Ms. Chin, Who? (070710, Wednesday, Day 7 Port Antonio to Negril)

We're leaving Port Antonio today, alas. So it's goodbye to Angela and Lorna and Chow and my dank little downstairs room with the air-conditioning problem and the steps down to the Blue Lagoon; it's goodbye to all that.

But first, a stop in town...


to another rooftop restaurant...


to grab lunch:




And then we're pointed west to Negril--but, wait, another pit stop for...corn:





and jelly coconut:



We try to pass the time by taking out T's braids,



but we have to make a detour to Kingston to drop off t, who's not going on to Negril, but finishing out her trip with a friend.

Boys in Kingston hitching a ride by clinging to the back of pickups.

It's at a Kingston gas station that I have yet another Ms. Chin incident. Walking past a woman crouching in front of the convenience store, I smile politely, and she responds cheerily with, "hi, Ms. Chin."

Ms. Chin is not, in fact, my last name, but because it's a common surname for those descendants of nineteenth and twentieth century Chinese migrant workers in Jamaica, it's become a catch-all form of address for anyone who looks Asian.

Here, I've come to acknowledge the particular sobriquet (and "China lady," "China," and "China Girl") as reasonable and appropriate, to varying degrees. I think because I'm looking through the prism of a very different trajectory of race relations.

(Although the dude who was not so subtly taking my picture with his camera phone was met with less equanimity.)

Anyway, we spend hours lost on the tiny, neglected road that threads the cane fields of Clarendon Parish, and it's dusk when we finally make it back onto the major freeway,



and dark by the time we get anywhere near the A1. At this point, I've donned my headlamp, V's expressed anxiety and questioned my attentiveness to my role as map-reader, while I've vacillated between exhaustion (trying to keep Speedy amused) and my own giddy sense of being lost.

When we finally reach Banana Shout, the ladies are all a little horrified by the quarters: two single beds on the first level, two doubles upstairs, and a horrible lack of air conditioning. In the shadows of the night, it's looking like a garish cabin in the woods, but we're too tired to do anything more than make a few bourgeois remarks.

I crawl onto the thin mattress, curl into a ball, abandoning any precautions against bug bites, let the mosquitoes feast, and sleep the sleep of the righteous.