"What a rude thing to say!"

Okay. The family dinner. It was a reunion of Sally's father's mom, his sisters and their families (one child policy only dates to 1987). Sally's dad treated us. We ate at a hotel restaurant with a buffet that had both Western and Chinese food. Dinner was U.S. $10 a person... which is an expensive restaurant there. It was kinda chaotic! Her 8-year-old cousin kept getting more food for everybody whether they wanted it or not (he brought me orange juice), and when he tried to put food on people's plates their harsh grandpa would shout at him to sit down and shut up (a sentiment that knows no language :D). Meanwhile, everyone was taking pictures and her grandma was ordering us to eat more, or else.   

Sally hadn't seen these relatives for 6 to 10 years. I was a little bit of a sore thumb. But very welcome, I think? I smiled a lot, tried out my new Chinese when it was appropriate (it works now! I can ask a bunch of questions! and sometimes I can understand a few words of people's responses! Just a verb here and there, not enough to do away with Sally's translating by far. But exciting nonetheless!) Mostly I sat there and ate, hoping nobody noticed me eating a bunch of pizza and no tentacles. Eventually they got around to the now-tiresome "Wow, she is SO WHITE, we have to get pictures with her!" conversation, and then I smiled and nodded extra nicely. Sally's uncle reportedly said "Now I feel like Hu Jintao!" - meaning, meeting a foreigner makes him feel like the freaking _president_, because he gets to meet them all the time. Isn't that just crazy, even if it was a joke??

The same uncle seemed really happy to talk to me, or rather at me. We were seated next to each other, and periodically he'd turn to me, look straight into my face and lean in close as if that would help me understand as he started chatting at me in rapid Mandarin. And then there I was with this smiling, expectant elder right in my face. What the hell was I supposed to do??

But. But, but. All was almost lost. In Xi'an's Muslim Quarter, we had wandered into a public courtyard full of four or five professional calligraphers, who paint traditional Chinese script onto scrolls in their personal style of handwriting (you can draw characters in cursive!). So I got all excited over this stupid idea to commission a scroll as a souvenir for my parents... that would read "Leave my country, foreign devil." AREN'T I JUST THE FUNNIEST EVER.

Hyuk, hyuk.

So Sally had the even brighter idea to mention to her family that I wanted to buy a custom scroll. Sure enough, Uncle is a semi-professional calligrapher and would be honored to make one for me. He could look up some beautiful characters to put on it. What would it say, he asked?

Sally's next sentence silenced the table. They blinked, confused. Finally her aunt exclaimed something to the effect of, "What a rude thing to say!"

Sally never managed to get across how this could possibly be funny, a joke of any sort. It turns out that
A) Chinese people sort of idolize Americans these days and appear to have no idea about our conflicted attitudes toward white people's colonial past,
B) you have to sign all the scrolls you paint, such that writing that phrase would be a direct insult from him to my parents,
C) dry humor is just not a thing in Chinese. Neither is sarcasm. Sally can't think of a word that could mean "sarcasm," or even make a sarcastic joke in Chinese if she tried! After dinner I asked her to try to translate "Well, _that_ went well!" And she couldn't!!

So finally, Uncle broke the silence with a generous "Don't worry. I'll look up some characters and write a meaningful phrase," and a smile. In my face.

Well, I tried... and they still wanted their girlfriend pictures with me after, so hopefully they just chalked it up to something strange about American culture!