Jeanette is still ill, even with the lack of food and the Chinese little medicine pills from yesterday’s adventure to the pharmacist. So this morning, after my wonderful breakfast of muesli, yoghurt, toast, tomato and fried eggs, I went hunting for bananas, bottled water, and more medicine.
The bananas I found, up a side street at a stall. He wanted 9 yuan, so I expostulated that that was too much. I offered him 3. I even enlisted the help of a Chinese woman shopping nearby – but she sided with him and said that was the usual price. Okay, I gave him the money with a smile. He laughed when I left and I doubted I had done the right thing. (Checked it out later, in my obsessive way, and it was a fair price for current market conditions. Damn.)
I continued up the street on a hunch and found the pharmacist I was at yesterday – but different staff. Luckily I had brought the sheet of paper identifying the anti-diarrhoea medicine and bought 20 small phials of the pills for 20 yuan. A bargain, if it works.
Water – that’s easy. We have a little corner store across the octopus walkway where we buy two bottle of water for 6 yuan.
Now came the real test of the day, and of my patience and ‘serenity’
The hunt: tally-ho and off I went, down in the lift to the Marco Polo Restaurant on the second floor (their first floor would be our ground floor). I explained to my favourite, button-nosed cute waitress, that my wife was ill upstairs and that she could only have dry toast for lunch. ‘Toast?’ she enquired, and shook her head. I explained, with suitable gestures, the slicing of bread, the slipping it in a toaster (which she saw every morning at breakfast time as hotel guests burnt their own with an antiquated multiple-slice electronic toaster), the popping up and the spreading of butter and jam which, I hastened to add, I wasn’t looking for. ‘Ah,’ she nodded thoughtfully, ‘just a-wait a moment, plees’ and took off . I waited optimistically. She returned, shaking her head. ‘Not toast. Toast ble’kfast.’ ‘But,’ I said, oozing Western charm, ‘your kitchen has bread and a toaster. It is easy to do …’ But, no, sorry and all that, warm smile, but toast is ble’kfast: there is no changing the order of the day. (Confucius probably said something about it somewhere.)
Sigh.
Downstairs further to the first floor (our ground floor) where the duty manager usually sits, only she’s not there but the assistant-to-the-assistant-chief is there, so I tell her my tale of toast woe. She makes a phone-call and returns to suggest, ‘You go to second floor Western restaurant, they have toast-a.’ No, I shake my forlorn head, I’ve tried that, they say only ‘Ble’kfast’.
‘Wait a moment plees.’ She disappears into the manager’s office.
Silence.
Then she returns to say, ‘Sorry, no toast-a. You try delicate shop-a’ and points vigorously to the street.
‘What?’ I am confused.
She stammers over the English word, ‘Day-lay-kay, deli-key, delect-a’ and I suddenly have an illumination, ‘Delicatessen! You mean ‘delicatessen.’
She struggles, ‘Yes, delicate shop-a, out-street …’
Ah, bugger it, I think, I’m off to hunt further a-field. I walk out and over the octopus walkway to Mamma Fu’s ‘as seen in the Lonely Planet’.
They offer me a menu, no thanks, and indicate a seat, no thanks – I want a special order, take-away. The smallest of the small waitresses appears and listens carefully, then says, ‘We have. Toast. Yes.’ And ducks off to start the process.
The sweet cashier, a larger girl than normal here, sweetly says, ‘Sit down’, and indicates a table. I try to pay. ‘No-no,’ she says and points at the chair. ‘We make toast – French toast …’
Panic. ‘No, no, mayo, mayo,’ I almost yell, ‘I want straight toast – just slices brown on two sides.’
A waitress scurries off to tell Miss Tiny in the kitchen.
I relax and sit and read China Daily. The Chinese government is attacking pollution. The ex-Malaysian prime minister applauds Iraqi militants and encourages them to make the Americans pay. England has bird flu.
Miss Tiny returns with toast – four pieces struggling to fit in a single thick cardboard container. She sees my pleasure and tells the cashier how much. The tiny waitress disappears again and I pay with a 100 yuan bill. The cashier laughs ironically as another waitress also appears with a bill and a 100 yuan to pay for it. Change – it’s the cashier’s constant headache. The tiny waitress returns with two sealed containers and wraps them in a plastic bag. So much trouble for so little – my 92 yuan change comes in the biggest bills she has. Smiles all around.
‘Thanks, thank you very much .. shie-shie, shie-shie,’ and I rush over the octopus to deliver my prize: dry toast for lunch, with a banana. True love’s banquet.
10/02/2007
*
Beggars everywhere some days – the broken, the homeless, some with chalk-written screeds in front of them on the pavement, some use chalk calligraphy as their
‘talent’. They break my heart. We can’t pay them all, so we sometimes put money in the hat for people who perform – even the children who do acrobatics in the street. The parents are so poor they can’t afford their children to go to school. The Chinese government is now cracking down on such situations of child labour. But here is a man, well-dressed, who plays a most melancholic melody between Mandarin Books and the new one, Wheatfield Books. His music reminded me of Li Bai’s lines:
Plucking the strings, he played for me.
I heard murmuring pines in many valleys.
Like flowing water, the music cleansed my heart,
leaving its echo in the frosty bell.
(from Listening to the Lyre of a Monk Named Jun by Li Bai, Tang dynasty,
trans. 2005 Gladys Yang, Panda Books: Beijing)
When we put money in his hat and thanked him, he smiled broadly and said, clear as a bell, in cultured English, Thank you …
*
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