I went to the post office to pay the Wife’s bills, as I often do. As a foreigner, I wait in line until it is my turn. I use the word line loosely. What we call a line and the British incorrectly call a queue, the Chinese call a bunch of people all trying to be first all the time.
There are four easy ways to tell that I am a foreigner. I do not even look vaguely Chinese, I rarely spit on public floors, I know what soap is and I wait for my turn. More often than not while I am waiting in line one or more Chinese will push their way to the front. It is not that they are all selfish assholes. That is simply the Chinese way. Also, they are all selfish assholes.
When it is my turn and some selfish Chinese pushes their way in front of me, I usually tell them in Chinese that they have lost face, or I call them selfish homosexuals. This is when they suddenly act surprised that someone else exists. No matter what batshit stupid thing they are doing, they are always baffled whenever anyone calls them on it. Even after all these years, I am still amused by how surprised these people are when they discover that they are not alone on this planet.
I might as well point out that I have no phobia of homosexuals. Except lesbians. Any woman who does not want me clearly has issues. But calling Chinese people homosexual shocks them. They do not care if you call them monkeys, and calling them pigs only mildly annoys them. But if you call them gay, they react as if you just shot their dog. But not really, since these people treat dogs as common sewer rats. I simply used that expression to convey my point. I could also say they react as if you have stolen their television. Losing your television or being homosexual is a fate worse than waiting your turn around here.
When it was my turn at the post office today, some selfish Chinese pushed her way in front of me, as they often do. Rather than engage in a futile attempt to educate her on the most basic points of living in a civilized society, I simply grabbed her money and threw it on the ground. This was probably not the most polite thing to do, but people tell me I need to act more like the Chinese. One cannot be polite and Chinese at the same time.
It should be noted that grabbing someone’s money around here does not elicit any police attention. I could pick every pocket in a room full of dirty smokers and the police officer watching me in the corner would do absolutely nothing. As long as I do not disturb his betel nuts or rob the business that paid him a little extra under the table to be there, he genuinely could not care less. The last thing these police want to do is any paperwork. Preventing crime or apprehending suspects simply requires too much effort.
The Chinese woman whose money I threw on the floor seemed surprised to discover that someone else exists. I cannot read their minds, Buddha be praised, so I will paraphrase what she was thinking.
“Foreigner throw monies? Me no like! All I do push in front, me go, I busy, me go now! Why foreigner do?”
Obviously she was not thinking this. That would indicate an understanding that actions have consequences. When bad things happen to the Chinese it is never because of anything they did. That day was simply the unluck. They can only comprehend consequences when it is someone else’s fault.
A special note to you politically correct douchebags: characterizing a Chinese person as saying “me no like” is not racist. “No likey chop suey” might be since there is nothing called chop suey around here and no one says “no likey”. But I have heard hundreds or thousands of Chinese say “me no like”. English grammar is incredibly complex compared to Chinese grammar and even the best students struggle with it. So, as Gandhi used to say, “Take your PC manual back to Lillypop and Gumdrop Land where all men and womyn are evolved equally and learn something about the world outside your little utopian bubble before you open your smug hippie mouth.” Sometimes the Mahatma really laid it down.
I also want to point out that while the Chinese woman was on the floor picking up her money and I was paying the Wife’s bills, the clerk never even raised an eyebrow. This is not only because they are physically incapable of raising a single eyebrow and are always baffled that we can. He simply did not give a shit about what I did any more than he ever gives a shit about the thousands of people he sees pushing their way to the front of the “line” every day. I cannot read his mind either, but he was mostly thinking about how many minutes there were until he could go to the nearest KTV to get drunk and participate in some illegal but ignored prostitution. I assume.
Putting myself in their shoes, I would be ever so pissed if someone grabbed my money and threw it on the ground. But it is very difficult to put myself in their shoes. Figuratively, of course. Most Chinese rarely wear shoes. I simply do not think the way they do. Once again, I cannot read their minds, so I have no idea what they are thinking when they do the horribly selfish things they do. But I know from firsthand experience that they are oblivious to the people around them, whether they are walking in the middle of the street, urinating on public benches or driving on the sidewalk. And this is as dangerous as it sounds.
For someone to grab my money at the post office, they would have to physically pry it out of my cold, live hands. To grab their money, one simply needs to take it off the counter where they have thrown it down as a way to lay claim to that space, as if to say, my money is now in front of you, therefore it is now my turn.
I cannot imagine wanting to hate my fellow man as much as they do, but this may be my own lack of imagination. Perhaps there is some benefit to being such a selfish asshole that I cannot fathom. I would feel bad about pushing everyone out of my way, treating public spaces as public toilets, killing children, raping the environment, sneezing in someone’s face, stealing wheelchairs and blocking fire exits. But maybe that has more to do with my own cultural hang-ups than the inherent flaws in their culture. Maybe my culture’s ideas of right of way, first come first served, do unto others, don’t kill everybody, a waiting room chair is not a toilet are flawed and the free wheeling Chinese idea of everyone do whatever the hell you want is the way to go. Different strokes.
From my point of view, I would have to be a horribly selfish asshole to act as they do. But that is not their point of view. One could argue that I am a visitor in their land. If I live here until the day I die, and this is very possible what with the way they drive, I will always be a visitor. Their culture should feel no need to adapt to the ways of my culture. As the foreigner, I should adapt. And indeed I think I have. I never complain when they scream at the top of their lungs into their cellphones. Even when it is in an elevator or other small space. I never scream pointedly into my cellphone anymore. When they eat with their mouths wide open and food spills out all over themselves, their tables and the floors around them, I never even notice anymore. I will sometimes point the food on my wife’s shirt out to her, but never in a what-the-hell-kind-of-pig-are-you way. We both usually laugh about her inability to keep food in her mouth. And I cannot remember the last time I saw a mother help her child urinate in the middle of the street because it phases me not. They treat their own country as a giant garbagie can. Who am I to say that this may not be ideal.
I still complain early and often about their horrendous driving, but that is only because I take issue with being killed and watching others killed simply because these people would rather kill and die than wait their turn. No matter how much I adapt to their ways, I like to think that I will always have a problem with being murdered by some selfish asshole.
When I paid the Wife’s bills and walked away, the woman whose money I threw on the floor took her unrightful turn before everyone else and did whatever she was there to do. No one said anything to me about what I did and no one besides me said anything to her about what she did. It was simply another day at the post office.
Somewhere there is a Chinese Facebook entry that reads, “Foreigner throw monies in floor! Unbelieve! Dinner tonight cat! Making delicious!”
15 March 2012
01 February 2012
Slow Boat To China
They say your life flashes in front of you before you die. But while flight 968 was plunging toward the East China Sea, I was not thinking about my third birthday party where I had frosted cupcakes and chicken pox or about how I took my first date with a girl to McDonalds because she had a coupon. I know how to treat the ladies right. While I was sitting next to an emergency exit (which I try to get as often as possible since it has the most leg room in the poor class section) and the possibility of actually having to use it, I was thinking about what a royal pain in the ass it took to get here.
When I first moved to China I thought it would be a good idea to visit China as long as I was in the neighborhood. They have a famous wall near Beijing that people seem to like and some fancy old buildings. I might as well go while I was living relatively close. I have also noticed that wherever I go I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time climbing stairs and steep slopes. I will spend the night in my car if the elevator to my fifth floor apartment is broken, but I never give a second thought to taking on twenty thousand steps up Notre Dame or walking up the side of Mt Kilimanjaro. My enthusiasm for physically exhausting myself whenever I am out of town seems to be waning exponentially with age. It might be best if I climb that famous wall before I am in a wheelchair and diapers, or before this decade is over. Whichever comes first.
The problem with going to China is that it is one of the few nations on this planet that forces people of my nationality to buy a visa. As long as I have a job in the part of China where I live and work I will have a visa to live and work here. Or until they decide I should not live and work here. The laws can and will change at random. But I need a different visa to go to the part of China that has the famous wall. One cannot get a visa to that part of China from this part of China unless one lives and works in this part of China. Fortunately, I am one. Unfortunately, I cannot get a visa from here to there because I cannot live and work here without a visa. Sometimes it is worth remembering that the Chinese invented bureaucracy.
If I were a citizen of this part of China I could get a visa to that part of China as long as I had pressing business there. The standard procedure is to let some travel agent fill out all the forms and provide the bullshit letters of introduction that show how pressing is your business. I have no doubt that the Chinese government is aware of all the lying on all the forms, but as long as everyone is doing it, they seem not to particularly care. The unenforcement of any given Chinese law is directly proportional to the number of Chinese people breaking it. Murder is a very serious crime because it rarely happens. If Chinese people murdered each other like it was New Jersey, it would not even be frowned upon.
As a citizen of my nation it is much easier to get a visa to China. All that is required are a simple visit to the nearest embassy, properly filled forms that meet the definition of properly filled as interpreted by whichever civil servant happens to look at them at any given time, and a sack of a few hundred happinesses.
But there are no Chinese embassies where I live. And why would there be. If this is China, as the Chinese say, why would there be a Chinese embassy. There is no American embassy in New York. As a citizen of my nation I am expected to go to a Chinese embassy in my nation. That may be reasonable for people who live in their own nations, but for those of us who live in parts of China that have no Chinese embassies it is inconvenient. Traveling to the other side of the world just to get a visa for this side of the world strikes me as somewhat asinine.
As luck would have it, back when the British were hell bent on world domination and drug addiction, they took over the Hong Kong part of China and made it the kind of place where pretty much anyone not from China could go without a visa. Anyone with a passport from the same nation as mine can go to the Hong Kong part of China from any other part of China. Ironically, anyone with a passport from any part of China other than Hong Kong needs a visa to go to the Hong Kong part of China.
In September of the Year of the Rabbit, I flew from my part of China where I have a visa to the Hong Kong part of China where I do not need a visa, in order to get a visa to another part of China. This was at the end of Ghost Month, when it is unlucky to travel or make travel arrangements. Not only did I travel, but the sole purpose of my travel was to make arrangements for more travel. I am the unluck.
It has been said that the Chinese invented bureaucracy. Scroll up if you doubt my veracity. Being a highly bureaucratic people, they do not simply hand out visas like Junior Mints, which are impossible to find here. Or umpossibow, in the local patois. There is not a single person in the known universe who can give concise and accurate instructions on the obtainment of a legal Chinese visa. Illegal visas are pretty easy.
I cruised the information superhighway before going to the Hong Kong part of China. There was very little information. More accurately, there was very little accurate information. There was plenty of information, but everything I read contradicted whatever I had previously read. The official Chinese government website designed and maintained for the sole purpose of giving out information about visas contradicts itself from page to page, and often on the same page.
Talking to live people is about as useless as asking the Chinese why they tilt their windshield wipers up when they park. Ask a billion people and you will get a billion different answers. Although in all fairness, I have not yet actually spoken to a billion Chinese people about either issue.
Talking to other foreigners is simply useless. Foreigners in a country like China are generally the worst sources of information about countries like China. Myself included. My experience in any given situation will likely not be similar to anyone else’s experience in the same situation. The laws change without notice and are enforced arbitrarily.
If a Canadian and I go to a government office for the same reason at the same time, we will have to follow completely different protocols because our passports are from completely different nations. Despite the fact that Canada is little more than the 52nd state. Puerto Rico comes first, hosers. If an American and I go to a government office for the same reason at different times, we will have to follow completely different protocols because the clerk behind the counter might not be the same person or is in a different mood that day. This is one of the reasons I give absolutely no advice whatsoever to people who may one day need to know how to do something I have already done. Another reason is that I simply don’t give a shit.
China is also the kind of place where foreigners come for two weeks and think they understand the culture. Taking a foreigner’s advice about how to do things in China is like taking a five-year-old’s advice about contemplative meditation. Several years ago I read a blog by a Canadian about living pretty close to where I now live. This was back before only shut-ins and people with Asperger syndrome had blogs. When I read it I was all like, “Dude. What the hell, eh?” It seemed to me that he was talking about a completely different place. Then I bothered to look at the dates and noticed that it was all written several years before. So much had changed from his time served and mine that we might as well have been in different countries altogether.
After minutes of exhaustive research I just went ahead and followed the official government website’s opinions vis à vis the visa. For my convenience, they even have all the forms one needs online that can be printed out on the Wife’s printer that always needs ink. Filling out those forms before entering the Chinese visa office saved me several hours.
My experience with getting a Chinese visa in the Hong Kong part of China was interesting only because it was very easy and relatively quick. I arrived at the visa office on Monday morning and picked up my visa on Thursday afternoon. I could have paid extra to get it earlier, but I have no strong desire to give these bureaucrats any more money. Americans already pay more than anyone else to get Chinese visas. This is partly because we are all billionaires and mostly because our country makes it terribly difficult for pretty much everyone else to get an American visa. There is also no guarantee that I would actually get a visa from a country that rarely follows any known guidelines for giving out visas. Like every visa office in the world, they keep your money whether they say yes or no. Staying in Hong Kong longer was more expensive than paying extra to leave earlier, but I still won. Because I say so.
When one enters the Chinese visa office one is inclined to mutter to one’s self, “Holy Hell. There are a shit ton of people here.” Large crowds are nothing unique in the Chinese part of Asia. China is about the same size as the United States, but it has a billion more people. One hundred people on a bus designed for fifty is a slow day.
Despite the huddled masses yearning to breathe communism, this particular Chinese government office is run efficiently. This is unique to the Chinese part of Asia. Efficient is not anything anyone has ever said of any Chinese government office. Except this one. I was both gobsmacked, befuddled, dumbfounded and stupefied.
There was a line of people near the door and uniformed agents giving out information. The Chinese are not known for their willingness to wait their turn or give out information. Yet here were people waiting in line for people whose purpose was to tell us if our forms were properly filled. If so then we were given a number and allowed to wait. If not then were were given the option of joining the biometric mass at the far end of the room filling out forms or, if this seemed like too much trouble, we could always lie down and die.
Having already filled out all my forms and copied all the necessary copies, I was one of the lucky many to get a number and wait. When I sat down on a predictably uncomfortable Chinese government office plastic chair, I looked up at the rather large electronic tote board and saw that the latest number being served was 23. There were nine windows wherein one could argue with a government employee and all of two were open. The number in my hand read 14,864. I knew that this might take a while.
With time to spare, I decided to observe the people around me. This turned out to be an unpleasant experience, so I went back into my fantasy world of a dystopian society and robots that make a pretty decent sandwich. The O Henryan ending is that they use too much mayonnaise.
If I leave behind only one slice of wisdom from my time at this mortal coil it is that you should never trust a Chinese sandwich robot.
Some time later, never mind how long precisely, having little money in my pocket, I approached the appropriate window at the appropriate time and gave the bored woman all my forms and copies. She looked at everything without enthusiasm and told me to give her cash, as bored women often do. Receipt in hand, I skipped jauntily into the oppressive Hong Kong humidity. I used to feel apprehension about handing my passport to a complete stranger and leaving the building, but that poor little booklet has been manhandled by so many that I never even think about it anymore. Especially whilst skipping jauntily.
When I arrived back at the office on Thursday, I went directly to the pick-up line and waited. While there, I could not help but notice an American who was dissatisfied with the service. Americans in foreign lands have a way of making themselves noticeable. He was bitching and moaning to no one in particular about how overly complicated the system was. I laughed to myself because I found the system uncharacteristically simple and because I derive joy from the pain and suffering of others. Then it occurred to me that he would probably go home and tell Facebook about how horrible the Chinese visa office is and write something garrulous with Moby Dick references that nobody gives a shit about. I thought that was funny because Facebook is a stupid waste of time for losers, while blogs are hip and happening.
I have to wonder how many times I have written about some horribly wanton experience that a similar foreigner found satisfying. But as Socrates famously said, “Introspection is for fags. Y’all should just watch tv, yo.”
In January of the Year of the Dragon I was in the Chinese part of China. The Dragon symbolizes strength and power, and Dragon years are prosperous with great happinesses. Not so much for Bruce Lee. As a Dragon year, 2012 is supposed to be lucky. This contradicts the Mayan version of 2012, unless lucky is the same as absolute annihilation. The Maya were destroyed by the Spanish; the people who invented religious conversion through torture, and paella. The Chinese were destroyed by their own apathy. Which ancient and ultimately useless culture you choose to believe should boil down to one simple factor: would you rather eat Mayan food or Chinese food?
There was a time when traveling from this part of China to that part of China required going through the Hong Kong part of China. But when the Chinese leapt into the 20th century three or four years ago they decided that since so many people travel from here to there, it might be a good idea to make it physically possible to travel from here to there. Now there are direct flights from select cities.
That was the good news. While I had to go to Hong Kong to get a visa to go where I wanted to go, I did not need to go back to Hong Kong to go where I wanted to go. The bad news was that I decided to go during the Chinese New Year, which the Chinese do not call Chinese New Year. Traveling to, from or through any Chinese territory during the Chinese New Year is generally a bad idea. Since every Chinese person on the planet is supposed to go to wherever their parents live or risk the ultimate shame of losing face, and since every Chinese person on the planet seems to live nowhere near wherever their parents live, there is considerable moving to and fro during the Chinese New Year. Planes and trains and boats and buses characteristically are filled to the brim with Chinese people. Not at all coincidentally, prices for everything increase dramatically.
Flying from any part of China to the civilized world is usually considerably less expensive than flying from one part of the civilized world to another. Flying from any part of China to the civilized world during the Chinese New Year tends to be as expensive as flying to and from civilization. Flying from any part of China to another part of China during the Chinese New Year is just stupid. That is why most of your Chinese types will take a train to get to wherever their parents live. That and the fact that standing on a train for eight hours surrounded by a hundred people within sneezing distance who have never heard of soap is a pretty good time. If you think you are going to sit on this train then you have clearly never ridden a Chinese train during the Chinese New Year. If you think the people constantly pushing into you like a New Zealand teenager on a sheep farm are going to cover their mouths when they sneeze then you have clearly never spent any time in China.
There is also the issue of hotels. While almost all of these Chinese travelers are going to visit their parents, most of them have no fervent desire to stay in their parents’ homes. This increases the prices of hotel rooms in and around all Chinese parts of China during the Chinese New Year. Since I was going to the Chinese part of China and had no intention of staying in anyone’s parents’ home, a hotel room was virtually the only option available to me.
However, for reasons that make no sense to anyone, my plane ticket was more than reasonable for any time of the year and the hotel was at a bargain basement price. I have been told that it was because I flew just before the actual New Year’s Day, but that is the same time that everyone else flies. The flights and airports were not especially crowded, which supports the price, but contradicts the fact that every Chinese person on the planet was also traveling on that day. I have also been told that I am simply the luck.
What I would learn not long after arriving in the Chinese part of China was that the hotel I had chosen was a bit of a dump.
The Chinese propensity for inefficiency quickly reared its ugly dragon horns when the plane from my part of China landed in their part of China. My experience with landing at airports has generally involved either the plane stopping directly at the gate, with passengers disembarking via a jetway, or the plane stopping somewhere on the apron and passengers unloading themselves down a flight of rickety stairs. When disembarked on an apron, passengers are usually shoved into a bus and driven to the nearest (or farthest) available gate.
In this particular instance, we were all herded into a bus where we waited for every last man, woman and dog to waddle down the stairs. It was at least ten minutes between the bus doors closing and the bus moving in a forward direction. And ten minutes in this age and day of microwave ovens and push button telephones is an eternity. When the packed bus finally moved, even the inefficient Chinese passengers were surprised to be taken all of ten feet away across a narrow street. It would have taken seconds to simply walk across this street directly from the plane. Crossing a Chinese street is usually very dangerous, but this was a small service lane at an airport. The only traffic I saw was our slow bus, and it spent more time stationary than moving.
What I liked about this unnecessarily overcomplicated operation was that it forced the Chinese people who always push their way out of the plane to arrive at the gate at the same time as everyone else. They ordinarily force themselves in front of everyone only to move much slower than the rest of us as soon as we are all inside the building. Here we all had no choice but to arrive at the same time. Maybe this is what communism is all about.
We stayed at 闽南大酒店, which I chose because it is listed as a four star hotel with Motel 6 prices. What I already knew was that four stars in China are roughly equal to two stars in the civilized world. Hence the Motel 6 price.
When we checked in they wanted to see both my and the Wife’s passports. Showing my passport at a hotel means nothing to me as this is customary pretty much everywhere in the world. But the Wife was having none of it. She saw no need for them to look at her passport since the room was in my name. I saw no need to point out to her that it was standard operating procedure and not some fiendish Chinese scheme since I have to live with her. For their part, the Chinese peons simply wanted to make sure that my Chinese wife was not Chinese Chinese. Your average international hotel in China has television and newspaper access that the Chinese government does not want their people to see. Even at a four star Motel 6. Chinese indolence prevented the hotel staff from really caring about it either way, and the Wife won in the end.
I quickly noticed that our room had no refrigerator. One of the first things that I check when I enter a new hotel room is the refrigerator since it is likely either turned to the warmest setting or turned off entirely. Refrigerators in East Asia hotels are as standard as vacuum tube television sets. Your standard Asian would find a room without either completely unacceptable. But the standard Asian definition of refrigeration does not entirely match my own. I like cold drinks cold. The standard Asian likes cold drinks at room temperature. If this makes one wonder why they insist on having refrigerators in their rooms then one is using western logic and ignoring the mystical ways of the Orient.
The websites that I used to find and book this hotel all said that there were refrigerators in every room. I did not doubt this since refrigerators in East Asia hotels are as standard as hard mattresses. This room had the hard mattress and low definition television, but no refrigerator. It took some time to convince the front desk minions that our room with a refrigerator had no refrigerator. I expected them to move us to another room since we had just checked in and that is what most hotels would do in this situation. But they brought up a refrigerator to our room instead. Eventually.
One thing they never wanted to bring to our room was toilet paper. Apparently there is a shortage in China. Or perhaps the housekeeping staff was simply too lazy to keep house. I could assume that Chinese people use less than normal humans, but the things these people eat has to result in using more.
One of my least favorite things to do in a hotel is to sit on a hard mattress with a tepid beverage and watch local television, but I was lucky enough to do that more than once here because I was with the Wife and when you are with the Wife, you wait. This is not a Chinese thing. All married men understand. Since I am married more often than most people, basic math dictates that I understand this more than most.
While waiting for the Wife on the hard mattress, tepid beverage in hand, I watched the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics on the low definition television receptor. I checked with the clock next to the bed, because you never know, and it was indeed 2012. There was no explanation as to why they were showing the 1984 Olympics or why they only showed the opening ceremonies.
It was interesting to compare the very low tech 1984 opening ceremonies with Beijing’s digital laser and fireworks show of 2008, especially as Los Angeles knows all about putting on an ostentatious show while Beijing is mostly known for KFCs on every corner and a bicycle every four inches. Four inches being a great length to Chinese people. It was disappointing to remember how popular pastels were in 1984.
Beijing had a million drummers doing the Chinese Bang with Dolby digital 6.0 surround sound while Los Angeles had John Williams wearing a tuxedo in Los Angeles in July. The Beijing torch runner ran the torch up the side of the stadium. Literally. The Los Angeles torch runner went up a staircase and lit a fuse. Beijing had a laser whale swimming on the roof and eating imperialist plankton. Los Angeles had a dude in a jet pack. Beijing had a few crouching tiger flying dragons doing wire dances all over the place. Los Angeles had some local cheerleaders spelling out USA.
The most noticeable difference between the two was that Los Angeles’ opening ceremonies can be shown on commercial television with only a few interruptions. Beijing’s opening ceremonies took 37 hours.
My favorite part of the endless parade of athletes marching into the Memorial Coliseum was watching the tiny teams make their way in; Singapore – 5 athletes, Sri Lanka – 4, Syria – 7, Togo – 6, UAE – 7, followed by the United States – 615. People from the big countries love to brag about how many medals they win, but when you have three times as many athletes as China or Australia, you probably should win. If Djibouti’s three athletes take home the most medals, something is wrong.
I cannot say that I remember much about the 1984 Olympics, or even 1984 itself, but I am almost sure that Ronald Reagan was involved in some way. He was president of the host country at the time and had lived and made some dreadful movies in Los Angeles several centuries before. He was completely absent from the Chinese broadcast that I watched. I also believe the modern Chinese commentary was inaccurate in its declaration that China won the most gold medals in 1984. As far as I remember, the United States won the most medals since the Soviet Union and its lackeys boycotted the games.
Outside of the hotel I learned that this Chinese part of China in January is colder than a blind date when she sees what kind of car you drive, and that the Wife is terrified of cats.
They say that cat people are more compatible with cat people and dog people with dog people. I like cats and agree with Thomas Jefferson about dogs. The Wife is perfectly comfortable sharing Chinese streets with packs of roving dogs but cannot eat if a cat is present. She says that she does not like cats because she was born in the Year of the Rat. But I was born in the Year of the Dog.
We went to some shitty restaurant that she thought would be good because it was “American”. Ignoring the fact that being American is not necessarily a good thing, what the Chinese call American rarely resembles anything that I might call American. There were a few American flags in the restaurant and I believe I saw a cowboy hat nailed to a wall, but the food seemed more Chinese to me.
There was a mechanical bull in the corner with all the KTV equipment, so I suppose the restaurant was more American than most. Nothing says American dining like KTV and mechanical bulls.
This American restaurant was also entirely outdoors. It looked like a restaurant with all the random and pointless crap nailed to the walls and was certainly not one of those plastic stool restaurants where the food comes from the back of some dude’s truck, but there was no interior.
Since this part of China is as cold in January as was previously mentioned, the American restaurant had a few tiki torches spread out. Nothing says American dining like KTV, mechanical bulls and Polynesian bamboo. While sitting under a precarious flame and eating our American mifen with seaweed and mung beans, we noticed a cat lurking about. It seemed to want to get as close to us as possible, either because we had the fire stick or because we had food. I was going to give it some food just to see how brave and/or aggressive it got, but the Wife practically panicked as soon as she realized there was a cat fumbling about her feet. When I pointed out another cat perched on a potted plant a few feet away from her, she froze. I mentioned that being mostly motionless is probably not the best way to keep a cat from filchering some food.
It soon became obvious to me and my anxious wife that there were more than a few cats lurking about this American restaurant. I found it interesting since China is infested with packs of roving dogs. One does not ordinarily see many stray cats in a place with so many stray dogs.
In addition to the American restaurant that did not remind me of an American restaurant, this part of China also has an American grocery store. It looks and smells nothing like an American grocery store, but it had more than a few genuine American products that I have never seen outside of the United States. These were not things made and packaged in China with “make in Amerca” stickers. These were honest to Buddha American grocery store items made, packaged and sold from the good ol’ US of A.
What amuses me is that despite all the anti-American rhetoric, China has absolutely no qualms about buying and selling American goods. Most of the cheap counterfeit crap is supposed to be American; not British, African or from some lesser country. Conversely, Chinese people do not seem all that interested in American products. Barack Hussein Osama recently said that “anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned doesn't know what they're talking about”. I assume he did not mean that people want to buy American crap. The American restaurant was practically empty. And it may have well been a Saturday night for all I remember. The American grocery store mostly sold Chinese products. Their American variety was impressive, but they had more Chinese than anything else. I have seen a few stores managed by and that cater to foreigners with nothing but foreign goods. They have all gone out of business.
American goods are most definitely in decline and the American influence over Chinese culture has more than waned. It has been replaced by Japanese and Korean culture. Forty years ago Chinese people wanted nothing more than American blue jeans. Today they want Japanese electronics, many of which are made in China, and Korean music.
Back at the hotel, we both noticed something that everyone should notice about every hotel in China, and indeed in most of East Asia. Our non-smoking room was in fact a smoking room. Most Asian hotels will gladly rent you a non-smoking room, but what makes it a smoking or non-smoking room is whether or not you smoke in it. Since five out of four Asians smoke, this never bothers them. Better hotels will do what they can to drive the reek away, but your average four star hotel with Motel 6 prices will simply open your window for you. This pretty much never does anything useful and is essentially a bad idea in the middle of winter.
As luck would have it, your average Asian is deathly afraid of sunlight, and most hotels have very heavy blackout curtains. These come in handy when your sleeping options are freezing to death or wearing an ashtray respirator.
The funny thing about smokers, other than how selfish they are and their horrid stench, is that they will use the cold to rationalize their smoking. Apparently it keeps them warm. This is also why they smoke in summer. Alcoholics are just as delusional, but only smell like shit up close.
What I will probably remember the least about this particular trip was how polite and efficient the airport security were when I left. We again had to wait for a bus to take us from the boarding gate all the way across the street to the plane, but the journey from check-in counter to shopping mall was as easy as any I have ever seen. It probably helped that I was there at the crack of dawn, before the shoving hordes of Chinese arrived.
After checking in, which I always do since the advance check-in system at whatever airport I happen to be in either does not apply to my flight or is out of order, I moved lively to the immigration desk. This is usually the slowest part, whether there is a line or not. Tiny uniformed people in tiny booths love to look at every single page in my passport, and the new American passports have a lot of pages. The Chinese woman at this airport went straight for the Chinese visa page, stamped her little stamp and sent me on my way. I assume she spoke no English and she likely assumed I speak no Chinese. This is useful when you have nothing useful to say to someone.
There was no one in front of or behind me at the security line and my bag and I went through faster than I have ever gone through any security checkpoint. My bag was mostly full of food, which often causes problems, but this airport’s x-ray machine did not seem to care. The tiny uniformed man manning the machine may have been asleep.
With the entire process taking mere minutes, I had more than enough time to indulge in the one thing I loathe more than waiting for the Wife on a hard mattress while watching local television; waiting in the airport shopping mall.
I have no idea when airports became shopping malls, but they all seem to be today. Even the smallest airports seem to be designed for shopping first, with all that pesky flying to and fro an afterthought. Hong Kong International is more shopping mall than anything else, but they used to have an area near the old food court where you could sit comfortably and listen to the bad loudspeaker music, almost like what they still have upstairs at Schiphol. Now it is more shopping.
Maybe someday someone will put a library in an airport. I suppose that is unlikely since most people would rather buy overpriced trinkets and eat overpriced microwaved food than read a book. Maybe I should buy one of those electronic books the next time I eat a pretzel at an airport.
They say the music you think about just before you die is the soundtrack of your life. While flight 968 was plunging toward the East China Sea, I could not get the Ofarim version of “Cinderella Rockefella” out of my head. I am glad I did not buy the CD at any of the twelve record stores in the airport.
When I first moved to China I thought it would be a good idea to visit China as long as I was in the neighborhood. They have a famous wall near Beijing that people seem to like and some fancy old buildings. I might as well go while I was living relatively close. I have also noticed that wherever I go I seem to spend an inordinate amount of time climbing stairs and steep slopes. I will spend the night in my car if the elevator to my fifth floor apartment is broken, but I never give a second thought to taking on twenty thousand steps up Notre Dame or walking up the side of Mt Kilimanjaro. My enthusiasm for physically exhausting myself whenever I am out of town seems to be waning exponentially with age. It might be best if I climb that famous wall before I am in a wheelchair and diapers, or before this decade is over. Whichever comes first.
The problem with going to China is that it is one of the few nations on this planet that forces people of my nationality to buy a visa. As long as I have a job in the part of China where I live and work I will have a visa to live and work here. Or until they decide I should not live and work here. The laws can and will change at random. But I need a different visa to go to the part of China that has the famous wall. One cannot get a visa to that part of China from this part of China unless one lives and works in this part of China. Fortunately, I am one. Unfortunately, I cannot get a visa from here to there because I cannot live and work here without a visa. Sometimes it is worth remembering that the Chinese invented bureaucracy.
If I were a citizen of this part of China I could get a visa to that part of China as long as I had pressing business there. The standard procedure is to let some travel agent fill out all the forms and provide the bullshit letters of introduction that show how pressing is your business. I have no doubt that the Chinese government is aware of all the lying on all the forms, but as long as everyone is doing it, they seem not to particularly care. The unenforcement of any given Chinese law is directly proportional to the number of Chinese people breaking it. Murder is a very serious crime because it rarely happens. If Chinese people murdered each other like it was New Jersey, it would not even be frowned upon.
As a citizen of my nation it is much easier to get a visa to China. All that is required are a simple visit to the nearest embassy, properly filled forms that meet the definition of properly filled as interpreted by whichever civil servant happens to look at them at any given time, and a sack of a few hundred happinesses.
But there are no Chinese embassies where I live. And why would there be. If this is China, as the Chinese say, why would there be a Chinese embassy. There is no American embassy in New York. As a citizen of my nation I am expected to go to a Chinese embassy in my nation. That may be reasonable for people who live in their own nations, but for those of us who live in parts of China that have no Chinese embassies it is inconvenient. Traveling to the other side of the world just to get a visa for this side of the world strikes me as somewhat asinine.
As luck would have it, back when the British were hell bent on world domination and drug addiction, they took over the Hong Kong part of China and made it the kind of place where pretty much anyone not from China could go without a visa. Anyone with a passport from the same nation as mine can go to the Hong Kong part of China from any other part of China. Ironically, anyone with a passport from any part of China other than Hong Kong needs a visa to go to the Hong Kong part of China.
In September of the Year of the Rabbit, I flew from my part of China where I have a visa to the Hong Kong part of China where I do not need a visa, in order to get a visa to another part of China. This was at the end of Ghost Month, when it is unlucky to travel or make travel arrangements. Not only did I travel, but the sole purpose of my travel was to make arrangements for more travel. I am the unluck.
It has been said that the Chinese invented bureaucracy. Scroll up if you doubt my veracity. Being a highly bureaucratic people, they do not simply hand out visas like Junior Mints, which are impossible to find here. Or umpossibow, in the local patois. There is not a single person in the known universe who can give concise and accurate instructions on the obtainment of a legal Chinese visa. Illegal visas are pretty easy.
I cruised the information superhighway before going to the Hong Kong part of China. There was very little information. More accurately, there was very little accurate information. There was plenty of information, but everything I read contradicted whatever I had previously read. The official Chinese government website designed and maintained for the sole purpose of giving out information about visas contradicts itself from page to page, and often on the same page.
Talking to live people is about as useless as asking the Chinese why they tilt their windshield wipers up when they park. Ask a billion people and you will get a billion different answers. Although in all fairness, I have not yet actually spoken to a billion Chinese people about either issue.
Talking to other foreigners is simply useless. Foreigners in a country like China are generally the worst sources of information about countries like China. Myself included. My experience in any given situation will likely not be similar to anyone else’s experience in the same situation. The laws change without notice and are enforced arbitrarily.
If a Canadian and I go to a government office for the same reason at the same time, we will have to follow completely different protocols because our passports are from completely different nations. Despite the fact that Canada is little more than the 52nd state. Puerto Rico comes first, hosers. If an American and I go to a government office for the same reason at different times, we will have to follow completely different protocols because the clerk behind the counter might not be the same person or is in a different mood that day. This is one of the reasons I give absolutely no advice whatsoever to people who may one day need to know how to do something I have already done. Another reason is that I simply don’t give a shit.
China is also the kind of place where foreigners come for two weeks and think they understand the culture. Taking a foreigner’s advice about how to do things in China is like taking a five-year-old’s advice about contemplative meditation. Several years ago I read a blog by a Canadian about living pretty close to where I now live. This was back before only shut-ins and people with Asperger syndrome had blogs. When I read it I was all like, “Dude. What the hell, eh?” It seemed to me that he was talking about a completely different place. Then I bothered to look at the dates and noticed that it was all written several years before. So much had changed from his time served and mine that we might as well have been in different countries altogether.
After minutes of exhaustive research I just went ahead and followed the official government website’s opinions vis à vis the visa. For my convenience, they even have all the forms one needs online that can be printed out on the Wife’s printer that always needs ink. Filling out those forms before entering the Chinese visa office saved me several hours.
My experience with getting a Chinese visa in the Hong Kong part of China was interesting only because it was very easy and relatively quick. I arrived at the visa office on Monday morning and picked up my visa on Thursday afternoon. I could have paid extra to get it earlier, but I have no strong desire to give these bureaucrats any more money. Americans already pay more than anyone else to get Chinese visas. This is partly because we are all billionaires and mostly because our country makes it terribly difficult for pretty much everyone else to get an American visa. There is also no guarantee that I would actually get a visa from a country that rarely follows any known guidelines for giving out visas. Like every visa office in the world, they keep your money whether they say yes or no. Staying in Hong Kong longer was more expensive than paying extra to leave earlier, but I still won. Because I say so.
When one enters the Chinese visa office one is inclined to mutter to one’s self, “Holy Hell. There are a shit ton of people here.” Large crowds are nothing unique in the Chinese part of Asia. China is about the same size as the United States, but it has a billion more people. One hundred people on a bus designed for fifty is a slow day.
Despite the huddled masses yearning to breathe communism, this particular Chinese government office is run efficiently. This is unique to the Chinese part of Asia. Efficient is not anything anyone has ever said of any Chinese government office. Except this one. I was both gobsmacked, befuddled, dumbfounded and stupefied.
There was a line of people near the door and uniformed agents giving out information. The Chinese are not known for their willingness to wait their turn or give out information. Yet here were people waiting in line for people whose purpose was to tell us if our forms were properly filled. If so then we were given a number and allowed to wait. If not then were were given the option of joining the biometric mass at the far end of the room filling out forms or, if this seemed like too much trouble, we could always lie down and die.
Having already filled out all my forms and copied all the necessary copies, I was one of the lucky many to get a number and wait. When I sat down on a predictably uncomfortable Chinese government office plastic chair, I looked up at the rather large electronic tote board and saw that the latest number being served was 23. There were nine windows wherein one could argue with a government employee and all of two were open. The number in my hand read 14,864. I knew that this might take a while.
With time to spare, I decided to observe the people around me. This turned out to be an unpleasant experience, so I went back into my fantasy world of a dystopian society and robots that make a pretty decent sandwich. The O Henryan ending is that they use too much mayonnaise.
If I leave behind only one slice of wisdom from my time at this mortal coil it is that you should never trust a Chinese sandwich robot.
Some time later, never mind how long precisely, having little money in my pocket, I approached the appropriate window at the appropriate time and gave the bored woman all my forms and copies. She looked at everything without enthusiasm and told me to give her cash, as bored women often do. Receipt in hand, I skipped jauntily into the oppressive Hong Kong humidity. I used to feel apprehension about handing my passport to a complete stranger and leaving the building, but that poor little booklet has been manhandled by so many that I never even think about it anymore. Especially whilst skipping jauntily.
When I arrived back at the office on Thursday, I went directly to the pick-up line and waited. While there, I could not help but notice an American who was dissatisfied with the service. Americans in foreign lands have a way of making themselves noticeable. He was bitching and moaning to no one in particular about how overly complicated the system was. I laughed to myself because I found the system uncharacteristically simple and because I derive joy from the pain and suffering of others. Then it occurred to me that he would probably go home and tell Facebook about how horrible the Chinese visa office is and write something garrulous with Moby Dick references that nobody gives a shit about. I thought that was funny because Facebook is a stupid waste of time for losers, while blogs are hip and happening.
I have to wonder how many times I have written about some horribly wanton experience that a similar foreigner found satisfying. But as Socrates famously said, “Introspection is for fags. Y’all should just watch tv, yo.”
In January of the Year of the Dragon I was in the Chinese part of China. The Dragon symbolizes strength and power, and Dragon years are prosperous with great happinesses. Not so much for Bruce Lee. As a Dragon year, 2012 is supposed to be lucky. This contradicts the Mayan version of 2012, unless lucky is the same as absolute annihilation. The Maya were destroyed by the Spanish; the people who invented religious conversion through torture, and paella. The Chinese were destroyed by their own apathy. Which ancient and ultimately useless culture you choose to believe should boil down to one simple factor: would you rather eat Mayan food or Chinese food?
There was a time when traveling from this part of China to that part of China required going through the Hong Kong part of China. But when the Chinese leapt into the 20th century three or four years ago they decided that since so many people travel from here to there, it might be a good idea to make it physically possible to travel from here to there. Now there are direct flights from select cities.
That was the good news. While I had to go to Hong Kong to get a visa to go where I wanted to go, I did not need to go back to Hong Kong to go where I wanted to go. The bad news was that I decided to go during the Chinese New Year, which the Chinese do not call Chinese New Year. Traveling to, from or through any Chinese territory during the Chinese New Year is generally a bad idea. Since every Chinese person on the planet is supposed to go to wherever their parents live or risk the ultimate shame of losing face, and since every Chinese person on the planet seems to live nowhere near wherever their parents live, there is considerable moving to and fro during the Chinese New Year. Planes and trains and boats and buses characteristically are filled to the brim with Chinese people. Not at all coincidentally, prices for everything increase dramatically.
Flying from any part of China to the civilized world is usually considerably less expensive than flying from one part of the civilized world to another. Flying from any part of China to the civilized world during the Chinese New Year tends to be as expensive as flying to and from civilization. Flying from any part of China to another part of China during the Chinese New Year is just stupid. That is why most of your Chinese types will take a train to get to wherever their parents live. That and the fact that standing on a train for eight hours surrounded by a hundred people within sneezing distance who have never heard of soap is a pretty good time. If you think you are going to sit on this train then you have clearly never ridden a Chinese train during the Chinese New Year. If you think the people constantly pushing into you like a New Zealand teenager on a sheep farm are going to cover their mouths when they sneeze then you have clearly never spent any time in China.
There is also the issue of hotels. While almost all of these Chinese travelers are going to visit their parents, most of them have no fervent desire to stay in their parents’ homes. This increases the prices of hotel rooms in and around all Chinese parts of China during the Chinese New Year. Since I was going to the Chinese part of China and had no intention of staying in anyone’s parents’ home, a hotel room was virtually the only option available to me.
However, for reasons that make no sense to anyone, my plane ticket was more than reasonable for any time of the year and the hotel was at a bargain basement price. I have been told that it was because I flew just before the actual New Year’s Day, but that is the same time that everyone else flies. The flights and airports were not especially crowded, which supports the price, but contradicts the fact that every Chinese person on the planet was also traveling on that day. I have also been told that I am simply the luck.
What I would learn not long after arriving in the Chinese part of China was that the hotel I had chosen was a bit of a dump.
The Chinese propensity for inefficiency quickly reared its ugly dragon horns when the plane from my part of China landed in their part of China. My experience with landing at airports has generally involved either the plane stopping directly at the gate, with passengers disembarking via a jetway, or the plane stopping somewhere on the apron and passengers unloading themselves down a flight of rickety stairs. When disembarked on an apron, passengers are usually shoved into a bus and driven to the nearest (or farthest) available gate.
In this particular instance, we were all herded into a bus where we waited for every last man, woman and dog to waddle down the stairs. It was at least ten minutes between the bus doors closing and the bus moving in a forward direction. And ten minutes in this age and day of microwave ovens and push button telephones is an eternity. When the packed bus finally moved, even the inefficient Chinese passengers were surprised to be taken all of ten feet away across a narrow street. It would have taken seconds to simply walk across this street directly from the plane. Crossing a Chinese street is usually very dangerous, but this was a small service lane at an airport. The only traffic I saw was our slow bus, and it spent more time stationary than moving.
What I liked about this unnecessarily overcomplicated operation was that it forced the Chinese people who always push their way out of the plane to arrive at the gate at the same time as everyone else. They ordinarily force themselves in front of everyone only to move much slower than the rest of us as soon as we are all inside the building. Here we all had no choice but to arrive at the same time. Maybe this is what communism is all about.
We stayed at 闽南大酒店, which I chose because it is listed as a four star hotel with Motel 6 prices. What I already knew was that four stars in China are roughly equal to two stars in the civilized world. Hence the Motel 6 price.
When we checked in they wanted to see both my and the Wife’s passports. Showing my passport at a hotel means nothing to me as this is customary pretty much everywhere in the world. But the Wife was having none of it. She saw no need for them to look at her passport since the room was in my name. I saw no need to point out to her that it was standard operating procedure and not some fiendish Chinese scheme since I have to live with her. For their part, the Chinese peons simply wanted to make sure that my Chinese wife was not Chinese Chinese. Your average international hotel in China has television and newspaper access that the Chinese government does not want their people to see. Even at a four star Motel 6. Chinese indolence prevented the hotel staff from really caring about it either way, and the Wife won in the end.
I quickly noticed that our room had no refrigerator. One of the first things that I check when I enter a new hotel room is the refrigerator since it is likely either turned to the warmest setting or turned off entirely. Refrigerators in East Asia hotels are as standard as vacuum tube television sets. Your standard Asian would find a room without either completely unacceptable. But the standard Asian definition of refrigeration does not entirely match my own. I like cold drinks cold. The standard Asian likes cold drinks at room temperature. If this makes one wonder why they insist on having refrigerators in their rooms then one is using western logic and ignoring the mystical ways of the Orient.
The websites that I used to find and book this hotel all said that there were refrigerators in every room. I did not doubt this since refrigerators in East Asia hotels are as standard as hard mattresses. This room had the hard mattress and low definition television, but no refrigerator. It took some time to convince the front desk minions that our room with a refrigerator had no refrigerator. I expected them to move us to another room since we had just checked in and that is what most hotels would do in this situation. But they brought up a refrigerator to our room instead. Eventually.
One thing they never wanted to bring to our room was toilet paper. Apparently there is a shortage in China. Or perhaps the housekeeping staff was simply too lazy to keep house. I could assume that Chinese people use less than normal humans, but the things these people eat has to result in using more.
One of my least favorite things to do in a hotel is to sit on a hard mattress with a tepid beverage and watch local television, but I was lucky enough to do that more than once here because I was with the Wife and when you are with the Wife, you wait. This is not a Chinese thing. All married men understand. Since I am married more often than most people, basic math dictates that I understand this more than most.
While waiting for the Wife on the hard mattress, tepid beverage in hand, I watched the opening ceremonies of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics on the low definition television receptor. I checked with the clock next to the bed, because you never know, and it was indeed 2012. There was no explanation as to why they were showing the 1984 Olympics or why they only showed the opening ceremonies.
It was interesting to compare the very low tech 1984 opening ceremonies with Beijing’s digital laser and fireworks show of 2008, especially as Los Angeles knows all about putting on an ostentatious show while Beijing is mostly known for KFCs on every corner and a bicycle every four inches. Four inches being a great length to Chinese people. It was disappointing to remember how popular pastels were in 1984.
Beijing had a million drummers doing the Chinese Bang with Dolby digital 6.0 surround sound while Los Angeles had John Williams wearing a tuxedo in Los Angeles in July. The Beijing torch runner ran the torch up the side of the stadium. Literally. The Los Angeles torch runner went up a staircase and lit a fuse. Beijing had a laser whale swimming on the roof and eating imperialist plankton. Los Angeles had a dude in a jet pack. Beijing had a few crouching tiger flying dragons doing wire dances all over the place. Los Angeles had some local cheerleaders spelling out USA.
The most noticeable difference between the two was that Los Angeles’ opening ceremonies can be shown on commercial television with only a few interruptions. Beijing’s opening ceremonies took 37 hours.
My favorite part of the endless parade of athletes marching into the Memorial Coliseum was watching the tiny teams make their way in; Singapore – 5 athletes, Sri Lanka – 4, Syria – 7, Togo – 6, UAE – 7, followed by the United States – 615. People from the big countries love to brag about how many medals they win, but when you have three times as many athletes as China or Australia, you probably should win. If Djibouti’s three athletes take home the most medals, something is wrong.
I cannot say that I remember much about the 1984 Olympics, or even 1984 itself, but I am almost sure that Ronald Reagan was involved in some way. He was president of the host country at the time and had lived and made some dreadful movies in Los Angeles several centuries before. He was completely absent from the Chinese broadcast that I watched. I also believe the modern Chinese commentary was inaccurate in its declaration that China won the most gold medals in 1984. As far as I remember, the United States won the most medals since the Soviet Union and its lackeys boycotted the games.
Outside of the hotel I learned that this Chinese part of China in January is colder than a blind date when she sees what kind of car you drive, and that the Wife is terrified of cats.
They say that cat people are more compatible with cat people and dog people with dog people. I like cats and agree with Thomas Jefferson about dogs. The Wife is perfectly comfortable sharing Chinese streets with packs of roving dogs but cannot eat if a cat is present. She says that she does not like cats because she was born in the Year of the Rat. But I was born in the Year of the Dog.
We went to some shitty restaurant that she thought would be good because it was “American”. Ignoring the fact that being American is not necessarily a good thing, what the Chinese call American rarely resembles anything that I might call American. There were a few American flags in the restaurant and I believe I saw a cowboy hat nailed to a wall, but the food seemed more Chinese to me.
There was a mechanical bull in the corner with all the KTV equipment, so I suppose the restaurant was more American than most. Nothing says American dining like KTV and mechanical bulls.
This American restaurant was also entirely outdoors. It looked like a restaurant with all the random and pointless crap nailed to the walls and was certainly not one of those plastic stool restaurants where the food comes from the back of some dude’s truck, but there was no interior.
Since this part of China is as cold in January as was previously mentioned, the American restaurant had a few tiki torches spread out. Nothing says American dining like KTV, mechanical bulls and Polynesian bamboo. While sitting under a precarious flame and eating our American mifen with seaweed and mung beans, we noticed a cat lurking about. It seemed to want to get as close to us as possible, either because we had the fire stick or because we had food. I was going to give it some food just to see how brave and/or aggressive it got, but the Wife practically panicked as soon as she realized there was a cat fumbling about her feet. When I pointed out another cat perched on a potted plant a few feet away from her, she froze. I mentioned that being mostly motionless is probably not the best way to keep a cat from filchering some food.
It soon became obvious to me and my anxious wife that there were more than a few cats lurking about this American restaurant. I found it interesting since China is infested with packs of roving dogs. One does not ordinarily see many stray cats in a place with so many stray dogs.
In addition to the American restaurant that did not remind me of an American restaurant, this part of China also has an American grocery store. It looks and smells nothing like an American grocery store, but it had more than a few genuine American products that I have never seen outside of the United States. These were not things made and packaged in China with “make in Amerca” stickers. These were honest to Buddha American grocery store items made, packaged and sold from the good ol’ US of A.
What amuses me is that despite all the anti-American rhetoric, China has absolutely no qualms about buying and selling American goods. Most of the cheap counterfeit crap is supposed to be American; not British, African or from some lesser country. Conversely, Chinese people do not seem all that interested in American products. Barack Hussein Osama recently said that “anyone who tells you that America is in decline or that our influence has waned doesn't know what they're talking about”. I assume he did not mean that people want to buy American crap. The American restaurant was practically empty. And it may have well been a Saturday night for all I remember. The American grocery store mostly sold Chinese products. Their American variety was impressive, but they had more Chinese than anything else. I have seen a few stores managed by and that cater to foreigners with nothing but foreign goods. They have all gone out of business.
American goods are most definitely in decline and the American influence over Chinese culture has more than waned. It has been replaced by Japanese and Korean culture. Forty years ago Chinese people wanted nothing more than American blue jeans. Today they want Japanese electronics, many of which are made in China, and Korean music.
Back at the hotel, we both noticed something that everyone should notice about every hotel in China, and indeed in most of East Asia. Our non-smoking room was in fact a smoking room. Most Asian hotels will gladly rent you a non-smoking room, but what makes it a smoking or non-smoking room is whether or not you smoke in it. Since five out of four Asians smoke, this never bothers them. Better hotels will do what they can to drive the reek away, but your average four star hotel with Motel 6 prices will simply open your window for you. This pretty much never does anything useful and is essentially a bad idea in the middle of winter.
As luck would have it, your average Asian is deathly afraid of sunlight, and most hotels have very heavy blackout curtains. These come in handy when your sleeping options are freezing to death or wearing an ashtray respirator.
The funny thing about smokers, other than how selfish they are and their horrid stench, is that they will use the cold to rationalize their smoking. Apparently it keeps them warm. This is also why they smoke in summer. Alcoholics are just as delusional, but only smell like shit up close.
What I will probably remember the least about this particular trip was how polite and efficient the airport security were when I left. We again had to wait for a bus to take us from the boarding gate all the way across the street to the plane, but the journey from check-in counter to shopping mall was as easy as any I have ever seen. It probably helped that I was there at the crack of dawn, before the shoving hordes of Chinese arrived.
After checking in, which I always do since the advance check-in system at whatever airport I happen to be in either does not apply to my flight or is out of order, I moved lively to the immigration desk. This is usually the slowest part, whether there is a line or not. Tiny uniformed people in tiny booths love to look at every single page in my passport, and the new American passports have a lot of pages. The Chinese woman at this airport went straight for the Chinese visa page, stamped her little stamp and sent me on my way. I assume she spoke no English and she likely assumed I speak no Chinese. This is useful when you have nothing useful to say to someone.
There was no one in front of or behind me at the security line and my bag and I went through faster than I have ever gone through any security checkpoint. My bag was mostly full of food, which often causes problems, but this airport’s x-ray machine did not seem to care. The tiny uniformed man manning the machine may have been asleep.
With the entire process taking mere minutes, I had more than enough time to indulge in the one thing I loathe more than waiting for the Wife on a hard mattress while watching local television; waiting in the airport shopping mall.
I have no idea when airports became shopping malls, but they all seem to be today. Even the smallest airports seem to be designed for shopping first, with all that pesky flying to and fro an afterthought. Hong Kong International is more shopping mall than anything else, but they used to have an area near the old food court where you could sit comfortably and listen to the bad loudspeaker music, almost like what they still have upstairs at Schiphol. Now it is more shopping.
Maybe someday someone will put a library in an airport. I suppose that is unlikely since most people would rather buy overpriced trinkets and eat overpriced microwaved food than read a book. Maybe I should buy one of those electronic books the next time I eat a pretzel at an airport.
They say the music you think about just before you die is the soundtrack of your life. While flight 968 was plunging toward the East China Sea, I could not get the Ofarim version of “Cinderella Rockefella” out of my head. I am glad I did not buy the CD at any of the twelve record stores in the airport.
07 January 2012
A Terse Cultural Observation
I live next to a hospital. The building in which I live is owned by the hospital in which it is near. I live here because the Wife works at said hospital. It is terribly convenient to live next to a hospital where one’s wife works when one requires a visit. It is not so great when the hospital is Chinese.
I seem to remember signs from my youth in the real world telling people to be quiet in hospital zones. This always made sense to me. The last thing you want while dying in a hospital bed is to hear a marching band outside your window. For many of us, the last thing we want to hear at any point in our life cycle is a marching band outside our window.
Such signs do not exist in Chinese countries. Such signs cannot exist in a culture where everyone is too self-involved to take anyone else into consideration. The Chinese mentality is to do whatever the hell they want regardless of how it will affect others. Other people are other people’s problems.
I have more than a few students who are just becoming teenagers. Experience has shown me that this is never a good thing. The nicest, most polite children become typical raging Chinese assholes once they fumble into puberty. One such student announced at the end of class yesterday that she did not care about anything. She used to be the top student in the class. Now that she is becoming a teenager her scores are plunging down the toilet. I asked her why she was doing worse in class. She said that she did not care. This was an unusually honest answer. Few of them care, but they usually come up with excuses for their apathy. I asked her if she wanted to fail the class and take it over again. She said that she did not care. I then asked her if she would rather eat cockroaches or mosquitos for dinner. She knew that she was trapped, and the rest of the class laughed at her predicament, but she was as obstinate as a teenager and said that she did not care. This brought more laughter from the class. Few things embarrass a Chinese teenager more than being laughed at by their peers. But it is far better to be laughed at than to compromise.
When I asked her how she would feel if both of her parents died she said that she did not care. This was probably more truthful than stubborn. Teenagers and parents are a bad mix in any country. When I asked her if she wanted to go home she said that she did not care. So I told the rest of the class that they could go home and told her to stay. When she said that her parents were waiting for her I told her that I did not care.
This is typical Chinese adult behavior. These people simply do not care about anything beyond what they want to do at any given moment. When their actions have horrible consequences they blame everything on bad luck. When your atrocious driving kills someone, it is simply the unluck. If your wife leaves you because you spend every night with KTV prostitutes, your marriage must be the unluck. Fired from you job for stealing everything that was not nailed down? Unluck.
When blaming your dipshittery on bad luck no longer works for you, kill yourself. Suicide is a national pastime around here. Chinese culture tells people to follow ritual superstitions to have good luck, and if you have too much bad luck you can always open a few veins. This is not a dust off your boots and get back on the horse kind of culture. Their motto is if at first you don’t succeed, stab yourself.
The Wife’s oldest sister considered suicide about a year ago when her husband’s business tanked. They consider themselves rich, although in the real world they would be middle class, and the greatest pain rich people can suffer is poverty. They still have several cars and a big house, so I would imagine they are further from poverty than they think. And if all else fails they have more than enough relatives with more than enough spare space with which to live.
When the Wife told me that the Wife’s Sister told her that she was thinking about taking a dirt nap, I told the Wife that there was nothing to worry about. People who say they are going to do it rarely do. People who actually kill themselves usually surprise those around them. But this perspective only works in my culture. Chinese people kill themselves at the drop of a hat. The Wife had more than a few colleagues who are no longer this side of breathing because their boyfriends dumped them. Transitioning from enough money to buy jewelry and furniture to just enough money to pay the bills is more than enough to send these people over the edge.
This is one of many reasons that these hospitals are always full. Another is that the health care system is dirt cheap and people will go to the hospital whenever they sneeze. But the biggest reasons for crowded hospitals are cancer, which would take a worldwide lifestyle adjustment to eradicate, and traffic “accidents”, which are utterly avoidable.
Spending time in a Chinese hospital is a very different experience from spending time in an American hospital. I spent a sleepless night in an American hospital listening to the IV dripping. It was far too quiet for my liking. When a selfish Chinese driver was kind enough to break my ankle for me I never could have gotten any sleep in the Chinese hospital. The patients around me were all screaming into their cellphones, screaming at their visitors, screaming at the nurses and screaming while eating. The din inside a Chinese hospital is excruciating. It is little wonder that no one would complain if a marching band were outside their windows.
Despite all of my tours of duty in this country I still think like a foreigner. Since I work nights I prefer not to wake up at eight o’clock in the morning. I take out the garbagie at my convenience, not when some truck plays its horrible song. And I absolutely refuse to wear a coat when it is thirty degrees outside. The calendar may call it winter, but I dress according to the actual weather.
So when the marching band outside my window woke me up at eight o’clock this morning I considered it inconvenient, unnecessary and terribly rude to the patients dying in the hospital next door. Starting my day far too early will not kill me. I prefer not to wake up twelve hours before I go to work, but it is not the worst thing that could happen. In my foreigner mind, waking up dying hospital patients with a marching band could be the worst thing that happens to them. To the Chinese it is morning. Time to wake up. If any patients die because of the marching band or the nine to five construction that has been going on for several months, obviously they were the unluck.
I seem to remember signs from my youth in the real world telling people to be quiet in hospital zones. This always made sense to me. The last thing you want while dying in a hospital bed is to hear a marching band outside your window. For many of us, the last thing we want to hear at any point in our life cycle is a marching band outside our window.
Such signs do not exist in Chinese countries. Such signs cannot exist in a culture where everyone is too self-involved to take anyone else into consideration. The Chinese mentality is to do whatever the hell they want regardless of how it will affect others. Other people are other people’s problems.
I have more than a few students who are just becoming teenagers. Experience has shown me that this is never a good thing. The nicest, most polite children become typical raging Chinese assholes once they fumble into puberty. One such student announced at the end of class yesterday that she did not care about anything. She used to be the top student in the class. Now that she is becoming a teenager her scores are plunging down the toilet. I asked her why she was doing worse in class. She said that she did not care. This was an unusually honest answer. Few of them care, but they usually come up with excuses for their apathy. I asked her if she wanted to fail the class and take it over again. She said that she did not care. I then asked her if she would rather eat cockroaches or mosquitos for dinner. She knew that she was trapped, and the rest of the class laughed at her predicament, but she was as obstinate as a teenager and said that she did not care. This brought more laughter from the class. Few things embarrass a Chinese teenager more than being laughed at by their peers. But it is far better to be laughed at than to compromise.
When I asked her how she would feel if both of her parents died she said that she did not care. This was probably more truthful than stubborn. Teenagers and parents are a bad mix in any country. When I asked her if she wanted to go home she said that she did not care. So I told the rest of the class that they could go home and told her to stay. When she said that her parents were waiting for her I told her that I did not care.
This is typical Chinese adult behavior. These people simply do not care about anything beyond what they want to do at any given moment. When their actions have horrible consequences they blame everything on bad luck. When your atrocious driving kills someone, it is simply the unluck. If your wife leaves you because you spend every night with KTV prostitutes, your marriage must be the unluck. Fired from you job for stealing everything that was not nailed down? Unluck.
When blaming your dipshittery on bad luck no longer works for you, kill yourself. Suicide is a national pastime around here. Chinese culture tells people to follow ritual superstitions to have good luck, and if you have too much bad luck you can always open a few veins. This is not a dust off your boots and get back on the horse kind of culture. Their motto is if at first you don’t succeed, stab yourself.
The Wife’s oldest sister considered suicide about a year ago when her husband’s business tanked. They consider themselves rich, although in the real world they would be middle class, and the greatest pain rich people can suffer is poverty. They still have several cars and a big house, so I would imagine they are further from poverty than they think. And if all else fails they have more than enough relatives with more than enough spare space with which to live.
When the Wife told me that the Wife’s Sister told her that she was thinking about taking a dirt nap, I told the Wife that there was nothing to worry about. People who say they are going to do it rarely do. People who actually kill themselves usually surprise those around them. But this perspective only works in my culture. Chinese people kill themselves at the drop of a hat. The Wife had more than a few colleagues who are no longer this side of breathing because their boyfriends dumped them. Transitioning from enough money to buy jewelry and furniture to just enough money to pay the bills is more than enough to send these people over the edge.
This is one of many reasons that these hospitals are always full. Another is that the health care system is dirt cheap and people will go to the hospital whenever they sneeze. But the biggest reasons for crowded hospitals are cancer, which would take a worldwide lifestyle adjustment to eradicate, and traffic “accidents”, which are utterly avoidable.
Spending time in a Chinese hospital is a very different experience from spending time in an American hospital. I spent a sleepless night in an American hospital listening to the IV dripping. It was far too quiet for my liking. When a selfish Chinese driver was kind enough to break my ankle for me I never could have gotten any sleep in the Chinese hospital. The patients around me were all screaming into their cellphones, screaming at their visitors, screaming at the nurses and screaming while eating. The din inside a Chinese hospital is excruciating. It is little wonder that no one would complain if a marching band were outside their windows.
Despite all of my tours of duty in this country I still think like a foreigner. Since I work nights I prefer not to wake up at eight o’clock in the morning. I take out the garbagie at my convenience, not when some truck plays its horrible song. And I absolutely refuse to wear a coat when it is thirty degrees outside. The calendar may call it winter, but I dress according to the actual weather.
So when the marching band outside my window woke me up at eight o’clock this morning I considered it inconvenient, unnecessary and terribly rude to the patients dying in the hospital next door. Starting my day far too early will not kill me. I prefer not to wake up twelve hours before I go to work, but it is not the worst thing that could happen. In my foreigner mind, waking up dying hospital patients with a marching band could be the worst thing that happens to them. To the Chinese it is morning. Time to wake up. If any patients die because of the marching band or the nine to five construction that has been going on for several months, obviously they were the unluck.
03 January 2012
Addendum of 3 January
With my advancing years I have neglected to mention that Mr McCartney now offers special “soundcheck” packages with his concerts. For about US$2000 or more, one can buy a single ticket to one of his shows, along with entrance to that show’s soundcheck earlier in the day. The package includes a buffet lunch (which is not always vegetarian, apparently), tour poster and baseball cap. The length of the soundcheck depends entirely on how long it takes the sound engineers to play with their knobs. It could be a mini-concert. It could be one song. Customers have no choice, or foreknowledge, of where their seats will be. The bulky men in small t-shirts tell you where to sit, or stand, when you show up.
It is this extra milking of fans that prompted this diatribe in the first place. So naturally I never bothered to mention it.
It is this extra milking of fans that prompted this diatribe in the first place. So naturally I never bothered to mention it.
25 December 2011
Paul McCartney, You Cheap Bastard
I have spent the better part of the last thirty plus years defending Paul McCartney from John Lennon fans. This is not so much a daily occurrence as something that comes up once or twice every decade. John Lennon fans, much like music critics, tend to dismiss McCartney as a lightweight who writes only “pizza and fairytales”, as Lennon once said. According to McCartney. Lennon never said this publicly, so we only have McCartney’s word for it. Yoko Ono very publicly told us all about a private conversation with her husband wherein she compared his songwriting with McCartney’s and said, “You don’t just rhyme June with spoon”. I can think of no song where McCartney does indeed rhyme June with spoon, but it is a fair point. Some of his rhymes are questionable.
When the real thing goes wrong
And you can't get it on
And your love she has gone
And you got to carry on
“Going Down On Love”
I took my loved one out to dinner
So we could get a bite to eat
And though we both had been much thinner
She looked so beautiful I could eat her
“Well Well Well”
You were caught with your hands in the kill
And you still got to swallow your pill
As you slip and you slide down the hill
On the blood of the people you kill
“Bring On The Lucie (Freda Peeple)”
“Hands in the till” would make perfect sense, but he says “hands in the kill”.
The theory seems to be that McCartney writes the silly love songs while Lennon wrote the political message songs. True enough, McCartney wrote a silly love song with which he anticipated his future mocking and named “Silly Love Songs”, but that is far from his worst song. Unless you listen to the Donny and Marie, Sonny and Cher version. That is absolutely horrible. But the Wings Over America version ass kicks. And Lennon indeed wrote more than a few message songs. Although I doubt that he would agree with some of the messages today.
Free the prisoners, free the judges
Free all prisoners everywhere
All they want is truth and justice
All they need is love and care
“Attica State”
You live with straights who tell you you was king
Jump when your mamma tell you anything
The only thing you done was yesterday
And since you've gone it's just another day
“How Do You Sleep?”
The first two lines are more about Lennon than McCartney and the last line is bad timing. When Lennon wrote it he had no idea that “Another Day” would soon top the charts and make McCartney a bag full of money.
To say that Lennon was the angry lyricist and McCartney wrote the merry melodies is nothing short of ignorant. Lennon wrote more than a few ballads and McCartney invented heavy metal, according to some idiots. It was the head banging flute solos of Jethro Tull, not McCartney, that won the first heavy metal Grammy. Lennon was a great lyricist, but he could write banal crap as well as the next icon.
When you're by my side
You're the only one
Don't you run and hide
Just come on, come on
So come on, come on, come on
“Little Child”, written in 1956
Come on, come on
Come on, come on
Come on is such a joy
Come on is such a joy
Come on is take it easy
Come on is take it easy
“Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey”, 1968
Hold me darling
Come on listen to me
I won't do you no harm
Trust me darling
Come on listen to me
Come on listen to me
Come on listen, listen
“Whatever Gets You Through The Night”, 1974
At the same time McCartney was writing songs like these:
Some day you'll know I was the one
But tomorrow may rain so I'll follow the sun
“I’ll Follow The Sun”, 1958
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life you were only waiting
For this moment to arise
“Blackbird”, 1968
My eye cries out a tear still born
Misunderstanding love in song
“Love In Song”, 1975
People tell me that I should prefer Lennon to McCartney. How come no one older than me ever seems to understand. “Help” was the song that got me interested in the Beatles in the first place. “Yesterday” is a nice little song, but I have always thought it overrated. I prefer “Strawberry Fields Forever” to “Penny Lane” and “I Am The Walrus” to any other Magical Mystery Tour song. But what makes “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am The Walrus” great songs is the combination of Lennon’s lyrics and “all that artsy fartsy shit” that Lennon complained about McCartney adding. Both songs were simple ballads before McCartney whipped out the mellotron. McCartney’s reasoning for being more experimental on Lennon’s songs than his own is dubious and now he has to live with the myth that Lennon was the artsy one while he was safe and middling. At this point in their careers it should be obvious that McCartney is far more open to experimentation than Lennon ever was.
But if you look at each Beatles album and compare McCartney songs with Lennon songs, I am more likely to prefer the McCartneys right from the beginning. The big vocal performances on Please Please Me are “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist And Shout”. Lennon gets all the credit for screaming his song, but McCartney actually wrote his song. With The Beatles, their weakest album, has the standout McCartney track, “All My Loving”. A Hard Day’s Night, Help, Rubber Soul and Abbey Road are pretty even. Lennon comes out ahead on Beatles For Sale. But McCartney dominates Revolver, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles and Let It Be. Yellow Submarine is evenly split between McCartney, Lennon and Harrison. Pound for pound I think McCartney gave more for the Beatles than anyone else.
Comparing their solo careers is simply unfair. John Lennon only released six proper albums in his lifetime. He has no real live album since he never toured after 1966. He only released one compilation album. Yoko has since released over a dozen.
Paul McCartney has released 19 studio albums so far, not counting Give My Regards To Broad Street, which is really a soundtrack album, and Run Devil Run, which is far and away superior to Lennon’s Rock’n’ Roll. But McCartney was sober when he did his. He also has a dozen experimental albums, ranging from amusing to what the fuck was he on, and five so-called classical albums, including two oratorios, a ballet and whatever the hell Standing Stone is supposed to be. His great weakness is in releasing a live album every time he goes on stage. To his credit he has only released three compilation albums, though each has the same dozen songs. Most of Wings Greatest is also on All The Best and almost every song on both is on the first disc of Wingspan.
This is where the trouble starts. While Lennon mostly released something and moved on (if you ignore Yoko’s attempts to rewrite history), McCartney is the George Lucas of music. All of his studio albums either have been or will be reissued as deluxe super special edition CDs. Band On The Run has been released as a regular album, special anniversary edition, part of the “Paul McCartney Archive Collection” and the “Paul McCartney Collection”. You can hear the song “Band On The Run” on 14 different CDs, excluding bootlegs. Will we ever get out of here indeed.
The Guinness Book people declared McCartney the most successful musician ever, in terms of sales, back when people read books. Sales of new material since then have plummeted. He has not had a #1 single since 1984 or top ten single since 1993. In all fairness, singles simply do not sell the way they used to, and the way all music is marketed and sold is completely different than it was before McCartney started dyeing his hair red. His albums still sell well in a market more concerned with single downloads than full length albums and his concerts always sell out quickly.
But McCartney wants more money. It is generally acknowledged by people with no access to such information that he is a billionaire (in US dollars), but one of his largest sources of income, his music publishing catalogue, has taken a hit since downloading music replaced record stores. McCartney compensated by leaving EMI after 45 years and taking his music to a much smaller company that offered him a much bigger piece of the pie. Your typical international superstar songwriter/performer makes about $1 per CD sold. As his own publisher and copyright holder, McCartney used to make about $2 per CD. With Hear Music, he reportedly gets $4 to $5 per CD. This is one reason McCartney was reluctant to sell music online.
Back before Steve Jobs was burning in Hell, he wanted to sell everyone’s music for 99 cents per song, whether they were Elton John or Milli Vanilli. But the Beatles (ie, McCartney and Yoko) felt that “Hey Jude” should probably be worth more than Five Man Electrical Band’s “Hello Melinda, Goodbye”, based in part on the court decision in the case of Let’s Be Fair to Everyone v. Some Shit is Just Better.
A typical Beatles album has fourteen songs. At 99 cents per song an entire album would sell at a bargain basement discount price. This gives McCartney a much smaller flame of pie, especially since he has to share the performer’s royalties with three other people and the songwriter’s royalties with Yoko, ironically. When he tried to change the songwriting credit on some of his own songs, Yoko successfully cockblocked him in court.
To make up for the loss in record revenue, McCartney started playing more concerts and charging concert promoters more money. In the ‘70s, the height of his toking and selling power, McCartney played three small UK tours, one European tour, and one hugely successful world tour. In 1989 he played his first world tour in thirteen years. Since then he has had four large world tours, three European tours, and four North American tours.
I went to three different shows of the Flowers In The Dirt tour (which was called something else) and probably spent less than $100 total on tickets. I have no idea how much concert t-shirts cost, but I must have considered the price reasonable at the time as I bought a few. And we were all given free tour programs that were more like novels (by today’s standards) than tour programs. I went to one show of the Driving Rain tour (called “Driving Tour” or something equally unimaginative) thirteen years later and spent more money on one ticket than all three tickets from the previous tour. Concert programs were more expensive than free and t-shirts were outrageous, but I bought one anyway because I knew that this would be the last time I saw the man live. My very cheap tickets to the first tour were all good seats while my expensive ticket to the last got me one of the worst seats I have ever had at any concert. I could see the stage with a telescope, but there were fireworks that I could not see at all.
Much of the blame for high concert prices can be placed on concert promoters and the evil Ticketmaster, but people like Paul McCartney who demand exorbitant salaries should feel guilty that their music, rock and roll, the music of the masses, can only be enjoyed live by bankers, carmakers and anyone else to whom Congress gives billions of stringless taxpayer dollars. Or at least people who see credit card debt the way their government sees public debt.
Now McCartney’s website wants to make a profit. I can understand selling his music via his own site. Most music is sold or stolen online, so there is little reason his site should not offer his music for a high fee. But they have recently gone beyond charging people for songs and videos. Now they charge people to be members of his website, as if any non-midget animal porn website is worth paying just to look at.
For the incredibly high price of £32.50 per year you too can have a “Premium” account at his website. What do Premium fans get that unimportant fans do not? Exclusive access to content you already have if you bought his albums. Plus personalised full length audio streaming, complete with improper British spelling, creatively called the “Jukebox”. This is an electronic device familiar to old people who dye their hair red but will mean nothing to the younger hipsters who have enough disposable income to pay to be a member of some website. With the Jukebox, the important Premium fans can play their favorite Paul songs right from his website. After going online, signing in, logging on and clicking all the right buttons. Simply amazing. Sign up today or be forced to play music offline like an asshole. Elite Premium members can also watch all the videos that are on Youtube and were on that $35 McCartney Years DVD from the inconvenience of his website. But wait. There’s more. Premium members also get a free Chinese sweatshop t-shirt. Not really free if you remember that you paid £32.50, but cheaper than any concert t-shirt.
But that’s not all. If you thought it would be, lo unto you. Act now and the first 5000 people with credit cards and nothing better to do can become elite “Pioneer” members. These are the real fans, so they get exclusive access to exclusive content befitting their important stature, which is much better than anything those Premium douchebags get.
Are you a true fan? Are you unemployed or at least have the free time of an unemployed person? Do you like spending all day looking at a website dedicated to a single person? Do you want yet another online account that looks and acts pretty much like Facebook where people try to collect the most “friends”, ie, anonymous strangers? Sign up today.
(Offer void in most of Asia, Africa, South America and probably Antarctica. Must have a Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo or Google account to become a Pioneer member.)
It is his website and he is free to do with it what he wants, just as the rest of us are free to ignore it or worship it as if it were a television program about people just keeping it real. My complaint is that Paul McCartney, the guy who said love unto others as you would have them love unto you, has turned a previously innocuous if relatively useless website into a cash register that classifies and segregates his fans purely on how much money they are willing to spend on him. My name, or some retarded “screen name” like MaccaFan1964 or Meigouren, has never been on his website. It will neither harm my real life nor my online fantasy world (where I am taller) should anyone think me not a Pioneer fan, Premium fan or even inexclusive regular member. But I am disappointed that McCartney is cultivating such a dystopian commune at the one place online where people can fawn over him without making it painfully obvious what poofs they are.
Or perhaps I have gotten too old to appreciate the stampede of progress. I used to enjoy going to the record store, flipping through the stacks of LPs until my fingers were dirty, paying my $2.50 and listening to the album while reading the lyrics or looking at the cover art. The first time I heard “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” I thought that the record skipped at the end. My Rubber Soul LP consistently skipped at the end of “I’ve Just Seen A Face” (which was on the American version of Rubber Soul), giving it an extra bar that I thought it was always supposed to have until I heard the CD version. These are peculiarities that the digital generation will never get to appreciate.
On my last visit to Tokyo, where Tower Records is alive and well, I bought Paul Simon’s So Beautiful Or So What, which I did not know existed, for something more than $2.50. When I brought it home I copied all of the songs onto my computer. I have listened to it several times but have never looked at the lyrics. I cannot even picture what the cover looks like. I am thinking baby’s face, but I know that is the previous album. I have abandoned most of the old ways, mostly because I am usually doing something else while listening to music (eg, Mind Games is playing on the Windows Media Player as I type this), but I have not embraced the new ways. I have not bought so much as a single song online. I illegally downloaded most of Billy Joel’s catalogue back when Napster was, but all of my legal music purchases still come in CD form.
While 69-year-old Paul McCartney uses the latest technology to milk even more money from his fans, I am still tilting at online social networking sites as if they were windmills. I cannot shake the feeling that they might be giants.
I also got Miscellaneous T in Tokyo.
Pay to be elite and you get exclusive content.
© MPL Communications LTD
(who probably want money for posting this)
When the real thing goes wrong
And you can't get it on
And your love she has gone
And you got to carry on
“Going Down On Love”
I took my loved one out to dinner
So we could get a bite to eat
And though we both had been much thinner
She looked so beautiful I could eat her
“Well Well Well”
You were caught with your hands in the kill
And you still got to swallow your pill
As you slip and you slide down the hill
On the blood of the people you kill
“Bring On The Lucie (Freda Peeple)”
“Hands in the till” would make perfect sense, but he says “hands in the kill”.
The theory seems to be that McCartney writes the silly love songs while Lennon wrote the political message songs. True enough, McCartney wrote a silly love song with which he anticipated his future mocking and named “Silly Love Songs”, but that is far from his worst song. Unless you listen to the Donny and Marie, Sonny and Cher version. That is absolutely horrible. But the Wings Over America version ass kicks. And Lennon indeed wrote more than a few message songs. Although I doubt that he would agree with some of the messages today.
Free the prisoners, free the judges
Free all prisoners everywhere
All they want is truth and justice
All they need is love and care
“Attica State”
You live with straights who tell you you was king
Jump when your mamma tell you anything
The only thing you done was yesterday
And since you've gone it's just another day
“How Do You Sleep?”
The first two lines are more about Lennon than McCartney and the last line is bad timing. When Lennon wrote it he had no idea that “Another Day” would soon top the charts and make McCartney a bag full of money.
To say that Lennon was the angry lyricist and McCartney wrote the merry melodies is nothing short of ignorant. Lennon wrote more than a few ballads and McCartney invented heavy metal, according to some idiots. It was the head banging flute solos of Jethro Tull, not McCartney, that won the first heavy metal Grammy. Lennon was a great lyricist, but he could write banal crap as well as the next icon.
When you're by my side
You're the only one
Don't you run and hide
Just come on, come on
So come on, come on, come on
“Little Child”, written in 1956
Come on, come on
Come on, come on
Come on is such a joy
Come on is such a joy
Come on is take it easy
Come on is take it easy
“Everybody’s Got Something To Hide Except Me And My Monkey”, 1968
Hold me darling
Come on listen to me
I won't do you no harm
Trust me darling
Come on listen to me
Come on listen to me
Come on listen, listen
“Whatever Gets You Through The Night”, 1974
At the same time McCartney was writing songs like these:
Some day you'll know I was the one
But tomorrow may rain so I'll follow the sun
“I’ll Follow The Sun”, 1958
Blackbird singing in the dead of night
Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life you were only waiting
For this moment to arise
“Blackbird”, 1968
My eye cries out a tear still born
Misunderstanding love in song
“Love In Song”, 1975
People tell me that I should prefer Lennon to McCartney. How come no one older than me ever seems to understand. “Help” was the song that got me interested in the Beatles in the first place. “Yesterday” is a nice little song, but I have always thought it overrated. I prefer “Strawberry Fields Forever” to “Penny Lane” and “I Am The Walrus” to any other Magical Mystery Tour song. But what makes “Strawberry Fields Forever” and “I Am The Walrus” great songs is the combination of Lennon’s lyrics and “all that artsy fartsy shit” that Lennon complained about McCartney adding. Both songs were simple ballads before McCartney whipped out the mellotron. McCartney’s reasoning for being more experimental on Lennon’s songs than his own is dubious and now he has to live with the myth that Lennon was the artsy one while he was safe and middling. At this point in their careers it should be obvious that McCartney is far more open to experimentation than Lennon ever was.
But if you look at each Beatles album and compare McCartney songs with Lennon songs, I am more likely to prefer the McCartneys right from the beginning. The big vocal performances on Please Please Me are “I Saw Her Standing There” and “Twist And Shout”. Lennon gets all the credit for screaming his song, but McCartney actually wrote his song. With The Beatles, their weakest album, has the standout McCartney track, “All My Loving”. A Hard Day’s Night, Help, Rubber Soul and Abbey Road are pretty even. Lennon comes out ahead on Beatles For Sale. But McCartney dominates Revolver, Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, The Beatles and Let It Be. Yellow Submarine is evenly split between McCartney, Lennon and Harrison. Pound for pound I think McCartney gave more for the Beatles than anyone else.
Comparing their solo careers is simply unfair. John Lennon only released six proper albums in his lifetime. He has no real live album since he never toured after 1966. He only released one compilation album. Yoko has since released over a dozen.
Paul McCartney has released 19 studio albums so far, not counting Give My Regards To Broad Street, which is really a soundtrack album, and Run Devil Run, which is far and away superior to Lennon’s Rock’n’ Roll. But McCartney was sober when he did his. He also has a dozen experimental albums, ranging from amusing to what the fuck was he on, and five so-called classical albums, including two oratorios, a ballet and whatever the hell Standing Stone is supposed to be. His great weakness is in releasing a live album every time he goes on stage. To his credit he has only released three compilation albums, though each has the same dozen songs. Most of Wings Greatest is also on All The Best and almost every song on both is on the first disc of Wingspan.
This is where the trouble starts. While Lennon mostly released something and moved on (if you ignore Yoko’s attempts to rewrite history), McCartney is the George Lucas of music. All of his studio albums either have been or will be reissued as deluxe super special edition CDs. Band On The Run has been released as a regular album, special anniversary edition, part of the “Paul McCartney Archive Collection” and the “Paul McCartney Collection”. You can hear the song “Band On The Run” on 14 different CDs, excluding bootlegs. Will we ever get out of here indeed.
The Guinness Book people declared McCartney the most successful musician ever, in terms of sales, back when people read books. Sales of new material since then have plummeted. He has not had a #1 single since 1984 or top ten single since 1993. In all fairness, singles simply do not sell the way they used to, and the way all music is marketed and sold is completely different than it was before McCartney started dyeing his hair red. His albums still sell well in a market more concerned with single downloads than full length albums and his concerts always sell out quickly.
But McCartney wants more money. It is generally acknowledged by people with no access to such information that he is a billionaire (in US dollars), but one of his largest sources of income, his music publishing catalogue, has taken a hit since downloading music replaced record stores. McCartney compensated by leaving EMI after 45 years and taking his music to a much smaller company that offered him a much bigger piece of the pie. Your typical international superstar songwriter/performer makes about $1 per CD sold. As his own publisher and copyright holder, McCartney used to make about $2 per CD. With Hear Music, he reportedly gets $4 to $5 per CD. This is one reason McCartney was reluctant to sell music online.
Back before Steve Jobs was burning in Hell, he wanted to sell everyone’s music for 99 cents per song, whether they were Elton John or Milli Vanilli. But the Beatles (ie, McCartney and Yoko) felt that “Hey Jude” should probably be worth more than Five Man Electrical Band’s “Hello Melinda, Goodbye”, based in part on the court decision in the case of Let’s Be Fair to Everyone v. Some Shit is Just Better.
A typical Beatles album has fourteen songs. At 99 cents per song an entire album would sell at a bargain basement discount price. This gives McCartney a much smaller flame of pie, especially since he has to share the performer’s royalties with three other people and the songwriter’s royalties with Yoko, ironically. When he tried to change the songwriting credit on some of his own songs, Yoko successfully cockblocked him in court.
To make up for the loss in record revenue, McCartney started playing more concerts and charging concert promoters more money. In the ‘70s, the height of his toking and selling power, McCartney played three small UK tours, one European tour, and one hugely successful world tour. In 1989 he played his first world tour in thirteen years. Since then he has had four large world tours, three European tours, and four North American tours.
I went to three different shows of the Flowers In The Dirt tour (which was called something else) and probably spent less than $100 total on tickets. I have no idea how much concert t-shirts cost, but I must have considered the price reasonable at the time as I bought a few. And we were all given free tour programs that were more like novels (by today’s standards) than tour programs. I went to one show of the Driving Rain tour (called “Driving Tour” or something equally unimaginative) thirteen years later and spent more money on one ticket than all three tickets from the previous tour. Concert programs were more expensive than free and t-shirts were outrageous, but I bought one anyway because I knew that this would be the last time I saw the man live. My very cheap tickets to the first tour were all good seats while my expensive ticket to the last got me one of the worst seats I have ever had at any concert. I could see the stage with a telescope, but there were fireworks that I could not see at all.
Much of the blame for high concert prices can be placed on concert promoters and the evil Ticketmaster, but people like Paul McCartney who demand exorbitant salaries should feel guilty that their music, rock and roll, the music of the masses, can only be enjoyed live by bankers, carmakers and anyone else to whom Congress gives billions of stringless taxpayer dollars. Or at least people who see credit card debt the way their government sees public debt.
Now McCartney’s website wants to make a profit. I can understand selling his music via his own site. Most music is sold or stolen online, so there is little reason his site should not offer his music for a high fee. But they have recently gone beyond charging people for songs and videos. Now they charge people to be members of his website, as if any non-midget animal porn website is worth paying just to look at.
For the incredibly high price of £32.50 per year you too can have a “Premium” account at his website. What do Premium fans get that unimportant fans do not? Exclusive access to content you already have if you bought his albums. Plus personalised full length audio streaming, complete with improper British spelling, creatively called the “Jukebox”. This is an electronic device familiar to old people who dye their hair red but will mean nothing to the younger hipsters who have enough disposable income to pay to be a member of some website. With the Jukebox, the important Premium fans can play their favorite Paul songs right from his website. After going online, signing in, logging on and clicking all the right buttons. Simply amazing. Sign up today or be forced to play music offline like an asshole. Elite Premium members can also watch all the videos that are on Youtube and were on that $35 McCartney Years DVD from the inconvenience of his website. But wait. There’s more. Premium members also get a free Chinese sweatshop t-shirt. Not really free if you remember that you paid £32.50, but cheaper than any concert t-shirt.
But that’s not all. If you thought it would be, lo unto you. Act now and the first 5000 people with credit cards and nothing better to do can become elite “Pioneer” members. These are the real fans, so they get exclusive access to exclusive content befitting their important stature, which is much better than anything those Premium douchebags get.
Are you a true fan? Are you unemployed or at least have the free time of an unemployed person? Do you like spending all day looking at a website dedicated to a single person? Do you want yet another online account that looks and acts pretty much like Facebook where people try to collect the most “friends”, ie, anonymous strangers? Sign up today.
(Offer void in most of Asia, Africa, South America and probably Antarctica. Must have a Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo or Google account to become a Pioneer member.)
It is his website and he is free to do with it what he wants, just as the rest of us are free to ignore it or worship it as if it were a television program about people just keeping it real. My complaint is that Paul McCartney, the guy who said love unto others as you would have them love unto you, has turned a previously innocuous if relatively useless website into a cash register that classifies and segregates his fans purely on how much money they are willing to spend on him. My name, or some retarded “screen name” like MaccaFan1964 or Meigouren, has never been on his website. It will neither harm my real life nor my online fantasy world (where I am taller) should anyone think me not a Pioneer fan, Premium fan or even inexclusive regular member. But I am disappointed that McCartney is cultivating such a dystopian commune at the one place online where people can fawn over him without making it painfully obvious what poofs they are.
Or perhaps I have gotten too old to appreciate the stampede of progress. I used to enjoy going to the record store, flipping through the stacks of LPs until my fingers were dirty, paying my $2.50 and listening to the album while reading the lyrics or looking at the cover art. The first time I heard “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” I thought that the record skipped at the end. My Rubber Soul LP consistently skipped at the end of “I’ve Just Seen A Face” (which was on the American version of Rubber Soul), giving it an extra bar that I thought it was always supposed to have until I heard the CD version. These are peculiarities that the digital generation will never get to appreciate.
On my last visit to Tokyo, where Tower Records is alive and well, I bought Paul Simon’s So Beautiful Or So What, which I did not know existed, for something more than $2.50. When I brought it home I copied all of the songs onto my computer. I have listened to it several times but have never looked at the lyrics. I cannot even picture what the cover looks like. I am thinking baby’s face, but I know that is the previous album. I have abandoned most of the old ways, mostly because I am usually doing something else while listening to music (eg, Mind Games is playing on the Windows Media Player as I type this), but I have not embraced the new ways. I have not bought so much as a single song online. I illegally downloaded most of Billy Joel’s catalogue back when Napster was, but all of my legal music purchases still come in CD form.
While 69-year-old Paul McCartney uses the latest technology to milk even more money from his fans, I am still tilting at online social networking sites as if they were windmills. I cannot shake the feeling that they might be giants.
I also got Miscellaneous T in Tokyo.
© MPL Communications LTD
(who probably want money for posting this)
27 November 2011
And Then Put Out The Light
Every once in a while, about three or four times each year, the indiligent, unconscionable people who appointed themselves in charge of the building where we live decide that those of us who live here can do without water for a day. I do not mean that there is no hot water or that there is no cold water. There is no running water whatsoever. They turn it all off. The excuse is that the water towers that hold the water supply need to be cleaned from time to time. I would have no problem with this if it were what actually happens. Water towers do indeed need a good cleaning every now and then. The pipes around here are old enough, and the water source is suspect enough that drinking tap water is advised against. Every year people die from drinking local water. This is not Montezuma’s revenge. This is Quetzalcoatl’s revenge. Some people boil the water before cooking with it. I simply cook with bottled water, which itself may or may not be loaded with contaminants.
My issue with completely closing off all avenues of running water to clean the water towers is that I have never seen anyone actually clean the towers. I know where they are. I pass several very large tanks every time I take out the garbagie. When we lived in the three bedroom apartment in the better building I could see the towers on top of the adjacent building from my bedroom window. On more than a few occasions that the water was turned off I checked for signs of activity and found none. It is possible that I was simply looking at the wrong time, but when the water is off between 8am and 6pm and there is no one anywhere near the water towers between 8am and 6pm I have my doubts.
The one good thing in this entire situation is that they let us know when they are going to turn off the water. They usually post notices in the elevators. This was not always the case. They used to simply turn it off and let the residents wake up to a world without running water. Eventually people started to complain. A major difference between Chinese types and what I like to call rational humans is that the Chinese types often wait a very long time before complaining about anyone in any position of any authority screwing them over. We humans complain right away. The powers that be may never support any change that we can believe in, but we certainly can complain.
About a week ago I noticed a notice announcing that the water would be off on Sunday from 8am to 6pm. Why they always do it on Sundays is beyond me. You would think that they would turn off the water during the week when most people are at work rather than on the one day when most people are most likely to be home. Such is Chinese logic.
As I always do, I prepared for the big day by filling a few buckets with water. This is mostly unnecessary since I can always use bottled water to clean, wash and brush that which needs to be cleaned, washed and brushed during the affected time. Bottled water cannot, however, flush the toilet. Buckets can. The streets of this city already smell bad enough. I can do without my home smelling like everywhere else.
But a funny thing happened at 8am, as far as I know. I was asleep. The water remained on while the electricity turned off. This was fairly obvious to me as the air conditioning was off when I awoke.
One of the most annoying idiosyncrasies of living in this building is that the cheap, lazy bastards who own it turn off the air conditioning every winter. The entire building is equipped with central air and not those individual units that dangle out the window. This is convenient most of the time, but terribly inconvenient when they render the air conditioning useless. This may be November for all I know, but I still require air conditioning during sleepy time. Our humidity stays on from late January to early January. It is not especially hot, and I rarely use air conditioning during the day, but I want it on when I am asleep. When I found it off, I thought that they had turned if off for the year. November is far too soon to play that game. They usually do not bother to turn it back on until March. Four months without air conditioning would be entirely unacceptable. The time that it is off is based on when the cheap, lazy owners of the building, and not the residents, think that it is not hot enough for air conditioning. Why it is not simply left on and up to the residents to decide when they are hot is more of that Chinese logic that escapes me. It would make sense to me if the cheap, lazy owners could save money by turning it off, but we all pay for our own electricity.
Every once in a while, about three or four times each year, the corrupt, extortionist puppet masters who decide what everyone is to do, say and think decide that certain parts of the city can do without electricity for the day. I have no idea what the excuse is. Entire blocks are shut down for the day for reasons unknown to those of us who are not important enough to need to know such things. Again, it is always done on Sundays. Since most people are at work on weekdays from 8am to 6pm they probably use very little water. But electricity is something we all use whether we are at home or not. I had thought about buying ice cream the last time I went grocerying, but fortunately, did not.
Not long after waking up I realized that it was the electricity that was off and not the water. Although without electricity there was no hot water. The water is heated by a gas tank which is activated by an electric motor. The stove is also gas, but requires electricity to switch on. The toaster oven and rice cooker are purely electric. This makes cooking anything fairly difficult.
My computer can run for about two hours on the battery, but connecting to the internet requires electricity. On one such day when the electricity was off and the Wife could not watch her local whacky game shows on the color television set, she suggested that we watch a digital video disc, or what the kids call a DVD, together. I let her figure out why that was never going to work. It is nothing to do with stupidity. She is far from stupid. It is simply a case of Chinese logic. If the peasants have no bread, let them eat toast.
I had prepared for the loss of water with buckets, but could not prepare for the loss of electricity. There is little one can do short of eating all the ice cream before it melts. As there was no ice cream in the apartment this was not an issue.
The reason I thought that we would lose water was the notice in the elevator. It said that the water would be off on year 100, month 11, day 27 from hour 8 to hour 18. It even pointed out that 8 to 18 is ten hours. Proof that these people are good at math. In human terms this translates to 8am to 6pm on Sunday 27 November. There is always the possibility that I misread the notice, but I know the difference between 水 and 電. Knowing what I know about the cheap, lazy bastards in charge of this place and the culture’s complete lack of pride in their work or any semblance of efficiency and honesty, I would say that it is more likely they who were mistaken. Their Chinese is better than mine, but when they fuck up they could not care less. If I printed a notice with such a mistake I would correct it and print a new one. They would simply ignore it, if they even noticed, and feel that they have done their job. 没事.
My issue with completely closing off all avenues of running water to clean the water towers is that I have never seen anyone actually clean the towers. I know where they are. I pass several very large tanks every time I take out the garbagie. When we lived in the three bedroom apartment in the better building I could see the towers on top of the adjacent building from my bedroom window. On more than a few occasions that the water was turned off I checked for signs of activity and found none. It is possible that I was simply looking at the wrong time, but when the water is off between 8am and 6pm and there is no one anywhere near the water towers between 8am and 6pm I have my doubts.
The one good thing in this entire situation is that they let us know when they are going to turn off the water. They usually post notices in the elevators. This was not always the case. They used to simply turn it off and let the residents wake up to a world without running water. Eventually people started to complain. A major difference between Chinese types and what I like to call rational humans is that the Chinese types often wait a very long time before complaining about anyone in any position of any authority screwing them over. We humans complain right away. The powers that be may never support any change that we can believe in, but we certainly can complain.
About a week ago I noticed a notice announcing that the water would be off on Sunday from 8am to 6pm. Why they always do it on Sundays is beyond me. You would think that they would turn off the water during the week when most people are at work rather than on the one day when most people are most likely to be home. Such is Chinese logic.
As I always do, I prepared for the big day by filling a few buckets with water. This is mostly unnecessary since I can always use bottled water to clean, wash and brush that which needs to be cleaned, washed and brushed during the affected time. Bottled water cannot, however, flush the toilet. Buckets can. The streets of this city already smell bad enough. I can do without my home smelling like everywhere else.
But a funny thing happened at 8am, as far as I know. I was asleep. The water remained on while the electricity turned off. This was fairly obvious to me as the air conditioning was off when I awoke.
One of the most annoying idiosyncrasies of living in this building is that the cheap, lazy bastards who own it turn off the air conditioning every winter. The entire building is equipped with central air and not those individual units that dangle out the window. This is convenient most of the time, but terribly inconvenient when they render the air conditioning useless. This may be November for all I know, but I still require air conditioning during sleepy time. Our humidity stays on from late January to early January. It is not especially hot, and I rarely use air conditioning during the day, but I want it on when I am asleep. When I found it off, I thought that they had turned if off for the year. November is far too soon to play that game. They usually do not bother to turn it back on until March. Four months without air conditioning would be entirely unacceptable. The time that it is off is based on when the cheap, lazy owners of the building, and not the residents, think that it is not hot enough for air conditioning. Why it is not simply left on and up to the residents to decide when they are hot is more of that Chinese logic that escapes me. It would make sense to me if the cheap, lazy owners could save money by turning it off, but we all pay for our own electricity.
Every once in a while, about three or four times each year, the corrupt, extortionist puppet masters who decide what everyone is to do, say and think decide that certain parts of the city can do without electricity for the day. I have no idea what the excuse is. Entire blocks are shut down for the day for reasons unknown to those of us who are not important enough to need to know such things. Again, it is always done on Sundays. Since most people are at work on weekdays from 8am to 6pm they probably use very little water. But electricity is something we all use whether we are at home or not. I had thought about buying ice cream the last time I went grocerying, but fortunately, did not.
Not long after waking up I realized that it was the electricity that was off and not the water. Although without electricity there was no hot water. The water is heated by a gas tank which is activated by an electric motor. The stove is also gas, but requires electricity to switch on. The toaster oven and rice cooker are purely electric. This makes cooking anything fairly difficult.
My computer can run for about two hours on the battery, but connecting to the internet requires electricity. On one such day when the electricity was off and the Wife could not watch her local whacky game shows on the color television set, she suggested that we watch a digital video disc, or what the kids call a DVD, together. I let her figure out why that was never going to work. It is nothing to do with stupidity. She is far from stupid. It is simply a case of Chinese logic. If the peasants have no bread, let them eat toast.
I had prepared for the loss of water with buckets, but could not prepare for the loss of electricity. There is little one can do short of eating all the ice cream before it melts. As there was no ice cream in the apartment this was not an issue.
The reason I thought that we would lose water was the notice in the elevator. It said that the water would be off on year 100, month 11, day 27 from hour 8 to hour 18. It even pointed out that 8 to 18 is ten hours. Proof that these people are good at math. In human terms this translates to 8am to 6pm on Sunday 27 November. There is always the possibility that I misread the notice, but I know the difference between 水 and 電. Knowing what I know about the cheap, lazy bastards in charge of this place and the culture’s complete lack of pride in their work or any semblance of efficiency and honesty, I would say that it is more likely they who were mistaken. Their Chinese is better than mine, but when they fuck up they could not care less. If I printed a notice with such a mistake I would correct it and print a new one. They would simply ignore it, if they even noticed, and feel that they have done their job. 没事.
21 October 2011
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.
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.
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I have no qualms about disseminating creative works for the public benefit when the author is duly credited, but if you use any of the writing or photography contained herein and try to pass it off as yours, that just shows you are a big pussy who is too lazy to come up with your own word usements or shoot your own digital paintings. You should be ashamed of your dipshittery.