Let me tell you a story. It’s funny, but it’s also kind of sad and wonderful at the same time.

We had two stints in China. One in the late nineties (where Tracey and I first met) and once when we returned to China in 2008. When we moved to China at that time, we had a nanny for our girls. Her name was Gu Ping.

I have prejudiced feelings about foreigners that get local help with their children when they go overseas and I could go on long rants about how bougie it is to have a local follow parents around, pushing their kids in their stroller, feeding them their meals, and putting them to bed. Many overseas people outsource the work of being a parent to their nannies and I think it’s wrong. Plus, they raise some screwed up kids who have never been parented by their actual parents. However, I will save that editorial for another time.

We, too, had a nanny, but Gu Ping was a babysitter for us more than anything else. She would clean the house during the day (a benefit of living overseas) and then she would watch the girls after school until we came home from work. And we had strict rules that she was to leave when we arrived. Not because we didn’t like her, but because we felt it was our job to take care of our kids and not to farm them out to hired help. (There I go…editorializing again).

Gu Ping was wonderful. She would speak to the girls in Mandarin and take care of them/play with them when they got home from school. She’d give them snacks and keep them company. She was very much like a family member…not a direct family member…more like a cousin that would occasionally babysit. She was with us for six years and it was truly a sad day when we had to leave. She was very sad, as were we. We left in 2014.

In 2019, we came back to China to visit, and of course, we looked up Gu Ping. She brought us to her house and we spent a lovely afternoon, awkwardly trying to have conversations with her through Google Translate.

Cut to 2025. Here we are, back in Shanghai, and of course, we had to look up Gu Ping to see how she was doing. It took a bit of effort to get ahold of her, but eventually we did. We decided to go to her, so we boarded Line 12 of the subway and headed off into a rainy Shanghai day to see our former nanny.

And this is where we get into the blissfully ignorant cultural faux pas that yours truly just kept making over and over again.

Our plan with Gu Ping was to go to lunch with her. This, of course, is a problem for me. You see, I am a picky eater. I eat a variety of foods, but there are certain flavors and textures that I just don’t like at all. And a lot of those textures just so happen to be born from east Asia. I don’t like soy sauce. I don’t like gristly meats. Anything with fish is gross to me, and pork is gross as well, unless it’s bacon. If something is gooey or soft or flabby, I will not be eating it. If it has a pungent odor, I will not be eating it.

And here we were, going to lunch with Gu Ping. It was going to be a long afternoon.

This wasn’t helped, of course, by the fact that I had the breakfast buffet that morning, so I was completely full. It was going to be a recipe for disaster.

Gu Ping met us at the subway station. Because we are unprepared morons, we emerged into a rainy day without umbrellas. But Gu Ping was used to solving our problems, so as soon as we walked out of the metro, she was on the phone to her husband. In all the years Gu Ping worked for us, we had never met her husband, who worked as a groundskeeper next door to our school. But today was the day. Gu Ping barked some orders to him on the phone and a few minutes later, her husband (who told me his name, but that I have since forgotten because I am old) showed up on his bicycle with three umbrellas. Problem solved.

Gu Ping marched us through the rain to what appeared to be a labyrinth of restaurants underneath the street. I swear to you, we went back and forth, up and down, around and through the entirety of that basement complex, so much so that I’m not sure I could have gotten out of the place if my life depended on it. I was that turned around. And inside, it was restaurant after restaurant, NONE of which seemed appealing to me in the least. (It should be noted that my wife and daughters had absolutely no problem with ANY of the restaurants down there. It was only ME with the problem).

The girls wanted dumplings, so we settled into a place. Gu Ping sat us down and then disappeared. She was intent on us having a wonderful afternoon, so she cornered the waitress, a teenage girl who looked utterly and completely uninterested in working that day. The restaurant was mostly empty. I heard Gu Ping yell at the waitress (“Kwai! Kwai!”, which means “Hurry up!”) and within minutes, we had a MASSIVE amount of food on the table in front of us.

Now, let me just say that I had it in my head that I was going to be a good soldier. Even though those dumplings were utterly repulsive to me, I knew I had to eat one. But that was all I planned on eating. One. It was all I could handle. (Plus, Tracey kept giving me the side-eye and occasionally saying, “It’s important that you eat…” I knew what my place was). So, I grabbed a soup dumpling with my chopsticks, bit off the end, accidentally sent the juice all down onto the table and onto my pants,. Then I ate the thing. It wasn’t bad, but if I had to think about it much, I would have gagged. Still, I forced it down and was proud of myself for doing so.

There was also some fried pork on the table, which I ate a bit of. Wasn’t my thing, but I ate it. And with that, I felt satisfied. I had done it! I had eaten some Chinese food! I had conquered my fears.

That was when the endless parade of errors began.

Harper was doing a great job of speaking Mandarin to Gu Ping and I occasionally would type something in to Google Translate to have a conversation with Gu Ping’s husband. Then, I made a fatal error. I typed, “I don’t really like Chinese food, but this was good! Usually, I eat pizza.” I translated it and showed it to them.

Gu Ping looked worried. She turned to her husband and said something very quickly to him. From there, he jumped up from the table and ran out of the restaurant.

“Oh, my God,” Tracey said. “He’s going to get you food!”

I realized it was true and I ran after him.

Literally.

I RAN after him, begging him to stop. And he RAN AWAY from me. No matter what I did, he would not stop. He just ignored me. And within seconds, he had disappeared into the labyrinth of restaurants and I could not find him. He was gone. I had no idea where.

I walked despondently back to the restaurant to the disapproving look of my wife. “He disappeared,” I said.

“He went to get you food,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “I lost him. He wouldn’t stop.”

I could feel judgement coming from the eyes of the three women in my life. Gu Ping was unbothered and continued the conversation with Harper.

After a few minutes, Gu Ping’s husband returned, but he didn’t have food with him. I was relieved. “He must have gone to do something else,” I rationalized to myself.

For about thirty minutes after that, we continued talking to Gu Ping and her husband. We showed her pictures of where we lived and pictures from when the girls were younger. It was a nice lunch together. My daughter, Abbey, felt the need to overcompensate for my idiocy and worked hard to get rid of the food on the table, even though she was full. I was relieved that I didn’t have to eat any more.

Then, without warning, Gu Ping’s husband jumped up from the table again and disappeared. “Where is he going?” I asked.

“He’s going to get your food,” Tracey said, as if I was an idiot for not realizing it. I knew she was right.

I had fear at this point. Tracey had put together that he had gone to get me a pizza, and I worried about what might be ON that pizza, for Chinese pizza tastes are quite different than American pizza tastes. He could return with a pizza covered in shrimp or some other kind of strange meat or vegetables, or it might be slathered in a thick layer of mayonnaise. And whatever he returned with, I would HAVE TO eat it, because the guy went off and bought me a pizza!!

He returned with the pizza and placed it in front of me. Luckily, it looked like a vegetable pizza, but it was steaming hot and had what looked to be hot dog slices and corn embedded into the cheese. Gu Ping and her husband watched me, expectantly, to see if I was happy. I removed a slice and the cheese was thick and gooey (and full of hot dog slices and corn). I suspect that Gu Ping and her husband might have tho, but no. It cought I was a heathen for eating with my hands, because they handed me some chopsticks as I struggled to remove a single slice of pizza. It was too late. I had committed to using my hand to eat the pizza. Then, Gu Ping’s husband handed me a tiny packet. I thought it was some wet wipes to wipe off my cheese-grease-stained handsntained a clear plastic glove. Chinese people don’t eat like us heathens. They use chopsticks or plastic gloves if they have to eat with their hands. I was an idiot.

I forced down one slice of pizza, smiled, and said, “Xie Xie” (thank you) to them. We finished our meal and decided to head to Gu Ping’s house.

As we walked, I used one of the umbrellas to keep Tracey from getting wet. This caused ME to get wet. When we walked up the stairs to Gu Ping’s home, she took my coat and then barked another set of orders to her husband, who took my coat to the bathroom and began to BLOW DRY my coat. Tracey gave me a look that said, ‘You should have known he would do that!” but I did not know that he would start blow drying my coat.

Gu Ping took us to the back of her house where we sat in a small room and had conversation. Of course, that conversation was between me and Tracey and my daughters, as Gu Ping spent the entire time BRINGING US FOOD. First, it was some containers of coconut milk. Then she had her husband slice up some apples. Then, she brought us some Chinese Pringles (skewered meat flavored, of course). Then, some sesame candies. Then oranges. The food did not stop coming and it was our obligation to eat as much as we could. This was on top of the bottle of wine and boxes of candies that she brought us. And even more, Gu Ping insisted that we take as much as we could with us when we left.

As we walked back to the subway station, we had ALL of these things in our hands. A large box of wine, candies, Pringles containers, and a bag with a full pizza in it. Gu Ping and her husband took us to the subway station and then insisted that we TAKE THE UMBRELLAS as well.

And as we went through the turnstiles and headed down to the train, Gu Ping and her husband stood at the gate, as sweet as they could possibly be, and waved us goodbye. I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced that kind of generosity and kindness in my life and I only wish that I had even an ounce of that in my day to day. The two of them were so very kind to us when they didn’t need to be, and I am grateful for it. Even in my bumbling, they did not bat an eye, even though they should have judged me for my idiocy and privilege.

Gu Ping was wonderful to my girls when they were growing up and she was wonderful to us on this day. From this point on, I plan to have incorporate a little bit of that into my existence.