SO YOUR PARTNER IS CHINESE: A Survival Guide to Meeting the Family: 1

Nobody warns you that a clock means a funeral.You have met someone. You are serious about each other. And in three weeks you are going to walk into a room full of their family, carrying a gift that might turn out to be an accident.Six months of a language app will leave you able to order coffee and describe the weather. It will not tell you that giving a clock, song zhong, is pronounced exactly like attending a parent's funeral rites. There is no lesson on what to do when the bill arrives and two adults start physically wrestling over it, and you are expected to join in, and also expected to lose.Most books about China are written for someone closing a deal. Guanxi as a networking tactic, banquet seating as a negotiation strategy. Useful if you are flying into Shanghai for a week of meetings. Close to useless when the person deciding whether she likes you is your partner's mother, who is not going to be handled.Inside - Tones, and why a wrong pitch is a different word rather than an accent - Why there are four separate words for uncle, and which one she is - Face: what it is, and why criticism only counts in public - The gifts that quietly mean death, and the numbers to avoid - The table: the lazy Susan, the chopstick taboos, the fight over the bill - Ganbei, baijiu, and how to slow down without causing offence - Red envelopes: when, how much, and why the number matters more than the amount - The questions you will be asked, including the political ones - Bride price, property, and what a family quietly expects - Chinese New Year, tomb sweeping, WeChat, funerals, and the wedding tea ceremony Written by an outsider, for outsiders. This is not a book by a Chinese writer sharing their culture from the inside. It is a book by someone who went through what you are about to go through, got things wrong, asked a great many questions, and wrote down what would have helped on day one. An insider often cannot see what is confusing, because none of it was ever confusing to them.China is a country of well over a billion people and dozens of regional cultures, and no book this size can cover all of them honestly. Where this book and your future mother-in-law disagree, she is right.It will not make you fluent. It will get you through the first dinner.Note: this book is written around Mandarin-speaking mainland families. A companion volume covers Cantonese and Hong Kong households.From The Nervous Guest, the series that began with So Your Partner Is Filipino.