My Mother-in-Law Bullied Me for Not Understanding Her Dialect, So I Started Speaking English with My Husband Every Day

My mother-in-law clearly knew how to speak Mandarin,

but whenever she talked to me, she spoke only in dialect.

I couldn’t understand her.

Then she’d turn around and complain to my husband that I was abusing her.

I tried to explain, but she stubbornly insisted I was doing it on purpose.

Later, I spoke to my husband only in English.

That finally got to her.

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I’m from Hubei, and my husband is from Qinghai.

We were college classmates and got married right after graduation.

After I moved in with his family, I couldn’t understand a word they said.

My husband usually spoke to me in Mandarin.

My mother-in-law could speak perfectly fluent Mandarin to the tourists who came by.

But she would only speak to me in dialect.