Man, they were everywhere!

I’ve lost count of the number of Chinese people I’ve met yesterday, just surprising me on the U-Bahn and chatting me up. Speaking Mandarin nearly the entire day in a German city would wear anyone down, but I guess it was yet another chance for me to improve my fluency in that language.

Sitting down in Tribühne with Hadi for dinner before we got about the business of clearing both Mikes’ rooms up, I teased him on how fortunate he was that the Chinese cook wasn’t on shift that night. He grinned, agreed, but reminded me he knew how to take care of that guy anyway.

Just threaten him with Arabic.

And the guy does turn into jelly, jelly juice even. I swear Hadi gets a bigger platter of Pommes with his Schnitzel than any of us. Last night saw us getting huge servings as well, though it’s more due to the fact the chef was a sweet lady just waiting to feed us men.

In between bites, I regaled Hadi with one of my day’s misadventures. One of the aforementioned Chinese acquaintances suddenly popped up on my way to Stusta and grabbed the seat opposite me in the U-Bahn.

He started yapping away to me in English despite his obvious discomfort with the language. I didn’t mind. I’m actually used to quite a number of Chinese insisting on using English with me, to improve theirs. Selfish buggers never ever consider that that I might want to improve my grasp of their language.

Halfway through a sentence, he stopped and looked at me. “Wait a minute,” he says, in Mandarin now, “you’re Chinese. You can speak Chinese.”

Like, duh.

I acknowledged in Mandarin and then he told me I should have stopped him earlier. He, unlike his fellow comrades, detested English. Couldn’t see the point of it. Even Mandarin got on his nerves sometimes. He was the kind of person who would be happy speaking in dialect for the rest of his life if he could get away with it.

Now, most of my readers are multi-tongued monstrosities, and so, I must apologise for not stabbing this monolingual miscreant with a stake. Didn’t have one handy.

Heresy aside, he did make a good point of how he couldn’t understand some of his Chinese classmates sometimes, who spoke even Mandarin, the universal Chinese language, with a Shanghai slang. He asked me what I spoke at home. Cantonese, of course.

“That’s not too bad. Sometimes I can even make sense of you Guangzhou and Hong Kong people.”

Okay, I lied twice before. I did have a stake and now, I did stab him with it. Don’t mess with the Cantonese, ye hendre dafad!*

All this bamboo bamboozling got to me in the end, cuz when I stepped out of the elevator earlier, before meeting Hadi, the first person I saw was Chinese and I almost greeted him out of reflex.

“Surely you could have recognised him?” asked Hadi.

I answered, without hesitation, “They all look the same to me.”

(Herr Wehrle is to be blamed for my newfound, all-encompassing bigotry.)

After dinner, we headed up to Monkey’s room first. Tons of shit to be removed, including enough chemicals for several small, localised explosions. Brought down rest of crap from Casa Stone.

Then we found the high-quality “literature” Mike had left Mike. Used literature. Monkey’s fridge looked clean but smelled like someone had died and decided to raise a family in there. And why in the world was he hoarding plastic bags?

We divided the junk among the stuff to be carried home and the crap to be thrown. Being environmentally conscious, we separated: paper, plastic and porn.

On our way out of Stusta, we met one of the Chinese guys I thought to be Hadi’s dreaded cook. He said no, it was another guy. I pondered my mistake for half a second before offering the most obvious explanation.

“They all look the same to me.”

* Hendre dafad is Welsh for lowland sheep, or as best as I can manage. I’m trying to curse in other languages than Italian these days, and Welsh-Cantonese siren Karen Mok’s been inspiring me in other ways as well, so…

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Copyright © 2002 Kenny Mah Ying Fye.