Today's Cultural Dilemna

Chinese tigers and cranes...
oh my!

Now that I have wasted countless hours indulging my "Weeds" habit and have watched the entire sixth season in just four days, I am ready to return to the task at hand: contemplating the daily cultural conundrums of Vietnam.  Today's puzzler comes courtesy of Lan, the very sweet woman who cleans our house.

This morning she arrived just as we were rushing out the door to school with two enormous canvases printed with Chinese tigers and a stack of ink sketches of fruit, motorbikes and scenes from around town.  She appeared to be gesturing that they were for us.  A gift?  This would be extremely sweet but feels incredibly wrong coming from someone who probably makes less than $50/week and works ten times harder than we do.  The sketches came with a note that someone had translated for her asking us to help her find more work.  We're unsure whether the sketches are a gift for us, a sample of her work that we should show others or something that she would like us to browse through and purchase.  Yikes!  The whole language barrier thing really can be frustrating at times.

Unsure of the status of this "gift," we thanked Lan many times and headed out the door to school.  When we returned this afternoon the tigers were still here along with the stack of drawings.  We assume we are meant to keep them and should now somehow integrate them into the decor (which I have been slowly trying to adjust to something that more closely matches our taste.  I had just managed to subtly remove the purple plastic flower chains from the wall and store them in a cupboard.  Now, it seems, I need to integrate Chinese Tigers that are ten times larger than those flowers into the scheme).  It looks like they will occupy the ledge above the crane field, and I will just designate the whole fish-pond area the Vietnamese culture corner.

I am reminding myself to be grateful and appreciative of this generosity of spirit.  There is a lesson in here.  I know it.  Just let me know if one of these tigers is something you must have.  I'm happy to "pay it forward!"