Sometimes when I eat, Sophie brings over all her toys and tells me they are for lunch. I must try each one with my chopsticks and give her feedback on her cooking. So far I have enjoyed the playdough more than the stuffed dolphin, but I think that’s just because I am a vegetarian.

It’s funny how whenever my family thinks I don’t like something, they ask me if I want sugar on it. I don’t know where they got this idea that Americans put sugar on all their food, but I certainly don’t like it on tomatoes and fried goat cheese.

My Chinese grandmother is kind of controlling. I love her, but it’s true. I think she likes to change tiny details of my plans just to show that she can. If I say I’ll be home at 6:30, she’ll say 6. If I want to sleep in until 8, we’ll haggle until I get her down to 7:30. If I want to read, she’ll trick me into going shopping (“we’re just going for a little walk”). My Chinese mother and grandfather are much more loose. So far I’m just amused by my grandmother’s antics, but if I were living here for longer I wonder if she would drive me crazy. Is she testing my American-ness? I like to test her too. I intentionally shock her with things like, “My parents are divorced.” “My mother likes to order takeout.” “I plan to put my career before a man.” “In America we do not think that wearing a t-shirt is the reason someone catches a cold.”

I came home fifteen minutes early from class yesterday, and the kitchen was filled with women. They were my Chinese grandmother’s friends. It was like having fifteen Chinese grandmothers at once. They kept urging me to sit down and eat even though no one else was ready, because in China you don’t wait for everyone to be seated, so I awkwardly picked up a jiaozi, and they kept coming over every thirty seconds to tell me to eat more and to try replace my chopsticks with a fork. There is nothing more offensive to a foreign exchange student in China than being offered a fork.

My grandmother got out the photo album I had given her and pointed to a picture of the Tufts econ department. “This is her house!” she said, and her old lady friends gasped. Then they started speaking in Kunminghua. The only thing I could understand, other than “she doesn’t understand Kunminghua,” was, “you let her ride her bicycle by herself?” I just moped by the fruit. Thank god pomegranates take so long to eat, and my grandmother was making me eat the entire thing. Otherwise it would have been me, a bunch of old ladies staring at me, and nothing to do but meet their eyesight.

Instead of lecture we went to a Wa village to get some more of that indispensable cultural immersion. I don’t really know what exactly the point was, but it started with a Wa man pointing to Justin, the only black guy on the trip, saying that since they both had dark skin they must share the same ancestry, and ended with Justin up onstage with a gong tied around his waist. Then we all had to chant one by one into a microphone and perform some kind of borderline sexual dance that involved a lot of hair-swishing and bending over, as Chinese schoolchildren looked on in boredom. One twelve-year-old even plugged his ears.