Different Slants

By Robert M. Katzman © June 29, 2013

 

Since the June 15th 2013 Chicago Tribune publicity about my Skokie, Illinois back-issue magazine store, people have been coming in from all sorts of places to check me out, but not usually from Shanghai.

 This man, his tall model-like daughter and his wife came in–I have no idea how he could know about what I do–and he asked me for whatever I had from 1874, because his company in China owns another company in Milwaukee which was founded on that date. I found five things for him. In five minutes.

 His daughter, about 18, said, “How did you do that without a computer?”

I responded, “I don’t know any other way to do it.”

 While her father was examining the fragile magazines, I asked the daughter where they were from, and she said Shanghai. But then she added that her mother’s family was originally from Peking.

 I dug around a little and found her a 1920 National Geographic, completely about China and Peking. The mother, who said little the whole time they were there, looked at the magazine and was simply knocked out. I wish I had a photo of her face. That time freezing old magazine had page after page of color pictures of Peking from the mother’s grandparent’s time, a few years after the pre-World War One Boxer’s Rebellion. They all looked at it and talked to each other excitedly in their own language.

 Watching them, I told them I used to sell Mandarin and Cantonese language tapes, 25 years ago. They looked at me like I was from Mars.

 Then the father picked out some 1936 magazines for another reason, including a beautiful Fortune and a Newsweek showing the Japanese army occupying part of China. His daughter picked out seven classic American posters: Bogart, James Dean, Scarlett O’Hara, etc. The mother stood silently and watched everything. I offered her a chair, but she smiled and shook her head.

 They were gentle friendly people. Easy to talk to and very pleased to find an American interested in their history, their culture and language. I told the daughter–talking to her was not painful–to tell all the other people in Shanghai to come visit me when they come to Skokie. All 25 million. I can dream.

 So, the father bought a stack of 1874 and 1936 magazines, the 1920 Geo and the posters, we shook hands and it was cool. I said “Shey-Shey” to them, “Thank You”, and they smiled, said the same to me and went on their way.  I was thinking we should not go to war with these people. One of the oldest cultures on Earth, we ought to find some way to co-exist with them. There has to be more between us than whose navy controls the two China Seas.

 I used to sell Chinese magazines in Hyde Park in the late ’60’s at my Bob’s Newsstand when I located an out-of-the-way source. When I was first married in 1971, the elderly owners of this small Chinese restaurant in Harper’s Court where I would frequently go to eat, alone and with my girlfriend, gave us a huge glass bottle of Oolong tea as a wedding gift. I knew the Moys, too, and their children, of Far East Kitchens off Hyde Park Blvd and 53rd Street.

 In the 1950’s, one easy way to identify a neighborhood with a significant Jewish population was how many Chinese restaurants there were. Now you can add Thai, Japanese and Indian to that.  Oh, wait.  The Jews are an Asian people, too.  No?  Exactly where do you think the idiotically named “Middle East” is located?

 The name came from when tiny Britain was a world power and referenced that vast area in between Britain’s home island and Japan, the “Far East”.  They also called part of it “The Near East.”  I think this is too stupid to continue. I don’t think most people could find England on a map, anymore. Who are they to name other places on the planet?

 In a way, I’ve always been interested in, and comfortable around Chinese people. I’d like to think that they felt that way about me, too. What I do every day in my odd little store makes people happy, if I can persuade people to use their imaginations and think about what someone they care for would really want, and then travel through time in my store to find it.

 But today, well, today was remarkable for me. I felt like I understood what mattered to them, and they seemed so pleased to have someone feel that way about them. Today was something. Something to remember. 

 Shey-Shey and Shalom.