Please don’t read this post if you take that Commandment about honoring your mother and father seriously. I mean, I’ll honor your mother and father, but I can’t honor my own right now.
My parents love foreigners. This is because they are both suppurating boils on the armpit of humanity, and they need a veil of cross-cultural miscommunication to hide it. So one of their new foreign friend is a “girl” from China. She is thirty, a little older than myself. Very vivacious. Maybe I’d say she was a little ditzy if she were an American and she couldn’t hide behind a veil of cross-cultural miscommunication.
Anyway, my parents immediately want to set the two of us up. Never mind that she lives in Beijing. Never mind the fact that they have no idea if the two of us like each other (we do) or if we have anything in common (we don’t). Never mind the fact that every time my mom tries to set me up with somebody she does it with all the subtlety of a transorbital lobotomy, and my personality turns inexorably into wet cement.
They naturally can’t tell her that I’m a slovenly ne’er-do-well, so they make up some bullshit about how I’m a computer expert. That’s the best they can come up with. It’s an old lie they tell all the time; with native English-speakers, it is usually recognized as a paper-thin lie, but our Chinese visitor didn’t ever understand. Everyone but me thinks her English is excellent; I thought it was barely adequate. Anyway, so they led her on about how great it would be to set me up in Beijing in an IT job. Yeah right, I want to go to the People Republic of China. What, so they can run me over with a tank instead of just vaporizing me with stolen nuclear weapons??? I just wet-cemented that idea every time it came up.
On to the hospitality part. (Really I’m only including this part to make it seem like she was the one they fucked with; really I’m just hurt because they fucked with me, but I’m transferring.) She gave my mom a set of lovely chopsticks in their own case; she also gave her a wallet-size picture of herself. So my mom put the picture in the chopsticks case; our visitor got very embarrassed and said, “No don’t put it there.” My mother persisted. “No, that would be what you would do for a dead person.” My mother did not relent. So now there is apparently some approximation of a Chinese shrine to our not-really-dead visitor.
My dad was buttering her up about how she should marry an American or European. (Why should she? Is she too good for a Chinese guy? He didn’t explain, but he’s enough of a bigot for me to expect the worst.) She said she’d never considered marrying an American. So he told her she would never be able to find a Chinese husband. Now granted, our guest is a liberated woman, she doesn’t live or die on her chances of getting married. But saying this to a Chinese woman is still the equivalent of telling an American woman she is a stinking pig, at least if I read my cultures correctly. She was embarrassed was polite; I was proud that I had suppressed the urge to shit my pants.
My parents talk and ignore. They love to ignore people. We told our guest we were going out for pizza. She jumped up and down and beamed in her vivacious/ditzy manner, saying that she loved pizza. Later on, at the dinner table, my mother felt the need to ask if she had ever had pizza before. She shoulda just come out and said, “By the way, if you’ve mentioned that you’ve eaten pizza before, just say it again because I haven’t heard fuckall in the past three days we’ve been grinning like idiots at each other.”
My mother felt the need to tell our guest how lazy and dirty American Indians are. I didn’t shit my pants that time either. Aren’t I great.
I could go on and on about how mad my mom was about my not teaching our guest to drive, blah blah blah, but I’ve run on for too long on this stupid subject anyway, true to my family heritage.
Any similarity in the above text to an English word or phrase is purely coincidental.
