She's the Boss

The sound of Shanghainese from every direction.  Even when gruff men, with nicotine lacquered throats, yell drunken, angry insults, it never sounds menacing.  It always has an effeminate quality with all the slurred s’s and interrogatives ending in ‘va?”  I’m sure it all says much more about me than it does about the language.  I’m down in my local joint here on Huang He Road, off of Beijing Road.  My enormous shrimp omelet has arrived.  It looks plain, so I asked for some soy sauce, which the tall thin fellow from up in the kitchen promptly deliveres.   The eggplant came shortly after with the beans and pork.  I’m going to eat now.  

I finished a long, disjointed read of Diderot’s “Jacques the Fatalist” riding around in 18^th century French countryside with master and servant, in the decades before the revolution, when master and Jacques would have been upended.  I’d wanted to just finish it a straight run for a while now, rather than two pages here and four pages there, as its been for some time.  Diderot does his best to push at the predictable parameters of what a story might be, who the church and nobility were, and within the Quixotic stumbling’s and narrative interruptions, we get a glimpse of sex and wine and travel in the French countryside of that time, which is probably what will linger the longest. 

Fifty years makes quite a difference.  The Revolution has come and gone.  Napoleon’s First Republic has as well and by the time Honore Balzac sits down to begin the many installations of his ‘Human Comedy’, Louis-Philippe's ‘July Monarchy’ of haute bourgeoisie normalcy casts a somewhat more tired French countryside then what I’d just been riding through.  Mssr. Grandet in “Eugnie Grandet” is a wealthy miser, who has lived through the period just described and we are slowly becoming acquainted to his landed life that supplies him with most all of what he needs, so that he never has to spend any of his fortune. 

Book in one hand, I shoveled eggplant on to my rice bowl, and cut off pieces of my omelet with the other.  At the far end of the restaurant the proprietress held court, ordering the staff to do this, and be faster about that.  Later she was gone and the man I assumed was her husband remained there.  He walked about, looked at me for a bit, returned.  He gave some orders as well, but they did seem very important.

By the time I’d paid the bill and packed up my things, she had returned and was seated back down, across from this gentleman.  I addressed her as the boss, when I left and told her in local dialect that the food was good.  “Very good eating.”  And it was.  I don’t know how they make the eggplant taste that way.  It was delicious.  I’ll return.  “Good bye, good bye. ”  “Zei wei, zei wei.” And she said, to the man, as she always does “He speaks Shanghainese, he speaks Shanghainse,” always a paired phrasing.  I don’t know that she’s the boss.  But it’s clear that she’s boss.  Women are always the boss in Shanghainese families.