The perfect fit

Little is more inspiring than being nominated by students to be a judge at an English movie dubbing competition... and perhaps nothing more hilarious than Ice Age 3 clips rendered in heavily accented fumbling English... unless you count the Forest Gump clips... and the Titanic ones...

That was yesterday evening, totally unplanned.

When the votes were cast and the microphones blessedly turned off the ever too formal Mr. Wu rose to the occasion and invited me to join him and the other teachers to "enjoy shrimp" with them. Although the thought of eating shrimp in Lhasa, the single most landlocked place in all the world, gave my stomach visions of food poisoning I was loathe to refuse and so I hopped in the car instead and promptly complemented Mr. Wu on his dolphin dashboard ornament... a pleasant contrast to the Mao rear view mirror decoration.

We dodged the thousands of Tibetan faithful doing laps around the city for merit on this most sacred evening of the year and entered a restaurant crammed with Chinese customers. The waitress shuffled around handing out plastic gloves and wet naps and I knew I was in for something. So, when the bowls of spicy, boiling shrimp and pig foot soup came out I wasn't even surprised. Into the bowl went cucumbers, two kinds of tofu, potato noodles, and bamboo shoots. Into our stomach the like. And out of the red splattering mess came shrimp eyeballs, oil, and the most striking compliment I have ever received in this city... and straight from the mouth of the hapless one himself...

Mr. Wu: Really, you've been so short time... but you fit perfectly here.

And I looked at my oil saturated glove and into the bowl where fatty pig feet brushed up against shrimp antennas and around the room to conspicuously Asian clientèle spitting shrimp tails out onto the floor and my mind rewound through my day past the lunch of potatoes and rice washed down with butter tea and eaten while squatting on a foot tall filthy plastic stool speaking in a conversation of mixed languages and through the class where forty five minutes was spent entirely on the pronunciation of the 'th' sound back to the morning when the cool urine scented breeze floated through my window bearing the Chinese breakfast hawkers bullhorn which woke me once again to the highest mountains in the world...

Me: Do you really think so?
Mr. Wu: I think so.

And so I praised my Father and unpinned the two year old bright badge strapped to my chest labeling me "foreigner" and fished a pig foot out of the soup with my chopsticks.

Because, despite all of my misgivings... and probably because of the Holy One's zest for using the foolish to shame the wise, I fit perfectly here.