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Some background: My wife is from Taiwan and understands basic Mandarin, my father in law has significantly more comfort with Mandarin.
We went out with our young infant son and my father in law for his birthday that was very nice! In teaching our son the names for his grandparents (The Mandarin words intended for the parents on the maternal side) we repeatedly were saying. "Say happy birthday to your 'gon gon'" and say thank you to "Gon Gon". Terms that we had learned from my mother-in-law, who of course is excellent skill in Mandarin. It definitely was getting some strange reactions from him, that we were surprised about considering he is very happy interacting with his grandson. He finally speaks up and says that word is the wrong word, and starts describing how emperor in China would have male servants around him that had certain surgeries performed so they would not go after the concubines.... We come to find out that we are using the word for eunuch, not the word for grandfather .... This word we learned from my mother-in-law, who is divorced with my father-in-law... Whether or not this was intentional or not.. hard to say. My wife was very short we were saying it correctly and we had to apologize quite a bit. He was very understanding once he understood why, and taught us the appropriate term. Definitely not the way to win over your father-in-law. He words were "when will people say this to you where I come from supposed to punch them".
TL;DR: my mother-in-law either on accident or on purpose taught that's the wrong term for grandfather, I'm calling my father-in-law.... And teaching my son to call him .... A eunuch. We've solved it now, but feel most embarrassed.
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