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.

So You Think You Can Drive Chinese

One of the first things most foreigners notice when they come here is that pedestrians do not have the right of way. Nobody has the right of way. Right of way is an alien concept. As is stopping at red lights, driving in one lane at a time, parking in only one space at a time, driving on the right side of the road. The list is endless. Every day I see people turn left from the right hand lane, turn right from the left hand lane, make u-turns from any lane in any direction, regardless of light color. People park wherever they want. There are very few real parking spaces in the cities so they will park absolutely anywhere. There are very few sidewalks in this country. Probably because if there were people would park on them.

In order to drive here legally you have to pass a written test and a driving test. The driving test is a joke. It is on a closed track without any obstacles. There are no other cars; no trucks, buses, scooters, bicycles, ox carts, farm vehicles, pedestrians or dogs. There are none of the situations every driver faces on the streets every day. If you can start the engine and not hit the borders of the track, you can pass the test. Licensed drivers never have to demonstrate any knowledge of the road or ability to drive. All you are required to do is drive around the track, back into one parking space, parallel park in a space that is much larger than anything you will find in the real world, and drive backwards on a curved road. The most interesting part is driving backwards on the curve because the written test clearly says that this is illegal. To legally drive in this country you must perform a completely illegal maneuver.

The more you drive around here the more it appears that there are few if any rules and regulations, and even less common sense or courtesy. When you see drivers make recklessly illegal moves in front of police officers who do nothing, it is easy to assume that there are no laws. But the laws exist. They are rarely enforced, and I doubt that most drivers know or care about them, but the written test implies that someone somewhere wrote a few things down.

The written test is more challenging than the driving test because of the creative word usements. All of the following are actual questions taken from the study guide, which are the actual questions on the test. I never bothered to study it, but I read most of the questions because I found them amusing. 

Most of the questions are simple common sense.  

True or false:  
* To use overpasses or under passed would be the last resort.

* If driver deliberately kills or injuries someone, he will punished accordingly.

* Vehicles should not break down for lack of water or oil.

* Speeding is one biggest reasons for accidence.

* It is definitely reduce accidence if everyone follows the traffic rule.

* The drunk driver cause serious hurt or death. Will punished for find, his license will canceled and cannot retake.

* Driving is both physical and mental work. With a regular life, driving safety can be ensured.

* Must not reverse on bends, narrow roads, steep slopes or one way roads.

(And yet you have to on the driving test.)

Multiple choice:
* I am good driver and always obey traffic law, for traffic safety, I hope traffic police will (1)observe and strongly enforcing traffic law(2)no observe nor enforcing(3)observe but not enforcing.

(This reveals a great deal about local law enforcement that such a question is even on the test.)

* When the blood sprays out continuously, that will bleeding of (1)vein(2)capillary(3)artery.

(The answer is obvious, but why is this on a driving test?)

* When the broken bone is out of skin, should (1)push it back to original place(2)stop bleeding first(3)sent injurer to hospital.

(If any of my bones are out of my skin, the last person on Earth I want touching me is some dude who just hopped off his scooter.)


There are the usual questions about being a good citizen.

True or false:  
* I discover from two passenger whispered conversation they are the drug dealers. To help my country, I should take to police stations and not them to escape.

* If driver has no driving moral, it is misfortune for him and others.

* Politeness and forgiveness is best driving behavior.

Multiple choice:  
* If driver wish to uphold national honor, promote social state ability and family happiness, they should (1)have driving morals and obey law(2)have good driving skill(3)not drink or smoking.

* The driver clothes and appearance should (1)have limits(2)clean and dignified(3)not important.


There are also too many questions about weight and height limits for trucks and other things that make more sense on a professional driving test.

True or false:
* If driver finds the infective, mental ill passenger or some carry stinky stuff. He can make excuse and refuse admission to passenger.

* Those with heavy truck driving licenses may a tactor or mini bus.

* Both owner and the driver should responsible for loading goods.

(I assume this is about trucks. Or am I legally obligated to help Pi Chi carry all of her crap out of her car?)

Multiple choice:
* If because of sickness or going abroad, professional driver is unable to his license re-examed on time, he must give proof and have his professional license re-examed within (1)1 months of recovery or returning(2)3 months of recovery or returning(3)6 months of recovery or returning.

* Those who apply for having license to drive container lorry, their past experience should first have drivers license (1)for driving sedan more 1 years or for driving heavy truck more 2 years(2)for driving heavy duty truck more 1 years(3)for driving coach more 1 years or for driving heavy truck more 2 years.

* What is limit truck charring dangerous goods may parked to bridge, tunnel or five? (1)50 meters(2)100 meters(3)200 meters.  

* When have old, difficult moving passengers, should (1)say no to them(2)drive after they sit well(3)double passenger fee.

* When loading dangerous goods, must follow regulations. Or will be find and (1)will marked 2 violation points(2)will marked 1 violation points(3)will not marked any violation point.

(How many people really know?)


There are more than a few questions that have questionable answers.

True or false:
* When wishing overtake, should give two short honks or flashing the lights once, wait for car in front slow down or make hand signal. Only then can overtaking.

* If front car doesn’t reduce speed and drive aside, you should not overtake. If you did, you’ll be find and be marked 1 violation points.

(The answers are true. You can only pass another car when it signals that you can pass. That cannot be right. And if it is then absolutely no one in the entire country ever obeys this law. Including me.)

* Only person involved or legal representative or guardian or heir can mediate the accidence.

(The answer is true. My heirs can mediate the accidence. Apparently.)

* When green light says you can pass, driver should pay attention of cars and pedestrians illegal going through red light.

(False. Drivers should not pay attention to anyone running the red light. This explains why no one ever does.)

* Drivers who injured people because broke the traffic safety rule will their license revoked.

(False. Personal injury is a very low priority.)

* When drive on highway, lane for reducing speed, or single lane highway entrance and exit ramps, cannot overtaking. On acceleration lane, if front car drives slowly and blocks traffic, can overtaking.

(False. You can pass someone on a single-lane on-ramp and cannot pass a car that is going slow. I think maybe it should be the other way around.)

* When you driving with tired body, will easily cause accidence.

(False. Tired bodies never cause accidence.)

Multiple choice:
* If driver hit working police officer while drive, his driving license will invalidated and (1)cannot take road test in next year(2)cannot take road test in next 3 year and a find NT30,000-60,000(3)can never take road test.

* Driver who kill people because broke traffic safety will (1)have license canceled and may not retake test for 5 year(2)have license canceled and may not retake test for 3 year(3)have license canceled and must wait year before retake.  

(The answers are (2) and (3). If you hit a cop under any circumstance you lose your license for three years and pay a large find. If you kill a civilian while driving illegally you only lose your license for one year and need not worry about paying any pesky finds.)

* Which following illicit behaviors can it are directly reporting police? (1)Unlicensed driving(2)Drunk driving(3)Illegal park without driver attendance.

(You might think the answer is (2). That is the most illegal. But the correct answer is (3).)

* When car is sliding and out of control, you should (1)brake right away and turn opposite direction(2)brake right away and no turn(3)no turn wheel instead, follow the direction of sliding.  

(All of these options are stupid and would likely bring pain. The correct answer is (1), which would cause your car to spin uncontrollably.)


And some of the questions I had to read several times before I had any idea what they were talking about.

Multiple choice:
* The two directors on highway dividing by (1)same markings as normal roads(2)absolutely dividing method in order have two unilateral director road(3)color of lights.

* If driver not follow police officer persuasion when commit illegal parking or over speed police (1)can inform driver again(2)cannot inform again(3)can detain driver and car.

* When have serious accidence with you car should (1)have regular check after repaire car(2)have temporary check after repaire car(3)to apply for number plate check after repaire car.

* If vehicle not equipped with tachygriph owner will find (1)$12,000 to 24,000(2)$15,000 to 60,000(3)$ 9,000 to 12,000.

* The car accidence happened inner lane because passer-by or other slow driving car doesn’t follow rule and cause the hurt or death, driver who driving inner lane and follow regulation will punishment is (1)original sentance(2)mitigating the punishment(3)comulating the punishment.

* Driver should taking roadway safety lecture if following illegal behavior is happened (1)Run acrossing railway(2)Cause accidence illegally with license detained(3)Above mentioning correct.

* People should taking roadway safety lecture if following illegal behavior is happened (1)Driver’s left child who under 6 years older or is needing the special care of car alone(2)Legal agent or guardian allow teenager who under 18 years age of unlicensed driving, racing or dangerous-drivering(3)Above mentioning correct.

* If car driver is found that snake on road will punished (1)find, number plate will detained 3 months(2)find, roadway safety lecture(3)find, roadway safety lecture, number plate will detained 3 months.

(I still have no idea what the hell this means. Is the snake punished? Some of my students often write snake when they mean snack, but changing those words does not help.)

* What is main reason to cause the accident while turn left? (1)Driver ignores(2)Dead space(3)Inner wheel turning distance.

* The identification of the “Visional Tunnel Effect” is driver has the visional mistake of bright front side but dark side in surrounding of drunk-driving. Therefore, what will driver visional became if driver is drunk-driving? (1)No visional change(2)Visional becomes hard(3)Visional becomes soft.

* If notice somebody take animals go through road, should (1)horn them and make aware of surround(2)increase the speed and go through road before they(3)reduce the speed and wait for going through.

(People taking animals go through road is not at all rare around here so the question deserves a space on the test, but as usual the answer has nothing to do with how people actually drive.)


Most of the things I see drivers do every day are illegal according to the test.

Multiple choice:
* Slower cars should drive in (1)inside lane(2)outside lane(3)slow lane.  

(Slow cars, trucks, buses use every lane. In South Africa, I was impressed by trucks going out of their way to move aside so cars could pass, even on narrow roads. Here, trucks and buses go out of their way to jump in front of faster cars and drive next to other trucks so that no one can get by.)

* When you driving (1) may use handy phone to dial or answer(2)may not use handy phone to dial or answer(3)may use handy phone to dial or answer if traffic condition is find.

(People use handy phone while driving all the time. Handy phones are an extension of self around here. I have 10-year-old students with handy phones. I never had a handy phone when I was 10. When Pi Chi drives while screaming into her phone I point out that it is illegal. I might as well tell her to drive in only one lane.)

True or false:
* On hearing ambulance, fire engine, police car or rescue vehicle, no matter which direction is coming from, should give way and must not following quickly.

* On a two-lane road, when entering a lane, right of way should be given to vehicles already on lane.

* At intersection where are lanes specified for right or left turn, vehicles which go straight may not use these lanes.

* At intersection with no lights or policeman and both road are main road, cars on left should give way to cars on right.  

* On two-lane road, when vehicle wishes turn left, he should use indicate 30 meters from intersection. When reaching center of intersections, turn left. Not use oncoming lane left turn lane.

* When pedestrians crossing ahead, you should slow down.

* Where there are signs prohibiting U turns, overtaking or changing lane, car must not make U turns.

* Do not park at station, airport, quay, school or hospital entrances.

* On same lane, if front car want reduce speed and stop, he should warn following car by signaling in advance.

* Do not park where you will clearly obstructing other vehicles.

* In normal weather condition, driver should obey marked speed limit rules.

* Vehicle on highway must not race at high speed or drive slowly side by side.

* When driving on highway, should pay greater attention to movement of other vehicles on both side.

* When changing lane, use indicator lights to give vehicle behind advance warning. You must also pay attention to movement of vehicles around you. 

* Before enter lane or change the lane, should use turn signals and check lane next you.

All of these are true. Foreigners who drive here might be surprised to see that these things are indeed illegal. And yet I see the locals break every single one of these rules every day. I live next to a hospital so I have a good deal of experience with ambulances. I am the only one who ever lets them pass. And usually when I do, several cars recklessly jump in front of me. Yielding to emergency vehicles, pedestrians, cars that clearly have the right of way or anybody is just crazy talk. I can only assume that to yield is to show weakness before the enemy. And that is what every other driver seems to be.

And the questions about paying attention are laughable. Paying attention is simply not a Chinese character trait. Drivers are rarely aware of anything that is not within 5 feet in front of them. Pedestrians routinely slam into each other, and they travel at much lower speeds. I have often said that you could walk down the street wielding a chainsaw and people would still walk right into you. And everybody seems to walk the way they drive. That is not a good thing in a place so crowded.  

True or false:
* When see vehicle nearby is indicate and preparing to change lane, you should increasing speed to avoid being overtake.

(The best way to get a slow car to speed up is to make him think you want to change lanes. Drivers react as if their family will suffer horrible dishonor if anyone passes them. Even if they are driving 5km/h. Especially if they are driving 5km/h.)

* When drive at night and car from opposite direction use upper beam, you should use upper beam as revenge.

(From what I have seen, the high beam is used solely for revenge.)

* If see the elder, children or handicapped people walk slowly on pedestrian cross, you should sound the horn.

(Not only will most drivers honk at old people and children, but they will usually come as close to hitting them as possible. Except when they actually hit them. I do not understand why handicapped people are included. The handicapped are rarely seen in public.)

* When see red light, you can still turn left if traffic not busy.

(Everyone turns left at red lights. I used to think it was legal since it is so common. But there is no such thing as traffic not being busy.)

* You may throw anything you like while driving on freeway.

(Throwing trash out of moving cars is an art form around here. I have seen people throw kitchen-sized garbage bags out of their windows. I saw a scooter driver throw his drink cup straight up into the air while he was driving. It nearly landed on another moving scooter.)

* A driver doesn’t have care about traffic rules.

(From what I have seen no one cares at all about any traffic rules.)


It is easy to pass the test without knowing about most of these rules. I passed without understanding much of the test. Once you have a license you never have to take the test again and since the laws are rarely enforced there is little reason to obey them. “Monkey see, monkey do” should be the official motto. When newer generations constantly see anarchy, they will follow along.

I drove in this country illegally for years. I can appreciate the irony of complaining that no one obeys any of the laws that are never enforced. But I am probably the safest driver in the entire country. I stop at red lights. I drive on the right side of the road. I have never driven into oncoming traffic. I have never driven backwards on the freeway. I look before I leap. I yield to everyone and everything. I have never hit any other cars. Every day someone comes within inches of hitting me. Usually because they are unaware that other people exist and they do whatever the hell they want. I have never been in any accidents in this country when I was the driver. Every year thousands of people die at Pi Chi’s hospital because of traffic accidents. I have seen enough to assume that they died because they or the car that hit them did something really stupid.

These are not inherently stupid people. They invented fireworks and pasta. Some of them can be very nice in person, if you ignore the racism. This is not meant to be a backhanded compliment. I often like living here, despite the tone of everything I have just written. There are advantages to my current lifestyle that might be difficult to find elsewhere. And I have no genuine dislike of Chinese people. Most of the people I know are Chinese. The best relationship I have ever had is with a Chinese woman. And not for the reasons most people in “the West” assume. She is demanding, contrarian, selfish, aging me prematurely, and one of the nicest people I have ever met.

But even nice Chinese people become raging assholes behind the wheel. It is not road rage. It is more like road superiority. Chinese people are without a doubt the most selfish drivers I have ever seen anywhere in the known universe. And probably in the rest of the universe as well. Every single one of them seems to have a sense of entitlement as if wherever they are going and whatever they are doing is infinitely more important than everyone else. This selfishness kills people.  

I am an outsider here. If I live here the rest of my life I will still be a visitor. Children on the street will still point at me and say, “美國人”. When you are a visitor in a strange land you should accept the cultural differences and never expect them to adapt to you. I never complain anymore when people eat with their mouths wide open, proudly release gas from every orifice or scream at the top of their lungs into their cell phones. That is simply their way. But I will always complain when they drive as though they are invincible and no one else exists.  

Several years ago one of my students was hit by a car. She was always the sweetest little girl and too smart for her age. I called her 小 Amy because there were originally two Amys in her class and she was easily the shorter of the two. Whenever I called her 小 Amy she would smile, even if I was calling her to write something on the board.

She was out of school for months after the car hit her. When she eventually came back she used crutches, then walked with a limp. I never saw her happy after she came back. Her test scores went down the toilet. On my last day at the school I gave her an American dime because I had given a girl named Penny a penny and I wanted to give Amy something. Before the accident she would have been overjoyed to see the dime because it was something new and different. When I gave it to her she just stared at it blankly. I have not seen her in years but every time I think about her it still pisses me off. I can only imagine the suffering she went through, and I saw how it clearly changed her. And all because some asshole was driving the way the Chinese drive every day. 

Licensed To Kill

I started driving when I was 15. I started driving legally at 16. About a year before I left my home country, my driver’s license expired. I renewed it as was the fashion of the day. But the DMV would not give me a new license because I was trying to get a commercial license at the time. Why I was trying to get a commercial license remains a mystery to this day. I am simply not the type and would have never fit in with any of my colleagues had I gotten such a job. But I passed the written test and had passenger and air brake endorsements. All I needed was to take the actual driving test, which required driving an actual commercial vehicle. Since the commercial license was still pending, they would not give me a new regular license. The thinking being that the commercial license outranks the regular license so who needs both and why should the DMV spend the money. Even though I was the one paying for them. Instead, I got a little piece of paper that told any interested law enforcement types that my license was indeed current. This paper was only valid for 30 days so I had the pleasure of going to the DMV every 30 days to get another little piece of paper.

Then I left the country and stopped getting the little pieces of paper. But I took my expired but not really expired license with me.

You can get an international license around here if you have a valid license from wherever you are from. When I started driving Boss Lady’s car during my first year, she suggested I might want to get one. My problem was that my valid license said that it expired and it seemed unlikely that any Chinese bureaucrat would believe my story. Especially in English.

An international license is only valid for the first 30 days or six months or year that foreigners are here. Which time limit depends on where you get your information. Foreigners who have been here beyond that time are expected to get a local license and anyone who drives with an international license is actually driving illegally. I eventually reached all of those stages without getting an international license. Getting a local license proved to be difficult since the nearest government office was a good hour drive away and only open on weekdays. I worked every weekday and could not possibly get there and back in the time allotted. Boss Lady also did not want me to drive her car there since I would be driving illegally to the office where people become legal drivers. That may seem reasonable, but she had no qualms about letting me drive her car illegally just about anywhere else.

Eventually I came across the local police while I was driving illegally and discovered that it was much easier to be a foreign driver than to have all the right paperwork anyway. I soon lost interest and no one noticed or cared.

When I moved in with Pi Chi, I started driving her car, but we never really talked about how illegal that is. I try to let her do most of the driving anyway.

Then I got a job that is about 45 minutes from home. Driving proved to be the only way to get there. So I did. At that point I had driven several different vehicle types all over the place without incident and never really thought much about it. When you are surrounded by fatally reckless drivers who would willingly drive over their own grandmothers to get home five seconds sooner, not having a little card seems trivial.  

But then I might have up and got me a stalker. The details about that are still a little hazy and I have yet to decide how to approach the subject in writing. I am sure I will type up something sooner or later. But it quickly became obvious that I should have a driver’s license. Experience has made me impressively skilled at avoiding the endless obstacles on the roads, and if I were a lesser driver I would have been hit by countless people by now. But even the best driver in the world can do little if someone is deliberately trying to damage their car. The local rule is that any unlicensed driver is at fault in any accident regardless of who actually hit whom. According to Pi Chi. So if someone went out of their way to try to hit me and I could not avoid it, I would have to pay heavy fines, I would have to pay what is really just extortion money to the person who hit me, and Pi Chi’s license would be suspended for allowing an unlicensed driver to drive her car.

So I asked the Internet how one goes about getting such a thing around here. The Internet was as useful as a jar of tomatoes on a cactus farm. It lied to me. As it so often has.

With time and the great patience for which I have always been known, I found that the process is simple, if not complicated.

Step 1: Travel to the only city where the tests can be taken in English. This would likely require spending the night since government offices are usually open in the morning and the train never leaves early enough to get there on time. I was confident that I could take the driving test in Chinese but thought that taking the written test in Chinese would be stupid.

Step 2: Fill out a form. This is in Chinese, but that does not bother me since most of the forms I fill out are in Chinese.

Step 2a: Get the form stamped by the appropriate people. An unstamped form is like Wyoming. Pretty to look at but functionally useless.

Step 3: Get a medical test. I get tested medically every year so I already knew how half-assed it would be. This particular medical test is to see if you can stand without falling over and have all of your given extremities. There is also a vision test that has nothing to do with driving.

Step 3a: Get the medical test papers stamped. See above.

Step 4: Give the properly stamped form and medical test, expired foreign driver’s license, passport, resident ID card, two visa-sized photos and cash to the woman at the counter. It is always a woman.

Step 4a: Make sure she stamps the form and medical test. 

Step 5: Take the written test. In “English”.

Step 6: If you pass the written test, make sure the guy stamps the form, and come back in three months to take the driving test. If you fail the written test, you can come back in seven days and take it again.

Step 7: Take the driving test. Make sure that guy stamps the form, and take all of the paperwork to the woman at the window and make sure she stamps all of the forms. If you fail the driving test, you can come back in seven days and take it again.

Step 8: Be sure to renew your license before it expires or you will have to go through the entire process again.

I tried to make an appointment but found that appointments are not necessary. Except for everything beyond taking the written test. I was ready to pack my bags and get it done when Pi Chi told me that I could take the English version very close to home. I found this hard to believe since everything on the Internet told me otherwise. But I did it her way just to humor her, fully expecting to do it my way later.

She took the day off and drove me to the government office. This was unusual and I still do not know why she did. Perhaps like Boss Lady she did not want me to be seen driving her car. What was not unusual was that we arrived much later than we should have because of a communication issue. The test can only be taken at a certain time and it was fast approaching. She had been told that I could take the medical test at the same office. This was false. We had to drive to the nearest authorized clinic when I was sure we would not have enough time to get all the stamps. The clinic was a typically filthy little building where I would not be caught dead with any medical needs. But they were qualified to see if I had all of my arms and legs. Then there was the vision test.

I do not have what one might call great eyesight. I come from a family of relatively blind people. But I did not get my first glasses until I was 24 years old. I still have them. My eyes are weaker than they were when I was 24, but I only wear glasses to drive and watch movies. I never wear them around the house. I cannot wear them at the computer. I wear them during vision tests. I need them to read the Snellen chart.

But I live in a country where 95% of everybody wears corrective lenses. And there is no alphabet. They use different tests and there does not seem to be any standardization. The test in question was unusual in that it would have been better without glasses. There was a point where my score was a judgement call and the woman behind the counter went ahead and scored it in my favor. Chinese people will often cheat on meaningless things, like tests to determine if a person is too blind to operate potentially fatal machinery. 

Stamped medical report in hand, we rushed back to the government office just in time to get it stamped and go to the testing room. I was still unconvinced that it would be in English. Especially since this was a small office and there are not many foreigners in the neighborhood.

The test was in English, more or less. Mostly less. I passed. I had to read some of the questions repeatedly. I guessed at about a quarter of them. I have since read the questions and answers and still do not understand some of them. It is not that the questions are difficult. It is that they were obviously translated by someone who does not understand basic rules of English grammar and spelling. Fortunately, I live and work with such people and no longer look twice at sentences without pronouns, articles, conjunctions, verbs or nouns.

After lunch we were supposed to come back for the driving test. The Internet repeatedly told me that there was a three month wait between tests, ostensibly to learn how to drive. There is even a flow chart in the government office with the same information. But both tests can be taken on the same day. What was even better was that once all the paperwork had all the correct stamps, we went to the woman behind the counter and she printed up my license right then and there. She glued one of my visa photos to a piece of paper and laminated everything. It is unimpressive and expires in three months, but at least now when I am inevitably hit by another car it will not be my fault. Assuming the police listen to my side of the story rather than just go with whatever one of their own kind says.

My license expires in three months because it is only good as long as I have a resident card. Even though I took all the same tests and have all the same stamps on the same forms as the locals, licenses held by foreigners are only valid while their resident cards are valid. Those are generally only valid for one year. So we have to renew our driver’s license every year while the locals have to renew theirs every six years. Even though my resident card actually expires in four months, it expires in three since that is when my passport expires. The resident card is only good as long as I have a passport. So when I get my new passport I will have to get a new resident card and then I can renew my new driver’s license. But since my resident card will expire one month after I get it, so will my license. In 2010 I will have to pay for three resident cards and three licenses. Yet the one passport costs more than everything else combined.

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.

My Second (Far Less Amusing) Encounter With Chinese Police

My weekend started like every other weekend. On Saturdays I wake up anywhere between whenever I wake up and 8am. Unlike every other day of the week I actually have to be at work before 4pm. Most Saturdays I work from 9am to 9pm, with two or three very long breaks. I may be the only foreign teacher here who works a full day on Saturdays (or any other day for that matter), but on this particular day I worked for 10.5 long hours. That has got to be a record. I think most of the foreigners would quit their jobs rather than work a full day. After working part time for so long I am not entirely wild about working a real day, but I would not quit unless this kind of thing happened at least two or three times. The reason for this sudden glimpse into the real world was that I arranged to take the following Monday off for a weekend trip to the coast. As the only English teacher here I cannot simply switch schedules with someone else. Ordinarily when I take a day off (which has only happened fewer times than I have found shards of my teeth in my food) one of the Chinese teachers takes my classes. It is a step backward on the educational dance floor, but at least I get out of the building for a while.

After a grueling day that only prisoners of Manzanar can relate to I caught the 11:35 (pm) to 左營. The main benefit to taking the train so late at night is that it is not nearly as crowded. Ordinarily (between 6am and 10pm) the trains are packed tighter than that porn star who set the record for most anal penetrations in one sitting. So to speak. A major drawback is that it does not arrive until after 1am, and since it is always delayed, even later. I “alighted” the train at 1:30am, a good 20 hours after I awoke. “Please watch you step when alighted”.

This is where things start to go downhill.

At 1:40am Pi Chi and I were in her three week old Mazda Isamu traveling down a relatively quiet street when a scooter monkey decided to drive across the road and directly in front of her car. Fortunately, she is perhaps the only Chinese person alive today who actually drives within the legal speed limit. Whatever that may be. It is not that she is a good driver. She has a fondness for making u-turns in the middle of congested roads and driving in multiple lanes at the same time. Neither of which are in any way uncommon here. But she does not usually drive terribly fast, which proved to be a good thing in this instance. Had she been driving like the rest of the country, said scooter monkey would be dead. As it was he suffered no apparent injuries and his scooter and her car were only superficially scratched.

When the scooter first appeared Pi Chi hit the brakes and my immediate thought was that she could not possibly stop in time. She did not. I believe I mentioned something about a dog’s male offspring. I was not concerned for his safety or ours. The impact was simply not that hard. I was not thinking of the immediate consequences. Indeed I was not even aware there would ever be any consequences. Abysmal driving rarely has consequences around here. I was not considering how this could hinder our impending weekend getaway. My sole concern at this point was that this asshole just scratched a brand new car. After 10 years another dent is just another endangered species going extinct. In for a penny, in for a pound, I never say. But that first scratch on a new car is worse than a lizard tail in your mashed yams.

While Pi Chi and Scooter Joe were squawking at each other in some heathen babble (after 20 hours of uninterrupted wake it all sounds like pigs being gutted to me) I was watching a police car casually approach the scene and wondering how and why they arrived so soon. A simple turn of my ever observant head revealed that across the street was a police station. Lucky us.

When the police arrived I wondered how they would interpret the situation. The drivers were male and female, and I could easily see the male police taking the male driver’s side. This is a very sexist country. I, being male, might be able to turn the tide if I could communicate effectively with the authorities. Sadly, I cannot. In this class-conscious society it helped that Pi Chi is the head nurse of the Intensive Care Unit of a very large and possibly famous hospital. Scooter Joe is a 7-11 cashier.  

While all the parties concerned were arguing and the police were pretending to pay attention I noticed something that would make it very difficult for the police to ignore who was at fault. From about four meters away I could smell Scooter Joe’s breath. He also seemed to be having a difficult time remaining erect. This is not an affront on his manhood. He simply could not stand up. During the course of the evening I watched him stumble around in an attempt to walk. Although he was clearly inebriated his driving was not at all unique in these parts. Jumping in front of moving vehicles is like a hobby to these people. While driving I have had large trucks, buses, blue trucks, cars, scooters, pedestrians, and everything in between jump in front of me. Some months ago I could not stop in time and hit a child on a bicycle. His reaction gave me the impression that this was common practice for him. My hand was still on the horn when he got up from the ground and peddled away. Leaving the scene after hitting a child on a bicycle would be a very bad thing in most countries. Here it is in everyone’s best interest to leave the scene immediately.

After about 30 minutes Scooter Joe’s people arrived. They were five to twelve mostly young, ruggedly ugly betel nut chewers. The one in the blue t-shirt was older, and it did not take long for him to protest the situation. At first he wanted Pi Chi to just take some money and call it a day. The police thought that was a wonderful idea. They favor anything that lets them get back to smoking and watching tv. With a brand new car, all the proper insurance and documentation, and being in the right, Pi Chi wanted to do things properly. What was she thinking.

Blue T-Shirt Guy became increasingly hostile. When he started to yell at Pi Chi I stood between them, and he started yelling at me. I said a thing or two that was not entirely diplomatic, but I never matched his lack of control, and only one person there (Pi Chi) understood anything I was saying anyway. She later told me that he warned her against going out with a playboy foreigner and she told him that she sees people like his friend in the hospital every day, only in much worse shape. She obviously did not need my protection. 你去女朋 . (Literally, “You go, girlfriend”, but really gibberish). A linguistic example of the deeply rooted misogyny in Chinese culture: the 女 in “female” is also part of the compound words for slave, flunky, subservient, anger, cruel, tyranny, embezzle, coward, argue, and malaria. By contrast, the 男 of “male” is also in hero, embrace, include, and benign (not malignant) tumor.



Pi Chi, Blue T-Shirt Guy, Useless Cop, Scooter Joe, one of Scooter Joe’s many friends

After another 10 or 20 minutes Angry Blue T-Shirt Guy must have realized that the police were not going to just go away and he sprang into action. What I saw surprised me, and there is very little a drunken Chinese person can do at this point to surprise me. While yelling at both and/or either of the two police officers Angry Blue T-Shirt Guy grabbed one forcefully by the arm hard enough to turn him around. A hostile, possibly drunk civilian was laying hands on a police officer and there was no choke hold, no beating, no imprisonment. The police officer did not even tell Angry Blue T-Shirt Guy to back off. He simply ignored his assailant as if no one was clawing at him. Chinese police are impressively lazy. I would never begin to imply that American police are not lazy, but if someone grabs them violently they and 10 of their colleagues will become very active very quickly.



Blue T-Shirt Guy assaults a police officer while they allow a mob to surround them

While I was still wandering in amazement another police car approached. It looked the same as the first car to me, but Pi Chi expressed approval that the “right police” had arrived. Being very close to the police station, the first police to arrive were merely the local precinct police, apparently not the appropriate authorities in a traffic accident. All of this explained to me, I began to understand why it was taking an hour to write up a minor accident and I was hoping that maybe we could end this soon now that the proper authorities had arrived. It was almost 2:30am.

When the traffic police arrived they asked everybody involved, and even the people who swarmed on the scene after the fact, all the same questions the other police asked. The only difference was that the traffic police came with equipment. They measured the distance between this and that and looked at the skid marks on the street and did all the things traffic police are probably supposed to do.

Pi Chi was able to convince the traffic police that Scooter Joe was drunk. The other police knew it all along, but that probably means more paperwork so they were willing to ignore the obvious. The traffic police whipped out their little breathalyzer and tested Pi Chi. I assumed they would be testing Scooter Joe forthwith, but minutes later Scooter Joe was still wobbling about while Angry Blue T-Shirt Guy was still yelling at everybody except Scooter Joe. Pi Chi later told me that he threatened to hit her right there in front of the police officers. They later said that they heard and saw nothing. Typical of the lazy, inept and often corrupt police force in a country where it seems that every type of official is lazy, inept and corrupt. I still could not believe that Angry Blue T-Shirt Guy was not bleeding and in chains. Or that he was in charge of the scene. He was not driving either of the vehicles and was not even present at the time of the accident, yet the police spoke with him more than anyone else and they let him control the situation.

Eventually the breathalyzer printed out a little receipt which Pi Chi had to sign. Her blood alcohol level was 0.00. Angry Blue T-Shirt Guy suggested that they test me. His theory was that I was the one driving and that I was drunk, despite the fact that I was the calmest person on the scene and the only one capable of standing still for more than ten seconds at a time. If you ignore that I have not had a drop of alcohol since 1987 one can admire Angry Blue T-Shirt Guy’s persistence in defending his friend, if not his methods. Considering the way people drive here the traffic police probably have more experience with traffic accidents than American police have with mustache grooming. It was pretty obvious from the location and position of Pi Chi’s car and Scooter Joe’s scooter that he had to have been driving across the street while she was moving straight ahead within the lane. Even if I had been driving it was clearly the scooter’s fault. I could not tell whether Scooter Joe looked drunk or was just naturally goofy looking, but he could not walk straight or speak clearly, whereas I was my usual pillar of poise, raging charm and enunciation. Not that anyone around here would notice. Pi Chi was somewhere in between, though further on the sober side.

After more questions and shouting the traffic police finally tested Scooter Joe. Angry Blue T-Shirt Guy was decidedly not happy about it. When the test result was printed I went and had a look. Since the scene was anarchy I had no problem looking at whatever I wanted to look at. According to this test Scooter Joe’s blood alcohol level was .54. That seems a little high to me (.08 is illegal in most of the US), although their system might be different from anything I know.

When it seemed like things were starting to calm down and maybe we would be able to leave soon Pi Chi informed me that we now had to go into the police station to give statements and fill out forms. Apparently the hour and a half we spent in the middle of the street blocking traffic was just to determine if the situation warranted going inside to do the paperwork. The scene inside was no better than that outside. Instead of a bunch of angry drunks wandering around the street there were now a bunch of angry drunks crammed into a tiny police station. While one precinct officer filled out a form of Pi Chi’s version of the story another handled Scooter Joe’s side. Scooter Joe had changed his story a few times, but now he was sticking to the defense that he was crossing at the intersection when we hit him. I do not know if he could explain how his scooter managed to fall 10 meters or more before the intersection when the impact would have forced him in the opposite direction. If you have never driven Chinese-style you might find it odd that driving a scooter across a crosswalk would be used as a defense, but driving on crosswalks is so common here that it is probably not illegal even if it is.

While Precinct Officer Number One was taking Pi Chi’s statement one of Scooter Joe’s friends was trying to convince her not to sue. Angry Blue T-Shirt Guy had been replaced by a slightly younger, much calmer version. While this New Guy never yelled at or grabbed anybody I considered him more dangerous. He was sober, calculating, and had an agenda contrary to ours. In a civilized country the authorities keep parties separated to avoid potential conflicts and make life easier. Here anything goes. While New Guy was trying to talk Pi Chi out of doing anything he mentioned the hospital where she worked. She was surprised that he knew where she worked and asked Precinct Officer Number One how this could be. Precinct Officer Number One pointed to one of the computer monitors that had Pi Chi’s information for all the world to see. Pi Chi wanted me to photograph the monitor, showing that the police were doing absolutely nothing to safeguard her information. I naturally assumed that the police would not let me photograph their equipment in their station, and I know enough about Chinese culture to realize that safeguarding personal information is an alien concept. I got my camera out anyway and expected someone, anyone, to tell me to stop. No one did. I was free to photograph absolutely anything I wanted.

During the course of the questioning I went outside to check on Pi Chi’s car several times. When we all went inside she had parked it near the station, but too far away to see from inside. Since some of Scooter Joe’s friends were loitering outside and none of them were entirely rational I felt it prudent to make sure that they were not vandalizing her car. I knew that if they did the police would do nothing. Just outside of the station door some of Scooter Joe’s friends were sitting in a van so I photographed it and its license plate. The van soon drove away. During one of my outings to the car I noticed that some of Scooter Joe’s friends were walking toward the station, away from her car. I went inside and told Pi Chi that I would be staying with the car from this point on. While I walked out to her car one of the police officers followed me. I have no idea why. He was certainly too lazy to be my protection. He watched as I inspected her car for damage and then wanted me to go back to the station. I told him that I was going nowhere as long as this car was vulnerable and those people were wandering around. I said this in English, but with the proper hand signals I think he may have understood me. He soon left and returned with Pi Chi. She told me that we could move the car in front of the station. That did not seem like much protection to me since these police are lazy enough to just sit and watch as someone destroys a car, so I had Pi Chi park directly in front of the door. Again, the police are too lazy to tell us to move it or give us a ticket.

After about an eternity it seemed like things were starting to wrap up. Precinct Officer Number One was getting all of his papers together and seemed to be finished. I asked Pi Chi if we were done and she told me that now we had to talk to the traffic police. I expressed my confusion as to why we were being questioned by the police for about two hours for a minor traffic accident and the drunk driver who caused the accident was not in a jail cell. Pi Chi told me that he would not be going to jail. Despite driving recklessly and causing an accident, despite wasting so much of so many people’s time, despite the fact that he was drunker than a televangelist on election night, he was not going to be arrested. Apparently driving drunk is perfectly legal here. The issue was not that he was driving drunk and could have killed someone. The only reason the police were involved was because there was property damage.

While Pi Chi was answering all the same questions with Traffic Cop Number One, Scooter Joe was in his corner answering questions with another traffic cop. The difference between Precinct Officer Number One and Traffic Cop Number One was that Precinct Officer Number One wrote everything down on pieces of paper whereas Traffic Cop Number One used a computer. I thought the use of technology might speed up the process and I was hopeful until I saw how Traffic Cop Number One typed. While most of us use multiple fingers (I use seven for some reason), Traffic Cop Number One typed with just one. The last time I was tested years ago I typed about 75 words per minute. My unofficial calculation was that he typed about one word per hour. It did not help that he stopped many, many, many, many, many times. He stopped typing the report to talk to other officers. He stopped typing the report to have a cigarette. Indoors, of course. He stopped typing to use the restroom. He stopped typing to argue with New Guy. Long after this had all stopped being amusing I implored Traffic Officer Number One to finish the report and argue with whoever the hell he wanted to argue with later. I pointed out that I could type it up faster, and I cannot type in Chinese. During the course of the evening I said quite a few things that I would never be stupid enough to say in an American police station. It was not the language barrier that dissuaded my self-censorship, but my knowledge that Chinese police are so lazy and so inept that one can violently grab them on the street without repercussion.

Eventually Traffic Cop Number One gave up and let Pi Chi type up the police report. I like to think it was my aggressive complaining, but the real reason was probably something baffling and unheard of in civilized countries. Why is irrelevant, but now Pi Chi, a civilian, was typing the official police report of a traffic accident in which she was involved. A bad idea? Definitely. Blatantly illegal? Probably. But it sped up the process considerably. Meanwhile Traffic Cop Number One was outside with some of his colleagues and Scooter Joe’s friends having a smoke and a good old time. As I watched the sun rise Pi Chi was just finishing what it took a “professional” hours to begin.



Pi Chi typing the police report

At 5:45am we left the police station and began our weekend holiday. So much for sleep. I had only been awake for about 24 hours at this point and knew from experience that I would be getting very little sleep over the next two days.

The drunk driver who started it all was not imprisoned, nor did he lose his license or his scooter. He was fined NT48,000 (about US$1,500). Although he did have to sit in the police station as long as we did and it probably took a lot out of him as the alcohol wore off. His hostile friend who threatened Pi Chi and assaulted a police officer went home with no repercussions whatsoever. We do not yet know how much it will cost to fix Pi Chi’s car, but I am certain we will have to pay for everything.

The people who pissed me off the most in this situation were the police. Scooter Joe did not bother me, although he is a drunk driver and should be made to suffer terribly. Angry Blue T-Shirt Guy was an asshole who said and did things that one really need not say or do to strangers in public, but it was probably all just that typical suppressed Chinese hostility. The police, however, are supposed to be professionals. They work an eight hour shift and it takes them half of that time to type up a simple accident report. What happens when someone is murdered. The best advice I can give to anyone who is in a traffic accident around here is to flee the scene as soon as possible. If you are in any situation that would normally require police assistance, resist your urge to seek out the authorities. Chinese police are more useless than a vestigial tube of cecum and take longer to excise. And they smell worse.  



Scooter Joe. Drunk driver and all around idiot.