Ovary

von Marcus Krug

Ovary in itself is not a weird word. Not at all. As we all know, the ovary is a very essential part of the female reproductive system and that fact makes the word ovary an important rather than a weird one. It is, moreover, the circumstances it has been used in, which makes it a weird word to me. Or was it the circumstances that were weird in the first place?

I don’t remember his name. But this shouldn’t prevent me from telling the story, should it? Of course, he had a real name, a Chinese name, but I can’t remember it, because the events have obscured my memories. Maybe later it will come back to me, while I am reading to you. If so, I am going to let you know. But for the time being we’ll have to go without it.

There’s something that I remember about him, though. He was balding. That’s what it was. And you could clearly see that he was overly conscientious to hide it. The comb over looked so desperately elaborate, it could have been easily taken for one of those traditional Chinese ink paintings – an abandoned pavilion on top of a lonely hill, surrounded by weeping willows, mourning the bearer’s receding hairline.

He was one of my student at the time when I was giving language classes for adults in China. He was one of those students who never said a word during class but became quite inquisitive after all the others had left the room. He always allowed himself plenty of time to get his belongings back into his knapsack. This way making sure that the other students had already vacated the room so that he could ask his questions without risking to make a proper fool out of himself. But he wasn’t a fool, he was only a bit bloody-minded.

There is something else that I remember about him. And maybe it will help me to recall his name. When he was smirking, his mouth and overbite looked like an excavator’s shovel covered by too small a tarp. The shovel prongs – it seemed – were sticking out from under the tarp.

When learning a foreign language one ideally tries to study it with the assistance of a native or near native speaker. And since most of the Chinese people could not afford to go abroad and study their preferred language properly first hand, so called foreign experts were called upon to upskill the people of the People’s Republic of China in any desirable language.

However, not all of us who came to the Middle Kingdom had an inkling of how the Chinese language works, let alone the pronunciation. To be honest, only an insignificant number of foreign experts were able to speak Chinese. To help all the others, the Chinese were more than willing to find a suitable solution – names more familiar to the foreign expert’s ears and tongues were taken on. The class rooms where filled with Peters, Pauls and Marys during English lessons, while mostly Wolfgangs and Hildegards attended German classes and Chinese Carmens and Fernandos could be seen studying Spanish.

I mentioned the near native speakers because it was a common practice to sell non-native speakers for native ones. People will pay more money when they are under the impression of being taught by native English speaker, for example. I had been chosen to pretend to be Marcus from Scotland. This was my boss’ idea. He was a sleazy spiv from Hong Kong. And proud to be in the possession of a British passport, he hated his fellow Chinese brothers and sisters from the mainland. Instead he liked to fleece them by selling them fake mother tongues.

I watched a lot of Sean Connery films, back then, to get an idea of the Scottish accent but gave up soon, because what is an accent to a person who doesn’t even know how to speak the language. I don’t know what my colleague Natasha, the enigmatic beauty from Siberia, did. A pale and lanky ginger herself, she was supposed to come across as Irish. Maybe she developed a liking for Liam Neeson?

It was in one of my first classes that I gave in English when I met him. There was something disturbingly eerie about this man and I don’t know what exactly it was. I don’t think it was his frog-ish appearance – his flat head with gibbous eyes, prongs for teeth; neckless, stout, square-ish torso and thin but short-ish limbs. The longer I looked at him – at his over bitten shovel smirk, his puffed-up eyes and his artsy fartsy hairdo – the more I knew that he was going to be difficult to deal with.

I’m so sorry, but I still can’t remember his real name. And no matter how hard I try, it won’t come back. At least not in time for me to finish the story here. So let’s just assume that his name was Li, Mr Li.

Everyone had already chosen a name and most of the names were actually nice and real ones. Only one wasn’t. But Mr Li insisted on keeping it. We told him what it meant in Chinese. Even showed him pictures. But he liked the sound of it. It had a very nice ring to it, too, he said, and stubbornly refused to take on another name. That’s how the word became a weird one to me, because of these peculiar circumstances. He was so adamant about being called Mr Ovary Li.