Midnight Mochi
The girls had many questions after K went to bed last night. About Argentina and Mexico, about being an immigrant (we had an interesting time discussing how I was a 'fourth-generation immigrant' in Arg. and a 'first-generation immigrant' here) - and about American politics and the democratic system (!). This all came about from the questions they were given to ask me as part of their homework assignment. While the Koreans' professor had stuck with tangible topics ('At what time do you usually eat dinner?', 'What chores can I help with?'), this woman (apparently they are all women instructors, the girls said sadly - they go to an all-women University in Japan and were looking forward to some male interaction for a change, but aside from a few students, apparently it didn't happen!) gave them some complex questions (i.e. 'Ask your host mother and father about their childhood: Where did they grow up? What was it like?' Well, er...) So I kept asking them: Do you want the short/simple answer, or the complex/'juicy' one? And they always wanted to TALK about the questions in depth - with their little electronic translators in hand and fast typing fingers, we could converse at a surprisingly high level of abstraction (but first, always the teacher, I had them WRITE the very very basic versions, in the blanks of their homework sheet). So this took a while - a couple of hours in fact. I kept pointing at the clock on my kitchen wall, reminding them they had to get up early in the morning, and asking them if they wanted to stick with the short answers for now and we could always discuss this later? No, they were INTO it! So I figured what the heck, *I* can always sleep in tomorrow (after I get them up, give them breakfast, and see them out the door) - this is how we ended up having green tea and tiny red bean paste-filled mochi until approximately 1:00am! Teehee, the last question, #10 said "What is the biggest problem in America today?" LOL after telling them that was a very complicated question and making sure they understood it wasn't quite as simple as this, I told them they could spell the answer to this one very easily (for questions #1-9 they had been carefully printing my 'short answers' verbatim and asking me how to spell the trickier words) and it was just one word: So after waiting for them to begin their answers by copying part of the question as they did for all the others ("The biggest problem in America today is..."), as they put pencil to paper waiting for me to spell it out I smiled and began: "B...u....s...h!"