Monday, December 29, 2008

Frosty Brew

My ayi comes Mondays and Thursdays.  In addition to the cleaning and washing and stuff she also does all kinds of errands for me, like my pay my utility bills, and make sure tat I have crates of beer delivered.  A crate (seen here) costs less than $5.  It’s 9:20 pm right now and I just heard the guy deliver it.  I’m sure he’s got his little tricycle covered with crates of beer making his deliveries.

The cool thing is this:  it’s fucking freezing outside today, well below zero.  So the beer he just delivered to me was ice cold, suitable for drinking the minute I brought it into the apartment.  And who says there aren’t awesome things about living here.

Saturday, December 27, 2008

TV Guide

I’ve been a DVD-watching bastard lately.  Since pirate DVDs are my only source of TV and movies I have amassed quite a collection.  I mean, they don’t cost but a few dollars each, so why the hell not?

A few months ago I bought a boxed set of the X-Files.  I was a big fan of the show when it was on so I undertook the herculean task of watching the entire series from the pilot through the second movie, one after the other.  It took me almost three months but I actually did it.  I’d come home from work and watch about four episodes a night.  It was a really interesting way to see the show again because there wasn’t the gap between the episodes and the seasons, so you noticed all kinds of little details that you might have missed on a regular viewing schedule.  There were things I noticed about the Syndicate, as well as its members Cancer Man, the Well-Manicured Man, the Elder, and so on.  I’d forgotten about Spender, and that CSM was father to both he and Mulder.  I also found that I enjoyed the Dogget episodes a lot more now than I did when they were originally on, when they were trying the whole supersoldiers thing. 

Other than that in the past week I’ve watched the most recent seasons of Entourage (which is the best fucking show on TV right now), Curb Your Enthusiasm, and I just now finished the third season of Dexter.  I need to find season six of The Shield.  Last time I was at the DVD shop I bought what I was told was season six but it was actually five, but I watched it again anyway to get me back up to speed with the whole thing between Shane and Vic.  I have to go do some running around tomorrow, I’ll see if I can find it somewhere.

It’s a pain in the ass having to watch all your TV on DVDs, but sometimes it has its benefits.  I really miss my fucking TiVo, though. 

Update: I’ve watched some crap movies in my time.  A lot of them I really liked, even though they were awful.  (There’s something appealing about a really good bad movie.) Right now Max Payne starring Mark Wahlberg is on.  It’s been on for about fifteen minutes, and it’s such a monumental piece of shit I’m not even going to finish it, and I’ll damn near watch anything.  Calling this movie an unholy crapfest is an insult to unholy crapfests.  Not only am I going to switch it off I’m going to smash the DVD into a few pieces lest it somehow fall into someone else’s DVD player.

Capitalist Barking Dog

One of my neighbors has a yappy rat dog, and the fucking thing has been barking non-stop for about six hours.  I think it’s up one floor but I’m not sure.  I’d like to throw it off the goddamned balcony.

Thursday, December 25, 2008

Turkey and Beer

Just got in from Christmas dinner.  Spent the night with friends at their house.  I took off at 4:30 because one must not be rude to one’s host. 

Merry fucking Christmas everyone, seriously.  Have a great one.

Technorogy

So I’ve had a problem with the fire alarm in my kitchen recently.  It’s been going off for no reason in the middle of the night.  The problem is that with this system there’s no battery and no reset switch so my only option is to rip it out of the roof by the wires.  Last time my ayi was in here I told her to contact the mamagement office and tell them to replace it.  I just got out of the shower and both she and here are in here replacing the alarm.

You know when you splice two pieces of electrical wire together, you use electrical tape to bind them and cover the copper join?  Well, he’s using plastic wrap (cling film for you Limeys).

While he’s here I’m also going to get him to look at that crispy electrical switch that always makes a sizzling noise when it comes on.  I swear to Christ this place is going to go up in a fireball one night.  I need to get about five fire extinguishers for my apartment, though I’m sure they were made with the care and attention to detail as the fire alarm and the light switch.

Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Reach Out and Touch Somebody

It’s Christmas Day here in Beijing (or, to use its Chinese name, Thursday) so I’ve begun making phone calls to friends an relatives all over the world to say hi and let them know that I haven’t been tossed on the train to the labor camp just yet.  My ayi is here cleaning (this is a work day after all) so she’s been listening to me talking to people over Skype.  I just use the built-in microphone in my Mac to work like a speakerphone, and I can call anyone on their phone.  (Skype is the greatest shit ever invented.)

Anyhow, she doesn’t speak a word of English, but she’s been giggling at some of the things I say, like shèng dàn kuài lè, which is how you say “Merry Christmas” in Chinese (literally “holy birth fast happy").  When I get off the phone with someone she wants to know who it was and where they were.  Usually it’s a friend in the US so I say tā shì wǒde péngyou zài Měiguó, or “He/She is my fiend in America,” a pretty easy thing to say. 

I just talked to my uncle in Australia, and as I hung up with him it dawned on me that I had no idea how to describe who I had been talking to.  The Chinese describe familial relationships in a completely different way than we do.  The particular uncle I was talking to was my mom’s brother, so you literally call him jiù fù meaning “mother’s brother” or “maternal uncle.” It gets even more confusing when you describe relationships with cousins, because you have to state whether they are from your maternal or paternal line, and whether they are older than you or not.  So You might actually describe someone as “father’s second eldest sister’s second-eldest daughter” or something of that nature.  Check out this page for lists of how to describe cousins in Chinese.

It’s 3:20 in the afternoon right now.  I was at a paraty last night until the wee hours, and I’ll be at another one tonight, all the foreigners who didn’t go home this year getting together for a bit of turkey and festive cheer.

NOTE:  I wanted to end this post with a humorous picture of a Chinese Santa, so I went to Google and searched for that phrase.  A few good ones came up, but Chinese internet censorship rules do not permit the downloading of photos from Flickr, which is where most of these are located, so just click the link yourself.  I particularly like the Mao in the Santa hat.

Update: Got one to work.

Sheng dan kuai le and a gong xi fa cai to you and yours!

Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Santa Craws

Here’s something interesting.  Here’s how you say Santa Claus in Chinese.

This is shèng dàn lǎo rén, which means “holy birth old man.”

Ping An Ye

Well, it’s Christmas Eve here in Beijing.  We haven’t really had any snow this year despite record cold winds blowing in off the Gobi.  As I wrote last year, there are Christmas decorations EVERYWHERE here.  And unlike the US, the decorations don’t say “Happy Holidays” or “Enjoy Your Festive Non-Denominational End of Year Celebration” but they actually use the word “Christmas.”

You come to a country where religion is outlawed and you see “Merry Christmas” everywhere. In the US, a country with a right to religious freedom written in the Constitution, and businesses are terrified of saying “Merry Christmas” for fear of offending someone.

Tonight and tomorrow night I’ll be with my friends, eating turkey and other traditional Christmas fare, all of us far removed from our families back home.

Update: I had some kind of weird formatting issue with the previous post and this one, the other one wouldn’t display properly, so I deleted it.  I’ll see if I can dig it out of a cache and repost it.

So Long Nuts

Those of you with testicles will appreciate the nut-shriveling factor inherent in this story.

Winter truly arrived in Beijing yesterday with the highest temperature of the day down to minus 8.8 ℃. Media reports say it was “the coldest day in December in the last 57 years.”

Strong wind ripped off part of the metal roof of a university’s gymnasium and the thermal insulation layer of a hotel in Beijing. It also blew away a man who was mending his own roof in Shijingshan District. The man landed on the top of a 15 meter-high tree and was rescued by firefighters (see front page image).

According to Sun Jisong, a meteorologist from the Beijing Meteorological Bureau, the cold weather will not last and the temperature is going to rise to above zero in the coming days.

Yes, it’s THAT FUCKING COLD here.  Must be that global warming thing I’ve been hearing about.

Sunday, December 21, 2008

Conscience of a Nationalist

Here’s yet another brilliant piece in The New Republic which gives an enlightening insight into Chinese politics and cultural views.

Like Abe Lincoln’s Beard

I have to see if I can find a copy of this.

A Chinese woman who became an online sensation after posting a homemade pornographic film of herself on the Internet has been detained in Shanghai, according to state media.

The 12-minute-video showed the woman, surnamed Huang, performing “sex acts,” the official China Daily said in its weekend edition, without elaborating.

“It soon became one of the most popular downloads on the mainland, with thousands of people downloading it last month,” the report cited the local police as saying in a statement.

The woman set up a blog, hoping to profit from her notoriety and sell interviews with herself for up to 30,000 yuan ($4,383) a time, the newspaper said.

Despite the police’s best efforts, the video is still available online, it added, without saying what penalty the woman may have to pay.

I can only begin to imagine how disgusting homemade Chinese porn would be. 

The Politics of Niceness

Everyone, and I mean everyone, needs to read this interview in The Atlantic with one of the men in China who manages this country’s investments in the United States.

I can understand why Americans might feel that way. But, talking with my lawyer head once again, it’s not relevant to discuss how Americans “should” think. We should discuss how Americans might think.

This concern is not really about China itself. It could be any country. It could be Japan, or Germany. This generation of Americans is so used to your supremacy. Your being treated nicely by everyone. It hurts to think, Okay, now we have to be on equal footing to other people. “On equal footing” would necessarily mean that sometimes you have to stoop to appear to be humble to other people.

And you can’t think as a soldier. You put yourself at the enemy end of everyone. I grew up during the Cultural Revolution, when people really treated other people like enemies. I grew up in an environment where our friends, our relatives, people I called Uncle or Auntie, could turn around and put a nasty face to me as a small child. One time, Vladimir Lenin told Gorky, after reading Gorky’s autobiography, “Oh my god! You could have become a very nasty person!” Those are exactly the words one of my dear professors told me after hearing what I went through.

But over the years, I believe I learned to be humble. To treat other people nicely. I learned that, from a social point of view, no matter how lowly statured a person you are talking to, as a person, they are the same human being as you are. You have to respect them. You have to apologize if you inadvertently hurt them. And often you have to go out of your way to be nice to them, because they will not like you simply because of the difference in social structure.

Americans are not sensitive in that regard. I mean, as a whole. The simple truth today is that your economy is built on the global economy. And it’s built on the support, the gratuitous support, of a lot of countries. So why don’t you come over and … I won’t say kowtow [with a laugh], but at least, be nice to the countries that lend you money.

Talk to the Chinese! Talk to the Middle Easterners! And pull your troops back! Take the troops back, demobilize many of the troops, so that you can save some money rather than spending $2 billion every day on them. And then tell your people that you need to save, and come out with a long-term, sustainable financial policy.

I think that with the collapse of the Cold War, which the West won, there would be an acceptance on the part of the rest of the world of Western hegemony, especially that of the United States.  After WWII there were the War Crimes trials in Germany and Japan, in which there was a clear verdict—they lost, their people knew it, their governments knew it, and so on.  There was a sense of finality.  The defeated parties accepted their defeat, and lived with restrictions placed on their armed forces, with foreign troops garrisoned on their soil, and other aspects of defeat.

With the communist world we never had that.  The USSR collapsed, China abandoned Marxism, Vietnam is liberalizing, and so on.  There never was a finality to the Cold War.  We might view it as the end of a War, they saw it as the loss of a battle.  The Chinese during the Cultural Revolution might have been one of the worst, most oppressive places in the world, but those days are over.  The Chinese look forward to a bright future.  They’ve seen 400,000,000 of their countrymen lifted out of poverty in the past 20 years, more than the population of the United States.  Can you imagine the popularity of a US president who could accomplish something similar?

The communist world doesn’t view itself as having lost anything.  Look at Putin and Medvedev, the former of whom is LOVED by Russians as he builds their authoritarian state once again brick by brick.  China is utilizing the best parts of the free market to turn itself into a superpower, and the way things are going it will be THE superpower sometime during my lifetime.

My point is this:  we in the United States have got to abandon the notion that we are always going to be the top dog by default.  It’s been 60 years since the end of WWII, the world is a vastly different place.  The UN Secrity Council, divided among the victorious powers in WWII, is an anachronism.  As we go forward with globalization, and the economies of the world become more and more intertwined, we have got to take the blinders off and admit that we can’t go it alone.  We need China and we need Japan and we need the other countries of the world, be it economically or militarily or what have you.  There is no reason that the US cannot retain its role as the world’s premiere superpower, but we have got to abandon the idea that we will forever be the ONLY superpower, and that countries like China and India are going to sit by like subservient lapdogs doing our bidding.

In short, if we want to be the leader of the pack, we’re going to have to earn it.  We earned it once by winning the Cold War, but we’ve been riding that victory by default for way too long.  There are a bunch of youngsters nipping at our heels, and unless there is a sea change in attitude in our country we’re going to find ourselves in a place we really don’t want to be in.

Many years ago I read something which struck me.  I don’t remember where I read it or who wrote it, but I still remember it:  “There is no problem in America which couldn’t be fixed by another Great Depression.” While it’s way too early to pronounce the current economic situation as being akin to the Great Depression, we are living in perilous times, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that we could end up in another Great Depression.  You’ll never meet a more capitalist oriented, free market, consumerist whore than me, I’ve proudly been that way for most of my adult life.  But I think the changes described in this article are necessary.  Democracies very rarely go to war with each other, that’s been the prevailing wisdom for most of my lifetime anyway.  Well, I think we ned to modify that a bit, since that idea was coined when the world was divided between the capitalist west and the communist east.  What we’re seeing now in India (democratic socialist capitalism) and China (authoritarian socialist capitalism) is that there is not the clear distinction between “us” and “them” that there once was.

The secret to preventing wars is not to make sure that the other country is a democracy.  The secret to preventing wars is to make it so that it’s in the other guys’ best economic interest not to go to war with you, nor to see you go to war with anyone else.  It is in China’s best interest right now to see the US economy recover.  This is the path of the future.  We need to look past the old political labels and begin to viee the world in terms of economics. 

Read the world article.  The words this man speaks need to be read at the highest levels of the Obama Administration.  As we prepare to begin to undo, or at least mitigate the errors of the Bush years, there is lot here to be heeded.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

Yes, I Am Alive

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.

Welcome to life in China.

Monday, December 01, 2008

Money For Nothing

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.

Monday, November 24, 2008

A Pair of Teeth

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.