Our Friend Max

Abstract

Our friend Max is in love again at the age of 54 and this time I tell my husband that we should waste no time alerting him to the plain fact that he is heading for disaster. The current object of his affection is a Chinese woman he met over the Internet who couldn't speak a word of English but used some sort of clumsy computerized transla tion program to convey that she was stuck in a lonely God-forsaken Communist pit-stop of a town and would love to meet an American man who would marry and bring quickly to democracy. Also that she was pretty (especially skinny) and enjoyed very much both giving and receiving sexual pleasure. This was more than enough for our chivalrous friend Max. Although he soon discovered she'd employed some old-fashioned bait-and-switch techniques in advertisement?the photographs she'd attached happened to have been taken about twenty-five years ago, and she was actually 44 years old and had a 22 year old son from a previous marriage?he was not deterred. After three months of halting electronic corre spondence Max bought a plane ticket for Shanghai then traveled inland by train to some dim and unpronounceable interior province where the woman (whose name sounded something like Shi-Shi or Gi-Gi, we were never quite sure) introduced him to entire set of relatives. They had never met an American up close before and treated him as if he were the Last Emperor, stuffing him with dim sum and promising him lifelong allegiance. Shi-Shi or Gi-Gi lived in a cement block apartment across the street from a dubious structure guarded by a barbed wire fence, which Max surmised was a repository for nuclear waste or perhaps the last remaining stores of the smallpox virus. Shi-Shi's apartment had no hot water; she had to boil a pot on an iron stove for Max's bath?manually igniting a pilot light first?and the toilet was one of those pull-the-chain-and-hope-for-the-best affairs. Nevertheless, Max and Shi-Shi had a honeymoon of sorts. Shi-Shi was as pretty and skinny as promised. Sexual pleasure was duly given and received. Max boasted that Shi-Shi was surprised by certain of his moves. He was there for her in a way that no one had been