I realize it’s been a couple of weeks since I last posted anything. I really don’t want to use the super lame “I’ve been really busy at work” line but the fact is I’ve been really busy at work. We’ve taken on our biggest project to date and aspects of it have turned out to be far more difficult than we had imagined.
Not a whole lot exciting has happened in the last few weeks, though I do have a couple of interesting anecdotes. Last weekend when I was out with my friends we had a couple of Russian guys from Siberia hanging around with us. They were telling us all kinds of stories about life there. One of them asked me, “In America, are you taught that Russia is a police state?” I answered that we’re taught that things have gotten better since the days of the USSR but that there are a lot of gangs now, the Russian Mafia. He laughed. “In Russia we prefer the gangs. Nobody goes to the police. The gangs will steal your money, but the police will steal your money, torture you, and throw you in jail.” (Insert Guantananmo reference here.)
They then described how the police would torture someone. They’d start out with something called the “elephant.” This is where they handcuff you to a chair and put an old WWII-era gas mask on you. This has a long hose hanging down in front of it where the air canister would attach, giving you a look like an elephant with a trunk. The police would take the hose and block the end off with their hand, cutting off the victim’s oxygen supply. They’d keep this up until you passed out, after which they’d take their hand off and you could breathe again. The police would then do this over and over and over to you for even days at a time, making you pass out then reviving you, until you admitted guilt to whatever they were trying to pin on you. Another technique is more traditional. They take an electric wire, plug it into a socket, and touch the live ends to your fingertips. This technique is known for some reason as “internet.” They said the elephant was preferred to the internet because it didn’t leave any marks.
One of the Russians mentioned that his family wasn’t originally from Siberia, they were from the west. How did they end up in Siberia? “Many years ago Stalin put my family on a train, so now I come from Siberia.” It’s a whole different world out there, folks.
The other tale happened last night. I ended up at the emergency room. As many of you know I have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) and I take medication for it. As part of the OCD I also am prone to anxiety. Since these medications are hard to get in China (one is almost prohibited for doctors to prescribe and the other is not sold here) I have my mom buy them in the US and FedEx them over. I’ve done this ten times or so since I got here and never had a problem. This time, for some reason, the box got held up in Chinese customs. It’s been there for almost a week. I had to write out a letter detailing every medication in the box, the dosages, the amount I take, why I was importing them, and so on. This then had to be translated into Chinese, faxed to FedEx, who then gave it to the customs department. It’s been in customs for three days, and I’m out of pills. In other words, the stuff I take to stop me from going nuts is sitting in customs, and the fact it’s in customs and may or may not be released was giving me maxor anxiety.
Yesterday at work all day I was anxious as hell. My heart was beating rapidly and I was forcing myself to try and remain calm. I got home from work and got some dinner. As I was eating I began to feel very lightheaded. My heart was racing, at one point I checked and it was 120 beats per minute. I was dizzy and honestly thought I was going to pass out. I recognized what was going on—I was having a panic attack. I’ve only had a few of them before, but they’re the worst feeling in the world. The way a doctor once explained it to me is that as humans evolved we developed our sense of fear, and as a part of that sense there is an alarm which says “You are in imminent danger of dying.” When you see a rattlesnake near your leg, or you’re underwater for too long, this is the sense you feel. During a panic attack this alarm goes off for no real reason. All of a sudden you literally feel like you are about to die. It’s awful.
I tried to calm myself down with breathing. I even made a couple of stiff drinks, but those didn’t help either. I knew I was going to have to go to the hospital. I was avoiding going because, even though I have great health insurance here, and there are a number of for-profit hospitals who employ Western doctors, they don’t direct bill my insurance, so I’d have to pay cash, and I had no idea how much it was going to cost. Eventually I admitted to myself that this wasn’t going to stop on its own, I needed something to help me calm down. I called a friend who came over, got me in a taxi, and took me to the SOS International emergency room.
I had an EKG and they determined I wasn’t having a heart attack. I was hyperventilating, and my heart rate was above 90 when they first checked it. They eventually gave me something to help me relax, and within a couple of hours I was more or less normal. The visit cost me ¥3,300, about $480. I filed the insurance claim today, so I should have that money returned within a couple of weeks.
Thankfully, according to the FedEx tracking page, the customs people have released my package, so hopefully FedEx will deliver it to me tomorrow.
Had a really odd experience in the taxi ride home tonight. After we had driven off the driver asked me (in Chinese, of course) if I could speak Chinese. I said not really, that my Chinese is very bad. He asked where I was from and I said America (Meiguo). “Ah, Meiguo!” he said excitedly, which he followed up with something that sounded like “Leering papers bang, bu hao!” (These last two words mean “not good.") I had absolutely no idea what he was trying to say, so I replied that I heard him but didn’t understand him.
“Ummm… uhhhh… Leerung Burse Bang. Uhhhh… bank! B-A-N-K!” I said “Yinhang ma?” (You mean bank?) He responded in the affirmative.
It was just then that I realized what he was trying to say: Lehman Brothers Bank. In other words, since I was American and the collapse of Lehman was the precipitating event in the financial mess he was saying “Lehman Brothers Bank is bad!” He was getting confused on the middle word, which we all know is an abbreviation for “brothers” but to him looks like “bross.”
People in America buy homes they can’t afford, Iceland goes bankrupt, and a Chinese cabbie forms a bad opinion of Lehman Brothers. It’s a strange world we live in, my friends.
So I had a particularly bad day at work today, and my fucked-up Scots Irish DNA compelled me to get my drink on. There’s a FANTASTIC Italian restaurant in my complex, so I went down and had a steak, plus a glass of white wine as an aperitif, an entire bottle of red wine with my steak, and a glass of lemon liqueur as a desert. All in all an spectacular evening of food and booze.
As I’ve mentioned before I have hardwood floors all through my apartment. When I first got here I bought a rug from IKEA so that I could protect the floors from the inevitable sloppy food and spilled drinks. Needless to say that after a year of being here the thing was as filthy as the piece of carpet in the garage of a frat house where they do the keg stands.
Last Thursday I left a note for my ayi to get the thing cleaned. She obviously called some kind of cleaner because I came home today and there it was, looking like it did the day I bought it. I’m sure many of you have had rugs cleaned before. What did it cost? Remember this is for pickup, cleaning, and delivery.
You can tell this city is slowly returning back to its pre-Olympic state of social depravity by the number of people there are in the street asking you if you want to go to a ladybar. “Hello, hello, sir, you want ladybar? Massa-jee massa-jee best price.” We usually return this with “fuck off” in English.
One of my friends, however, has come up with a novel solution. He says, Bu, Ni shi ladybar! This means “No, YOU’RE a ladybar!” The guys look us in bewilderment because what we said really doesn’t make any sense, so they ask again, and we give them the same reply. Eventually they just give up out of boredom.
Something else just dawned on me. Before I leave this country I’m going to get video tape of me playing catch, either football or baseball, in Tnananmen Square. We’ll probably get about 30 seconds in before we’re told to stop, but that’s all I need to prove I did it.
I had an interesting experience last night. I went out with one of my friends and, as you might guess, we got pretty shitfaced. It was about four in the morning and the place we were at was pretty much dead, so we decided to go another bar, a place called Cheers, to have a couple more drinks before slinking home in a stupor.
It’s been really cold lately, so everyone here is of course wearing winter coats. In Cheers there isn’t a cloakroom so we just tossed our coats onto whatever pile of clothing happened to be nearest to us. My friend started a conversation with an Irish girl who was sitting next to us. After half an hour or so she left, then half an hour after that we decided to split. He grabbed his coat and I went to get mine. No dice, it was gone. At first I thought someone had stolen it, but then I saw under a chair a dark woolen coat similar to mine, though clearly for a small female. It seems that the girl had grabbed my coat by mistake. I waited around for 15 minutes or so to see if she’d come back but she didn’t. I looked in the pockets of her coat and saw her phone was in there, so I took her coat home with me, figuring she’d call.
I was in the taxi and had just gotten off the freeway when she called. She asked me to meet her at a restaurant called The Den, which is open 24 hours and serves a lot of western breakfast-type stuff, so it’s always full of drunks at this time of the morning. I told the cabbie to more or less turn around and take me back to where he had picked me up. I went into The Den, ordered a drink, and waited. Five minutes later she came in. Since I’d ordered a drink she said she’d have one too, so we sat there and had a quick chat.
Now, here’s the weird thing. Prior to the Olympics the government shut down all the hooker bars, and almost none of them have as yet reopened. Consequently the hookers are starting to crop up in other establishments. You can imagine that in a bar known to be packed full of drunken lao wei there would be a market for prostitutes, and sure enough there were maybe 20 of them in there, trying to score from one of the drunks. As I sat there talking to the Irish girl there were hookers coming up behind her and waving at me. Now, this girl could have been my girlfriend or wife or something, but the hookers were trying to peddle their wares to me right behind her back. I mean, what did they think I was going to do? “Honey, why don’t you go back to the house and climb into bed. I’m going to go fuck this skanky Mongolian hooker for an hour or so. Tomorrow I’ll make pancakes.”
There is, for some reason, a pack of dogs outside my apartment howling at the moon. I don’t know where they are but I can hear them all the way up here on the 25th floor. It’s a little creepy, actually. It kinda sounds like the food pens in back of a Korean restaurant.
Things at work have sucked lately. For some reason things have deteriorated lately between me and the other two lao wei in my office. It’s just stress, but still. The thing that sucks is that here in China I’m kinda trapped at this company because I’m under contract. If I was in LA I’d be thinking, “Time to send out the old resume. I don’t need this shit.” I don’t have that luxury here, so I have to go to work and grin and bear it.
It’ll pass, I’m sure, but the last few weeks have been a real pain in the ass.
Tens of thousands of migrant workers are leaving the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou after losing their jobs, railway officials say.
The increase to 130,000 passengers leaving the city’s main station daily is being blamed on the credit crunch.
Guangzhou is one of China’s largest manufacturing hubs, but many companies who export products have collapsed.
Chinese officials are worried that a sudden increase in unemployment could lead to social unrest.
By “social unrest” they mean “questioning the Party.” That being said, the Chinese aren’t going to pull an Obama and tighten up their trade agreements. If anything they’ll liberalize them further to provide an incentive for other countries to continue to buy products manufactured in China.
China said Thursday it hoped the United States would adhere to free trade under Barack Obama, while defending exchange rate policies criticised by the president-elect during his campaign.
“We will continue to follow a mutually beneficial foreign policy, we believe in free trade, and we believe America also believes in free trade,” foreign ministry spokesman Qin Gang said.
“We hope that the policy of free trade will continue to be adhered to. We must prevent trade protectionism, which is no good for either side,” he said, when asked if he thought Obama would be more protectionist.
That’s right, folks. Communist China has a better perspective on international free trade than the guy we just elected president. This country has used capitalism to lift 400 million people out of poverty in the last 20 years. (That’s more than the population of the US.) In the last 20 years in the US we’ve gone from the free market ideals of Reagan to the neo-socialist protectionism of Obama, all while we’ve convinced ourselves that more government, law, and regulation are the best ways to help the poor.
As mentioned previously, this morning I watched the election at a breakfast event hosted by the American Chamber of Commerce in China. The place was full of people from the embassy and American business types here in China.
When you first registered they gave you an wristband to show you paid, and they asked who you were voting for, red for McCain, blue for Obama. I saw very few red armbands, it was a virtual sea of blue. Every time Obama won a state there was a cheer, and when he was declared president the place erupted. Remember, these are businesspeople. You can look at McCain’s stance on trade versus Obama’s, but the people here were clearly more interested in America’s long-term reputation in the world than they were any short-term economic considerations.
My absentee ballot never arrived. This year I will not be voting. It’s not that big a deal, though. If China has taught me one thing it’s how worthless voting is.
Think about it. The Chinese have no chance to vote, they’re told beforehand who their next leader is going to be. In America, depending on where you are registered, your candidate has no chance of winning. When I lived in California it went for the Democrat every year. Now I’m registered in Texas, and it goes Republican every year. It’s been pretty apparent for the past three months or so that Obama was going to win. Your vote, when you think about it, is functionally useless unless you happen to live in a battleground state.
I’m about 90% sure I’ll never vote again. Every year I vote for the lesser asshole, and I’m sick of it. Nobody I think will do a good job ever wins. McCain is a douche and Obama is a phony. (I mean, really. Hopes and dreams? Yes we can? Who the fuck believes this crap?) Unless there’s a sea change in the political landscape after this election I think I’ll be sitting in the bleachers drinking beer, watching the monkeys on teh field thinking their vote counts for something.
I don’t know what the hell is going on lately, but the last four or five taxi drivers have been farting in the cab. I don’t mean they farted before I got in, they fart multiple times while I am in it. The odd thing is they are completely sneaky about it. They’re all SBDs, you never hear them do it, it just hits you like a blast wave. Now, if there is only you and the driver in the cab, and you smell a fart, are you going to have any problem figuring out where it came from? If the cabbies are going to fart in the cab, why not go up on one ass cheek and let ‘er rip? Why be surreptitious? Proudly float that air biscuit, and claim it as your own!
Of course, I quickly learned how to say fart: fang pi. Now I can say Wo bu yao nide fangpi, which means “I don’t want your farts.” It’s actually got kind of a cool cadence to it, I could see it being in a rap song. “Woe boo yow need a… fahng pee!”
Obama proposes funding the tax cuts by closing corporate loopholes, cracking down on international tax havens and increasing the dividend-and-capital-gains tax for the wealthy, he said.
He called his proposal a “fair” alternative to the present tax code and said it was necessary because hard times on Main Street translate to hard times on Wall Street.
“When the changes in our economy are leaving too many people behind, the competitiveness of our country risks falling behind,” he said. “When that dream of opportunity is denied to too many Americans, then ultimately that pain has a way of trickling up.”
Sounds great, right? Let’s close all the loopholes those greedy corporate bloodsucking fat cats are stealing so they can light cigars with $100 bills! The problem is, the more you raise the cost of doing business in the US, the more you are going to pay for products, and the more likely that the corporation in question will seek to do business outside the US, and they’ll take their jobs with them.
As an American who is living in China, opening a subsidiary for a US corporation, which came here in part to escape America’s astonishingly high corporate income tax rate, you might want to think about this. Note that this isn’t specifically about Obama, the Congress hasn’t done jack shit about this issue for years, then everyone pisses and moans that their jobs are going overseas. Well, if we don’t cut corporate tax rates that’s only going to get worse, and there will be people like me who are more than willing to move to countries like China and profit from it.
If the decision were up to me I’d abolish corporate income tax entirely. There is no such thing as a corporate income tax, really, since the corporations just pass those costs on to the consumer in the form of higher prices. To put it in simple terms, if you levy a $1 per unit charge on widgets, the price of widgets will go up by $1. All you’re doing is taxing yourself.
Next to my office there’s a small walkway, underneath the air conditioning units. Next to this walkway is a fence separating our area from the courtyard that I can see from my office window. There’s a big pine tree on the other side of the fence.
One day I noticed an enormous dog turd, like Great Dane sized. I thought this was odd because large dogs are banned inside the city limits, you can only have irritating yapping lapdogs. (I saw an enormous husky in Hohai one night, and that was the biggest dog I’ve seen in the year that I’ve been here.) The size of this dog turd was kinda remarkable.
A couple of weeks later I noticed there were a few more dog turds there, and next to them were these white things. Upon closer inspection they were wads of toilet paper. Which do you think is more likely, some disgusting Chinese peasant was taking a shit behind the tree, or someone trained their Great Dane to wipe its ass?
This, my friends, is China as you can only experience it by living here.
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