Chapter Three – I Find an Old Friend, a Translator, Several Chickens, and a lot of Alcohol

I was in France before I actually got to work. In a small café off the main Rou in Paris, I ran into an old college friend of mine, Renee Gallimard. She had returned to France after completing her education in the States, but still, it was a big city, and I hardly expected to run into her.

“Sharpless, mon ami! Where have you been, you beautiful boy!” She recognized me instantly and swallowed me in a hug, her wide-brimmed hat falling askew.

“Oh. Renee! What a surprise!”

“Really, now, zees eez inexcusable, you should ‘ave looked me up ze minute you stepped foot in France!”

“Well… I…” Was as far as I got into the conversation before she took control of it, lock, stock, and barrel. She told me all sorts of things; about France, her work (she was in Human Resources or something), her life, her, her, and her. When I managed to interject a response to her question about why I was in France, she laughed in my face about my “zilly plan to travel ze world.” She might not have laughed so hard had I told her my secondary objective was to possibly kidnap a young foreign girl to bring back home and force to marry my cousin. She mentioned a friend of hers that had did something similar to my own journey, and had been propositioned several times during his travels through China and the rest of the Far East.

“Zey vould come up to heem, and offer heem goatz zand zings. For zee dowriee, you understand. Can you imageene eet? Goatz?!” She laughed at her own joke raucously. But it did give me hope. Perhaps my little mission wasn’t as unreasonable as I had first thought. Or so I hoped.

Anyway. The first person I met when I landed in Beijing was Song Hwang. Song. How do I begin to describe Song? He was cabbie. Well. Sort of. He drove. If you could call the reckless abandon he had for the life and limb of man, woman, horse, and chicken ‘driving.’ He was also my translator; I hired him through an online agency, and didn’t know much about him at the time. I had wandered around the Beijing Capital International Airport for about half an hour, looking futilely for my baggage claim (who can even read Chinese? Sometimes I doubt the Chinese even can. No one ever seemed to pay much attention to the signs, at least.) before I came across him, smoking a cigarette under a “NO SMOKING” sign and holding a sign reading “Pinkerton.”

“Uhm…” I started.

He looked up, irritated, and seemed to size me up like he was trying to figure out if I was going to try and steal his wallet.

“You Pinkerton?” He asked.

“Er… well…. Yes and no. That’s the name I’m booked under, though. My name’s Lewis Sharpless. My uncle booked you, though. He’s Pinkerton. You’re Mr. Hwang, right? Are you my driver?”

“Translator.” He corrected.

“Yes, that too.” I answered in Mandarin. His eyebrows arched in momentary surprise before he regained composure.

“You speak mandarin, and yet you hired a translator? Are you stupid or do you enjoy wasting money?” he interrogated.

“I may speak the language, but I don’t know the customs, or the territory. Also, most people expect me to need a translator. Having most people I meet not know that I can speak their language is an advantage. They say things they don’t want me to hear and don’t expect you to translate in their language. They rely on the translator to not say the whole truth, which is advantage still.”

The cabbie nodded, “You’ve thought this out too well to be a tourist. Come on, I’ll take you to my cab.” Apparently he wanted to demonstrate that he had just as much control of my language as I did of his. He didn’t even offer to help me with my bags.

His cab was as haphazard an affair as the rest of his appearance. The front bumper hung off the vehicle like his cabbie hat hung off his tawdry black hair; the colors were a chipped mash up of yellow, black, red, and green, like his absurd, clownish suit. I doubted the thing would actually run. It did. Poorly though.

“So. Not a tourist. Then what? What’s your purpose here in China?” He asked as he drove us away from the airport.

“Find a wife. For my cousin.” I answered bluntly. What was I going to do, lie about it? His eyes looked at me through the rearview mirror, and he swerved to avoid a bus as he looked back. Apparently my goal wasn’t so ridiculous as to warrant more than a brief near-death experience.

“Your cousin, he likes Chinese girls?”

“I dunno. Not particularly, I guess. I’m just supposed to find him a wife that can cook and clean.”

“They don’t have girls like that in America?”

“Not very many.”

Song hissed, and his eyes narrowed angrily, “Fucking liars. Oh yeah, US is land of opportunity. Can’t even find a decent fucking wife. This is bullshit.”

“What?”

“My nephew immigrated a couple years ago. He’s a computer engineer or something. Does something with data systems or banks or some other capitalist bullshit. Anyway, he sends me a letter, saying how awesome America is. Fucking lies. He’s never gonna get a decent wife. Stupid kid.” He was positively seething about the matter. I felt sorry for him, in a way.

“Uhm. Sorry. Maybe he’ll come back here to find a wife? I hear some guys do that.”

The cabbie merely shrugged, “Whatever. His mistake. Anyway. Where are we going?”

“Oh. Right.” I handed him a slip of paper with the address of the hotel I booked. He looked at the paper, grunted, and me sped us off to our destination.

“What’s this?” was the first thing Song asked of me as we entered my hotel room. I hadn’t asked him up, he had just kind of wonderingly followed me. In the middle of the room was a large crate. I had told them to leave it in the hotel’s storage, but apparently that had been lost in translation.

“Open it,” I said. Song shrugged, pulled out a jackknife, and pried of the lid.

“This… this is a lot of alcohol.” He muttered.

“Hand me a beer, and grab one for yourself.” The crate was filled to the brim with the various liquors, spirits, and wines of the world. Chardonnay from Chardonnay, Altbier from Düsseldorf, Kentucky bourbon, vermouth from Turin, Italy, Moskovskaya Vodka straight from Moscow, spiced rums from the Caribbean, London gin, and even the pack of Pyramid Ale my cousin had offered as a “graduation present.”

“Why… why so much?” Asked my intrepid translator as he popped the tops off two brown ales, handing me one.

“Alcohol is the universal social mediator. All cultures, everywhere, have some form of it. You can give it to people as a gift without them feeling too obliged to you, it both shows that I am a man of taste, consideration, and a social man of means. Alcohol, the man with the greatest variety and amount of it, is always the most popular. This is what will make the future bride of my cousin’s family let me into their home, court their daughter for another man, and take her to a country they only have very vague ideas about. This will be my bride price without being a bride price, in case I need a dowry.”

Song nodded, “Your still going to need chickens, though.”

“Chickens?”

“Yes.”

So we went to buy some chickens.