"That right?'
"Mmm, you are. Don't you realize it's their 50th anniversary?"
"What? NATO?" I say. "What does NATO's birthday have to do with the bombing of an embassy?"
I'm getting frantic. Here I am, waiting interminably in an emergency room with my sick daughter, trafficking in second-hand didactics with some motor-mouthed nutter. A memory from my year teaching EFL in South Korea flashes. First week in, a student comes up after class and tells, me, ominously, that foreigners don't last long in Korea, can't cope with the culture. He re-tells the story of an American expat who goes "dicky Tao" one day and runs off down the main boulevard of Seoul, naked, and screaming, "Get me out of here!" Dicky, meaning malfunctioning. Tao, the balance of yin and yang, the synergetic life principles. Dicky Tao. In short, el tropo, fucked in the head.
I look over at Barbara, and mutter, "Dicky Tao," with a delivery so toothsome that Amelia pops one lid open and eyes me for a moment.
"No, no, not NATO. China," she says, not skipping a beat. "China is celebrating its 50th year of communism. Fifty years. But that's nothing, because China hasn't changed in its essentials in 2500 years, and probably never will."
I'm having trouble seeing what this has to do with the embassy bombing, even if it were true, but I follow anyway. "Oh, come on, of course China is changing. What about Tiananmen Square? That's a start. No one thought the Berlin Wall would ever fall either, but now they make key chains out of it for tourists."
Barbara snorts. "The Berlin Wall? Let me tell you something about walls. The only wall in this whole world that matters is the Great Wall. 21,000 kilometres long. It would stretch half the circumference of Earth. The largest structure ever built by human hands. 'Beside it,' said Voltaire, 'the pyramids of Egypt are only puerile and useless masses.' It was built to keep out Attila and the Huns. And when the Huns couldn't get past it, they changed direction and pounced on Europe. Rome fell, and Western civilization entered the Dark Age, because China built that wall. You want inscrutable? Try fathoming the depth of Confucian introversion that conceived that wall."
At uni I wrote my thesis on Candide, and I'm just bowled out to hear the name Voltaire uttered by such hateful lips. I barely eke out, "What does any of that have to do with the bombing of the embassy?"
"Don't you see?" she says. "The Americans, with their store-bought freedom this and freedom that, are little more than barbarians to the Chinese. Latter day Huns trying to crack the Wall. Bombing the embassy was a loud Yank knock on the door. 'Open up', they yell, 'We got some dang toasters fer ya' But they won't get in, and when they can't get in they'll destroy themselves, because this time the Huns and Rome are one and the same."
I'm slack-jawed and astonished by so much encyclopaedic trivia wrapped in paranoia and hatred. But her spontaneous combustion seems to have burned Barbara out, and for the first time in more than an hour she's truly quiet. I look down at Amelia and she's mouthing "baw-baw."
"She wants her bottle," says Sam.
It's then that I realize in my haste to get Amelia to the hospital I've broken rule number one of toddler traveling: bring a bottle. "sh*t," I bark.
"There's a McDonald's on the other side of the hospital," says Sam, with a look that conjures up Ginger Meggs. "I can show you."
Amelia's mewling becomes more insistent. I say, "That's okay. Just tell me how to get there." He does, and off we go.
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