He's probably one of the few people I can say are weirder than my mom. Really. He was impressed that I can play Rock, Paper, Scissors with my feet. Apparently, that makes me super Japanese. "Funny, you don't look like a Japanese!" - this was his catch phrase all weekend. He gives my mom a harder time than I do, probably. They went to the US around the same time and I guess went to Yale together. We talked about how tough the TOEFL test is nowadays and they both mused that they probably would have flunked it if they had had to take such a test and would have never been able to go to college in the States at all. That's probably true.
Anyway, he was telling stories about traveling through the US on a bus in the 60's. This was one of the best stories. He was on tour and his group had stopped at a Howard Johnson's or something somewhere in the Midwest for dinner. "The waitress was staring, you know, because probably she had never seen a Japanese before," Ryohei tells us. "When she came over to take our order, I said, 'I'll have spaghetti.' Then the waitress said to me, 'We don't have that kind of tea here. We don't serve Chinese tea.' You know, because I pronounced it like the Japanese do, spaghe'TI, instead of spagheddy." My mom practically had a conniption. For me, I thought it was as sad as it was funny.
1 comment:
That photograph: amazing.
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