Turkey. Gobble, Gobble.

While the fourth of July may be the nation's holiday, I believe Thanksgiving is what it's all about.

To me, Thanksgiving is America and it's my favorite.

However, I've realized as I've spent the past T-day with friends, not family (last year I was Chile, we had salmon) and soon to be this year's blessing of Thanksgiving (we'll have chicken, again, there is no turkey) that my idea of Thanksgiving is extremely skewed whether I'm in the country or not.

See, for me, it's about the Swedish meatballs, the Red Oak and Bishop Hill.

Still, I was determined to teach my students about the great Thanksgiving, the one where most people relish the great turkey. I made it simple. I excluded details of my own celebrations, i.e. chasing tomtes, yulebuks and drinking lingonberry creme coffee (something most Americans don't really understand either, I get it!).

To my students, however, simple is relative. Just as America is as different as the language that defines it.

I tried to explain "mash" potatoes, but without a dictionary of simple vocabulary at hand, most of my students just looked dazed as if they too understood the spell of a turkey coma, which they didn't either. See, they thought the white outline of food filling the bowl signaled rice.

As an ESL (English as a second language) teacher, suddenly you realize the limits and great expansions of your own language. Why does that word mean that? I've had to question myself on a better way to explain something several times over. Luckily and not so luckily, I have 6 classes and 6 times to attempt my explanations.

"Carrot, you know, it's orange, a vegetable, you eat it here in China."

"Huh?"

Sometimes teaching English as a second language is like a long, never-ending game of charades. Of course, when you are not playing charades, you also find yourself doing all sorts of weird things at the expense of understanding. Like today, I found myself using baby talk to illustrate slang. Why? Only a student in that classroom could explain, but oddly enough to the Chinese mind, it worked, I think. As so, I've also scared some students silly in trying to get them to truly understand the element of surprise; they didn't see it coming-- BOO! I'm sure this has never happened in their Chinese classes and only enhanced their joy, confusion and hopefully--surprise.

Yet when it comes to teaching English abroad, it can be a weird sort of therapy.

Language and your knowledge of it, can either sprout a wall blocking you out of a culture or usher you in to its most intimate circumstances. My Chinese is such that without my student's English striving, I would only be tapping on the window display glass of understanding into the Zhengzhou lifestyle.

However, once the bell rings, it's my time. English is the mode of communication and I can revel in stories about vampires and ghosts (if Halloween is our muse), songs that teach like Bruce Springsteen's Glory Days, episodes of Friends that exemplify the inevitable failures of Thanksgiving, and the like.

It's therapeutic in a world where most girls enjoy gnawing on the talons of chicken feet. I'm still observing that one. Not all interests to human beings are universal.

So, while I can't eat turkey yet again this Thanksgiving (or Swedish meatballs). In China, I can at least hear its name and talk about its grave absence from my new world.

"Hmmm....sounds delircous," my students chime (in their traditional Chinese accent of an added r).

"Yes, yes it is," I assure them. "It's deLICious."

Yet, this also means I can't stop thinking about America and all that I am missing in the holiday season.

So, Happy Thanksgiving to the land of unlimited freedoms and wild turkeys. I'll be thinking about you all week long with chicken cordon bleu and imported apple pie as my Thanksgiving imitators.

We do what we can ;)