American, and I almost started a fight or maybe more like almost hurt my Filipina wife's feelings one time when I tried to complain about a certain, idk facial gesture? she does in certain cases, that just reads a certain way to me and is apparently not at all what she means.
I'll be saying something, and she'll raise her eyebrows up and down twice. To me it looks almost like Groucho Marx, and looks like someone thinks you are joking or saying something silly, and are responding with a non-verbal "oh really?" Or maybe like a suggestive flirting thing, except totally out of any flirting context, so wth does flirty suggestive eyes mean when you were talking about figuring out which outlets to plug the kitchen appliances into so that they don't trip the breakers? It just throws me right off the horse and all I can think is "WTF IS THAT?"
We're old enough and adult and frank enough that I can simply say everything I just said here and we tried to figure it out. It simply became the interesting thing we talked about for a while that day. But she could not explain it. So I never got an answer. It's just something she does unconsciously and apparently is not meant to deflate or derail or laugh at whatever I was talking about. It's apparently more like an actual "oh really?"
I never saw her even-more-filipina mom do it, nor her brother or sister or other family members, and she actually mostly grew up in the us and a few years in China but in a special place with all the other foreign people as her mom worked for the UN. So it may have nothing to do with the Philipines, or China.
So a little eye-waggle can be like that.
Update: I just told her I cited her in this conversation, and now she tells me her family and extended family does all do it, just I'm not around them enough to have seen it, and it is a phillipino thing, and it means I understand or agree like what I would do with a head nod.
