Mui Mui by Roberto Ernesto Gyemant

 

 

Panama City

 

Even though I don't get down there that much anymore – now I stay with Friends out by Tumba Muerto - I went down to the edge of the Marañon barrio where I stayed many times, to pass my little sack of dirty clothes over the counter at the super cheap Chinese laundry. After I had done so, I had to go next door to give my saludos to La China... I don't know her name, of course, but she is a lively reed of a woman, probably only in her early 30s, short, with hair pulled back and basically complete disdain for any order or fashion sensibility in her clothes, preferring, it looks like, whatever is close and clean and light, cause its hot in Panama City and with everything she deals with behind her little counter...

 

And there she was, holding chaotic court as always, little jade red

stringed Chinese charms hanging from the frame around the open counter , bottles of pretty expensive liquor shining behind her, mostly inaccessible things in this very poor and crumbling little barrio, and the usual maelstrom of black, brown, and every mix imaginable color of people washing in and out like bits of bark and jellyfish on the beach the morning after a big storm... the people demanding, rude, barking, but everything has its flow, and the gatekeeper of the flow is La China. Everyone who wants to buy a screw, a tiny bag of rice with a tinier malformed onion and green pepper with a black spot on it, a fifteen cent ice cream or a pay call on the store's cellphone (she dials, when they answer, she says 'pera que te llaman (wait, someone is calling you) and hands the phone's earpiece-mike over -- everyone, for every reason, has to go through La China.

 

I walk in, and there are only three or four people around. That I can

see... a young girl, an old lady holding a chubby young woman by the hand, a burly guy who needs a shave in a soiled shirt by the counter, and a little girl of three or four wandering around. I stop in the middle of the entry and give a mock salute to La China. I am a dumbass, and she doesn't notice me or my pointless antics, then she does, and as much as possible, her face lights up, for just a second, maybe technically it was like .08 of a second and she might even have said "como 'ta" in response to my flowery saludos of "mi amor, como estas." Then back to  the lightly swarming crowd - they want to pay, or get something, and get out. It’s hot and no one has time for a how you been.

 

If there were a central casting for Cantonese store owners in a poor

Latin American barrio, my girl would get all the work. She speaks Spanish bluntly, sparely, not wasting words nor even unnecessary syllables, though she is not the crude imitation you might hear on a typically obnoxious morning show on the radio here, where the china or chino is just another of a swarm of ethnic types that serve the locutor's cheap sense of humor – (haranguing voice) "tu quiele compla? si no quiele compla, no tocah" (you want to buy? If you don't want to buy, don't touch).

 

No, mi China is more real, with none of the dramatic pauses afforded by commercial radio. "Cinquenta un centavo," she tells a young girl in ten years out-of-style poom poom shorts who badly needs her hair hooked up by onti - "cinquentay dos?" barks back the girl. "Cinquenta un centavo," offers La China. Her voice is like the chipping of a block of granite by a chisel-holding scrivener who knows she has many lines to write on this damned block today, and she is not going to draw or add flourishes. The girl plunks down five dimes which appear to be perspiring themselves from being clutched so tightly in her palm. "Voy a tene que regresa con el centavo, que solo tengo un quatah," says the girl. La China, with her very thin eyes, what a white boy at my high school might have called slanted eyes, looks at the quarter in the girl's hand, and with a small wave of her own hand, releases the girl back into the afternoon sun of the sad marañon. The girl bounces out (with the little bag of rice, the dwarf onion and old pepper that will finally find a home in someone's fifty million times scraped frying pan) and the crowd surges again. La China´s attentions are open - it's as if there is a prize for getting her attention, and getting the hell out of there.

 

The guy in the soiled shirt has been hanging around far too long. I

know it, the old lady knows it and La China knows it. She turns to him

quickly, throwing him a quick and short nod of the chin which in Yiddish is expressed as "nu"? He, no doubt sensing the tiniest sliver of

opportunity which has just opened, the precious split second which he has to fire his photon torpedoes into the exhaust duct and destroy the death star (or lose to the empire - or, have to put in

another quarter and get past the boring ass ty-fighters stage) - he mumbles something, and quickly, and it works, for she reaches to her left into a case of penny candies and drops three date pit-sized blue breath mints on the red counter, which he quickly snatches up, and out he goes. Only later do I wonder what he has on her that he doesn't have to pay the three cents we all would have to pay. Does he watch the store for her sometimes? Or is he just insistent, as many survivors have to be in this fucked up money world - insistent enough to break down the great wall of La China. (sorry)

 

Oh and she multitasks, because I carry on a conversation with her as

she handles him, and someone else who flitted in and out, and I get a

bottle of water as the old lady approaches the counter. "Where is the funny paper," I asked, not seeing it on the newspaper rack, "the one with the drawings." "La cascara?" she asks. "It comes out on monday." And just like that, I am at the counter with my bottle of water. The old lady surges next to me, pushing forward a tiny cuplet of ice cream. And I am so aware of how cool this moment is, that the world slows down for me, matrix style ( I have been working on this). The little girl behind the counter is La China's daughter, and she is massaging a thin plastic slinky. She has a bowl haircut and wears pink short pants. She looks like she needs a good scrubbing. She is saying something, with much attitude, something complete and passionate, and her little eyes are cinched up in angry concern. She has not been sparing with her words, like her mom, but allows her expression to come out completely. She is speaking to the old woman, or the old woman's daughter, held by the old woman's the hand. She is speaking Spanish, the little girl, and no one is listening to her.

 

Her mother is, however. "Quince centavo," she says to the old lady, who has deeply sunken eyes and a formidable grey black moustache, and then begins at the same time to edify her little daughter in the fascinating, and to my gwei-lin ears dissonant tones of shopkeeper Cantonese. I don't know what she is saying, have no idea, but it goes on for a while, and I am rapt, listening to her, and watching her daughter's face as the words sink in, and as she extends and mashes her slinky in comprehension. I feel like she has learned something here, and if for some reason she grows to be a poetess, holding the hand of some boy who wants to crush with her, she might say, "my mother used to tell me..."

 

The old lady cocks her head at me (I am standing about seven

centimeters away) and with a cuckoo and lovely circus circus smile tells me that "forty seven hit, forty seven hit and I had five pieces!" She is thrilled, and I recognize that it is due to this great luck in hitting a number in the loteria that she is indulging in a fifteen cent ice cream. "Excelente!" I say with gusto. Her daughter turns to me, holding a small piece of ripped cellophane in her hand, the shiny kind with crisply pressed corners torn from a new three dollar payhone card. It is then that I notice that the girl is severely retarded, perhaps mongoloid, and the old lady has not let go her grip, probably now for the good fifteen minutes since they left their tiny little apartment in the crumbling tenements I pass after the fire station. I accept the piece of cellophane with an honest "gracias," and the girl's face turns back toward the floor - to find another gift that shines? "Oh she picks up everything," says the old lady. "And twenty six hit! twenty six hit, and I had ten pieces." Now she is holding her free hand out - the one that gesticulates and holds money, for she has no pockets that I can see - and she is making a fist of luck, of happiness, and shaking it. Her eyes are happy, almost manic and teary.

 

I am coming out of my matrix moment, and beginning to understand her. She has won the lottery twice, and didn't just have one ticket, but five on one number and ten on another - that's seventy dollars plus one hundred and forty from a total investment of three dollars seventy five cents, a hell of a lot of money in a country in which the average young and able working man's salary is about 250 a month (not women, they get less, but you knew that). There is legislation pending to increase the minimum wage to 350 a month, but the rich, for whose children three fitty is a full night at one of the local Miami style coke-fueled dance bars, are howling in protest, and have stalled the bill in the legislature. "Entonces," I said, "ganaste?" "Si!" she said gleefully, "that's why I am buying this!" She is pointing to a carton of milk, which I had not noticed before, already sweating through a plastic bag. It might have cost a dollar, and I guess the ice cream was a last minute splurge item after she had completed that purchase. "Que bien," I offer. "Cinquenta centavo," says La China, nonplussed by our exchange. I put down two quarters, they disappear into the cash register, and like that my time has past, my moment in the sun, and I am cast loose, to float out the door with the other bottlecaps and bits of driftwood...

 

But no! I will not go gently into that dark night! (or really fucking hot day). For I have realized that although I know how to say little brother-big brother in Cantonese (tai tai- ko koi) - and thus am able to relish the look of complete, utter and total amazement/non comprehension on the face of two-to-five year old shop owners' sons holding forth, from the outer richmond district in San Francisco to Limon, Costa Rica, I do not know how to say "little sister". I learned tai tai ko koi, by the way, hanging out in a chinese calligraphy master's kooky store in the inner sunset - the one with the cutest little green booger-nose grandson, the same dude who taught Jazz great Yusuf Lateef how to play the chinese flute, which I know because it was with equal surprise that I saw his autograph next to my mother's eighteen years after she was canvassing neighborhoods in her campaign for Muni court judge in 1980. (She won, and due to her great integrity beat a Moscone, a big deal if you know San Francisco ethnic politics). He also sold me a rare fleer insert Gary Sheffield rookie card, which I still guard jealously, that shows a young Gary in the corny blue uni of the late eighties brewers.

 

I ask La China "how do you say little sister in cantones?"

 

Silence.

 

"Tu quiere aprende cantoneh?" she asks suspiciously, testing to see if I

am just joshing, whether I will just give up and drift out... "Si," I

reply, ernestly. My middle name is Ernesto.

 

"Mui mui," she replies, and looks down. And I drift out.

 

So two wins, really. The .08 second smile and recognition, and the new info, mui mui. And the cellophane wrapper, which I hold here in my hand as I write this.