Bob and the Meaning of Life

My dad visited me all the way out in Alaer this weekend. He came to a number of my classes and the students really enjoyed getting a chance to meet him. For some part of each class I did normal class stuff so he would get a chance to see what that was like, but I also let the students ask him a bunch of questions. There was a really interesting variety of questions. There were a lot more technical questions than I thought there would be including one about inflation and the Consumer Price Index, or CPI for short. In two classes he got asked what his opinion would be of me marrying a Chinese girl, to a lot of giggles. The oddest question by far though was, "What is the meaning of life?" At first I thought I had heard the questions wrong or the student meant something different, but after a clarification it was clear she as really asking about the meaning of life. Even after this I thought it was just a fluke until he got the same question again later, and a slightly different version of it a third time. It's not that any specific question is too odd for China, I've gotten some really odd ones in my time here, it's that I've never been asked anything really like this. I wonder if it's because he's older, and this is a more common question to ask older people as if they have the answer stored away somewhere, and the only reason no one knows it is that no one has bothered to ask.

He also got to see both how nice and how annoying Chinese people can be. The school was very nice and arranged a big banquet for him and for Slav's girlfriend who was also visiting at the same time. But of course this being a banquet the baijou came out with all the cultural pressure to drink to much even when you have work early the next morning. I mostly drank wine because I had an early class, but it was still quite a bit actually. They then asked if he would give a speech to a class of communication students, which he nicely agreed to do, but of course after that they wanted to have another banquet. This time we refused since we just wanted to have dinner on are own, but even this didn't stop them. At night Lake insisted on coming by and giving him some milk and crackers, a very odd gift. It's amazing but people in China can be very sweet and completely infuriating at the same time. It's hard to tell someone to fuck off and stop calling you and stopping by when they are really trying to be nice and just don't understand how they come across to people of a different culture.