The mother of my student, Christy, wants me to teach her how to make American style cookies, similar to the oatmeal raisin cookies we made last fall. Along with this, she asks that I choose one more thing to make. I can choose anything so I decide on the Texas Sheet Cake recipe my mom emailed me just the other day.
We go to a nearby cake shop that also sells some imported goods. I buy some powdered sugar. We are there for 37 minutes. I know it wasn't 36 or 38 minutes because the ticket the police officer printed out makes it very clear: we had been parked illegally for thirty plus seven minutes.
While my student and I read the ticket (how weird is it that this little Chinese-Korean girl is asking me in English to read the ticket to her in Chinese?), her mom is trying everything to get the officer's attention. She immediately plays the foreigner card, which is funny because I recently played the same card in the U.S. to get out of a parking ticket (Hey, I was a visiting scholar from China!). She brings out her Korean "eggyo," what we might refer to as baby-talk for grown women, usually reserved for boyfriends, but I'm sure this wasn't the first officer to be exposed to its charms.
The problem was that she had changed bags before leaving the house and so didn't have a thing on her, not her driver's license, not her passport, not even her phone. What she had in the large handbag is beyond me. I let her use my phone to contact her husband, which I then saw her force onto two other people's ears, the officer included. By this time I had already guffawed inside the car more than once, but poor Isabelle was as worked up as her mother. She even tried to tell me that she had once gotten out of a ticket by crying. She's 8. I highly doubt the credibility of this story. Next she acts out what she will do to the police officer if he tries to arrest her mom. I think a kick in a highly susceptible place was involved, poor guy.
"Change bags or whatever. If you don't have your driver's license I don't want to hear it!" We hear the officer shout. After all her pleading, Christy gets back in the car and we are free to go. Her fine is 300 RMB, which I'm unclear whether she will really have to pay or not, what with all her husband's top tier connections she keeps mentioning.
"The officer didn't believe I'm a foreigner," she added as she turned onto the main road. "He thought I was from the South, like Jiangxi or somewhere like that." To this, I really did have to laugh!
Later, after taking me to Changchun's newest mega-mart, Metro, to get some ingredients for the baked goods we were going to make, we go home and get to work. Isabelle helps where she can, although I've never seen a child so scared of a mixer. To think today is her first time getting to lick the beaters afterward! We used to fight for those in my family.
We have to cut the cake recipe in half for lack of a full-size oven and matching cookie sheet. It turns out sweet and chocolatey anyway, to which I breath a sigh of relief. The cookies also turn out nicely, although omitting the oatmeal makes them spread pretty thin. I hope they work out for Christy when she bakes them herself. I leave the house with a sugar high ready to get home and finish an assignment for my class the next day.
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