"Maureen McHugh - China Mountain Zhang" - читать интересную книгу автора (McHugh Maureen F)

eVersion 1.1 - click for scan notes

CHINA MOUNTAIN ZHANG
Maureen F McHugh

CONTENTS:
CHINA MOUNTAIN (Zhang)
KITES (Angel)
BAFFIN ISLAND (Zhang)
JERUSALEM RIDGE (Martine)
GHOST (Zhang)
HOMEWORK (Alexi)
DAOIST ENGINEERING (Zhang)
THREE FRAGRANCES (San-xiang)
RAFAEL (Zhang)


CHINA MOUNTAIN (Zhang)
The foreman chatters in Meihua, the beautiful tongue, Singapore English. "Get he over here. All this
trash here! Got little time." He is a stocky little Chinese man who has suffered disappointments.
"Someone work that cutter, xing buxing?"
Someone is me, the tech on the job. "Xing," I say, "Okay." Good equipment can't be trusted to stupid
New York natives. I heft the cutter, balance it against my thigh. My goggles darken, shutting out the
buildings, even the lot we are clearing to build.
"Okay," he says, backing away, glad to have an ABC engineer. ABCтАФAmerican Born Chinese, or
like the waiguoren, the non-Chink say, Another Bastard Chink. With my goggles dark I can't see
anything but the glow at the end of the cutter as it goes through rusted, twisted steel, girders in tangles
and laying there like string dropped in a pile. Where the cutter touches it goes through like butter, and
where the steel is cut it will shine clean and rust free. Steel drops spatter like quicksilver, glowing metal
white. The air smells like a thunderstorm coming.
I swear softly at the foreman in Spanish, but he is too far away to hear anything, which is good. He
does not know I speak Spanish. ABC; he knows I speak MandarinтАФPoutonghuaтАФand American
Standard and the Singapore English Asians call Meihua and waiguoren call Chinglish. (Waiguoren don't
get the joke. Meihua, beautiful language, because this is MeiguoтАФAmerica. In Mandarin, Meiguo
means 'beautiful country' because 'Meiguo' approximated the sound in A-mer-i-ca to Chinese ears.)
The foreman is all right, for someone born inside. He speaks English as if he learned it in school in
Shanghai, which he did, but at least he speaks it unaugmented. He likes me; I work hard and I speak
Mandarin better than most ABC. I am almost like a real Chinese person. My manners are good. An
example of how breeding will out, even in a second rate country like this. He can talk to me, and there
are probably very few people Foreman Qian sees each day who he can talk to. "You here what for?" he
asks me. "You smart. You go Shanghai?" Everyone inside thinks that all the rest of us are dying to go to
China.
If I went to China to study I'd be doing a great deal better than working as a tech engineer on a
construction crew. Maybe the rest of us are dying to go to China, maybe even me. But maybe Spanish is
the first language I ever learned because my mother's birth name was Teresa Luis and it's just because
my parents paid to adjust the genetic make-up of their son that I look like a slope-head like my father.
So Qian doesn't know; my last name is Zhang and I speak Mandarin and when he asks me why I don't
go to Shanghai or Guangzhou to study I just shrug.
It infuriates him, that shrug. He thinks it is a native characteristic, that it indicates indifference and a
kind of self-defeating fatalism. But just looking Chinese is not enough to get someone to China. My