Adventures in (mistaken) Identification

My family recently took a trip to Europe, where we went to London, Paris, and Cologne. As these are somewhat popular tourist locations, the number of Asian tours- namely those from Japan and China- was staggering. The implications for my family from this constant influx would be that we would be subject to the guessing games of the local population in regards to our ethnicity. As we walked out of a small street in a small town in the west of Germany, in front of a large, drunk, singing crowd of Germans, a man staggered over to us. "Sayonara!" he said thickly and cheerfully, struggling to keep his balance. My family looked at him. "Sayonara!" he repeated, undeterred. My dad looked at him. "No," my dad said. "Zai jian!" The man laughed and repeated himself. "Sayonara!" "No, no, we're from Taiwan," my dad explained. "Taiwan!" he exclaimed. "Taiwan..." he repeated, blankly. "Ah!" And he swung his arm around my dad's and they struck up conversation, my dad explaining what Taiwan was, and answering the man's other questions about our origins. His fairly good-natured drunkenness made his mistake almost endearing, but other times people seemed fairly determined to tell us exactly what we were, and that was certainly not appreciated. What was endearing about the whole guessing game, though, was that sometimes they got it right. The French seemed to be particularly accurate, in this regard. They got it right at both the Louvre and Versailles. As we were leaving Versailles, several vendors were selling trinkets just outside the gate. As we walked past them, one looked at us and said, "Ni hao!" With the simplest of all ploys, his call to our language worked. Of all the vendors out there, we went to him, examining his collection of Eiffel Tower keychains and scarves. "How much?" I asked, pointing at the keychains. "San ge yi kuai chian," he said. Three for a dollar. In severely accented but absolutely understandable Mandarin. I blinked. I looked at my mother. Really? I thought. He just said that? There was no way we weren't going to buy from him now. He, with his two brilliant lines (he had undoubtedly just displayed his entire repertoire for us, but no matter), had won us over. He had connected with us on that ever so important level. And then I heard my mom. "Si ge!" she said. Four! Always the bargainer. The language thing will only help you so much, mister vendor man. Karen wants to go back to Paris because it was ever so lovely, but she wants to learn the impossible French language first. After all, you can't always depend on them knowing your language. You can contact her at karen_shih at yahoo.com

Best Of Both Worlds

The plan for this 3 month summer was to do something productive. The first step to the plan was debate camp. Alas, Stanford debate was too far away and far too costly for the wallet. My parents and I came to a mutual agreement that the University of Iowa was a good institution to learn from. Although I never really got to see palm trees, beaches, or gorgeous women, I did gain knowledge in the field of Lincoln Douglas debate while looking at cornfields, cornfields, cornfields, and grass. Aside from debate, there are chances to meet interesting people that share your same passion for arguing with people. One of these people was a guy named Jack. It all started with me walking by a building while taking some time off from debate. I noticed the building had a few footsteps leading to the door. At the bottom of those steps was a plastic cup with a fat purple straw in it. Bubble tea. Somebody had finished drinking it and left it there. You can imagine my surprise and enthusiasm at discovering bona fide bubble tea in the state of Iowa. I had to figure out where it came from. I asked around and finally a girl from Texas told me that she had bought some at "The Java House." At that point, debate was no longer on my mind and I rushed out to find all the Asian people at the institution and tell them about the good news. Nobody seemed to care. You see, I live in Toledo, Ohio where bubble tea doesn't exist. These other kids live in big cities where bubble tea is accessible to them. Thankfully, a culture loving friend named Jack Kelly was there to accompany me on my journey to find bubble tea. Jack was white, but I guess he really wanted to figure out why I made such a fuss about a beverage. We made our way to downtown Iowa which was about a 15 minute walk from campus. On the way there I told him what bubble tea was. The only way I could really describe this was, "It's a fruit smoothie or tea with milk and inside it there are little balls of gelatin-like tapioca." Jack's response: "Sounds gross." Oh, my dear friend Jack. You are so naïve. I promised to buy him a cup when we got there. When it became evident that we were taking too much time (we got lost a couple of times) and that we were going to be late for the next debate meeting, Jack began to panic. As we arrived at "The Java House," I breathed a sigh of relief. I asked the cashier if they had bubble tea. She said they didn't. They didn't even make them. I was horrified. This began to feel a lot like a Harold and Kumar situation except there was no happy ending. We had spent 40 minutes getting lost in downtown only to find out that it was for an empty cause. Jack was clearly ticked off and told me he'd never do this again (we were already late for the meeting). I was pretty embarrassed for dragging him out here. On the way back, he stomped his way to a convenience store, filled up two 48 ounce cups with slushies and paid for the $2.35 total cost. "Have it the American way," he said. "Cheers." It turned out that the girl had given me the wrong location to find tea. It was actually the store next door. How frustrating. We arrived late at the meeting and got bad looks from the lecturers as we sipped our slushies. But for some reason I felt satisfied. 2 months laters, Jack sent me a message on Facebook. He said he walked by a bubble tea restaurant and it reminded him of me. So he bought a cup, and he thoroughly enjoyed it. I guess everybody has to share a bit of their culture with somebody else even if it means wandering around downtown Iowa for one hour. I have it good. I can enjoy a slushie and bubble tea and taste both worlds. Now, so can Jack. Justin enjoys scavenging for bubble tea in his free time. He is in the process of persuading Chinese restaurants nearby to start serving his beverage of choice. If all else fails, he may have to start making his own. That usually has bad results.

Be home by eight.

Growing up, if my parents had their way, curfew would have been early. "Be home by eight", they'd say to me and my sister. "Don't go out to movie theatres late at night. They're dangerous. Go to the afternoon ones (matinees)." To us, that was absolutely ridiculous, since movie theatres were what people took their families to on a night out. We went out anyway, but our parents would say the same thing to us throughout high school and college. "Be home by eight." But eventually, my sister and I figured out that it wasn't that movie theatres in the US that were dangerous, but that movie theatres in Taiwan back then that were dangerous. More accurately, because of the dark, it was sometimes riddled with lechers and perverts that would sit next to you, and try to cop a feel on your leg. "But wait a minute, mom." I'd ask, "Didn't you go to the theatres a lot when you were young?" "Yeah, I did," she replied, "but I always carried a pin with me, so I just stabbed them if they tried anything." "Why can't we just do that?" I asked. "Don't be ridiculous." she countered, as if it was the dumbest idea to have come out of my mouth. So my sister and I decided to try another tactic. We would actually take our parents to the movies to show them that it's not so bad. In the 14 years that we had been in the US, they hadn't had time or the inclination to go see a movie. We'd pick an AMC with the reclining seats and big cup holders, and hopefully, they'd see that movie theatres weren't dangerous places. During winter break, while my sister and I were home, we took them to a movie. At the time, I wasn't really familiar with what was out there, but I saw a trailer on TV about a sunken ship, and a submarine flipping over wreckage. I thought, "Hey, that looks like a good documentary that my dad would like to see, and that whole Leonardo DiCaprio love story is just something on the side." Yes. I took my parents to go see "Titanic". It might have been ok, except that sitting next to your mom is pretty uncomfortable when Kate Winslet is naked and saying, "Jack, I want you to draw me in this...and only this." In the end they enjoyed the movie, and even gasped when the old lady threw the blue diamond into the sea. "Why didn't she just keep it?" as they threw their hands up in frustration. So from then on, my parents weren't as opposed to us seeing movies at night. In fact, it became much of a family tradition. Whenever my sister or I were home from college, we'd all go see a movie. However, ever since Titanic, it was a string of bad-films-to-see-with-your-parents. One time, I let them pick the movie while I was driving home. I met them at the movie theatre, and was dismayed to find that they had already brought tickets to "Shakespeare in Love". More uncomfortable scenes that I suffered through with my parents. Damn you, Gwenyth Paltrow! But the ultimate bad-movie story was when my dad and I decided to go see a movie while my mom and sister were out. I mistakened "8mm" with Nicolas Cage for another film, and ended up watching it with my dad. For those of you that don't know, "8mm" is a detective story about snuff films (pornographic films with killing the porn stars). That movie was disturbing and turned my stomach. It was definitely not something I would have wanted to see with my dad. I was afraid of what he might say when we came out of the theatre. Unexpectedly, he was quite pleased with the film. "Hmph," he said, "Good movie. Shows you all the crazy people out there in the world. Be home by eight." Wil Chung is a programmer and am looking for other like-minded programmers. He just went to TAF, the midwest summer conference, where he likes watching kids grow into better people than him. He keeps a weblog at http://webjazz.blogspot.com/.