More Generosity

So, more generosity.

Often when we're eating at restaurants, other diners talk about us. At Er You Fan Dian, one of the places we go pretty often, there was a guy who came in for dinner when we were eating. He was there with another man - they were business people, and the first man took a phone call before coming back to sit down. He asked the waitress if we could speak Chinese, and then he asked us how much we would charge to help teach English for his company. We said we couldn't (it's in our contract), and he said something about how ah, we must be helping China to improve her language abilities. We sort of shrugged (we didn't really understand exactly what he was talking about) and he went back to eating. Periodically as he ate, though, he would talk to us - he said that if we ever had any trouble, we should call him - he gave us his phone number and email address and QQ number (QQ is a mostly-Chinese instant messaging service). He said he had a company in Guangzhou (I think; I could be completely wrong). He finished eating and paid the waitress. Then he paid the waitress for our dinner, too. Then he gave each of us a mobile phone card worth 100 kuai. We were… speechless, we were overwhelmed, we were unable to effectively decline (we don't even know how to use the cards). We didn't know how to respond, except to fall in love with everything in China for a while.