well ... I only tell people I'm from Singapore .... NOT China
.... 
Biangz, I'm sooooo glad I'm NOT from China! 
Just yesterday, I had to admit an elderly patient from
PRC. She came accompanied by her elderly husband and her
daughter.
My nurses' alarm went "Bing! Bing!", meaning, I have a
hard-to-please, potentially problematic patient on my hands.
My sixth sense and my instinct warned me that it is NOT a good idea
to tell them that I know how to speak Mandarin and Cantonese.
I've encountered patients before who latch on to you like leeches
the minute they find out that you speak Mandarin, and they remind
me of one of the reasons why I left nursing in Singapore in the
first place.
So, yeah, I suddenly couldn't really speak Mandarin, and had to
mischievously (and convincingly) pause and stutter and insert a lot
of erm's and ah's etc in my feeble attempts to speak
Mandarin.
True enough, the patient turned out to be so obnoxious and fussy
that by the end of my shift, her husband got red-faced from being
irritated at her, and her own daughter was close to tears trying to
please her. One of the Aussie patients in the four-bedded
room asked to be moved to a private room, and the other patient
turned her TV on loud to drown out the drama.
Extraordinary... she was extraordinarily difficult. THANK
GOD I pretended I couldn't understand her half the time.
She had this habit of clearing her phlegm twice a day and it is
some kind of elaborate exercise whereby she'd drink orange juice
first, then spit it out and spend the next 20 mins, I kid you not,
hacking and doing the Aaaaargh, Acccck, Pweeee!! routine! It
was disgusting. Horrifyingly, instead of doing it in the
bathroom, she did it by her bedside!! 
The patient
beside her was so repulsed, so was I, I had to step in and get her
to stop and continue at the bathroom! 
Even the Team Leader shook her head and frowned at the
commotion.
Awful, just plain awful.
No wonder the Aussies don't really like the PRC's...
