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Update History

25 December 2012

Making Of Move Again

They say one should be quick to adapt if one is to expatriate oneself from one’s homeland for another. They say a lot of things, but in this case, one thinks that they are spot on the mark. Moving from an industrial powerhouse that can kick anybody’s ass, except maybe North Korea, Vietnam and Iraq, and possibly Iran, China and the Soviet Union, to a backward agrarian nation of ox plows and blue trucks takes a bit of getting used to.

American grocery stores have 78 different types of bath soap. Chinese grocery stores rarely stock soap as it is a luxury with which the masses are not particularly interested. Those who choose not to believe me can simply compare a Chinese public restroom with an American public restroom. Aside from the filth, open sewers, fauna, complete absence of toilet paper and the frequent presence of old women ironically mopping the floor, the first difference you would notice in a Chinese restroom is that soap and water are not a priority.

While it may be true that most Americans do not wash their hands after expelling fluids and whatnot, at least there is freedom of choice. Chinese lavatorians do not have the option of washing their hands since there is no soap on the premises and precious little running water. Developed locations like airports that have those developed faucets that automatically turn on and off when the sensor senses your hand will give the tiniest squirt of water. There is little use in setting the mechanism to give customers an adequate volume since most of the customers never use it at all.

I was at a relatively large airport on my way to a relatively small country when I had an altercation with the restroom’s faucet. It was imitating most of my dates in high school and refusing to service me. A tiny Chinese gentleman watched me get my tiny allocation of water followed by my verbal abuse of the obstinate apparatus.

“What is problem?”, he queried.

“I am not Chinese”, I replied. “I like soap and water”.

Though possibly impolite on my part, this dialogue illustrates my point and is often what I think to myself when faced with faucets that simply refuse to put out. I think it is impolite of tiny Chinese dudes to be all up in my face in public restrooms. I understand that they are a curious people. Not so much about anything having anything to do with any other part of the world. But when they see a handsome specimen such as me, their interest is invariably piqued as if someone is talking about who Jennifer Aniston is dating this week. I take a more American view in that I think most things are pretty much none of their business.

Another area where adaptation is absolutely required is on the road. Chinese people do not drive like humans. Much can be said about how different American driving is to European or African driving, but drivers outside of China generally share a basic level of humanity that has somehow escaped the Chinese. It is in this lane of adaptation that I refuse to yield and am failing miserably. I simply do not want to die just because some selfish asshole would rather kill than follow the most basic rules of the road and common sense.

One of the easiest elements to adapt to is the very different category of holidays. I was raised on Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July and Columbus Day. None of which are celebrated here. Instead, we have Red Envelope Day, Dragon Boat Day, Moon Cake Day and Tomb Sweeping Day. Like American holidays, they all require eating too much food and have the option of getting drunk as a Chinaman. Unlike American holidays, it is preferable to give wads of cash to those whom you only see during these holidays rather than well thought out personal gifts such as ties and Aqua Velva.

The most expensive holiday, like Christmas, is Red Envelope Day. You are the unluck if you do not give money to people you never talk to. And like Christmas shopping, giving people money in red envelopes has little to do with the birth of Baby Jesus. You would never learn anything about the original meanings of these holidays by observing Americans celebrating Christmas or Chinese celebrating Red Envelope Day. In both cases, better people spend the most money while anyone who does not go into debt must be an asshole.

When I first came to Scooterland, I lived in a tiny dirt and dairy farm village of about six people. That took some adjusting, having come from a major metropolis where the streets are paved with gold and everyone lights their Cuban cigars with hundred dollar bills. My tiny dirt farm village was lucky to have streets paved with sun dried cow shit.

I quickly adapted and became the toast of the town. As the only foreigner within several towns, I was a local celebrity. I got a discount at the local breakfast sandwich shop and the locals stared at me everywhere I went. I was like Tom Cruise, only much taller and with little interest in brainwashing cults.

Then I became a cliché and met a woman. Unfortunately, she lived nowhere near my tiny dirt farm village. As our relationship progressed, it became evident that one of us was going to have to relocate. She was from the big city. Her family lived in the big city. Everyone she knew, besides me, lived in the big city.

Big city Chinese are generally snobs. They look down on tiny dirt farm village Chinese and would prefer to never be caught dead anywhere near any tiny dirt farm village. Despite living in a tiny dirt farm village, I have always been a city person. I had no problem with moving to the big city, while there was no way in hell the Future Wife was going to move to my tiny dirt farm village. Moreover, I was not as invested in my tiny dirt farm village as she was in her big city, other than having a job there and all of my wacky adventures.

So I went from a tiny dirt farm village of about six people to a big city of about two million. This was a bigger adjustment than moving from the civilized land of milk and honey to the Chinese dirt farm village in the first place. The big city combined the filth, noise and suicidal driving of a big city with the filth, noise and suicidal driving of China. My tiny dirt farm village was certainly filthy, but I had gotten used to the obvious lack of noise and suicidal drivers. Not that they were good drivers. There were simply far fewer of them.

Before I moved to the big city, the Future Wife was offered a higher paying and better job in a medium sized suburb of a medium sized city not all that far from my tiny dirt farm village. We could have lived there and I could have easily commuted to the job I already had. But the Future Wife was not at all interested in leaving the big city. So I left my job, moved to the big city, found a crappier job that paid less in a big city where everything is more expensive than in my tiny dirt farm village and lost my celebrity status. But the locals still stared at me everywhere I went.

Marriage requires compromise. This means that if you are the husband, you do whatever the wife wants.

Six years later, the Wife was offered a higher paying and better job in a small suburb of a medium sized city. Much to everyone’s surprise, she accepted. I elucidated that doing this six years earlier could have saved me a shitbucket of pain and aggravation. Her mother was all, like, no way.

So once again I quit my job, packed my two boxes of personal possessions, helped the Wife pack her 42 tons of personal possessions and moved house. This reminds me that I need to tell my mother our new address. That has nothing to do with the story at hand, but if I do not write it down now, I will forget about it by the time I finish my drink.

As such (the quitting my job and moving part, not the telling my mother our new address part, or even the fact that I usually have a drink when I write these things), I am now adapting to life in a small suburb of a medium sized city. I have no idea what the population is, although I am sure it is somewhere between six and two million. I am not even sure if it is classified as a township or village. I doubt it is a city.

I cannot yet tell if I am a celebrity here, but the locals stare at me everywhere I go.

This current townvillage is nothing like any place I have ever lived. Neither was my tiny dirt farm village, and the big city was nothing like a big city in a civilized country, but where we are now simply defies description.

It is a tiny village in the middle of nowhere that looks like a developed city in the middle of somewhere. The streets are enormously wide by Chinese standards and paved about as well as one can expect around here. Outside of the downtown area, there are actual sidewalks between the streets and buildings. In many cases there are simply empty fields instead of buildings. This looks like a town that someone wants to develop into a city but where few people actually want to live. The downtown district looks like every small Chinese town. Where we live looks like an area where an urban planner wanted to create a planned city.

Our apartment is nothing like a typical Chinese apartment. We have a real kitchen with counter space, though no oven. Chinese people hate ovens for some reason. There is a real balcony with a real view, albeit a view of an unfinished planned city with empty fields. Most Chinese apartments have tiny balconies just big enough to hold a washing machine. We have one of those, but we also have a balcony that you can stand on and watch the birds.

The only similarities between our apartment and a typical Chinese apartment are the frequent water disconnections and the abundance of mosquitos.

When we moved here we had a choice of three different apartment styles in six different buildings. The complex has older buildings, which are about five years old, and newer buildings, which are at least three years old. None of them are even close to being full. We chose where we are now because it was the only one not rejected by either of us.

The Wife wanted to take a one bedroom apartment in one of the newer buildings because it was newer. I rejected it because it was even smaller than our previous apartment, the kitchen was a sink against a wall, the view was the building ten feet away and there was no air conditioner. The Wife wanted to buy new air conditioners for the living room and bedroom, but I found that to be a waste since all of the other available apartments came equipped.

I wanted to take one of the three bedroom apartments in one of the older buildings because it had more than enough room and two bathrooms. If you lived with my wife, you would want an extra bathroom, too. The Wife rejected it because it was slightly more expensive and, as she says every night, “too big”.

There were also four bedroom apartments with three bathrooms, but we both agreed that we did not need that much space.

We settled on a larger one bedroom in one of the older buildings. I liked the kitchen and large balcony, and the Wife liked the lower price and small laundry balcony. It took about a day to make our choice.

There were several apartments available, but narrowing it down to three options was very easy since the Chinese love to leave their apartments in a state of unnecessary dilapidation. None of the buildings are more than five years old, but some of the apartments look like they should be condemned. Every apartment you look at will be dirty. Whoever owns the building will only clean vacant apartments when they are rented. Electrical sockets and phone jacks are often torn out of walls. Windows are sometimes missing. Bathrooms are best viewed well after you move in. It is not uncommon to find discarded clothes, bicycle parts and food in closets or in the middle of the floor. When the old tenants move out, they just leave all of their garbage behind, and no one bothers to remove it until the new tenants sign the paperwork.

We immediately rejected all of the apartments with holes in the walls. Windows are easy enough to replace, but an inexplicable hole in the middle of the wall will always be trouble. We also rejected all of the apartments with animal and/or human feces on the floors and/or walls. This can be cleaned, but the Chinese version of clean is lacking, and I simply reject that shit on principle.

Some of the apartments had views of nothing more than other apartments. The Chinese do not care about what is out their windows. More often than not they cover their windows to keep out the evil sunlight. Given a choice between a view of somone’s soiled curtains on the fifteenth floor or the open sky on the fifth floor, being higher up is no longer very important.

Neighbors are more important to the Wife than they are to me, so she immediately rejected any apartment with obviously bad neighbors. By her definition, that means too many shoes and bicycles outside of their doors or too much garbagie out in the hallway. Everyone leaves their shoes outside, and I do not particularly care what is in front of their door as long as none of their crap is in front of mine, but I agree with her on the garbagie. I would prefer to keep their insects inside their apartment and not roaming the hallway and coming into mine.

The apartment we chose has no immediate neighbors. There are four apartments on the floor, and ours is the only one currently occupied. Even if others lived on this floor, we could all go in and out of our doors without ever seeing each other. We only share one wall with another apartment, and it is vacant. Since each apartment is in a corner, there is absolutely no reason for anyone to put their crap anywhere near our door. There will never be anyone above us since we are on the top floor, and there is currently no one below us.

There was some minor damage in our apartment, but we assumed it would all be fixed before we moved in, given that we were told it would all be fixed before we moved in. I have no idea why we thought the people in charge of the building would do their job in a timely fashion. I have lived amongst the Chinese for several years. The Wife has lived with them even longer. We should have known better.

When we first looked at our apartment, the floors and walls were covered with a lifetime of dust. When we moved in, the walls were freshly painted (but probably not cleaned first) and the floors were still dirty. The sliding glass doors leading from the living room to the balcony had not been replaced. Surprisingly, the kitchen was fairly clean.

This meant that dirty repair people would have to come into our apartment after we moved in. I understand that they have dirty jobs, but I do not understand why they can never clean any of the debris they always leave behind and how they always manage to leave questionable stains wherever they sit. I knew this would happen since it always does, but for some reason I was hoping we could avoid it this time. To me, it seems better for everyone to simply fix all of the problems before people move in. But that is not the Chinese way.

They fixed the sliding glass doors on the day we moved in. The Wife was more interested in the dirty floor, but I stressed the doors because they could not be properly opened or closed. This was not only a security issue, but a great way to let every insect in the country into our home. They tried to clean some of the floor, but it was getting late, and service people rarely work after four thirty.

When they tried to clean some of the tiles, that proved too difficult, and they simply replaced them. This required several days of work since every change of plans must be done on a different day. Trying to clean the tiles was one day, replacing the tiles was the next day and using one of those industrial floor cleaning machines was about a week later. The floor still has stains and cracks all over the place. You would never know that people spent three days cleaning it.

There are still some tile issues and a broken seal on one of the windows, making an unusually windy corner inside the apartment and letting in every mosquito on the planet. If they have not been fixed by now, they probably never will be. I spent the first month in the apartment fixing what little I could, and I am still battling the ants, though I fear that in this struggle I will likely lose.

There is an old Chinese saying, before one month we try make half ass fix ok, after one months you on own tough shit.



06 December 2012

Apples And Oranges

The Chinese media are trying to compare the case of the homeless man in New York who was pushed or fell in front of a subway train while people watched in horror with Yue Yue, the little girl who was hit by two different cars in the middle of a small but populated street while no one gave a shit. The Chinese point of view is that Chinese people are better than imperialist Americans because Americans also stand idly by and watch their own get run over.

For reasons known only to the Chinese and people who understand that the easiest way for the Chinese to show that they are not horrible people is to point out horrible things done by other people, subway tracks buried and barricaded underground are the same thing as a small surface road, and ten 42-ton trains are the same as two 800cc blue trucks. The Chinese media will never point out that picking a small child up from a small road and taking her to safety is not nearly as dangerous as jumping in front of a moving train and grabbing some homeless dude. Most Americans will never jump in front of a moving train to save an adult. Neither will most people in any country in the world. Neither would I. Every single American, and most people on this planet, would have picked up Yue Yue.

And, no, a little Chinese girl is not the same as some homeless guy in New York. Yue Yue did not choose to be born a girl in China. Destiny fucked her over on that one. Homeless adults in New York made questionable choices to get where they are. Like it or not, they could change their circumstances far more easily than a Chinese female can become a European male. It seems to be completely lost on the Chinese media that adults are required by common decency to help small children in danger. In our live and let die society, adults are on their own.

The Chinese media tell us that Americans do not give a shit about homeless people. This is true. The homeless in New York are invisible, just as they are every place I have ever been. Just as they are in China. The communist Chinese ideology of robbing from the rich to feed the poor has long since been replaced with the capitalist Chinese ideology of robbing from everyone to feed the rich. The homeless population in China is increasing as communist China becomes more capitalist. There may be a culture somewhere in the world where homeless people are not invisible, but I have never been there.

The Chinese media point to a court case in 2006 where a Chinese judge punished a good Samaritan for helping a stranger in trouble, as good Samaritans are wont to do. This, they say, is the reason Chinese people are selfish assholes and will willingly walk by a small child who is about to be killed. Anyone who knows anything about the Chinese id or basic sociology or group psychology or common sense can tell you that the Chinese masses were not selfless and compassionate in 2005 and suddenly became selfish assholes in 2006. The entire culture did not change its way of thinking after some minor court case that no one ever heard anything about until it was used as an excuse to stand idly by and watch a small child get run over. This was a selfish culture long before 2006.

Americans are also selfish, though not nearly on such an advanced level as the Chinese. But the homeless dude in New York did not die because of selfishness. It is not selfish to not jump in front of a moving train. One would have to be very brave to do so. Or very stupid, depending on the outcome. Only a coward would let a little girl die in the middle of a small street.


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