Cafes in Boston's Chinatown

Don't know why I am writing about them now, probably just came to mind after yesterday's mahjong.

They are all over Chinatown, about 10 of them, and they are usually pretty full. They sell tea and pastries. None of them has a liquor license, AFAIK, but from the look of some of the customers one might think that they either have a flask of alcohol somewhere with them, or have just come from a restaurant that has a license.

There is tea and coffee. Lots of exotic pastries made of stuff that I am not sure I want to know about and I am sure I don't want to eat. Sometimes with exotic names, but in most of these places the signs are only in Chinese. Those are not what I come there for, of course. They also have various pastries made of soft moist dough, with cream or butter frosting between the layers or inside rolls. They used to have something like that in Estonia and Latvia when I was a kid. That's what I come there for. They are also amazingly cheap, just like everything else in those cafes.

Almost everyone there is Chinese, and it felt strange to be in a minority at first, but I got accustommed to it long ago. What feels even stranger is that most people are men, and senior citizens. Groups of men in their sixties and seventies, along with an occasional young boy of fifty, sit at the tables as if they spend the whole day there, and maybe they do. They play mahjong and cards and god knows what else, and talk with each other, and make indecent proposals to women.

These men are either very optimistic, or they have not heard about the sexual market value theory yet. Or maybe it's some cultural thing that I don't know about. It might be that they believe that being rejected by a woman brings good luck in a game, and go straight for the rejection. I mean, I am definitely not a god's gift to men, but what chance does a guy have with a woman who is thirty years younger, fifteen centimeters taller and has her boyfriend with her? Yet some of them try. Some just come up to tell me that I have big breasts, in Chinese augmented with gestures. When they do that they have an expression of satisfaction of having conveyed some useful information. In fact all the men who say that have such an expression, be it in Boston's Chinatown or in Joensuu's outdoor market.

The staff speaks English, at least until you try to inquire about the pastries' ingredients, and valiantly tries to explain something in English even then, although they don't know the right terms.

Sometimes I see other white people there. They are just that, random white people. Can't define what kind of non-Chinese people go to those places.