It's us?

Last night, six of us went to eat at a diner in Gubei, an expat suburb. It's been awhile I since my last diner experience. Pancakes, fries, milkshakes, 50% off teacher night....the Jersey in me was excited.

So we get there, and at first we're the only customers. The diner has the appropriate 50s vibe, red and white checkers, posters of fords and elvis. Pancakes arrive and they're decent. Biscuits and gravy, not that good (gloppy, soggy mess). Still, everything is going well (even though I get occasional strange looks from the waitresses, probably because I can say some things in Putonghua perfectly yet sound awful otherwise, and because I was hanging with a bunch of laowai).

The diner starts to fill up. In the table adjacent to us is a group of teachers from the Livingston American School, behind is a grandmother(?), mother, and young son. The discussion at our table starts to get louder, and then Brian W. asks me and cole if we want to have a kid soon.
"NO!!" we both say at the same time.
"Unless we can sell it," I conclude.
"People love halfies," cole says.
"We could probably get a good price," I agree. "Or otherwise leave it on Baise Lu somewhere."
The conversation continues for a while after that, veering off in disparate directions, with shouts of "Whore!" and "Prostitute" chiming in. Then I catch the face of the grandmother sitting behind us. Is she giving us a dirty look? She is giving us dirty looks! And the kid next to her, the one that looks about five years old, is...half Chinese.

And then I realize it; we have become those Americans. If only for a night, we are those loud, obnoxious stereotypes.

Maybe it's because we live in the outskirts of Shanghai, where there aren't any other foreigners and no one understands English. How to act when there are actually people who know what we're saying?

I wonder how it's going to be when we finally get home. Will we be unfit for society?