Last Thursday, I was having my Chinese New Year holiday in Ipoh. I planned to meet up with my friend as we had not met for a long time. Since I fancy Japanese food, we decided to dine in a Japanese restaurant called Ten-Good. After waiting for my friend for 20 minutes, I decided to give her a call. However, she told me she could not come because her relatives came over to visit her family. I decided to have my lunch anyways since I was too hungry. There were not many customers at that time so i managed to catch some time to chat with the lady owner. She is a Japanese whom married a local and they opened this restaurant a few years back.
My chance to chat with her came when she served me the Miso soup. I started the conversation by complimenting the Ramen noodles I had finished. She seemed delighted by the compliment and soon we jumped into a deeper conversation. She told me that she made the noodles herself and that she is good at making noodles. After a while, I started introducing myself by telling her my name. She responded politely by saying “nice to meet you” too and told me her name was Yumi.
To maintain the conversation, I asked her some follow-up questions about how long did she spent learning to make good Ramen and what other noodles can she make. She only gave me short answers as I asked closed-ended questions. Then, I noticed my mistake and tried to ask her some open-ended questions about what made her decided to come over Malaysia a few years ago. Yumi hesitated for awhile, seemed to be finding the appropriate answer for my question. However, she managed to tell me that her husband, who is a Malaysian went to Japan to learn about Japanese cuisine and they were apprentices in the same restaurant. Eventually they fall for one another and got married in Malaysia. I listened to her carefully as she was not fluent in English. After listening to her, I used the encouraging expression by saying “How interesting” and “that is so romantic” with non-verbal...