Damn Maid Wont Leave His Stuff Alone!

In the chapter The Blind Panic in the novel Last Chance to See, Adams employs the laughing return technique when he is presented with the challenge of finding a way to get suitable water so he can brush his teeth. The first appearance of the water problem comes when he is “suspicious of the delicate brown color of the water leaking from the washbasin taps” (147). I find this extremely funny especially since here at the school the water that comes out of the tap is also suspicious-looking. Adams then decides that he will use some of the hot water meant to be used for making tea. He pours some hot water out to cool and then goes to have breakfast. The humor returns when he returns to the hotel room and finds that a maid has poured out his cooling water and has refilled the thermoses with fresh boiling water. This adds humor into the situation because he did not expect anyone to come in and mess with his teeth brushing water. It really is not strange to think that a maid would come into the room and clean up, but the next appearance is just plain hilarious. Adams says he “was going to have to come up with some serious strategic thinking if [he] was going to get to clean [his] teeth” (148). He then goes through the trouble of pouring another glass of hot water and then hiding it “out of site in the back of a cupboard” (148). He also tries to get rid of a bottle of the aftershave he bought while on the flight to Shanghai by “hiding it under the bed” (148). After a brief sidetrack into telling about his expedition to see the Great Wall he returns to the hotel. Here he finds that the water he had so carefully hidden had been found by the maid and that the maid had also found his hidden bottle of aftershave and put it back with the other bottles. It is hilarious to think that a maid would go rummaging around a person’s hotel room the way that this maid did. Adams’s use of the laughing return gives the readers a short break from the seriousness of the new task, finding the baiji river dolphin, and allows them to laugh at the ordeal he went through just to brush his teeth.