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TRINIDADIAN NEWSPAPER WEBSITES carried the story on Wednesday and everything about it was fishy, beginning with the number of people involved. According to reports, “about 85 Chinese nationals” were “gathered on the southbound lane of the Uriah Butler Highway near Guayamare”; in the first place, how can you have “about” 85 of anything?
You can have 80-odd, 50 or so, roughly 90, under 100, fewer than 70 – but “about” 85? That extra, precise five tacked on to the nearest ten simply negates the “about”; it’s like someone saying pi is “roughly” 3.1428571 or
the name of the art film was “something like” The End of the World in Our Usual Beds on a Night Full of Rain. If we allow newspapers to count “about” 85 Chinese nationals or “about” 41 electoral constituencies, what’s next? A reference to Joseph Heller’s famous novel, Catch-Roughly-22? The 100 Years-or-So War? VH1’s Top Ten Approximately Most Embarrassing TV Moments? 24-odd-karat gold?
Again, how does anyone know the about-85 Chinese were actually Chinese nationals? Were passports checked? ID cards with Chinese character-writing produced? Or were blue denim shirts and/or shorts treated as conclusive proof of citizenship? Would eating with chopsticks have sufficed? If so, you can find many Chinese nationals aplenty at Kam Wah any given lunchtime; some of them Indian, others white, and including at least one Rastafarian I once saw flicking white rice into his mouth like a bank teller rolling silver on a Friday payday month-end.
The suspicion is that the “nationals” was a knee-jerk inclusion intended to distinguish the Chinese in the story from Chinese Creoles (meaning “locally born persons of Chinese descent”, not “hak wai”) but the term is equivocal and raises more problems than it solves, at least for the linguist or grammarian; or me; and brings to mind, too besides, another lexical dilemma: should Chinese Trinidadians be called “Trini-Chinese”, “Trini Chinees” or, following the “Afro-“ and “Indo-“ examples, “Sino-Trinidadians” – no, forget that last one: somebody would be bound to say we certainly see-no Chinee on URP sites; or something.
These about-85 probably-not-Trinidadian Chinese people were, it seems, “gathered” “on” the “southbound lane” of the highway. Surely there would have been a massive traffic jam if as many as about 85 people had gathered on the highway itself? Again, “southbound lane” wouldn’t quite get the halal rating from the language imam – aren’t there two southbound lanes? Which one were they gathered on, then? Or were they really gathered on the southbound carriageway? (Seems unlikely, given the semantic precision of one sentence: “This is what about 85 Chinese nationals say they were protesting”; note the groundwork is laid for a future editorial disclaimer: “This is what [they] say they were protesting”; is them say so, not we!)
It’s something of a relief that the “near Gyayamare” appears okay; what is really worrying, though, and what seems the most fishy of all, is what they say they were protesting, which is their not having been paid for months.
Things must be bad in Trinidad when Chinese (from China) workers, who seem to constitute the government’s entire economic stimulus plan, don’t get paid; if handling the economy was a game of all-fours, unpaid Chinese workers on the highway is the moment the bare-Jack is exposed; at the end of the lift; with queen, king and ess falling in that order immediately before; it makes no sense counting for “game” now.
Nor does it make a difference, for the purposes of stemming the haemorrhage, whether the scrunting Chinamen are employed by the state of Trinidad & Tobago or by a private firm (whether Trini or Chinee) contracted by the state; what matters is that the most visible indicator of what we have taken to be prosperity in Trinidad has simply collapsed.
Like the last piece of land connecting the arch to the mainland, leaving the stack to stand alone and cut off; or the hump of a kissing bridge, leaving two sets of stairways to assured break ass.
The handpicked, balisier tie-wearing posses who get “a invite” to the Great House nowadays will have strolled around the grounds and perhaps crossed it themselves; but anyone who went to the Hotel Normandie in St Anns while the Prime Minister’s palace was being built could have seen the whole shebang just by looking over a low wall. (The wall has since been raised substantially for security reasons – but aesthetic ones would have justified it, too.)
And all such people would have seen the meticulously landscaped grounds, complete with artificial pond, painstakingly (and expensively) created solely to allow the subsequent erection of what old people in Guyana call “a kissing bridge”; all of that done, at all of that expense, so that a deserving class of person could go up one side of the bridge, pause, perhaps, to wave at the minions, and descend, gracefully, down the other side.
If, now, there are about 85 people who are probably from China wandering around Guayamare looking for a dollar or a stray pothound, think of the hundreds, perhaps thousands, who have been employed over the past years of plenty. Think what they have achieved on our behalf.
Think of our leaders, who have led us to this place, singing songs of (self-) praise all the way. ( “Leaders”, clearly, are not restricted to prime ministers who feel incomplete without their own private jets when you have captains of industry who squander old people’s pensions on their own whims.)
Consider their certainty our leaders have had over the course they have charted for us. If you, pipsqueak or peabrain, worry that you cannot find, in our Cabinet, anyone who can parse a sentence with about 85 persons or object to a hotel with about 80 rooms, don’t despair. There are many more who can dismiss, with a peremptory wave of the hand, about 70 per cent of the population as so many sufferers sickened by their own sour grapes.
BC Pires is sucking sweet-and-salt on the stairway to Hell
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