William

I caved and had dinner with my student last Tuesday because he was preparing for an oral English exam as part of a summer work program.  It sounds really sketchy and borderline illegal, but basically these students apply to a program where they pay a fee and then go to work in the US at a variety of different jobs including working at McDonalds, as is shown in the photo on the brochure.  I am against this on so many different levels and also want my students to get a better view of American than this warped cheap labor one.

It's marketed as some sort of "Work & Travel" program where they work for 3 months and then have money to travel around the US for a few weeks.  I question the legitimacy and legality of the whole thing.

So one of my students, William, is applying to this program and asked me to practice speaking English with him after class to prepare for the test.  I invited Jenna along so we could tag-team test him, but it was simultaneously the strangest, most hilarious and awkward dinner I've ever had with a Chinese person.

After we grilled him on some basic interview questions, the conversation took a turn to all sorts of weird topics.

• William asked us what we thought about love, and apparently this meant homosexuality (quote, "What about boy and boy or girl and girl?).  We told him that it was perfectly fine for a man to love another man and a woman to love another woman and he said this was just wrong and not correct while making all sorts of faces at us.  Moving on...
• Apparently the poor kid has an ex girlfriend that he is still in love with and still is his cell phone background.  They broke up at the start of the school year, but he says he is still in love with her.  He also said that she was "up here" and he was "down here" (then we couldn't really describe to him how to say 'out of your league').  
• Then he declared that he "wants a wife!" and basically spends all his extra time out of school looking for a girlfriend.  This is actually pretty common with students and they are obsessed with finding a significant other. 

Then the conversation shifted and he decided that he was in love with Jenna.

• William was perplexed that Jenna was single and had no desire to have a boyfriend.  He just didn't get it.  No matter how many times we said it, he would just be flabbergasted and say "I don't understand!" This is also a pretty common feeling in China.  We then tried to explain to him about the American desire to get to know yourself before you settle down and look for a wife/husband and he just didn't get it.  You'd think we were speaking a completely different language or that we were from a completely different planet. 
  
• Jenna is probably going to teach in Taiwan after this semester is over.  When she told William, you would think someone killed his puppy because he yelled "NOOO!!" and the color drained out of his face.  I laughed hysterically and was pretty much tearing at this point. 
• Then he decided that he wanted to be Jenna's boyfriend and kept asking her out to be his girlfriend.

When we walked back to our dorm, we got into this really awkward standoff when William wanted to give Jenna a hug but she wouldn't (teacher-student relationship... very dodgy here).  His logic was like this:

Americans : casual --> Jenna : American --> Jenna : casual

This ended in a standoff and a "joke" about whether he could hug her off campus.  On the whole, this was a very awkward dinner on many levels but shed light on many cultural differences between us as Americans and the Chinese.  I have a feeling I'll be mentally digesting this one for a while...