The BIG Mac

Last week my friend Yumi sent me a text message to wish me a Happy Chinese New Year and asking if I’d like to get together for dinner soon.  And since I’m always interested in meeting for dinner I said yes, please.

We met up soon after that and I asked Yumi how she had celebrated her New Year.  She told me that there was a Taiwanese Student Union at her school and she had gone to their New Year’s party.  And, as is our tradition, we began a cultural discussion.  Our “cultural discussions” usually just entail her telling me things about her culture that I’ve never heard of.  She spends a lot of time educating me.

So, Yumi was telling me that it is tradition in China to pass around a red envelope at the New Year’s party and everyone there puts in a little money.  After the envelope is filled up they give the money to the children and the children give the elder’s a blessing.  She was telling me about this and said that her friends at the party wanted to do this but they’re all poor college students so they didn’t have the money to.  She said that instead they decided to have a raffle and she won the raffle!

Yumi told me that she was mortified because she wasn’t technically a member of the student union and that they’re supposed to pay dues but she never paid any money.  I asked her what she had won and she told me: “Well, I opened it and it was a Big Mac box.”

My friend told me how she felt so awful because she couldn’t believe they would buy her a Big Mac, and especially because she didn’t pay her dues.  Yumi went on and on about how bad she felt because she thought they’d bought her a Big Mac.

So, I asked her if there was a Big Mac inside the box when she opened it and she said no, there was a t-shirt inside the box.

I thought about that for a little bit and then finally asked her how they’d managed to get a tshirt into a big mac box.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, Big Mac’s are great but they’re not usually THAT big (or, if they are then I am going to the wrong MacDonald’s for my Big Mac’s).

Yumi looked at me like I was crazy and said “I told you it was a BIG box.”  I told her I didn’t understand why they would get a big box for a normal-sized hamburger.  Even if they were putting a t-shirt inside it.

She said “I told you it was a BIG Mac.  A big Mac computer.  The Mac computer in the big box.”

Although we were both talking in English, we were clearly speaking two different languages.

Am I the crazy for thinking the hamburger would have been the better prize?