你能活多久?

Our secretary had been absent for days because her father passed away and she is busy for their funeral and busy doing a lot of these rituals as if it were going to do their dead good in the afterlife aside from dignity, so I had been doing most of her work, one of which is receiving people.

Today I had rounds of my own paperwork while I sat at her seat when these two ladies showed up. I could tell from the way they looked that they were going to sell something and I could feel they were ready to persuade me even before they started talking, it was too obvious. They introduced themselves as whoever they were because I forgot and they asked for the management, I told them to talk to me and I said “shoot”, something that I wasn’t used to saying but I did out of panic anyway, they first asked if I were chinese and I said I am almost and they asked if I were conversant in mandarin. I was beginning to wonder if this were another offer for me to teach mandarin so I told them I dont know mandarin to give them second thoughts about continuing whatever campaign they had, but anyway still they said they were there to promote their chinese magazine and they handed me one and if I wanted to subscribe. The magazine was from last year and it had a baby’s head on the cover and on the bottom quoth “你能活多久?” and if Im not wrong it means “til how long can you live?” but I gave it back to them and said I couldn’t understand it, now I reckon they must be selling life expectancy pills or something in public because maybe they felt that death scared the hell out of everybody. The other lady said the magazine was free anyway and they had english copies if I wanted one and I replied in a fit of riddance that I’ll just take the chinese version, it will be just fine and there would still be pictures to see anyway.

Seeing that I finally took their magazine as a bait, the other lady pulled out an envelope and asked if I had anything to donate for their cause. For crying out loud, goddam gypsies were just asking for money all along and I’ll bet that they don’t even know anything inside these gook magazines they're carrying around in the first place, they just want to get away with your money.

I told them I didn’t have any money, I didn’t really, I only had coffee and garlic bread for a snack that afternoon, and even if I did have some I could have gone eating something better than give it to them, they left me the magazine anyway.