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| Published in February 2026 |
Previous chapter: Yer Üstünden Notlar: Beyond Exile (7)
8
While I was plunging headfirst down
the waterfall of divorce — terrifying on the way down, cool on arrival — you
were perhaps spending the most beautiful summer of your life. Wang Chenxi had
previously visited nearby countries like Thailand, Malaysia, and Singapore, and
had acquired some degree of international experience. Xiao Ma had joined these
short trips too, but since he had been very young at the time he remembered
little. For this reason, he was excited, if not quite as much as his mother. He
looked around with curious eyes, comparing everything — from the cables of the
bridge their airport pickup car crossed to the width of the moving walkways before
passport control — with what he knew from home. His mother, meanwhile, was busy
accumulating. She had no notebook, but a memory as large as a whale’s, the
patience of a camel, and the cunning of a crow. She was recording, sometimes
rewinding and replaying things in her head, stacking everything she saw and
heard in meticulous detail, layer upon layer, like a prospective tenant listing
one by one the defects of the apartment she is about to rent in order to show
them to the landlord and thereby earn the right to a reduction in the rent. For
Wang Chenxi, Türkiye was not a country to be visited and left behind, forgotten
and never thought of again, a country that its photographs shared on social
media to a bombardment of likes. She could not look at Türkiye like a child or
a tourist. She needed to approach and examine the confusing contradictions that
would come before her, the cultural differences she would struggle to make
sense of because she was seeing them for the first time, the traditions that
would seem strange at first glance but would take on flesh and bone as they
were absorbed, in a more serious, more consistent, more systematic way. After
all, Türkiye could be, for her — given that it was her husband's homeland — a
country whose citizenship she might one day obtain, where extraordinary
opportunities might present themselves for her son, where even for her own
profession she might try out ways of earning more money while working less.
The first week had already passed in
a commotion and confusion that surprised you all. Your sister, brother-in-law,
and nephews had come from Eskişehir for three days. You had given Muhabbet paid
leave for a month and eight of you had been crammed together in the
three-bedroom apartment. Your mother had given you and Wang Chenxi her own
bedroom — the one she used to share with your father — since you were newly
married. She had moved into Muhabbet's room herself, and your sister and brother-in-law
had stayed in the room that used to be yours — your books were still there, and
notebooks filled with journal notes. In this arrangement, you had given the
three children the pull-out beds in the living room. As your mother put it,
this was for the best. Let them talk, let them play, let them get to know each
other, let them become friends. And so, it turned out, just as she said. From
the very first day, before you had even introduced Wang Chenxi to your sister
and brother-in-law, before you had shaken off the exhaustion of the
fifteen-hour connecting flight — the children had sat down at the Uno table
and, to the accompaniment of laughter, as though the language difference
between them didn't exist at all, had begun to enjoy the untouchable world of
childhood. You might have attributed this to innocence of childhood, to having
nothing to lose, to their having less will than a riderless horse. But what of
the friendship that sprang up at once between your sister and Wang Chenxi? The
three women had gone into the kitchen together with your mother and,
communicating in the halting English they both spoke — your mother contributing
to this convention by speaking in a loud voice and drawing pictures in the air
with her hands, but somehow getting her point across — had cooked together and
thoroughly exhausted the subject of gossip, as if they had been friends for
forty years. That left only you and your brother-in-law. You too, like people
who have no common ground and resort to artificial narratives as a last resort,
had decided to follow in the footsteps of other Turkish men of your age. Having
obtained permission from your wives, you had gone to a nearby coffeehouse, sat
down at a table by the door, lit your cigarettes, and while sipping your
ruby-colored teas from tulip-shaped glasses in one hand, waited to be called
for dinner, plunged into a futile conversation about the unchanging and forever
unchangeable problems of your homeland. Everyone was happy, and so you were
happy. That the people around you were catching happiness, filling with joy,
and spending their time productively within the order you had constructed and
arranged made you content, as though you were writing your name, surname, and
the date at the end of a long story. You hadn't written anything in your
journal on the evening of the first day, but you had not neglected to send
yourself small notes from your WeChat account with sleep-heavy eyes.
Naci: Peace is in relationships, in
tolerance, in laughing things off, in finding happiness in others' happiness —
there's no point in straining too hard. A little, but yours; a little, but
close to you.
Naci: How easily a neglected life can
be revived with the help of love. Mothers...
Naci: Children are half-humans. Not
even half. Sub-human creatures... Quasi-humans who haven't completed their
evolution... Ha ha ha (You deleted this note the following morning.)
Naci: How do you explain our carpet
culture to a Chinese person — do I understand it myself, that I should explain
it? Why does carpet exist, really? And despite having such a rich soup culture,
why don't we have wide-angled soup spoons? I made a mistake not bringing spoons
from China. If I'd brought a few samples of those short-handled, flat, shallow
ones. Should have brought three or four pairs of chopsticks too. When you stick
a fork into sarma[1]
they fall apart. Especially the white cabbage ones — soft as cotton. Easier to
eat with chopsticks.
Naci: The water here tastes
completely different. Whether it's the air, the mountains, the rocks — I don't
know. Maybe it's the taste I got used to as a child, but water is entirely
different in Türkiye. Delicious as wine. I can't get enough of it. Maybe it's
because we are in summer. I drink everything cold I can find, and then I pee
like a fountain...
You spent your second day at home and
at the enormous Maltepe coastal park nearby. Fortunately, the weather was
cloudy but rain-free. You walked the paths inside the park without reaching the
end of them. Your mother had grown twenty years younger with the arrival of her
son, didn't know the meaning of tiredness, and was proudly pointing out the
activity areas in the park. Look, over there you can see the ramps for
skateboarders, further on there are tennis courts, further still football
pitches and running tracks, they've built a pier here too, ferries run four
times a day to the Islands... Are there such beautiful parks in China? Look,
it's like a picnic area — tables, seats — not only playing football, you could organize
horse racing events on that lawn. When it cools down a little more, we'll
spread our cloth and sit. There's börek[2]
in the basket, I made sarma. Cabbage sarma — both white and dark cabbage — not
veiny like vine leaves, I won't have my son who's come from abroad chewing
stalks. For the children there'll be chocolate biscuits in the other bag. And
tea. And fruit juice. Cheese, olives, jam, molasses... Tell my daughter-in-law,
tell her we have everything here. Say there's nothing missing. Say everything's
neat and proper and lovely too. Türkiye is a magnificent country — praise your
homeland a little, let her love it. Let her love Istanbul the way she loves you. Maybe
one day you'll settle here. You'll stay with me. And you'll give me a
grandchild. One with your eyes and eyebrows and her nose and chin! Would that
be so bad, eh?...
Yes — that was your mother's only
concern. One way or another she was going to convince you to stay in Türkiye.
Though every time you went to Türkiye, it's true that in the first few weeks
you'd look warmly on the idea, couldn't help saying "I wonder?" and
asking yourself "Could it really happen?" And once the tourist spell
wore off and the realities of your homeland began to pelt you like hot ashes in
the face, you'd understand why this dream was pointless. You had written about
it many times before. Türkiye was like an old lover for you — you end up
together again by chance years later and say shall we try once more. You swear
to each other to revive the passions of your adolescence when your blood rushed
wild through your veins. Yet all this enthusiasm can last only a few weeks.
After that the reasons for your separation surface again, the truth of why you
can't make it work together becomes clear once more, all those ugly features —
the bloody pus still very much alive beneath the scabbed-over wounds, the lava
that burns everything in its path and turns it to cinder — erupts again at the
light but ticklish touch of memories. The curtains of optimism come crashing
down after that, and all at once you find yourselves searching for fig leaves
to cover the relevant parts of your naked bodies. You can't drown this in three
or four glasses of rakı![3]
A person misses things — and if they know what they miss is worthless and
meaningless, then they miss the missing itself. "My life has passed in
missing you!" you had written once about Istanbul. Alongside the lament I
detect pleasure here too. Istanbul is simply a city that is only beautiful when
missed — that's why! Like all the other pleasures that humanity has never tired
of singing the praises of throughout history, Istanbul too can only make those
who are in love with it happy. Don't ask me how I know. How would I know — from
myself of course! Who doesn't miss sitting on a bench in Baltalimanı on a cool
October morning, enjoying tea and simit, watching the flag rippling on top of
Anadolu Hisarı, clearing a head as heavy as a drum from the previous night with
the smell of seaweed!...
After your sister's family left, the
square meters per person in the house doubled, planning and setting out became
easier, and consequently time for observation and irony became more plentiful.
Your mother had sent you out into Istanbul's crowds saying "You're young,
my child. Go, show your guests the historical sites. How will she understand
our country without seeing Sultanahmet, Süleymaniye, the Grand Bazaar, Topkapı
Palace. The metro is at your feet. Get out and about — but come home to your mother's
table in the evening, make sure to come hungry. Muhabbet had taught me how to
do the supermarket shopping by phone. I'll get the ingredients, I'll take my
time in the kitchen. When I'm tired I'll rest, when I've rested I'll start
again. I'll be done by evening." Even without her saying so you would have
done it anyway. Was there any task more enjoyable, more pleasurable, more
cheerful in this world than showing Istanbul to your wife and child? Your only
concern was that the mechanisms I mentioned above would start operating and
your wife would turn into an unstoppable comparison machine. Fortunately what
you feared didn't come to pass — at least for the first three or four weeks, as
everything encountered was described with superlatives such as magnificent,
extraordinary, dazzling: the view from the courtyard of the Süleymaniye, the
Topkapı walls seen from the Karaköy pier, the breadth of Sultanahmet Mosque's
dome, the marble remains in the courtyard of Hagia Sophia, the enticing chaos
and rumble of the Grand Bazaar, the glass-smooth sculptures in the Istanbul
Archaeological Museum... All of this had stroked your pride considerably,
cleansed your soul of unnecessary anxieties, and left you face to face once
more with the reality that happiness was being lived right now. Yes — you were
happy, at peace, and grateful. For the first time in years, you were
encountering the thought that living was as easy and as fun as sledding in the
snow, and without dwelling on it much, like children accepting the gifts given
to them without questioning why, you were embracing happiness with your whole
being.
After spending the first four weeks
in Istanbul — from Sponge Bob in Şile to the beaches of Burgazada, from Pierre
Loti in Eyüp to Yoros Castle in Beykoz, you had left no place unvisited — you
decided to rent a car and tour Western and Central Anatolia. Muhabbet had
returned from her leave; your mother would not be alone. You could now travel
freely to your heart's content and say goodbye to the stuffed peppers, mantı,
spinach with yogurt, and tarhana soup your mother had cooked by the potful and
fed you continuously for five days straight. The day you left Istanbul was also
the day you began the enterprise of writing your journal in your wife's voice.
These were not the short notes hastily scribbled onto your phone as a reminder,
as you had done before — you were writing page after page in Wang Chenxi's
voice. Through her eyes, through her ears, and even on occasion through her
nose and skin. Like a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner who, from
simply taking a pulse, can diagnose a stone in the patient's kidney, fatty
liver, spots on the lungs, and a hole in the stomach — she too, after four
weeks in Türkiye, had made her diagnosis, stepped behind the counter and spread
her yellow paper on the glass, and begun to prepare the mixture of plant roots,
leaves, herbs, and dried wild animal organs that would cure all ailments of the
patient. Even I was sometimes unnerved by what I read. No — it was not the
accuracy of what you wrote in Wang Chenxi's voice that unnerved me, but the
fact that you could plunge beneath her skin as easily as diving into a warm
pool. A person shouldn't be able to do such a thing with the ease of picking up
the water-filled glass on the table and drinking it straight down. You should
have struggled, got confused, stumbled or made mistakes. But once you started
you genuinely became your wife — as stingy as her, as proud as her, as
calculating as her, as convinced as her that she was her country's
representative and carrying that puffed-up chest everywhere she went. Despite
this, in my humble opinion you were not producing particularly good work. The
success you had shown in capturing the soul of a Chinese character living in
China was nowhere to be read in what you wrote in Wang Chenxi's voice — because
into a character who was disparaging Türkiye, negating and criticizing life
there, a little Naci the teacher inevitably crept, and the teacher, with
emotions he couldn't rein in, placed an absolute embargo on this know-it-all
woman's tongue, eyes, and ears. He wouldn't let the woman speak with her own
free will, express her own troubles, shuttle between repulsion and admiration
the way a Chinese person visiting Türkiye for the first time would. Because you
couldn't leave her to her own devices — like a teacher stuffing answer into the
mouth of a lazy student called to the board — the work that emerged was less a
literary text and more an unrealistic political, sociological, and
philosophical analysis. But what worried me was not the content of the
enterprise you had embarked upon or whether you succeeded — it was that you had
the audacity for such an undertaking and were insistent on attempting it at
whatever cost.
I was becoming uneasy because I had
begun to doubt myself. Not my existence within the text — my existence outside
the text! What if, after getting your hands on what I had written, you denied
my existence altogether and tried to publish the book under your own name?
After all — I am Naci Zara, this is a novel I have written, I created a Chinese
spy in my imagination in order to look at myself from the outside, to see
myself through someone else's eyes; like a soul separating from its body and
watching from a corner of the room the body that has housed it for years with
tenderness, regret, and wisdom, I tried to observe myself — and after long
efforts I produced this text — if you were to say that? That would be quite a
logical and consistent claim. It would certainly be more convincing than the
thesis that the novel was written by a Chinese spy, because it requires fewer
assumptions. Never mind she studied in Türkiye, never mind she wrote her thesis
on Sevgi Soysal, never mind she loved Beykoz. Don't die my dear donkey, don’t
die, summer will come and the clover will grow.[4]
In place of the truth that I recreated you in words — made of flesh and bone,
passion and weakness — through my close surveillance and constant observation,
readers would believe that I am a figment of imagination skillfully constructed
in your mind. They would find a memory from your childhood related to Beykoz;
they would bring to light an essay you wrote on Sevgi Soysal and even you
yourself forgot; they would discover a relative or friend who lost her baby
when she was close to giving birth... By Occam's Razor this thesis holds, and I
disappear as though I never existed. Look — all at once such a large lump
pressed against my chest, I couldn't breathe, my hands and feet went numb, my
tongue went dead as though I'd eaten long beans fried in anise flowers. Even if
my soul cannot resist injustice, do you see how my body rebels? You would hurt
me very, very deeply if you stooped to such a cheapness. Just think — what will
become of all my labor? For nearly twelve years I have been working on this
text, turning your world over in my head far more than my own — thinking,
planning, taking notes. My head is in turmoil, my day and night have merged. I
stop and read, adjusting this and that like a young girl who is about to meet a
suitor for the first time — deleting words that grin out of place, meaning to
add two sentences in between and producing new paragraphs instead, recreating
the text afresh every day. I have started talking to myself, laughing and
crying to myself at odd places and times. I get irritated more quickly than
before, I see life like a film that's about to end — if only the film would end
so I could return to you, to reality. It's as if not the living, breathing
people, animals, and plants outside but only this story is real. I miss it, I
think of it, I live inside it. I have in a sense become a captive of what I
have written, and I hope these discomforts will pass once it's finished. This
is a brief illness — like dizziness after running ten kilometers or nausea
after walking for hours in the heat. All the suffering I have endured — for the
pleasure of finishing the text and signing my own name at the end of it. I hope
you will grant me this small beauty, will not deprive me of my rights, will not
shame me before my dreams. No — no, you wouldn't. You respect effort, honest
labor, and the sublime value of artistic creativity. The Naci I know, loved,
respected, and to whom I have become attached with an obsessive passion does
not steal from others. Even if that person is Chinese... Isn't that so? In the
end, I have seen every side of you until today — but I have never seen you lie,
cheat, or swindle. You are a 21st century dervish who, unable to harm others,
constantly harms yourself — unable to prevail over others, constantly throwing
yourself under the truck. I must believe this, lean my back on this thought,
trust you. Though I do sometimes ask myself the same question. For whom and why
am I writing this story? I cannot publish this text either under my own name or
under a pseudonym. In either case they would raid my home immediately and try
me for treason. They wouldn't even bother filing it in the state archives.
They'd delete it instantly. Therefore, the most rational thing to do will be
this: once the story is finished I'll take a single printout from the computer,
place it in a safe I'll rent at the bank, and in my will I'll say: to be
published after my death. Let them say whatever they like about me after I'm
gone — I don't care. If you're still alive by then you'll have read it. If you
die before me — all the better. Like Romeo and Juliet, like Layla and Majnun,
our love will reach infinite dimensions and be carved into humanity's eternal
memory... Ha ha ha... Dreams, never-ending dreams. The hungry hen imagines
herself in the granary... Let me leave all this now and return to the story.
Otherwise, left to myself, I'll never finish this little thing in a month of
Sundays...
Yes — first you went to Bursa.
Uludağ, the Green Tomb, Koza Han... Then Ephesus, Kuşadası, Pamukkale,
Ölüdeniz, Fethiye, Antalya, Konya, Kayseri, Sivas, Ordu, Trabzon, and finally
dropping the car off there and flying back to Istanbul. Wang Chenxi was constantly
grumbling through your pen, of course. You wrote a great deal in her voice, but
I will take only one of those passages here — the one I found most absurd. The
dialogue below is from an imaginary conversation between the two of you. To be
honest, it's a comedy scene that in my opinion you wrote in a frivolous state
of mind purely to mock yourself and your wife. The woman in the dialogue is a
freshwater intellectual who has read and thought ten times more than your wife,
and the man is ten times less well-read than you, added to the scene purely as
wallpaper or kitchen decoration — a mascot, in the most innocent description
"a bit better than a vagrant" I am including it here because it made
me laugh when I read it — it reminded me of the long and meaningless tirades in
the novels of the so-called leftist writers I encountered at university — and
because it is a scene that pretends to have no intention of lecturing while
giving the finest lecture imaginable. I am closing this subject here, not to
raise it again.
— Do you know what I compare Türkiye
to most, Naci?
— I won't be lying if I say I'm
surprised you can compare Türkiye to anything at all.
— I'm not joking, be serious for a moment.
Though actually it should be "to whom" rather than "to
what."
— All right then, to what or to whom
do you compare it? To a cherry paradise?
— No! What does that have to do with
anything?
— You've eaten a ton of cherries
since you arrived.
— They're so cheap here, what can I
do! In China I pay the price of half a kilo here for a single cherry.
— If not cherries then apricots. You
ate a lot of those too. You'll get an upset stomach.
— It has nothing to do with fruits.
I'm comparing it to a person. Or more precisely, to a certain state of a
person. Also, I already have an upset stomach. You'd have noticed if you paid a
little attention to your wife.
— To an old grandmother?
— No! Where did that come from. An
old grandmother would be China at best. Ha ha!
— To a ship with torn sails?
— I said a person, what's a sail,
what's a ship, where is your mind?
— To a poor taxi driver?
— It looks like an adult who hasn't
outgrown adolescence but has somehow gained their freedom. They make decisions
with their emotions rather than their mind, and because of this they always
lose.
— Ohhh! I thought you were going to
say something like a blind barber or a deaf news anchor. You've turned
philosopher on me.
— Listen and let me tell you, but
first order me another tea. Make it light this time. And don't fill it to the
brim. My hand burns. Leave a lip's width.
— The tea will come, don't worry. You
just tell me. An adult who hasn't outgrown adolescence. What exactly did you mean?
— An idle man who hasn't overcome the
excitements of youth but has somehow become an adult, grown accustomed to being
treated as an adult by those around him, who is constantly stumbling because he
makes decisions with his emotions rather than his mind, and continues to
stumble. He has taken the ease and cheerfulness of Westerners but left behind
the industriousness, wisdom, and discipline, and as a result has turned into a
spoiled freak of nature like the firstborn son of the family. So much freedom,
so much comfort, so much personal entitlement, it's too much for the country.
Because nobody ever says let's grit our teeth for a few decades so the next
generation can be comfortable, every generation has had the same fanfare of
"we've developed, or we're about to develop" for centuries. At the
high school where I studied in Changzhou there was neither a radiator nor a
central heating system. In winter months snow would fall outside while we sat
inside from morning to evening in our padded jackets without even taking off
our gloves. Our teachers were no different from us. What happened? Did we die?
Did we get sick? On the contrary, we grew stronger. We didn't let money flow
out, we didn't pay for natural gas, we generated our own electricity, we kept
our money in our own country, and today we are a country that exports mobile
phones, cars, and computers to every corner of the world.
— So, what are we supposed to do? Should
Turkish children freeze in schools in winter?
— Is that what I'm saying? I'm saying
grit your teeth.
— No madame, you're saying Turkish
children should also freeze in schools in winter.
— Turn the words any way you like —
you know what I mean.
— Look, my dear, as far as I know the
Turkish people have been busy gritting their teeth for the last few centuries.
Either their teeth or their belts. In fact, most of the time both at the same
time.
— In my opinion they're gritting
neither. This abundance, this ease, this indifference — we don't have even half
of this in China. With us, the richer you get the harder you work. There's no
such thing as getting spoiled, giving up on education and discipline. In this
country creativity is a cover for laziness, productivity for idleness, politics
for art.
— Until recently China was a poor
country. Don't appoint yourself as a lecturer just because you've surged ahead
in the last forty years. If your ancient culture was so valuable, why didn't
you develop earlier? Why did you wait until Deng Xiaoping? Were those before
him less Chinese?
— We were waiting for fortune to
smile on us and for the right wave to stand on. Besides, if you read a little
Chinese history, you'll see that Chinese dynasties have built the world's
richest and most advanced civilizations many times over the last three thousand
years. This is not the first time. We are simply reclaiming the first place
that Western imperialists unjustly took from us. If you Turks thought like us
too, freed yourself from the foreign elements in your country, and built
modernism on the foundations of tradition and ancient culture, you would be at
least as successful as us, but you have too many short-sighted politicians.
Everyone here plays to their own tune and dances to it. Your work is very
hard...
— What have you gone and done? You've
been in the country barely a month and a half and you've turned into Žižek on
me.
— Who's that?
— Never mind — one of those fellows
nobody can make heads or tails of. You're better than him. Have you finished?
— Not finished. Everything's
backwards in this country. For example, socialists instead of advocating
gritting teeth, equality, and brotherhood, advocate freedom. But freedom is the
god of liberals and capitalists. You can't be both free and equal. Equality is
a state of balance that must be constantly protected, and the moment you leave
people free they move in the opposite direction. That is basically they start
exploiting each other, crushing and wringing out those at the bottom, swelling
like a mosquito sucking blood in a room full of drunk people. First enforce the
laws, raise citizens who respect the laws, then slowly loosen the chains.
— Aaaand?
— And what! Democracy came to your
country too early. You weren't even
ready for the first letter of democracy when the country was split into pieces
and factions. "A bum not used to knickers won't keep it on" as your
mother says. That phrase fits Türkiye's situation perfectly. Democracy makes a
rich country richer, confuses a poor country, doesn't let it advance a single
step. Look at India, look at Indonesia, look at Egypt, look at Türkiye... I'm
not talking off the top of my head. I've read your recent history too.
Everything that happened in the name of development and progress happened
before the transition to a multi-party system in your country. After that, nothing
but chaos, quarreling, noise, two steps forward three steps back. And you
constantly blame external forces. We have a very old proverb — do you know it?
Yuàn rén zhě tú yuǎn, zé jǐ zhě xíng bàn, wú lì zhě yǐ zhì[5]. In
English...
— Leave the
proverb for now. What should we do? Tell me that. Should we go back to a
one-party system? Bring back the death penalty? Make our country a center of
cheap labor? Should we be like China?
— I'm not
saying that, it's impossible anyway.
— So, what exactly
are you proposing?
— Wake up,
come to your senses, build a solid identity and construct your own civilization
upon it. Spend as much effort protecting and enforcing the laws as you spend
making them.
— Ohhhh, that's a challenging task.
We're a candidate for the European Union, my girl. Our nose is practically
already in, so to speak, most of it's done, just a little left. Our large ass
will presumably get in too in time.
— That's a separate story. You know
they won't take you. Do you know what your situation resembles? Imagine our
Xiao Ma sitting in front of the television eating potato crisps. When he eats
crisps, his mouth makes so much noise he can't hear the television. Helplessly,
he keeps turning up the volume. After a while there's a knock at the front
door. The neighbors from next door are disturbed by the television noise. Xiao
Ma says "I can't hear it — how can you?" He picks up the packet of
crisps and, saying "Maybe the neighbor's house is better," moves in
with the neighbor. When he arrives and settles on the sofa in the living room
he realizes that only a muffled sound comes from the television. This time he
accuses the neighbors of lying, of deception, of cheating. He swears, he starts
kicking left and right, turns the house upside down. The neighbors show him the
door. Now, if Türkiye ever joins the European Union its fate will be exactly
like Xiao Ma in this fable. A person who carries their own noise everywhere
they go, it makes no difference whether they end up by a stream in a forest or
at a mountain lake. They hate themselves just as much, they cannot stop the
number of their enemies from growing.
— If instead of making analogies you
told it straight, I'd understand faster, do you realize that? And what's all
this fuss! Just because you've read two blog posts on Turkish history, do you
have to talk nonsense like a television pundit? What should we do, tell me
that. What should this country's lonely and isolated intellectuals,
politicians, teachers, doctors, lawyers do? Tell me, but tell me without
resorting to propaganda. It's just the two of us here.
— You always ask the same question
and I always give you the same answer. Get your heads together, that's all,
nothing else is really needed. If you don't use your minds in the age of
science you'll fall behind. That's it. You trust the individual too much, but
the individual is like a headless chicken. An individual whose hands and feet
aren't bound by tradition, religion, and the state first harms themselves and
then others. They're like an unexploded sea mine. China has ensured preserving
its civilization of thousands of years by keeping these sources of fear alive.
The role of religion has diminished, the role of the state has increased, but
nothing has changed. China never trusts the individual. I took you into my
bosom because you're Turkish and closer to us than to Westerners, but it turns
out you're Asian on the outside and European inside. Not much different from
our banana people[6]!
Ha ha ha...
— What are you saying! Banana man...
I'm the same man inside and out. Wait, the tea still hasn't come. Let me call
that waiter and scold him a bit. He forgot us. After all, we're coming once and
never coming back to this place.
— Why are you scolding the poor boy.
Can't you see he's buzzing around between the tables like a bee? He has work to
do. He'll come in a moment.
— No, no, you don't understand. This
is Türkiye. He saw you're Asian, he's looking down on us, not serving us. Look,
let me give him a sharp look — watch how he finds his way at once.
— Don't be silly, Naci — wait a
little, be patient.
— I will not. Don't teach me how I should behave
toward my own country's people. You don't know these things. If they find you
weak they won't serve you. You have to be persistent, show your teeth, crow
like a rooster. These people only understand that language.
— Fine, do whatever you like. If the
waiters beat you up, don't expect me to intervene!...
— What's it to you! This is my
country. I can do whatever I want. And you just twitter on! We haven't even
been in the country for two months and you've solved five hundred years of
problems.
— …
— Excuse me! Hey waiter, may I have
your attention please?
[1] A traditional Turkish dish where delicate grape or cabbage leaves are
tightly rolled around a savory filling.
[2] A kind pastry that is made of a thin flaky dough such as filo
with a variety of fillings, such as meat, cheese, spinach, or potatoes.
[3] An alcoholic beverage made of twice-distilled grape pomace and
flavored with aniseed.
[4] Turkish idiom that is used sarcastically to mock empty promises,
extreme delays, or unrealistic optimism. It implies that the person waiting
will "starve" or "metaphorically die" long before the
promised reward or solution finally arrives.
[5] One who blames others
travels far but accomplishes little; one who examines oneself walks half the
distance; one who has no strength uses wisdom.
[6] A term used in China to
describe Asians who are "yellow on the outside, white on the inside,"
i.e., culturally Westernized despite their appearance.
