Harmony parked her motorbike outside and brought up the cake… a gorgeous chocolate torte from the Japanese bakery. A few months back, I would have never known that such a place existed. Harmony had trudged me there on a cold winter’s day. We had splurged on a piece of cake and a pot of aromatic Earl Grey Tea. I had rejected the aisles of the Chinese bakeries long ago… the plastic-tasting, gook-covered pastries with boring yellow sponge. The bakeries only redeeming purchases were the plastic lotus flower that opened into fireworks on a cake… the tinny “Happy Birthday” microchip inside, a party joke as it plays on and on endlessly while people laugh and then get annoyed until someone eventually has the compassion to go find a hammer to kill it.

I was pleased with how the cake looked alongside the warm plum cobbler, the Japanese version of the Spanish meringues made with almonds and bright-colored fruit salad macerated with sherry. I had been messing around with cooking for days now. I had made the roasted Moroccan pumpkin… smooth with olive oil, cumin, toasted black pepper, and honey covered with plump pistachios. I had cooked Arabiata sauce with the last of the chorizo and fried up a pure heaven of albondigas… Spanish meatballs with pork so fresh it had “oinked”… made potato salad in honor of the Russians. I had labored over the too-fast cooking propane gas “mei qi” making the tortilla, the Spanish omelet of potatoes, eggs and olive oil… an emulsion of omelet dating back to Arab times in Spain. The rest was on the coffee table… Manchego cheese and slices of “mojama”… salt-cured Spanish tuna, all sliced thin and drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with capers… Marcona almonds and hand-cured olives in thyme and lemon peel that I had carefully packed away and brought from Spain… the thumb-sized tangerines of China… all the stuff I bought effortlessly at home, but not here.

Today, it had been like pulling blocks of salt across the frozen Siberian tundra. Yesterday, it had been worse. I had started early in the morning to prepare the last of it… found a young taxi driver from the countryside with a tedious dialect that had given me me a dull headache. I had hired him to run a lot of errands with me in the front seat telling him where to stop and wait. He had waited for me at stores with Western products… curb side stalls where experience had taught me that the best watermelons, mangoes and pineapples were sold… all in different places, of course. The backseat of the cab was filled with parcels and plastic bags of vegetables and fruit. He carried it all up for me. Who was more exhausted? When it was all stowed away in the small kitchen with the fresh fruits gleaming from the baskets on the floor, my spirits lifted. A party!

I had laid the table with the cloth I bought from the gypsies in the Spanish market. They had insisted it was crafted in Malaga and needed no ironing. Of course, it was made in China.  I needed a blast furnace to get out the permanent folds. The bargaining had been fun, though, and the wrinkles endeared me to the memory. I used the Portuguese doilies I had kept from home and mismatched candles of several colors. The white china plates painted with lotus leaves and fall-colored Chinese lanterns sat in a stack. Surprisingly, I had found them at a discount store almost two years ago now… ancient history.

My guests all tumbled in ringing my neighbor’s doorbell constantly provoking many bows and “Bu hao yisi’s” from me. As always, my aged neighbors were gracious. Effusive Elena, came with Raia. I met Elena some months back in the video store with Vadya, the artist. I had gone to his exhibition, drank a lot of force-fed vodka as I admired the paintings, went to lunch with all of them… had managed to stay barely sober as we finished the meal singing drunken Russian folk songs together.

Elena and Raia speak nary a word of English or Chinese, but speak French and German along with their native tongue… so they brought Zhen Yeping along who spoke English and Russian to translate for them. Xia Yun came next with her Chinese friend, Li Na who speaks English and Russian, too. Xia Yun speaks Chinese, English and Japanese. Her Japanese would come in handy, because Kanako and Chika, the Japanese came next. They speak Japanese, English and Chinese. Harmony, an American from California, speaks excellent Chinese. And me? Jack of all… master of none… I speak a lot of everything badly. But, a person such as I, incompetent at all, is useful. At this four-corners-of-the-world gathering, my role would be to keep things going, and my egregiousness would be a source of well-taken derision and laughter.

So… here we all were… a nine-woman Tower of Babel. What could we all talk about at our ladies’ tea? We all talked about home… who we were, what we were doing, where we had come from… why we were here. We used our words to cook dishes from our native lands… the fires seemed as if they were lit and the pots, ready… the descriptions of ingredients fragrant. We tried on each other’s languages like women at a shoe sale. Somehow, unlike shoes, they all fit… some badly, as we all laughed uproariously. What was missing? Where in the world we are going and what our next steps would be… thankfully, no one talked about that. We conversed in odd syllables and mismatched inflexions, emulsified in this one moment of living instead. I smiled at the Arabs. The idea of an emulsion… shrewd people, the Arabs. If I had known any, I would have invited some…  that was another thing that was missing… the nomadic thought of desert people.

The afternoon grew long in the tooth… we were exhausted from figuring it out. Besides, almost all the food was gone. I packed up plates for Joy, the Fillipino, who could not come, and Aschild, the Norwegian who was sick. Joy speaks Spanish, Tagalog, Chinese and English. Ashild speaks Norwegian, English and German. They were also what was missing.

About English… the suspension that supported all our languages on this lovely, bright afternoon… the sun pouring through the bay window, the fragrance of the Stargazer lilies in full bloom on the coffee table. English does not belong to the English-speaking world anymore. It has taken on its own culture everywhere it goes. It has new expressions and vocabulary we are unfamiliar with at home. There are few here who are “like” me or speak like me. I find myself swimming in many different cultures. I have come to the realization I will not have friends here otherwise. Similarly, the attitude is “if I have tried on your language, why won’t you try on mine?” Long gone is the attitude, “I will struggle through my middle school English just to keep you from having to use my language.” Elena is insisting that it is time to return to my school girl Russian studies, and Xia Yun, my Chinese teacher, would rap my knuckles with a ruler if she could get away with it. The cultures of the world have come to China from the Philippines, France, Norway, Germany, New Zealand, Australia, Nigeria and Kenya… few from America, the U.K. and Canada. Native English speakers are often in the minority. English has become a colorful, revealing map of the world that takes on the charming qualities of its own culture and language.

I cleaned up slowly after everyone left… enjoying the memories of having guests. I sat down with a glass of wine in the twilight and asked myself what was best about the afternoon. We, each of us in our own language and culture, had made a fleeting home for each other in a kind of transcendent space in time. What is home anyway? Home is where you share your heart. Home includes. Home stretches to give as much as it is able. Home is in being. Home is in being what you are. Home is a willingness to suspend attachment for the freedom it allows in others. Home is beyond a need to control. Home is beyond control. Home is a state of mind.

I finished my wine… lay down for a nap. I thought of the young student I had met from Bangladesh the other day at a food store. She had neatly dressed in traditional clothing for her shopping outing. She was in a dither about how to retrieve her other packages she had left in the store’s lockers. I had tried to calm her down and describe which way to go… so many had done the same for me. She was also missing this afternoon. I regretted not having asked her.

You find them in the street. You ask them to come in.