SIT DOWN, AH YEE!

The street outside my house still looks like a disaster zone. Wrecked bus shelter, lengths of tree trunk waiting for a truck, leaves and branches everywhere. And further up, a tree lying on its side waiting for final rites. The overhead lines for the busses are down for three or four blocks, and traffic is not allowed on my block as well as two others. According to the internet, what happened was a bomb cylone. Which is a term I never heard before last night.

Lots of elderly Cantonese take this bus line down to Chinatown everyday; I doubt that they're hiking over the hill on foot. Even at a snail's pace.

Except, probably, auntie with the pistacchio-coloured sunhat (開心果色嘅帽 'hoi sam gwo se ge mou' ). Who, starting at the very beginning of the pandemic lockdown three years ago, assiduously kept in shape and increased her stamina by trudging up and down the block, eventually ranging further and further afield. I suspect that she is well capable of skipping across Nob without even breaking a sweat now.

Naturally I found an altenate bus route. Past one or two downed trees on cross streets. Which is where the title of this essay came from. Because I insisted that an old lady sit (阿姨，你坐你坐。'a yi, nei cho nei cho'). To which her response was that there was no need for such courtesy (唔使客氣，吖，我唔坐。'm sai hak hei', 'ah', 'ngo m cho' ), which prompted me to thought-cloud without a sound "siddown, dammit". Your typical middle-aged Dutch American bachelor is strongly of the opinion that a little old lady a foot shorter than myself and twice my age should bloody well sit down before we hit the next pothole, okay?! I insist upon it! But of course it was pointless to argue, as over the years I've learned that elderly Cantonese women are kind of like bomb cyclones. Don't waste time opposing them.

And far be it from me to stand in the way of an unmovable object.

Enjoyed a pipe after lunch at a familiar place, staffed by Cantonese women. None of them elderly. So no man the barricades batten down the hatches stubborness evident, though it's probably hiding just under the surface.
Both my downstairs neighbor and a gentleman across the street are married to Cantonese women, and my apartment mate is also Cantonese, so eventually I'll be surrounded by that rock hard obduracy. We Dutch ourselves are known for a certain amount of muleheadedness, so it will be just like old school week.

Just ask my former regular care physician about his attempts to make me quit smoking. He was Fujianese from Sumatra, so entirely unprepared for a blankly defiant yet infinitely courteous absolute refusal to even consider the proposition. I always tried to soften the blow by leading the subject onto Indonesian and Malay food, which is the great overlapping interest of both Netherlanders and Peranakan Chinese.

He now knows how to stirfry kangkong with shrimp paste and chilisauce, plus garlic and a dash of rice wine. Sort of in the manner of the long-settled community in Penang.
Which is very good information to have.
He came out ahead.


Ninety percent plus of the staf I have dealt with at Chinese Hospital are Cantonese women. Surely he had encountered rigid stubborness before then? Maybe he didn't realize what was going on? Perhaps he blanked out the memory.

In any case, he's gone back to school and is no longer there.
Likely there was a reason for that.



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