Falling down the rabbit hole, writing as I go, with my Free Fall Friday peers.
prompt- What have you got on your shoulder honey?
My wife and I parted ways in Chinatown. No, I don’t meant that tensions in our marriage had finally reached a boiling point, I mean we each wanted to buy lovely presents for each other. Sheila, that’s her name, had discovered Chinatown back in the summer and often came home so refreshed from her expeditions to that exotic place.
Soon she was wearing Chinese dresses—Sheila is very slim—and carrying Chinese fans, and buying pottery and paintings. She even began getting our house into an Asian minimalist look. Yes, the minimalists are more Japanese, but hey, Asia is Asia.
That’s what I said one afternoon when we were having green tea in our living room. “Asia is Asia,” I said, “nothing wrong with green tea from India.”
“Well Neil, if the Chinese drink it, it’s Chinese.”
“Oh, then if we go to Chinatown and have a cherry coke, it’s Chinese?
“Of course. The finest drinks in Shanghai have a red to them.
“Suddenly,” I said “this tea is too green.”
Sheila looked at me. “Isn’t this just grand?”
I had to agree, looking at our Dragon cups and saucers and dragon wall tapestries and my own dragon sweater.
So that evening in Chinatown when we met up again I was thinking of accusing her of liking a Chinese fellow since summer when she beat me to it, finding a long dark hair: “What have you got on your shoulder honey?”
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Prompt-inviting the enemy to move in
My wife had new-found feminist friends.
We’d be drinking green tea and she’d look around at our Asian themed walls and say, “Did you know the Chinese would bind women’s feet?
“Yes” I nodded,
“And the women would put up with it! Encouraged by the patriarchy!”
Every husband knows what to do when the good wife starts talking with exclamation marks.
I said, “Men! Don’t talk to me about men! Those dratted wretches.”
For my last sentence, no exclamation mark, I was trying to wind us down. No luck.
“And I know a Chinese woman! A young thing with horrible in-laws, a horrible husband, but they are separated, and she’s desperate for a place to stay!”
I knew something was up, for this was a sentence almost all in exclamation marks, every word breathless. I almost held my breath, wondering was coming next.
“Neil, we have to invite her to move in, give her shelter.”
I sipped my tea. “Everyone needs shelter and good tea… ummm, good. Say, does this lady drink green tea?
“What?—of course; her name is May Ling. They used to call her May, but she is reclaiming her heritage.”
“Oh.” I wrinkled my brow. “I thought her family was very into traditional heritage.”
“We have to call her May…. And you have to take your deer trophy down. May is a vegetarian, and hunting is part of the patriarchy.
“Oh… hunting is patriarch?… oh” And I kept looking into my cup. Sometimes all you can say is “oh.”
“And could you not wear your camouflage T-shirts around the house? I know you are only having a mid-life crises, but May’s husband used to wear camouflage.”
I groaned, “And it’s patriarchy.”
“There’s more. She likes women more than men.”
“Obviously” I said.
“No, I mean likes.”
“Ohhhh, now I get it. But she still is OK with men, right? And the male dragons on our wall.”
“Actually, Neil, she is going through a phase. You know, being strident.”
I had to say my thought out loud: “Oh jeez, we’re inviting the enemy to move in….Good thing we own a doghouse.”
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Sean Crawford
April 2021
weather: above freezing every night—spring is here!
Footnotes:
A smile: My blond (former) girlfriends’s grandmother, years ago, married a person of Chinese heritage surnamed “Mah,” which means “horse.” But for making curtains she had to give up on horses, and instead sew dragon curtains, because in her white small town everyone knew “Chinese” meant “dragons.”
Note for smile-challenged trolls: As Mark Manson wrote on Monday, (temporary link) …“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.”
For example: Regarding China, absence of me “spelling it out as if you were a poodle” as to whether or not I’m anti-communist does not necessarily mean evidence that I am absent of sympathy for dear old grandmothers, born and raised in Taiwan who don’t want their nation to be forced by violent bayonets—Power to the revolution! We love Chairman Mao!—to join the People’s Republic of China… with their grandchildren then being violently clubbed and gassed on the street, as people of all ages experienced, all through last year, in Hong Kong.
Well, here’s what I am saying: Too bad the Internet is still stuck with the same blankety-blank “aggressive conformity trolls” whom I had once hoped to escape by leaving high school behind. Don’t you wish grown adults, on computers in their mother’s basements, would grow up?
~”Patriarchy” is defined in my eponymous post of December 20, 2020;
~“Why China hates Taiwan” is in my eponymous footnotes for April 5, 2021.
~I explicitly examine “cultural appropriation” in my book review post of August 2020, Dog Says Don’t Label Me.
~No, I won’t link to my own work. My readers aren’t that lazy, and I have no undignified desire for SEO. (search engine optimization)
