Free talk in my apartment.
“Mistah Hobison, what is a UFO?”
“Mistah Hobison, do you think Chinese girls are more beautiful than American girls?”
“Mistah Hobison, do you breakdance?”
This was free talk. Four evenings a week I opened my apartment for students to drop by and chat about anything. The goal was to give them informal English practice, but the time quickly morphed into an English/Chinese blend.
I played host, stocking up on peanuts, crackers, sunflower seeds, tangy fruit candies, cookies and grapes. I prided myself on serving ice water, using the tea kettle to plastic bottle to fridge method I’d perfected during that waterless first week.
We played games: mahjong, Chinese chess (not the colored marbles on a six-pointed star), and Uno with all the house rules thrown in. They loved a silly call/response game called Bippity Bop Bop Bop, but they changed the name to Bippity But But But because repeating bop bop sounded to them like baba, the Chinese word for “father” – and they felt it too weird to call each other father.
We talked. They asked about Dracula, Big Foot. They wanted to know about crime in America, how dangerous our country really was, how we treated convicts. They asked how married couples meet, and told me that in China it was against the law for a woman to marry before the age of 23, a man before 25. They said their work units would select spouses for them. They wanted to know about American universities, and told me their majors had been decided for them by test score. If I remember correctly, my graduate students had scored 86%, which made them forestry majors; an 87% would have made them architects; scores in the 90-100% range became doctors and scientists.
I never knew quite how to take their cultural revelations. Communication was difficult across the language barrier, and without a fuller understanding of social institutions, I suspected the impressions their words created in my mind were so incomplete as to constitute misinformation.
Their favorite question for me was how I was coping with culture shock. Somehow they all knew about this psychological phenomenon, perhaps because many planned to travel overseas themselves. Thus I served as a test case, their culture shock guinea pig. (About three months into the year I was listening to tapes of American country music, poring through back issues of Reader’s Digest, and asking Mom to send more dairy supplements. Think culture shock affected me?)
They taught me Chinese songs, as well as phrases that made me sound more natural in Mandarin. My favorite: “Chi le ye bai chi (Eat, since there’s no use not eating)!” I taught them English slang. Their favorite: “Maaan, I’m freakin’ out!”
Compared to their dorms, my apartment was relative luxury. They were amazed by my kitchen (their dorms had none), my combo washer/tumbler (a single appliance that washed clothes, then dried them by spinning blindingly fast, using centripetal force to fling out the water), my bathroom with shower/tub and toilet (they paid to shower in a separate building, and campus buildings had no toilets, only porcelain-rimmed holes in the floor). Even my unpadded carpet, the thinnest imaginable, seemed extravagant compared to the cement floors of their dorm rooms, where they dropped peanut shells, sweeping them up at the end of each day.
Those who were parents bragged about their children (one apiece). Harvey joked that his son looked like an elephant. Morris frequently repeated that his newborn daughter was “very beautiful, and very fat.” Historically the Chinese preferred sons over daughters, so if the one-child policy had a positive impact on family dynamics, it was in encouraging parents cherish their daughters. I was always touched by how lovingly my students who had daughters spoke about them.
They taught me games like sunflower seed racing — who can eat the most in a minute?
I taught them games like Uno, an instant favorite.
Uno games became intense enough that we eventually ditched the table for the floor — very unusual, as the Chinese don’t consider sitting on the floor to be clean.
The call-and-response game Bippity-Bop-Bop-Bop (or, as they renamed it, Bippity-But-But-But).
