I consider myself very fortunate to have married a wonderful woman from Taiwan. It has been twenty years of wonder and amazement at how two people can become such good friends and companions. In those years we have had a lot of adventures and some are know as "family legends" on both sides. Her family has always suggest that I write a book to capture them but there are just not enough to compose a book, but a BLOG on the other hand would be a great place to share them. So here is one of the first...
Shortly after we were first married, we lived with her parents in Taiwan [yes, it can be done; yes, it was hard; and yes, I would do it again; more on that in another post]. She had a job that required her to leave first thing in the morning while I worked nights. That gave me a lot of time with my in-laws. Now I had learned Mandarin Chinese [which is what I mean by Chinese] years before as an LDS Missionary in Taiwan [which is where I met my wife on her mission to the same region] but I had not spoken it for many years since and I had really only learned the American way of speaking Chinese, not really the Chinese way. There is a difference and it still alludes me to this day but my in-laws always say mine is very good. Anyway, at the this time I was not great with the 5 tones of Chinese nor was my pronunciation that great either.
My mother-in-law was from Taiwan/China and spoke Chinese but she was more comfortable speaking Taiwanese, a dialect of Chinese common to either side of the Taiwan Straits. My father-in-law was from southern Mainland China and spoke Chinese but he had learned to understand Taiwanese. So as you can see, the recipe for disaster was set.
As my new life began, I found myself left alone with my mother-in-law in the mornings as my wife went off to work during the days while I worked in the evenings. My father-in-law only came home on the weekends from his job up on the mountains of Taiwan while my mother-in-law was studying at the local monastery a few nights of the week. One morning I got up after my wife had left for work and informed my mother-in-law that I had seen a rat in the house during the night. Now rat in Chinese is lau-shu [老鼠]. My mother-in-law looked at me very confused and asked me what I said. I repeated what I said that I had seen a rat. She repeated my sentence (which I thought very strange at the time but that is another lesson). I said yes that I had.
She then asked me when I had seen it and I said sometime around 3:30 am. She repeated that as well as the previous sentence and then asked where it was. I pointed at the floor where we were standing in the living room and said right here.
Now she was getting more and more animated as she pieced the story together and I could tell she was confused. She repeated all three sentences as if trying to tell herself the story. The she asked where she was and I pointed to her bedroom and said in there at which she asked why I did not wake her. I told her she was sleeping and that I did not want to.
She then repeated the whole story to herself one more time and paused. Then she asked, "Was it a boy or a girl?"
I, being somewhat flustered at the interrogation so early in the morning, answered, "I don't know, I will pick it up next time and look."
She looked at me strangely and we both paused to think.
You see in the Chinese language it is all about tones and proper pronunciation. The word for rat, lau-shu [老鼠], sounds similar to other words such as teacher, lau-shr [老師].
When my wife came home, my mother-in-law asked her about our conversation. My wife laughed when she found that I had thought I said rat, lau-shu [老鼠] but my mother-in-law had heard teacher, lau-shr [老師] since she was studying during a few of the evening. This story lives on in our family to this day.
