In the hot northern summer of 1999 long before my plenitude of decrepitude drew nigh, a caravan of Chinese Esperantists and I traveled by bus and train (and on foot in one memorable smoky sojourn in Pingxiang) from Nanning to Hanoi to attend the Second Asian Congress of Esperanto and to meet Justice Kep Enderby Q.C., (one time Attorney General in the avant-garde Whitlam government, Australia, 1972 – 1975), who was President of the Universal Esperanto Association from 1998 to 2001. I was his photographer in the Presidential Palace (Hanoi) as he liaised with the Vice President on language policy. (Ho Chi Minh had been much more of an Esperantist than Mao Zedong )

None of us spoke any of the Zhuang languages or even recognized the original orthography but did try to pick up a nicety or two via Putonhua script. (Me, vicariously, so to speak.) Though I was out of my depth our international cohort had no trouble communicating after six months engaging Dr. Zamenhof’s auxlang.

FROM ALEXANDRA’S TEXT: “A community leader interviewee: That’s right, it’s often written wrong but no matter how erroneously those sorts of things are written there is no-one who can pick that out, because Guangxi people have no opportunity to receive a Zhuang script education; who can read and understand?”

You might say Alexandra and I are simpatico or en accord in that I feel exactly the same when I mutilate the poetry of Tennyson in Esperanto among my dear co-coreligionist Baha’i friends who, almost to a ‘man’ among those under forty, think of Esperanto as an Italian opera staged in utopia. -)