Boil the Beans
Merry Christmas — A AI-generated speech. Still holds the spirit.
My home club of Toastmasters was chartered four years ago. One of its co-founders, Linda, now lives in China. She lost her mother unexpectedly. She missed a couple of meetings. When she returned to her first meeting, she served as the Table Topics Master. She did not pick a heavy topic. Instead, as we were all heading to the holiday season, she asked some questions about the holiday meals. When she got me to speak, I mentioned that the previous day my wife wanted to have Yangzhou Chaofan. It’s a popular fried rice among Chinese families. A good Yanzhou Chaofan would need well-prepared eggs and green beans. While there are plenty of green-bean cans in American stores, they are all too soft, which would make the fried rice taste squishy. So we would have to boil the fresh beans instead to keep the crunchy texture. But I was not in the mood to shop the beans and boil them on that day. So we ended up having some noodles instead.
The meeting went on as usual after the Table Topics session. At the end of the meeting, I got a private message in the Zoom Chatbox. It was from Linda. She said, “Boil the beans for her.”
It took me a few moments to realize that she was not talking about the meals anymore. Over the past years, we all shared our family stories in the club…
