We all know, even if it’s not through personal experience, that
hosting a foreign exchange student has the obvious advantages. You
will learn about another culture, experience diversity firsthand,
and improve international relations and all that. But I think the
biggest advantage is that it motivates you to ante up your
household standards. A lot.
We all know, even if it’s not through personal experience, that hosting a foreign exchange student has the obvious advantages. You will learn about another culture, experience diversity firsthand, and improve international relations and all that. But I think the biggest advantage is that it motivates you to ante up your household standards. A lot.
And it’s not because anyone will be overly critical of your laissez faire housekeeping lifestyle. Oh, no. It’s more because of the thought that your family, the same group of people who break out into fistfights over who has three more sprinkles on their ice cream, will now be an example of The Average American Family. One that, mind you, an entire foreign country could base their view of American culture on.
Frankly, if that’s not enough pressure to make you go clean out the dust bunnies from underneath the oven, I don’t know what is. And I’m not even going to mention the additional guilt caused by the irony that somebody has spent hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars to travel over half of the globe just to end up vacationing at “ha! ha!” your own house.
So you can understand my problem.
This year, our exchange student was from China, which made things even trickier since our last three students were from Japan. Oh, it’s not like there’s anything wrong with China. It’s a nice country, filled with ancient culture and educated people. The problem is that, at last check anyway, it’s a Communist country, which if you recall from high school history class, is a form of government built on the credo of sharing. It’s a concept that’s not exactly my family’s strong point.
So, being a slightly creative and desperate sort of person, I came up with a few ideas that, with a little luck and a big language barrier, might help us set a good example.
The first was to establish strict household rules. The basic tenets were: There will be no eating bologna and bean dip for breakfast. Everyone will be out of bed and dressed in street legal clothes by 10am. Meals will be served at the dining room table and there will be intelligent, lively discussions about current events, the state of the global economy or international relations. There will be no burping, throwing food, or name calling. And under no circumstances will anyone ever mention the incident between the dog and the beer can sculpture in the garage.
However, this flimsy charade was waaaay too exhausting for my family to keep up for more than two or three days.
So then we resorted to Plan B, which was much less tiring, but slightly more devious. It was built on the premise that we could go back to our usual ways, and just make ourselves look normal by sporadically saying things like, “Hey, did you know that it took four years to build the Golden Gate Bridge, and that Americans always lay around playing video games in their pajamas until noon?” Or, “Isn’t it interesting that most Congressmen can’t discuss the key points of the Patriot Act, and that cold cereal is really more of a dinner food here?” And so on.
Of course, I don’t need to tell you that the big problem with this plan is that it’s not only sneaky and wrong, in the end it fools nobody, anyway.
So luckily there was still Plan C to fall back on, which is simply keeping our exchange students so busy that they’re always too tired to realize what a shoddy dump they have landed in for three weeks.
So that’s what we did. And in the end she had a nice time, we had a nice time, and, most importantly, she never realized that she’d spent her entire vacation in a place that, upon closer inspection, would make Communist China look pretty good.
And, as an extra added bonus, she can now say 17 variations of, “You have more green M&Ms than me, you big booger-nose,” in clear English.
And my kids can say it back in Chinese.
Hey, if that’s not bridging cultural differences, I don’t know what is.
