Hanging out with Yangyi

            Every time I’ve met with Yangyi this semester it has been in a more artificial, manufactured way than I would prefer. Recently, I’ve had some issues with him not coming to our meetings. After some thought, I decided to make it less of an intrusive meeting than something he could do while going about his normal routine. Thus, we ate at Market Square together. It was an experience…maybe we won’t do it again. But I did learn a few things.

            First, some Chinese students apparently have trouble digesting American food. Yangyi doesn’t have any problems and actually likes some American food (“not as much as Chinese food, but its good. Whatever,” he says), but he tells me that some of his friends just can’t take American food. I think that’s pretty interesting. Through my discussions with my friend who is an international student from China, they don’t really have many restaurants in China from other cultures, not really anyway. Perhaps that adds to their inability to digest American food. But he seems to like it. We both got burgers and fries.

            The main discussion topic on the menu was Thanksgiving Break. He asked what I was doing and I told him I was going home. I explained to him the 3 F’s of Thanksgiving: Food, Football, and Family. He looked at me and then took another bite. I laughed awkwardly, and then we moved on.

            I asked him what his plans were and he said a lot of his friends were headed up to New York because they had never went, but he and a group of his friends are headed down to Houston for Thanksgiving. He said it was for the beach, but I warned him he wouldn’t find much beach there. I suggested Galveston. He was a little distraught at the fact that all of the friends going with him at that time were girls. I told him not to worry about it too much, but he questioned whether he could get one of the guys going to New York to cancel their trip to go with him.

            It was strange to me for them not to experience the American holiday while they are here. All of his friends are Chinese International students. Last year, I took the friend referred to earlier home with me for the week of Thanksgiving. She said that it was really important to her to experience our culture just as I would want to experience hers if (and, according to her, when) I travel to China. However, because Yangyi hasn’t made any American friends and doesn’t really know any Americans besides me, he was unable to experience the holiday. I felt bad, but he didn’t really seem to care. This woke me up to the idea that of course he wouldn’t necessarily care. It only matters so greatly to me because it has been engrained into my culture and into my life. But he has other holidays I don’t necessarily recognize that he is probably grief-stricken when he misses them.

            So this conversation resulted in 2 basic understandings: (1) I was sorry he didn’t get to experience Thanksgiving, one of my favorite holidays, and (2) it served as a culture-check for me to lead towards a better understanding of how it is like to be in another country when holidays occur that are not among your customs.