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.
Nothing much new to report here. I’ve been pretty broke the last few weeks (don’t ask), so I haven’t been doing much. Last weekend, when I went out with the two guys I usually go out with, only one of us had any cash, so he financed the evening for the other two.
The evening did have a few surprised in store for us, though. At one club a guy walked in with his pants down around his thighs, underwear, too. He saw some friends in there and he went over to say hi. The girls in their group freaked out, took him over against a wall, and pulled his pants up. I, of course, was laughing my ass off.
At another bar I saw a girl dancing who looked exactly like Ugly Betty, without the braces.
Later in the night we saw a black girl in a bar with a Chinese friend. Black women are not really common in China. (Black men, in general, are either Marines from the US Embassy or drug dealers from Africa.) At any rate she was from Eritrea, a tiny little country near Sudan. One of my friends spent a lot of time talking to her and her friend, while I sat against the wall sucking down Jack & Coke, generally getting my drink on.
We ended up, as we so often do, at a Russian nightclub sometime around four in the morning, sitting and watching Russians dance. I swear to God, Russian men have no shame whatsoever. The culture that gave us ballet masters and the Bolshoi and classical Russian dancing, with the leg kicks and hands raised high, has degenerated to a bunch of drunks stumbling about on the dance floor, looking more like they are convulsing than dancing. Nobody gives a shit, though, they all encourage each other to do this. The women all urge them out, then join them on the dance floor. Russian women are all great dancers, and there’s something oddly appealing about Russian pop music.
There was one girl out dancing with her friends. She was a super-hot blonde, mid 20s, looked like a fashion model. Unless you happen to look like Brad Pitt she would be out of your league. Some drunk Russian guy kept trying to pick her up on the dance floor. For three consecutive songs he tried to get her to dance with him. She kept politely dismissing him, but he wasn’t taking no for an answer. He’d grab her hands to dance, twirl her around once or twice, then she’d walk away. He’d run after her and grab her again and the would continue. Over and over this happened. I thought it was hilarious. She kept looking out off the dance floor into the dark of the club with a plaintive look on her face, as if begging someone to come and save her from this beast. Not a chance. One, it was too damn amusing and I didn’t want to spoil it. Two, many of the Russians in China are maphiya (say it aloud) and the last thing you want to do is have a professional gangster pissed off at you. You might leave the club with your entrails hanging out.
From a sociological aspect it was fascinating to watch, like a male peacock splaying out his feathers, and the female peacock telling him to go fuck himself.
It seems that “The One” is so popular that people are promoting him in a country that doesn’t allow free elections. I took this with my phone on the way in to work this morning.
As my taxi driver sped past the car I expected to see a laowai driving, but it was a Chinese guy. This, now, presents a conundrum. Is Obama such a revolutionary force for good in the world that even the Chinese are supporting him? Or does it prove that his economic policies are so far to the left that he appeals to communists?
I will leave it to you, gentle reader, to decide for yourself. As for me, I’m voting for the Turd Sandwich.
A former Beijing official who oversaw citywide construction projects for this year’s Olympic Games has been given a suspended death sentence for corruption in a case that involved bribery and lavish living, state news outlets reported on Sunday.
Xinhua, the state news agency, reported that the sentence, suspended for two years, meant that if the defendant “shows good behavior, his sentence will be commuted to life imprisonment.”
In other words, he’s the patsy. I bet there wasn’t one person on the BJOC who wasn’t on the take to the degree this guys was. That’s how shit gets done here. But, they had a scandal and they needed to show to the world that they were “serious about solving corruption.” So they find one guy, blame everything on him, and threaten him with a death sentence. If he spends the next two years taking the blame for the corruption of everyone else involved he gets to go spend the rest of his life in prison?
A Chinese prison? Christ, a bullet in the back of the head sounds more appealing.
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