Dov and I were sitting in separate sections of an internet cafe, quickly checking email before catching the boat to the Big Buddha across the river. The Big Buddha in Leshan is touted as the largest Buddha in the world, but it’s difficult to sort out these sorts of claims. Let’s just say it was the largest seated stone Buddha within a two-mile radius of that internet cafe and leave it at that.
I could hear the Chinese man next to Dov attempting to strike up an unwelcome conversation. He asked Dov where he was from.
“America,” Dov muttered, keeping his gaze fixed on the screen.
“America, nooooo! America big! Iraq-uh small! Small!” the man cried in a strangely pinched voice.
I twisted around in my seat to get a better look. What made the scene interesting, what lent it a curious psychological subtext, was that the man harassing Dov was a midget.
Dov isn’t a huge guy himself, but, as the saying goes, he’s bigger than a Chinese dwarf. He also has a history of acting out. When I first met him, he had scuffmarks on his head and face from a drunken encounter the previous night with a group of Zimbabwean brothers. Dov couldn’t remember the specifics, but I found out later he had spent a good deal of the evening explaining to the brothers how stupid they were, until finally they snapped. Dov found the whole incident hilarious, and, I suppose, I did too, because it wasn’t my face that was scuffed up.
I was glad that Dov resisted the temptation to turn the scene in the internet cafe into a geopolitical allegory by pounding manners into his tiny antagonist. We paid and quickly made our way to the boat.
It was a very big Buddha indeed.
