THE AGELESS AND UNDEAD

This is disconcerting. Not only do many Chinese people considerably older than myself ask me whether I am retired yet, but on the bus they will make sure to offer me a seat or point out that there is a convenient place over there please sit please sit. This all happens in Cantonese.

So apparently all of us Caucasians do not look alike (and they're starting to recognize me), but to their eyes I must look like a haggard old wreck.

What really disturbs me about this is that I do not look old. If it weren't for the salt and pepper, you would never guess that I'm over thirty five. Mm okay, forty, forty five. I think it's the cane. Which is actually just a walking stick suitable for clouting folks. If unmasked yobbos (tourists and other white people) come too close, they might regret doing so.
I am as ever vibrantly full of piss and vinegar.
And certain that I look like it.

Still, to Chinese people, all of us white people really do look like antique old fossils once we're past our twenties, too lumpy and textural, and when a white person carries a stick, AND glows in the dark because of that pallid unhealthy zombie skin-hue, they must be older than Jayzus and need to sit their rickety selves down.

A few years ago I went out to dinner with my apartment mate. Who is eight and a half years younger. And I could tell exactly what was going through the mind of the restaurant owner. "How delicious! Here's this sweet young thing fallen into the clutches of this dirty old man, who can't do what he likes because he's a creaky wreck and will fall asleep after eating!"
Eight and a half years. Only.

Anyhow, it was a good day. I got my booster shot today, after which I had some congee and an oil-stick in Chinatown (柴魚花生粥 'chai-yü faa-sang juk', 油條 'yau tiu'). If I've heard this correctly, I now have THREE nanochips inside of me, AND fifteen G!
Soon I can levitate to the mother ship.

I am probably glowing with "new cooler" magnetism.

Shopped for vegetables and snackies, putzed around, dawdled, and finally had milk tea and a little chicken pie at a familiar place. Tried to cram as many errands into the day as possible, because tomorrow I may be hors de combat from the Pfizers.

Smoked three pipefulls while out and about.

On the bus several times since morn.
Please stop offering me a seat.
We whites all look like this.

Muni Bus lighting just makes us look like withered cadavers. I am not old.

唔使客氣，真嘅 。

No, I didn't live through the 1894 Hong Kong plague.
Nor was I "brought over" many centuries ago.
I am "flattered" that you think that.



Honestly, I am somewhat weirded out by elderly people whom I'm fairly certain I haven't seen before addressing me in Cantonese. It's happened nearly a dozen times this week.




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