My host mother is obsessed with my socks. She keeps taking mine, including my Pizza Days socks, and giving me new ones while she washes them. And when I don’t wear her socks, she goes down to the village meeting house and complains to my professor.

“She’s so confused,” Xiao Zhou said to me. “She gave you socks, why won’t you wear them?”

I also don’t understand why Chinese people think they can make any situation better by giving you a pomegranate.

Our last night in Shaxi we went to the village meeting house to see a performance of traditional Bai song and dance. My host mother sat in front of me, and kept looking back every two minutes to make sure I was okay. When I got up to talk to Xiao Zhou at the other side of the room, Justin told me that she asked everyone in her general vicinity if they knew where I was and when I would be back. Then she told me I should dress warmer or I would catch cold. I’m sorry, I’m from upstate New York. At home you can ice skate on my birthday, but here I can catch cold by wearing flip flops in sixty-degree weather?

Bathing was so awkward.

I got home from lecture Sunday night and my host mother seized me by the hand and showed me a pair of plastic basins, into which she poured hot water from a thermos. I hadn’t seen a sink anywhere in the house yet and had been wondering how to shower/wash clothes, but didn’t expect to arrive at this crossroads so soon. My host mother handed me a bar of laundry detergent. “For my clothes?” I asked. “No. For your face,” she replied. We were right in the middle of the open-air “hallway” between the “kitchen” and “living room;” she and her brother were both looking at me. I sat down and started to rinse my face with only the water, but the brother unwrapped the detergent and put it in my hand. So, with them examining me closely, I washed my face with laundry detergent.

When my host mother went into the other room for a minute, I hurried and got a dab of shampoo from my room and started to wash the roots of my hair. She came back and tried to take the basin away from me, saying the weather was too cold, and I was trying to explain to her that I had shampoo in my hair, and then her brother came back out and tried to take the basin away too, and took a towel and started drying my hair as I was washing it. I managed to get all the shampoo out of my hair as I was wrestling with them, and slunk away to read the National Geographics I had found in the village meeting house.