Palms Upward in Askance

At the gym.  Huffing and puffing on the stair master.  An older lady hopped on the stair master next to me.  Good for her.  She didn’t look like she was long for the machine. That’s cool.  Work what you got.  Soon an older gent, I’ll make an assumption that he was her husband began to saunter around the front of us.  They spoke to one another in the distinctive Shanghai dialect.  She was ordering him around, he was sheepish, as per the henpecked Shanghainese husband stereotype.

Six minutes in to my twenty-minute routine.  I had some bouncy, upbeat Nelson Cavaquinho up in my ear buds.  What is that instrument that makes the high pitched, bird like “who-who-who-who-who” call in samba songs?  (Looked it up:  The Cuíca, a percussion instrument rather, than as I’d always assumed, something involving air being blown.)   Hard to be in a bad mood with this cheerful, swinging samba, driving the steps to nowhere up and down, on and on.  The szhlubby husband had now decided to take this lady’s picture and film her on her ever so hearty routine.  That’s a perfectly reasonable thing to do but I am also necessarily showing up in that camera frame.  I can tell.  I stare.  I glare.  He knows it.  I raise my palms upward in askance. 

The dude clearly appreciates I’m not happy and puts the camera down.  She orders him to continue filming from a different angle.  Oh dear.  Mr. Shanghainese man has now moved sheepishly to the other side.  Once again, I will be a clear fixture in any picture shot from that angle.  That’s it.  I remove my earbuds and fire off in Chinese: “Sir.  Please don’t photograph in the gym.  You can photo her if you want but I’m showing up in those photos.  Please don’t shoot us at that angle.”   Cowed now, by me and his wife, he puts down the camera suggests, falteringly that he’d been photographing her, not me.  But we all know that I’m in those photos.

Mrs. Shanghai yells at him in Shanghainese.  He grumbles.  I wonder if she’s just said: “don’t listen to that asshole, keep filming! (expectorate noise)” Of course, I assume so.  She might also have said: “How vain he is!  Does he think we care about him?  (expectorate noise)”  Then again, she might have said:  “It will look good with a big, sweaty, foreigner next to me.  Who cares?  You already got it, right? (expectorate noise)”   Whatever it is, I couldn’t know in Shanghainese. She leaves and I go back listening to my Nelson Cavaquino and soon they move on to other photo-shoot locations. 

Wednesday, 6/5/19