"Apart your legs."
Now, I would have it known that I would not normally be so obliging as to comply with this command for just anyone, but for my yoga teacher Maya, yes. It is in part, the economy of the phrase - its succinctness - that makes it so endearing, as much her humility and quiet humanity that it emanates from. Why should "apart" not be a verb here when it makes perfect sense? We all know exactly what she means: "Pull your legs apart" or "Spread your legs." Either way, we - her pupils - are so in awe of the ease with which she demonstrates the correct position and the not small discomfort that our own efforts are producing that the grammar seems ...well, unimportant. How could one possibly correct someone so superiorly physically strong and flexible? Should not our English (in a Chinese world) be as accommodating - not to mention creative - as her limbs?
Well, I fear it is just such liberal ethical linguistic gymnastics that are getting me into trouble at work! After all, in my new job as English Editor I am expected to fly the flag for imperialist English usage and to halt the tide of American-Chinglish. And in many ways I am in complete agreement: we cannot have so many 'convenient stores' in Hong Kong as we do 'convenience stores'...
However, as a wee slip of a gweilo girl it is not always easy being the one to lay down the law of English letters to burping Cantonese men and assert that to 'ise' is better than to 'ize' but that you should never, no matter how bad it gets, 'hospitalise'. And, besides, I have to admit that often the literati in me just dies hard and sometimes there is poetry in the oddness of a phrase. I mean, it's not quite Shakespeare, there can be ugliness and redundancy too, don't mistake me: often there are frequently too many unnecessarily repetitive words repeated without need so that any sense that started out in the sentence soon got lost in an explosion of bubbling metaphors all racing frantically at once for the finish line only to spawn afresh, double quick off the blocks! But, where does the line in the sand lie? When does incorrect equate to economical sense and when incoherency? How ugly and how poetic?
Well, I was left wondering - nay, marvelling - at some of the startlingly beautiful turns of phrase in my recent reading of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera (in translation, of course), which as anyone who's had to endure me tell will know that I found to be one of the most delightful, charming and witty reads I've had in a while. While others have said - from the blurb on the back, the title on the front, or an attempt to get between those two covers by more than a few pages - "oh, how depressing" before casting it aside, I found it lively, engaging and rather funny. In places, of course, elsewhere, otherwise, yes, it is as the title describes, about unrequited love during the years of cholera and begins, pretty much, with two deaths. But then, I did inherit my great grandmother's dark sense of humour. She was the sort who'd laugh herself into stitches when someone fell over, and who kept a Minor Bird for the wicked impersonations it performed of her gossipy neighbours, keeping her entertained for hours after they'd left. Yes, I'm afraid I'm one of those. Though I know I am not alone. Just this weekend, as my friend and I were racing about the MTR trying desperately to get to the cinema on time, we passed a couple in the station on the travelator who, as it came to an end, had completely failed to pick up all two-dozen of their shopping bags in time and found themselves too suddenly helpless to stop the chaos that was ensuing. As they looked on at the wreckage piling up about their feet, my friend and I took one look at each other, burst out laughing, and carried on running on our way, thanking our lucky stars that in our lateness we had been given that classic comedy moment unfolding in real time, as if just for our entertainment.
And you might say "Aren't you a yogi, do you not believe in karma and all that?" But I would say that you are missing the point. The more important question, Dear Reader, is what in GGM could possibly be comparable to a golden travelator pile-up moment in the MTR? To which I would reply, "You mean apart from a man dying falling off a ladder trying to get a talking parrot out of a mango tree?" Well, if that doesn't intrigue you or raise even a smile, then you should stop reading here, for nothing of interest can possibly lie in anything I will go on to say. For the rest of you, I refer you to the part in the novel in which Florentino Ariza (because characters are always referred to my their full name, as if we've not been following them for 200 pages already and cannot possibly distinguish them from all the other characters who share their names), the unrequited lover of some 30 years, enters one of his poems in the Poetic Festival and watches as Fermina Daza, the object of his long-time frustrated love, reveals the winner on the stage of the National Theatre to a packed and equally expectant audience. While Florentino is imagining the honour of winning, of having her read his name off the card inside that golden envelop and the desire it would necessarily inspire in her for him, the actual winner - in a moment of true bathos - is a Chinese immigrant who comes up onto the stage, beaming with pride amid the boos and jeers of a xenophobic audience who cannot believe that this minority person could possibly have written "a perfect sonnet in the purest Parnassian tradition that revealed the involvement of a master hand." So not only does the reader have the pleasure of seeing Florentino's amorous fancies thwarted once again, but also the pleasure of the unlikely winner triumphing over a prejudiced society.
Yet, before I mislead you into thinking that this is a straightforwardly heartwarming story of right over racism, we need to return to our thesis in hand ask "Ok, but where's the humour?" Well, remember I'm an editor (as well as literature nerd), and believe me, the devil lies in the detail, in the position of a comma, apostrophe - a single letter, or phoneme - that changes "Sit down" into "Shit down", a "flatted factory" into a "fatted factory", "a good year for investment" into "a good ear for investment" and the list goes on, including my personal favourite "de horse" when the writer clearly meant "divorce". So, if the position of a letter or two accidentally out of place can change the meaning so much, just think what a word purposefully so-placed can do, inflecting our entire world with the nuances it sheds. So, here is what GGM had to say that made me smile - because, after all, he said it, and would any way say it much better than I could ever rely - in the cause of exploiting prejudice to explode it. And since they say that the surest way to mar a joke is to explain it - that if you have to the joke is lost - I will take the risk nad avoid doing that. I would of course try to reassure you that if it is lost on you, well, you never had it to begin with, so don't feel bad; but if you get it, well, just know that someone - equally mischievous - is also smiling with you.
No one believed that the author was the Chinese who received the prize. At the end of the last century, fleeing the scourge of yellow fever that devastated Panama during the construction of the railroad between the two oceans, he had arrived along with many others who stayed here until they died, living in Chinese, reproducing in Chinese, and looking so much alike that no one could tell one from the other. At first there were no more than ten, some of them with their wives and children and edible dogs, but in a few years four narrow streets in the slums along the port were overflowing with other, unexpected Chinese, who came into the country without leaving a trace in the customs records....
