dining with my student's family

i've written a few posts on here on about my student's mom who always cleans my apartment. it was really starting to make me feel uncomfortable- i didn't want her to feel like she HAD to do that every time... so i suggested that we start doing 1 lesson a week at their home. she was amenable to this, so i met them outside my student's school on wednesday.

on the way to their house, the mom asked me if i wanted to eat dinner with them that night. so freakin nice. i didn't have any plans, so i told her that i would. i figured that i would just give the daughter a lesson and then we would all eat, but when i got there i realized that they weren't that interested in having class that day. they just wanted to show me all the things in their house and hang out, haha. their apartment was tinnnny. one bedroom for the girl, one bedroom for the parents, and then a kitchen with a dining room table. the only place to really hang out is the kitchen table because they don't have a living room. it's so hard for me to imagine growing up in such a small space, you can't really move and there is no privacy. they also had a ton of pets- frogs, turtles, fish, ants and a cat.

i gave the girl a short lesson and then we were called in for dinner. the dad made the whole dinner, apparently he is the chef in the house. we had a chicken wing dish, cucumbers, an egg rollish thing, shrimp and rice. it was pretty good. for some reason though, the dad did not sit down to eat with us. i never fully understand what's going on with things like this in china. while i was eating, the mom kept encouraging me to eat more and suggesting what i could eat next, haha.

after we were done eating, the daughter returned to her room to do her homework and the dad sat down. we ate gummy bears and nuts, and drank 2 different kids of tea. they don't speak english, so the entire conversation was in chinese. i didn't understand everything they were saying, but enough to keep up and add my 2 cents, which was always some inane comment haha. they are really chill people though so i felt relaxed the whole time, which is good. earlier, i had been dealing with another parent who didn't really speak english and it was incredibly stressful because she basically was speaking to me like i was a fluent speaker- she seemed to have no ability to slow down her speed of speech (even though i asked her to slow down like 4 times) and she was using ridiculous words (like instead of simply calling her son's english book a book, she was calling it a text book, which is a completely different word in chinese that i didn't know). really, how can you be so dumb? the family i was with later was just the opposite, they could speak slowly to me, and use a variety of words that i might know. but i felt like language barriers aside, we were all on the same page with each other. they're about 30-35 years old.

in total that day, i was trying to listen and speak chinese for like 6 hours. i was pretty dead when i got home, but it was cool trying to use everything i have learned.
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i finally got a picture of my little student, she is the one doing the wink face. she is a genuinely nice child, but her class is like the class from hell. last semester they were my first class in the morning every friday, and i always dreaded it. the day and time have changed this year, but they're still little hell raisers. of course i still have a soft spot for them though- my little private student, the girl next to her in pink who is always smiling and whining at me about something or other chinese, and the boy behind them with glasses whose mom told me on QQ how much her son likes me as a teacher :)