THE TYRANNY OF JIN

One of the places I like to go for a spot of tea before smoking my pipe in Chinatown I actually do not like to go to. Not so much. The people who work there are fine. The customers quite frequently not. One youngish coarse mouthed harridan (curses like a fishwife) and a dozen antiquated Toishanese peasants who seem slightly crippled in the courtesy department.
Plus several old bags of both genders who scowl and grumble.

Country people are naturally paranoid and suspicious, and tend to be cold and offish toward outsiders such as myself. As, with skin that glows in the dark and horns growing out of my head (meaning that I'm Caucasian), I naturally am.

For all they know I work for the salt gabelle (鹽稅 'yim seui') and the tax office, and will demand that they fill out forms in a language they don't understand.


Or, even worse, start dancing while strewing mininimity.


Yeah, I know. It's their own private world.
And in a way I represent invasion.
The other side of the wall.
The stench of other.

Bumpkin rebels. I am fully aware that it took tyrants to keep their country together. If it had been left to the salt of the earth, they would have fallen apart into several warring states.
Which, several times, they did.


As a whitey-white individual (鬼佬) semiliterate in Chinese and speaking Cantonese I am an anomaly, but despite the love of the odd and unusual which many Chinese have, that bunch of snooty country folk want more than that. And I'm just not entertaining or engaging.


It is significant that only in their ancestral district, (四邑 'sei yap', "four counties"), gun towers and heavily fortified farms (碉樓 'diu lau', "rock-hewn tower"; 砲樓 'paau lau', "cannon tower") were widespread, to ward off bandits and the outside world. Extreme local poverty alleviated by funds from overseas made them more paranoid of everything. So, massive multi-storey buildings with metres-thick walls, iron doors, and turrets. Basically, bunkers.
Common in rural Kaiping (開平 'hoi ping').

[Paraoia: 偏執狂 ('pin jaap kwong'); 妄想症 ('mong seung jing'); 仇外心 ('chaau ngoi sam').]

I have learned not to go there when it's busy during lunch time. Unfortunately the "Resist Foreign Imperialism & Pipe-smoking Dutchmen Revolutionary Association" (反外國帝國主義和抽煙斗的荷蘭人革命協會 'faan ngoi kwok tai kwok jyu yi wo chaau yin tau dik ho lan yan gaak ming hip wui') now gathers there most days, having bailed out from another place to which I go. Good, because there are now only two dingos who frequent that place, and usually I don't encounter them there anymore. But it is closed on Thursdays.
The number of bakery coffeeshops in Chinatown has decreased.


And I've already been to the other establishment run by the same fine people this week.


So where do I go today for tea-time?
係一個好嚴重嘅問題。



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