fuenf neun scaling the alps

Today marked the final coffee meeting of one of the expat wives, a friendly fiery-haired Swedish lady who returns to Europe tomorrow. As is the case with most farewell coffees, she got to hold court over much of the conversation, reminiscing over good times and bad, and waxing on over all the things she’s missed in her time in China and all the things she will miss upon her return to “civilization.” Of course, as these things are wont to do, the conversation frequently went off in some random directions as topics remind people of other topics and whatnot.

At one point, the discussion had veered toward the topic of dubbing versus subtitles. In much of Continental Europe, movies are generally dubbed into the native language of the country. I frequently give Christian a hard time about this when he makes comments like, “Wow! That’s not what that actor sounds like in German,” though it’s now one of my secret wishes to moonlight as perhaps the English voice of Audrey Tautou if dubbing ever catches on in the English world. Anyway, everyone was pretty much in agreement that they thought having English movies subtitled
rather than dubbed would make learning the language easier, and the Swedish lady made some comment about how she thought subtitles were more common in the countries of Northern Europe compared to middle and southern Europe, when some loud-mouthed man, who had obviously been listening into the conversation, piped up that Finland had the number 1 English educational system and that the Swedes were all conservative racist bastards and that he knew because he had lived in Sweden for two years; not visited, lived.

Before we all realized we should just ignore the guy, someone asked, “Well, where did you live in Sweden?”

His answer: “With my girlfriends.”

One of the Australians whispered what pretty much everyone was thinking at that moment, “Obviously there was a messy break up over there then,” which the guy apparently overheard and sent him off on another tirade, making it even more obvious that, yes, he had been rejected pretty badly (though he insisted to the contrary).

It was quite a shock to the system as it occurred to me that it’s been a really long time since I’ve been in the presence of a true a$$hole. Sure, I regularly meet jerks (although even those have been more rare of late), egoistical maniacs, and racists, but it’s just been forever since I’ve witnessed a loud-mouthed jacka$$ in true form. Part of me felt sorry for the guy. He kept trying to toss out Swedish swear words for his brief tenure in the country, but kept slipping into Mandarin, suggesting this was the first time he’s gotten to use any language other than Chinese in a while (for the record, Mr. Loudmouth was American, stereotypically enough). If I were to hazard a guess, I’d say he works at one of Dalian’s shipyards and this was probably the one free day he’s gotten off in weeks if not months. As such, he was probably desperate for some interaction that didn’t involve screaming obscenities at Chinese coworkers. Shipyard work must be really difficult emotionally. Most of the dockworkers I’ve met around town have come off rather desperate if not a little disturbed (though the vast majority are also very nice people). The hours are long and hard with little if any time off. For all appearances, this guy had been ridden too hard and thought the world was responsible for every mistreatment in his life, which is too bad, because I suspect he’s been to some wonderfully exotic locales which I can only presently dream of.

Some people have all the luck.