Damn you, unknown Chinese character.
I see you sitting there. Complacent. Smug. You think you’re all that because you’ve got 18 strokes.
Want to hear a secret?
I think you suck big doody.
You weren’t at my fifth birthday party, when I was getting to know basic buddies like 王, 大, and 中.
You weren’t there for me for me in my Chinese school reader when I was 12. You know who was? 香蕉 was. So were 葡萄 and 草莓.
My first day of college. Did you think to say hello then? No, but communist propaganda did. Lesson 1: 毛主席，祝你万岁! (Mao Zedong, may you live 10,000 years!)
You weren’t there for me then, you weren’t there for me ever. And I don’t want you here now.
What’s that? Are you calling me illiterate?!
*sob*
Fine. I will look you up. Just this once. But then you’re out of here. What happens tonight stays just between you and me. 王大中 does not need to know.
*flip flip flip*
Now you've made me angry. Where is the heck is your radical? You've got so many extra bits, I can’t tell your 横 from your 竖. Hìjole... you don't need a definition, you need a shave.
I bet you’re one of those kinky characters. I’m going to tear out all my hair, and at the end of the day, I’m going to find you in bed under some one-stroke radical.
You know what? I’m not going to give you the pleasure. I don’t care what you mean or how you used to be pronounced. Your new meaning is “enormous mole with straggly, two-inch hairs trying to escape from it”. I see it all the time here, so there might as well be a character for it. Your new pronunciation is “aaaaaaah”, since I'm looking at you now and that's the sound coming out of my mouth.
I can't wait to butcher you the next time I sing karaoke.
Felix’s brother and I are waiting at the airport to receive some foreign hotshots. The plane is an hour late, so I have a rare opportunity to engage one of Thailand’s mightiest business honchos in light conversation. We talk about terrorism and housing bubbles. Eventually the topic turns towards philandering.
“I have a theory about why men are more inclined to cheat than women,” I say.
“Let’s hear it.”
“If you believe in evolution, then you believe that we are programmed to sow our genes as widely as possible.”
“OK,” Jeff assents.
“Faithful man: one baby. Unfaithful man: many babies. Faithful woman: one baby. Unfaithful woman: Still one baby, but minus the protection of a husband.”
Jeff mulls over this gross oversimplification of love for a bit, then laughs.
“I have a theory too,” he states.
“Let’s hear it.”
He draws a graph with a single bell curve.
“Do you know what this is?”
He marks the x-axis with two ticks. “Good” at the far end. “Evil” at the origin.
“This is what most people think human morality looks like. Martyrs on one side. Murderers on the other. Most people fall somewhere in between.”
“Seems to makes sense,” I concur.
‘Well, I think this model is entirely inaccurate.’
He draws a new graph. One little spike over Good. One big spike over Evil. Flatline in the middle.
“You can give to charity and give up your seat for little old ladies,” he says, pen hovering over the Good Spike.
“Or you can have a red-hot temper and a penchant for theft,” he says, migrating to the other side.
“But when true crisis knocks, none of that matters. The courageous may suddenly tremble and cower. The deadbeat who usually lives faint as a whisper may suddenly ignite, possessed by the hero instinct. On a very deep level, underneath behavior guided by society’s hand, underneath your own self-perception, you are either fundamentally selfish or you are not. There is no middle ground. You will never know where you stand until you are tested.”
The Evil Spike looms over the Good. So many souls who want to believe they are morally outstanding. So many lives a petty endeavor of self-preservation.
I’m at lunch with one of our suppliers. Perrin specializes in bamboo products. Bamboo has all kinds of qualities that make it superior to wood. It’s hard as a hammer. It grows to full size in two years. What really surprised me is that it regenerates. You can lop it off at the base and it’ll come back from the dead like a starfish growing zombie arms. That’s right all you environmentalists, no depressing stump graveyards when you cultivate bamboo.
She asks how I came to be in China, so I tell her. She ponders me briefly.
“你会不会觉得中国很落后？”
“Do you think China is a backwards country?”
This is the second most common question I get from Chinese people. People here cannot go abroad easily. To them, the outside world exists in print only. They know the headlines, but the details of life across the big blue remain a mystery. Like any dreamers are wont to do, they fill in the information gaps with solid gold of their own starstruck manufacture.
Some of my local friends tell me that, to them, an ABC is like an exotic bird-of-flight descended on an island, a journeyman with the unfiltered, full-bodied story of faraway lands. Hopefully it is one that will corroborate their rose-tinted visions.
To the people who ask this question: Firstly, Las Vegas and Manhattan are not representative of our whole country. Secondly, you now live in one of the most technologically advanced cities in the world. Your telecom is better than ours. Your electronics are better than ours. You also have the world’s first maglev for commercial use. Us Yanks don’t hover at 420 km/h over superconducting tracks.
I say as much to Perrin. She nods.
“那，科技方面中国可能还好，可是福利方面美国应该好很多吧?”
"OK, China’s not so bad technologically, but America is still better in terms of social welfare right?”
I think of the few mainlanders who’ve managed to visit my family in San Diego. They catch their first glimpse of America through our car window. They see wide streets, one-story buildings, trees galore, and they ask: “So how far are we from the city?” Then we pull into our driveway, and they say disappointedly, “Wow, you didn’t tell me you live in the countryside.”
Yes Perrin, we have more purchasing power. It is easier to secure a steady flow of food and shelter in the States. But if you want to dream big, if you want towering, cherry-topped visions of the future, you needn’t look further than your own backyard.
Ah, the line-cutting. Oh, how the lines here are cut. The average Westerner here responds with a standard sequence of emotions.
First comes shock, shock that ten little old ladies have just cut in front of him. His mouth hangs open in disbelief. He whispers to his friends, “Did they just do that? I can’t believe they just did that! Should I say something?”
Next comes bitter resentment. He stops leaving any space between himself and the person in front of him in line. Ten little old men dive in from the sides at the head of the queue. He roils and boils, he spumes and fumes… but he does nothing. “Surely this will stop soon. Next time… if it happens next time I will say something for sure.”
What happens next is anyone’s guess. Some people spontaneously explode. Some continue on indefinitely in indignant resignation. My soccer teammate Brian started picking up line-cutters and physically placing them in line behind him. They look up at his six-foot tall, bald-headed figure and laugh nervously. “Heh heh, you caught me.” He just glares back.
Good for you Brian. Get even. Win that dignity back. Dump that bad mojo out on the street where you found it, so you can laugh loud and live large when you go home to your loved ones.
