Monday, August 11, 2008

She Loves the Gipper

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.

Only in China, man, only in China.