Story and Digital Mischief by Warrigal Mirriyuula

I went shopping with Sche the other day, what she calls an Entebbe Raid, and to be honest, shopping with Sche is rather like a well-executed military operation.

It occurred to me as I pushed the trolley while Sche took short forays into the various aisles, that supermarket shopping is a highly regulated act of human co-operation that transpires according to a very sophisticated set of social rules.

But I don’t want to talk about that, interesting as it is.

What I want to talk about was something that gave me serious pause for thought. But that didn’t happen until we were in the car on the way home, so here’s the set up.

While we’d been in Coles there was a point when Sche had ordered me to stand by the cart and wait for her.

Where she had ordered me stand was immediately adjacent to a checkout and one of those in your face magazine displays shouting at you about some starlet’s pain or the more prurient details of some serial football fool’s two-timing Barrier Reef holiday with the best friend’s wife. You know the sort of thing.

While I was waiting, taking in the inanity of the magazine rack and enjoying an insufferable sense of superiority, only for a few moments I promise, a couple came up and she enquired as to whether or not I constituted a line. (Those rules again)

I told them “No”, and that I wasn’t quite sure how an individual could constitute a line. They apparently didn’t want to get into a discussion of geometry, but he cracked a smile. I misinterpreted it as friendly and thought, “Here goes.”

“Yes, I’ve been instructed by my wife to wait here and guard the cart. I feel like an old red cattle dog, loyal and obedient.” It seemed innocuous enough as a conversation starter.

“What a good husband you are.” she says, odiously oozing condescension. I’m set back a little. Her tone wakens startled childhood memories of the Wicked Queen in Snow White. Now I feel like a ten year-old waiting for Mum.

Then turning to her husband she adds sourly, “You could learn a lesson or two here.”

I’m not sure I want to be a lesson to anybody, and frankly, now that I really look at him, he doesn’t appear like the docile instructable type. He’s big in the shoulders and thick necked. Was he a rugby player, private school boy? He’s a little flabby, more “well upholstered” than fat. Sort of, “Another bottle of Grange and then I’ll go to the gym.” but he’s not bad looking. That’s how he’s worked this, probably since he was a boy.

His face is still smooth like he’s in his thirties. Perhaps he maintains an expensive skin regime, privately I’m sure. He’s obviously much older. I’d say early fifties at least. The hands and neck give him away. Narcissistic personality disorder? His eyes are overbright and have a mechanical look to them. He’s wearing a Polo RL shirt. It’s sky blue with white strips, white collar, open, no tie. Suit pants and expensive hand made shoes.

When he looks at her he uses one of the faces he looks at her with. It’s been crafted over years of dystopian marriage and contains just the right balance of contempt and lustful threat. He’s daring her to do something about either. He’s calculating, weighing the odds. Banking or insurance maybe?

He takes his wife’s barb well. It glances off him and he suggests, “You may be right, Darling.” This last dripping with passive aggression.

He’s got the moves this guy.

I look at her more closely. She’s short and compact, losing what her girlfriends may once have called a good figure. Her face is a little puffy. She drinks too much. Her make up is perfect though. Not overdone; this is only the supermarket; and applied with precision and experience. This woman knows all the tricks. You almost don’t see the real face at all.

Her hair has coarsened after years of salon heat and colouring, the part is wide and scoured clean. The hair has a sallow look. A cheap blonde mixed with yellower streaks, like fat going off. Odd, I thought, given her make up.

Maintaining the depressing theme expressed in her sepulchral blonde hair, she is dressed all in black, including Victorian jet mourning jewellery, a voluminous open shirt over black T, and leggings that stop short to show her pasty ankles and slightly bloated feet to be trapped in some S&M sandal that wraps her lower leg in thronging; the dead white of her flesh becoming an inflamed red where the leather cuts into the skin. They really are quite unattractive footwear.

None the less, she’s as into this as he is. She will not allow him to humiliate her like this, appearing the reasonable and accommodating husband, forcing her to play the shrew. Not in front of a total stranger.

She covers me with smiles that are actually quite uncomfortable, exerting a kind of corrupting, smothering pressure; otherwise they unload their carts in co-ordinated silence. She persists with the smiles and I respond awkwardly, a grimace that might be a smile. She continues until she is sure that her husband has noticed. He’s seen my grimace and it’s game over. She has restored the balance of terror by embarrassing him.

They pay by platinum card and leave. As they walk out into mall concourse I note they walk a few metres apart, looking in different directions. I’m left wondering why I don’t come shopping more often if it’s this much fun. I haven’t seen a couple like these two since the local players put on “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?”

I was thinking that their relationship is similar to the MAD concept so beloved of the RAND Corp. back in the early days of the cold war. Should either of them take the game outside the carefully set rules of their constant skirmishing it would inexorably lead to Mutually Assured Destruction; an escalating fight to the death. Doom for them both.

It was at this point that Sche rejoined me and I let the other couple slip from my consciousness. Sche and I emptied out cart onto the conveyor. Apparently I had been “a line” after all.

As Sche ensured that the right purchases went into the right bags, I maintained my perusal of the magazines.

Kate plays hockey rather well and this is unusual for a princess; Jennifer and Courtney won’t be using Botox anymore; and lastly, though there were many other screaming headlines I might mention, that young woman who gave birth to 8 children has posed topless for a magazine. I suppose it’s nothing those eight kids haven’t seen before.

We paid for our shopping and made our way to the Chinese grocer where Sche wanted to look for some prawn meat prepared a particular way. The grocer Sche goes to is a genuine Chinese grocer. Nearly exclusively Asian lines, mostly Chinese. The place is full of Asian people, again mostly Chinese, which I take to be a good sign.

Sche only wants a couple of things, so again I’m asked to stand by the checkout with the cart. And once again there’s a magazine rack and by chance I’m parked with a couple of Chinese husbands also “guarding cart” for their shopping wives.

What strikes me is how friendly the other husbands are. Not exactly chatty, I suppose that’s cultural or maybe they don’t speak English; but they’re friendly. They smile and welcome me to the cart corral with quick bows. We’re all the same here. I smile in response.

Again my eye drifts to the magazine rack. All the titles are Chinese, the script too, but they have almost exactly the same kind of “front” as the magazines at the Coles checkout. Subtle differences of graphic focus and style but otherwise topologically identical. Pretty girls and handsome boys, movie or soap stars I assume. I can’t tell if they share the pain of the western starlet, or if the smirking young man with the confronting razor cut hair has just had a naughty weekend with a mate’s wife.

And then it strikes me. I may not be able to read a word but I do recognise the style and strangely, I also recognise many of the faces, just as I did at the other stand; and their visual context and presentation style makes them almost indistinguishable from their western counterparts.

It occurred to me that my recognising some of those Chinese faces might be the first landings, the cultural beach head of the coming change as China moves to dominate the geopolitical scene in the coming century and the focus of popular culture shifts to Asia. I’m being culturally colonised. It’s like the Britpop Invasion of the 60’s all over again.

I never miss a chance to watch Asian movies and TV on SBS. I particularly like Chinese stories, particularly the grand historical tales of Empire, or the lonely swordsman bringing justice to the rural badlands, they do a fabulous ghost story or perhaps a modern urban tale of everyday life in Beijing. That must be how I know these faces, but they are none of them Chow Yun Fat or Michelle Yeoh, and I only mention them because they’re the only Chinese stars I can readily name.

It’s all great stuff and I wonder how long it may be before I might not only recognise their faces but also be able to put some detail to their individual legends, as I can with our home grown media pop-tarts. How long before there are English language versions of those Chinese magazines on display at the Coles checkout; before we all sit down to watch a Chinese soap, a gritty detective thriller set in Shanghai, mainstream culture with eastern themes on Channel 9?

Some time ago young Wordsworth and I went to see that new Karate Kid movie with the precocious Jaden Smith in the lead and Jackie Chan as his sensei. The audience we saw the flick with didn’t mind an essentially American/Japanese notion being translated to China, (that was Jackie Chan I guess), and when it was all over Wordsworth said that the thing he’d liked most about the film was seeing China; the streets and cars, the buildings and how people lived. It was an eye opener for him and he went through a brief period thereafter when his room began to resemble a Chinoiserie of popular Asian culture.

I wish I still had that sponge like quality. The ability to guzzle culture like the Solo man, all eager imperative, throat open and bugger the spill; but I’m too old for that now. My old brain just doesn’t have the plasticity his does at 11 years old.

I was thinking of young Wordsworth’s future in the car on the way home. That’s when it finally resolved in my mind.

Shopping, the typically over-privileged, unsatisfied western couple, the friendly but quietly waiting Chinese husbands, the two magazine racks and the ubiquity of pop culture. It all suggested a changing balance, things in transition, phase shift, dynamism. There was energy in it, the increasing tension before the snap to a new attractor.

The future needs young Wordsworth’s plasticity, his eagerness to embrace change and innovation. It needs his love of difference and diversity because he will grow up and grow old as a member of one of the first generations of European descendents in the last 500 years that will not have the hegemonic grip on global culture. While the strength of English as the global lingua franca is likely to continue indefinitely, there will come a time when the simple economics of pop cultural production will see Wordsworth or his kids listening to Chinese and Indian pop, watching Chinese TV and movies and reading Asian narratives. Perhaps the TV and movies will be dubbed into English, the books, comics, games and websites with an English language version, but they will be indissolubly Asian. In creative impetus, style and content they will express and reflect a completely different cultural heritage.

The future is Asian and it’s a pity I won’t get to see it flower, but Wordsworth will, and his children and their children. I wonder what it will be like.