Anyone's Luck is Luck Enough
When I met AG—a 29 year old literature professor from Manila, via Kyoto, now in Jakarta, in the company of an Alabama Fulbrighter—he was wearing a kelly green “Irishmen” t-shirt, so that he wouldn’t be pinched.
One can’t be too careful around St. Patrick’s day, never mind the scarcity of leprechauns here.
The world is full of equal opportunity poltergeists & jinxes. Take my apartment building—the pink towers of Puri “Palace” Casablanca—which has no floors with the number 4 in it. I know why this is: the Chinese word for FOUR rhymes with the Chinese word DEATH, so 4s are unlucky. The fact that we are in Indonesia, not China, is not the point; it’s unlucky. There is no 13th floor, either; triskadecaphobia. Somehow I only noticed this two weeks ago, when a mob of little girls in the elevator ritually chanted out the floor numbers as we descended: “Seventeen! Sixteen! Fifteen! Twelve!…” without a hiccough. Fifteen, Twe--? Oh...Hey, look at that.
AG is just learning Indonesian. Over coffee at the Bakoel café, he cheerfully taught us the word for Bastard—brengsek—which he’d learned that morning. He didn’t mention how. Pooling our meager language skills, AG & I could now utter the following sentence:
“Good afternoon, may the peace of God be upon you, I would like the fried noodles with tofu, you bastard, where is the bathroom?”
A Filipino scholar, AG is here on an Asian Public Intellectuals grant. Similar to a Fulbright. To my unending delight, he is spending 6 months scouring the countryside for Indonesian science fiction.
One can’t be too careful around St. Patrick’s day, never mind the scarcity of leprechauns here.
The world is full of equal opportunity poltergeists & jinxes. Take my apartment building—the pink towers of Puri “Palace” Casablanca—which has no floors with the number 4 in it. I know why this is: the Chinese word for FOUR rhymes with the Chinese word DEATH, so 4s are unlucky. The fact that we are in Indonesia, not China, is not the point; it’s unlucky. There is no 13th floor, either; triskadecaphobia. Somehow I only noticed this two weeks ago, when a mob of little girls in the elevator ritually chanted out the floor numbers as we descended: “Seventeen! Sixteen! Fifteen! Twelve!…” without a hiccough. Fifteen, Twe--? Oh...Hey, look at that.
AG is just learning Indonesian. Over coffee at the Bakoel café, he cheerfully taught us the word for Bastard—brengsek—which he’d learned that morning. He didn’t mention how. Pooling our meager language skills, AG & I could now utter the following sentence:
“Good afternoon, may the peace of God be upon you, I would like the fried noodles with tofu, you bastard, where is the bathroom?”
A Filipino scholar, AG is here on an Asian Public Intellectuals grant. Similar to a Fulbright. To my unending delight, he is spending 6 months scouring the countryside for Indonesian science fiction.
posted by Anne E. Campisi at 2:20 AM
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