Chinese United Nations

February 4, 2008

Nowhere in Mölndal, Sweden

Eric Howard Way

I'm sitting here in Sweden, once again putting myself into the Twilight-Zone experience of ordering Chinese food in Swedish.  There's something just unnatural about cultures as far away as America and China finding each other in Swedish as a common language.

I spotted this little stretch of strip mall just off the highway and fishtailed onto the exit ramp when I saw the Chinese characters and the big English "Take Away" sign.  Someday I want to meet the evil Swedish grinch who is so adeptly removing every bit of charm and culture from the Swedish towns and villages.  The process is much too efficient not to be masterminded by some bitter Lutheran civil servant trapped down a windowless corridor in a windowless office...in Norrköpping.

This non-descript row of Asian restaurants could be best described as... well, that's just it, it can't be described.  Any attempt to paint a visual picture would bring unnecessary embarrassment on the 70's by flaunting how the Swedes ill-treated that oft-abused decade with abandon.  Let us just politely say the building is functional, and I'm certain, very safe.

The Swede in the booth next to me just asked for a word I've never heard of.  As my mind was trying to process this new word, the waitress crossed the room and reached for a pair of chopsticks, but alas the epiphany of comprehension flashed the new word from my short term memory.  It sounded fun too.  Like a word Pippy Longstockings would use. Note to self: look up chopsticks.

Mmm.  Hot hot kyckling med ananas, chicken à la pineapple.  So hot you have to dance the little morsels around on your tongue a few times before you can chew into them and savor the sweet and the sour.

Sitting here makes me think of an incident in our local Chinese restaurant just down the street from us in Lyon.  We used to live next door to the building it's in, and Hélène was practically our short order cook. She and her husband escaped from Cambodia twenty eight years ago and never looked back.  Over the years we got to know Hélène on a first name basis, but her husband has forever remained a pair of hands snaking their way out of the small window from the kitchen.

One evening, we were enjoying our standard Vietnamese spring rolls (all Chinese restaurants in France are obliged to serve Vietnamese spring rolls), when we noticed a table across the dining room with five people who were obviously foreign.  They had distinctly Mediterranean features, but we couldn't place where they were from as we tried to steal snippets of their conversation to at least catch what language they were using. 

Later, engrossed in our conversation, we came to realize we'd been staring at our empty plates for a good five minutes. The service had stopped as Hélène was bartering away with the table of five over some serious discord concerning the bill. With Hélène waiting tables alone, the backlog was starting to mount in the dining room, rarely so full as this night.

My stare was broken when Laurent suggested I go and put my English to some use as interpreter.  Hélène and the "Mediterraneans" were clearly not finding a lingua franca as we heard smatterings of English and Spanish being thrown at each adversary. 

I stepped over to the counter and politely asked the man in English, "Can I help you?  Do you speak English?"   He replied with a very nervous, "Oh, English not so good."  But in the few seconds I was standing there listening to the others, I had a strange feeling that I was hearing words which had some sort of meaning to me.  "What other language do you speak?"  "Sprechen-Sie Deutsch?"  "Hablas español?"  The middle-aged man looked on with wide eyes and up-turned palms as he simply shook his head.   Just then one of the women with him giggled as she let trickle out what can only be described as a hopeless last-ditch effort: "Svenska?"

There was a half second of silence as the shock on my face reflected onto those of our foreign guests before turning to a flash of expectant hope.

"Ja, jag pratar svenska.  Vad är problemet?"  The words rolled out of my still unbelieving mouth.

Fighting instinct, we didn't dare burst into laughter for fear that we had somehow misunderstood and that our serendipity would melt like a snowflake.  Without missing a beat, the man drew in a deep breath and explained to me in Swedish how he had in fact had only one soup with rice, and his companion had had only one chicken and rice dish.  Realizing I was getting inextricably entangled in Hélène's non-western accounting methods, I managed to sum up the matter as a 2-euro difference of view, which I told Hélène I would gladly pay, without letting on to the others what was transpiring. 

As Hélène counted out the man's reclaimed change, he thanked me profusely for settling the matter and explained they were Kurdish refugees living in Sweden, on vacation with a bus tour. 

So there I stood, an American, translating a Kurdish man's Swedish into French for a Cambodian woman, in a Chinese restaurant, in France; each one of us using a borrowed language from the borrowed homes whose callings invited our paths to cross.  To think I used to dream of working for the United Nations.

Oh, and the Swedish word for chopsticks is:  pinnar.  (PEE-nahr)  Take note. You just never know when you might need it.