Chiang’s San Telmo curio shop
is sandwiched between a traditional parrilla restaurant and a
café that are, to me, quintessentially Argentine. A portrait of
Carlos Gardel, patron saint of the tango, hangs on the wall
inside the parrilla. In the café next door, we find lonely old
men sipping espressos over the soccer game on television. I’m
not sure if this is a refuge for these men with self-imposed
solitude or are they just simply lonely old men seeking a
fleeting moment of love in a tango with a stranger with no
strings attached.
I end up having coffee with Wang, a frail little Hakka uncle who
manages the store for Chiang. They’ve been buddies since the
beginning of time. Wang is the quintessential “Gold Mountain
Man”. Like those uncles of the bygone “bachelor society”, he’s
been abandoned here by eternal time… suspended between the
culture he left behind and the one he has entered.
The rain outside has lightened up momentarily; we grabbed a cab
back. On the way, Chiang gets melancholic about identity,
loneliness, departure and loss incarnate while the rain drizzle
against the windowpane, filtering the moving streetlights that
bathe his face. As I approach the end of this journey, I’m
getting closer to making peace with my own identity issues… but
all this rain and problematic identity is still depressing the
hell outta me.
As we were setting up an interview with Chiang’s daughter Jiayin,
I snuck a peep at Chiang’s living quarters. It was a sad
reminder of the bygone days of bachelor societies… full of musty
old furniture, unkempt piles of old newspapers, that pungent
smell of Chinese herbal medicine that conjures up images of sick
elderly Chinamen holding on to their last breath of life. The
last time I visited this scene was thirty-seven years ago when
my Great Grandfather took me to visit some of his less fortunate
relic buddies living out their final days without family at the
Dat Koon Benevolent Society. As a ten-year old, it frightened me
then and it still frightens me now.
Tonight Chiang treats us to another fine Argentine tradition,
“beeferama” at a local parrilla. But it’s good to see Chiang
finally warm up to our crew. After six days of massaging, he’s
finally making jokes and having fun with us. We walk off the
heart-attack meal by strolling down to Bar Sur with Chiang.
Wong Kar-Wai had staged “Happy Together at Bar Sur”. We pay homage to him
tonight with Chiang, an “old man suspended in his own
melancholic tango”, cigarette smoke caressing his weathered
face, gazing into the distant, holding on to his stoic ideals,
abandoned by the passage of time, exiled without a homeland to
return to. Cheuk tells me to pull wide so I become a human-dolly
and back-step my way across the cobbled-stone street.
It was a perfect closing shot. As Chiang’s taxi disappeared into
the misty night down the glistening cobblestone streets, I’m
once again overcome with that familiar but inexplainable
melancholic sadness of leaving another uncle behind… uncles that
I’ve only spent a few days with… but those few days felt like a
precious lifetime.
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