One day I asked an American lady who recently moved to China how she liked living here. She said, "My apartment is great on the inside, but I hate it from the outside. I am so embarrassed to tell my friends that I live in a building where people hang their laundry out on the balcony to dry."

Meanwhile at home, both my mother and our Chinese housekeeper keep complaining to me that our apartment does not have a big enough balcony to hang our clothes out to dry. Instead, we have to rely mostly on our dryer or hang the semi-wet clothes on a rack inside the apartment.

One day I mentioned to our housekeeper that, in the United States, we never dry our clothes outside on a clothes line. Everything is dried in the dryer. I tell them that it is considered uncivilized to hang one's undergarments out in public. She was shocked. "What? You never dry your underwear in the sun? How can it be clean then? You need the sun and its ultra-violet rays to kill the bacteria on the underwear." I was not able to convince her that the washers and dryers do an adequate job cleaning our clothes.

Now we compromise. We first leave the clothes in the dryer to get semidry so that they don't drip, then our housekeeper finds a sunny patch in the apartment to dry them on the cloth rack.

(selected from 101 Stories for Foreigners to Understand Chinese People by Yi S. Ellis and Bryan D. Ellis, published by China Intercontinental Press in 2012)