Here’s a little insight into the batshit crazy mind of most Chinese girls. Please take a moment to review this post about a Chinese girl, arguing with her boyfriend who was smashing her face into the window of a parked car. One of my foreign friends has a Chinese girlfriend, and I told her “You Chinese girls are all feng zi (crazy) by western standards.” She replied that when she was younger (she’s in her 30s now) she might have done something similar.
“By smashing my face into the car it would have demonstrated how upset I was, and made him feel very bad for upsetting me.”
And people wonder why the lao wei generally leave the Chinese chicks alone.
So I went to 7-11 a few hours ago to buy a bottle of Jack (yes, you can buy booze at 7-11 here) and I noticed that they were selling… wait for it… DORITOS! Yes, cheesy, spicy, crunchy Doritos! I haven’t had a Dorito in almost a year.
it tasted like a little piece of heaven. THIS is what the consecrated host should taste like in Catholicism, it’d probably make church a lot more fun.
Remember that cute little girl who sang during the opening ceremony? It turns out she didn’t sing, some ugly girl did.
One little girl had the looks. The other had the voice. So in a last-minute move demanded by one of China’s highest officials, the two were put together for the Olympic opening ceremony, with one lip-synching “Ode to the Motherland” over the other’s singing.
The real singer, 7-year-old Yang Peiyi, with her chubby face and crooked baby teeth, wasn’t good looking enough for the ceremony, its chief music director told state-owned Beijing Radio.
So the pigtailed Lin Miaoke, a veteran of television ads, mouthed the words with a pixie smile for a stadium of 91,000 and a worldwide TV audience. “I felt so beautiful in my red dress,” the tiny 9-year-old told the China Daily newspaper.
Peiyi later told China Central Television that just having her voice used was an honor.
It was the latest example of the lengths the image-obsessed China is taking to create a perfect Summer Games.
But wait, it gets better!
A member of China’s Politburo asked for the last-minute change during a live rehearsal shortly before the ceremony, Chen said in the Beijing Radio interview, posted online Sunday night. He didn’t name the official.
During the live rehearsal, the Politburo member said Miaoke’s voice “must change,” Chen said.
“We had to make that choice. It was fair both for Lin Miaoke and Yang Peiyi,” Chen told Beijing Radio. “We combined the perfect voice and the perfect performance.”
“The audience will understand that it’s in the national interest,” Chen added.
The Politburo. The fucking Politburo! This would be like someone in Bush’s cabinet making this decision. It shows just how politicized this entire affair is. Having a cute girl singer is in the national political interest.
We’ve been hearing for months about how China’s most famous fireworks expert had spent weeks rigging the city for the most spectacular fireworks display ever seen. Fireworks were invented here, and the display was promised to be something spectacular. Unfortunately, they turned out to be about as real as most of China’s Chanel purses.
As incredible as the Olympics opening ceremony fireworks looked on our television screens, it’s disheartening to learn that some of what we saw was a computer-generated illusion.
The Telegraph picked up a story in the Chinese newspaper the Beijing Times which explained that filming the 29 firework “footprints” from the air would have been impossible. So visual effects artists spent a year creating a computer-graphic simulation—inserted precisely at the same time the real fireworks went off—to bedazzle home viewers as if they were at the actual ceremony. The fireworks themselves were real enough, but if you were watching on TV, what you saw was a CG simulation of that reality, happening in real-time. Confused yet?
According to the report, the only real fireworks TV viewers got to see were those filmed from inside the Bird’s Nest.
Note that when you click on the link for “picked up” it goes to the UK paper The Telegraph. That page isn’t making it through the Great Firewall of China. I can get to the regular Telegraph page, just not that article.
What a pisser. They blocked off the 4th Ring Road, one of the major freeways circling the city, ostensibly so they could set up these fireworks in safety. The traffic on the 3rd Ring Road, the one I take home every night, was unimaginable. Now we find it was all bullshit.
Smoke and mirrors. As I’ve said before, China cares less about the reality and more about the illusion. They care less about being a modern, thriving city than they do about looking like a modern, thriving city.
Keep all this digital trickery in mind when televised footage shows superhuman Chinese atheletes sweeping gold after gold. Or when a giant crimson dragon swoops out of the heavens like Falcor during the closing ceremony to kiss the head of Hu Jintao and then passionately denounce the independence of Tibet and Taiwan.
I went out to eat tonight with a bunch of friends at a Benihana teppanyaki-type place. All you can eat and drink for $28. (See why I never cook for myself?) It was right across the street from Worker’s Stadium, the site of the Olympic soccer matches.
As early readers of the blog will remember, Worker’s Stadium was the site of one of my earliest Beijing experiences. For the last ten months it’s been under construction, being updated for the games. Tonight I saw it live for the first time. The restaurant we ate at was on the third floor of a building across from the stadium. Gong Ti had light streaming from it, a sea of people going in and out, and cheers that sounded like crashing waves.
It was cool to finally see the old girl in action.
It’s 8:40 Monday morning. Considering that I just spent the entire time since Thursday evening either shitfaced or asleep, I feel surprisingly good. Just took a shower, feeling okay, need to get a little coffee in me. Gotta buy a few phone cards to charge up my cell phone then it’s off to an agonizing week of mundane, boring work which will make me want to hang myself.
You know, the usual.
I’m sure that about Wednesday I’ll feel the itch to go out for dinner and drinks, but I have to let these creaky old bones get a little rest before I go out and tie one on again. I’m getting too old for this shit.
Update: I’m about to walk out the door and I’ve been listening to some tunes while I dress. “Rocketman” by Elton John just came on and, for some reason, this seems like to perfectly capture the mood I’m in right now. I love this song.
It’s actually been raining quite a bit this evening, which is usually a good sign that the next few days will be light on the pollution, if not all the way to clear blue skies. Let’s hope.
In most cities you think, “Ugh, rain, this blows.” In Beijing you think, “Yes! Rain! There won’t be so much toxic filth in the air!”
This was the bar street in Sanlitun last night around two or three in the morning. I’m standing more or less in the same spot I did for the police siren video below, only it’s about 21 hours later.
At the end you can hear some French ya ting de singing “La Marseillaise.” As soon as I finished filming some Germans showed up, and the French immediately surrendered.
I have to admit, for all the apprehension the lao wei have been having for the past few months about the no-fun Olympics, I spent the weekend partying my balls off. I mean, I’m 38 now, which means that I spent all day today feeling like I’d been run over by a cement mixer, but damned if I didn’t have a hell of a time non-stop since Thursday evening.
The U.S. Olympic basketball team treated President Bush and perhaps a billion more fans to a game to remember.
With LeBron James and Dwyane Wade soaring for dunks that thrilled the raucous crowd at Beijing’s basketball arena, the United States pulled away for a 101-70 victory against host China on Sunday night.
Wade scored 19 points and James had 18 for the Americans in one of the most highly anticipated events of these Summer Games.
Houston Rockets All-Star Yao Ming scored 13 points for China.
Yao Ming is one of the most famous people in China, this is going to be a huge blow to the national ego.
I seem to have been able to score some tickets. I’m going to see Holland play baseball against some other country that doesn’t really play baseball, so it should be a super lame game. There is a good chance, however, that I’m going to score tickets to see the US soccer team play Nigeria, a game which will immediately followed by Argentina playing some other reasonably good team. That should be a lot of fun. It’ll most likely be packed with all the 1-0 action that we’ve come to expect from soccer.
The funny thing about the US/Nigeria game is that one half of the stadium will be full of Beijing’s drug dealers, and the other half will be full of their clients. They’ll probably be sending text messages to each other to hook up before the Argentina game starts.
And for those of you who don’t know about Argentinian football, learn about the “Hand of God” incident in the 1986 World Cup.
Update: I just noticed something. Yao Ming was wearing the number 13 on his jersey. I’m going to go into work tomorrow and tell all the Chinese that the reason they lost is because western numbers are more powerful than Chinese numbers. If you think this is insane you have to remember that I used to have people tell me all the time that my cell phone number was “unlucky” because it had a lot of fours in it. The Chinese are extremely superstitious, so this should be fun. “See? If Yao Ming had paid proper respect to the superstitions of the foreign devils China would have won.”
Last night, well after the sun was up, my buddy and I ended up at a bar in Sanlitun. We were sitting there discussing politics or some goddamned thing when we struck up a conversation with a Chinese gal who was sitting by herself at the bar. She asked where we were from, he said Scotland and I said America. Her eyes lit up: “America! I love Ronald Reagan!” She went on and on about Reagan. She then said she admired Truman because he bombed Japan. (The Chinese still viscerally hate the Japanese.) She even knew that he had “The Buck Stops Here” on his desk. She also said that she really admired Lincoln.
My friend asked her what she thought of Clinton. “Clinton? He asshole.” I thought I was going to shit myself laughing.
Lest anyone thing we ran into some kind of Chinese libertine, she then expressed her admiration of Napoleon Bonaparte and Saddam Hussein. We asked what she thought of Chairman Mao. She said he wasn’t good, but she gushed with admiration for Deng Xiaoping (the guy who followed Mao) and for Zhou Enlai, one of Mao’s cohorts who struggled with the Gang of Four. He died before Mao, so Deng ended up succeeding the Chairman, and subsequently created the modern China.
We asked her what she thought of Hitler. She did the Hitler salute and said he was a bad, bad man. We then tried to explain to her that Napoleon and Mao weren’t a whole lot better than Hitler, but her English skills weren’t good enough to really get what we were trying to say. At this point she piped up that she also loved Winston Churchill.
As a follow-up to my post on how Chinese women have no idea how to dress I cannot even begin to describe the ridiculous outfit she had on. Some kind of weird tube top with a necktie, and a little pair of shorts, with weird knock-off Converse All-Stars. When she left we laughed our asses off.
There was a little craziness last night. (Maybe it was the night before last, the last three days have been a blur.) My friends and I were three sheets to the wind, and as we were walking down the street we heard a Chinese couple yelling at each other, obviously in an intense argument. Suddenly they came running out of the shadows, with the girl swinging her purse at the guy. Then—I shit you not—she ran into the street and began banging her head on the rear window of a parked car. He ran after her and pulled her away from the car, but she kept trying to break free and smash her head into the car.
I turned to one of my friends and said, “Okay, I know I’m really fucked up, but is this actually happening or am I imagining it?” He confirmed the reality of the situation.
Chinese girls. Batshit crazy lunatics, every one of them.
Carter’s boycott, done in the name of human rights, accomplished absolutely nothing. I’m willing to say that Bush is a worse president than Carter (who at least deregulated airline ticket pricing and interstate trucking, and invited Willie Nelson to the White House), but it’s Bush who has gotten it right when it comes to superpower-charged Olympics.
To have Bush out there, saying what he’s saying where he’s saying it—and pursuing a larger policy of engagement via trade and other forms of exchange—is absolutely the best way to pull China into something approaching Western-style democracy, complete with robust individual rights and the sort of economy that will ultimately force governments to loosen up. Milton Friedman famously said that as people get richer, they demand the ability to live however they want—that economic freedom, which increases prosperity, helps create the conditions for political freedom. It seems clear that the Chinese government, like all governments, doesn’t want to yield power if it can avoid doing so. It’s also clear that the more a country trades with the world—for goods, services, and even cultural identities—the less its government can control its people. Here’s hoping that the Beijing Olympics, regardless of the predictable and bizarre repressions going on right now to ensure a “stain-free” event, push that process along.
Bush is one of those guys for whom everything always seems to go wrong. But with his decision to come to China, and to show the Chinese people that they are worthy of the “face” given them by the leader of the most powerful country in the world, he’s demonstrated that, unlike most leaders from Europe, he gets it. Perhaps it’s because George Bush I was at one time ambassador to China, so there might be so insight and advice there. Given their allegedly frosty relationship, I doubt this is likely. I just think, instinctively, he recognizes the value China has in the future of global trade and United States in particular. As a sinologist professor giving lectures on the BBC once said, he thinks America is the only country in the world that really “gets” China. Everyone else views it as “a” country, whereas it should be seen as “the” country.
Good day for Bush. Good day for America. And now I an going to crawl into my bed and sleep until dinnertime. This has been, seriously, one of the most fun weekends since I got here. The odd things is that there are very few tourists. “You here for the Olympics?” “No, I live here.” Oh, me too.” I got that a LOT tonight. So while the bars were full it doesn’t give off the sense of impending doom that you get from, say, walking down Bourbon Street during Mardi Gras.
I’ve basically spent the last three days partying my ass off. Tomorrow is Sunday, which is the “get your sleep patterns back in place” day. Otherwise I’m completely screwed come Monday.
Someone is actively blocking my access to YouTube as I write this. I uploaded a video from last night, showing a police car with its siren going off down in the Sanlitun bar area. My access to YouTube works fine, then gets cut off, then works again, then stops again. Now the video is up but it says it’s “no longer available.”
Ironically, there’s nothing bad in it, the police are acting professionally, and when they drive away you see how festive it was down there last night. It’s not anything the Chinese government should want to block. If anything they should want this sort of thing to get out because it makes them look like they’re capable of having a good time.
Here’s the URL to the video. See if you can get it to play because it’s been blocked here.
Update: It appears to be live now, so check it out.
On further review the Brazilians appear to be Mexicans. But anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of Spanish will know what they were chanting when the police left. The weird thing was that, when we first walked out of the bar, we heard the siren, and the cop inside was switching it off and on, like he was scratching it, and there were all these people dancing right behind the car. We were like WTF? so we went over to look, and this was the video I got. So you can see the dancing drunks and the cops doing God knows what with their siren.
I have wooden floors all through my apartment. (Very common in China.) Last night after I got in I was walking around wearing socks, and I slipped and came down hard.
Today there is a huge bruise on my left elbow and down near my left ass cheek, so you can see exactly what direction I fell. Damn slippery floors. It’s not the first time I’ve slipped, which is why I usually never walk around anything but barefoot.
Last night was a riot. We ended up at a club which was full of Olympic visitors, many from Russia and Brazil, and stayed there until they shut the place down around 5:30. The we migrated to Cheers, a bar whose motto is if there’s one person buying drinks they’ll stay open. There were a bunch of Olympic types in there from Australia and, if I recall, Belarus.
I got some great video on my camera of a Chinese police car. I’ll have to get it up on YouTube as soon as I can.
Of course, while I was out having a great time, this happened.
A Chinese man killed a relative of a U.S. men’s volleyball coach and injured another family member in a stabbing at a popular tourist spot in Beijing on Saturday.
The dead man was a U.S. citizen and the injured victim was an American woman, police said, adding the attacker jumped to his death after the killing. The murder cast a shadow over the first day of sporting action at the Olympic Games.
“While at the Drum Tower in central Beijing, the two family members were stabbed during an attack by what local law enforcement authorities have indicated was a lone assailant. One of the family members was killed and the other seriously injured,” the U.S. Olympic Committee said in a statement.
A Chinese tour guide was also injured in the attack carried out by a Chinese man just after midday. Assaults on foreigners are rare in Beijing, site of the 2008 Olympic Games.
Tang Yongming, 47, from the eastern city of Hangzhou, jumped to his death from the second storey of tourist site the Drum Tower after the attack, police said in a statement.
“We need further investigation to find out the motive since the man has killed himself. We have no more information to provide for the moment,” a spokesman for the Beijing Public Security Bureau said.
Honestly, this is rare here. There are barfights and stuff, but this guy was at the Drum and Bell Tower. A murder suicide? In Beijing? At that location? Very odd indeed, poor bastard.
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