Family Daze: Foreign exchange student bridging cultural differences

We all know that hosting a foreign exchange student has the obvious advantages of learning about another culture, experiencing diversity firsthand, and improving international relations and all that. But I think the biggest advantage is that it motivates you to up your household standards. A LOT.

And it’s not because anyone will be overly critical of your laissez faire housekeeping lifestyle. Oooooh no. It’s more because of the thought that your family, the same group of people who breaks out into fistfights over who has three more sprinkles on their ice cream, will now be an example of The Average American Family; one that an entire foreign country could base their view of American culture on.

Frankly, if that’s not enough pressure to make you go clean out the dust bunnies from underneath the oven, I don’t know what is. And I’m not even going to mention the additional guilt caused by the irony of someone spending hundreds, perhaps thousands, of dollars to travel over half of the globe just to end up vacationing at – ha! ha! – your house.

So you can understand my problem.

Earlier this year, our exchange student was from China, which made things even dicier since our last three students were from Japan. Oh, it’s not like there’s anything wrong with China. It’s a nice country, filled with ancient culture and educated people. The problem is that, at last check anyway, it’s a Communist country; which if you recall from high school history class, is a form of government built on the credo of sharing. A concept not exactly my family’s strong point.

So, being a slightly creative and desperate sort of person, I came up with a few ideas that, with a little luck and a big language barrier, might help us set a good example.

The first is to establish strict household rules. The basic tenets being: There will be no eating bologna and bean dip for breakfast. Everyone will be out of bed and dressed in street legal clothes by 10 a.m. Meals will be served at the dining room table and there will be intelligent, lively discussions about current events, the state of the global economy or international relations. There will be no burping, throwing food, or name calling. And under no circumstances will anyone ever mention the incident between the dog and the beer can sculpture in the garage.

However, this flimsy charade was waaaay too exhausting for my family to keep up for more than two or three days. So then we resorted to Plan B, which is much less tiring, but slightly more tricky. It’s built on the premise that we could go back to our usual ways, and just make ourselves look normal by sporadically saying things like, "Hey, did you know that it took four years to build the Golden Gate Bridge and that Americans always lay around playing video games in their pajamas until noon?" Or, "Isn’t it interesting that most congressmen can’t discuss the key points of the Patriot Act, and that cold cereal is really more of a dinner food here?" And so on.

Of course, I don’t need to tell you that the big problem with this plan is that it’s not only sneaky and wrong, in the end it fools nobody anyway.

So luckily there’s still Plan C, which is simply keeping our exchange student so busy they’re too tired to realize what a shoddy dump they’ve landed in for three weeks.

So that’s what we did. And in the end she had a nice time, we had a nice time, and, most importantly, she never realized that she’d spent her entire vacation in a place that, upon closer inspection, would make Communist China look pretty good.

And, as an extra added bonus, she can now say seventeen variations of, "You have more green M&Ms than me, you big Boogernose" in clear English.

And my kids can say it back in Chinese.

Hey, if that’s not bridging cultural differences, I don’t know what is.