One Sorry Blog

Around this time last year in Buenos Aires, a Chinese mafia flare-up was leaving Chinese folks dead all over the city. The mafia was getting back at shop owners who wouldn’t pay their taxes, which could be up to a few thousand dollars per month per chino (small Chinese-run grocery store). Some members of the chino community banded together to stop the violence, and their efforts culminated in a stampede at Ezeiza International Airport in Buenos Aires in pursuit of four or five of the mafia goons.

It was a Wednesday, one of the two days of the week that flights arrive from China, and as the vigilante store owners raced into the airport, hot on the tails of the hitmen, who were apparently running for a flight out of the country, the customs doors opened and a plane’s worth of Chinese innocents was disgorged into Ezeiza. With the shopkeepers tackling the mafia, and a load of their countrymen, essentially fresh off the boat, tripping over the bodies wrestling on the floor, and dozens of Chinese people generally running amok, the Argentine airport officials were lost.

In the tone of Dennis Leary’s order to “Start arresting people” when the Met is swarming with businessmen in bowler hats in the Thomas Crown Affair, the Argentine cops started grabbing every Chinese who wasn’t carrying luggage, trying to sort them out. A quote in the Página/12 newspaper the next day said something like: “It was bedlam. They all look the same – we didn’t know what to do.” In the end, with the help of 30 shopkeepers pointing fingers at four or five guys in suits, the Argentines apprehended the thugs.

These days, there’s a commercial on television in which an Argentine guy and a Chinese guy are stuck in an elevator in Shanghai. As the Chinese security guards monitoring the elevator cameras slurp noodles, one asks if the Argentine isn’t Julio Bocca, the famous dancer, and the other says who knows, “All westerners look the same.”

Nevertheless, I was surprised the other night when, just before turning the corner onto our block, I said hello to our friendly neighborhood Bolivian fruit and veg vendors, as I always do, (Bolivians sell Buenos Aires its fruits and vegetables. Even in the chinos, there’s a Bolivian or two at the front of the store selling fruits and veg.) and rather than say hello back and wave me on my way, the mother and one of the high school-aged sons called me into the small store, as if to settle a bet.

“This is the guy,” the kid said with some authority, while the mother asked me, “Is this your girlfriend?”

There in the store was Sarah, our current houseguest, looking like a hostage held at bananapoint. Clare (Scottish) and Sarah (a Starr-King alumnus) are both white enough, I suppose, but Sarah is a tan girl the Bolivians had never seen before whereas Clare is pale or sometimes red and has been in the store every week or two for almost three months.

“No,” I said, “this is our friend. But it’s alright, they all look the same.”