For Valentine’s Day, my friends and I went to my favorite Indian restaurant in Berkeley, and of course, no one was surprised when asked how spicy I wanted my food, I replied, “As spicy as is humanly possible.”

Even by Indian standards, my tolerance for spicy food is very high. When I was in school, my mother used to make potato chips at home. While everyone else simply wanted salt on theirs, mine were always covered with red chilly powder. My friends were equally fond of the stuff. We’d often eat out, getting the spiciest food available in the Indian cuisine, and then gulp it down with bottles of water. It was our version of fun.

This, of course, did mean that every time the three of us got together, we also got sick. Sore throats, stomach aches, and eventually, orders from each of our doctors to cut down.

Our mothers would stare at us in fascination. My mother often wondered about the sanity of eating something so spicy that you needed two glasses of water to wash it down, but she wasn’t surprised. I am my father’s daughter– a man who eats raw green chilli (the very hot kind), because… well, because it’s tasty. Don’t look at me. I just inherited the weirdness.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been missing India so much it’s almost a physical pain. Which is funny, because I actually do love my life here in America.

For several days though, there’s been a lot of India going on in my world. I’m working on a presentation for Thursday on women and sexuality in India. I finally saw Slumdog Millionaire and just finished writing about it. And I had to refrain from getting into a verbal war with journalists who managed to, despite their best intentions, completely offend me with their comments about India.

That’s probably the one thing that has surprised me most about America. I have on several occasions now been asked questions like, “China’s not a democracy?” and my personal favorite, “Is Delhi cleaner than Berkeley?”

Funny as these statements are, they become downright painful when someone proclaims, after returning from India, that they’d watched Slumdog Millionaire before leaving, but Oh. My. God. they were not prepared for the poverty in India. Maybe, oh I don’t know, because poverty isn’t glamourous in real life and doesn’t end after two hours?

It offends me greatly when after spending two weeks in a tourist part of town, people paint all Indians as lying, cheating scumbags. And that they’re shameless enough to actually say it to my face.

A Chinese-American friend says she no longer views it as ignorance, but as a refusal to see that what works in one culture or country, may or may not work in another.

Like most people, my views on Chinese policies and government are based on Indian, American and British media’s portrayal of it. Because I have been researching Chinese politics for almost two years (I hope to live there someday), I was very excited to see many Chinese-American students and five Visiting Scholars from China at Berkeley.

One said to me the other day that if significant changes were made to the human rights conditions and freedom of speech, she’d actually prefer the current system to a democracy. But that she will probably never say this to anyone here except me because she’s afraid of people jumping down her throat, telling her how wrong she is, and then assuming that she doesn’t know what she’s talking about.

And I will never forget how two people personally thanked me after a presentation in the J-school, in which I was the only person in the entire session who made a case for why a boycott of the Chinese Olympics would have been a mistake. It was a surprise to most in that room when I said having the Olympics in China was, in my opinion, a “good idea.” The Chinese students thanked me because until then, they had only seen me as a journalist who was a vocal critic of China and wrote about Tibet.

It is the same appreciation I feel when journalists come to India, and instead of applying Western ideals to the culture, sit back and try to understand it first. It’s what I did when I first arrived here. I didn’t feel comfortable reporting, so until December, I continued writing about India, and just assimilated. Now I’m writing about the Bay Area for American readers, and I feel confident in my ability to not offend.

There are a lot of things I have learned and continue to learn in Berkeley, but the most important one is this: Before you speak, shut up and listen.