Celebrating my wife (while shaking my head)

I’d been meaning to write this blog about my wife for quite a while, but a current piece by Sarah Britten on poisonous snakes prompted me to get on with the job. Ouch. That sounds terrible.

I hasten to add that this is not because I think my wife, Marion, better known as chookie or the Chook, resembles some hideous reptile; not at all. It made me immediately think of my wife’s love for and fascination with snakes and other reptiles, and this got the creative juices going.

On reading Sarah’s piece, I immediately thought of my wife gleefully walking on a couple of occasions through a Chinese restaurant in Nanhui* with a large, glistening, poisonous bugger slowly twitching in her hands. The Chook’s arms were outstretched to hold the tail and head, the long, luminescent body slightly twitching.

The restaurant specialised in seafood, amphibian and reptilian cuisine, one specialty being live snakes kept in cages. You choose your snake from various cages, nestled alongside buckets of twitching crabs, lobsters and solemnly paddling turtles. The snake is slaughtered and cooked to specification. Reptilian meat does not come fresher; I won’t touch it, settling for fish, noodles and the excellent variety of mushrooms and vegetables also on display.

You don’t need to know Chinese — you just point and the pretty lass hovering next to you says “houda” okay, and scratches something down on her orderpad, which makes a South African doctor’s script for a chemist look like clearly legible print.

For me the snakes are a fearful, spell-binding sight; for my wife they are a constant source of fascination. I will never forget those evenings with her wandering around the restaurant, a place very tastefully laid out with long white and blue tablecloths, amusing and alarming the grinning waiters and open-mouthed customers. The snake’s teeth had been removed and it was too cold to move much. I am not endorsing cruelty; this is just how the place was.

My god, my wife, my character: she really is one. She has gone from being a high-powered medical consultant to joyfully teaching at a Western kindergarten in Pudong, Shanghai. The kids love her so much they say at the end of the day, “Mommy I don’t wanna go home, I wanna be with teacher Marion.”

Marion enthusiastically teaches me her new nursery school songs most evenings, regaling me with, for example: “little bunny foo foo walking through the forest, picking up the field-mice and kissing them on the heads, and the good fairy said, little bunny foo foo, don’t pick up the field-mice and kiss them on the heads. If you don’t stop I will turn you into a blob …” She can’t sing unless its simple, chanted nursery rhymes. This is done most nights while we sit round the kitchen table chopping the veggies and arguing about how much garlic to add, bottle of vodka glinting sometimes in candle-light under a huge vase of flowers, an atmosphere which the Chook loves and brings out such softness in her.

Yet this same kindergarten missy will eat, at restaurants, pigs’ brains (somehow saying pork brains does not work), freshly scalloped, undamaged from the skull, placed on a plate in its pool of blood. Fondue-style, pieces are skewered off and placed in the bubbling hot pot before her.**

Some Chinese go for this, others do not, depending on which part of this vast country they come from. The non-Hannibal-the-Cannibal types, who don’t do cerebral matter in any culinary form — among whom I stalwartly and resolutely include myself — sit on one side of the table with menus between us and the Hannibal Lecter sight of Marion and her Chinese cronies. She will also do pigs’ ears (pork ears again do not work for my ear) and chicken feet, because that is what she was brought up on in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.

Yet chookie is also the fussiest eater in the world.

You wouldn’t think so with all the weird stuff she can eat. God help us all if the chicken is under-done, which the Chinese prefer, or if there is too much salt in the bolognaise.

Five feet tall, plucky, chestnut cloud of bushy hair, brown teddy bear eyes and a cocky sailor’s gait, she has been a constant source of surprises in our six years together.

Our neighbours are about to have a baby; inevitably Marion lavished baby jumpsuits and pyjamas on them. I have learned a lot about generosity from the Chook.

We used to teach at universities together in Shaoxing, two-and-a-half hours from Shanghai. When we sorrowfully said goodbye to all those wonderful, bubbly college students, she burst into tears and sat in a heaving mass of female students around her, offering tissues, with many of them calling her mom. She truly was a surrogate mother to many of them.

Her other nickname is Paddington Bear. She has no sense of direction and has caused me considerable heart-pounding stress. On our very first day in both London and Shanghai she got lost. No cellphone. It was only by miracle that she was found in Shanghai, where, especially then, several years ago, even fewer people could speak English and chookie did not have the address for the house where we were staying with Aussie friends. She finally found a crumpled note in her handbag with one of the Aussie’s phone numbers on it.

The scariest was when we visited Suzhou, a small city with ancient gardens that are world-heritage sights, quite near Shanghai.

We went out on the first night with friends, but I went home to bed after a marvellously spicy Sichuan style meal while the Chook went to some club to party.

I got a phone call on my mobile at one in the morning. There was almost a wail: “Chooky I am lost!” (I am also called Chooky.)

She had somehow managed to lose the copy of the hotel address I had given her.

This could have turned nasty. It was in the middle of a freezing winter and she was lost at one AM in a completely strange city. Her friends had already gone different ways and had no idea Marion could not get home on her own, or that she had lost the hotel address.

To cut the story short, she eventually recognised a sign saying K-TV, which is the sign for karaoke, very popular in China.

I breathed a sigh of relief.

I knew small cities and towns always had K-TV bars usually just on one street in China. I said I would come fetch her soon. This was confirmed by the owl-eyed, sleepy concierge when I shuffled down to reception. She scribbled down the street address and I went in search of a taxi, which I found quickly enough. The taxi driver gathered, as we slowly trawled down the darkened street, me saying man man, slowly slowly, implying that I was looking for something. He asked in Chinese what I was looking for.

My knowledge of Chinese was pidgin. The great thing about having a fair mastery of a language is that you can airily couch the purpose of slowly roving down a street at nearly two AM in the teeth-chattering cold with: “Oh, I was meant to pick up my wife at a K-TV bar, but I forgot which one. I know it is here somewhere. Just drive slowly.”

All I could manage was, after clearing my throat, “My wife is here. Somewhere. We look, yes? Okay?”

This was met by a bemused silence from the taxi driver followed by a knowing chuckle. He said he would look on his side, me on mine, the breath pluming from his mouth as he spoke.

Just then I saw the most precious, Paddington-shaped bundle in the world, huddled in a huge jacket, sitting next to a bright lamp post.

She got into the car and brightly announced: “I could have got home on my own, I just realised. I recognised that bridge over there.” She vaguely indicated with a hand.

The Chook? Stubborn and correct to the bitter end, sometimes.

“Yeah right,” I muttered. “And pigs might float upside down over India.”

“No need to get sarky, please.”

The taxi driver laughed, thinking we had started a quarrel; it was just two relieved spouses.

Oh well, she certainly has added flavour to the material in my memoir, Cracking China.

My wife, the Chook, a character who could have gone into Peanuts and Charlie Brown.

*A semi-rural but still fairly built-up town on the northern edge of Shanghai, which boasts a huge African Safari Park nearby and the most magnificent displays of flowers I have ever seen at a botanical gardens called Flowerport. Also some quaint, typically old-fashioned Chinese villages.

** Chinese food in China is not the same as the Westernised, tamed, watered-down variety I have found in South Africa, England and New Zealand and, I am told, by Chinese friends who have been to Australia. Not at all. This is not an argument I wish to enter into with readers again.