Am-Bushed in Chinatown

It just goes to show you how full of serendipities the Bay Area is. I was on my way to get my passport out of my safe deposit box at Chinatown San Francisco Federal Savings, when my ears were assaulted by a wail of police motorcycles. When I asked one cop who was guarding an intersection what all the hoopla was about, he curtly replied, intent on his walkie talkie, "The Vice President," an ambiguous answer under our circumstances. "Bush," he clarified.

Ho-hum as a Detroit-bred New-Deal Depression-Democrat, I yawned impolitely, and threaded my way delicately through the throngs lining Grant and Jackson (what a historically oriented Michael Pritchard could make of that intersection). Duly repassported for my impending trip to Japan, I sauntered back towards the San Francisco Business Journal to turn in a story.

But the clot of oriental Republicans was reaching terminal gridlock, and besides, two Dragon dancers were being drummed down Jackson. I took out my reporter's notebook, brandished my zoom lensed Nikon--the better to simulate a credentialed journalist, and jockeyed for better shooting position.

As it happened, Mr. Bush pressed the flesh along my line, and suddenly I found my calloused Democratic hand being briefly massaged by his Yalie pinkies. Oddzooks, my mind raced to a verbal confrontation. "Are you going to kick more ass in San Francisco, today, Mr. Vice President?" I maliciously queried.

Flashing an orthodontically perfect set of Ivy League choppers at me, he demotically intoned, "All Right," you know the all-purpose, yuppieish, affirmative, with double accent, and a stringing out of the "Right." He had bitten for my cheap taunt. "Glad to see you," he added, simulating Nelson Rockefeller's old de-billionaireizing tag, "Hi Ya Fella."

So Mr. Bush hadn't learned a thing since he first "kicked ass" with a longshoreman several days before. He still fakes locker room rhetoric to garner the macho vote. How sad. How unvicepresidential. How stupid, to try to conquer that way by stooping.

My curiosity aroused, I decided to try to slink by the Secret Service without benefit of dangling computer-checked credential (after all, I was on the computer anyway from having interviewed President Carter in 1980 at the National Educational Association convention in Detroit).

I must say I look completely harmless anyway, in any case. No Hinkley me. Well, they ogled me each and every one of them, the SWAT guys with their carbines at the ready, a Naval Full Lieutenant (How the hell does he get off sea duty?), and phalanxes of Secret Service persons, enough to keep a hearing aid rehabbing center in full operation for a year.

Into the Grand Palace I waltzed, wherein my nose picked up the unmistakable scent of Dim Sum. I may be dim at sums, but I know I could never afford to eat here on my pension, so I fell by the press table and gorged myself. (I must say the median piggery of the American media operatives is not a sight to inspire credibility in their nobility and higher worldliness.)

I almost was too busy gnoshing to attend to the elegant and eloquent paeans of one Mr. John Fang, who was described by a local newsperson (properly credentialed, and not stacked bad either, come to think of it) as Mr. GOP/Chinatown.

Mr. Fang laid a sweet and sour short history of SF/Chinatown as the largest, oldest, most culturally hip Chinese center outside China. (From my recent two visits to the Mainland I'm willing to argue, "in the world"--but then I haven't been to Taiwan yet.) Mr. Fang then asserted that Chinese food in SF is the best in the world, and my mouth was too full of goodies to object, if I could have, and given the taste of it all, I wouldn't have.

Mr. Fang, however, then made the mistake of praising George Bush for speaking Mandarin to him when the Veep last deplaned at SFO. This born again China-lover flinched a foot, blushed, and in many other minor ways revealed that he is not always the macho man we have come to expect him to be! What were the Mandarin phrases that moved Mr. Fang to his praise of Mr. Bush's linguistic expertise? "Ni Hau, Ma?" Which is to say, "How are you?." Last year I spent a month in Shanghai at their Foreign Language Institute studying Mandarin and we learned that and "Thank You" (chi-chi) in our first high class lesson.

It's the Captain Kangaroo maneuver. But then maybe the Veep is a slow learner. (I have been getting aisle-rolling laughs out of my Chinese hosts when toward the end of the month of studying Mandarin I mock-seriously complained that their language was so difficult that I had only learned to master three words in the entire month.) "Which three words?" they invariably replied, cocking their slanted eyebrows at an even more puzzled angle. "Wo bu dong" ("I not understand"), at which they roll over in hilarity at my witty sally.

The Chinese, unlike their high-tech, tight-ass neighbors, the Japanese, are gregarious and fun-loving. They are always ready for a laugh. Which is what they must have been ready to do, when Vice President Bush, fatigued from an excess of oohing and aahing at the serial Chinese barbecue he had just subjected himself to, brought up the touchy matter of the state of his Mandarin. ("How long was he our Ambassador to Peking?" I asked a studious-looking credentialed national reporter. "A year and a half," was his cynical reply.) Eighteen months and "Ni-Hau-Ma?" is the best he can do? I don't know how good Geraldine Ferraro is at language study, but I hope she's more studious than her competitor.

Monolingual Americanism is, of course, one of our principal debilities, both in diplomacy and commerce, but it is embarrassing to see the disparity between Bush's "Me thinks he protesteth too much" level of fulsome praise about Chinese culture, and his evident sloth about really linguistically possessing the riches of Chinese culture. It reminds me of President Reagan's rhetoric about inaugurating a renaissance in American education while limiting his own pursuit of literature to what he can find fits on a 3 x 5 card. These dark thoughts moiled in what passes for my mind, as I wended my stuffed body over to Sacramento and Kearny, huffing and puffing from an excess of some dim sums.