I Sing, You Sing, My Maid Sings, We Scream
My grandmother is back at my house now after a stay in Plant, her hometown. As a result, (to her) I have just arrived, and so (to her) I am still underfed, malnourished, and languishing for home-cooked food, even though I’ve been eating nothing else (well, almost nothing else) for the past week. Everything’s settling back down into its pre-me-going-away rhythm: grandmother dominating the TV with her soaps, my mother as busy as ever with our school life, my dogs howling for attention every time it rains, and my sister still only calling me “Big Brother” when she wants something out of me.
Well, almost everything. My maid has started singing in the house. The fact here is that she leads a very comfortable life—for a maid, that is. Her duties only involve cleaning the house, which (given that there’re only four other people in it) is extremely easy and is usually completed in two hours, and cooking three meals a day, which (given that both my mother and grandmother are inveterate cookers—not that I’m complaining!) is also very easy. Her salary reflects that (I think she only gets about 300 a month, which in my opinion is grossly overpaying her).
It’s obvious that my maid has too much free time on her hands: she’s bought herself a handphone, and it cost her 98% of her salary (my mother’s estimate). Her phone card cost the rest of her salary for that month. (She finished using it up in about two days and has started getting salary advancements from my mother to keep her phone running.) And you know what? Her phone is more advanced than mine or my sister’s, and she gets more calls in a day than I get in a week. It’s very annoying, especially she seems to fear herself going deaf—she’s put her ring volume at the maximum level, and she’s gone and chosen what must be the most jarring tune available. To someone like me (I put great store on aural harmony), it’s slow torture.
And what’s more, the volume at which she speaks is directly proportional to the distance between her and the other speaker. For example, a local call is conducted at normal volume (for my maid, normal volume means loud enough to be heard three doors away) and when she calls home, she shouts at the phone. This means that she also ends up shouting at her employers—us. I think I’m a bad influence on her, though. My habit of self-flattery (the only form of flattery I indulge in) must’ve got into her through osmosis or something, since we heard her saying the other day that she was so skinny that she looked like a monkey.
Her best friend, the mirror (it doesn’t matter which mirror, as long as it’s a mirror) must’ve lied to her. Either that or she’s going prematurely blind, because if she thinks she’s as skinny as a monkey, a sumo wrestler would weigh about the same as your average strand of hair. It’s getting to be a popular and oft-repeated joke in the family. She doesn’t know about it, of course, since she doesn’t speak English, Mandarin, or Hakka. (She seems to sincerely believe that she’s thin, though, because her consumption of foodstuffs has undergone a dramatic increase. She’s been eating a lot of meat especially, and has almost stopped eating her vegetables.)
And she sings. I read somewhere that primeval man sang before he spoke. If that’s true, I’ve got the proof: my maid sings without words. Her idea of singing is to open her mouth and go “Aoaoaoaoaiaiai~” in various tones and pitches, giving the impression that she’s working on a fusion of funereal and pipe organ music, with some native rain-dance influences thrown in for good measure. Her volume never varies—it’s stuck on Extra Extra Loud and none of the subtle hints we drop (screaming and closing our ears, walking around with cotton buds in ears, trying to forcibly gag her, playing the piano extra loud in an attempt to drown her voice out) are having any effect. It’s annoying to say the least, especially when the only thing that stops her singing is her working or her phone ringing, which just causes a whole lot of new problems.
At least I can drive, or will be able to drive as soon as I pass the exam—not that that is particularly comforting in itself. My driving instructor says my triangle maneuver has improved dramatically. (The reason is that I have found that in Gear One, you can floor the accelerator and the car won’t overtake a snail; as a result, using the clutch to keep the speed at nearly zero helps in more precise placement of the car.) Now all I need to do is overcome my fear of the handbrake! (I have barely mastered the clutch and accelerator and now I need to work with THREE limbs at once?!)
Incidentally, I went for a trial exam today, and passed it. A brief breakdown would be: during the triangle maneuver, did exceedingly well (if I do say so myself) but made a bad exit (the turning out was thirty degrees to the right off-course); during the side-parking, parked very smoothly but hit three posts while coming out (two when coming out crooked and one when reversing in a vain attempt to get straight); during the mountain, managed to do it successfully one out of nine times (four times, I didn’t release the clutch enough; three times, I released the clutch too much and the car stalled; once, I forgot to let the handbrake go and slid merrily back to the starting point again). The one time I managed to do it, I went down the other side too fast and fortunately didn’t hurt anything except my pride.
The on-road section deserves a paragraph all its own to document my misfortunes. First, the car kept on backsliding, and if the examiner hadn’t told me to use the handbrake I’d still be backsliding. After that, (since it was an unfamiliar car) I pushed the accelerator several degrees too low and the clutch several degrees too high, and set us off on a kangaroo course for the road. And then, I panicked and completely lost my head, and with it all memory of the route I was supposed to follow. I didn’t use the signal at the correct times, I stayed 15 kilometers per hour below the minimum speed, I didn’t turn fast enough (except once when I turned too fast and nearly lost control of the car), I didn’t keep the car from drifting into everybody’s lane except my own, I didn’t brake at the appropriate times (the examiner’s braking is probably the only reason I’m not typing from a hospital bed!) and I didn’t manage to convince the examiner that this was just a bad dream. (She’s firmly convinced by now that she needs a hospital stay and aggressive treatment for high blood pressure, as well as preventive medicine for cardiac arrests.)
My exam proper is on Monday next, so I’ve asked my tutor for another 3 or 4 hours with which to get properly familiarized with the route and actions to take during then, including maintaining the proper speed, which in my opinion is 40 kilometers per hour too fast. But I think I’m giving myself too much stress about this. Even my tutor keeps telling me to have a little more self-confidence and stop being afraid of the car! I don’t know who it was who opined me to be confident in Form Five (the teacher told the whole class to write compliments about each other and then typed them out so we couldn’t analyze handwriting) but if they could see me now, their opinion would change at once to “scared as a long-tailed cat in a roomful of rocking-chairs”, if they had the literary ability.
Driving is a scary business, and if possible I never want to do it again! But what’re the odds of that?
I’ve tried my hand at PhotoShopping an anthromorphised picture, but I’m not putting it up here until Kelvin and Herr Robson assure me it’s detail-perfect. They’re the only people I can think of, who have the time and the detail-consciousness necessary. And besides, Kelvin’s the one who introduced me to anthro art, so I might as well get the local expert’s opinion. All I’m telling you now is that I got the idea for the pose from a gaming magazine I saw in my grandfather’s place in So Hour. (It belonged to my cousin, who is an anime fan.)
Just one note: yesterday, it rained for nearly nine hours. I loved it—having real rain come down on one is a rare enough sensation, especially when one just came back from the Land below the Haze where the rain that falls is unerringly acid. By now it’s probably radioactive as well, but I’m taking no chances. But I digress. My dogs didn’t love it at all, and howled for what seemed like hours until I let them out from their enclosure, upon which they went for shelter in the porch.
They were obviously grateful to me. They’ve always been very vocal in their affection for my family, and not just vocal: their idea of loving play is jumping up and down on the loved one, pawing him/her, and lightly biting his/her limbs. Well, when I let them out, they didn’t bother to bark and simply enveloped me in drool and paws. This is where I admit that I have always had a kind of fear of sharp things, and having three sets of sharp jaws (I know they’re sharp from the damage they do to my slippers and the rats around!) lunging at me is not my idea of soothing. To cut a long story short, I put myself behind the safety of the grille door and let them lick whatever they could reach. I’m not at all opposed to the idea of being licked. I am opposed to the idea of being licked on my face and chest! So the dogs ended up giving my feet a bath and massage. (They seemed to enjoy the taste of my toes especially, as they kept coming back for more.)
If I were them, I’d have run for the porch too: there’s no shelter in their enclosure except a tiny dog house, and even that smells like them. (That’s a nice way of saying it stinks to high stratosphere.) Now, after a whole afternoon of them romping around on my porch, it smells like them too.
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