Category Archives: Mom in Law

Chinese and Finnish Grandmothers

November 2, 2014 CrazyChineseFamily 22 Comments

During the past eight months I was able to see first hand the major differences between a Chinese and a Finnish grandmother. My mother-in-law stayed in the beginning of the year for three months with us to help with our little baby and right now we live already nearly two months in Germany in my parents apartment. Of course here my own mother is also playing a major role when it comes to take care of Nathan.

During all these months I was able to witness many amusing occurrences my both MIL and my mother. Believe it or not but even though both grandmothers couldn’t be more different they still share many similarities.

How to spend the day

While MIL enjoys sleeping into the day, going to dancing class or shopping during midday and leading her dancing group in the evening my mother handles things a bit different. She wakes up sharp 6 am and starts with all kind of housework. When the main work is done it is time for grocery shopping and preparing lunch for the family. Even though this might sound much it is just about 11am by now and you would guess that her productivity would continue as so much of the day is still ahead but no, after lunch and coffee time nothing happens anymore. She loves to watch German soap opera or other useless things on television and thus spends every work day from 2pm till 10pm in her sofa spot to watch TV. On the one hand you have the bit lazy but still sporty Chinese grandmother and on the other hand you have a very work focused but also a TV addicted Finnish grandma.

What to eat

When it comes to food my mother is very simple. For breakfast a slice of bread and a cup of coffee, for lunch some quickly prepared German or Finnish food and after that either cake or cookies with coffee. There is no real dinner except perhaps another slice of bread as she stops eating after 6pm. This does not sound like a food lover right? You are right! My mother hates to try out new things, salt and pepper are already exotic spices and going out with her to eat is nearly impossible. My dear mother-in-law is the total opposite. Breakfast is mostly some soup, porridge and whatnot bought from the many vendors downstairs. Lunch is yet again either bought at one of the street kitchens or eaten in one of the many restaurants in the area. Dinner is the main part of the day and needs much preparation/ calling friends who wants to go out to eat with her. During night-time the occasional instant noodle pack is prepared or some of the leftovers from the eating battles are warmed up again. Yes, she is a food lover. She just loves to try out new things, nothing is too spicy and eating less than three times a day some warm food is a no go. Sometimes I have the feeling that she spends her entire free time with eating and of course she is not gaining any weight…

How to take care of Nathan

While the one person is overly crazy, wants to carry her grandson non stop and wouldn’t let go, the other person tries to make the child as independent as possible. As so many Chinese grandmas MIL is also totally crazy about her grandson. She would do everything for that little monster (if my wife would let her…). During her three months at our place there were a few fights between her and my wife as she was not allowed to carry the baby around all the time and so on. Here in Germany my mother is the complete opposite. Sure, she enjoys spending time with her grandson and for unknown reasons he has to laugh nearly all the time when he sees her but she also tries that her daughter-in-law is doing most things with the baby. A mix between those two would be perfect!

Similarities

You probably wonder now how there can be still any similarities between these two different grannies. It is actually very easy as the main similarities is very plain and simple: They can be so annoying! I can’t really say why but my father has the theory that all women after some certain age become just naturally annoying for their children. My wife is already afraid that Nathan will be as annoyed by her later as she is with her mother and my mother…

Even though they can be really annoying we still love them. They are both people who lived completely different lives but they also try to help their children whenever they can. In the end it does not matter where someone comes from, what background they have, or what weird things they do, because as long as they love their family, what can be bad about them?

Crazy Chinese People, Mom in Law

Dancing Mother-In-Law

October 26, 2014 CrazyChineseFamily 28 Comments

It has been already all over the news in the past years in China: The Dancing Granny Problem. Apparently there are more and more people doing their dancing routines during evening hours in Chinese cities and at the same time cause an annoyance for residents in those areas.The majority of these people is from my experience somewhere between 40 and 70 years and female. So it is no wonder that my dear mother-in-law belongs to this group of people.

WeChatImage635499295030855846 — MIL’s Dancing Group

My mother-in-law retired from her modeling career some 15 odd years ago and had ever since then too much time on her hands. Her favorite activities are shopping and sleeping as already mentioned here. However she has another hobby and I believe you guessed it already from the title of this article!

She started with dancing some short time after her retirement in some real classes. After few years she started one of the infamous Dancing Grannies groups and terrorizes Xi’ans city center ever since then on a daily basis. However there is one main difference which sets her group apart from most other groups: Real complicated folk dances.

You see, most of the groups are dancing to overly load music each evening and only use a very limited set of different moves/ steps. Through this anybody can learn the dance in no time and join the ever-growing dancing movement. With MIL’s group it is a bit different. Her group is much smaller and consists of perhaps 20-30 people and to learn even one dance can take up a whole month. Each evening they meet for at least 90 min and first revise some old dances they had already learned and then start with new dance step by step. And don’t be mistaken because with step by step I really mean it. There are barely any repetitions in these dances so each part has to be learned bit by bit. I have been watching these dancing practices already for some time and I am just amazed how these elderly women (and few men) can remember these different dances as they are in my opinion pretty complicated.

But there is one thing which is just to typical of my MIL and I just have to share this. Every time when we come over to watch her dance she usually just sits around with some friends, chats and eats snacks. Now, as soon as she sees us she of course greets us in a way that you expect we had been away for the past decade or so and then she gets in front of her group for the next dancing steps and shows how to do them properly. You might think it is just coincidence that she starts teaching the others when we arrive, perhaps she has some set timetable or similar, but no. We have watched sometimes the group from around the corner before we arrive and it is every single time the same thing: She just sits around, jokes with her friends while the rest of the group is trying to learn the new moves. Usually she is still dancing when we leave but as soon as we are around the corner it is again the same thing, she goes back to her friends to do basically nothing. I know I know, I am just too picky with my MIL’s behavior but it is just so like her, trying to show off or appear to be a very busy person.

Even though it appears that she is resting most of the time she is actually rather good when it comes to dancing. Her group participates sometimes in a few dancing events and she is usually the lead dancer. Not bad for a woman who views shopping and sleeping as her main activities in life.

Before I forget it, MIL is the only one of her Dancing Group who is wearing the dress properly resulting in that the stomach is showing as all others pull up their skirts more because they think that they will look shorter when they tummy is visible…what troubles those poor people have.

Crazy Chinese People, Crazy Family, Dad in Law, Mom in Law

Ikea Madness

October 19, 2014 CrazyChineseFamily 28 Comments

Few days ago I had an adventurous day at Ikea with my family to buy a bedroom wardrobe. This adventure reminded me first of all how crazy shopping at Ikea can be and secondly, how my mother-in-law went into berserk mode at that store last summer.

This is how it should look like — This is how the wardrobe should look like in the end!

Let me tell you first of all about the family adventure to buy that wardrobe. In theory everything was set in stone, we had already figured out which wardrobe we want (PAX System), what extras should be included and how we transport it. How naive I had been to imagine that this would actually work as planned. The trouble started already with the mass of people at Ikea. It was so full that I felt like being back in China, walking through some shopping center except it was not that hot at Ikea and few less Chinese around. The next problem was that we could not just pick out a wardrobe from the examples as they did not fit my wife’s taste so we had to put together every single item of the 3m wardrobe system.

The list of the different items for such wardrobe included for example the frame, sliding doors, the different elements of the door, shelves and much more. After roughly one hour of planing this was done and everyone was hungry (except me because I was just dead tired by now) so it was lunch time at the store’s own restaurant. Again it felt eerily similar to a Chinese restaurant by the noise level and amount of people except of course the food itself.

Lunch was done and the first two hours at Ikea were survived and we walked straight into the next disaster. We had to collect the different parts from the warehouse and as we found the first few pieces we started to realize that we would definitely not be able to take the monstrosity of a wardrobe in our car with us. Not only were these parts just too huge but also too heavy as my father and me together started to sweat carrying them. This meant we had to decide on a delivery option and we ended up renting a little truck to drive our purchased goods home. This is usually not so stressful or related to madness itself however the rental timeframe was only two hours, the store being over 30km away from our home, which meant a lot of speeding and very quick loading and unloading of the truck. In the end we spent six hours with Ikea stuff, including the rental truck story!

Now lets continue with my dear mother-in-law. Back in February I wrote a short version of her berserk shopping style at Ikea. As it was only a brief description of her weird ideas I did not mention much of her craziness. As mentioned in the article she had the idea to take an Ikea kitchen cabinet to China for their own use. Not only was this a very silly idea due to the size and weight of the packed cabinet but this whole kitchen cabinet idea would have ended latest in China as both MIL and FIL have just zero talent at constructing stuff. They surely would have tried to build it up but it would have been anything but a kitchen cabinet in the end! Whenever they have to do such things themselves it either never happens or they hire someone to do it for them as it just does not work for them.

The fascinating thing about my crazy Chinese mother-in-law was that she was not really interested in all the furniture offered at Ikea but all the annoying stuff downstairs(for me at least) such as kitchen ware, carpets, textiles and the dreadful area of interior decoration. Can you even imagine how much time a person can spend on trying to convince someone of the great traits of a cappuccino foam maker? Lets just say MIL used up the better part of one hour to convince her daughter to purchase it. Saddest part back then was that MIL did not even like any coffee or related drinks, she just wanted it to show her friends what fancy drinks she can make. But that was back then, by now she has her own coffee machine and couple of nice Finnish coffee packs.

Basically MIL and FIL investigated everything there, especially all the small items to give away as gifts to their friends. No matter what they checked out it was just not good enough as every single item had one thing in common: Made in China. No good for my Chinese parents-in-law but good enough for me. After being for several hours there with my in-laws we left the store without having bought anything. They certainly liked the things offered there but all the stuff was not good enough for their friends which resulted later on a chocolate buying mayhem on a cruise ship.

Now in the end to show you what Ikea Madness means also for me: 2 1/2 days of constructing the bedroom wardrobe and still not done!