I’d call myself the prodigal daughter except I have yet to return home after my years away in the wilderness.
Every year, with irregular clockwork, my kind, brave parents gird their loins, apply for visas, book astronomically priced red-eye flights and come to see me. I repay their loving parental support by allowing these visits to degenerate into chaos, danger, discomfort, illness and exhaustion.
Sometimes I think that these visits devolve into madness and confused terror because I’m generally as integrated into my home abroad as a fish is in helium: the language, the unwritten cultural rules, the subtleties of traffic regulations generally evade me and I spend most of my life flailing about, hoping to not screw up too badly or to get anyone killed. I’m going down ignominiously and I’m very obviously taking them with me.
That said, I’m not the only one who can seriously traumatize their parents when they come to visit you abroad!
You can too with my simple yet effective list of hints and tips!
Survivors!
Top 4 Tips on How to Traumatize Your Parents When They Come to Visit You!
Maim Yourself
I’m really good at this one. It’s a skill I honed back in Turkey, whereby I made sure to be seriously  injured just days before their arrival, or alternately, to fall gravely ill just days after their arrival. Both work equally well.
They can be greeted at the airport by a wincing, pale, shuffling daughter, as was the case when I found myself in the middle of a 5 car pile up in Istanbul just three days before they flew in. I was barely able to walk due to massive soft tissue damage (and a concussion, to boot!) so my school loaned me one of their drivers to help me pick them up at the airport. It’s always a heartening sight to see your only child shuffling slowly toward your exit gate, leaning heavily on the luggage cart, letting out little yelps of searing agony, supported at the elbow by a doting middle aged Turkish man.
Alternately, as noted, you could always wait until they have settled in before you thoroughly traumatize them. This is what I did the year before the car accident and it was equally effective, if not more so. I managed to somehow contract a corneal ulcer just days after their arrival, which slammed my right eyelid shut, reduced my eyeball itself to a horrific meaty mess, and resulted in daily hospital visits and round the clock antibiotic drops they had to administer every hour or so for most of their one month visit. In their jet lagged state, they took turns getting up at 2am or 4am to pry my hideous lid back to administer the drops. I very nearly lost that eye- isn’t that something every parent wants to witness for their only child?
Provide Extreme Discomfort
I’m good at this one. It’s not as dramatic as maiming yourself but it can be prolonged and quite effective. For example, for the past two visits to Shanghai it has been so hideously bone-chilling cold that even my Canadian mother can’t get warm. I insist on long walks along roads that act as wind tunnels, blasting icy air into their pores then take them to unheated noodle joints for lunch. At the other end of the spectrum, you could also drag them to central Turkey in summer time and insist they go on rather long hikes through baking, open terrain. Other options include taking them to Hong Kong and Macau before the shoulder season eases the heat and humidity somewhat. Again, insist on the long, arduous hikes in unshaded areas.
To reach these places, I suggest you take overnight buses if possible, preferably the kind that still allow smokers and which pause every few hours for smoke and pee breaks throughout the night, interrupting any hope of sleep.  For best effect, I recommend a long arduous hike after the 12 hour overnight bus ride. If  you prefer to stay in the city, take them to the most crowded, aggressive areas for a quiet stroll after their sleepless, cramped night on the bus. I recommend a Saturday stroll along Istiklal caddesi in Istanbul, particularly if the riot police are out.  Nanjing Dong Lu in Shanghai, with its persistent touts and throngs of wide-eyed Chinese day-trippers ploughing into you, is also handy for this. In addition to the sleep deprivation caused by the overnight bus, you could always take it a step further and do as I did over a decade ago in London, when I got the inspired idea to take them on an all-day walking tour through the whole city immediately after they landed. So what if it was 4 in the morning in Vancouver? We needed to see Camden Town!
Mind your step
Put Them in Harm’s Way
This one is actually quite simple and needs little explanation. It works best if you are living in a developing country. For example, one of the best ways to bring about immediate terror is to take them from the airport to their hotel in a taxi. In Shanghai, I recommend combining one of the dodgy red or dark blue taxis with a rainy day and a driver who loves both the elevated expressways and playing chicken with other drivers at great speed. He should also be unable to understand the phrase, ‘please slow down’ in any language, including Mandarin as spoken by a non-Shanghainese.
As we discovered this past week when I took my parents out for dinner not long after their arrival in Shanghai, a very quick and easy route to trauma is to take them out to dinner at a restaurant which then proceeds to catch on fire. This isn’t as hard as it sounds. The key to maximizing the impact of such a simple action is to make sure you are sitting next to a window looking out over the kitchen window so that you can see the flames shooting out of the uncapped propane canister which is just outside the window. Â Stare at the flames for a good minute or so before reacting, as it is rather hard to know in China when things are going horribly wrong or if they are totally normal. Lull them into thinking this is normal. Then evacuate as soon as the restaurant starts filling with smoke and the electricity shorts and plunges both floors into darkness. Allow the throngs to clog the stairway before your parents have a chance to leave. Bonus points for not allowing your mother time to finish her much needed beer before being thrust into the acrid, jostling throng.
Bikes on sidewalk to dodge
Assign Daunting Tasks
This one is also fairly easy to arrange and can be done in conjunction with other activities mentioned above. For example, when I found myself horribly damaged after that car crash in Turkey I sent my jet lagged father out to pay my rent and bills which were due but which i had been unable to pay as I couldn’t walk down our steep hill to the bank. The bank spoke no English and my father spoke no Turkish but I recklessly sent him down there anyway.
Another option is to agree to meet them somewhere after you finish work, cavalierly telling them that they can easily get a taxi to the destination but failing to explain to them how to tell the driver where to go. Similarly, you could send them down to the wet market to buy vegetables for dinner without explaining prices, weight units or arming them with even a word of Mandarin.
Braving the hordes
Have you any further tips on how to make your parents’ visit as nerve wracking and psychologically damaging as possible?
17 Responses
Taking Mum to Cuba and subsequently being unable to take out any money proved to be VERY effective. Having tortured her with (appalling) La Habana street food and the total inability to do anything fun for two days in scorching June heat, I sent her merrily off on her flight (brought forward a week), then proceeded to scrape by myself for ten more days with no money for internet and barely any for food, leaving her to imagine all kinds of nasty endings for her poor, sweet daughter, all alone in Cuba with no money and predatory men on every corner.
I had quite a nice time, actually.
Camden Luxford recently posted..Adjusting to Life as an Expat: Interviews and Resources
Gotta say, that’s impressive! What happened with the money? Was it just that the banks were internationally incompatible or what?
You set a hard bar there, Maryanne. I’m impressed. Imperiling their only grandchild is always a good one, I find, perhaps with something wilfully dangerous such as overtaking on Balinese roads. “What?! What?! He didn’t have to brake! It was fine!” Extra bonus points for having one grandparent in the back with no seatbelt while braking vigorously.
Jungle hikes for people who have yet to adapt to the climate, one of whom is also carrying a bad knee, is a bit of a specialty of mine. Ooh! Insanely complicated developing world boat journeys, based on the assumption that there’ll be a logging track back at the other end. (There wasn’t.)
Oh yes! Force your parent to try delicious local speciality at rural cafe, basically food poisoning their unacclimatised gut for two days. Repeat ad nauseam (indeed, trans nauseam), “I don’t understand it! I mean, we’re both fine! We eat there ALL THE TIME.”
Theodora recently posted..The Beauty of Tibet on Horseback
Nicely done! Adding the grandchild to the equation really does bump up the trauma level, doesn’t it? I’m still not ready to put my folks on the backs of motorbikes, though they have been pretty brave about food. I took them to a water town snack street last year and bought a half dozen random things, some of which I could identify and others I couldn’t. They gamely ate everything. No food poisoning (but I’ve been priming their gastro intestinal pumps for well over a decade now).
May I also suggest booking a traditional Japanese inn (while in Japan) and making your parents sleep on the floor despite any bad backs/bad knees/whathaveyou as you are convinced they will want the “authentic experience.” When in fact all they really want is a bed… especially after the March of Death that you took them on earlier that day.
Oh, and acting like a bratty sixteen-year-old because you’re tired and stressed out and just need some alone time also works really well.
Sally recently posted..Introducing My New Blog Series: Stuff I Really Kind of Like About My Life in China
Sweet! So glad you went the authentic route for maximum impact! Did they get the authentic raw egg and fish breakfast?
Here’s to being bratty and 16 in your 30s!
Oh, this is extremely helpful! I’m finally getting my dear mother to come visit me next month, and I was worried I wouldn’t be able to traumatize her thoroughly enough. Fine tips all around. I thank you kindly, and I’m sure Mom will, too.
I’m sure you’ll do well. There are plenty of creative ways to traumatize parents in Shanghai. Let me know if you come up with any innovative ones!
Some excellent tips there. And yet they still visit! Parents never learn!
I’m a fan of dodgy meeting-up ideas, such as having to be working when they arrive, particularly if they have never visited the country before, and leaving them to negotiate taxi sharks at the airport all by themselves. Then give them directions to a random restaurant and hope they will still be there, with their bags, in a couple of hours’ time when you get off work and manage to make it there. Super extra bonus points if the restaurant is close enough to your house no taxi will take you there, yet far enough away to make dragging the suitcases there a real pain. (If you can involve going up steps with said suitcase, even better, and double points if the only reason the cases are so heavy is because you gave them a shopping list as long as your arm.) Hopefully this will wear them out for the rest of the holiday.
You can also do this trick even when not working, by living out in the middle of nowhere and therefore trying to give them directions to meet in a random cafe in a city you don’t even live in, that you’ve only been to once before and you’re not quite sure where it is or what its name is (before the days of internet and mobile phones…).
Super bonus points if you arrange a random meeting somewhere in Turkey and then fall asleep on the long-distance bus and miss the town altogether. Next time, for variety, get to a town a half hour journey away from where they are and then find there’s no onward buses for two hours and the dolmus is refusing to fill up, so make them do a one hour round trip to come and pick you up.
And yet they have managed to find me every time!
I’m impressed! You have skilled parents! Airport pick ups are something I’ve always prioritized as failing to meet up or crossing paths is always so much more trouble than it’s worth. Especially in that decade I travelled before I owned a mobile phone! I’ve taken overnight buses myself from Kayseri to Istanbul just to pick someone up from the airport because I didn’t want to have to spend the next three days chasing after them…
These are great tips! i’ll be sure to keep them in mind. One that’s always worked for me is having a totally inappropriate boyfriend. A twenty year age difference works well. Bonus points if he speaks no English.
Ellen recently posted..A Day at Antalya’s Police Station: Renewing myTurkish Residence Permit
Nice! I’d have had a better chance with with that last one if I still lived in Turkey, but I suppose I’ll just have to try harder on other fronts here. If I was a guy in China, I could totally just start dating my 18 year old students…
I am impressed! 🙂 Hmm, if my family visits me in Taipei (when I eventually live there with my husband instead of just visiting myself)- how an I torture them? Let’s see…
-Encourage them to be on a scooter and have me drive. Ohh, good one. (writes this down)
-Take my family to snake alley and encourage them to drink snake venum.
-Have my family stand in the cold ’cause there are no seats while eating. (which reminds me, make it a December visit).
-Let my female side of the family to enjoy the “squatters” in the women’s restroom.
-Use the matr station during rushhour in Taipei.
– Wait for my family members to scream when they see how big the cock roaches are in Taiwan.
– Overdose my family with allergic medicine because their allergies are not going go swimmingly well.
– Speak Mandarin/Taiwanese to my husband and have my family members wondering what I am saying.
This is just rough draft. I’ll do better. (ponders)
Eileen recently posted..Wisdom I’ve learend (so far) through life experiences.
Hehe. Awesome. Definitely inspired thinking there…
All I needed to do was send to my 83 year old mother a picture of me in a cage with a tiger in Thailand. I am older now and very experienced at traumatizing my mother after 30+ years of travel in asia and central america.
Well done with the tiger trauma! I’ve only been living abroad for 18 of my 37 years so I still have a lot of traumatizing to catch up on. We are going diving in the Similan islands near Phuket next week, where we’ll be sharing territory with tiger sharks. Havent told my mother about that yet…
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