jujube lady

my mom told me a funny story today.

before i begin, let me explain what a jujube is for those who don't know. my mom calls them "chinese apples" but they are also often referred to as "chinese dates" or "chinese prunes." after performing a google search, i found that the actual name is "jujube."
heh. jujube. what a funny word.

this is what they look like:

we grow these in our backyard. i think we have two trees? each summer when they grow ripe and abundant i see them all over my parents' backyard and kitchen. the fruit starts out a yellowish-green and turns brown as it ripens. as you can see in the picture, they're usually no bigger than an inch. 

i was never too fond of them. the taste isn't so bad; it's slightly sweet, similar to a pear. but i dislike them because they're very dry, and also there's a pit in the middle. i find the small amount of fruit you get just isn't worth having to mess with the cumbersome pit. so i hardly ever eat these little things.

every year my parents harvest more of these than any human being or dog (since my dogs often like to gnaw on them) could ever want to eat. so my mom usually dries them and turns them into prunes, which i think makes them even less appealing to eat, but i guess it extends their shelf-life.

anyway, enough introduction. on to the story.

my mom was explaining to me how she boils these prunes and drinks the resulting juice in her tea. apparently a chinese lady gave her the idea.

whoa, hold up. chinese lady? my mom doesn't know any chinese people. yes, we are asian, and my dad is part chinese, but my parents identify as fully vietnamese and they only have viet friends.

so i asked her, "chinese? you know a chinese lady?"

"oh yeah, she came to our house."

"why was a chinese lady at our house?"

"she saw our tree and wanted the chinese apples."

wait. wait. what?

i had her back up and explain.

again, i have to explain another thing before i go on. our house lies right along a highway. in fact, i tell people the highway is my backyard, which isn't much of a stretch. there's a giant wall and some grass that separates us from the road, but for all purposes, we're pretty much on the highway. i remember once while sitting in my backyard, a friend asked me if i ever worried about cars crashing through the wall and into my house. i told him that i had never thought about it before.

so anyway, apparently a chinese lady driving down this highway saw a little jujube tree on the side of the road and instantly recognized what it was. i'm guessing the little tree sprouted when fruit from our tree fell on the other side of the wall.

the woman sees the tree and then calls the city asking them if she can have it. so to reiterate: this lady drives down a highway, sees a tree she wants, and calls the city to ask if she can dig it up to take home. i wonder how often they get that request.

even though the tree was on the other side of the wall, apparently it was still part of our property, so the city told her she would have to ask the owner, that being my parents.

i'm not really sure how she tracked down my parents. i'm sure the city just gave her my parents' names and address. but i like to imagine this little chinese woman driving down my street and peering into people's backyards to see if they have a jujube tree. (i asked my mom where she got the tree from, and she said a friend gave it to her as a gift. now the question is, where did that person get the tree, and who gives trees as gifts anyway?)

the chinese lady comes to our house asking for the tree. i'm sure my parents were quite confused by the request. they told her she could do whatever she wanted with the tree on the other side of the wall (seeing as my parents didn't even know it was there) and gave her a bunch of the little jujube fruits in a basket. my mom told me how the lady was absolutely ecstatic with this gift, because apparently these little jujubes bring good luck and are quite hard to find (at least in america anyway).

the grateful chinese lady told my mom how the jujubes, when boiled into a tea, were very good as a cold and stress remedy, and were especially good to consume in the wintertime.

my mom ends the story as she gets up to pour her jujube tea into a mug. 

i was left slightly dumbfounded but extremely amused by how weird asians can be.