Mulligatawny = multicultural soup at my old lap pool

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My closest pool pal is Bangkok Kay. Kay is ethnic Chinese. Additionally, she is Thai royalty. In Thailand, she tells me, her title is "Little Maiden", which is the equivalent of little princess.

Kay speaks an obscure dialect of Chinese. There are, of course, quite a lot of Chinese dialects. I would have no idea about any of them, obscure or otherwise. Kay also speaks, of course, Thai (is Thai a language, I think so). And Kay's English is excellent. When she is in Mountain View, she attends English class four evenings a week. She's always working on her language acquisition. I have had a lot of fun coaching her with colloquialisms and, especially, slang.

And then we have Aida. Aida grew up in London. She speaks with a lovely British accent. But Aida was born in China. Aida, it turns out, also speaks an obscure Chinese dialect. Aida has been living in Mountain View for fourteen years and she never gets to speak her obscure Chinese, except when she visits her family back in London.

And we have Lucy, the Jew-from-Ukraine who speaks a bunch of Slavic languages and English, but not so good the English, yes?

One day, about a year ago, Lucy suggested to Kay and Aida that maybe their Chinese was the same one. It had not occurred to Kay and Aida to speak to each other in Chinese.

Lo and behold, Kay and Aida speak the same obscure Chinese dialect.

I think it is adorable that Lucy from the Ukraine is the one who figured this out. I also feel compelled to point out that I think Kay is an anti-semite. She is unfriendly, if you ask me, towards Lucy. I don't really know why Kay is unfriendly to Lucy. When I found out a few days ago that Kay and Aida learned they shared the same Chinese because of Lucy, well, I was surprised. I would think Kay would have gotten past whatever it is that has her treat Lucy with the coolness that she does.

Things at the pool are tricky. Hey, life is tricky. None of us ever spend more than a few minutes talking to one another. It's not like there are lots of opportunities for deep bonds, for lots of storytelling. I might have concluded that Kay feels cooly towards Lucy but it is also possible that Kay likes Lucy and I am missing some of Kay's cultural clues or misreading things. I don't assume that as the white American, my cultural lens is the right one.

Kay is my best friend at the pool. She and I both swim every single day and we always share a lane. If you aren't a swimmer, you probably can't appreciate, not quite, how important it can be to share a lane with someone you know.

Addendum added on January 21, 2014:  I know Kay was not particularly racist, no more than all humans, because when she hired a realtor, she hired a black woman. She asked me to accompany her the first time she met the realtor. Kay had been working with a young, inexperienced and dumb-seeming white man, the nephew of her mortgage loan officer at the bank.  Kay is rich and could pay cash for the house but her daughter was going to be the owner of the house and her daughter wanted some mortgage for the tax deduction.  Kay thought it was how business is done to use the nephew of her loan officer. And how sweet a deal did that kid have? His auntie intimidating prospective mortgage seekers into using her completely inexperienced.

The kid was so white male entitled. So privileged. He had grown up wealthy -- we know this if he grew up in Palo Alto. He was pudgey, a college drop out and lazy. He actually believed Kay was going to buy the first house she looked at with him. He thought he was going to pick up a gigantic commission for an afternoon's drive to one house. And even so, he was boorish enough to be impatient with her when she took too long, in his opinion, to look over the 1.4 million dollar house she was considering putting a bid on.  He rudely paced by the front door to signal to us to hurry up.

After meeting him, I assured Kay that with her stellar credit and considerable assets, and the fact that the bank had already guaranteed her mortgage so when she house-shopped, realtors were all eager to work with her. A guaranteed mortgage for a house shopper means not just a fast close but a guaranteed close. Nothing is going to go wrong. A realtor knows their pay day is coming. And that young lazy kid thought he was going to pick up more than $100K for one showing.

He did not know Kay. She had already looked at 200 houses, dropping one realtor after all that work because Kay felt the realtor had insulted her. The realtor had said that since Kay wanted to stay in the Mountain View area that guaranteed her residency rights at the pool in Mountain View -- it was, by far, the nicest public pool around. Residents in Los Altos got to use Mountain View parks as residents so Kay had wanted to find a house in Mountain View or Los Altos. Those suburbs are all built up, with noew empty lots. Or few lots. Kay wanted a brand new house, she did not want ghosts. She did not want to risk buying a house where someone might have died in it. Cultural differences.
This realtor had told Kay that she should buy a tear-down in Los Altos and build or else buy a decent used house and remodel it to give Kay the brand new kitchen and baths she simply had to have. Kay was deeply offended and dumped that unfortunate realtor after she had invested many hours showing Kay about 200 houses.

I immediately coaxed her into dumping the kid. I pointed out that she was an obsessive shopper, that she would have to look at tons more houses and did she want to spend a lot of time with that impatient, entitled, greedy male?  I explained to her what I meant by each of those adjectives. I thought Kay was totally hooked by using the banker's nephew. I think in Thailand such recommendations are seen an an honor code and it is harder in Thailand to blow off a banker's recommendation of a nephew. I told  her "If you have a guaranteed mortgage, this gal cannot queer your deal if you dump her nephew and you have to dump the kid."

She asked around and got recommended to another realtor and asked me to come to the first meeting. I ended up going out on all their house viewings until I moved. Man, Kay sure looked at a lot of hosues. When I saw the black realtor walk in though, since I had thought Kay had been anti-semitic, I thought Kay would reject the realtor for being black.  She didn't. The new realtor was erudite, classy, seemingly very smart and her British accent gave her a chic-ness that was very appealing.  She asked Kay to sign a contract agreeing not to work with any other realtor. I liked that.

In the end, after many more months when that realtor earned every dime of her commission because she must have spend hundreds of hours driving Kay around, Kay bought an older house in Los Altos on a rarely huge corner lot with lots of mature trees. She did a major rehab, putting in an all new kitchen, gutting and redoing both the baths and adding a beautiful 'family' room off the kitchen. It even had a two-car garage, a circle driveway and the garage also had a small guest house space.

Kay ended up doing what that first realtor had suggested, the suggestion that got the poor gal fired after investing a lot of time with Kay.

I guess everything that is meant to happen happens. I know the final realtor badly needed a sale. Her husband was a contractor and this was 2008-2009, when the economy tanked and real estate sales and rehabs plummeted even in Silicon Valley. Real estate is bang up booming down there again. I am sure Kay's new house rose in value. And she said she was going to keep the townhouse in Mountain View that she had paid cash for, buying the model home on a whim when visiting a son attending Stanford. Driving along El Camino, she saw signs for a real estate develop, swerved over several lanes of traffic, walked in and said "Sold, but you have to sell all the furniture so I can just move in." That realtor had a happy day, eh?  He had to figure out what to charge her for the furnishings, which probably belonged to a business that stages houses.

I loved going house shopping with Kay. When else am I ever going to look at dozens and dozens of homes priced at 1.2 up to 2.0 million?  It was fascinating to see what that kind of money buys. Even more fascinating to see some houses priced at what seemed like grossly inappropriately high pricing that sold. I guess it was the location. Kay and I didn't have the kind of home-shopping agenda that many people would have. She cared about the schools, but only because it affected house value. She didn't really cre about public schools. No relative of hers would ever go to a public school.

Kay gave birth to her first child in New Jersey, deliberately having her baby in America so her daughter could sponsor her for US residency and then citizenship. Kay said this was during the Viet Nam war and she was afraid that the communists in Viet Nam would take over all of Asia and she wanted an escape to America.  Maybe it was commies but I know, now, that lots of Asian women do this. I have read that there are hotels and hospitals that specifically cater to pregnant Asian women who come here a few months before the baby is due, probably with visa timing in mind, and then have their babies and go home. Presto. Magic. The baby is an American.

Kay's American daughter went to Brown. Her fluent Chinese and fluent English scored her a job at a consulting firm, an investment banking kind of joint where the daughter gets scary large bonuses. Even in 2008, her daughter got a scary large bonus.  What does she do that makes her worth a million bucks? It can't just be fluent Chinese. She is based in Hong Kong. She wanted her mom to buy a house in her name in case she ever decides to live in America but I bet she never does. Life in Hong Kong and her jetsetting lifestyle in general, is pretty awesome. Los Altos would look tame. She did it for the tax write off and to please her mom.

Kay and her ex-husband own a large chain of Home-Depot-like stores in Thailand. That's where their money comes from. Elites in Thailand. Kay is royalty in Thailand, altho very minor royalty. She swims at the same club as the royal family when she is in Bangkok.

I had a lot of fun teaching Kay some American slang. And once we had a bit of a bond, I taught her a lot of profanity.

When I lived in Bogotá, my Colombian boyfriend refused to teach me good Colombian profanity talk but his younger brother, a teenager and whip smart, couldn't resist reaching me. He didn't just teach me a few dirty words. He coaxed me on long, profane-laced sentences. He coaxed me on the nuances of the whole sentence so the intended insult would come across. Once, a few years later in Chicago, some Latinos passed me and a college pal on the street and said something insulting about her being fat. Iwas not fat then. I turned around and spit out a long, rambling and note-perfect insult. The guys were shocked. Their insult was not particularly serious. Many males feel it is their right to insult fat women. I think anyone who has not lived in a fat woman's body would be quite surprised by all the open derision a fat woman hears.  Not having yet been fat, I did not know what it was like. I was shocked when those young men insulted my friend. Obviously the guys did not expect the gringas to understand them. It was fun spitting out my note-perfect insult. I said, basically, shove a stick up your ass, you little piece of nothing, you son of a whore. It was overkill but I had been trained. The lines just came out naturally. The guys' comments had been laced with profanity and my database within my being pulled up the best profanity-laced lines I had been taught. I acted on a kind of autopilot.

And it was a lot of fun to see how shocked the young Latinos were that (1) I had understood the insult and (2) my fluency was impressive. It really was. My favorite Spanish professor said I had the best Spanish accent he had ever heard from an American and he was a Spanish prof for 35+ when he said that.  I've even had some native Spanish speakers, from countries other than Mexico or Colombia, which is where I picked up my accent, think I am a native speaker. Like maybe someone from Argentina might hear my decent accent and assume I am from another Latin country, one whose language he does not know as well as his own. Each country has it's own English.

We ugly Americans are so ignorant about the world. Few Americans realize that English is spoken in many places where we can barely understand the English. I honeymooned in Jamaica and supposedly all Jamaicans speak English as their first language but we could hardly understand anything a Jamaican said to us. A friend married a Nigerian who spoke truly fluent English but his accent was very thick, Briish-influenced, plus he used some dipthongs very differently because of his Nigerian language influences that I could not understand him. It took me a long time to realize he was fluent. It took even longer to admit that it was my prejudice that kept me from understanding him. I wasn't listening well enough. He was speaking very well, just with a thick accent. Live and learn.

I am a work in progress. I am sick and tired of being a work in progress. I am quite sure if someone loved me, if I had a life partner, I would be perfectly happy. Right now, I cannot conceive of the idea of me being happy. As I read some of my beautifully written posts from my first years in CA, when I lived in the Golden Tunnel, I see how happy I was then. And I know why I was happy. I thought someone in particular loved me. He did not. And like a big fat old baby, I am having a hard time accepting the loss.

At the pool I swim at now in Berkeley, it is hard to make friends. Lap hours are dispersed both throughout the day atnd at several pools In Mountain View, everyone had to show up at 10:30 am so you got to know everyone. Here, with folks dispersed in several pools and lots of lap hours, I rarely see the same face twice.

rambling, as I do