Saturday 3/8-Sunday
3/9/03 Teppanyaki
and Sundays With the Grandparents
Mafia JieFu’s family took me to dinner at the
teppanyaki place in Tienmu again which he knows I absolutely love; the beef is
the most tender, flavorful, the best beef I have ever had in my whole life. They’re quite close with the chef who’s
pretty young and rather cute, but the only thing he’s ever said to me is the
only English he knows: “How would
you like your steak?” People here
ask for steak done as a percentage, like “5” means 50% done or medium, 8 is
well-done, etc. When I told them
we only have 3 or 4 levels for steak, they were surprised, “[So few?]” I asked if they could really tell the
difference between 2 percentage points and they admitted no.
For dessert he made us a special banana, honey and
vanilla ice cream treat that was fantastic: he fried the bananas, warmed the honey with butter on the
teppan grill and poured it over the bananas and ice cream, it hardened like
Magic Shell. YuUuuUuuUmmmMMMmm...
Sunday my parents wanted me to go see Dad’s 2nd
older brother (“Apeh”) and his wife (“A-m”) who live near Ama and Agong, I
haven’t seen them yet during my time here. I first went to Ama’s and gave them the sweets and lotions
from Mom and said I was going to Apeh’s, Ama immediately told me not to listen
if A-m told me anything about her yelling at her, which I knew nothing
about. Over there A-m gave me
fruit, tea and sure enough, immediately went into how she ran into Ama at the
market and asked about mom and dad and Ama yelled at her for some reason. So A-m was scared to go over there and
talk to them anymore. Caught in
the middle of family politics. I
was clueless about everything and not understand exactly what went on, so I
just said “I don’t know why.”
Then her daughter and husband came home and the
daughter (looked around Will’s age) immediately inquired when I was getting
married, as did A-peh. Then it got
out that I teach kids English and they ask how much teaching makes. Not wanting to tell them I make
800/hour, I said “around 600/hr” meaning an average beginning teacher; so they
assumed that’s what I make, then asked if I could teach their kid Lucy, a 17-yr-old. A-peh said Sure, he’d pay me the
600/hr. Doh, I screwed myself
over. I couldn’t backtrack now and
say “Actually *I* make 800/hour”.
So now was stuck with another kid to teach, and for less $$ too, and
found myself saying I could do it Sundays as long as I come over here to Ama’s
anyway. There go my Sundays,
yippee. The girl Lucy looked so
happy and eager to meet me and have someone to talk English with though, that I
felt bad.
Back
at Ama’s I sat with her, rubbed lotion on her hands and feet, then listened to
minutes tick by as she went on and on about the usual and some family gossip
and worrying about money and how old she and Agong were, letting most fly
through my ears. Heard Agong was
hungry for cookies so I toasted a PopTart from mom and fed it to him. He took it from me and munched away, I
asked “[Taste good]?” he agreed
“Hoh jia” and offered me some but I shook my head, just sat and waited and
thought about how kids love PopTarts and so does my 90-year-old
grandfather. He put the last
quarter down and closed his eyes, I thought he couldn’t finish, but a second
later he picked it up and finished it off.
After
teaching Livian again that night I decided to take price up with her dad, said
since I have many students now I must change the price policy, that to keep
800/hr we must do at least a 2hr session at a time, if it’s split one hour at a
time it will be 1000/hr, and I can do 1 ½ hr session for 1400. Told him to think about it and he said
OK. Felt a little bad since it was
a good day, she’d laughed which is so rare and we started making a crossword
puzzle of her new vocab words. But
business is business, and my time is money…