rarely goes out. The way she talks is so agressive/angry, I’ve only known angry American feminists to talk like that. She is apparently confident of her attractiveness, having no fewer than 3 boyfriends at a time. I think she was being truthful there, I’ve known net players who had even more.

I did also just meet another mysterious hapa last month, who speaks English with an accent despite growing up in Canada. Two unusual women in one month. I’ve told both about the other, and they hate each other already… hehe… I have had voice conversations with both, and they have different voices.

But I wonder, are there equally bizarre and terrifying encounters among e.g. deaf people, who live in a different universe without sound? Sign language has completely different grammatical rules from spoken language; American Sign Language grammar is more similar to Japanese than English, for example. Deaf people are literally part of a nationwide tribe of deaf people, who have mass social meetings in various cities, and frequently exchange text messages with each other. I’ve seen deaf people having text conversations with their friends thousands of miles away, at shopping malls, coffee shops. They’ve got their own slang and everything. There are deaf-hapas, if you will, people who can hear, but have deaf family members; or people who acquired deafness, or people who are able to hear again.

Will we have a future when rejected Bulgarian lovers showing up at American front doors with guns will become an everyday event?