yabaliu,
我们不想看不起她，可是需要了解这种话的意思， 再说需要多了解中国人和中国文化。

(yabaliu said (i think): “I understand your meaning, you also urge Jessica not to sink to that kind of person’s level.” I replied (in Chinglish) that: “We don’t want to look down on her, but we need to understand what that kind of talk means, and we need to understand Chinese people and culture more.”)

Lee and Albert,
the husband’s mother/step-daughter relationship would be so interesting to study. i’ve read some classic descriptions of it, but i wonder how the Cultural Revolution and One-Child policy has impacted that relationship (and impacts relationships in general, for that matter). No doubt Mary Ann has her own stories to tell.

sometimes feigning ignorance when asked annoying questions (which isn’t hard when i’m mostly ignorant already) is really convenient. I gotta try “够我用”！

hooray for foreigners using Chinese with one another! (just promise me you won’t leave me way behind on my own blog！) :D

oh yes, when they’re nosey and have figured out that I’m a foreigner (外国人is not the same as 外地人), then the money questions come out. My most recent teacher’s answer is: “差不多” “够我用” she’ll even pretend not to have heard, and change the subject! 你也可以试试看吧！

Albert, you guessed it.” 婆媳关系” is about the delicate and often-tumultuous relations between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law.

Your experience can be most helpful and insightful for the rest of us since you’ve kind of infiltrated.

Just to clarify, are you saying that you get asked about your salary by strangers just as we bairen do?

A very interesting theory about 婆媳关系. I’d never heard that term before. Is that a common way to describe the relationship between a husband’s mother and the husband’s wife?