chinatroll

“Hello, White-knee?” She speaks in a husky voice with unintentional Valley Girl overtones, and without waiting for an answer she continues, “This is Helen from Nogogo.” I manage a sort of salutary grunt while experiencing a flashback to being called “Whitey” by my sixth-grade classmates, most of whom were African-American, after they discovered that my first name is Whitney. Helen goes on to tell me that they are out of Frosted Mini-Wheats but they’ve got a bunch of Banana Nut Cheerios, or that they don’t have the Progresso Chicken Rice and Vegetable soup but they do have Tomato Basil soup, wouldn’t I like to switch to that? I get these calls just about once a week, when I order from Nogogo, Shenzhen’s answer to Amazon Fresh. Athena and I don’t use cow’s milk, and Nogogo is the easiest way to get hold of fortified soy milk, so when we’ve been eating dry cereal for a day or so, I go online and order.

I look forward to my weekly chats with Helen. Last week she called me three times, making discovery after discovery about the unavailability of various items in my order. When we order from Nogogo, I usually get chocolate cupcakes for Athena and me. They are sold as “Chocolate Muffins,” but there is nothing muffin-like about them. So  last week I ordered the chocolate muffins and after a while, Helen called. “Hello, White-knee?” She drawled, “This is Helen from Nogogo.” She told me they could only send one chocolate muffin my way, and wouldn’t I like to also try raisin muffins? Oh, sure, why not? She called back fifteen minutes later, “Hello, White-knee?” The routine started again. We negotiated about cereal for a while and she hung up. Five minutes later my phone rang again. “Hello, White-knee?” I was in near-hysterics at this point, and wanted to echo her accent and cadence back with “Hello, Hell-ahn?” but refrained. It turned out that they didn’t have any chocolate muffins, and only two raisin muffins. I said to send them on over.

Later that night, Athena and I were sitting in the apartment watching my bus-driving, photo-taking, film-making friend, Nathan, who was here visiting from Seattle, scorch some rice for dinner, when the outer metal door of my apartment rattled fiercely. I opened the door to the Nogogo delivery guy for our enthusiastic exchange of Hellos and Nihaos. He handed me the groceries, I handed him the money, and there was a flourish of Bye-byes and cheerful waving.Nathan, Athena and I set about investigating the raisin muffins. They looked like they were trying to crawl out of their wrappings, blobs of sickly yellow not-quite-muffins forming strange Kewpie-inspired swirls that reached out to us imploringly. Nathan looked disturbed, and Athena vehemently declared that she wasn’t going to eat one of those. We ate dinner with them sitting on the table out of the same compulsion that makes one stare at the snakes in the reptile house. After finishing dinner, Nathan gingerly tore off a very small piece of the “muffin” and handed it to me to try. I hesitated and then, deciding to get it over with quickly, popped it in my mouth and chewed. It tasted like a very plasticky, eggy yellow cake and contained no hint of raisins. Watching my reaction, Nathan quietly set the piece that he had torn off for himself back on the table.

Nathan left for Seattle the next day, leaving his raisin muffin untouched on the kitchen counter. I sat down with it, determined to find out if there was any reason to call it a raisin muffin. I gallantly ate through to the very bottom of the little sickly yellow cake and discovered five of the tiniest raisins I’ve ever seen. I am looking forward to the return of the chocolate not-remotely-a-muffin.