I know it’s the key to a happy life in a new country, but you can’t spell assimilate without “limits”. Here are the Assimilator’s top three ‘no-can-doos’.

1. Telling someone to “Japan your Mother” (the local version of MFer)
In my opinion, Japaning someone’s mother sounds like taking her for a nice dinner or to a hot spring. It might end at a love hotel, but I couldn’t be certain. What’s wrong with that?

2. Speaking Chinese during sex
She can say what she likes, but I’m sticking to what my tongue knows best;-)

3. The “brother fucker” syndrome (i.e. the girl I’m sleeping with calling me “big brother”)
No doubt, when you come here, you’re gonna meet some girl, fall for her, go out with her and her friends, whom she’ll proceed to introduce you to. One guy will be her “big brother”. You’ll remember the one child policy but think that her family is the exception (didn’t she say her dad is an official?) or that he’s just her cousin (they look alike, you think, but you haven’t been here long enough, so everyone looks alike). This is rational, and rationality takes precedent here, too…right? Then you’ll see them making out and get angry, drunken “western people” style angry and say, reaching for your best Chinese, but only finding English, “you….you….brother fucker!!”.

That’ll be a funny story to email your buddies back home about, telling them how you realized girls here call their boyfriends “big brother” and how you find it totally perverse. But then you’ll meet another girl, definitely prettier (you’re sure of it because now you can tell them apart), who takes you out and introduces you as her “big brother”. You’ll let her do that, and later the same night, much more. And you’ll be a victim like everyone else. Then you’ll think, ‘but my old American girl called me Daddy’, and wonder who the real perv is.