A Lawsuit due to Intercultural Misunderstanding

Five years ago in a small town in Texas, a Chinese immigration family was facing a lawsuit. The grandfather was sued in the name of abusing his grandson John, who was at the age of nine. The real story was:

The grandpa, Lee, travelled from China to visit his son’s family in this small town, where his son and daughter-in-law had immigrated since 1999. In weekdays, John’s parents went to work for full day, and after John returned home from school, it was always the happy time for the grandpa and grandson to share. They watched football games on TV, gardened, and played games. It was one day when John got cold in the morning, and asked a day off from school. Lee was going to take care of him. However, John felt even sicker in the afternoon, and got heavy cough and a fever afterwards. Lee was thinking about to take his grandson to hospital, but on one hand, the hospital is far away from their home, on the other hand, Lee could not speak English and either drive a car. He remembered the tradition Chinese treatment back in China. People will give sick people a Skin Scraping Therapy (刮痧 GuaSha in Chinese) to help blood circulation and the release of pain. The only thing is after the therapy, there will be some gores left underneath the skin due to scraping. However, it does work well in healing. And this therapy gets much popular nowadays even in western world. I once saw on TV that a famous female celebrity dressing a backed dinner gown stepping on the Oscar red carpet, with the imprint of a skin scarping therapy. Newspapers even gave a zoomed shot to the imprint and titled “Chinese tattoo becomes a fashion”.

Back to the grandpa, he did the therapy to his grandson. And with no doubt, there are gores left on John’s back. The second day, John got better and went to school as usual. Then when he had a PE lesson and got changed in changing room, John’s classmates saw the imprint and reported to their teacher. Lee got the letter of complaint saying he had attempted to abuse his grandson John, and both Lee and John was taken away for investigation. I guess Lee would never picture himself in a lawsuit, neither in a foreign country, nor abusing his own grandson.

It took about a real long time for police to investigate the case. And during that period, Lee was not allowed to get close to grandson.

I have no idea how Lee and the family get over the event, but I can imagine their frustration and uncertainty. There are troubles aroused by intercultural communications, but they are still solvable in some way if both parties calm down and talk to each other. However, when it goes to law, innocent people can become guilty, and they really invloved in troubles.