Meet The Parents. Check!

I'm sleeping over at one of my students' houses today. I'm approximately 95% sure he's not going to murder me in my sleep, way higher than with some of my other students. He went skiing in the morning so we moved our class from 11AM to 8PM and since the subway goes home at 11PM and we have a 3+ hour class, he offered me to either stay the night or he'd pay for a taxi to take me home. My Sunday morning class got cancelled on account of lazy-studentitis so I decided to stay.

I met Yuan Yuan's mom yesterday and I'm pretty sure she likes me. I don't think she's going to try to steal me away from Yuan Yuan, especially since she's already married, but I think the overall impression I made was favorable. Yuan Yuan told me this morning that her mom was saying yesterday how she found me "quite polite for a foreigner," whatever that means, and pretty handsome, not too tall but not too short. Yuan Yuan assured me that she rushed to the defense of the foreigners of the world against such vicious calumny but I don't see why she bothered as it could only hurt my standing. Silly Yuan Yuan, so straightforward.

[WARNING: spoilers ahead]

We got to know each other over dinner, the three of us, though Yuan Yuan and I already knew each other pretty well. Coincidence? We had some roast duck, the Beijing special, and I made sure to order six times the amount we would consume if we were only worried about filling our and the people's at the neighboring tables stomachs. So I definitely passed round 1. Then we talked a bit about what I do, which is a topic ever popular with women and women's mothers. I somehow managed to restrain myself from dropping a Mark's-life-philosophy bomb on her and ruining any chances of seeing Yuan Yuan again in this lifetime without full body reconstructive surgery. When she asked me how long I'm planning to stay in Beijing, I remembered Lucy's advice and said that I had no plans of leaving in the near future except for the purpose of visiting my family. And when her mom asked me which I liked better, China or America, I neatly avoided the question by asking her which of her daughters she liked better. At that point it turned out she had a sense of humor.

There was only one slightly awkward moment. We stopped by a little convenience store on the way back because mommy needed to buy some needles and thread. I wondered allowed if Yuan Yuan knew how to sew and she answered me in the typical Jewish answer/question manner "Have you ever seen me sew?" to which my sarcasm reflex responded without my consent: "I've never seen what you do in the bathroom but I'm guessing you might know how to use the toilet." I don't know what her mother made of that. I think she could tell I was lying. That xkcd comic came to mind.


http://xkcd.com/275

Oh yea, I forgot to mention that there were three languages at play during the whole adventure. Yuan Yuan's mom doesn't really speak Mandarin. She speaks her hometown's dialect of Mandarin, which has a lot of words in common with the original, though often with different tones. Kind of like jive. So the dinner went something like this:

Yuan Yuan's mom: Hey Holm, I dig this duck yo.
Yuan Yuan: Col' got to be yo! I pray to J I get the same ol' same ol'.
Mark: I totally agree. Or I would if I understood what you're talking about. Unless it was something I wouldn't agree with of course.

After every few minutes of hometown dialect, Yuan Yuan would ask me if I understood what they were talking about. Against all expectations, I actually managed to do pretty well; I almost always got the gist of the conversation though I'd miss most of the words.

So overall I think I did way better than when I met Chun's parents in college, sometime before graduation. That time I think I forgot to turn on my brain and told them all about how I had no idea what I was doing next but that after I skipped the graduation ceremony because that was totally lame and only lame traditional parents came to see that, I was probably going to Texas to start a band and that maybe we'd sleep with other people for a while as long as there was a steady stream of groupies and if there wasn't then I'd definitely maybe possibly come back and be a good boyfriend for at least a while but who knows if that would ever happen because who knows what's going to happen in the future anyway and that I loved their daughter. By the time I got to that last part I think her father was already halfway to Massachusetts General Hospital with a severe case of reality-overdose. Compared to that, yesterday I passed with flying colors.