To Be in Switzerland

Night’s in early, light’s on.

And you could count the flies swarming above freckled shellfish with their mouths half open --- but not clearly, thanks to the dimming bulbs --- and the words printed on the shirts wore by tired men. Those words were shuffled, dragged along, and squeezed between the crevices of the fabrics.

They come together, an impromptu, silent, careful conversation in a loud farmer’s market. I read them only when I run out of jokes.

Those words were misunderstood, and one boy wore “I am a bitch” as if his slender fingers did not combine the smell of ink pens and recycled exam paper from minutes ago, when he’d finished his physics study hall.

If he’d found a can somewhere and kicked it around while slugging his uniform off his left shoulder, these words on his shirt may begin to scream.

The freckled shellfish shut their openings tight, as a toddler dipped their fists into the tray before the seller yelled at the mother, and the “mother” looked around in confusion.

“Oh, duibuqi! I thought you were the mom. There’s just so many people here.”

“No problem! Ay, these shellfish look really good!”

“Fresh out of Tiger Beach earlier!”

“Ay”

The child took her fingers out of the water and spilled some on the ground. She put her feet together and stretched her neck out, looking for a familiar face.

No luck. I slowed my steps and right before I approached her, the child turned the other way and I followed her glance.

In the crowd, there were more pear-shaped men trembling in the wind as they carried groceries around their waist. More men that I looked and did not observe, because I did not feel the need to form perceptions about them as I do the way I had to back in America, where colors screamed their lines under the table and demanded tips.

They didn’t tip at this farmer’s market, but prayers were appreciated.

I was less nervous around them but more confused, not only by the twists and turns in my tongues when I mimic Dalianese, a dialect my grandfather named a “four-faced monster”. Each face represents a region from which migrants would flow to Dalian, like buckets of paint in their giant pipes would flow to the ocean. I feel like there could be more than four at this moment, but my grandfather could not comprehend that.

To him, seafood at every meal is a survival must. Seafood while speaking the "four faced monster" is a simple luxury.

Yes, my grandfather, whose wife was carried to this peninsula in a tiny basket when she could barely form sentences, is happy. I kept my pace with him.

Let’s think of the wife. During the Cultural Revolution, my grandmother was shuffled into a van with the countryside as a place of education filled with labor, revolutionaries, and my grandfather with a future ahead. Her woolen clothes began to poke around her skin as she puts down her pen and takes up shovels. Her wisdom peaking out of the way she'd organize her food stamps. Her hair got in the way of her deep, almond eyes as she steps down the van in resignation.

Her and my grandfather missed the bus to the suburbs and sighed because they were missing the hot spring water and the flatter "four-faced monster" the people had spoken there.

How nice! The geese eggs too, a bit larger than chicken eggs with whiter shells. You wash them down with gruel, seasoned vegetables, and maybe some seafood and it's fancier than Chinese New Years in heaven.

They would dream about this dish and that was it. There were not enough geese, let along eggs. Sweeping the floor was joy when they were together, though.

She was once a young person, too. We often forget that because sometimes souls could come from a way away, as we believed.

"Did we starve?" I asked one day, trying to speak in the "four-faced monster" as I held chopsticks and devoured fish boiled in various spices.

"No, we did not!" My grandfather clapped his hands in joy.

"Who says we did not? Remember when even whole wheat was rationed? Remember when our neighbors ate leaves and their bodies became swollen all over? We were once hungry."

My grandmother looked down at the table where there was a pile of fish bones and a couple beer cups.

I did not know what to say. Nothing felt fitting.

...

Three years after her birth, her mother carried generations of rituals, grits, reapings and sowing from Shandong, an impoverished province interrupted by the modulations of fate.

Confucius, too, was born there. They said goodbye to the mountains and the yellow soil only to seek asylum in a place where the soil was much rougher. Ships were built, and people, including her, were dumped on grounds and left to create miracles.

Human migration was the origin of DaLian, and the future too.

She was nervous at her Dalian home, nervous in Dalian school, nervous everywhere, because she spoke a different dialect on the first day of class. She also was tall, very tall, maybe a bit taller than the locals. She missed the mountains but overtime, as she fit in, she did not know why.

Thanks to her, there is now a dialect called Dalianese, and it resembles a "four-faced monster." Little did she understand that she was the person who kept this diverse, open-minded island afloat, with its half peoples, half dialects, half rituals, and brief history full of quirky innovations, bloodshed, and pure chances that came from all over.

In the process, the dialect itself didn’t even know that it would intermarry with so many others that it would not know who to love more.

Yes, I was less nervous than that to face the men, but more nervous for what I thought it was okay to not understand. For what I thought it was acceptable to embrace my Americanness but also the lack thereof, as the sun glistens on my wheat tinted skin.

I craved sun bathes, cheddar cheese, the local lake, and solo cups on a pong table. I craved instantaneous, smogless, and capitalistic joy. I craved white America as a social lubricant and a free pass.

But I love it here in DaLian, in a manner that I have not loved anything with before.

No wonder I sometimes felt like a “four-faced monster” too, but I don’t know how to tell my grandfather that. He could only bring himself to put that tag on things, not people. He saw me as a Chinese person who was, honestly, kind of weird.

"Too obsessed with the outdoors and Patagonia. Too into sports" He clapped his hands again and spit out another fish bone.

He likes fish.

As we walked in the market, the words on the T-shirts became louder as they traveled closer together toward the direction of the wind. I tried to pick up sentences, but failed. Until I saw a snippet of something:

“To be in…”

I froze. The girl, the owner of those words, was gone instantly. Her shadows might not have ascended from the shellfish tray but certainly from my vision.

My focus were the men, shuffling their feet and spitting their spit. Shivering in the breeze like ripen pears afraid to touch the ground. My feet pushed and pushed as if they were trying to chop the soil into pieces, and I went forward, where I got a better look.

“To be in Switzerland!”

Those were the words that squeezed between fabrics than floated among pear-shaped men that danced above four-faced monster dialects that came out of the mouths of buyers and sellers.

I could situate myself in a place and search, or I could keep walking and every step I take, I ponder. Those were words on a shirt that I could not let go. I imagined my hands as fists gyrating the fabric into a tiny ball in a fit of rage.

Rage for what I don't understand. What's so good about Switzerland?

I had glanced at those words moments ago. They jumped out so much that buzzes were heard in my ears, I think. The man’s face was blurred, and the shirt was snow white, neatly ironed, and surprisingly petite, like the pear core you want to throw away but hesitate because there is still so much flesh left.

So much flesh. Your mouth waters and you want to take a moment to consider your choices. I took a moment to reread those words, all while thinking about pears.

The pear zoomed past and the night threw on a silky jacket. Impractical, I thought. Because the wind was blowing even stronger.

The pears labored their slender legs and feet to come home, or to come home to Switzerland. Muddy areas were made clear by tap water flowing out of small pipes made of lamb skin.

Once the night sets in we live life by taste and fragrance, not sight. Mixtures of seawater and coal shuffled their ways into our noses before we knew it, and the flesh of fruits and vegetables litter themselves and come alive.

Pomegranates, lemons, half-ripe cherries, and things you could not recognize that could be categorized four-faced monsters.

They were all there, in all forms. Peeled off, squished, broken, collapsed.

You could see stars reflecting from these bits and pieces on the ever-stretching concrete ground.

When boredom strikes due to silence, due to lack of pear-shaped men, our mind often wanders. Switzerland would not look like this in a regular night, I thought.

First, the people would have a higher level of environmental consciousness than the people here.

Secondly, here is not Switzerland, and Switzerland does not have crowds on top of crowds that would do such deeds.

Thirdly, don’t we all want to be in someplace better? My grandmother did. The buyers and sellers do. I do. But where is it?

Does the person wearing the shirt know what it says, and has they been to Switzerland? Are they from there?

One sentence was enough for me to elevate the importance of the person. Like Confucius, this person is a humble teacher. I must think.

To be in Switzerland may mean that we are on the top of some stairs, the beginning of a food chain, or the end game of a series of misfortunes.

It may mean getting carried away in a basket by your mother to a land named DaLian, or developing a tongue that sound like a four-faced monster.

It may mean getting a bargain for the fruits and vegetables you saw, or getting one of the pear-shaped men to smile at you.

It perhaps feels like getting out of your study hall early, or staying up later than usual. It means a clean ground without the smell of seawater and coal. It means revelation.

It may mean many things, but it never means the now.

Because one second you are here, and the next second, someone has told you that there is a Switzerland, and you say:

Wish I was there!