Chez Jason

He was living with his parents. I felt as if I had walked into my aunt's house.

"Your house is so Chinese," I said. Painted silk scrolls hung on the walls, and antique Chinese furniture made of hand-carved wood and inlaid with mother-of-pearl dominated the cluttered living room. Mismatched Oriental rugs covered the floors in odd positions, not in the spaces you'd expect.

Jason showed me the kitchen, whose floor, tiles and appliances were mostly brown and yellow, and matched the brown vinyl kitchen chairs. His parents had let the mail pile up on the counters. The only thing missing was the scent of mothballs, although it could have been masked by the smell of his mom's cooking. We went to his room and he apologized for not having made his bed.

"You even have Chinese sheets," I said. He began searching the hem for a tag to see if they had indeed been made in China.

"No," I said. "I mean I can tell those are your parents' old sheets from the sixties because of the floral print." I pointed to the pink, yellow and orange flower pattern. "My parents have a set of those, too. My brother used to use them when he was small."

Jason flipped on a taped episode of "Fruity Pie," a children's show on the Chinese language channel. The program was all in Mandarin, and starred a cross-dressing grandmother and her two banana-shaped grandkids.

"How much do you understand?" I asked, pointing to the TV.

"Nothing really," he said. "You?"

"No clue what they're talking about," I said.