Till Talk

Look buddy, I can’t help it if you don't understand something this simple.

NATURAL FIT

A man steps inside the Persian grocery where I work near Main and 14th Avenue. It’s Tuesday morning, middle of winter in Vancouver. He doubles over into a spastic fit of coughs. Then he lets out one more dry cough to announce he’s here.

“Hey, you don’t look Lebanese,” he says. “You’re not the owner, are you?”

“If it matters, the owner’s Persian. I just work here,” I say.

“But a Chinese guy working here? It’s like going to a Chinese restaurant and finding out that the cooks are Black.”

I want to tell him my parents are from Taiwan but then I’m not sure if that disputes his claim of me being Chinese.

“Can I help you find something?” I say.

“I’m Lebanese. That’s why I walked in here,” he says.

He browses the aisles. He points out things the Lebanese buy: halwa, zaatar, labneh, yerba mate even. Then he says, “Syrians like the same things. I’m part Syrian too.”

Not only is the man Lebanese and Syrian, I find out, but he’s also Austrian and Al-Andalusi in heritage.

“I’m a descendant of Sephardi Jews and Moors expelled after the Reconquista in Spain,” he says. “That means I’m both Jewish and Muslim.”

“And how does that balance out?” I say.

“I’m non-practical,” he says.

“Sure, or do you mean non-practicing?” I say.

“That’s it,” he says.

“For which religion?” I say.

“Both. Back home, my grandparents still pray or whatever,” he says.

“In Lebanon?” I say.

“Argentina. I go back sometimes,” he says.

“Must be nice down there,” I say.

“It’s not. They can’t speak English. I don’t like that. And the only other language I mess with is Chinese. Nihao, xiexie, and yau mou gaau cho ah! See?” he says.

“Back home is still Argentina?” I say.

“I was born there, bro. My dad moved us here to sell beds. Hey, I can get you a bed. I can get you a discount for a king size bed. It’s going to be the best bed you’ve ever had,” he says.

I tell him I don’t need a new bed. Since he’s been eyeing the trays of baklava, I ask if I can cut him a square.

“Listen, bro,” he says. “I’m a dishwasher. I’ve got five bucks. How much hummus and olives can I buy with that?”

As I scoop out the hummus and pack the olives he tells me the restaurant he works at is a Greek taverna somewhere downtown. When I ask why it doesn’t matter that he’s not Greek, he says, “Dude, the Lebanese and the Greeks have been allies for five thousand years. I’m a natural fit.”

-

MAPLE TREE

The name of the store is Afra. “It means ‘maple tree’ in Farsi,” my boss says.

But why that, I pester him, as we stack the sangak onto the shelves alongside the pita.

“What do you mean why? Maples. Canada. Would ‘beaver’ be better?” he says.

That’s not my point, I tell him. Persians know what it means. But most people here don’t speak Farsi, and don’t know what it means.

“Afra sounds Canadian. Look buddy, I can’t help if you don’t understand the business sense in something this simple. Now go finish up at the deli,” he says.

I move behind the counter and stock the spanakopita and samosas. When he brings over a freshly baked plate of herb patty known as kookoo sabzi, I tease further and ask how Afra sounds more Canadian to an Anglophone than any other Farsi word. Or is it an exercise in multiculturalism in its most progressive sense, in which immigrants decide how to express themselves how they see fit in the country in their own way? Is it signifying to Persians that the grocery store is Canadian in a non-Anglocentric way?

“You went to university for that?” he says. He holds up the kookoo sabzi, still steaming in his hands. “Cut this into eighths, and do me a favour, don’t ask why.”

-

EASTERN WHATNOT

“Do you know if there’s any meat in this?” the woman asks.

I read the ingredients of the can of clam chowder. This kind of situation happens quite often in the store, parents or grandparents asking for something vegetarian, gluten-free, vegan even.

“Only clam meat,” I say. “This for the kids?”

“This is for me,” she says.

“So, you’re pescatarian!” I say.

“My goodness. A pesca-what? You can say I’m vegetarian. I just don’t eat animals, so no beef, chicken, lamb, and as long as there’s no bacon in this stuff, then it’s good to me,” she says.

“How long have you been vegetarian?” I ask.

“Nearly sixty years—my whole life. Of course, there wasn’t any of this where I came from,” she says as she sweeps the cans of clam chowder into her bag. “I’m a Kabalarian.”

I assume she belongs to some Doukhobor-like sect from the BC Interior or the Prairies, one that adheres to a Lenten diet, perhaps something resembling the Cathars of the Middle Ages.

“It’s a philosophy, a way of life.” She looks me up and down. “What’s your name?”

I tell her my English name and she says, “Yes, so I see.” Then she gives me a business card to look up her way of life. “It’s got some Eastern teachings in it too, don’t you know.”

As we wait for the card machine to register her payment, she adds, “It’s from a long way back, before all these green smoothies and yoga mats and whatnot.”

When she leaves, I look up the Society of Kabalarians of Canada website. There is a free first name analysis service. I type in my English name. The resulting preliminary report reads, “All names are not equal,” and offers the option of ordering a name and birthdate report, also for free.

-

MOOLA(H)

There’s a small change in the air pressure just before a customer enters the store. It happens the moment they first put their weight against the door, which holds and then gives. This is when I usually take my cue. But there’s one old man I hear from a block away. He shuffles and drags his feet down Main Street.

“Hey, boy! I need da smokes,” he says as he points his quad cane at the tobacco case behind me. “Du Molay. I wan da lih wans—da lih wans.”

His English is not very good. I’ve gathered enough to know he’s an old immigrant from Seiyap and that he came to Vancouver in an era when Seiyapese, a dialect of Cantonese, was still the main variety of Chinese spoken in Chinatown. That was a time when most of the Chinese immigrants in North America came from just four counties in southern China. I can speak Mandarin, and having grown up in Vancouver in the 90s, I sometimes pick up on Cantonese phrases that I absorbed from immigrants from Hong Kong (who speak a dialect like the one in Guangzhou, which the name Cantonese comes from), but that doesn’t cut it for these situations.

In one instance, I write my surname for him on a receipt, just as I have done for my girlfriend’s Japanese aunt. Chinese characters travel across borders better; they’re readable to people from China and Japan, and some older people from Korea and Vietnam, and now tattoo parlours here in the West. But the old man doesn’t recognize the logogram and says, “Aiya, I don know dis wan.”

One day I show him a list of Chinook words in a book I’m reading: chako, chuck, cloosh, cultus, hyack, illahie, kamooks, Kinchotch, klahowya, kumtux, mamook, muckamuck, moola…

He smiles, nods, and says, “Moola, yes, I wok moola long time, boy!”

“You speak Chinook, the trade language? Are you saying you worked in a moola—a mill—or do you mean moolah like the slang for money?” I ask.

“Wah? No, I make da money like dis.” He motions his hands over the table like he’s mixing mah-jong tiles. “I go Chinatown to make da money. Now gimme Du Molay—da lih wans.”

-

NOT YET HUNGARY

The pickles here on the West Coast are inferior. I’ve heard this said by Ontarians and Manitobans.

A woman puts cucumbers in her bag.

“In Czechoslovakia, we eat this kind we call kvashaky. The secret: add old rye bread to help ferment,” she says.

“I’ve been there before,” I say. “To the Czech part. Well, just Prague.”

“Did you like it?” she asks.

“It’s my Plan B, for when I decide to stop paying rent in this city,” I say.

“Good. When you go, tell them you are Canadian,” she says. “Right now, things are not so good over there.”

I nod my head. “At least it’s not yet Hungary.”

“But maybe it should be like Hungary. More mosques and more mosques every day. Soon there will be no beautiful Praha for you to take pleasure in,” she says.

“But you and I are here,” I say. “My parents came from elsewhere. You came from elsewhere. Every day people are coming.”

“Yes,” she says. “But they are different.”

“Like this store, which sells falafels and halal meats,” I say.

I picture minarets poking out among the famous Gothic towers and cathedrals of Prague, the City of a Hundred Spires. I wonder if the woman is aware that Mount Pleasant, where we are now, was once called Church Hill, for its spires. Those churches are now converted by new sects of immigrants or repurposed by developers as chic condominium units.

“You’re not feeling any contradiction?” I ask.

She smiles and shakes her head. She pays in nickels, dimes and quarters. “This way I get lighter,” she says.

-

DRAWING THE LINE

I discount the old Persian man’s Pamir dates.

“But this is absurd,” he says. “Give me the price that everyone else pays. Why charge me less, because I am from Iran?”

This is indeed what the store owner decided, and it can’t be that absurd, I think, for there are much more arbitrary reasons for giving discounts. There is a similar kind of goodwill in my culture termed tongxiang, I explain, which entails giving favours to those from the same hometown.

“But he is from Tehran!” he says. “I am from Esfahān. The next Irani may be from Shiraz. And what if they are Azeri or Kurdish or of the Baha’i faith? Where to draw the line? There is only one kind of person, I tell you, and that is a human being.”

What a way to bridge back free market principles with cosmopolitan ethics.

My eyes focus on the white whiskers sprouting on his nose. When he catches me looking, I dart my eyes left and right and say, “You have lots to think through on your walks, eh? I see you going up and down the slope everyday.”

“No, I take the walks to check my diabetes. But I cured myself, I tell you. I have not had problems for ten years,” he says.

“And what’s the secret?” I say.

“It is all published—the sort of research I did before I retired, when I was a professor at the Free University of Berlin. That was another life. I spoke German then. If you want to live, you must give Germany a try.”

“And to move to Vancouver, that must be if you want to retire,” I say.

“Ah,” he says as he scoops out loose change from a tweed pocket. “This leads me back to my point. I moved here because Montreal, where I first immigrated, is too cold. And here you can be more than just still alive or retired. In Germany everyone is either Deutsch or not. Here, the possibilities are far more numerous.” He puts down the additional quarters to make up for the difference in the price. “So now, you see, I must insist on not having the discount.”