my student and her family

finally got some pictures of my student and her family. this is the same mom who would always clean my entire apartment before i decided that we should switch the lessons to her house so she wouldn't have to do that anymore. now they always invite me to eat with them, they just won't stop being so nice. this picture of the mom and i is a little awkward because it is a picture of a picture- they printed it out for me :) now it's up on my refrigerator. you can see their 2 fish tanks in the background (they have to many pets for the size of their apartment!), the chili peppers strung from the wall, and our post-dinner tea glasses on the table.

here is what a meal looks like at their house. SO MUCH FOOD! i really don't think they could normally eat like this every night. someone told me that in order to show hospitality and friendship the chinese will go all out on meals. starting from the top left hand corner and going around clockwise, they had chicken neck, seafood and egg soup, celery, string beans with beef, sweet and sour fish, tofu, cucumbers and of course, rice. they also gave me a really strange tasting duck egg to try. the yolk had a very ammonia'ish flavor. when i was trying to describe my perception of it to them, i didn't know how to say yolk so i wanted to call it the center of the egg, but i think the way i said 'center' is the colloquial term used for 'city center', so they were giggling. oh well...i would probably laugh too if a chinese person referred to an egg's yolk as its city center!
the dad cooks all of the food for the house, because apparently he is a better cook than the wife. i told them that this cooking ability issue was the same case with my boyfriend and i, and the daughter was delighted to hear that we were the same as her parents, haha. maybe if zach comes to dalian he and the husband can share sob stories about how incompetent their significant others are :) they seem like a pretty happy couple, although i guess you never really know. i have heard that many chinese marriages are born out of convenience and practicality rather than love, but on the surface at least they seem to defy that stereotype.

they were playing simon and garfunkel one time i was there, so i brought my computer over to their house last time and put a bunch of my music on a usb so they could try it out. now they will rocking out to the beatles, bob dylan, stevie wonder, and the mamas and the papas. i think i'll give them miles davis too if i can remember. i am positive about most things in china but i really don't like the music here (i'm not the only one, another foreigner once described it as 'primitive'), but they just happened to have some CDs of a chinese singer i heard on TV one time that i liked. this singer is sort of like the susan boyle of china- she is unattractive, overweight, but has an amazing voice that makes up for the first 2 super important qualities :) i knew there was a reason i liked these people!

here's my little student, amy. amy is a very pretty girl but photographs poorly. her english is dismal and still continues to be dismal even after working with her for several weeks, but i have confidence that she just needs to get over this first language hump and then she'll improve. right now we are still at the basics- months, days of the week, colors, etc. i do have to say that she has made major improvements in those areas after i saw that art was her thing and could be used to her learning advantage. we made little flash cards with her own pictures which helps her remember the vocabulary. to all chinese people's credit though, our naming system for the months and days of the week is about 100 times as hard as the chinese naming system- january translates to '1 month', february translates to '2 month', march translates to '3 month'....i think you get the picture. it's the same with the days of the week. who said that chinese was the hardest language in the world? :)-
here is a little hat that amy made for me. she is so talented! i also saw some of her artwork in room which i'd say was at least on a high school level. she had done a shadow study on several objects and shapes and the different shades of gray was very well rendered. i told her parents that she should be an architect!
despite all these great things about them, there are some culture differences that can make things a little awkward. the language barrier doesn't help either. 2 saturdays ago i was at their house for our 11am lesson and i was feeling pretty tired. the night before was my friend's birthday party so i had stayed out quite late and i had woken up around 7:30 for my 9am lesson at my house (i needed to clean and make myself presentable, ugh). after finishing the lesson they invited me to eat lunch with them, which was cool, and then the mom and i finished watching harry potter 7 pt. 2 because we had watched half of it a few days before. afterwards we talked about the movie as best as i could, and then somehow switched to talking about health and swimming. this somehow led to talking about massage, and the mom proceeded to give me a wonderful chair massage! man, she's always so nice to me, but i felt really uncomfortable about the whole thing and didn't return the massage. i'm going to take her out to get a real massage sometime next week though. okay this is another one of my convoluted stories, now i will get to the point.

the daughter and the father eventually left to go get some groceries and i was left alone with the mom for a while. at this point, i was honestly fatiguing- it was about 4 or 5 pm, i was running on like 3 hours of sleep, had already taught for 3 hours that day, and was attempting to listen to and speak a language that i am not that well versed in. after chatting for a while, i told the mom that i was very tired and needed to go home soon. she absolutely would not have this. she said that i could take a nap in her and her husband's bed (!) and wake up for dinner time. i think this is fairly common in china. i told her that it was very nice of her but that i really couldn't do it. this is where her insistence went beyond all reason in my mind. in america, i think most people would understand that i needed to go home and rest, especially after repeating it twice. the mom was aware of all of the points that i listed above. but in china, sometimes it feels like other people think they know what's better for you than you do, and will be really pushy with you. i also think it's a politeness thing- the chinese seem to have less hesitation about arguing back and forth about who will pay the bill, who will sit down in the empty seat on the bus (i've seen this fight go on so long between 2 old people that it became bizarre), etc. she may have thought that i was just being polite and we were playing this little game before i finally said 'okay'. however, i was not playing, and felt extremely uncomfortable, almost as if i was being held hostage. at first i was like crap i guess i'm going to have to go along with this...but then from somewhere deep inside, a new hardened victoria emerged. i explained to her that we were having a culture difference and that in america we have different habits when visiting friends. this led her to think i was speaking about solely about the bed situation, and she went on to insinuate some things that i didn't want to think about. i tried my best to explain that it was more than just that, but i had trouble because i didn't want to hurt her feelings. finally, she repeated culture difference to herself, and i think she realized that she was just not going to be able to understand where i was coming from, just as i didn't really understand where she was coming from either.

the father and daughter returned to the house soon thereafter, along with a family friend and her daughter. they had a ton of groceries with them. i was like oh great, the WHOLE gang is here now. i felt really terrible, so i played with the new little girl and amy for a little bit, but then they seemed to be looking to me to make up a game to play and i was all gamed out (i play a game in all 26 of my classes each week) so i was like oh my goodness it's time to bid everyone adieu. amy really didn't want me to leave but i had to break her heart and say that i had to. i talked to the father alone for a moment and told him that speaking chinese really makes me tired sometimes, and i think he understood where i was coming from.

putting my shoes on was pretty awkward because everyone was looking at me sadly. they just couldn't handle me leaving empty handed though, so they grabbed an uncooked bag of popcorn and gave it to me. the mom thought for a second and remembered that i didn't have a microwave so they took the bag back from me and popped it in the microwave. while i waited there i didn't know what to do so i told them a "story" about my shoes to ease the tension. then the popcorn was done and they put it in a bag for me. i left, a hot bag of popcorn and all, and took the bus back to home sweet home!

anyhow, moral of the story, it's a blessing and a curse to be so welcome somewhere....! i also teach another boy whose family invites me to dinner after every lesson. so 2nd moral of the story, if you do private teaching every night in china you will never have to cook :)