Two sets of interactions with the (Thai) restaurant owners's (Thai-American) children...

...when they were in the restaurant for like two days straight, when they had some school off because of parent-teacher conferences:

1) I told the younger one who's like early middle school that "back in my day" parent-teacher conferences only lasted for one hour, since all of the children were perfect and the parents would come in and the teachers would just be like, "Your children are perfect," and then the parents could leave again right away, and that's how it was with all of the children, and she just looked at me and was like, "Wow."

(I'm not sure if she got that that was a joke.)

Later, she was doing her (French) homework, and so I started quizzing her and telling her about Romance languages and Haitian Creole as a daughter of French etc., all in really simple accessible ways, and then I asked her if she knew about Haiti, and she didn't, so I told her that it's a country in the Caribbean where around the time of the American Revolution there was this huge slave revolt and they went and set up their own country, and at that her eyes sparked up and she was like, automatically and genuinely and partially to herself, "That's cool"

2) When the next day they were both eating at a corner table and I got water to go around to the customers, I stopped at their table like they were customers and very formally topped off the water in both their glasses, which took them a second to see that I was doing it as a joke, and then I very formally asked them if they had "one or separate checks," at which the (older) (high school-aged) daughter right away was like, "One, and she's paying!", flinging her finger out and pointing across the table at her little sister.

"Okay," I was like.

So, like ten minutes later when I had time, I took the back of a receipt and drew up a mock receipt for them, with the cost as "$37 million," and then a bit where tax was "$.03," so the entire bill was "$37,000,000.03."

Only, by that time, the little sister was gone.

So, I went and served it to the older daughter anyways, and she looked at it and was like, "Inflation is getting crazy!".

Later, too, I saw the little sister and I asked her if she had gotten the bill.

She had, she told me, "And I'm not paying!".