Sixty people, one foreigner, and one rubric

The kitchen is quiet at last. I am still in my jacket, sitting at the table, while my wife pours a final cup of tea. Sixty people, one foreigner, and I spent four hours auditing myself. The porcelain clicking against the wood is the first plain sound I’ve heard all evening.

“I keep thinking about the host,” I say. “He never let my glass go empty. And I couldn’t tell whether I was keeping up with the room or just imitating it badly.”

She stops, the teapot in midair. This is usually where she translates. Tonight she only looks amused, and a little tired.

“You’re running the tape back again,” she says. “Looking for the place where it went wrong.”

“I’m not looking for mistakes. I’m trying to understand how it works.” It sounds defensive, so I add, “At home, a party is a collection of individuals. You arrive, you keep your square of floor, you respect the next person’s. It’s tidy.”

“And tonight?”

“Tonight there were no squares. If I stopped eating, the host felt responsible. If I went quiet, he filled the silence. The whole table seemed to share one appetite, and I hadn’t been consulted.”

She sits down and slides a cup toward me. “It is intense. You think respect means leaving people alone. Here, we show affection by intruding. If he had stopped watching your glass, it would have meant he’d stopped watching you.”

I think about the plates, refilled before I’d finished. He hadn’t been grading my manners. He had been checking that I was still at the table.

“I was so busy being a well-calibrated guest,” I say, “that I barely noticed the warmth.”

“The seating, the toasts, the endless food. They exist so nobody has to think about logistics. You were inspecting the stove while everyone else warmed their hands.”

I notice a tea stain on my sleeve, a souvenir from earlier. “I didn’t want to be the one who missed the assignment.”

“There was no assignment.” She smiles. “The only person with a rubric was you.”

I lean back. My shoulders, I discover, have been up around my ears for some time.

“Next time,” I say, “I’ll leave the observations in the hallway.”

“Good,” she says, pulling her cup closer. “Next time I’d like to enjoy the company with you, not the fieldwork.”

Bread and Rice is an ongoing series about life between two cultures: a German husband, his Chinese wife, and the small negotiations, misunderstandings and discoveries that fill a bicultural life.