We had lunch with my in-laws today. I'd met most of them on my previous visit, but I hadn't met her youngest sister.
The first woman on the right is Yanmei's younger sister Yanxing, the youngest of the four sisters. Yanmei is 2nd youngest. Next to Yanxing is Xuemei, the oldest sister, and next to her is Dongmei the second sister. Yanmei's mother and father are on the left with us (the mom isn't happy because Yanmei just told her we wouldn't spend the night at their apartment). In the middle is Hanghang, Yangxing's daughter, age 12, and Qianqian, Dongmei's son, age 20. Taking the picture and thus not in it is Qingqing, who is Xuemei's daughter.
I believe Hanghang, Qianqian and Qingqing are all nicknames or diminutives like Bobby or Susie. Qingqing is in the picture below making the double peace signs.
Her whole family was very welcoming to me, although communication is an issue since her sisters, their husbands and her parents don't speak English, so I have to rely on Yanmei and Qingqing to translate for me. We really tried to pay for this lunch after failing last time because Yanmei's sister got up and paid before they even brought the check. This time we made it clear we were paying from the start, but when I got up to pay it ended up being a big altercation so I gave up and let them pay. I guess we'll have to wait until someone visits us in the U.S. before we can pay.
After lunch we tried to take care of a work item that came up, even though I'm on sabbatical. They need my signature on a couple of forms as co-inventor for some patents Veeva is applying for. We went to a small computer/printer shop but gmail was blocked, so I couldn't access the documents. So we went to Yanmei's big sisters apartment which has wifi, and Qingqing logged into her company's VPN, and from there I could access gmail. We eventually got the two forms downloaded and saved onto a USB drive. Now I just needed to print them, sign them and scan them back in and email them back.
Yanmei was tired so Qingqing and I went out to print the documents, it should only take a few minutes, right? It turned out the print shop was closed, so we walked to another one farther away and it was closed too. Finally after walking around for 40 minutes Qingqing suggested we try a real estate agency, they probably could print it for us as a favor. They tried to help us (apparently they thought I was the English teacher for the local elementary school), but one computer could open the documents but couldn't access the printer and another computer could print but had trouble opening the documents. Especially frustrating because all the error dialogs where in Chinese so I had no clue how to help. I didn't want to keep wasting their time so we gave up and went back. Mission not accomplished. 🙁
After that we went over to Yanmei's parents' apartment for dinner. I must have made a good impression because Yanmei's father really likes me.
For dinner we had something Yanmei said they used to have when she was young: fresh spring rolls. These are not deep fried like you get at restaurants, instead you make them yourself. Start with a wrapper a lot like a fajita wrapper, put what you want in it, then fold it up and eat it. They were quite delicious, I had four. There were some other dishes too, all of it was good.
After dinner we originally planned to stay the night, but Yanmei wanted to go to her school anniversary early the next day, so we went back to our own apartment.
-David
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