Let's Explore Diabetes with Owls - By David Sedaris Page 0,55

on. Those things choose you, and, once they do, nothing, it seems, can shake them. Find someone with a similar eye, and Christmas shopping is a breeze. I can always spot something for my sisters Gretchen and Amy. The three of us can walk into a crowded party and all zoom in on the person who’s missing a finger, or who has one regular-size ear and one significantly smaller one, while my sister Lisa will pick up something else entirely.

Hugh and I don’t notice the same things either. That’s how he can be with me. Everything the taxidermist saw is invisible to him: my superficiality, my juvenile fascination with the abnormal, my willingness to accept and sometimes even celebrate evil—point this out, and he’ll say, “David? My David? Oh no. He’s not like that at all.”

A person who’s that out of it deserves both an owl and chocolate, so I got off the train at Piccadilly Circus and picked him up a box. Then I caught a bus and hurried toward home, thinking about love, and death, and about that throat, so elegant in its detail, which was, no doubt, awaiting me.

#2 to Go

“I have to go to China,” I told people, this in the way I might say, “I need to insulate my crawl space,” or, “I’ve got to get these moles looked at.” That’s the way it felt, though. Like a chore. What initially put me off was the food. I’ll eat it if the alternative means starving, but I’ve never looked forward to it, not even when it seemed exotic to me. I was in my early twenties when a Chinese restaurant opened in Raleigh. It was in a new building, designed to look vaguely templish, and my mother couldn’t get enough of it. “What do you say we go Oriental!”

I think she liked that the food was beyond her range. Anyone could imitate the twice-baked potatoes at the Peddler, or turn out a veal Parmesan like the Villa Capri’s, but there was no way a non-Chinese person could make moo shu pork, regardless of his or her training. “And the egg rolls,” she’d say. “Can you imagine!”

The restaurant didn’t have a liquor license, but they allowed you to brown-bag. Thus we’d arrive with our jug of hearty burgundy. I always got my mother to order for me, but when the kung pao chicken was brought to the table I never perked up the way I did at the steak house or the Villa Capri. And it wasn’t just Raleigh’s Chinese food. I was equally disinterested in Chicago and, later, New York, cities with actual Chinatowns.

Everyone swore that the food in Beijing and Chengdu would be different from what I’d had in the United States. “It’s more real,” they said, meaning, it turned out, that I could dislike it more authentically.

I think it hurt that before landing in China, Hugh and I spent a week in Tokyo, where the food was, as always, sublime, everything so delicate and carefully presented. With meals I drank tea, which leads me to another great thing about Japan—its bathrooms. When I was younger they wouldn’t have mattered so much. Then I hit fifty and found that I had to pee all the time. In Tokyo every subway station has a free public men’s room. The floors and counters are aggressively clean, and beside each urinal is a hook for hanging your umbrella.

This was what I had grown accustomed to when we flew from Narita to Beijing Capital International, where the first thing you notice is what sounds like a milk steamer, the sort a café uses when making lattes and cappuccinos. That’s odd, you think. There’s a coffee bar on the elevator to the parking deck? What you’re hearing, that incessant guttural hiss, is the sound of one person, and then another, dredging up phlegm, seemingly from the depths of his or her soul. At first you look over, wondering, Where are you going to put that? A better question, you soon realize, is Where aren’t you going to put it?

I saw wads of phlegm glistening like freshly shucked oysters on staircases and escalators. I saw them frozen into slicks on the sidewalk and oozing down the sides of walls. It often seemed that if people weren’t spitting they were coughing without covering their mouths, or shooting wads of snot out of their noses. This was done by plugging one nostril and using the other as a blowhole. “We Chinese think