All anyone's listening for are the mistakes.

“You both look very great.”

This was the congratulatory commendation that slowly freed itself from my over-enunciating lips with a much too rigid rhythm. It was addressed to the young couple currently commencing their matrimony in the large and ardently adorned banquet hall. Their attire was surprisingly Western. One was draped in a flowing white wedding dress and the other in a stylish black tuxedo. They could easily have been extras in “Baby Geniuses 3: All Grown Up and Intelligently Getting Married To Each Other in Standard American Wedding Garb.” That is when Hollywood wises up and actually decides to make this surefire blockbuster.

(Confession: I originally had that as Baby Geniuses 2, but when I checked my sources, I found that a sequel had already been made. So instead, I offer up this suggestion as the long awaited finale of, quite possibly, the most import cinema trilogy ever created.)

“You both look very great.”

I’m not really sure why these five words seemed like good choices to string together into some short expression of meaning, but I am fairly positive that this awkward acknowledgement was a strong strategy in drawing even more curiosity to the lone whitey at the wedding. It was as if George Lucas took a break from writing unnatural sci-fi romances to airmail me a line of stiff comic book banter.

Still, I have a defense.

Being in a country that displays differing proficiencies of your native tongue, you never quite know how any one English comment will be received by your listening audience. As such, I usually tend to err on the side of the rudimentary. In the best instances, it facilitates friendly conversation. In the worst, it can be construed as condescending. In the mildly unfortunate, it takes the above form, showcasing a less than vivacious vernacular that barely rivals that of Jodi Foster wandering the woods as Nell. However, a charming Liam Neeson, tirelessly dedicating himself to some small verbal victory, is nowhere to be found. Instead, all I have is a large man sporting a greasy ponytail and a pair of big-and-tall potato sack pajamas. He goes by the name by the Qui-Gon Jinn and has to call his mom every three hours or so.

Given this broad constituency and the inevitable brevity of this celebratory exchange, perhaps the safest statement would have been something from my small, but always growing, Vietnamese vocabulary. However, I was invited, along with an entire class of international relations majors, to this festive affair by one of my students, who was the younger sister of the groom. In turn, as a response to that irrationally insecure need to valiantly validate myself amidst unfamiliar situations, I felt additional pressure to qualify my position as an English teacher. In the end though, I cracked and all I managed to do was reserve a seat with R.L Stine at the kids’ table. But with such intentions, it serves me right.

I later found out that both members of this newly formed union had quite impressive English abilities. The bride in particular had just returned from a two-year stint at a university in New York, bringing back with her a newly awarded masters degree. In light of such accomplishments, maybe I could have stepped up the word choice a bit, shedding my Boo-Radley-like swagger. Maybe I could have used an adverb, or even a compound sentence.