Thieving Bastard(s)

My bike was stolen. Finally. It still looked brand-new. Bought it a few months ago, this past spring, as a “fuck you” to the city’s public bicycle system, plagued with bad bikes, bad renting stations, bad hours, and never enough empty stalls to return your bike back to when you really need to.

It was probably the most expensive bike I’d ever bought. Well, no, I take that back, secondmost expensive bike. And, ironically, both mountain bikes were stolen, more or less, out of some degree of carelessness.

She was a Giant. Bright red, ripe for the plucking. I bought two steel, red locks to match the paint job. She wasn’t THAT expensive, really–a little over 1500 RMB, less than $200. But perhaps because of her feather-light frame, Shimano brakes and gear shift system, and shiny, red exterior, she always brought attention to herself everywhere I took her.

I lost her not even five minutes away from my apartment on foot. Foolishly, I decided to bike over to the Foreign Languages Bookstore cafe on Fengqi Road. I tried parking her under the awning, right next to the entrance to the cafe, and right next to the chair where the building security guard sat. He protested. “Can’t put that here,” he said. “What if I put it next to the other two bikes by the bookstore entrance?” I replied. “Nope, those gotta move, too.” Sonuvabitch, I thought to myself. Fine, whatever, I’ll put it right next to the street, next to the public bike station with some others. Dangerous, but … whatever, hasn’t been stolen yet, why would it be tonight?

Wheeled ‘er over, locked ‘er up, both wheels. “Hey!” the security guard yelled after me. “Why don’t you put it over here, closer to the building? It’ll be safer here.” I looked over to the other spot he indicated. Was in clear, plain sight from where the guard would be sitting. Sigh. Whatever, why not?

That was around 9pm-ish. Against my better judgment, I stayed in the cafe longer than I should’ve, even after chatting with my wife online (she’s now back in her hometown for the Mid-Autumn Festival visiting family), dilly-dallying on the internet, being 100% unproductive. I emerge from the cafe at midnight. Gone.

Gone. The security guards are just coming around the corner of the building. I don’t recognize the one from before, but eventually, I do. “You. You told me to put the bike here. Were you not sitting in that chair, right there?” “Well, I was making my rounds, wasn’t exactly sitting there all night,” he says. Yet when I left, he was. Conveniently, none of the building’s exterior security cameras point in that particular spot. And coincidentally, two other more expensive bikes are sitting there, untouched, whose owners just so happen to come down from the cafe as I’m discussing this matter with the guards. They arrived around 10pm, they say. “When you girls rode over here, did you see a bike right here?” “Yes, we did!” Fuuuck me. It was stolen, literally, within the past two hours.

The only conceivable way someone coulda made off with it was to carry it off. Can’t see how they would’ve stuck it into a car and drove off, woulda been too conspicuous. How did they do it? Why weren’t the security guards there? Why didn’t the other two bikes get stolen?

Very suspicious, indeed. Called the police, they came over, I gave them my story, also gave them the impression that, yes, I suspected the security guards had something to do with it. Just a bike, yes, stolen bikes are as common in Hangzhou as traffic. But this particular theft just didn’t make sense to me. Why did the security guard specifically ask me to move my bike to that particular spot after I’d already moved it away from where he wouldn’t allow me to put it in the first place?

This is the biggest question I have looming in my mind now. Thieving bastard(s).

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Bright & Grim

Recently, I seem to be having a slew of dreams all related to the baby and/or to my marriage, both of which have evidently been constantly on my mind lately.

I’ve dreamt about raising three babies at once, I’ve dreamt about duplicitously engaging in infidelity (several times) and then feeling bad about it and admitting such to the newly involved party (though, never mentioning such to my actual spouse), I’ve dreamt about little Emese walking, talking, crawling, I’ve dreamt of feeling emotionally betrayed, and of my home life dissolving.

I dream of bright futures in childrearing, yet grim ones in domestics. When? When will I no longer feel this way?

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I am loved.

Little Emese really, genuinely smiled at me for the first time ever tonight.

I … cried! :-)

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Fight Club (Dream Chronicle)

Last night, I had a dream that was the first indication that my inner/spiritual self-confidence has truly taken a turn towards the sky. (And that I actually found a chance to sleep long enough to fall into a REM sleep state, ever since the baby was born. :-p)

In the past umpteen years, I’ve had this recurring theme in some of my dreams in which I get into a physical fight with another person, yet I never have the strength or courage to fight bravely, much less victoriously. Throwing punches in my dream was always like trying to flail around two bags of sand, struggling to even barely injure my opponent.

But last night. Wow. I was like, in my old living room in Skokie (again), and this Caucasian guy who reminded me of a teacher I once worked with back at WEB Hangzhou’s Julong center, wearing a white dojo outfit, challenged me to a spar. And seriously. I literally whooped the shit out of him. No contest. At all.

It was bloody amazing. Definitely took the “best defense is an offense” approach during the fight. And it worked marvelously. (Particularly considering how puny I’ve shrunk down to ever since little Emese was born; I’m now only 52kg. Do the math, Yankees.)

The other unique thing about this dream fight was that it was, in no way, an antagonistic type of conflict. It was purely a spar.

Albeit where in where I literally kicked the crap out of the other guy! He couldn’t even get a single kick in. It was like I could predict his every move and kick him in the legs first before he could even do anything.

Bloody amazing. :-)

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A Nightmare of Sorts

Been ages since I’ve truly blogged. This time, it’s not exactly for a good reason. No brimming ideas to speak of (though, I’ve had many), no listless nights filled with rambling thoughts. No. This time, it’s about a kind of nightmare that I don’t think I’ve ever had before. It wasn’t a horror film. It was possibly even more unnerving than that:

It was about the death of my mother.

Now, I’m willing to wager that my mother is probably superstitious enough to believe that the act of my publishing this on the web will bring her bad omens. But since no one has even read this blog for the past umpteen years, I think I’m safe. Besides, this is only in the interest of dream chronicling so that I may better understand myself in the future.

If I haven’t mentioned before, a vast majority of my dreams that involve my family always take place during my childhood. I suppose in my subconscious, this was apparently the “golden era” of my youth or life, when we lived at our old house in Skokie (which, to this very day, I still consider to be my one and only true home).

(Uggghhh. The morning hordes of screaming residents in my community here aren’t being very conducive to my dream chronicling …)

Before the death of my mother took place in the dream, I had, typically, been arguing vehemently with her about something or other, the subject matter of which really didn’t matter. (We’ve always argued incessantly since as long as I can remember.) It was never physically shown, but in my dream, I knew shortly after we argued that my mother had fallen seriously ill, and that she was incapacitated from any physical labor at home, much less going to work. It was also implied in my dream that the absence of our father was not due to divorce and marriage incompatibility, but rather, due to a deadbeat and dangerous husband, of the white trash variety. (No offense, Dad.)

My young brother and I, both of us still children, came home one early evening, the sky already turning a hazy blue-gray in the last vestiges of our neighborhood’s sunlight, to find that our garage (and ramshackle shelter) had been completely disassembled into wooden boards that had been piled and stacked onto one another in our backyard, next to where the garage used to be. The black soil around where the boards would’ve been buried vertically in the ground had been all dug up, the slits in the earth where the boards had stood clearly visible. This puzzled the both of us.

Suddenly, the dream flashed to two scenes of our mother (who, in this dream, was white, with long, brown hair), the first of her floating atop a pond in a dimly lit environment, with her quietly struggling to stay afloat. The second scene was of her in another pond, sometime in the early afternoon on a cloudy day, white light bathing the scene in a kind of ominous, emotionless feeling, reminiscent of the baptism scene in Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?. In this second scene, she was no longer floating; she was submerged and sinking, motionless. She had passed. And though it was never explicitly shown in my dream, it was implied that her death was due to her, in our weak state, being helplessly drowned upon the return of my supposedly deadbeat father. But, for some reason, that implication’s ramifications never really played in my dream. The feelings I felt upon the death of my mother were the primary focus.

Flash back to my brother and I standing before the remains of what used to be our garage. My brother started crying profusely. I didn’t. At first. There was only one thing running through my mind initially. How in the world had, in her ill and weakened state, my mother managed to completely disassemble the entire garage? For what purpose had she done this, as now we had no shelter to stay in. (We had no house in this dream, actually, even though the events took place in the backyard of where my old house was.) And after a long moment, it finally started to sink in that now that my mother was gone, there would no longer be anyone else to do the housework, take care of the family, and provide for us. My brother and I would have to re-construct our garage shelter with our own hands. And that’s when I suddenly started to break down and cry, crouching onto the cement floor of the former garage. I then began to furiously lament that my last words with my mother had been of conflict, not love or appreciation, and I began to slap myself in the face continually. My brother came over, crouched down next to me, and cried alongside. I couldn’t stop telling myself how much I regretted yelling at her right before she died.

I continued slapping myself in the face right up to the time when my aunt, uncle’s wife, and grandmother (oddly enough, since she has also passed away) pulled up in our driveway in two separate cars, came over to my brother and I, and tried to comfort us. It was of no use. They dematerialized.

Flash to next scene. My brother and I, as a team of brothers with strong familial bonds (as I often dream of whenever he is in my dreams), began replacing the white, wooden board panels of the garage shelter back into the soil where they once were, the earth around them still a mess and upended. The dream ended before we had the chance to re-fill in the earth and find someone to lay cement over it all.

So. I suppose there are a few things I can glean from this dream. (1) Make every conversation with my mother, from now on, as if it were our last, especially since our conversations and face-to-face encounters are so rare these days, with us living on opposite ends of the planet. I dare not think of the guilt I would carry for the rest of my life if our last words together were of dischord. (2) Always know that I have a brother, and that brother will always be beside/behind you in times of need. At least, I hope so. I feel like I barely know him anymore, what with all the time I’ve already spent away from home, for, literally, the past 12 years. But at least I can say to myself that I will promise to always be there for him in his times of need. That, I should guarantee. To him and to myself. (3) Lastly, obviously, but of least importance, I feel–at least within the context of this particular dream–is the death of my mother at the hands of, well, a father. I know now that I’ve already long since detested the general absence of my own father in reality, and that my life’s goal to be the best father that I can ever be can be attested to my trying to make up for my own general lack of one. I’ve often blamed his general absence, as well, for my unhappy childhood, my relatively late realization of my own manhood, and my lack of career focus and perseverance during my early adulthood. It’s easy to correlate all that to the death of my mother in my dream. Notice that in this blog, I’ve never called it “murder”, because I don’t want to give the dream that sort of weightiness or malevolence. My mother died in the dream, and it doesn’t really matter how it happened, but only that it did, and how I felt about it afterwards is what has intrigued me upon my awakening from slumber.

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Chinese Vocabulary Practice–Sentences

引
+ 勾引 – 我四年半前倍老婆勾引，结果2011年已经结婚了生孩子，青年已经丢掉了！:-p
+ 吸引 – 搞活动需要考虑很多方式吸引人来参加，不然没有人来真的很郁闷很蓝费时间。

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I Know, But I Know

Originally posted by Li Hong zhang

Scene: LHZ eating lunch in company cafeteria. Some random Chinese person comes by brandishing a box of rice.

Chinese person: “You’re not eating rice! Here, have some rice.”
LHZ: “No thank you. I don’t like rice. The meat and vegetables are enough for me.”
Chinese person: “But you have to eat rice!”
LHZ: “No thank you. I like my lunch the way it is. No rice needed.”
Chinese person: “But you have to eat rice!”

At this point, there’s two ways to react. One is to stonewall, the other is to question.

The knee-jerk stone wall:
LHZ: “HEY! MIND YOUR OWN EFFIN BUSINESS!!! I DONT @$#@* WANT TO EAT RICE SO $#@& OFF AND LEAVE ME THE $@^# ALONE!!!!”
*Chinese person runs away in fright*

The reaction by questioning:
LHZ: “Why do I have to eat rice?”
Chinese person: “Because rice is a part of a proper Chinese meal.”
LHZ: “Why is it part of a proper Chinese meal?”
Chinese person: “We have a 5,000 year old tradition of eating rice with our meal.”
LHZ: “Are goat cheese and borscht part of a proper Chinese meal?”
Chinese person: “No. Of course not.”
LHZ: “Are the Chinese Mongolians Chinese?
Chinese person: *starts to squirm* “Umm.. Yes.”
LHZ: “Are the Chinese Russians Chinese?”
Chinese person: *blank stare* “What?”
LHZ: *pulls out Blackberry and explains the [俄羅斯族]”
Chinese person: *blinks* “Well, I suppose they are.”
LHZ: “Well if these Mongolians and Russians are both Chinese, then shouldn’t their cuisine be considered Chinese food too?”
Chinese person: “I guess.”
LHZ: “So therefore borscht and goat cheese can be part of a proper Chinese meal, right?”
Chinese person: “Fine.”
LHZ: “So therefore, where do you get your definition of a proper Chinese meal? Why does it always have to include rice? Where’s your borscht and goat cheese, for example?”
Chinese person: *walks off mystified*

(The above is just one example of what I can (and have) pulled. Because I got rice forced on me every day. Believe me, there are literally infinite directions you can go with that premise.)

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

LHZ, this was pure philosophical comedy–downright hilarious. Some deliberate jumps in logic there, but all the funnier for it.

This is a tricky one. Because I’m all for expanding people’s horizons, intellectually, culturally, etc. That’s why many of us decide to become teachers (here in China). Why not have them question their own identities? Existentialism certainly needs a jump-start over here, and they could certainly use it. Both Sartre AND Lao Zi couldn’t agree more. If, for nothing else, than to question the logic behind the traffic lane dividers drawn at the corner of Jianguo Lu and Qingchun Lu. (Unless, of course, that’s been changed since I was last back in ol’ HZ.) And it would consistently provide endless hours of comedy for themselves as well if they could just learn to laugh at themselves a little more. And they say a laugh earns a minute more of longevity. So why the hell not?

But on the other hand, one thing I’m very sensitive to is the type of cultural arrogance that can arise from transitioning from an open, developed country, to a country that’s technically only been awake to the rest of the modern world for the last 30 years (since 1980, I suppose). Sensitive to claims of disseminating knowledge, culture, how to be civilized, and even how to think in the 21st century unto “the random Chinese guy,” as you so eloquently put it. Especially from individuals who seem to claim these things without the slightest abandon and introspection. (Knee-jerk mindsets, as you say.) I myself can sometimes be guilty of this as well, but I always try to keep it in check, even on inconsequential message boards. More often than provoking local Chinese to question their identity and beliefs, I love to provoke grumpy, jaded expats to question the same as it pertains to their existence in China.

And believe it or not, expats are usually the more stubborn ones to see things differently than they’ve resigned to. So, you could say, EVERYONE, really, is a product of SOME form of cultural propaganda. Unless they’re TRULY invested in understanding the other side. Which, for better or worse, sometimes DOES require a little conformity and assimilation in order to “get it.”

Imagine the traditional Chinese 20-something female who thinks American women are all whores and over-opinionated b1tches from what she sees in movies and on TV. Until she actually moves to the U.S., conforms, assimilates, and gets a taste of what it’s like to be freely sexually frank without being shunned by her peers and intellectually respected. (Well, to some degree, at least, haha. Boys will be boys.) Or the honor-obsessed Chinese 30-something male who thinks foreign men are all good-for-nothing playboys who are out to humiliate Chinese women everywhere. Until he gets stationed abroad with a good salary in some lesser-developed country in Southeast Asia, or hell, another Chinese city like Guiyang, and then proceeds to assimilate into the no-committments-traveling-salesman’s lifestyle by womanizing like a hyena. (Which, my God, is oh, so true throughout Southeast Asia.)

Anyways, you’ve suddenly piqued my interest in your past experiences here in Hangzhou, though, because hard as it may be to swallow, based on how I’ve gone at it with the tag team known as LiHongZhang and Fu Man Chu (wow, a genuine WWE white-trash stereotype moniker just waiting to be marketed properly), you and I have a lot in common.

Though, our experiences and outlooks seemed to have diverged at an early stage in our “China development.” In that, you seemed to have garnered a whole lot more (comedic) angst than I, even though we’ve both encountered similar situations. Although that may just come down to personality differences, who knows? (Then again, mine comes out in explosive bursts of frustration rather than constant (comedic) ranting, of which my fiancee receives the full brunt, which is arguably worse.)

I’ll PM ya sometime. But it’s too f*cking late now, and I’ve gotta get up at, like, 10am. F*ck me. In the meanwhile, hope to see some replies back on this thread.

Your scenario surprises me, though. Whenever I go to a restaurant in China, it’s the hardest f*cking thing on Earth to actually GET rice, since people rarely order it and waiters are deaf to it. Completely converse to my Chinese restaurant experiences in the U.S., where they bring rice out to you without you even asking.

(By the way, LHZ, I’ve actually learned a lot from your rants on Qing Dynasty currency manipulations and the formation of foreign concessions. It provided a great point for debate!)

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Lady Gaga–Understated Genius

On the contrary to many of the expats on this thread, I’ve got to say, “pop” music is far more inclusive a genre and relevant than many of us “musical elite” like to admit. It’s just easily denounced by more discerning music lovers simply due to the fact that it’s–God forbid–popular. “If a lot of people like, it’s gotta be sh1t.” But the fact is, the more mainstream it is, and the more clever the people are behind it, the more societal change in values and thinking it can actually bring about. Just look at U2, a certified mega-pop band.

Lady Gaga, in my humble opinion, is an understated genius. As some have mentioned here, American pop music is all about the marketing. As it is everywhere else, one could argue. And Lady Gaga certainly knows how to market herself.

People said the same exact things about Madonna, Christina Aguilera, and N’Sync when they first came out. But look at ‘em now. Madonna’s still the world’s biggest female pop star, Christina’s proved that she’s much, much more than a Mickey Mouse Club teeny-bopper, and Justin Timberlake has taken male pop to whole ‘nother futuristically sonic level with his collaborations with Timbaland.

Madonna openly respects Lady Gaga, whose intentionally tongue-in-cheek, simpleton lyrics and contemporary dance sensibility are perfectly attuned to today’s market. She’s openly admitted to being bisexual, is a strong supporter of the LGBT community, and, if any of one happened to catch her performance on Saturday Night Live of her instrumental version of “Poker Face,” she’s actually a tremendously talented Broadway-style singer and piano player. And very contrary to Paris Hilton, you’ve probably never even seen Lady Gaga WITHOUT her “clown costumes” on, placing emphasis solely on the image she’s projecting and not her own personal self.

We know with pop stars, that “image” is everything, and like a dance club venue, it needs to constantly be renovated and re-invented. Madonna went from “Material Girl” to anti-abortion “Papa Don’t Preach” to hyper-erotic “Justify My Love” to political “Evita” to Giorgio Moroder-ish electronica queen “Ray of Light” to club-thumping “Confessions on the Dance Floor,” all personas that were worlds apart yet somehow a catalyst of the pop culture global conversation.

Similarly yet less drastically, Christina went from teeny-bopper “What a Girl Wants” to slutty “Dirrrty” and straight to vintage, jazzy “Back to Basics”. And if anybody bothered to listen to the songs inbetween, they’d actually realize that she’s an Etta James-worshipping, super-talented and hard-working singer.

So don’t be surprised if next year, you get something COMPLETELY different from Lady Gaga, one of the rare metamorphisizing pop extraordinaires who’s managed to hit it big with the mainstream and even in China.

Even Michael Jackson Himself couldn’t have said the same a mere four albums into his solo career.

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Fed Up With Expat Elitism

Yet another response to a thread at HangzhouExpat.com, a thread intentionally incendiary by asking “Chinese People … Why Do You Love Your Country?“, subtitled with, since your government allows you no freedom of speech and kills its own people, etc.

—–

I can’t even begin to explain how pointlessly f*cking stupid the premise of this whole topic is. At the expense of exacting warmly welcomed verbal vengeance, I will let my vitriol fly.

The opening call for debate on this thread reads:

“Chinese people say they love China. Why? How can you love a country that arrests people for speaking their mind?”

What then ensues is an 8-page monologue of merry HangzhouExpat.com-ers b*tching and wh*ning about the same exact sh*t and “party line” as what we’re all brainwashed with back home on CNN and BCC with anything related to China. Not so different in the same way people are brainwashed here.

1. Allow me to rephrase Fu Man Chu‘s hamfisted call for response: “Hey, Chinese dumbf*ck, your government AND your country (because, of course, as you stated, these two entities–widely differing by definition and interpretation–are inseparable) treats you like donkey sh*t. So, yeah, why do you love it?”

And so, what type of response did you actually expect? You’ve already severely narrowed down their range of answers. It’s like asking, “Which one do you like–A or B–but A’s really bad, worse, no “infinitely worse” (as you yourself stated)? So tell me, A or B?” Well, you really haven’t given them any other choice but to agree with you, now have you?

Perhaps a question to ask yourself is this: Why do you feel the need to post on HangzhouExpat.com in search of “local” responses that you’ve very obviously expected to validate the opinion you already hold? This is not a debate, nor an open-minded topic. This is simply a pointless self-exercise in political masturbation.

2. Why would any sensible local Chinese person want to debate you on this topic on little dipsh*t website HangzhouExpat.com, in YOUR language?

That point has been repeated on this forum countless numbers of times. How culturally arrogant is that in and of itself? If you truly want to discuss the merits and drawbacks of LIFE IN CHINA, then why wouldn’t you post your topic on a CHINESE forum?

I’ve tried this myself, albeit unsuccessfully because of the wrong wording getting my posts deleted by admin, but I’ll offer you this: If you reword your question–as I believe that deep down, there is merit to asking it–I will post it on Sina.com for you and see what responses you get.

There are so many other lame points and poor logic throughout this 8-page moanfest I’ve yet to bash, but to sum it all up, I’ve been on this site for a long, damn time, and honestly, I’m ashamed that so many of you would actually support and condone such culturally arrogant thinking.

There comes a point in every China expat’s life when they may or may not become disgruntled enough to simply bicker all the time about the sh*ttiness of life here and go on and on and on about how life is so much better elsewhere. It’s at the point that, well, maybe it’s time for a move. And Fu Man Chu, I’ve seen you here on this forum for about a year and a half now (correct me if I’m wrong, but often that’s about how long it takes for most to reach the ‘disgruntledness’ phase), and I don’t say this as a threat or anything remotely hostile. I say this from the perspective of helping you keep your own sanity and allowing newbies and veterans alike to form their own opinions of their experiences here.

I think it was Niku who made one of the more interesting rebuttals here. He’s a businessman, and thus cultural understanding and assimilation was a necessity for his survival here.

For those of us who are English teachers or work in that industry, myself included, this is not the case. We are imparters of the world’s most widely used language and the culture that comes with that, ‘cultural ambassadors‘ as LFA called it, and thus are much more prone to cultural arrogance. We tell local people how to speak, how to listen, how to think, how we think they should live. For us, we have almost no obligation to culturally assimilate, no strong need to even bother learning the local language past a basic needs level. And so, we can easily stand on our pedestals and shout down to our pupils to tell them what’s wrong with their lives, their government, their country, their history, their identity. And the next morning, we can continue pushing our language opiate unto the great populace of China.

Because they need us. And they pay us to give them their fix. And as their dealer, you feel you can condescend anonymously behind the closed doors of our humble little dipsh*t forum without any sort of consequence whatsoever to your livelihood or your daily social interactions. Just imagine if all your students found out their teacher, Fu Man Chu (and I don’t think I have to expound on the racist implications of the moniker you’ve chosen for yourself) was talking sh*t about their country on the internet.

Think about that for a moment.

Then again, don’t. This is all just one way of looking at it. Up to you to take it into consideration or not.

—–

And the only public response received from that was, disappointingly:

Fu Man Chu: (Yes, this is actually what this guy dubs himself. While living in China.)
Ming – I thing CBR did a great job at responding to your comment before it was even posted. All I’m looking for is some Chinese input. You seem to have placed yourself in the role of paternalistic protector of the dignity of the Chinese people. I prefer to believe they can think for themselves. If you think the thread is stupid, then f*ck off.

—–

And later on down the line …

____________________
Originally posted by Fu Man Chu

Timeline of this Thread -

1. Question put forward.
2. A few foreigners contemplate the question.
3. A couple nationalist Chinese and their foreign apologists begin spitting venom.
4. Thread goes horribly off-topic.
5. Two Chinese people put forth very good answers to the question. Both are ignored by the apologists who continue to argue that Chinese people should not have to answer questions like this.
6. After longing for involvement by Chinese posters, we finally get our wish and the thread is taken over by two Chinese idiots.
7. Thread dies.

It was a nice little experiment that proved a point it wasn’t even meant to prove.

R.I.P.
_____________________

That timeline should really read more like this:

1. Hamfisted, intentionally sensationalistic, single-reply fire bomb lit and tossed.

2. A few HangzhouExpat users chime into the condescending vibe and make themselves feel all good inside about it.

3. A couple of Chinese locals who actually happen to read and use English, a foreign language to them, try, with their limited knowledge of English to do what they know best: deflect, play the blame game, then name call, and possibly tell expat posters to go home.

4. Sensible expat posters who have lived here far longer than inciters here try to write some sense into things by trying to supply an alternative point of view to inciters. (Though, I must say, CBR, I’m a bit disappointed this time ’round.)

5. Manchildren know nothing else than to label them “foreign apologists” because, wow, lo and behold, they DISAGREE with their fellow expats! The one thing they give all Chinese posters a hard time about in every single thread!

6. Thread turns into flaming war, which then temporarily gets extinguished by original poster, who then proceeds with re-lighting his fire bomb. But with earnesty this time!

7. Chinese locals who have bothered to stick around for the fight actually reply earnestly, without poison. Though, they just can’t resist throwing in another blame game reference.

8. Original poster then proceeds to racistly and personally bash every single Chinese response forthwith with acute prejudice and China-be-damned abandon, because Moderators are too busy with their day jobs to actually do anything about this site-sullying disgrace of a thread.

9. Chinese posters continue, in their mediocre English skills, to stage a defense but obviously fail against the rampant cultural circle jerk that has ensued for umpteen pages based on a close-ended question that only ever had one outcome.

Annnd, HangzhouExpat.com bears witness to yet another example that proved something, all right. Proved why this site will never transcend above cultural flame wars to achieve the its actual purpose of trying to bring locals and expats together. All because a small handful of un-moderated posters feel the need to flaunt their ignorance and arrogance.

Welcome to Beverly Hills, Hangzhou.

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Punched in the Mouth

The following was a post of mine on HangzhouExpat.com:

Wow. Talk about efficient censorship.

I’ve been thinking for a while, we here at HangzhouExpat.com like debating (sometimes irrationally) about topics of an international/sociopolitical scope. Sometimes a Chinese forum user will wander into the middle of it and express his opinions and/or disagreement in understandably bad English. Which usually doesn’t help to support his argument.

So I finally decided to act on my whim of participating in another popular forum, namely, Sina.com (from which the big Western media outlets seem to have a hard-on for quoting users as a legitimate, realistic gauge of widespread Chinese sentiment on foreign issues), trying my luck to start discussions and express my disagreements on a Chinese forum with my own understandably bad Chinese.

Well, I suppose I should have expected it, but lo and behold, mere seconds after I post, what I deemed, harmless responses to harmless posts, my comment is summarily removed from the site without explanation. My username over there is ‘ming127‘.

Here are the two topics that I tried commenting on:
1. http://news.sina.com.cn/w/sd/2009-12-03/003819176053.shtml (Mixed Reaction to Obama’s New Afghan Troop Increase Strategy)
2. http://news.sina.com.cn/c/p/2009-12-02/232019175941.shtml (56 Minorities Columns Erected at Tian’anmen Square)

The first one only has one comment:

西方强权一次又一次的在人类历史中上演着弱肉强食的悲剧。而奥巴马刚刚获得和平奖！这不是笑话又是什么?!
(Basically: “The West continues its history of committing human travesties. And Obama just won the Nobel Peace Prize? What a joke!”)

To which I responded, in translation, something like:

“Should The West have invaded Afghanistan? Without results so far, it’s not clear. But the Taliban and Muslim terrorists are not only The West’s problem, they are China’s problem, too. Xinjiang, anybody? Afghanistan is right next to China. If Afghanistan crumbles, who do you think will be affected first?

Have a look at this article from the China Daily. It’s in English, so just use Google to translate it.

In modern society, no one is left unaffected. So we might as well work together to solve problems.”

Very diplomatic and harmless, no? But ungh-uh, bloop, deleted!

The second comment I responded to about the 56 Minority Columns went something like, “Yaaay, hooray for national unity! Solidarity can naturally unite us all!” Along with the other 300 poetic overtures of appraisal.

To which I responded:

I’m curious. I’m not a Mainlander. Do you guys consider Xinjiang people to be Chinese?

Well, by the time this got deleted, I figured I must simply be tripping motion detectors. Maybe I should’ve just replaced Xinjiang with East Thanksgiving-stan and my comments would’ve gone unmolested.

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