Amity Foundation in China

As the title suggests, today is what I would call a hard day. After being in Xingtang for a week and a half, we finally had to deal with a small issue that had been growing increasingly troublesome. It may sound simple, but basically our generous hosts served for us at every meal more than we could ever eat. Now, we understood that our hosts are being generous, and serving a sufficient amount of food is one very important aspect of their ‘duty’ as host. But the problem was that, at the end of the meal, usually only half of the food (or less) was eaten! Our hosts would also implore us to eat more (as is Chinese custom, I have been told), but even when we obliged their requests a little we still couldn’t eat much more. Today was hard, because it became obvious over the course of the meal that our Chinese hosts were a little hurt by our inability to eat all of the food served to us. I call it a hard day because it was an extremely uncomfortable situation, knowing that our host was being generous, and we were trying our best to be kind, but the difference still arose. We finally talked to one of the hosts about it, who seemed quite surprised because she had thought that we didn’t like the food because we weren’t eating all of it. So, hopefully, after talking a little bit, we’ll be able to come to a better understanding.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 21st, 2010 at 9:35 am by Elizabeth Wolensky '11 and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.