My many Chinese friends prove to be my family

We had the time of our lives. We watched hungry wild elephants trash a restaurant in the rainforest of Yunnan province's Xishuangbanna in search of the fruit stored inside.

We were pickpocketed by even more ravenous wild Tibetan macaques in Sichuan province's Mount Emei. One of the mischievous monkeys even leapt into my mother's arms to snatch the bag of peanuts she was clutching.

We saw the world's largest stone-carved Buddha in Sichuan's Leshan, stood above the clouds and beneath the shadow of a 48-m-tall bronze Buddha statue at Emei Shan's Golden Summit and watched the dazzling face-changing performances of the country's top Sichuan Opera troupe.

Certainly, China offers some of the most amazing sightseeing experiences Earth has to offer.

Of course, my family - my mother, father, brother and aunt - who had come to China for their third time, but first Spring Festival with my wife and me, marveled at these wonders with wide eyes and slack jaws.

But taking in these magnificent spectacles was not the favorite part of their adventure. While the lofty mountains, lush jungles and ancient temples were incredible, it was their times spent around dinner tables with our Chinese friends that were truly magical.

All said and done, we feasted at seven baijiu-drenched banquets with six sets of local pals, and their friends and families. That is, in addition to a night of alcohol-fueled cultural exchanges with two conservation officers in a tree house in Xishuangbanna's Elephant Valley.

My family was astonished by Chinese generosity, for which there is no equivalent in the individualistic-and-proud-of-it United States, and it left them reeling.

Conversation and tipple flowed across tables and cultures, and my family got its first real taste of local food and hospitality. It left them hungry for more. So, on our last day we decided to give the Forbidden City and Tian'anmen Square a miss and go for dinner instead with a buddy from Beijing.

During my family's first two trips to the country, they visited many remarkable places that led them to understand why my wife and I had come to China.

But they enjoyed few opportunities to engage local people aside from vendors, servers and cabbies. However, on their second trip, they got to make friends with ours - and this made all the difference.

Since my wife and I moved to Beijing about three years ago, we've missed out on the family element of both Christmas and Spring Festival. But this year, we didn't.

And a chorus of foreigners living in China agrees that your friends become your family when you live so far away from your blood relatives. So it was a great chance for our families - the American biological one and the surrogate Chinese ones - to meet one another.

My family had been pondering whether or not they would be able to make it back to China next year, given the impact of the financial crisis.

But it was their encounters with the Yao, Fu, Zhang, Feng, Lan and Hou families, and their friends, that cinched the deal.

They, along with so many others we met along the way, made this Spring Festival the time of our lives.

And my family agrees: It could never put a price on that.