Wednesday, April 06, 2005
Curse of the Oma
The sidewalk was as active and chaotic as the street. Everyone in the churning crowd was busy, distracted, immersed; families swarmed and youths skulked and sino-american princesses paraded coyly past the bins of produce and stacks of plasticware and all the innumerable offerings available to us that grey morning.... I was with my crew; it was JT and Laila and Rob’t, Sue and Kel and me, dipping our respective and collective toes into the mysteries of chinatown. We’d already been into cluttered alleys and explored obscure shopfronts, been exposed to much that lay beneath the surface and, in our little posse, we were starting to feel like we belonged where we were.
This particular stretch of sidewalk on the north side of Pacific was especially busy, being as it was adjacent to Portsmouth Square and old DuPont Gao. Navigating the foot traffic and the shopside obstacles took a bit of concentration: Watch your feet - don’t kick over any stacks of soft porn magazines or pirated CDs. Watch your sightlines - don’t let a bunch of sugar-addled kids trip you up, and don’t fall in behind a wizened clutch of nanogenarian women long since done with hurrying. Watch out for large bag-laden families bursting out of discount stores, blocking the sidewalk with inconvenient attempts to organize themselves and their booty and potentially separating you from your support group. There was a lot to keep track of.
It was in this spirit of attentiveness that Rob’t, and all of us, spied an old woman coming toward us. She wore shabby old clothes, dark and mismatched, that hung off her thin frame like a soiled pillowcase over a stick. Her skin was sallow and looked ill-fitting; deep creases lined her face and her thin neck was wreathed with wrinkles. She dragged a rolling wire basket-cart, stuffed with a variety of bags and sacks and carefully-selected random items. Her hair, black gone the grey of cremains, was loosely tied back with tired fabric; her gait was tight and fragile.... and over her mouth and nose, she wore a soiled, ill-fitting, seemingly superfluous paper respiratory mask. Even in this mad crowd, she seemed particularly mad.
Rob’t passed closest to her. We felt good enough about ourselves at that moment that he ventured a comment toward her in the clamor of the crowd: “Hope that’s working out for you there.”
She stopped on the sidewalk and turned on him immediately, her face racked with indignation, and from beneath the dirty mask that hid the sour gash of her mouth, she let loose a powerful stream of foul invective. Some words I didn’t recognize; some, I did, and they were words of the harshest vituperation. Her curses fell on us like black rain, like a rain of frogs. Between unintelligible words I assume were in chinese, I was able to discern some heavily-accented but unmistakeable comments in english. We were urged to interfornicate, and to cease to exist. Our mothers were castigated. Our ancestry was impugned. Our right to exist on the planet was emphatically denied.
She berated us with such passion and anger that, even in the agitated ruckus of the street, an old chinese man, that most phlegmatic of personages, grey dungarees on his lithe body and a mao hat on his inperturbable head, stopped in his tracks to stare at her, agape and agog, eyes wide with - fear? disgust? shock? A piece of all of these, it seemed. His expression was hard to read but had something to do with disapproval and amazement.
Her expression, by contrast, was all too legible. It was hatred and anger and bitterness, pure and simple - truly, the universal language. No translation was necessary. I had never been cursed out by a crazy old chinese lady before. And now that I have been, I can tell you one thing with confidence: If you’ve never been cursed out by an old chinese lady, buddy, you have never been cursed.