I’ve moved in with my host family. I am with a young, single mother who lives with her parents and her three-year-old daughter in an apartment in downtown Kunming. My host grandmother likes to keep me at arms’ length, putting a blanket around my chair when I’m doing homework because “I might catch cold.” The grandfather does the cooking and plays with the three-year-old girl, Sophie, who happens to speak perfect English. No one else in the family can say a word, but of course the toddler strolls right into my room an hour after I move in and announces, “my name is Sophie, what’s yours?”

It’s kind of bizarre living with a family that speaks only Chinese and a toddler that only wants to speak English. But Sophie seems to have made an executive decision to help my Chinese by flatly refusing to translate anything her family asks her to. Of course, she addresses me nonstop in my native tongue—“where are your slippers? Why are you in bare feet? You’re eating too much pomegranate,” but when her grandmother is trying to explain to me where to lock my bicycle, Sophie glares up with arms crossed, and shakes her head.

That’s right, I’ve decided to grab the bull by the horns and ride my bicycle in Kunming, a sort of carpe diem moment for me. Also, my host family lives a forty-five minute walk from my university. Within the first twenty feet of riding, one of my pedals fell off. I just looked at it in disdain. At least the Chinese drivers did not make roadkill of me today. Perhaps tomorrow.

Home-cooked Chinese food is infinitely better than restaurant food. They don't feel the need to drench everything in oil. My host grandfather cooked me eggplant with cloves of garlic that I simply could not get enough of, and I don’t even like eggplant. There was boiled spinach, familiar enough. And thin tofu strips with slices of red pepper. They mercifully kept the hot pepper on the side so I did not have to choke on everything I ate. I was so confused. Why was it so good? I didn’t even have to supplement my meal with hidden crackers after everyone had finished.

The first morning, I woke up (to Sophie pounding on the door, “wake up, wake up!” It made me miss Shay) to find breakfast already laid out on the table for me. Sophie and my grandmother sat across from my plate, watching expectantly. It was seven o’clock in the morning, and they had painstakingly arranged the ingredients for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a serving of potato chips, and a red apple. My grandmother looked very pleased with herself.

My bed here is a lot more comfortable than my hard dorm bed, with a big squishy comforter, though bus station lighting seems to be a general trend in China. Also, I have discovered that my family stored their bootleg B-movie DVDs in my closet. Surviving Christmas with Ben Affleck last night, Lord of War with Nicholas Cage tomorrow?

But bootleg movies aside, since I was pretty nervous coming into my homestay, I am truly thankful about the family I am with. They are all very wonderful to me, if a little overprotective--I think I can deal with a 6 p.m. curfew for the time being. My Chinese has already improved drastically. There really is no substitute for living with a real Chinese family. I’ve talked to my host mother so much that sometimes I don’t even notice I’m talking in Chinese. Until Sophie comes along and tries to feed me dried prunes or whatnot and I jump at how strange English sounds to my ears.

I hope my host mother doesn’t mind putting up with my kindergarten-level comparisons. That’s all they make you do in Chinese class, dumb comparisons about Zhongguo versus Meiguo. “Oh, Chinese broccoli is spicier than American broccoli, how interesting!”

Last night was my host grandmother’s birthday so we went out to one of those hospital-sized restaurants that are so common in China, where families can rent their own private rooms. I ate peanuts, fried goat cheese, a slightly greasy tofu dish, and pumpkin fritters. Being a vegetarian is very convenient because not only is Chinese meat sketch-tastic, but not eating it reduces the number of dishes which people can randomly spoon into my bowl. Which they do, quite frequently. Also, whenever people turned their heads, Sophie would grope my food. My grandmother would catch her, than transfer whatever she had fondled onto her own plate and give me an even more generous serving of the tainted item. And then she would scold me for not eating more, and other people would join in the fun of heaping food into my bowl, or just shout words of encouragement from the sidelines. The whole thing was very complicated.

On the way there, we all piled into the Volkswagen of who I am 99% sure is my host mother’s younger brother’s fiancé. They insisted that I sit in the front passenger seat. Not only did they insist that I sit there, but Sophie insisted on sitting on my lap. Not only did she insist on sitting in my lap, but she turned around and stared at me the whole drive there. It baffles me that my host mother won’t let me go outside without a million layers of fleece, but she lets her three-year old daughter roam around in the front seat of a moving vehicle in a Chinese city on the lap of a foreigner. Obviously I have a lot to learn.