Mom tried hard to teach us Chinese after school, but as I got older I found these lessons increasingly tedious. I well understood spoken Chinese at a child's level (e.g. the Chinese for "Tidy your room!" is permanently etched into my brain) but was reluctant to speak it myself, due to the wish (all too common among children of immigrants) to distance myself from my parents' accents and intense pride in their ethnicity and traditions. Likewise they despaired over my refusal (like a "foreign devil") to eat most Chinese food, especially the most authentic dishes with the strongest tastes or smells, or prepared from exotic creatures.