Would you like some camel pee?

From Viv Liu

28 Nov 1995

Suppose your mother doesn't want you to marry someone out of your own race, what would she tell you? Some yucky story about how scary it is to marry sb. of another race, right? That's exactly what my mother dug out of a newspaper, unfortunately, I laughed pretty hard at the story, and dismissed it since I wouldn't believe myself to be as stupid as this woman I am about to tell you about:

There is a young woman in China who craved to get out of China, more accurately, desired someone white. One day she was wondering around in a huge shopping center, (perhaps looking for the minority of white people in China). All of a sudden, her eyes were fixed on this tall, handsome, beardy white guy who appeared very mature and honest. Of course, being not bad looking herself, as soon as she approached the guy, they hooked up quickly within a week. A month later, she announced to her family proudly that she is getting married, moreover, she told her mother mysteriously that her fiancee is going to take her to the Middle East. Upon seeing her daughter's excitement, the mother assumed that it is the destination of her daughter's honeymoon.

There went our young woman. She and her husband landed in the Middle East two months after they met. On the way to her new home, she had been imagining how she would spend her time arranging flowers with her handsome prince, how they would frolic inside the maze like palace and how she would look in the finest jewelry...

She opened her eyes. And she saw five shriveled Arab women in dirty white veils and robes, each holding a child with tears and excretions from their noses all over their faces, screaming their throats out, while their mothers stared at this frightened young lady with evil and disgusted eyes from behind their thick veils. They stood up when their husband led his new wife into the room, and whispered something unintelligible. The husband started introducing his five wives to his sixth. "Maybe they are my maids, I might have to tell them to bathe." Although disturbing, she proceeded to see her husband's mother, who is even smaller and dirtier and who spoke to her in the funny language very fast. Apparently, her "prince" wasn't as rich as she'd thought.

The next day, our young lady is ready for wedding. She is all "dressed up" after spending a night by herself in a bare room. Oh all that complicated procedures of the wedding did not cheer her up at all. I bet she felt like she was dropped onto an alien planet. At the end of the day, comes the most important of stage of wedding. Her husband's mother solemnly walked up to our kneeling heroine and presented her with a large bowl of light yellow liquid and gestured her to drink it up in one gulp. She, took the bowl and smelled it, (I will leave it to you how it smells). She managed some smile and asked her husband standing beside her what it was. "Oh, it will bring you good luck and lots of healthy babies. It is camel pee." I don't know much about what happened to our heroine after hearing the words "camel pee". Throwing up, crying, screaming, storming out of the wedding... a lot of things happened.

I only remember that the next day, she contacted the Chinese consulate and cried to them about what happened and that she wanted to go back to her mother. I think it was two weeks later that she did return to China. She had a nice vacation in the Middle East, I guess.