How Thanksgiving Dinner Could Be Considered Weird

There's a Chinese guy who lives in my apartment complex that I talk to sometimes while waiting for the transit in the mornings. The first reason I'm fascinated by Asian culture is because people's names mean something. Not to say that American names have no significance. Most traditional names mean something in the language they originate from, and many times our names are chosen out of a family tribute (my middle name is my paternal grandmother's first name), but many times our names are chosen because they sound nice. I just think it's awesome that many Asian names have a direct meaning in their own language.

It's also fascinating to me how much is sacrificed in order for a foreign student from a country like China to go to school in the United States. He has no family here. He is the only one out of his family who has ever traveled to the US, and many people are counting on him back home. Failure is not an option. Can you imagine not being able to see your family for years at a time? He can't just go home for Christmas break. Like, I can't fathom that. The longest I've been on my own in a foreign country is a few months.

He had only studied English for a little over a year before coming, and speaks extremely well, seems to understand easily, gives presentations in class. Imagine if I had to do the same thing in Chinese after only about a year. Caramba. French is hard enough, and Spanish took years to master.

I asked him what he did for Thanksgiving, and he said he had dinner with an American family. I asked if he liked the food, and he was pretty much like . . . "It was okay." He said he liked the turkey. lol. He said that any meal without rice as a significant part of the meal is weird to him. Like, to us, rice is an occasional side dish. But to the Chinese, it's eaten with everything, all day, every day. That was so amusing to me. For Thanksgiving food to be completely out of cultural context and foreign because of the decentrality of rice.