Excess Rice

Every Tuesday I pay an ayi, Chinese for aunt but here it refers to a house worker, to clean my apartment and cook a meal for me. I love ayi-cooked meals because they taste good, usually aren’t as greasy as those from restaurants and I can enjoy them in the in the comforts of home. Since I moved to a smaller apartment this summer, ayi hasn’t had to spend as much time cleaning so I decided to ask her to use that saved time from cleaning to make a couple of extra dishes and put them in the refrigerator so I could eat them later on in the week. This idea really excited me and I even went out to buy tupperware specifically for the purpose of storing the extra dishes. I called ayi on Monday to explain my idea so she could shop accordingly and bring extra food to make. When she came on Tuesday I made sure she was clear on what I wanted and showed her the tupperware dishes to use. Then I had to run some errands so I left her to her work.

I came back after she had gone and excitedly went to the kitchen. There like usual was my meal for that night of cooked vegetables and meat sitting on the table waiting. I opened up the refrigerator to see what my dinner was going to be the next day and saw two tupperwares full of plain rice! I looked in the microwave, another pot of rice! There had been a severe miscommunication somewhere along the line and I knew that it had to be my fault but I still wondered why ayi would think that I would want enough rice to make a life-sized sculpture of Yao Ming. Hopefully next week’s meal turns out better.