Living together with someone from a different culture is enormously interesting. Maybe because it is the kind of person I am, but I enjoy bumping into little situations that are culturally unexpected. Some people might get frustrated, some people might ignore it, but I always find myself thinking, “Wow, that’s cool.” It helps that I live with Kuniko, who is infinitely patient. It’s as if a long time ago she decided that we’re going to have times when we completely don’t understand each other, but the good things more than make up for it.
Generally he handle our day to day communication in English, but there are times when we stray into Japanese. We strive to avoid mixing the languages mid-sentence, but we don’t seem to mind changing languages sentence by sentence, which probably is weird to hear but seems natural to us. Sometimes one language has a better way of expressing an idea in that particular situation, so we use that.
Last night after we came home from dinner at Kuniko’s parents (where I got a pretty good Japanese workout) we were doing little chores around the house and Kuniko mentioned that she was looking forward to our brunch on Sunday. The restaurant is having a special course based on shrimp dishes, and since I love shrimp I was all excited about it as well. I said something like “Woo, yeah, shrimp, shrimp, let’s eat shrimp!” while smiling and Kuniko gave me a look like “What the hell are you talking about?”
I think the last thing she expected me to do after an evening of polite Japanese with her parents was act like a junior high school cheerleader and do a shrimp rally cheer in English. The last thing I expected was for her to think it was weird.
Like I said, I love it when this kind of stuff happens. She just shakes her head and smiles, and I usually try to measure if it is worth it to try and explain it or to just let it slide as “Bryan sure is weird sometimes”. Last night I let it slide, but it did remind me how culturally different we are, and how lucky I am to have someone as open-minded as my wife.
