the world has turned and left me here

three happiness

The next morning we wake up and, as our last little undertaking, Yun & I go to Chinatown. Yun is from southern China where families go out on the weekends for something called Dim Sum (literally "Small Servings"), which kind of reminds me of Chinese sushi. We park & enter the large dining room at the Three Happiness restaurant.

It's a very lively atmosphere, and straightaway Yun starts ordering Dim Sum off the carts that roll past. The servers lift the lid of each metal tray on the cart; if you see anything that strikes your fancy you take it, and they mark your meal card. We try all kinds of stuff. Some of it, I think, is really quite good, but Yun just scowls and keeps saying she's had much better. Her final verdict rests: it was bad Dim Sum.

Then we walk around Chinatown for a while, starting at this sign. Probably the first and last time I will ever see Chinese characters inscribed on an American flag. (Or? Who knows?) We go into quite a few shops, looking over porcelain figures, statues of Buddha, giant wooden dragons. Yun laughs at the bad English translations everywhere.

Before we leave we stop at the Sun Yat-Sen museum. It's just a smelly old room with no real artifacts, just a bunch of newspaper clippings, presided over by an old Chinese man who will talk on and on, pointing at things with his stick, if you let him. We produce the 8 and a half hour drive back as a means of escape--I wouldn't go there without some pressing excuse for leaving if I were you.