You take advantage of the strange emptiness and the sunny, Saturday calm of the shop to sit with me. A friendly, but facetious hello to this old-outsider shifts to Mandarin, and I can hear that neither of us is using the tongue we speak with our mothers. Your home, I know from the sign and your pulled-noodles, is the Place of Orchids in the far west. Why have you come to Crooked River? The Place of Orchids, you say, is not so beautiful.
I am a lone American today on my way to the West Lake, and you say with certainty that it is a beautiful lake. But certainty fades to uncertainty, and your common tongue stumbles forward with carefulness. Does America have pulled-noodles? Chopsticks negotiate my noodles, and I tell your dreams and your young-faced cooks listening in that America’s are not as good these, and there are no noodle shops I’ve seen.
You ask me about money, how much a bowl would go for, how much to rent a place, but I don’t know what language makes it easy to describe impossibilities and uncertainties. I don’t know.
I leave for the sun, you and your dreams left behind in the shadows of your shop. Did your silk-trading forefather that first walked on that ancient road, think the itch that bothered his foot would die with him? Did he imagine that it would carry on, over deserts and mountains and rivers to the sea, where it could only go farther in your heart?
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