The come on is “minky minky”. But it’s actually “bugsie bunnie”. “ooooh FYI.” (lol)
COI says you find out what kind of shopper/person you are. It is true. I won’t go in anything anywhere if they want me to (unless I don’t care at all in the first place, so impervious). If I see something that interests me, catches me, I pause. Then if nobody comes at me, I’ll approach. Then if someone talks to me too quickly, I shrink. I like to say hello first, finally. Then they stare quietly and I study what I’m looking at. I make up my mind. If it is a thing to buy then, I have some leverage but not more than 50/50. We’re even. I decide my actual desire level and so do they, and we stare at each other. They say X, I say Y, they say A, I say B, they say A, I say A-, they say yes, I say Happy New Year. Very quiet. By Chinese standards rather expensive. I like the old people best. The chop, they study the translation proud of the effort and craftsmanship. I go back. When at home and I want sausage, like when company is coming such as K., I think it ahead and wait for the man named Mike whose mother harps on him whose uncle is shorter than I am whose spinach ravioli I also wait for.
When Ears started kindergarten, here’s how it went. The bus comes first time, his father wants him to be brave, Ears panics, I pull him off, a common and ultimately deadly difference between X and me, of many. We play “bus” on the bed, Ears and I, it’s the hydrolic something brakes schhhhhhhh sound that freaks him, and I can do a good imitation. “The wheels on the bus go round and round.” He trusts me and gets on, a few weeks later. There are no seatbelts on a bus. I think about this the entire time it takes him to reach the school, except after awhile I lapse and think of other things in that time, what the work day holds for instance. When I find that I have not thought about him, I freeaaaaaaaaak ooooouuuuuut. A panic surge, then I have to stop it on purpose concentrating. Here everything fascinates me. It is like nowhere I have been before. I have not been everywhere, but I’ve been some places. I’ve had blankets thrown on me in a mosque bc my arms were showing. But here there is an odd familiarity in the oddity. They drop their eyes if you catch them looking, then study you hard sideways. I am already doing it too. Eye catch you! Then everything goes to sleep, I find I haven’t thought about the very few people I allow to trouble me, and I jolt. In all other ways, I am nothing but quite cranky to have to leave this place.
Today was the venders (factories), by far my favorite thing so far. I am like my father, but can’t maintain anger. I am like my mother, but can’t believe in Jesus as my Personal Savior. B. takes me to the vender that makes plastic aprons. What begins to charm me is the 3rd man down, who started as a worker but who is deft at on-the-spot engineering. For instance, a stack of plastic aprons even in this humidity will have a static charge, and on a complicated rolling machine he has rigged a bag of rocks on a string, each one a calibrated sling shot to hold the growing roll steady against itself. We walk further on and see the machine that blows the air into the plastic to create a tube of a bubble that cools on its way upward and becomes a two-layered line that becomes a row of plastic bags. He has designed this. B. explains. I marvel, truly. We go inside past the owner’s opportunistic gardening, and the 2nd man down from the owner looks EXACTLY like Tony Soprano if he were Chinese, track suit and gut and mia familia hospitality. They make the tea in the ‘muddy’ (clay) pot, pour the cleansing dose into the beautiful wood, pour the water into the leaves quickly (no steeping!), it all smells like earth and wood and leaves green all at once—and ya know my smeller, right? I can smell all those elements, clearly, and wonder at it again delighted. They try to give me their entire tea set wood inlay and all. I look sideways at B. and ask with my eyes, ummmmm shit (?). The owner, says B., has already left to gather tea for me. I gush. Then they offer more, short cut directions, a smaller tea set, everything they can think of. I keep gushing, asking questions about it all. B. flashes me a look I have never seen except on my own face where I can’t see it when my mother is making friends with Baptists on a plane: if you don’t stop, I am gonna smack the shit outa you. (Ohhhhh . . . sorrwwy.) I stop, but it’s kind of too late because they chase us down at the gates of the next factory with two bags full of tea and a ‘muddy’ pot for me.
