[9/21/2011] Perelman Tonight: Breaking news! -- Part 1 of "Mama Don't Want No Rice" (Chapter 4 of "The Swiss Family Perelman") (continued)

"I refuse to taste another spoonful of that excelsior!" announced the margravine in a ringing voice. "We've been on this blasted reef four days and all we've eaten is barnacles and boiled string! I want something that sticks to the ribs."

"Hamburgers!" the children caught up her refrain. "We want flapjacks with maple syrup -- chicken enchiladas -- apple pandowdy!"

-- from tonight's installment of "Mama Don't Want No Rice"

The Swiss Family Perelman
Chapter 4, "Mama Don't Want No Rice,"
Part 1 of 3

ON A DANK WINTER'S DAY shortly after the Chinese New Year, the population of Upper Lascar Row in Hong Kong was enjoying its midmorning snack of bêche-de-mer and jasmine tea when the street was galvanized by the advent of a quartet of foreign devils so manifestly aching to be plundered that a mighty hosanna welled up the length of Queen's Road Central. Abacuses began clicking furiously, catchpenny ivories of the goddess Kwan Yin bloomed on every curio dealer's shelf, factory-fresh Ming horses were hastily baptized with dust to simulate age, and tempting whiffs of Lapsang Soochong wafted about to decoy the Outer Barbarians.

While the latter bore no placard proclaiming their nationality, certain obscure indications tended to establish them as an American family. In typically Yankee matriarchal style, the party was headed by a well-preserved woman of thirty-odd, her features distorted by an insensate craving for bargains and an iron resolve to paper the Thieves' Market with her husband's money. Trotting at her heels, as obedient as a coach-dog, came the present deponent, bearing in his arms the gallimaufry of opium lamps, snuff-bottles, door-knockers, sandalwood fans, and ceremonial scrolls she had bartered for his heart's blood. A man of rare gentleness, possessed of almost Socratic wisdom and a patience outrivaling Job's, he recognized no law but his wife's airy caprice; at her bidding (provided, of course, that he was not otherwise occupied), he was prepared to scale the snows of Everest or plumb deepest Lake Titicaca. Straggling behind and alternately whining, sassing their parents, and cudgeling each other, there followed two wiry hooligans in levis and polychromatic flannel jumpers.

It was a sight for sore eyes, this close-knit, harmonious little company sprinkling valuta indiscriminately over the crown colony, and many miraculous cures were subsequently reported by local opticians. The day dawns, nevertheless, when even the Comstock Lode yields up nothing but gravel, and finally, on the very brink of insolvency, I brought the juggernaut to a halt. Straining at a gnat and swallowing the smoke of a Camel, I slapped from my wife's hand the Sung pipkin she had purchased with our last greenback.

"That's enough rubbish for one day, sweetheart," I hinted. "Back to the carbarn before I touch a whip to your flanks." My sally, as I anticipated, awoke no response from the stolid creature, whose sense of humor seldom rose above the Punch and Judy level. Flushed with resentment, eyes akimbo, she planted herself squarely in my path and declined to move. Fortunately, I happened to recall an apothegm of the T'ang dynasty to the effect that more flies may be captured with honey than with vinegar. I adroitly introduced the subject of food and suggested that we have a spot of tiffin in a tiny Szechuanese restaurant nearby, where the sweet-and-sour squid and gedämpfte kelp boasted an international reputation.

"I refuse to taste another spoonful of that excelsior!" announced the margravine in a ringing voice. "We've been on this blasted reef four days and all we've eaten is barnacles and boiled string! I want something that sticks to the ribs."

"Hamburgers!" the children caught up her refrain. "We want flapjacks with maple syrup -- chicken enchiladas -- apple pandowdy!"

By now a crowd of several hundred Chinese was pressing in on us, eager to miss none of the fireworks; so, distributing to them a rough translation of the proceedings in the Fukien dialect, concluding with an impassioned appeal never to marry, never to have children, and never to travel abroad with their wives and children, I made our adieux. We dined sumptuously on triple-decker sandwiches and quadruple malteds at a busy soda fountain off Chater Road, whose neon lighting and ulcerous tempo afforded a reasonably repugnant facsimile of our neighborhood drugstore.

Over the postprandial Bisodol tablet, I bade my bride close her eyes and placed in her outstretched palm a bulky envelope. Her wee brow wrinkled in perplexity as she spelt out the destination of the steamer tickets within. "What's this?" she asked suspiciously. "Why does it stand 'Macassar' on these?"

"Because that's where the steamer goes, honey," I smiled. "It's the principal port on the island of Celebes."

"Is that anywhere near Bangkok?" she demanded. "Come on, answer me -- none of that Eric Ambler stuff!"

"Well -- er -- vaguely," I hedged. "About twenty-seven hundred miles as the crow flies, more or less. Naturally, we won't ---- "

"Just a second, Jocko," she interrupted, quivering with anger. "Do I interpret this to mean that you inveigled me all the way to Siam and then switched the deck on us?"

"Of course not," I said placatingly. "It's a little extra dividend -- kind of a warm-up for Siam, so to speak. By the time you get back from the Moluccas -- if you ever do come back -- Siam will look like Rockefeller Plaza."

Exactly as instinct had warned me, the poor thing kicked up the most preposterous fuss. She drew a ghoulish picture of a remote and unexplored archipelago swarming with vampire bats, anthropophagi, and virulent diseases; cited some absurd fiddle-faddle about the war in Java (a grotesque designation for the minor police action in which the Dutch, to preserve order, had unavoidably bombed Djokjakarta and were being forced to kill a few thousand extremists); and having pilloried me as irresponsible, a delayed juvenile, and an erotic dreamer nourished on Terry and the Pirates, flung her arms around the children and defied Lucifer himself to drag her to the East Indies.


TOMORROW NIGHT IN PART 2 OF "MAMA DON'T WANT NO RICE": "You rat!" -- the "margrave" tries subtle persuasion on the "margravine"


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