In Lancaster, PA

My Dad can never remember the word “Amish” and, by some permutation from who knows which universe, has memorized it as Hachimi¹. I now profoundly believe in acoustic reinforcement language acquisition (at Duncan’s request). A hundred miles east of Wright’s Fallingwater, because we were afraid we might have to ask the turnpike for help again, we went early to a service plaza for gas. Dad snatched up the mop from under the Mobil trash can and gave the windshield a bout of scrubbing like groundhogs fighting. I followed the scent of Auntie Anne’s to go to the bathroom. While researching Applegreen and finding out it originated in the United Kingdom, I suddenly remembered that on the way back we would pass Lancaster and ought to go look at the Hachimi people.

Dad kept refusing to believe the Hachimi people really would “give up” electricity, saying that on the way here we had already grazed past countless settlements but there was no horse poop on the ground, so it was all staged. Then fifteen minutes later, the moment we came near Ronks, three carriages appeared by the roadside. The great clear sky to the south inexplicably produced a rainbow. The Hachimi people’s houses and ordinary residents’ houses were aggregated together. The cornfields here were much denser than the Hachimi farms beside Lake Ontario. I said, doesn’t this mean you could crawl inside and do bad things, and Dad said that when they were children they all had to dig traps inside, stretching long long fishing lines to trip homemade muskets and shoot rabbits. But I have no good impression of cornfields. In an ancient memory where dream and reality cannot be told apart, I was once cut by corn leaves. Most frightening was that there was no feeling at all, so by the time I found out, the blood had already flowed into a river.

We drove toward the depths of these not-very-undulating hills planted full of crops. By this time the sun was already dropping very fast, and we said we had seen horse poop now, wish fulfilled, could go back now. Then the fork ahead was blocked dead on both left and right, so we could only keep going forward. We had only just reached the next intersection and were blocked again. The sky began going green as though sprinkled with bath salts, and the horse-poop smell began making its way into the car. Sirens came faintly from far away. At the intersections after that there kept being suddenly spawned Hachimi people moonlighting as traffic wardens and putting down roadblocks, and we were herded by them like sheep to an intersection. By this time the sky had already gone orange. Mom at the same time scrolled upon an extremely cheap motel, so we decided we might as well stay. We looked at the map. We had to turn around and drive five kilometres back, and next door was a restaurant called Miller’s Smorgasbord. Only on driving back did we discover that, unexpectedly, while we had been going ahead they had been sealing the roads behind us. Now all the roads we had come by were impassable. We drove to the end and got stopped. Several fierce-looking wardens were giving conflicting instructions, and I could not understand what exactly they wanted us to do, so I had no choice but to roll down the window and ask how I was supposed to get there. “Where to?” “There!” “Where is there?!” “There’s an Inn!” “What Inn?!” I took out the map and showed it to him. He looked at it for a while and said to a traffic cop not wearing safety colors, “They want to go over by Miller’s!” They talked for a while. He came back and directed us to reverse out, then allowed us through the roadblock and onward, but only as far as there, not one step farther.

So we kept driving forward. On the sealed-off road there was not a single person, only the smell of poop and a sky so yellow it had gone purple. Just before we reached the motel, we were stopped again. We repeated the same exchange, “They’re going to Miller’s!” “Make them loop around and go through from the back!” So we took the side road, got to the west side of the motel, and were stopped again. Dad had already grown sick of them kicking the ball back and forth, so he had me tell them we had already been made to detour several times, and this time he had to let us through. The warden who came to our window was a very mild-looking young Hachimi man, with a terribly awkward bowl cut and a snake-staff-like beard, and the first thing he asked was: “Going to Miller’s?” I said no, we were going to the motel a little farther ahead. He looked at my phone, but did not dare touch it, then laughed heh-heh and ran off to report to his superior. “Are they going to Miller’s?” “No, a little farther ahead!” “Let them through, have them stop at Miller’s first.” The Hachimi warden came back to relay this. At this point I felt this spectacularization was a bit like Xinjiang traffic police with the least sexualization, and then under some ghostly compulsion asked, Miller’s…is it still open now? “Open! Still open!” I looked toward the Miller’s sign not far behind them, which under the sky, now already deep blue, very inappropriately had no malfunctioning neon decoration.

After the wardens with very bad attitudes, I could not be sure whether outsiders were welcome here, especially once we went inside and found the lobby piled full of a tour group of Catholic nuns, while everyone else who looked local was speaking Pennsylvania Dutch. After freeloading the bathroom, I gathered the courage to strike up a conversation with the hostess. The hostess did not seem to have much belief that we actually meant to eat here, and said we would have to wait forty-five minutes. I said I had to check with my party. Mom saw this scene and had the exact opposite reaction from me. She only thought it was very interesting (had antiexoticized it) and said let’s just eat here! Then the hostess’s attitude changed a little and, with ten percent embarrassment, she said actually it would not take that long.

After getting into Miller’s queue, we walked over to the motel to see whether the walk-in price would be cheaper than Qunar (usually not…Qunar really is cheaper than any American platform), and at this point we found that up ahead was the center of this whole great road closure. Turned out it was a car accident. The motel we had been thinking and thinking about was directly opposite the scene, and the two Indian households next door, whole families and all, were standing on the lawn rubbernecking. A shop’s glass display window had been smashed to pieces, and a tow truck was lifting up a pockmarked sedan. Television reporters, police, and several dozen other people were gathered in a huge ring. One Hachimi warden even had a mini Hachimi sitting on his shoulders. The smell of horse poop was thick beyond all precedent ancient or modern. I secretly took a photo of the accident scene.

We had booked the motel and our number had also been called, so we went back and chatted with another very young hostess who had a very mean-girl look. “Do you know there’s an accident outside?” I said I had actually just come back from the accident scene. “Oh my god! What’s it like at the scene?” I said I even took a photo. “AAAAAA holy crap quick show me!” A server lady beside her said with disgust, “There’s been an accident and you’re this excited!” then leaned over to look herself. I very proudly displayed my documentary photography. These people who could not get out of the restaurant studied it over there for a long time. The mean-girl hostess suddenly realized she used to work at the shop that got hit, and all at once grew worried: “Oh no, I should call them…are they okay…” In the end I airdropped the photo to her.

Footnotes

1. Hachimi represents the Chinese internet expression 哈基米 (hājīmǐ), itself a phonetic approximation of Japanese はちみー (hachimī, with a lengthened final vowel). Its immediate source is Hachimī no Uta (はちみーのうた, “The Hachimi Song”), sung in character by Tōkai Teiō, voiced by Machico, in the second season of the anime Umamusume: Pretty Derby. The song appears in episode 12 and was subsequently issued as track 10 of the second disc of TV Anime “Umamusume: Pretty Derby Season 2” ANIMATION DERBY Season 2, vol. 3: Original Sound Track, released by Lantis on March 31, 2021. The official credits assign its words, composition, and arrangement to Machico. Within the fictional world of the anime, hachimi denotes a honey-based drink favoured by Tōkai Teiō. The name is generally understood as a deliberately childish clipping of Japanese 蜂蜜 (hachimitsu, “honey”): the final mora tsu is dropped and the preceding i is prolonged, producing hachimī. It is therefore neither an ordinary Japanese word nor a translation of “cat.” Its later feline meaning arose through the circulation of the song where its repeated syllables were detached from their original narrative setting and used as accompaniment for short videos of cats and other small animals. A frequently cited stage in this transmission is a 2022 Bilibili audio remix associated with the creator 京桥刹那, after which versions of the sound circulated more broadly through short-video platforms during 2023. Exact claims about the “first” remix should be treated cautiously because reposting, deletion, unattributed audio reuse, and platform migration make meme genealogies unusually difficult to establish. What can be observed more securely is the semantic sequence: a fictional honey drink became the refrain of a song, the refrain became reusable audio, the audio became strongly associated with cat videos, and 哈基米 consequently came to mean something like “kitty,” “little creature,” or “cute foolish animal” among users who often had no knowledge of Umamusume. See Lantis, ANIMATION DERBY Season 2, vol. 3: Original Sound Track, disc 2, track 10; Umamusume: Pretty Derby, season 2, episode 12, “Futari.” ↩

爸永远记不住“阿米什”不知道采用哪个宇宙的排列组合记成了哈吉米。我现深刻相信acoustic reinforcement语言习得（应邓肯要求）。赖特流水别墅以东一百英里处因为怕不得不再次向turnpike寻求帮助提早去服务区加油。爸抄起美孚垃圾桶下的拖把对挡风玻璃土拨鼠打架似的一阵刷，我循着Auntie Anne’s的香味去上厕所。研究applegreen原来发生自联合王国时突然想起返程时会路过Lancaster应该去看看哈吉米人。

爸一直不肯相信哈吉米人真的肯“放弃”电力，曰来时路上已经擦过无数聚居地但是地上并没有马大便，都是摆拍。结果十五分钟后一靠近Ronks马上路边就出现三辆。南边的大晴天莫名其妙出了彩虹。哈吉米人的房子和一般居民的房子聚合在一起。这里的玉米地比安大略湖边哈吉米农场密得多，我说这不是可以钻进去干坏事，爸说小时候他们都要在里面挖陷阱，拉长长的鱼线勾土火铳打兔子。但我对玉米地没有什么好印象，在梦和现实分不清楚的古代记忆里被玉米叶划伤过，最可怕的是根本没感觉所以发现的时候已经血流成河。

我们往这些起伏不大种满作物的丘陵深处开去，太阳这个时候已经下降得很快，说看到马大便了，心愿完成了可以回去了。结果前面的岔路口左右都封死了，只能继续往前走。刚到下一个路口又被封了。天开始像撒了浴盐似地发绿，马大便味道开始传进车里，远远地传来警笛声。接下来的路口持续都有突然刷出的哈吉米兼职的协管放路障，我们像被他们赶羊似的到了一个路口。这个时候天已经发橘，妈同时刷到了一个非常便宜的汽车旅馆，遂决定住下算了。看了地图，我们得掉头往回开五公里，隔壁是一家叫Miller’s Smorgasbord的餐厅。往回开才发现，没想到之前我们在前面走，他们在后面封路，现在来时的路都不通了。开到底被拦住，几个凶巴巴协管指令冲突，我看不懂他们到底想干嘛，只好摇下车窗问我要去那儿该怎么走。“去哪儿？”“去那儿！”“那儿是哪儿？！”“有一个Inn！”“什么Inn？！”我把地图拿出来给他看。他看了会儿跟一个没穿safety colors的交警说“他们要去Miller‘s那边！”讲了一通，回来指挥我们倒出去，然后允许我们穿过路障往前开，但只能到那儿，不准再往前一步。

我们就继续往前开。封掉的路上一个人都没有，只有大便味和黄得发紫的天。就快要到旅馆前，我们又被拦下。重复了一样的交流，“他们要去Miller’s那里！”“让他们绕一圈从后面走过去！”我们就走了小路，到了旅馆的西面，再次被拦下。爸已经厌烦他们踢皮球了，就让我告诉他们我们已经被要求绕好几次路，他这次必须得让我们过去。到我们车窗前的协管是一个看起来很温良的哈吉米年轻男，非常尴尬的锅盖头和蛇杖似的胡须，一上来就问：“是要去Miller‘s吗？”我说不是，是要再过去一点的那个汽车旅馆。他看了看我的手机，但不敢碰，然后呵呵笑着跑去跟他的上级报道。“他们是要去Miller‘s吗？”“没有，是去更前面一些！”“让他们过去，先停在Miller’s那边。”哈吉米协管回来传达。我这时觉得这个奇观化有点像新疆交警with the least sexualization，然后鬼使神差地问，Miller‘s…现在还营业吗？“开着！还开着呢！”我往他们身后不远处的那个Miller’s招牌看去在现在已经是深蓝色的天下非常不合时宜地并没有故障霓虹灯装饰。

似乎在态度很差的协管之后，我不敢确定这里欢不欢迎外地人，特别是一进去大厅里堆满了一个天主教修女旅行团的游客，而其他看起来像本地人的都讲着宾州dutch。蹭了厕所之后，鼓起勇气跟迎宾姐搭话。迎宾姐似乎对我们要在这里就餐不是很有置信，就说我们得等四十五分钟。我说我得跟我的party确认一下。妈看到这个场景跟我有截然不同的反应，只觉得很有意思（antiexoticize了）说就在这儿吃吧！然后迎宾姐态度小变带一成尴尬道其实不用那么久。

排上Miller‘s的队后我们就走那个汽车旅馆看walk-in价格会不会比去哪儿便宜（一般不会…去哪儿真的比任何美国平台便宜），这时发现前面到了这段大封路的中心。原来是车祸。心心念念的旅馆就在现场的正对面，隔壁的两户印度人全家站在草坪上吃瓜。一家店玻璃橱窗撞得粉碎，拖车正在把一辆坑坑洼洼的轿车拉起来，还有电视台记者，警察等几十个人围了一大圈，一个哈吉米协管肩膀上还坐着一个迷你哈吉米，马大便味道前无古今地浓厚。我偷偷拍了一张事故现场照。

定了旅馆也叫到号了，回去跟另一个很年轻看起来很mean girl的迎宾姐拉呱，“你知道外面有事故吗？”我说我其实刚从事故现场回来。“我去！现场什么样？”我说我还拍了张照呢。“啊啊啊啊我勒个骚刚快给我看看！”旁边一个大姐服务员嫌弃道：“出事了你这么兴奋！”然后自己也凑过来看了。我很骄傲地展示了我的纪实摄影。这些没法走出店的在那边研究半天，mean girl姐突然意识到这个出事的店她以前在那儿工作过，一下担忧起来：“哎呀，我应该跟他们打电话…他们没事吧…”我最后把照片airdrop给她了。