Breakfast with Amber

July 2021: Dinner With Friends: Do's and Don'ts

I think it's time we got back to the Japanese cultural exchange I was part of. It met once every other Tuesday (or Wednesday if you were in the Eastern Hemisphere) for about two hours or so, and professors from Trinity and Kwansei Gakuin would teach us about communicating with people from other cultures. Since the meetings were spaced so far apart, it was easy for me to forget about them.

That is, until session 5 when Dr. Nishikawa told us that there was going to be a final group project. The project would be a six-minute video about what we had learned about intercultural communication that would be presented at the final session. My assigned groupmates were Victoria, Thao, and Sayuri.

We had an initial Zoom meeting shortly after the meeting to discuss what we were going to do because I certainly didn't have any idea. Through our collective brainstorming, we decided to make a video about an American visiting an Asian household for dinner except there'd be two versions of the scenario: one where the host and guest were considerate and respectful of each other and one where everyone did absolutely everything wrong. We had decided to have the Americans be the guests because we thought that Asians visiting American households was so common in media. Thao and Sayuri, as the Asians, would play our Asian hosts, and Victoria and I, as the Americans, would play the American guests. I volunteered to play the good guest with Thao being the good host, and Victoria and Sayuri would be the bad guest and host.

Since we were all meeting virtually, we all had to shoot our own scenes in our own homes and then send the clips to one person who would edit them together. But who would do all this editing, you may ask? Well, during that initial brainstorming meeting, I said, "I have Premiere Pro."

And thus, I had just appointed myself as this project. I mean, it's just a six-minute video. How hard can it be? I can edit a 20 to 30-minute gameplay video for my YouTube channel in less than an hour.

Before I could start editing, though, I had to start filming. Since it was supposed to be dinner at someone's house, I could have easily gone downstairs and shot my scenes in the kitchen, but I was worried about my parents noticing me and asking, "Hey, Daphne. Whatcha doin'?" In retrospect, I could have just told them, and they'd probably be cool with it, but 2021 me was not up for that level of social interaction. Where would I film instead? I chose my room, which was the least culinary but most secluded spot in the house, and any trace of believability that Thao and I were in the same house was gone because she filmed her part in the kitchen with actual food. She even went outside for the part at the beginning where she lets me in. It literally goes from her standing outside with the vibrant trees all around to me standing inside with the beige walls of my room.

The video was split into three segments, each one focused on a different Asian cultural practice involving visiting people's houses and food. The one that involved Thao being outside was on taking one's shoes off when going inside. There's supposed to be a close-up shot where I go "inside" with my shoes on. Thao tells me that I need to take off my shoes, I go "outside" and take them off, and I thank her for telling me. This part always irks me because for the shot where I'm actually taking off my shoes, I'm facing to the left, but when I turn to face the camera, I start out facing to the right.

The second was about sharing food at the table instead of serving yourself first like Americans would. For my plate, I decided to use the green tic-tac-toe board that I had painted at Color Me Mine years ago and hadn't touched, and for chopsticks, I pulled from my handy dandy pile of pencils.

The third part was about waiting until everyone's seated to start eating. I must have already seen Thao's clips and known that her clip explaining why we needed to wait to eat was a bit long because I recorded myself sitting there for a few seconds listening intently. It felt awkward while I was doing it, and it looked awkward in the final video.