The Asian Woman

By Adrian Nathan West.

In Philadelphia, on New Year’s Day, it is customary for working class men, who have received money to this end from the city government, to dress themselves in women’s clothes or as harlequins and march or ride floats down Broad Street while making noises that are reciprocated by the throngs of people on the sidewalk. It is therefore necessary, if you want a bit of peace and quiet, to go to places you do not usually frequent; and this is what I did on the first day of 2009, walking fifteen or so blocks from my apartment to a Starbucks on Ninth and South streets, thinking there to read a book I had bought myself for Christmas, La mauvaise conscience, by Vladimir Jankélévitch, in the Spanish translation, and to make notes on that book for an anthology of ideas on ethical philosophy that I had been compiling at home to no foreseeable purpose, and also to think back over the course of the preceding year with its many disappointments. I ordered a hot chocolate at the register and took a place at the counter beside an Asian woman in her forties who was wearing a burgundy down coat with a fur-lined hood and a pair of what seemed to me very fashionable boots, with squared toes and a zipper running up their back side. I laid my books, journals, and pens before me.

‘Are you a student?’ the woman asked.

Her question did not admit of a short answer. ‘Yes and no,’ I said, and explained, in a desultory way, my unhappiness with graduate education, the boredom that classrooms inspired in me, my misgivings about whether a Master’s degree would advantage me, professionally, and my notion of going to Salamanca to study there in the coming summer.

She said, in a way that seemed but was not, I believe, apropos, either that the principal at her high school had recently completed his PhD, or else that her friend with a PhD had recently been promoted to principal, and discussed for a moment the mixed blessing of the teacher’s métier.

‘Do you teach high school then?’ I asked, hoping to hear the perspective of somebody who did so, as I at the time was considering this career for myself.

‘Oh, no,’ the woman said. ‘The high school I went to. I work in sales. Women’s fashion. I was studying Spanish too’—at this she pointed to the cover of my book—‘I was in Spain, you know, I was in the European studies programme.’ I saw that her gums, the colour of coughed-up blood and mucus, had far receded from her yellowed teeth. ‘I started,’ she continued, ‘with the Western European languages, you know, the French, the Spanish, the Italian, but you know the Italians are so…’ She abruptly interlaced the splayed fingers of her two hands. ‘They’re very closed and insular, you know. The Spanish, too.’

‘I found I didn’t like the Spanish,’ she whispered, ‘their philosophy, Unamuno, it’s still very Catholic and patriarchal. The Italians, too. So I started doing the Northern languages, you know, the German, the Dutch, Swedish. But the Germans are very strange, it’s hard to connect with the Germans, they have their own philosophy and their own way of doing things, I didn’t like that. Hegel, Heidegger, you know. Of course, the Dutch do too. So I was working for a company with a Dutch manager, sales, I was living in London for two years. At one point I said, I just can’t do this anymore, I’ve been working with the French for two years and I’ve only been invited to this one conference, an international conference, and everybody just sort of shuns you, it’s very hard to get in with the French, and so I said—enough!—I went to London and I was in the chorus with Gilbert and Sullivan for two years, they were nice enough to let me do that, and we travelled around. I’d like to work more with the Danish.’

‘You must be quite good with languages,’ I said.

Well, with the languages, it’s very difficult. The Queen of Denmark, you know, diplomacy with the Chinese has become so important, and they’ve come to look to her in an ambassadorial role. She speaks Cantonese, and so she is helping to strengthen Denmark’s ties to the East. She’s very cosmopolitan, she speaks ten languages. I look to her as a kind of model.’

[This is a short extract, the full article is available to read in Issue Four]

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Adrian Nathan West is the author of The Aesthetics of Degradation, forthcoming from Repeater Books, and the translator of numerous works of contemporary European literature, including Pere Gimferrer’s Fortuny and Marianne Fritz’s The Weight of Things. He lives between the United States and Spain with the cinema critic Beatriz Leal Riesco.