Tehvitan Ibele

A story from Yangzhou

So this fucker gets on our boat right. Sorry, let me establish a bit of context. My mother and I, after coming back from Beijing, set off on another train toward Yang Zhou, the place where my mother's family is originally from, where beauties and geniuses are bred—no seriously that is one of their ancient proverb cemented trademarks—for a two-day stay to visit her half-brothers and half-sisters. We have a wonderful dinner together, and afterwards the eldest sibling in the group of eight or so says that we must go on a river tour of one of the most famous waterways in Yang Zhou.

As we walked to the tour area, I noticed something haphazardly that would become important later—a middle aged man was clutching the hand of another middle aged man, saying that though he was poor, the next time they went drinking, he would buy two glasses of the best alcohol in the restaurant, saying that he could afford at least two glasses. After we boarded the boat for tour, we still had some thirty minutes left before it started, so we secured the window seats for better viewing.

So this fucker gets on our boat right. I didn't know it at the time, but he was a bonafide douchebag. Twenty minutes pass. As the staff is getting ready to embark, the lights go out, and with it, the air conditioning. As a collective wail forms from the crowd, our hostess, a pretty young thing of about twenty or so, tells us that it is due to the lightning storm over our heads (oh yes, I had forgotten, it was raining heavily). A man yells out that our money should be refunded if the conditions do not improve. Laughs ensue, followed by sarcastic agreement.

As time goes on, the heckling grows, until finally the lights come on, but they say that they lack sufficient power for the air conditioner, and we leave a few minutes after our posted time. An argument breaks out on deck, indistinct, impossible to hear from the inside—but a fight is brewing between the captain of the ship and a customer while the latter's friend trying to stave off an actual confrontation. The captain comes in, followed shortly by the two men, and it is then that I realize that those two men were the ones in the conversation I noticed forty minutes prior—the huskier of the two was not only the instigator in the potential fight, but upon hearing his voice, I realized he was also the one who was heckling the staff from the outset.

Our hostess begins her commentary for our boat ride. Immediately, the husky fucker starts yelling through his hands at her, yelling that he is going to complain to her managers and such about the maltreatment he suffered on this tour, in order to obtain a full refund and words of apology. The hostess ignores him and continues. Now. The fucker stands up and wrests the microphone away from her, and yells, “EVERYONE MAKE SURE TO LODGE A FORMAL COMPLAINT IN ORDER TO OBTAIN A FULL REFUND. WE HAVE NO AIR CONDITIONING BUT WE PAID FOR AIR CONDITIONING, SO MAKE SURE TO CALL TOMORROW, FREE OF CHARGE.” The hostess tries as calmly as possible to tell him that he is not allowed to do that, that she is in charge of hosting this tour, and that if he wants to make a complaint, he should and not bother the rest of the passengers.

This husky drunk is a child. At every comment she makes regarding the history of the river, or Yangzhou itself, he interrupts her and yells for her to sing for us, and other undoubtedly equally sexist and crude things, because in moments, she is crying between her sentences, attempting to continue her tour. He goes up and snatches away the microphone again, repeating his previous request to the audience.

At this point, I was ready. I mean, absolutely ready. Though my distance from the front was longer than ideal for an immediate effect, I had it planned out. The next time he would try and grab the mic, I would walk up, take the mic with my left hand, and push him with my right against the nearest wall. I would tell him that nobody wanted to hear him speak anymore, and that he must have had a poor education to be acting this way at forty or so, and that he should show some respect and sit down. If I saw any movement of his hands towards his pockets, I would knee him in the stomach and break his right wrist with my left foot against the ground—chances are he was right-handed. If he tried anything else, I would wait to see what he would pull out with his remaining hand. Given that he was drunk and rather slow, and at that point would be reeling from the pain of broken things, I could easily take whatever weapon he would draw, and present it as evidence for self-defense.

But he never got up again. As the trip continued, he sobered, and even apologized to the hostess for his behavior. As we disembarked, I placed my hand on the hostess' right shoulder and told her that I was sorry for what she had gone through, that she was strong to be able to finish the tour, and that the husky fucker had no sense of manners, respect, or decency. She wiped her eyes, thanked me, and asked me for my number for a counter-report in case the drunk actually did file a complaint.  Easily the worst boat ride I had ever been on.

Grandfather

I tell people I am fluent in Chinese. I can carry on a perfectly normal conversation with a mainlander for twenty minutes or so, but soon after, it becomes painfully obvious that it is not my first language. This is frequently pointed out to me by my relatives in China who also make sure to liken my capacity for writing and reading to that of a sophisticated high-schooler. These limitations rarely present themselves when I am in the US, but as one might imagine, they become readily apparent in the motherland.

 

Today I found a further limitation. My mother and I had woken early from a restless night after having taken the new high speed railway from Shanghai to Beijing in order to arrive on time to visit my grandfather—my maternal grandmother's third husband—who had been in the hospital on dialysis for the past year or so. As crass as this is going to sound, I know how to be comforting in English. I can speak on several different registers, switch readily between them, and add modifiers to produce a spectrum of tones. Standing in front of my grandfather, I found that my choices had become severely limited. For the first few minutes, I stood at his bedside, watching his eyes that seemed to plead for me to say something, anything, at all. Before I could oblige, my grandmother helped me, asking if I had remembered that winter many years ago when I visited Beijing and asked to sled on the frozen lake. My grandfather rented a sled for me and pulled me across the ice—it was one of the most beautiful winters I have ever experienced—we must have been out there for hours. That was ten years ago, when the inner rings of Beijing still had run down buildings, half-built skyscrapers as monuments to empty pockets and a lack of investors. Now some square meters in the fourth ring sell for up to one-hundred and thirty thousand RMB each, but that is another matter for another time. Of course I remembered—it was a memory that stuck. For the sake of my loving to hear myself explain phenomena, well, here goes; there are moments, frames within any given scene of our lives, from our past, that become imprinted so heavily, that they replay, repeating within daydreams, idle thoughts, reminiscence in the dark of night, constituting an active visceral conscious recollection. We can say that these memories are special, but truly, who knows how we choose these moments. Anyway, this was one of them. As I stood in silence, nodding at my grandmother's words while gazing half-sheepishly, half-longingly at my ailing grandfather, I could only come up several questions that I would utter a minute or so later—“are the days getting better?” and “does it hurt?” were met with “a little” and “not much.” As my grandmother beckoned me to sit, she told me how handsome I had gotten and began to tell us stories of her life during the era of Mao, as she is wont to do, while my grandfather smiled and watched. Those stories are perhaps for another day, but in-between each segment, she never failed to ask me if I remembered that day on the lake, one winter many years ago, when my grandfather took me sledding, pulling me firmly and steadily across the perfect ice.

 

Yes, of course.

 

It is surprising

how greatly a few simple words can affect us.  Perhaps it is merely a sign of age, or perhaps, lack of contact with those very few that make you better than you believed you were, but things get old.  I do not mean with the passing of time, but rather the passing of cycles.  It is words like routine, repetition, and grind, that seem unthreatening at first, but should be feared the most--"This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / This is the way the world ends / Not with a bang but a whimper."  Time.  Or more explicitly, the passage of time.  There are these moments that we remember in our childhood, certain scenes seemingly randomly chosen from a multitude of others, that play in our minds at random intervals, that we remember with increasing clarity.  Yes, the loss of memory is very likely due to age, but this illustrates an important point, which is that the passage of time is fluid, compressing and expanding depending on the number of moments that define us within any given timeframe.  Perhaps all of this leads to the incredibly loaded concept of apathy.  But this is not about apathy.  This is about how several words can reignite the soul.  Several words, wonderfully timed and almost lost in this old old world, that can give one of the rarest things in life: purpose.