by Lonnie Carter
The first time I knowingly heard the Chinese word for China, it sounded to my eminence-grised-hair ears like JungleGym (the fact that it really sounds nothing like that except for vaguely the first syllable confuses the point, in point of fact) and I instantly thought, well they sure are great acrobats, like being born with a tumbler in their mouths or at least a glass of Tsingtao, the national beer for foreigners.
This occurred to me, desperately trying to put any last drop of residual racism down the drain (more about drains later), while being driven to Razzle Dazzle or Razzle Fun or some such name, a Western style amusement indoor plaza some place in Beijing for children who are having troubles with their vestibules. O.K., that takes a bit of explaining.
Razzle Dazzle or Razzle Fun
It’s a place for kids to do silly games, crawl through tubes, slide down chutes into a sea of balls which they then procede to throw at each other even though the sign in lovely English warns everyone as a first precaution not to throw balls at each other. What the proprietors or managers, every one seems to have a manager here all the way up to Chairman Manager, thought eight year olds would do having slid into a sea of balls with those selfsame balls besides throw them at each other is perhaps something Confucius would know, but not this foreigner raised on Plato and Aristotle, two hundred and one hundred years after the great Chinese philosopher.
Watermelons
In an ancient Fleetwood sitting in the front passenger seat and trying to believe that the air-conditioning is protecting me and mine from the heavy leaden fumes consuming this city of 12 million where the bicycle trade is holding on for dear life and I mean that not literally and figuratively but literally twice I try to imagine my children are not really shooting watermelon juice at each other through orangegreenyellow squirt guns watermelons being here ubiquitous, driving through the gates of Bei Da, Big North, Beijing University, in the driving rain the day after Clinton’s speech there and the day after the one across from Tiananmen Square, the blinding rain almost obscuring the students in 1998 as the tanks had obscured them in 1989, watermelon patches on either side of the path into Bei Da, watermelon wedges served with the hot dogs at the Hard Rock Cafe in the Marquis Hotel in downtown Beijing, the t-shirts o so cool Hong Kong ones not half so, watermelons piled on the sides of the roads leading to the Ring Roads oblonging the city, watermelons sold out of the backs of flatbed trucks, carts, donkey-drawn, watermelon men, women and children in the Sino-variation on the theme of the jazz classic Watermelon Man, I recall that the previous day or was it the summer palace yesterday and the Great Wall the day before as we tooled out I saw a huge billboard very close to the ground, and I caught the words “Forbid preaching of Feudalism and spiritual beliefs” and I thought I’ve preached a lot of malarkey in my days, now maybe I should try a little Feudalism.
Spice Girl?
The templemosqueiglesia of Fuedalismo. Fidelismo? El Revolucion Cubano as personal fiefdoms, is it so far from la verdad? We pile out of the Batista-era Caddy smack into the North Capital (Beijing, literally) smog like I suppose Los Angelenos understand, their dear burg I’ve not seen since ’48, and City of Mexicanos, with the Good Grey New Jerk Times saying that Beijing has a higher level of worse pollutants, etc. and enter RazzDazz.
My three year old daughter is still turning over “Spice up your Life” and “Saturday Night Divas” as I tell her my fav spice girl is Polish Spice which she looks the live ringer for, so much so that she is assaulted at these tourist spots by armies, if that’s not an unkind word, of Chinese, of course, black-haired families, who insist and i mean INSIST that they take her photograph with their kids, their aunties because what? I know I know, Gentlemen and Chinese Prefer Blondes, so my baby has taken to saying “Not again, no more photographs, no THANK YOU.” For crying out loud, the girl is THREE!
Translations
We pay our yuans, deposit our shoes, buy our tokens for the various rip-off machines, hey, these Chinese must at least have studied the stateside manuals, and I begin to read the English translations of the Chinese. Now translation, literally a handing over, is always a difficult task. A favorite is the re-translation of the Spanish of Samuel Butler’s (he who brought the word “erewhon” into the language) “The Way of All Flesh” which coming back to us arrived as “The Street of All Meat,” the writer enamored of rhyme, no doubt.
My guru, Arnold Weinstein, the premiere lyricist of this time with his work on Bertolt Brecht’s “The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny,” as sterling as work gets, said that a translator has to be at least as good a writer as the originator and here I am looking at “What makes the disorder? Disorder of vestibule balance resulting from small playing space and inadequate crawling.” Over the loudspeaker? This is July, mind you. ‘Tis the season to be jolly, fa la la la la la la la. la.
Now the Chinese “fa” (don’t ask me about “la”) is the word, sign, sound, I’m not sure which, for “law.” Is it possible that part of the vestibule balance has to do with legal Christmas carols?. The ninth admonition on this list is “Using the baby walker too early, resulting in inadequate balance and support of the vestibule.” These children tend “to bite fingers, to weep and to play the genitals,” as I take it child prodigies in the 18th Century played the recorder.
The day before, going through Huai Rou where the 1995 International Women’s Conference was held, I saw “Welcome to tourism holiday spot, Huai Rou, expect everything to turn out as you wish.” We then passed a man who was exploding firecrackers and our driver, a Mr. Ow, of course the kids went right to “Ouch,” said on the right was a firecracker factory. Our other driver was a Mr. Ma (I know this gets a little much, we weren’t exactly living in the last of the undemolished hutongs, that is, barrios, ‘hoods), Mr. Ow’s brother-in-law, which for some reason we were not supposed to know this nepotism of sorts, Ma meaning four things, 1. horse, 2. hemp, 3. mother (I guess this is global) and 4. to insult. These economical Chinese.
So if you want to insult somebody’s mother who looks like a horse and dresses in hemp or smokes it you can do it all at once merely by saying mama mama. Now the Italians have been saying mama mia meaning much the same thing, no doubt since Marco Polo brought back Scotch tape and the airport moving sidewalk and invented the polo shirt adding an “l” for style, cooking in it and coming up with Barthelona’s pollo con arroz. Sort of.
Well now, global awareness, hackers and hackettes, wasn’t invented with Netgoatscape. Now “fa” means law and is also the first part of frenchperson. I haven’t gotten to “fafafafa,” let alone “lalafafa,” but it could be a long life. I’m avoiding saying that those four “ma’s” are pronounced in four different tones the likes of which I cannot possibly reproduce in a month of Rat Years. The tones slide up, the tones slide down, the tones play pinochle if you drown, go from low left to high right or the reverse and if you hear them say “Michael Douglas,” it sounds like Brando with a head cold.
You think Messrs Ma and Ow didn’t become Mr. Maow, the chairperson hisself? And was that a big sign in the middle of Huai Rou saying Beijing Certified Public Accountants? You’ve come a long way from the Long March roasting up those capitalist wienies, boobula.
Firecrackers? They’ve been banned in the city so folks right outside the firecracker factory set them off. Are they quality control testers? Frustrated city-mice venturing to the country to blow off a little cherry bomb steam?
Beijing: City Dwellers
Whether the Beijing authorities and their stratification of stratification of managers are concerned with city dwellers blowing their hands off (a man with his hands off, I mean stumps were the operative upper appendages, is everywhere in the Silk Market-now beanie baby market where they sell silk and the beebbe’s with equal vapidity) or adding to the dust of this most in-dust-rious of cities I know not.
But straw-hatted workers are sweeping the highways, just off the median strips as black Audis streak past them on the way to where? I said to Mr. Ow, there are an awful lot of black Audis and that I happen to drive an 11 yr old black one in the States and he said “This Chinese Audi” and I swear I do not know which one of us broke first but we both started laughing. And it grew. Why were we laughing? Not a day goes by without our being cut off or sped past by several seemingly identical black Audis. Nor does that day go without one of us saying “Chinese Audi.” And then rolls the laughter.
As we pulled into yet another impossibly small lane to find a parking space no one else, meaning me, could possibly find, Mr. Ow hands one yuan, about 12 American cents, to a leathered gentleman and we disembark. A while later we get back in the car and start to pull out when the same gent starts pounding on the window. Mr. Ow, a little reluctantly rolls down the window, hey, the a-c is blasting and the two Chinese have a rather heated exchange. It still sounds to me like most Chinese are yelling at each other all the time so I don’t take it in too much as we start to take off. With the fifty times this sort of thing has happened in the last few days I feel silly asking but I do.
What was that man saying, Mr. Ow. He starts laughing and says he’s giving me my yuan back because my money’s too dirty. Then I start laughing.
Which one of those Frenchmen takes credit for inventing “surrealisme?” Breton? One of those Andre’s, no doubt. Well, ‘Dre, you Fa-folks on one of your colonial sojourns in the region maybe brought back some of the sur-, but basically, at the base of the Eiffel Tower, you’re about as real as it gets.
Conclusion
Feeling entirely unrealistic at the moment, I’m going to ride my bicycle over to fitness center factory 4, use my idiotsyncratic baby walker not too early and, I hope, having served the people heart and soul, as Chairman Mao loved to say, and which all the cheapest taxicabs have emblazoned on their back windows, to be in adequate balance and complete support of my vestibule.
As we say in the good ole PRC (the Peoples’ Republic of Correctness – fifty grams of coke gets you a bullet in the back of the head, 500 for maryjanes), ni hao, which seems to mean hello, herro and everything in between, never mind that in the states it sounds like an orange drink. Though never fond of watermelon – as the wag has it, too much water and too litle melon – it’s better than a hellmann’s and soda.
