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Christmas Tale – From Furio’s old diaries
Disclaimer: This history is part of a sea of personal reflections that I collected during my first year in China. Despite having changed the names of all people mentioned, the facts – as improbable as they might seem – all really happened.
Spoiler Alert: This series is extremely explicit and contains a high level of sarcasm. If, for some reason, you might take offense, I would then recommend the Junior Woodchucks Guidebook : ).
Index: Click here to read all stories in this series in chronological order (however this is the first one).
“Is sex dirty? Only if it’s done right,” Woody Allen.
“Hello my friend,
today I feel like a sex object…”
Two in the afternoon on December 25th, I eat cold chicken still buzzed with Christmas alcohol and write an email to Marcelo, who for years has helped me every time my feelings take me off the ground.
“…Michela brought me to Bar Blue despite my reticence to go to a hole on Christmas Eve. The club is packed and we are forced to share the table with two Chinese girls. Not that it bothers me: the girl closest to me, a porcelain doll, starts the conversation by asking if I speak Mandarin and, in response to my dry “no” she tells me her life story in English.
Her name is Nina, an American–born in Beijing then moved to Los Angeles as a little girl when her parents separated, she says “shit” every three words, is a consultant and plans to quit in order to travel the world earning a living as a photographer.
[update: she did it, I met her again the next year in Vietnam as she was traveling the world].
I decide to go deeper. I discover that she got into town that morning to visit her father that she hadn’t seen in ten years. As soon as she was of age, tired of her mother’s curfew, she went off to live on her own, paying her rent with a job at McDonald’s. The mother has never tried to restart her love life. She tells me, rather pissed off that she recently asked her if her father had a fiancee. He’s had another woman for years, but Nina never told her anything.
Then, disgusted, she tells me that her father has sent her to a hotel instead of hosting her at home. The official reason is that “the apartment is small and it isn’t presentable.” Nina sees it differently:
“That slut of a fiancee doesn’t want me in the house.”
I laugh heartily while she sips a Tiger – a watered-down imported beer – and I listen to her as she spits out sentences like a machine gun while downing one gin and tonic after another. Then she point blank informs me that the guy that’s with her who’s entertaining Michela with Chinese lessons, is only a friend. She musses his hair just like puppy:
“He’s my little friend since elementary school, we haven’t seen each other in twenty years.”
Two thoughts pop into my mind.
Source: http://www.saporedicina.com/english/christmas-tale/
