My ancestors, and by that I mean one or two generations ago, intersected with Chinese culture in three ways.

One was Chinese food.

One was the Chinese laundry.

The last was fireworks.

My father was a tenement kid in a Massachusetts cotton mill city, a child of the obligatory poverty-stricken immigrants. They couldn't afford Chinese food, laundry services or fireworks.

They did know a guy who owned a Chinese restaurant.

"My two kid brothers and I used to go down there and the guy would give us a big bag of water chestnuts to peel," my pop would say. "If we peeled the whole bag, he'd give us a large order of chow mein to take home."

I told that story because old newspaper hacks like me never mention any culture other than white American unless we talk about food. The only writers who don't are the ones who use "Sino" as in "Sino American." That means "Chinese American, but pitching the "Sino" in there tells the readers you're smarter than they are, and then they quit reading because no American wants to read anything written by a smart person.

You can bet your double cheeseburger Donald Trump doesn't say "Sino American," or he won't if he wants to poll real good in Alabama. A number of states still experience a second of tongue freeze before they can say "nonbinary," so "Sino American" is a long way off.

Trump went to China for a summit. "Summit" is a newspaper word meaning "state banquet where nothing changes." As the standard of journalistic English in this country declines, I've heard two news station refer to Trump's trip as an "important summit," a term which would have made an old school cigarette-smoking editor gargle with rage.

If nothing else, Trump should be pretty familiar with the Chinese form of government, which they call "Communism" but is actually "obscenely rich guys running everything." Here in America, we call, it "Democracy," but it's actually "obscenely rich guys running everything."

The world's oldest form of government is obscenely rich guys running everything, and Trump took some obscenely rich guys to China with him so the Chinese would know he's serious.

Both the Chinese government and the American government represent the guaranteed doom of any political philosophy that tries to hand political power over to poor and working people.

The rich are always waiting, and pushing, and probing, looking for a way to hike the retirement age and take away a week of your vacation. If things get too democratic or too communist, the pushback gets harder until order is restored.

And you stand out in the parking lot and get mad, but you don't usually get mad enough to quit. The rich people don't like people who quit all the time, though they'll accept it if it means they can keep paying minimum wage. They don't want you sucking up the paycheck for 40 years, but they don't want you to leave until they pitch you out into the parking lot one final time.

And this is where the American and the Sinos sync, right there around the ramen noodle end of the economy, right there where you can accept a small number of new rich people every year because it encourages the poor to have dreams that don't cost anything.

I don't expect anything out of the important summit. Trump went in there dragging a noisy chain of Epstein and Iran, and he'll come out announcing victory of the biggest kind, and if the Chinese don't laugh at his corrupt innocence, they're better people than I thought.

Anyone interested retaining even a dirty scrap of American dignity hopes only that Trump can get through the whole trip without grinning and saying that "Asian women are beautiful."

"Really," he might say from some podium. "I know you can't say this, and you really can't say it in America where we have this terrible, bad thing called political correctness, but I'll say it anyway. Asian women are beautiful. It's a whole big country full of beautiful women. In America, it's almost wrong for women to be beautiful but we're changing that. I know the liberal corrupt media is going to hate me for saying that, but have you seen American women reporters? They look like men, and they can't get husbands, and they're bitter. So bitter."

If you think about it, though, how much difference will it really make if he says that out loud? It's happened before, and the obscenely rich guys aren't that concerned. And that is where the Americans and the Sinos sync.

To find out more about Marc Dion and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit www. creators.com. Dion's latest book, a collection of his best columns, is called "Mean Old Liberal." It is available in paperback from Amazon.com, and for Nook, Kindle, and iBooks.

Photo credit: Alejandro Luengo at Unsplash