Typical Chinese Drivers

I have said it before and I will probably say it again and again until I am killed by some functionally retarded drunkard; Chinese drivers are assholes.

The one about my student in an "accident".
The one about taking the joke of a driving test.
The other one about taking the joke of a driving test.
The one about getting hit by a Chinese driver.
The other one about getting hit by a Chinese driver.
The one about lazy Chinese police.

If you live anywhere in the Chinese-speaking world you have likely heard about Yueyue, a two-year-old girl who was hit by two different cars and left for dead on the streets of 佛山市 in central 广东. While her mother was shopping, the national pastime in China, she wandered about aimlessly in the street. This is not at all unusual. I regularly see unattended children of all ages blocking traffic. The more I think about it the more I have to correct an earlier statement. Blocking traffic is the national pastime in China.

While Yueyue was amusing herself with the aforementioned wandering about, a van hit her in broad daylight. It was 5:30pm but there was still more than ample light and this particular part of the street was under an awning of sorts with lights. Almost like Freemont Street in Las Vegas, but a thousand times shittier. Think of it as a covered, and lit, pedestrian mall with cars driving through. The unusual part is that it is covered, not that cars drive through.

The first driver claims that he never saw her. That is probably true. Chinese drivers rarely see the people and things they slam into. But the driver stopped after hitting the child, paused briefly and then continued driving over the rest of her. He knew he hit something. He simply did not care what it was.

What comes next is what seems to shock most people. Running over a child when there are no visible obstructions is apparently not all that shocking to the Chinese. After Yueyue is run over, several people walk by as though a dying child bleeding in the street is a common occurence. And it probably is. I have seen the way these people drive. I have read several reports that say that an average of 300,000 people are killed in traffic “accidents” every year in China. I have to assume that more than a few of those people are children.

After the two-year-old is run down and after several people walk by without giving two shits, a small truck runs over her dying body as if she was just another garbage bag in the road. In all fairness to these assholes, one cannot drive more than five minutes without encountering a garbage bag in the road. I have hit one or two myself. But in all fairness to me, I actually stopped. The second driver, being as blind, suicidal and/or functionally retarded as most Chinese drivers, may very well have assumed that the crunching body under his tires was indeed someone’s discarded goat heads. But the people who walked by could clearly see that this particular garbage bag was actually a small child bleeding to death.

Eighteen people, and I use that word loosely, walked, bicycled or scootered by the dying child and did not do a single thing to help in any way whatsoever. One scooter monkey stopped and looked back, but quickly drove away. I guess it was not his child, so why give a shit. Several people looked at her dying body and went about their business. One jackass was walking directly toward her and had to drastically alter his trajectory to avoid stepping in her pool of blood. As soon as the annoying little obstacle was cleared, he turned back onto his original path.

These people clearly saw her. It was not dark. It was not raining. The street was well-lit. Chinese people are generally oblivious to anyone and anything around them, but to not see a small child lying in a pool of blood literally in the middle of the street is an extreme level of oblivious far and away from the common knocking down old ladies to be the first in line. And by line I mean mass of people crowding together and all screaming at the clerk at once.

Eventually an old lady collecting garbage from the street dragged Yueyue away and prevented a third truck from running over her. I have often said that these old people who rummage through the garbage looking for recyclable material provide a valuable service. Without them the street garbage would simply pile endlessly higher. Millions of tons of trash that could be recycled would otherwise fill more holes in the ground. They also seem to be the only Chinese people willing to keep small children from being pounded into roadkill.

Yueyue is currently listed as anything from critical to brain dead. Different news agencies disagree.

About half of my drive home every night is on a street with no street lights and little to no houses or shops. The only light in front of me is from my own headlights, the headlights of the cars that almost hit me in their endless quest to always be first all the time regardless of how much slower they are going (of the few cars that bother to use headlights), the headlights of the cars driving on the wrong side of the road and coming directly toward me (of the few cars that bother to use headlights), and the occasional full moon. Weather permitting. More often than not there is no visible moonlight.

But I can see every dog that runs in front of me, every child wearing dark clothes and riding a dark bicycle, every scooter driving perpendicular to the road, and every single one of the 68,000 potholes in the road. It seems that the only things I can never see in time are the black garbage bags (I can spot the pink ones) and the orange traffic cones that have turned black with dirt and apathy. I would see a bleeding two-year-old. And if I could see her while dodging every car, van, giant truck carrying a precariously stacked load, blue truck, taxi, bus, scooter, bicycle, ox cart, tractor, those weird battle bot trucks that look like something out of a low-budget straight to Beta movie about an oppressively dystopian future society, then someone walking by her on the street who cannot see her has no business walking without a white cane.

Unfortunately, the only reason people are talking about this particular two-year-old victim of a horribly selfish culture is because it was all captured by a surveillance camera. Ordinarily, when the Chinese run over the Chinese they simply drive away. If they stop for some strange reason or if, even stranger, the police who make Clancy Wiggum look like Tony Baretta bother to get off their corrupt, lazy asses and do their job that month and find the driver, they have to pay the medical expenses for the person they almost killed. There are also a wide variety of fines available, based on the victim’s gender, age, occupation and importance. There is a flowchart that makes determining the fine pretty simple. If the person who was hit dies, the driver does not have to pay the medical bill.

In Yueyue’s case, every second was captured on tape. This has brought cries of moral outrage, nationwide soul-searching, actual arrests for horrible driving, endless comments on websites, and what I am typing right now. What bothers me the most is that only now are people talking about this. Actually what bothers me the most is that when I watched the video of this two-year-old being run over by two vehicles, I was not horrified, shocked, disturbed, angry, in disbelief, aghast or agog. I simply nodded my head to myself and said, to myself, “Yeah. That’s how they drive.”

I find it horribly hypocritical of the Chinese to feign outrage over something that they never gave a flying fuck about before. Chinese drivers have been driving like Helen Keller on meth since Henry Ford invented slave labor. It never bothered them until people in other countries could see on Youtube how horribly selfish the Chinese are. Most Chinese are apathetically unaware that any of their actions will ever have consequences. If something bad happens, it is not because of the horribly selfish thing they did. It was simply an unlucky day.

Soul-searching is a moot point in a nation that has no soul. I do not mean this in a religious way. Baby Jesus and I are not exactly on each other’s Twitter rolodex. They probably call it something hipper than a rolodex, but that is clearly not the most relevant misuse of pop culture here today. The Chinese invented a few good things in the past, and they were probably a decent people once, but from what I have seen in the present they are soulless automatons who desire nothing more than money, terrible television programs and have a violently strong urge to be in the exact space that I am taking at any given moment.

Arresting people only for crimes committed in front of surveillance cameras seems like a bad idea to me, but since there will one day be at least one camera pointed at each and every person at all times, it will eventually work itself out. Arresting people for lawless driving in a country where any and all laws pertaining to driving are constantly ignored probably only confuses those arrested. How can it be bad today to do what has always been socially acceptable. When you have watched the police sit idly by while people do the most batshit stupid things humanly possible, there is no reason to assume that the police will ever do their jobs.

The two drivers who ran over Yueyue have been arrested. They probably have no idea why. Surely, having an unlucky day cannot be illegal. Some of the passersby have publicly said that they never saw her. The surveillance footage clearly shows them looking right at her. But letting a small child die in the street is not illegal.

The comments on the information superhighway are mostly hilarious. Many are in Chinese, and illiterate Chinese is so much funnier than illiterate English. English comments by Chinese speakers can be amusing at times, but after seeing so much Chinglish, if you will, over the course of so many years, it loses much of its novelty.

It has been said that we, the rest of the world, cannot judge the entire Chinese culture on a single isolated incident. I would ordinarily agree. In fact, if this were the only time that Chinese drivers have driven like functionally retarded drunkards then I would say that, overall, they are doing pretty well. But I judge the entire Chinese culture on innumerable incidents. Many I have witnessed. More than a few I was lucky enough to experience firsthand. Some I recorded on the camera in my car.

When you buy a car here, some of the standard options include air conditioning (a requirement), a CD player (ours is a piece of shit), and a camera that records everything in front of the car while driving. This feature is fairly common because so many people run into so many people that one cannot count on any police officers at the scene to do, frankly, anything. What people are most concerned with in any collision is fault. Since it is always the other person’s fault, a camera on your dashboard takes away a lot of the fines issued by government offices that base their decisions on gender, age, occupation and importance.

When we first got our camera I thought it might be amusing to show my loyal reader some of the batshit stupid things I see every day. I have talked about horribly selfish Chinese drivers once or twice. I thought it might be nice to show them. But the problem is that I, and the camera, see batshit stupid things every day. The amount of information is simply overwhelming. If I went through everything every day I could post each day’s highlights here, but it should be obvious to anyone paying any attention that this website is not something I consider on a daily basis. And the camera automatically divides everything into two-minute files. Each file is about 80mb. That is simply too much to upload. And the pictures look like they were taken from a cheap Chinese car camera.

Not too long ago our cheap Chinese car camera recorded a scooter monkey taking a dive while driving over 80km/h. This is only 30% above the speed limit. In other words, average. He was in front of me and there was no one between us, so I got a clear shot. I ran over his helmet. His head was not in it. Fortunately for both of us, these helmets are cheap Chinese pieces of crap.

After turning his helmet into tiny bits of trash that will be in the road for weeks to come, I stopped. I am such a foreigner. The cars around us used the fallen scooter and my stopping as an opening to speed their way in front of everyone else. That is the most important thing. It still intrigues me how much everyone always wants to be first. Including and especially those going the slowest. At the very least four other drivers and maybe a dozen scooter monkeys saw this guy go down. I was the only person who stopped.

Here is the best part. This would be the punch line if any of this were a joke. I stopped after I ran over a cheap scooter helmet in poor visibility in the driving rain where there was no camera but my own. At least twenty people passed or ran over the two-year-old girl in the infamous footage that clearly shows good visibility, no rain and plenty of light where the presence of a surveillance camera should be common knowledge.

I am not the nicest person in the world. I do not generally like to be around most people. If I were Henry Bemis it would not be tragically ironic since I do not wear glasses. But even I showed more compassion for some dipshit scooter monkey, exactly the kind of horribly inept driver that I regularly deride, than any of these Chinese people showed for an innocent little girl.

While looking for footage with the least commentary I found a Chinese article about an American tourist in China who jumped into a lake to save a Chinese woman who was drowning. The article, written by a Chinese writer, said that “only a foreigner would dare such a rescue”.



This video is fairly graphic and ends with a typical
“how do you feel” interview with the parents.



This video is less graphic
but shows the same attitude.



This video is far less graphic and contains no death,
but it illustrates my point beautifully.



These are compilation videos of Chinese drivers
slamming into each other.

Spread Honey On The Perpetrator’s Blank Stare

I may have already said a word or two about the Chinese being the most selfish drivers in the world. This is a point I simply can never exaggerate. I see all manner of vehicles run red lights, drive on the wrong side of the road, drive in multiple lanes at the same time, make left turns from the right hand lane, make right turns from the left hand lane, make u-turns from the outside lane regardless of light color, swerve into oncoming traffic, change lanes regardless of traffic, jump in front of cars going twice their speed, abruptly stop in the middle of the road for no apparent reason, block traffic at every opportunity and park absolutely anywhere. I do not witness these activities occasionally or once a month. I see people drive like drunken monkeys every single day that I drive. I have seen these people do all of these things at night without their headlights. I drive home on a road that has no street lights for a good twenty minutes. This stretch of road has no houses or businesses to light the street. The only light I can ever see is from my headlights and other cars. So when another vehicle comes directly toward me from the opposite direction without any headlights I cannot see it until it is entirely too close. And when I honk my beleaguered horn at them they always get angry.

The funny thing about Chinese drivers, aside from their complete disregard for the rules of the road and any semblance of common sense, is that they are always personally offended whenever anyone honks at them. When they drive dark colored cars in the wrong direction on black unlit roads at night without their headlights they cannot fathom why anyone would honk at them. Nothing in their brains register that perhaps they are doing something amiss. The Chinese mentality is that if you honk at me then you are clearly the bad guy, no matter what batshit retarded thing I am doing. And yet they freely honk their horns at each other. That is not some exotic ancient Chinese cultural prerogative. That is simple hypocrisy.

Just today I honked at a scooter driver who came within inches of hitting the Wife’s car while he drove his scooter with one hand, held a baby with the other and ran a red light to make a left turn from the wrong side of the road onto the wrong side of the road at night without headlights. I did not honk because he was endangering the baby. According to his culture he was not. I did not honk because he ran the red light or because he was driving on the wrong side of the road without lights. If I honked every time I saw such things the horn would no longer be operative. I am surprised it still works as it is. I only honked because if he had not turned his head around to look in the direction he was driving I would have slammed into him. I hit the brakes as soon as he ran the red light, but since he was driving like this is England I had far less time to stop than I usually do in similar circumstances. When he stopped, literally inches in front of me, my hand was still on the horn. He looked at me as though I had just shot his dog. How dare you honk at me, is the general reaction one gets from local drivers.

I almost always honk at intersections when I have a green light and I cannot clearly see the cross traffic. That is probably annoying to people living there but, and this is foreigner thinking, I think a collision would be worse. The Chinese roadmakers were smart enough to place directional dividers on some of the roads. This prevents cars from swerving into oncoming traffic. A good thing, I say. But the dividers are almost always loaded with large bushes or trees. This makes it impossible to see any cross traffic at intersections until it is too late. Most of my green light near collisions are at such intersections. On roads without the dividers I can usually see the cars that are going to run the red lights in enough time to hit the brakes and wonder what it is about red lights that these people find so confusing.

I usually honk at any vehicle that I almost hit while I run the green light and it runs the red light. One day a scooter monkey that I came very close to killing stopped dead when I honked at him, but not when his light was red or when a car came inches from killing him, and changed direction to follow me. I think he was trying to chase me. Chinese drivers love to chase people whom they imagine have wronged them. I suppose ignoring all traffic rules is not dangerous enough. But I find it hard to be intimidated or impressed by a tiny person on a broken down scooter. If he had a better scooter that could drive above 30km/h what would he do? Wave his fist in the air at me? He could slam his scooter into the Wife’s car. It would not be the first time. That car has several scratches and dents of unknown origin. They were most likely given to it while parked. Leaving a note is not the Chinese way. He could wave his metal rod at me. This is not a euphemism. More than a few Chinese drivers keep bats and metal rods in their cars for the sole purpose of trying to intimidate other drivers. When I honked at a driver who clearly thought that merging into another lane means speeding up to hit the car in front of him and this particular driver waved his metal rod at me I waved a finger back at him. That is the only metal rod I need. Although on another occasion I showed another driver my umbrella when he showed me his metal rod. I think I confused him.

So where are the police? That is a good question. The local police are largely corrupt, incompetent and Chinese lazy. The local news often shows footage of police officers sleeping in their cars or having sex with prostitutes while on duty. There was an infamous photograph of a police officer leaning against his car, casually huffing a cigarette while someone was dying in a fatal car “accident” half a block away. He could have been the first on the scene and possibly saved a life, but he was Chinese and they are not the most observant people in the world. Unlike American police, Chinese police do not become cops so they can bully people and carry guns to compensate for their own inadequacies. Chinese police become cops because they fail most aptitude tests and it is a pretty laid back job. Despite or because of the inherent laziness and inefficiency that all Chinese share, there is very little serious crime. Ninety percent of a Chinese cop’s job is dealing with traffic “accidents”.

Cameras at occasional intersections issue fines to cars and trucks that run the red light or drive over 20km/h above the speed limit. The police seem to feel that this is good enough. The problem is that there are not nearly enough cameras and everyone knows where the few are. Even if you did not already know about them you can see them early enough to slow down or, heaven forbid, actually stop at the red light. A bigger problem is that they are not sensitive enough to catch scooters. Any scooter can run any red light anywhere without consequence, other than the occasional fatal collision with a larger vehicle. But the very real threat of death is not enough of a deterrent to these people. They need the state to take money out of their pockets for them to give half a shit.

And that is the main cause of the problem. No one here gives a shit. It is not that they do not know any of the rules. If we assume that half of the drivers on the road have a driver’s license then half of the drivers on the road must have passed the written test. The English version of the written test is incomprehensible, but I have to assume that the Chinese version makes sense. To pass it you have to have a basic understanding of general rules or guess very well. If at least half of the drivers know three fourths of the rules then why do ninety nine percent of them drive like drunken lemurs? Probably because they are without hyperbole the most selfish people I have ever seen in my entire life. Every one of them seems to think that they are the only vehicle on the road and that they are the masters of all they survey, which is generally only the few feet in front of them. Chinese drivers appear to be physically unable to see anyone in any other direction or other people more than half a car length ahead. Eyesight cannot be the problem. You can get glasses 24H even in the smallest towns. It is mostly a sense of entitlement that they are infinitely more important than anyone else and everyone should always move out of their way. Which is odd since Chinese drivers, and indeed Chinese pedestrians, are incapable of moving out of anyone’s way under any circumstance.

The selfishness reaches beyond the road. Someone will always push their way to the front of every line at every bank, post office, grocery store and government office. The smarter businesses have done away with lines completely and force everyone to take a number. But even then there is always someone who thinks it is their turn right now. Whether on the road, at work, indoors or outdoors, the Chinese all think they should always be first all the time.

It was in this environment that one of my favorite students was almost killed.

Sunny is a happy, friendly, polite child. At least she was before the “accident”. I noticed these qualities in her on her first day at my school because a polite child is rare around here. Most Chinese children are rude, spoiled brats. That might be an exaggeration. Most of the hundreds of Chinese children I have met are rude, spoiled brats. Any foreigner who has ever worked here will say the same. Their spoiled nature has nothing to do with income. I lived in a tiny dirt poor farm village for a few years and most of those children were rude, spoiled brats. In fact, those children were worse overall than the big city children I deal with now. And their parents could barely afford to pay for food, shelter and education. Cell phones and MP3 players were unheard of. Most of my big city students have cell phones and electronic devices that I have become too old to operate. But they are either less spoiled than their village counterparts or I have become more tolerant of the spoilage.

I am not the most polite person in the world. I have probably thanked five people in my lifetime. I cannot remember the last time I said “please”. When people say “hello” to me I usually reply with either, “Yeah, whatever” or “What do you want?” I used to blame this on my upbringing, if you can call it that. I was not raised to say “please”, “thank you” and “yes, ma’am”. I doubt I have ever said “yes, ma’am” out loud. At least not facetiously. I was raised to say, “Yeah, whatever” or “Just what the fuck do you want?” But eventually we all reach a point where we can no longer blame our parents or our childhood. I was a rude child because I did not know any better. I am no longer five years old. Not even close. I know better. My education and ability to communicate extends far beyond whatever I learned as a child. What I say and how I say it is entirely my responsibility. So when I think someone is rude that should tell you something. Most of these children are far more rude, selfish and spoiled than I ever dared to be at their age.

Some are not. A few of them say “please” when they want something and “thank you” when they get it. I even have one student who thanks me when I hand him a test paper. Most of the students are less than enthusiastic about taking tests. I have a student who should be as rude as can be. He never does his homework, he rarely pays any attention in class and he fails most tests. But when he wants to borrow a pencil he always says “may I” and “thank you”. Most students simply say, “No pencil” or “Give me pencil”, to which I respond, “No.” They all have backpacks full of books, notebooks, toys, rulers, scissors or razors, but pens and pencils seem to be a rare commodity.

Some of the students are just happy all the time. Sometimes I try to relate my own childhood to their experience in order to better empathise with whatever is going on at any given moment, but this happiness just baffles me. I used to have a student who was so happy all the time that she was prone to fits of laughter for no apparent reason. If I called her name to answer a question she would laugh before answering. And she was always smiling. I never knew why. In contrast, there was another student in the same class who would cry at the drop of a hat. I tried to be sympathetic but it quickly became obvious that he only cried when there was a test or I called on him to do something. During breaks he would run around the hallways and laugh with the other students. He was only depressed when someone expected something of him. Both of those students are no longer at the school, possibly because I no longer teach that class. Whenever schedules are arbitrarily changed and I lose a class, students always leave. Boss Lady II does not see the connection.

Sunny was always in the happy category. We had a test on her first day at the school and she asked me a question that simply blew me away. I cannot recall what she said, but she said it with perfect grammar. This is an extremely rare event around here. Grammar is not something that anyone cares about. Students, parents, other teachers all focus on vocabulary and conversation. I might very well be the only teacher in the country who tells these students what the rules are and why they make sense. I have never seen a single English book for children in this country that has the words “noun”, “verb”, “adjective”, “article”, “pronoun”, “preposition” or “conjunction”. All of my students know those words and can give examples of what they are. The more advanced students know adverbs and interjections. The few students at my school who are not in my classes have no idea what any of these words are or what they mean. I can tell most of my classes to write sentences in the simple, perfect and continuous tenses and most of the students can do it with minimal mistakes. My more advanced students can combine perfect and continuous. If I say any of these words to other students they will look at me like I am speaking in Esperanto. I once asked a Book 9 student who was not mine if something was singular or plural. She had no idea what I was talking about. They learn the difference in Book 2.

When Boss Lady II casually mentioned that Sunny was in a car “accident” I seemed to be the only one who gave a shit. Some of the Chinese teachers thought that maybe someone should send her a card or something. Fuck that, I thought. What hospital is she in? I will visit her even if it means driving for 45 minutes amongst the Chinese. In an incredible stroke of luck, more so for me than her, she was at the Wife’s hospital. This was convenient for several reasons. I could walk there, thus alleviating my need to drive around people who are hell bent on having people visit me in the hospital. I could go at any time rather than only going before work as I assumed I would since it seemed likely to me that she would be in a hospital near her home. And the Wife works at the Wife’s hospital. In fact, she is a head nurse. This means that I can easily get information that would be tediously difficult to get otherwise and I can be a hero by bringing a head nurse into a patient’s room. This is a major score to these people, though I was far more interested in the information gathering aspect.

From Boss Lady II I found that Sunny was in an “accident”, her mother was driving but probably survived since she was the one who told Boss Lady II about it, and she was at the Wife’s hospital. From the Wife I learned how the “accident” happened, what medical procedures Sunny had already undergone and which she will likely have in the future, how long she will likely be in the hospital and at home in recovery, and where she specifically was in the hospital. At any other hospital it would have taken me all day to simply confirm that she was there.

It is worth noting that I gained access to Sunny’s medical information not because I am sleeping with a head nurse but because anyone can gain access to anyone’s medical information. Knowing the Wife simply made it much faster. Privacy is an alien concept at Chinese hospitals. Any reporter can walk into any hospital and get any information about anyone who happens to be there. And they routinely do. When a celebrity is in an American hospital the news reports simply say that there is no word yet on whatever they want to talk about until some doctors holds a press conference and tell the world whatever the patient wants the world to know. When a celebrity is in a Chinese hospital the news reports immediately tell everyone what bodily orifices all the tubes are in and when the patient last had a bowel movement. I was about as horrified as I am capable of getting when the wife of a prominent politician was in a car “accident” that severed one of her legs and caused all kinds of internal damage and the television crews were right there in the emergency room with a camera in her face, asking her all manner of idiotic questions while the doctors were trying to prevent her death.

Another curiosity about the Chinese is that when I asked Boss Lady II what hospital Sunny was in, she wanted to know why. I would have thought the answer obvious, but I have spent years stating the obvious so I went against my better judgement and told Boss Lady II that I was going to pay a visit. She quickly pointed out that Sunny is no longer my student. An arbitrary schedule change some months ago saw to that. Apparently, visiting a student who was recently almost killed in a car “accident” is unusual, but visiting a former student is unheard of.

Sunny was asleep in the passenger seat. Her mother was driving while heavily medicated. Sunny woke up in the ICU with tubes in her body and surgical wounds in her abdomen. Her mother walked away without a scratch, as often happens. The asshole who caused it is unscathed while innocent bystanders are killed or maimed.

The prevailing Chinese attitude seems to be that while Sunny’s mother was obviously at fault she had no choice. She had to get home and she had to take her medications. Call me a foreigner, but I think there were other options. I know nothing about her medications or why she takes them so I cannot address that. But I am fairly confident that there were other choices to driving.

Taxis are abundant around here and relatively cheap, with rates slightly higher than Thailand and lower than Korea. And taxi drivers will probably not stare at Sunny’s mother with mouths wide open when she tells them where she wants to go in Chinese. There are also much cheaper buses, though they do not go everywhere. And there are hotels, motels and tiny dirt cheap shacks all over the place. If one cannot drive right now there are always alternatives.

Sunny’s spleen is permanently damaged. Part of it was removed during her first surgery and they will probably take all of it in the coming weeks. Without a spleen she will be more susceptible to sepsis and bacterial infections, and she lives in a place that is always susceptible to SARS, bird flu, pig flu and whatever the next pandemic will be. Most vaccines will be useless to her, and the older she gets the more likely she will develop pneumonia, renal failure and/or heart failure. She will have to take medications for the rest of her life and is at increased risk of stroke, heart attack, arthritis, bone necrosis, gallstones, kidney necrosis, ocular hemorrhaging, hypertension, various immune reactions and fetal retardation and spontaneous abortion if she is ever pregnant. But that should not be much of an issue since she now has a large scar just below where her left breast will one day be. This will make her largely unacceptable to most Chinese men since this culture values appearance above all else.

This all happened because her mother drives like a Chinese person.

---

Update: Sunny returned to school in April as enthusiastic and happy as ever, although more pale than usual.

23 Million Monkeys With 23 Million Cars Cannot Write Hamlet But They Can Really Fuck Up Your Day

Pi Chi and I have decided to move. Partly because it is far more convenient to live where at least one of us can walk to work and partly because we found a really nice apartment. Pi Chi’s apartment is dark. All of the apartments in this country are dark. You have to turn lights on even in the middle of the day. Not only because the curtains are always closed but also because even with the curtains open there is never enough light. The curtains are always closed because Pi Chi’s apartment, like every other apartment, is inches away from the next building. But even when she is not home and I open the curtains there is never any light because her apartment, like every other apartment, was designed to keep light out. Sunlight is a national disgrace to Chinese people. If you are not whiter than Michael Jackson, you lose face. Anyone with any kind of tan obviously spends time in the sun and anyone who spends any time in the sun is obviously a manual laborer and therefore an inferior person. Ironically, most of the people around here are naturally tan colored, but many of them use skin whitening lotions and super lucky magic potions to make themselves ghostly white. Where I come from people who are not Michael Jackson risk cancer to make themselves darker. The skin is always greener on the other side.

We found a very nice apartment from which Pi Chi can easily walk to work. It is owned by the hospital so we get a discount. Pi Chi says we get a discount, but since you have to work at the hospital to live there and what they are charging us is their usual price, I say it is not a discount. But it is much cheaper than an equivalent apartment would be elsewhere in the same city.

Actually I think it would be very difficult to find an equivalent apartment in the same city. The new apartment has enormous windows all over the place. This is very rare around here. The new apartment has a real kitchen. This is completely unheard of around here. I wanted this apartment as soon as I saw the kitchen. Pi Chi says it is too expensive. But this three-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment with a real kitchen, large living room, separate dining room and plenty of hall space costs less than half of what I paid for my last American apartment, which was much smaller and did not even have a separate bedroom. And if we sell Pi Chi’s apartment she can help pay for everything. In theory at least. I know she will never help pay the rent, but at least if she sells her apartment she might have enough money to stop expecting me to pay for everything. I think she has known me long enough to realize that picking up the tab is not what I do best.

With three bedrooms we will now have a spare room should anyone decide to visit. I know that is unlikely since most of everyone Pi Chi knows lives within a thirty minute drive and most of everyone I know will never set foot in this country. Pi Chi’s apartment has always had three bedrooms, but the guest room was used by her sister for entirely too long. I still do not understand why she could not have moved out sooner. She was living with Pi Chi while her and her then fiance’s new house was being built, but she should have relocated once I moved in. I still do not understand why it took five years to build that house. It is not even a house. It is an apartment, but they call apartments houses. I still do not understand why she even lived with Pi Chi in the first place. She worked a few hours away. There must have been something much closer available.

Unless there is a catastrophic event involving death and destruction, Pi Chi and I will live alone in the new apartment. Or if someone really needs a place to say. Who am I to say no. One of the best things about Pi Chi’s family is that they all seem to like each other and most of them have room for guests if necessary. There are many options should anyone find themselves off their feet. That is why families were invented. In that spirit, if any of my relatives ever need a place to stay, I have room. Of course, this would require leaving your homeland and moving to the other side of the world where you probably do not understand the language or culture and it might take time to adjust to people who would rather kill you than slow down half a kilometer, but if life as you know it suddenly sodomizes you violently and turns your world into a festering shitheap, it is always an option.

About seven weeks ago I broke my ankle at work, but not really. I walked on a cane for most of the time since. I had only recently started hobbling around on my own, but I still brought my cane on trips outdoors because these “sidewalks” are not always what one would call horizontal. There are no sidewalks here, but it is much easier to put sidewalks in quotation marks than to explain the lack of sidewalks. Walking on a cane makes moving things more interesting. I am an easy person to move. I have some experience with moving. I came to this country with a single suitcase. I have slightly more crap now, but still enough to move in a car. Pi Chi has considerably more crap. She has lived in her apartment for at least 13 years. I really have no idea who long she has been there because every time I ask her I get a different answer. This is common. I think it is cultural. If you ask people their age they will give you different answers depending on their mood. And also not many people know how old they really are around here. Chinese children turn two at their first birthday. If I ask my students how old they are they get confused. And not because they do not understand the question.

Pi Chi’s crap will require professional movers. No easy feat since there really are no professional movers around here. We will have to pay sweaty dudes with a truck to haul her crap. I doubt they are insured for damages. But the more they damage the less we have to move. I have a good excuse for helping as little as possible since I am currently lame. Some would say I have always been lame. Lamentably, I do not have a good excuse for helping since Pi Chi is a nurse and knows exactly how lame I am. In this culture you have to be dead or rich to get any sympathy from your woman.

On Friday some “professional” movers came to the apartment to look over all of Pi Chi’s crap and determine how badly they could swindle us. Pi Chi even took time off work to be here when they came. It should be noted that Pi Chi takes time off work at the drop of a hat. Not literally, but I could probably get her to take the day off by dropping a hat if I tried. She once took the day off because she had a mosquito bite. There was no malaria or wacky fever disease. She simply found any excuse she could and took the day off. I am surprised she still has a job. On the other hand, everyone else probably does the same thing.

Previous movers had come on previous days, but they wanted to charge too much. Pi Chi reasoned that people who were only available during regular business hours would be less expensive. I am not sure how that works, but she would have taken the day off no matter what. My job was to leave the apartment while they were there. The logic being that if they saw a white face they would want to charge more. This is very reasonable. White people pay more for everything here. When anyone sees a foreigner their eyes light up with cartoon dollar signs. I chose to go to the nearby grocery store for nothing in particular since hobbling there and back should take enough time. While I was there I might as well get some candy.

While I was limping my way to the one intersection between Pi Chi’s apartment and the grocery store I was suddenly filled with an overwhelming sense of dread. This was not my usual sunny optimism. I knew with absolute certainty that something bad was going to happen. I thought about Pi Chi alone in the apartment with sweaty dudes who drive moving trucks and all the horrible things that could go horribly wrong. I stopped hobbling and decided to go back to the apartment. Paying too much because I am a foreigner seemed much better than the alternative. But I also thought about how that kind of thing is extremely rare in this culture. These are horribly selfish people, but not violent criminals. And Pi Chi is not the kind of person to take much crap from strangers. Even if she could not defend herself physically, she could make enough noise to bring enough neighbors running. These are also very nosey people.

I vacillated between going back to the apartment and going to the grocery store. I sent Pi Chi a text message instructing her to call me when the movers arrived and make it obvious that she was talking to her big strong boyfriend who would be home at any minute. As long as they did not know he was a rich foreigner. I figured that I could probably still get some candy and make it back before anything untoward could happen.

At the intersection I waited for the light to turn green. I always do. These are not the safest drivers in the world. Crossing at a green light is dangerous. Crossing at a red light is suicidal. Not in the way that eating McDonald’s is suicidal. It is more like lighting a chainsaw on fire and carving yourself suicidal. While I was in the intersection I noticed a car running the red light and coming toward me. “That asshole almost hit me”, I thought to myself. A fraction of a second later he did. If you have ever watched an episode of “Starsky & Hutch” you know what happens when someone is hit by a car. I flew unto the hood of the car like the heroic detective chasing the street thug. Only it was not very exciting. Either my cane or my hand made quite the dent in the car’s hood. Then my ass showed the pavement who was boss.

When I lifted myself from the dirty street I noticed that my left pant leg was torn at the ankle. This was the same ankle that I had broken at work, but not really, exactly seven weeks before. I was only starting to walk on my own and now it felt as though maybe something was amiss. But I was not in any pain. I mostly felt that the best course of action at that point would be to see how much I would have to beat this fucknut’s head in with my cane before I got to the chewy center. It took some self-control to keep from beating the shit out of this puppetfucker. I was personally offended. You can say whatever you want to me and it will wash off like welts on a runaway slave’s back. I might even agree with you. I am difficult to offend. But hitting me with your car because none of these fucksacks can ever follow the most basic rules of the road or common sense just pisses me off. When I called Pi Chi she did not answer her phone, of course. She never does. But she soon called me because she was to call when the movers arrived. I told her that I was hit by a car and she asked me if the car was ok. I said something to the effect of “fuck the car” and expressed my opinion that I am more important than some horsewhore’s car. When she arrived on the scene she was surprised to find me lying on the curb and Monkeyfucker’s car parked oddly nearby. She then explained that she thought I had been hit by a car while I was driving her car. No such luck.

She then spent a good deal of time arguing with Shitbag, as is the custom in these situations. But in this instance, every time he tried to raise his voice I made like I was going to rearrange his ugly sack of shit face. I think this is probably the best way to go. It really saves time. His excuse was that he could not see me. I am larger than almost everyone in this country. I was wearing a red shirt at the time. Red is a lucky color. I was crossing at a well-lit intersection. And he obviously saw me because he hit the brakes before he hit me. But all the assholes have excuses. The dipshit blue truck driver who hit Pi Chi’s car because he drives like a dipshit blue truck driver said he had a headache. He was also driving at night without his lights on, but that is pretty common.

Pi Chi called an ambulance, but I said I really did not need an ambulance. Her hospital was only a ten minute drive away. She then explained that the ambulance was free. Apparently you can have an ambulance drive you to pretty much any hospital or clinic in whatever county you are in without charge. I have no idea why no one bothered to tell me this when I broke my ankle at work, but not really, and drove myself 45 minutes to Pi Chi’s hospital.

At the hospital I talked to a tired old police officer who seemed like he would rather be anywhere else. The shitsack who hit me had followed us to the hospital. This seemed odd to me. If you do not give a shit enough to ever stop at right lights why would you give a shit when you inevitably hit someone. The Chinese are not known for their respect of privacy and hospitals are no exceptions. Anyone can go pretty much anywhere in a hospital and watch. Fucksock decided he wanted to participate while I was sitting on an emergency room bed and talking to the lazy police. I convincingly expressed my opinion that he did not need to be there. This forced the lazy cop to talk to both of us in separate locations. That meant he had to walk an extra twenty feet.

Suckstain told the police that he was turning left on a green light while I was crossing the street. This was completely false. He was going straight and blatantly ran a red light. I took pictures with the crappy little camera in my phone that clearly showed that his car could not have possibly been turning left and ended up in the position it was in. His car was stopped on the painted crosswalk so it was pretty easy to make out angles in the photograph. But by the time the police arrived on the scene, after I had left, Shit4brains had moved his car out of the road and parked. This is a direct violation of local law. Everyone is supposed to leave vehicles where they are in an accident until sufficient bribes are paid and the police can decided whom they want to blame.

The photographs on my phone did not impress the lazy police officer and he announced that he was leaving since he could not effectively communicate with me. Even though Pi Chi was there to translate whatever I could not say. Like “douchebag”, for example. I have no idea how to say that in Chinese. I live in a city that is large enough to have a foreign affairs police office. Supposedly those police are supposed to be summoned when a foreigner is involved in such a situation. They never came nor was I ever contacted by anyone later. Loves2lickmonkeysacks was never charged with any crime even though he admitted to hitting a pedestrian while turning left and moving his car before the police could investigate. Apparently running the red light would have been the greater crime than hitting a pedestrian. He paid my hospital bill, but that was neither required by law nor anywhere close to expensive. I had health insurance by this point so I think the grand total was somewhere near US$30. He only paid because not paying would make him lose face. I kind of think running a red light and hitting a pedestrian is worse, but I am only a foreigner.

The doctor came just before the lazy cop left and when he asked me how I was I told him that I was in a pretty fucked up country where bitchmonkeys can hit pedestrians and the police are too lazy to give a shit. He seemed genuinely embarrassed, but the lazy cop really did not give a shit. In a culture where losing face is the worst thing in the world there seem to be a lot of people who really do not give a shit about anything. I think simply driving the way they drive would be a great loss of face.

This time I had to wait in line to get my digital x-ray. I had Pi Chi there to bypass most of the bullshit, but it was a Friday night. When you combine weekend binge drinking and people who drive like retarded lemurs on ritalin the emergency room gets a little busy. Ordinarily Pi Chi wheels me into x-ray in a wheelchair, but this was a Friday so there were none available. I got to travel by hospital gurney. This is fun because they are never moved by hospital staff. Relatives or whoever happens to be with the patient is responsible for transportation. If you have no friends or family with you, be prepared for a long night. Sometimes cheap medical care is cheap. In my case I was pushed around by someone who works at the hospital, but Pi Chi is not very good at moving gurneys. She drove it the way everyone around here drives their cars and we hit pretty much everything in the hallways. By the time she wheeled me back to the ER the doctor was looking at my digital x-ray.

This time it appeared that two of my bones had fused together. The doctor said that this probably will not cause any permanent effects, but these words were not very reassuring to me. The thought of having any permanent problems because some selfish assbag drives like all the selfish assbags around here and will never be held accountable for his actions did not make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Pi Chi told me that I could sue this particular assbag, but it would be extremely difficult to prove that he ran the red light since there are no traffic cameras at that intersection and the photographs on my phone do not count since I took them. Hitting me was never in doubt. The legal question is whether he hit me because he ran a red light or because he turned left on a green light. I contacted the closest thing to an American government agency around here to see if they had any legal advice. They have yet to respond. Eventually I decided to let it go since I was more angry than injured and it will be much healthier for me to move on than to deal with a long and probably fucked up legal battle that would likely only piss me off more than the “accident” itself. I think when you purposely drive the way these people drive you cannot call the inevitable outcome an accident.

But I went back to walking on the cane, so there is always that to enjoy.

Some would say that my feeling that something bad was going to happen was a warning about getting hit by the car. My guardian angel was looking out for me. If that is the case then my guardian angel is an asshole. Had I not stopped at the intersection and thought about going back I would have missed the car completely. Whatever convinced me that something was amiss led directly to my getting hit. But I do find it interesting that I knew without question that something bad was going to happen. I was simply wrong about who it was going to happen to. I am about as far from psychic as you can get. Most of my premonitions are along the lines of some celebrity will die eventually.

And the movers charged a small fortune.

Warning: The preceding post may have contained strong language. You should not have read it if you are easily offended by shit like that.