Lust in Translation

On the streets around our hotel, amid the noodle joints and mom-and-pop markets, we'd seen a number of curious shops with barber poles, hazy pink lights and young women inside. Was this woman calling from one of them? Was she hoping to lure me in?

"I'm sorry," I said, "but I just don't understand what you're saying." She said something back, her breathy voice rising and falling seductively.

I cursed the Great Wall of language barriers. What to do?

I summoned my most charming, debonair voice and said, "Wo xihuan chi fan." I like to eat rice.

My phone friend giggled with delight and cooed, as though I'd just whispered a sweet nothing in her ear.

I felt as though I'd unlocked the door to some alternate Forbidden City where gibberish was an aphrodisiac and young women had nothing better to do than to giggle and coo and flirt on the phone with strange men. I liked it.

I picked up my Mandarin phrase book and rifled through it, searching for another bon mot.

"Wo yao zu yiliang zixingche," I said. I want to hire a bicycle.

My friend laughed. Then she whispered something else -- her soft voice revealing, I was almost sure, a deep and heretofore unspoken yearning.

A picture was forming in my mind of a young woman who looked not unlike Lucy Liu, flaked out on a sofa in one of those pink-lit rooms, twirling a finger in her long hair, smiling coquettishly. When she replied this time, I could swear she was telling me, "I know a great place where we could share a bowl of rice." Or maybe she was just saying, "My prices start at a very reasonable 300 yuan." Whatever. The important thing was that she seemed to be into me.

I scoured the transportation section of my phrase book for another enchanting line.

"Moban qiche jidian kai," I said. When is the last bus?