Play Stupid Games

The surprising dangers of cultural appropriation

“Hand Series: Poker”, Rachel P Smith

In my defence, I never intended my nephew to become an international drug baron. It was an innocent mistake, and I have apologised on more than one occasion. Accidents happen, and I think it is high time that my sister put the whole thing behind us.

Even before the unfortunate mishap at the child’s first birthday, there was always a little friction in our relationship. I prefer to attribute this to the laws of physics, rather than to any defect of character on her part. Whenever two objects rub together, a certain amount of heat is generated. I can only assume that nine months jiggling around together in our mother’s womb left her a little warm under the collar where I am concerned. I like to make the best of people, so this is what I choose to believe. Although, I suspect, her volatile female hormones may also play a part.

Mercurial as she may be, I will say one thing for my sister – she has impeccable taste in men. She can look through superficial details, like character and values, and see the real man beneath. Her chosen husband really is a prince among men. As rich as Croesus and as docile as an anaesthetised labrador, he comes from a Cypriot family with a lot of ships. His real name is hard to pronounce after a few single-malts, so I like to call him Dyson, because he really is a cyclonic sucker.

Dyson and I became firm friends the moment we met. Early in our relationship he was kind enough to help me out with some liquidity problems I was having. We agreed that it would be better if neither of us mentioned the loan to my sister. As a man of honour, I insisted on paying him back at the first opportunity. As my only alternative source of funds was my sister, I borrowed the sum from her, adding a little extra for ongoing expenses, and making the same promise of mutual secrecy. It was an excellent arrangement for all concerned. They both got paid on time, and I was able to cycle the debt four or five times, and more than quadruple the principal. Sadly, the elegant scheme was ruined by careless talk on Dyson’s part. My sister was furious with us both. For a time, it looked like their upcoming wedding would be called off. Fortunately, good sense and better natures prevailed, and Dyson agreed to cut out the middleman and pay my sister back directly. Happy to see harmony restored, I had the grace not to complain about the loss of my credit line.

I mention all of this, not to cast my sister in an unfavourable light, but to illustrate the pains to which I will go to maintain harmony within the family. Like many victims of bullying, I have suffered in silence, and I hope my story will inspire others to live their own truths.

The drug baron thing? I do apologise. Pour me another drop of that brandy and I will start at the beginning.

My nephew’s fate was sealed on his mother’s sixteenth birthday. It was my birthday too, but such was the trauma of that day, my wounded subconscious has suppressed many of the details. I only know that it should have been a happy day. Our parents had recently separated, so we were swimming in cash as we auctioned our affections to the highest bidder. Better still, my grandparents were visiting, so the ancestral bank was well and truly open. The only cloud on the horizon was that my sister was going through a political phase. Not satisfied with the amount of conflict at home, she had decided to pick a fight with the unsuspecting Taliban.

I should say at this point, that, personally, I have never had a quarrel with the Taliban. For me, they are handsome, free-spirited chaps with an innovative take on headwear. Sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn’t, but they are willing to take sartorial risks and that is how we move forward as a species.

No. I’m sorry – you’re quite wrong. The Taliban are highly relevant to my nephew’s career. They are one of his best suppliers. But – if you insist – give me a top-up and I’ll get back to our sixteenth birthday.

My sister wanted to spend the auspicious day delivering a petition to the Afghan embassy, protesting against the Taliban’s treatment of zoo animals and women. Poor child of a broken home that she was, nobody spoke against her foolish idea. She spent the morning getting angry and looking up big words in her thesaurus, and then Grandpa drove us all across town to present our demands to the mullahs. Alas, fate chose that moment to enter the chat, and decreed that the embassy should be closed that day for all consular services and the receipt of petitions. My sister pouted. She flushed. And she appeared to be on the narrow verge of stamping her foot. A family durbar was hastily convened and it was decided that we would respond by staging a twenty-four-hour hunger strike in the privacy of our home. My sister would chronicle the event in the school magazine. That, apparently, would show them. Grandpa and I attempted to raise a counter-protest, but representations from the patriarchy were deemed inadmissible. So, nobody could hold Grandpa responsible – or dream of blaming me – for the sequence of events that ensued.

A kindly old soul, Grandpa was heartbroken that I should have to spend my sixteenth birthday in this way. A spirit of quiet rebellion rose up in his chest. When the women weren’t looking, he beckoned me into the pantry and poured a nip of whisky into the cap of his hip-flask. ‘It will burn a little at first, my boy, but if you stick with it, scotch will become a life-long friend. Whenever things get a little too much at home, slip away and have yourself a dram. Your life will be the better for it.’

He was, of course, absolutely right – even if he was a bit limited in his list of self-prescribed medications. With frequent visits to the pantry, my birthday passed in a happy haze. By the end of the day, I had developed quite a taste for it.

Well, if you insist, I’ll have a small one, then. Your good health!

Now, before you accuse me of hiding from my problems – or my grandpa of leading me astray – you need to understand the severity of the provocation. After that, my sister went through a series of phases, embracing religion, atheism, veganism and bouldering in quick succession. None of this could be borne without intensive sedation.

Take their engagement party, for example, which they held in the Ayurvedic vegan restaurant where they had their first date. Dozens of bald white men with ginger beards kept appearing with plates of roadside weeds and charred root vegetables. To be fair, there may have only been one man with a red beard, but Grandpa and I had to hit our respective hip-flasks pretty hard to get through the forty-five-minute slide-show of my sister and Dyson mooning all over each other. The photographer – a friend of my sister, apparently – had a very loose grasp on the line between sensuality and sex-crime. None of the guests will ever look at a roasted parsnip in the same way. It was as though they were deliberately driving us to drink.

But the engagement was nothing compared to the wedding. It wasn’t so much my sister’s tantrums, or the monstrous arrogance of expecting people who don’t own ships to fly to Bali for a week. The problem was that she had entered what I call her cultural appropriation phase. She wanted a Buddhist ceremony, which was a bit capricious given her complete ignorance of that religion (she had flirted with becoming an Anglican – or was it an Armenian? – I forget). The problem was, she didn’t like the abbot that the hotel had lined up. He was too old and ugly. She wanted photogenic little monks, and she wanted them to serve champagne and canapés after the ceremony. And while she was at it, she wanted to exchange her vows under an arbour of white roses, with an elephant in attendance. The wedding planner burst into tears, and the hotel manager took immediate compassionate leave. Poor Dyson just smiled and sold another Cape-size oil tanker.  

The evening before the wedding, the guests assembled for a quiet dinner, complete with fireworks, a string quartet, and a local Barry Manilow tribute act. Everything was going well until my sister noticed that the sun was setting in the wrong direction.

‘It’s setting over the island,’ she told the hotel’s duty manager, her right eye twitching menacingly. ‘It’s supposed to be setting over the sea. I ordered a sunset wedding on the beach.’

The duty manager did his best to explain that Nusa Dua was on the west side of the island. He would see what he could do, but it was unlikely that the sun would be prepared to set in the opposite direction. Dyson reached for his wallet, but there was nothing to be done. Crisis talks were held. The wedding would have to be shifted to the morning. We would all need to get up at five a.m. to ensure the ceremony was appropriately cinematic.

Grandpa and I had a little conflab of our own. We agreed that five a.m. was more of a late night than an early morning, and since there was no way we could get through the ceremony without liquid fortification, we ordered a car and headed off to the bright lights of Kuta. It might be best to cast a veil over the events of that evening. Suffice it to say, Grandpa, who was by now confined to a wheelchair, made quite an impact on the dance floors of Jalan Legian. We diligently kept an eye on our watches, and we would have been in good time for the wedding ceremony had we not gallantly escorted some Dutch backpackers back to their hotel. We might have just slipped in the back of the ceremony but my sister wanted Grandpa to give her away. By the time we made it to the hotel, the sun was a little higher in the sky than I could reasonably have anticipated. When we joined the festivities there was a perceptible chill in the air. The under-twelve soccer team, who were standing in for the recalcitrant monks, had eaten all the canapés and they stood around yawning and scratching their freshly-shaved heads. The mahout was fighting to stop his elephant eating the roses over the arbour, and my mother was arguing with some German hotel guests who were trying to reserve sunbeds by the pool. To my eyes, Grandpa looked appropriately festive in a feather boa and some strings of beads he had picked up in Kuta, but my sister appeared to be underwhelmed. And to be fair, his wheelchair did meander a bit as he escorted her to the makeshift altar. Still, all’s well that ends well. Rings were exchanged, the groom kissed the bride, and we all learned a good lesson about elephants, white roses, and explosive diarrhoea.

I certainly will get to the point. You have my word as a gentleman. But I think it would be remiss of me – remiss of us all in fact – not to drink a toast to the memory of my grandpa. Little did we know at the time, but he was not long for this world. It is difficult to know the exact cause of his unexpected death – and I’m not the sort of man to make accusations – but I am pretty certain my sister was responsible.

Within weeks of the marriage, she announced that she and Dyson were pregnant. Both of them? I asked. I will say nothing about her indecent haste to procreate. That is her business (and, one assumes, Dyson’s). What killed Grandpa was the ordeal of something called a ‘gender-reveal’ party and the accompanying slideshow, documenting the development of her ‘baby body.’ Poor Grandpa sat slumped in his chair, drinking Glenfiddich through a straw. I can only thank God that he did not live to endure the birth, or the secular baptism ceremony, or, for that matter, the child’s first birthday party, which you are so keen to hear about.

With Grandpa looking down from above, I had to brave that event on my own. And what an event it was. Still firmly rooted in her cultural appropriation phase, my sister had decided that the kid would perform a Chinese grabbing test. This is a charming, time-honoured ceremony in which symbolic objects are laid out in front of the yearling child. By observing which object he grabs, the family can divine what the future holds. If he picks up a paintbrush, he will be an artist. If he chooses an abacus, he will go into accounting. And so on. My only objection – and I think it’s a fair one – is that nobody in our family is Chinese. My counter proposal – that we observe the Scottish tradition of wetting the baby’s head with whisky – did not go down well. Even so, I was determined to do the right thing by my sadly depleted family. And out of nothing but love for my sister, I decided that I would be far better company if I powdered my nose with a little Colombian sherbet.

My sacrifice was not in vain. I was attentive. I was charming. I was genuinely happy to be there. I even remembered a gift for the child – a four thousand-piece Lego Death Star that Dyson had funded. When the time came for the grabbing ceremony, I was brimming with excitement. Would he go for the racing car, or the miniature ukulele? Perhaps he would choose a stethoscope and become a doctor. I could hardly wait.

Just as the kid started to crawl forward, somebody dropped a stack of plates in the kitchen. Excited as I was, it was hardly my fault that I pulled my hands out of my pockets rather quickly, and inadvertently dropped a tiny Ziplock bag on the rug. I assume it was me, but it could have been anyone. Anyway, by the time we all turned our attention back to the child, he was clutching a gram of cocaine in his chubby little fist.

So! There you have it, gentlemen. Or should I say, caballeros? That is how my nephew became El Cocodrilo. I can see you are surprised. I’m still a little surprised myself, to be honest. Now, I’m afraid I’ve come out tonight without my wallet, but if you just send the bill up to the big hacienda on the top of the hill there, my nephew will be delighted to pay it in the morning. I must be off. Buenas noches to you all! 

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Julian Lyden is a Hong Kong-based writer with an interest in folklore, murder and the unseen forces which shape our lives. Having lived in seven different countries and worked in everything from aviation to agriculture, he is convinced that there is no better place than Hong Kong, and no more rewarding experience than writing about it.