The Yellow Peril

Dona Filismina didn’t know anyone at The White House. She didn’t know anyone at Buckingham Palace either, or the Élysée, or the German Chancellery. Nevertheless, the same thing that had been keeping the leaders of the Western world awake at night was distressing her too: the return of the yellow peril. Before the vigilants of good moral shoot me, I beg your pardon, cancel me, I hasten to say that I use that expression – “the yellow peril” – I do not say inadvertently, but with the express purpose of ridiculing it or, at least, making obvious its perfect uselessness in face of new global dynamics, whatever they may be. It is for this, among other purposes, that humor serves, wich however seems today, let´s say, at serious risk of life, in face of literal interpretation and unique thought. Brazilian humorist Millôr Fernandes´s boutade that “humor is a serious business” seems to be turning against him. Therefore, I perhaps have to make a suggestion to readers: whenever you come across the expression in question, imagine it placed between quotation marks, that is, “the yellow peril”.

For those who don’t know her, Dona Filismina is an Angolan woman somewhere between fifty and sixty years old. She is the mother of three children: two strapping sons, aged fifteen and seventeen, each dedicated to petty urban crime, like stealing cellphones, gold chains (fake and real), and wallets, and a nineteen year-old daughter who has yet to marry for the simple reason that, so far in life, she's been too busy helping to run the precarious family business of selling cans of beer and soda, which has constituted their livelihood ever since the wonders of capitalism reached Angola in the late 1990s, not that the wonders ever reached them, though they live in hope that one day, for better or worse, they might. After all, there were a number of wide boys who used to live in the same neighbourhood as them but who, from one day to the next, ceased to be poor and transformed themselves, though nobody knew quite how. Dona Filismina and everyone else who remained in the neighbourhood – people who'd spent their entire lives there, those who hadn't transformed themselves – spread vile, secret rumours about this radical transformation, though none of it would stand up in a court of law. Literature, therefore, would do well not to repeat such slander, for the good of the stability of the nation.

By the same token, the author is not going to waste anyone's time by describing in any great detail the transformation of Dona Filisima's – somewhat unusual, as you will already have intuited – former neighbours. In truth, the only way to do so would be by resorting to cliché, which I know some readers deplore. In any case, I'm told (and who am I to doubt it?) that readers are part of the writing process too, so please feel free to define this transformation in whatever way your imagination sees fit, according to your own criteria and, ultimately, your own bad faith. All I'll say is that Dona Filismina did not like these wide boys. That label, by the way, is mine. She used much more cutting epithets, terms which I am not going to list in their entirety here because we haven't got all day. Again, and without wishing to overuse the ploy, I'll leave it to you, my dear readers, to make a complete list of all the expletives Dona Filismina would have used, not only in her two languages of Kimbundu and Portuguese, but in whatever languages you, my dear readers, are fluent in yourselves.

This tendency of hers to launch into a bout of expletives typically occurred whenever she saw one of her old neighbours on the television looking completely transformed. As soon as she saw their podgy figures, their greased-back hair, their fashionable sunglasses, their grinning mouths, spread so wide they appeared to be attached by clothes pegs at each ear, their enormous abdominal circumferences, and wearing matching handkerchiefs and ties, (I said I wouldn't resort to cliches, but cheap shots are hard to resist sometimes), Dona Filismina would let fly with her catalogue of Kimbundu and Portuguese insults, and with such vehemence that it often seemed like she might faint. Indeed, the only reason she did not was to preserve the credibility of this my literary tale.

Thankfully, as regards her health, Dona Filisimina did not see these former neighbours very often. Even on television, they appeared less and less, no doubt, she thought – she'd had little education, but she was no fool – due to some unknown fear. Or a premonition, perhaps. Either way, Dona Filismina gave them less and less thought. Some might say this was down to Angolans being so very accustomed to suffering, dispossession and abuse, initially brought by foreigners who disembarked one day, out of the blue, on Angola's defenceless shores, and nowadays by their own people, born from the innocent native wombs of their mothers, people who were, incidentally, and rightly or wrongly, among the most favoured targets of Dona Filismina’s vicious tongue. Hence the widespread apathy not even Dona Filismina could escape, despite her having learned, from an early age, to face up to life alone and to never stand for any abuse. Just ask the fathers of her three children who she sent packing with a kick up the arse (that expression is hers) as soon as they went in search of another woman. The truth is, however, that her old neighbours no longer meant anything to her. Does this mean Angolans are being ground down by exhaustion? Dear reader, think what you will, but don’t judge Dona Filismina too harshly. It could just be that she gave increasingly less of a shit about her old neighbours as they became big fucking shots, but, unlike certain (ex-)revolutionary intellectuals, this didn't mean she'd become accustomed to putting up with crap of any kind.

(A short pause: yes, I realise that the previous sentence represents, without any shadow of a doubt, a clear case of excessive swearing, and this is deeply regrettable, but before the new moralists – who have, in recent years, started circling in on all sides, like angelic, irrevocable cazumbis, if not to say outright fascists – accuse me of some extraordinary crime such as, for example, “the use of intemperate language”, I hasten to add that these expresssions are merely examples of the kind of foul language that so frequently escaped Dona Filismina’s mouth, expressions I cannot, therefore, in good faith, simply gloss over. Let us, then, continue.)

Indeed, Dona Filismina was not accustomed to being pushed around, especially not on her home turf. To give just one example, in 1975, the year Angola gained independence, Dona Filismina was only twenty years-old but she didn't think twice about joining the liberation army, the FAPLA, to fight against the invading South African and Zairean forces. But as soon as those Boer and Congolese sons of bitches (sic) were expelled and the war went on regardless, she became increasingly uneasy, without really knowing why, until eventually she was discharged to go and look after her mother, who had no one else left in the world (a lie Dona Filismina invented in order to get out of the army). This all happened such a long time ago that whenever she had to repeat the story she gave away a somewhat compromising detail, though luckily for her no one seemed to notice. What is true, though, let me emphasise, is that without ever having heard the expression “personal space” or possessing any kind of geopolitical knowledge, she did not like to feel that her own backyard was under threat. Which explains why she'd now become so concerned about another large maka, what she insisted on calling, in her unreconstructed way, 'the yellow peril'.

Given the serious implications she is making, and the potential for any decent person to notice her racist tendencies, I would rather let Dona Filismina speak for herself:

“Where on earth have all these fucking Chinese people come from? They’re everywhere you look! It’s insane! Everywhere you go, you get greeted by another Chinese person. How on earth did they end up as our neighbours, eh? What I want to know is who gave them the authorisation to come and live here. Way back when, we had the returnees, we had the internally displaced, and we had a few tugas left over from all the confusion in 1975. Then we got the Malians, the Senegalese and the Ethiopians, but at least they adapted really quickly and became caluandas like us. But the Chinese! That’s another matter entirely!”

I don’t know if you, dear reader, are able to fully comprehend the rather chaotic thoughts of Dona Filismina. Suffice to say, it is because of people like her that a reputable (no pun intended) Portuguese teacher has accused Angolan writers of not knowing how to write. Fortunately, I am not a writer. I am unable, therefore, to translate Dona Filismina’s words. The best thing to do is let her continue:

“If you look to your left, you see a Chinese person. If you look to your right, you see two more. They’re all over the place! My son told me there are fucking billions of them! And according to Manguxi, there’s only a few millions of us. How on earth are we supposed to deal with them all? Our neighbourhoods are filling up with more and more of them. And you don’t just see them on the building sites anymore! These days, some of them have actually become zungueiros, walking the streets selling cellphone chargers, school books, Nespresso machines, spare car parts, beer, soda, ice, and even those little sachets of whisky. Who told them they could do this? Who gave them the visas? I bet it was one of those wretched old neighbours of mine, the ones who appear on television. That wouldn’t surprise me at all.”

Whether the US Secretary of State speaks like this when discussing these sorts of matters with his colleagues in the Free World, I don’t know. But I’d love to be a fly on the wall and watch their faces the day they’re told that the Chinese are selling sachets of whisky on the streets of Luanda. What I do know is that these western politicians are only interested in China’s macro investments in Africa. At the end of the last century, Africa was still thought to be the lost continent. Nowadays, however, several African countries have begun investing so heavily in infrastructure, they not only look completely different, but this has brought hope to the hearts of their people – or (let’s not kid ourselves) at least a few of them, particularly those who have benefited from all the changes.

I beg you, please don’t ask me to elaborate any further on what I’ve just said. I’m leaving all the extra interpretation and commentary to you and your wit, dear reader. One of the advantages, so they say, of controlling the narrative is that you can say or not say whatever you want, however you want, with the vain intention (or presumption, if you prefer) of being able to influence your readers, who we might also call recipients, which comes from the same root as receptacle – a fact that never ceases to disturb me.

I have no idea whether the leaders of the Free World suffer from any kind of semantic anguish, at the very least when they are with each other and no one else. But I know, without a shadow of doubt (for the soothsayers who serve them have shown this to be the case in a strangely insistent and methodical way), that they have not had a good night’s sleep ever since China began building, in Africa, certain “extravagances”, to which its poor people have not been accustomed, such as roads, bridges, ports, airports, schools, hospitals, housing and a variety of other things that are usually reserved for people of another class entirely. To further trouble the soul, there are no end of provocateurs who, every now and then, like to remind us that the West, as well as having colonized the African continent, shunting its people all over the place and exploiting its resources to the limit – as if that were not enough! – also promoted division and fratricidal war between its undeserving children. So much for the claims of the West that it wanted to help Africa rebuild!

The million-dollar question, therefore, is: how can the self-proclaimed West enter into xinguilar and simply sit back and watch while China immerses itself in Africa? In truth, Dona Filismina would probably think, if she was anything like this narrator, that the Europeans had, for a very long time, been extremely lucky. What is happening today could have happened as early as the fifteenth century if the incumbent Ming Emperor had not ordered a halt to the great Chinese navigations, which began in 1421 with the explorer and fleet admiral, Zheng He, who was not only a court eunuch (a simple literary detail that is interesting for this story, but ultimately has no bearing whatsoever on the merit or credibility of real history) but, while in service to Emperor Zhu Di, was also the first to reach the Cape of Good Hope. Bear in mind that this hypothesis – that China could have marched into Africa hundreds of years ago – is not communist propaganda because communism is already over. There will, nevertheless, be no shortage of people who will disagree profoundly with this, just as there is no end of those who blame every new outbreak of illness on China’s investments in Africa.

Dona Filismina, as well as not wanting to have anything to do with politics, and not knowing a single eunuch (at least, as far as she was aware), swore that she had never been introduced to Emperor Zhu Di or any other Ming emperor for that matter. The only muata she knew was Zedu, and she only saw him from time to time on TPA. This is why she was always asking the same question, “Where are all these fucking Chinese people coming from?”

If she knew just a little bit of contemporary history, she would not have needed to go as far back as the extraordinary discovery of the mythological passage made by the Chinese navy between Asia and Africa, which happened long before any Portuguese navigators were on the scene. In fact, one could simply blame President Nixon for the rise of the yellow peril! Although he definitely visited Beijing, but he didn’t learn how to wire-tap discretely and without getting caught, which may explain why he got found out in the Watergate affair. Dona Filismina, however, was not only unaware of these squalid matters, but, in contrast to the promises that she had made to herself, she could not rid her mind of her old neighbours. For her, the truth was as clear as water: “It must be those bastards who are importing all these Chinese to slog their guts out on our building sites! These guys control everything. Only they, and they alone, can bring all these drudgers over here, without visas, without anything at all!”

In fact, Dona Filismina felt especially head-fucked (reader, you already know that this expression could only come from her mouth) when, walking through the dusty streets of Luanda, she noticed Chinese workers opening pot-holes, erecting buildings, hanging from scaffolding, passing buckets of cement and painting walls. They were all over the place.

“If, one day, I need to paint my house,” she said, “I don’t want a single Chinese anywhere near it! With those slanty eyes of theirs, the paint would end up all smudged.”

As time went on, Dona Filismina became more aware of the new yellow peril. She also became more unpredictable. She had her own reasons. Recently, for example, one of her children had shown her a video that was circulating on the internet in which a Chinese guy was dancing kizomba like a true mangolê. When she saw this unbelievable clip, she called on all her spirits, though none of whom, to her complete horror, paid any attention. The video in question went viral. Dona Filismina didn’t know exactly what this meant, but in her flesh and bones she could feel its corrosive effects. In fact, everyone who knew her began telling her about the Chinese man who lived in Viana and danced kizomba. Every time someone else told her the story, she felt a bit more exasperated and confused, although she could never manage to explain, with any clarity, the unbearable symptoms she was experiencing. Instead, she simply let rip with a series of expletives, most of which are unpublishable here. Soon enough, mujimbo was running wild through the neighbourhood. The rumour was that Dona Filismina was losing her mind “through” the Chinese. (To the dear Portuguese teacher, who thinks, with good reason, that Angolan writers don’t know how to write, you need to know that in our version of the Lusitanian language, the adverb "through", contrary to what we have been strenuously taught, does not mean "through", but rather "because of" or "due to". I suggest, therefore, that you don’t try to correct the language of Dona Filismina’s friends and neighbours because they are not to blame for the traps laid by your former empire. They are but the latest victims, who are still getting caught in the tripwires of history.)

Fortunately, Dona Filismina was completely immune to these post-colonial discussions. Her obsession was the yellow peril. Another story that left her cacimbada (if you prefer, madam teacher, you can say "deranged") was the famous marriage proposal in which, in the list of conditions drawn up by the relatives of the bride for the relatives of the groom – and in addition to the usual demands for Congolese cloth for the entire tribe of aunts and grandmothers, suits for the father, uncles and all the older brothers, one hundred thousand kwanzas in brand new notes, twenty crates of beer, ten crates of fizzy drinks, and five bottles of wine, as well as a case of champagne for the cousin working in the head honcho’s office – it also included, slipped in, among all the other demands, an apparently naive but candid request for a team of Chinese workers to finish building Uncle Pedrito’s wall!

Yes, for the sake of literary benchmarking, I probably ought to remove the exclamation mark at the end of that last sentence in line with today’s cold, translucent, androgynous authors, who write about vague, unidentifiable realities and who invent bland characters, the ready-to-wear type, in order (apparently) to suit everyone’s tastes. But what if Dona Filismina, when learning of this ignoble fact (the request for a bunch of Chinese guys to finish the wall of Uncle Pedrito’s house), reacted furiously? What if she said, for example:

"Even bricklayers, for fuck’s sake! So, nowadays, even to put up a wall or a simple lean-to, you need to import Chinese people! Well, to hell with it! A team of Chinese to finish Uncle Pedrito’s wall! This is bullshit! And the buelo got married all the same ?!"

Personally, I don’t know what happened and, since I’m not a fan of investigative literature, I won’t be wasting my time trying to find out. Maybe this would be useful for another story – because, as we know, the problem with stories is how to start them – but I am not giving in to temptation. What I want is to get on with Dona Filismina’s story before she’s caused some serious political and diplomatic makas.

As time passed, Dona Filismina became more and more glum. Although she did not know how to interpret the strange feeling she experienced from the moment she woke up in the morning to the moment she went to sleep – "I can feel my head tingling", she’d say – the cause of this malaise was, for her, clear and unquestionable. It was the yellow peril. Because of this, every night Dona Filismina went to sleep with a desire (her words) to kill all the people she encountered who had pale skins and slitty eyes, whether Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese or simply kamussekeles. At the same time, however, she felt less and less strength to actually carry out such a plan. D. Filismina´s feelings are obviously unjustifiable and unacceptable, but if I didn´t reproduce them here, how could readers fully know that character? Also, this is just a story, but more often than not, reality is crueler than fiction.

Unfortunately for her, the leaders of the Free World didn’t know what to do either. The US President had to put up with a bunch of Republican lunatics accusing him of being "Indonesian". The French president, François Hollande, got caught leaving his mistress’s apartment at dawn (a crass and elementary mistake that a true Angolan would never make), so clearly he had no morals to speak of (“Quite literally,” added Dona Filismina maliciously). The British prime minister, lost in the London fog, didn’t know which was the best way forward for Scotland or whether the European Union was to the right or the left and, even worse, who the naked man was, who was seen climbing down a rope from one of the upper floors of Buckingham Palace on 27 February 2015. The German chancellor was increasingly Greek because of Syriza. Dona Filismina, like most of the men and women of our time, had no doubts at all. In her view, they no longer make leaders like they used to, which is why politics has become so impoverished. When she thought about it, she wanted to throw every possible insult up in the air, in every language, including those that had already disappeared or were yet to be invented.

Meanwhile, her neighbours had stopped listening whenever she started banging on about the Chinese. Some would tell her to, "Let it go, my friend, let it go.” One remarked: "At least they talk to us. At least they live right here, among us, in our neighborhoods. Don’t you remember the Russians? They didn’t talk to anyone, not even a Good Morning or a Good Afternoon! They went to the beach at odd times of day – sometimes, in the middle of the week during working hours – and they didn’t make any effort to learn even a few words of Portuguese". Faced with Dona Filismina’s insistence on swearing more and more about the yellow peril, her neighbours began to muxoxar and say things like, “The old woman’s going nuts.” Little by little, they began to keep their distance. Initially, they stopped knocking on her door to ask for some salt or jindungo. Then they started avoiding her in the street, turning around when they saw her approaching or, if necessary, not hesitating to cross the road, until, eventually, they had entirely estranged themselves from the uassaluca old woman.

It seemed that Dona Filismina was totally alone in her symbolic and quixotic battle against the yellow peril. There was, however, worse to come. One day, without any warning whatsoever, Mingota, Dona Filismina’s 19-year-old daughter, the one who helped her mother sell soda and beer outside the house, was crouching in the doorway of the kitchen, making funje, when her waters suddenly burst. Dona Filismina could not believe her eyes! “Shit! What the hell is this? You’re pregnant!” She couldn’t stop herself from screaming, despite knowing that the situation could do well do without it. Her daughter was going to give birth in the next few minutes and urgently needed her mother’s help. But Dona Filismina still found the time to insist, “Once this is over, you’re going to tell me who the son of a bitch was, do you hear me?”

Mingota responded in a tiny voice, "Mother"! Her eyes and face were full of so much pain, it was clear this was a cry for help. So, Dona Filismina swallowed her interrogation for the time being and promptly swung into action. She knew that there was no time to try and find a candongueiro to take them to Mingota hospital. She also knew that she could no longer count on her neighbours to help – they had all abandoned her, accusing her of being sick in the head. Luckily, however, she had done a course in traditional midwifery – a profession that could only exist in Angola, where traditions are taken seriously, so you don’t need to query me on that. Remembering the techniques she had learned, she dragged her daughter into the house, laid her down on a mat and – to this day, she still doesn’t know how she did it – managed to pull free, from the darkest depths of Mingota’s body, an extraordinary being, covered in blood and other liquids, and which immediately erupted with a cry that his grandmother considered impertinent and provocative. Having firmly cut the umbilical cord that united the baby to its mother – or, as Dona Filismina muttered under her breath, “This whore!”, because she could not forget, in spite of everything, that her daughter had, until this fateful day, hidden the pregnancy for nine months – Dona Filismina lowered her grandchild into a basin of warm water, to wash him and admire him more fully.

Mingota watched all of this, astonished and delighted, with an air of radiant happiness, as is common in all women, so they say, when they endure the complex and enigmatic experience of childbirth. But, all of a sudden, Dona Filismina leaped up, the newborn in her arms, and flew into the backyard. Holding the child above her head, her face having turned quite suddenly pale, she swung it about in all directions, while screaming, in a truly crazed voice:

“Aiué! Aiué! Fuck me! Ngana Nzambi! Shit! What did I do wrong? What did I do wrong, Ngana Nzambi? A Chinese mulatto! A Chinese mulatto! My fucking daughter gave me a chilato! A chilato, damn it! What wrong have I done? What wrong have I done?”