Fool me once. Or twice. OK! Fool me all the time!

Never once has a person in the street shouting at me “Excuse me, hello, you speak English?” ended well for me.

There was of course, the incident in my first month here where I was waiting on a busy street for a friend and a man came out of nowhere shouting at me “GOOD AFTERNOON GOOD AFTERNOON!” And it threw me off my game because, really, who says good afternoon? And by the time I realized that I’d responded to him, he’d made his way across the street and was shaking my hand, telling me things like “I am Mickey Mouse, you are Cinderella. I’m here visiting my sister.”

Then it turned into a debacle in the middle of the street when he grabbed me really firmly by the shoulders and started to do the European kissing on both cheeks thing and I kept shouting “We don’t do that in America! We don’t do that in America!”

He didn’t actually get to my wallet, and this is mostly because it was at the bottom of my bag underneath a scarf, cardigan and a newspaper. I stumbled into a store to get away from him and watched him sprint off to, well, wherever it is he came from.

But, I thought, never again will I respond to people who speak English to me on the street. So, I ignored the women in People’s Square who greeted me with “Welcome to Shanghai! Welcome to China!” There was a woman who went down the line of people waiting for the metro who kept asking for the time – no time for her! Get a watch, lady! There was a really strange incident when I was walking home late after work and passed a van and two men in track suits got out after me yelling “Hello! Hello!” Definitely ignored them. And walked really, really fast. Then I thought of Run DMC and the nephew on the Sopranos that was also fond of track suits.

Things were going well, until tonight when I was waiting outside a metro stop for a friend. A man in a suit came out of nowhere and said, “Excuse me, hello, you speak English? May I bother you?”

See, this is his story: He’s from Beijing. Likes America! Hates to ask, but there was a problem with his washing machine, and he lost all his money. (Right, I don’t know how we got from point A to point B, either)

The sad thing is, if I were a better student, I would have been able to take care of the situation because last week we actually learned how to say “I don’t have any money.” But like 80 percent of the other Chinese things I learned it escaped my leaky sieve of a brain about 2 seconds after class ended.

The man eventually left (maybe it should have been me that left, but, I mean, I’m always the one who leaves when a stranger is trying to beg money off me. Why can’t they be the ones who leave first?). I watched him as he walked to the intersection and looked around, confused to the point that I though well, maybe there was some sort of terrible washing machine tragedy and all his money was….somehow…washed, I don’t know, away?

It could happen, right?