The second time the subject was
family. His family, my family, writing the Chinese character for family; in
short, we covered it all.
I must admit this meeting was
awkward. The amount of time in between our initial meeting and this meeting was
less than a week, and so we struggled with finding what we could talk about. I
tried to ask him about some of the things we had previously discussed. I
thought this would be perfect to let him know I had paid attention and was
truly interested in what he had to say. The problem was when he was telling me
about his future plans in our last meeting he had told me the wrong dates. For
instance, he had said the next Monday he would be going to a Justin Bieber
concert with some friends of his from the IEP program. This being the Tuesday
after the day I understood him to be going to the concert, I asked him how the
concert was. Apparently it was still three weeks away. Oops! He had to
re-explain it to me. While this could have been a bad or frustrating situation,
it actually was a great jumping off point for our conversation. We rehashed the
concert and any further plans he had made and then used it as a springboard to
discuss his friends here.
This is where family started to seep
into our conversation. Apparently one of his friends here acts very similarly
to his cousin in China. Because of my understanding of Chinese laws about
having children, I questioned him on his family situation. Apparently one of
his parents has a brother, which is not very common in China. Though we never
did clear up which parent it was that had the sibling, the point is that the
fact that he or she had a sibling was shocking enough in context. I took this
as an opportunity to share with him a picture of my HUGE family.
When the EMT’s finished CPR on him
20 minutes later...just kidding. His eyes did pop nearly out of his head when
he realized I literally meant that they were all related to me, but any true
medical emergency was averted. He asked about the family dynamics in a large
family like mine, and I tried to explain to him about my family as best I
could. From what I could tell, it was difficult for him to really understand
what I was talking about. He has 1 cousin and they are extremely close, and
I have around twenty first cousins that I probably see once a year, if that.
It’s easy to see how it would be difficult to comprehend something so
drastically different than you are used to.
At this point we switched to writing
Chinese. Due to the topic of the evening, we chose “family” as the character to
write. I’ve wrote Chinese characters before, but family was definitely more
difficult than the other words I have attempted. It took at least 5 minutes for
a successful writing of “family.” But how long it took is not important! It is
the fact that I did it, and did it well I might add!
At this point we again had the
awkward moment of searching for topics to discuss. Unfortunately we had
exhausted every other topic in our previous meeting. So, 45 minutes into our
second meeting, we decided to depart with plans of meeting again soon.
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