I didn’t expect the home visit of the weekend would be so happy. Coming back from the visit, it was already 11 o’clock, but Chai, Fu and I just kept talking about how nice the family was and how many interesting things happened.
The hostess of the family, Lisa, is a well-educated and generous woman, with natural red hair. She came from a wealthy family (for God’s sake, she told us her mother owned racing horses!) in New York. She studied English literature in university, and became the assistant vice president of a firm, doing public affair and store marketing. Her husband Dave is a photographer, who came from Italy and speaks quick English. They adopted a little girl from Guangdong, China, and for this reason, they pay a lot of attention to China. Also for this reason, they are more than willing to contact Chinese students like us.
Lisa is so well-educated and nice that she won’t say anything is bad. We all gained much assurance from her kind approvals on our English, our appearances and also our personalities. To her beloved daughter Lily, who will turn to 2 years old soon, one can not imagine how patient and considerate a mother she is. During our visit to her home, when Lily began to throw her toy violently (she has two roomfuls of toys, assorted. ‘She is spoiled.’ quoted from Lisa, and I totally agree.), Lisa just patiently repeated ‘be gentle, Lily, be gentle’ , and tried to hold her flapping little arms. In the middle of supper, when Dave was teasing that Lily was a ‘wild’ girl, she yelled at him ‘Dave’, and earnestly corrected the word ‘wild’ to ‘energetic’, ‘funny’ and ‘busy’. All of us could tell how much she loved the kid.
She is also a kind-hearted and sentimental woman. Every time she talked about how they found Lily in an announcement of searching parents for abandoned infants on a Chinese newspaper, she would close her eyes once in a while in sorrow, not only for the abandoned infants, but also for the mothers who had to do such a decision. ‘I want to leave something like posters at the place Lily was left. Just try to let her biological mother to know that Lily is fine.’ She said, hand pushing on her chest.
the family