(I’m visiting my extended family for the holidays. Nobody bothered to get things ready for the upcoming party, so a handful of my relatives and I are hectic, running around the house, cooking and decorating. Since we’re so busy, my young cousin is left without supervision in the living room, and is currently drawing gigantic circles on the wall.)

Me: “[Cousin]! Look at this mess! You can’t just go and draw such big circles on the walls!”

Cousin: “Sowwy…”

(I leave and come back sometime later. He’s still drawing circles, but this time, they’re the size of pennies.)

Me: “[Cousin], stop that! Your dad will be mad!”

Cousin: “Okay.”

(I left and came back yet again. He was nowhere to be seen, but he’d left a message on the wall. It read, “Don’t be mad, Daddy.”)

(My mother had a surgery, and I’m taking her home from the hospital. She can walk, but is still kind of loopy because of the painkillers.)

Me: “All right, we’re home. Do you need help getting out of the car?”

Mom: “Baby… my little ladybug…”

Me: “Aye?”

Mom: “Turn on the Christmas lights, please.”

Me: “Right now? It’s noon.”

Mom: “I want to watch!”

Me: “Okay.”

(She then stayed inside the car with the windows down for half an hour, staring at the outdoor Christmas lights. At least she had a good time.)

My friend and I are taking the subway. We are both Mexicans and both look like Mexicans, but my friend asked me to talk to him exclusively in Mandarin, in which I’m fluent, so that he can practise.

A middle-aged woman gets on the subway and stares, giving us a strange look. I think nothing about it since it’s not common to hear a conversation in Mandarin in a Mexico City subway.

Suddenly, she suddenly says, quite loudly, in Spanish, “D*** Chinese. They’re everywhere! They come, open a restaurant, exploit their Mexican employees, and take all of our money back to China; they don’t even try to learn Spanish.” Then she goes, “Ching chang chun li,” trying to imitate Chinese.

My friend and I begin to laugh, which only makes her get angrier and turn blood red.

I respond to her, in Spanish, “Ma’am, we’re both Mexicans, and most surely can speak better Spanish than you do!”

A few people on the subway laugh really hard. The woman turns an even brighter shade of red and suddenly remembers she has to get off at the next station.

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(My friend is a very attractive woman who likes to dress nicely, but when this happens she has been going through a rough patch. She’s not wearing nice clothes, nor wearing any jewellery or makeup. She also has red, swollen eyes from crying. I’m taking her to have dinner at her favourite restaurant to cheer her up, when a group of Chinese girls gets on the same bus we’re riding and stands right in front of where we’re sitting. I have been studying Chinese for four years. This takes place in Chinese.)

Chinese Girl #1: “Oh, God… Look at that girl in the black shirt. She looks awful.”

Chinese Girl #2: *laughs* “Yeah… Why did she go out like this? She’s so ugly.”

Chinese Girl #1: “Look at her friend, though. He looks nice.”

Chinese Girl #3: *to me* “Hey, handsome. Don’t pay attention to that ugly girl. Come with us.”

(They all begin to laugh, thinking no one has understood anything they’ve said.)

Me: *in Chinese* “No, thanks. Being with her, what would I need someone like any of you for?”

(The three girls stared at me before one of them asked if I understood all that they said. I nodded, and they all turned a bright red colour I never even knew people could get. They moved to the back of the bus and tried to avoid eye contact with me.)

When I was a little kid, my mom became the best friend of a woman who had a daughter around my age. The two of us would end up in forced playdates every time they wanted to hang out.

Since we both had terrible tempers and brought up the worst of each other, our relationship was tense at best and violent at worst. Our mothers didn’t seem to care. As we grew up, though, this changed. I realized that while we were sitting together on the couch, texting in silence. She looked up for a second and said, “This is way better than beating the crap out of each other with plastic golf clubs.”

I had to agree.