I was appalled the moment I discovered that my parents got involved in a Chinese soap opera.

It was about some girl that had fallen in love with a guy when she was young, but her mother or something made her leave. Then she met a new guy but the old guy had come back. Then she got pregnant somehow and the new guy thinks it\’s his child, but it might be the old guy\’s child. Then the parents appear. And as most soap opera goes, someone cheated on who and it\’s really not her mother? Are they siblings?

Both of my parents work. But I was shocked to find them behaving like housewives, gossiping about how the soap opera could occur…about who slept with who…

If you overhear people talking about a tv show, you would think they were talking about real people. How would you keep track of what is real and what is not? Last year in my cognitive linguistics class, I learned it was mental models. This year in my philosophy of language class, it\’s all about the pretend speech acts.