Smile-Frown, Smile-Frown

It’s a very modest human gesture.  If I go to the café at the club house, I usually ask for two cups of boiled water to go with my espresso.  On the quick ride home, I’ll pass one and then another guard who is standing there in the freezing cold, keeping the peace, waving at every car that goes by, park my car, step outside and say, “Hey.  Here you go.  Have something warm to drink.” I mentioned, it was modest. 

Andy why not today?  Sweaty, cold with my enormous orange coat unzipped, and a pair of shorts and sneakers for my bottom coverage, I parked car on the shoulder of the road, as all the closer spots had been taken and ambled up and into the club house.  Costa Coffee does not make especially tasty espressos but they’re all right.  And I hopped over and asked the young lady to make me a double and get me two cups of boiled water.  I told her I was going to get a few things in the market and I’d grab them on the way back.  Then I handed her a hundred renminbi note. 

She smiled and frowned and smiled and frowned, sheepishly.  “I can’t give you cups.”  “Huh?”  I repeated my order and she repeated her refusal.  A Swami Vivekananda, anger bubble began to take shape in my guts.  “What are you saying?  You can’t give me water?  You can’t give me cups?   For what reason?”  She had no reason.  She just had the order she’d been given.  Voice raised, scene starting: “Look darling, you want to make money, I want to spend money, we should be able to work this out.”  Smile-frown, smile-frown.  “So I can have water in a ceramic cup here, but I can’t have it in a paper cup, to go?  How much to do you charge for a cup of water?  What is the cost for a paper cup?”

My English mind is moving much faster than I can keep up with in Chinese.   I want to ask if this is an environmental protection edict?  Is this a cost savings edict?  Is this a “watch out for the guy who orders cups of water and gives them to the guards” edict?  I can say all these things in Chinese, but not calmly.  I begin to notice the guy with glasses, sitting in the comfy chair is looking at me.  I am making a scene over something stupid.  “Hey, you know what, forget it.  I don’t need the espresso.  You keep your water and your cups.”

Once again, a modest annoyance, that would have been handled with a shrug back home, doused with the jet fuel of linguistic ambiguity, became a conflagration of outrage.   I’m riled for a while, annoyed that my modest humanitarian gesture was thwarted, increasingly annoyed that I let myself get annoyed and I know that it will be this way here, no matter how much I learn, until the day I die, or the day I leave. 

Friday, 2/08/18