The Thong Also Rises (13 page)

“I haven't got one,” I replied

“Well how can we print your business cards?” tutted the production manager impatiently.

“I don't know,” I said limply. “I wasn't aware I was going to need one.” Looks of disapproval and exasperation crossed the faces of my new Chinese colleagues.

I thought I'd done so well. Become one of those uber-cool global citizens I'd always wanted to be. Landed a dream job as a magazine editor in Shanghai. Found an apartment before I'd even set foot in the city. Arranged my flight and visa with minimal hassle. Said goodbye to my boyfriend and dog with minimal tears. Even managed to pick up a few words of Mandarin. And, yet, here I was, standing in my new place of work, only three hours off the plane, and I'd already made my first cultural faux pas.

Realizing I needed to get a name quickly, I asked what the other foreigners in the company had called themselves.
They reeled off a list of names translating into eulogies such as Tall Handsome One, Elegant Crane, Proud Butterfly, and Bringer of Light. Not even having had the chance to brush my teeth since landing, I didn't feel I was in any position to bestow such glorious compliments upon myself. My breath was stale and my hair looked as though I'd flown in from London strapped to the top of the plane.

It was explained to me that Chinese names were given by a child's parents or grandparents, in the hope of bringing them a bright future, but my sense of British modesty kicked in. I just stood there—international go-getter that I wasn't— shuffling from one foot to the other, until my assistant Happy came to my rescue.

“What's your middle name?” Happy asked.

“Amey,” I replied.

“Well, that translates almost exactly into Chinese so that can be your name,” said Happy, happily.

I'd always wanted to be Amey—Amey Andrews, after my mother's maiden name. And now I could be. New country, new name, new fabulous me. I smirked a little at the thought of my colleagues who had been arrogant enough to name themselves with praise and congratulated myself on my own choice of subtly glamorous moniker. Gratefully I signed a slip of paper confirming my authority for the printing, and soon had a box of name cards with my job title followed by my new name written in Chinese characters.

You're a nobody in China without a name card. On meeting someone new the first thing you do is swap name cards. I was soon sitting in meetings handing my cards out to fellow Chinese journalists, photographers, and high-flying businessmen. Often they would stop and repeat my Chinese name a number of times, pronouncing it
Ai-mee
, and checking to make sure they got it right. Then they would smile
slightly and emit an understanding “ah.” Innocently I believed they were touched that a foreigner had so quickly picked up their ways.

Only a year later, after handing out over a thousand business cards, did I realize
why
they were smiling. It was as I was sitting in my Chinese language class, learning the correct forms of address for ordinary Chinese people—the man generally being
Xiansheng
and the woman being
Xiaojie
followed by their surnames—I was asked my name in order to incorporate it into a role play.

“Aimee,” I said with pride. “So I would refer to myself as “
Xiaojie Aimee
.”

The teacher sniggered. And despite his obvious urge to roll around on the floor, he managed to splutter, “Do you know what that means?”

“No,” I replied with a sense of dread.

“
Ai
means love and
Mi
means rice. And
xiaojie
can also mean…”At this point the hilarity of the situation paralyzed him and a classmate had to help him out by kindly whispering the word “prostitute” in my ear.

Composing himself my teacher said firmly, “I think you better change your name, Miss Love Rice.”

English writer Olivia Edward recently returned from Shanghai where she worked as editor-in-chief of travel magazine
Voyage.
She has also contributed to numerous publications including the Time Out, DK, and Luxe guides, American Express magazines, and
Out Traveler.
She is currently writing the MTV guide to Ireland. Aside from words, she loves swimming in rough seas and drinking fresh watermelon juice.

The best haircut I got in Ho Chi Minh City was at a salon called Krap. I'd been expat too long to notice the irony. Vietnamese often named their businesses after themselves, filling the streets
with proudly lettered signs like Hoa's Noodles, Bich Flowers, and Pawn Shop Dung. For a year my daily commute had taken me past the My Thuat art gallery—against which the shock value of all other names seemed to pale. At least that's how I saw it. My housemate Andrew, from California, saw it differently.

“New cut?” he asked. “Where'd you go?”

“Korean place at the corner of Dong Khoi and Mac Dinh Chi.”

“Hmm.”Andrew's gaze stopped flitting over my hair and fixed abruptly on my face. At the corners, his lips began to twitch. “Black-and-white sign?”

“That's the one.”

“KRA-A-AP!You went to KRAP!” He doubled over, hooting and gasping, skinny wrists flailing through the air.

Finally he sighed, wiping his eyes. “Did you get a card?”

I reached for my bag and pulled out the black-and-white business card. “KRAP by Parkseongchol,” I read.

Andrew was back in hysterics.

—Mari Taketa, “The Search for Good Hair”

It was time to stop being jerked around.

I
T STARTED WAY BACK IN
1978
WHEN
I
SAW
M
AGIC
,
THE
Hollywood thriller starring Anthony Hopkins as a ventriloquist whose wooden dummy, “Fats,” slowly goes crazy and embarks on a murderous rampage.The movie itself was terrifying. But it was the incessant airing of the TV commercial that really disturbed me. “Abracadabra, I sit on his knee,” chanted the wide-eyed, high-voiced dummy while staring into the camera. “Presto-chango now he is me. Hocus pocus we put her to bed. Magic is fun. We're…dead.”

O.K., maybe it doesn't seem so spine-chilling in print. But at the time, the movie and its ad were menacing enough to instill in me a lifelong fear of ventriloquists' dummies, marionettes and other small, hand-painted facsimiles of human beings.

I imagine myself rising from a warm bed at 2
A.M.
to let the dog out only to encounter a Charlie McCarthy-type character seated serenely at my kitchen table in the moonlight. “I'm glad you're awake,” he'd say, his stiff lower jaw
clacking shut as his eyes dart, Kewpie-like, toward the gleaming butcher knife gripped in his white-gloved dummy hand.

For years, I've been able to get through most days without obsessing about the sinister potential of puppets. But recently I was in the Czech Republic, in Prague, where marionettes are allegedly part of a “long and rich tradition.”

On my first day there, while walking through the narrow, cobblestone streets, I passed several shops selling the stringed puppets. Row upon row of still, expressionless marionettes hung limply from the walls, their hands and feet suspended in mid-air. There were rabbis and chefs and kings and witches, all of them silently beseeching passersby to give them life. I shuddered.

My friend Angela looked at me. “They creep you out too, huh?” she asked.

I nodded as I scurried past the shops.

That night at dinner, Angela and I discussed our jointly held fear of marionettes and other inanimate human beings. Sipping our wine, we talked as if we were discussing something semi-rational, like politics. “The problem I have with them is their inability to reason,” Angela explained, using the highly logical lawyer's voice she typically reserves for closing arguments.

Yes, I agreed.That
was
one of their deficiencies.

“I mean, when they are attached to human beings, they're fine,” she continued. “It's when they're left to their own devices that I have trouble with them.” Angela, too, had seen the ads for
Magic.

After dinner, we walked through Prague's old town and noticed, in the corners of lighted store windows, colorful posters advertising a production of
Don Giovanni
by the National Marionette Theatre. Instead of sleek ads for cigarettes, or posters promoting the latest action film like you'd
see in other European cities, Prague was all about puppets. “No way,” I proclaimed. Angela agreed, thus securing her position as my favorite traveling companion.

The next day we were led on a walking tour of the city by a Czech woman who alternated her talk between English, for us, and French, for the other couple on the tour. We'd stop in front of a Gothic cathedral and she'd spend twenty minutes talking excitedly with the French couple about, I assumed, the history of the church. Her hands would make wide swooping circles overhead, like she was describing the general craziness of church leaders during the Middle Ages. The French couple would nod their heads in rapid agreement. “
Oui, oui, oui, oui,
” they'd say, as if they were glad to have
finally
found someone who shared their passion for religious history. When it was time for the English version, the guide would turn to us and say something along the lines of: “This is the Teyn Church. Let's move on.”

At one point, as I waited for the guide to finish a lengthy French narrative of the Charles Bridge, I spotted yet another marionette shop.This, in itself, was not unusual. What made this particular shop stand out was that its exterior speakers were broadcasting “Billie Jean” by Michael Jackson at levels loud enough to cause the last remaining communists in that city to pack their identical, government-issue suitcases and flee up the Vltava River. On the street in front of the shop, a small Pinocchio marionette in yellow pants was breakdancing, its red feet clomping on the cobblestones at the behest of the college-age salesperson controlling its strings.

“Look,” I exclaimed before I knew what I was saying. “How cute!”

Angela stared at me as if I'd broken some unspoken covenant of the anti-marionette society. Then her eyes
traveled to the breakdancing puppet. “They
are
less threatening when they dance,” she conceded, a bit reluctantly.

With the edge taken off, we soon found ourselves admiring the range and artistry of marionettes available for sale. We discussed how marionettes could still be popular in a city that has survived the Habsburgs and communists, and now boasts sushi bars and Internet cafes.There must be
something
to this marionette business, we reasoned.

Our defenses crumbling, we scrambled for ways to keep our disdain of dummies intact. “The marionettes must just be for
tourists,
” we scoffed. When that didn't work, we tried snobbery, ranking marionette theatre on the same cultural stratum as a monster truck rally.

But the more we questioned the allure of the puppets, the more we became fascinated by them. Over a beer and goulash that afternoon in a low-ceilinged Czech restaurant, Angela turned to me. “You know, I think we should see a marionette show, just to see what the fuss is about.” I agreed, feeling strangely excited in a birthday party kind of way.

Back at the hotel we asked the desk clerk to make reservations for the following night. While she cradled the phone and waited for the theatre to answer, I sought confirmation for our decision. “Is it a
good
show?” I asked, eyebrows raised like a toddler seeking praise for a good deed.