My aunt and uncle hap­pened to be in town from B.C. yes­ter­day, so they took me out to din­ner and brought their son along. I don’t believe I had met any of them before, although they all seemed famil­iar. A dif­fi­cul­ty I have with the Chinese cul­ture is the fact that every­one is called aunt or uncle if they’re old­er, even if they’ve just been met. Our actu­al rel­a­tives (the aunts and uncles relat­ed by blood), how­ev­er, have a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent name sys­tem, most­ly based on rank and which side of the fam­i­ly they are from. The prob­lem ends up being the fact that I have no idea what the names of these peo­ple are, since we don’t append a first name to “aunt” or “uncle”, and I ran into that spe­cif­ic prob­lem yes­ter­day. I was able to go the entire din­ner with­out hav­ing to call any of them by name though, so I escaped with my igno­rance in igno­rance.