Back on the Train

Chances are if you're reading this, and it's not Friday yet, I'm somewhere on that red line going up or coming back. Again.

Haircut, Round III

I'm an alley rat. I get some weird pleasure taking random turns through the alleys near my apartment with loosely defined missions of finding some random service or product. Little business districts pop out of nowhere - an entire alley of seafood with water running out of a hundred tanks and into the streets, a used-furniture alley, the chopping block alley with live ducks and chickens awaiting your execution orders. Dotting the alley's are people running phone rooms, tailors, game rooms with 80's arcade games, neon lit brothels, cigarette & baijiu stores, and salons. I was on the prowl for a massage joint. It costs about $3 for an hour long and thoroughly strange massage and I figured I'd treat myself for no particular reason.

Bright lights caught my eye reminding me that I needed a haircut. I detoured into an alleyway salon and took a seat. I whipped out my pocket dictionary and pointed to the side of my head and said, "short", then pointed to the top and said "not short." Hopefully that would do and they'd get my point - which explicitly was to not shave my head like had happened in Tianjin. I made little visual cues as to how short I wanted it.

I was bombarded with a long, fast stream of Chinese. "Wah boo hway shwaw Hanyu [not pinyin, I know]/ I don't speak Chinese," I told them in a horribly mangled accent. More Chinese. Not even a little bit slowed down. I repeated myself. I gave up. Maybe the inflections in my English would get the point through: "Dude, I don't speak Chinese."

They got it.

A young lady grabbed a clearly marked "shampoo" bottle off the shelf in front of my chair with proceeded to spray four inches of white foam on the top of my head. She began a 15 minute process of massaging it in.

It began again. A million questions in Chinese. I picked out one I thought I was hearing correctly and told them I was American. I told them I was an English teacher. Confusion. People start walking into the salon from the street to see the laowai getting his head massaged with white foam who doesn't speak crap for Chinese.

A man kept getting closer in closer. Without my glasses I could only see a blur of him in the mirror. I turned right and he was staring at me from about six inches away with the wild eyed joy of a six year old poking a dead alligator with a stick. We both broke into maniacal laughter.

For the remaining 12 minutes of my massage was a endless sequence of someone asking me a question in Chinese, me shrugging, and then uncontrollable laughter - especially from the girl rubbing her hands through my hair with the white foam. There's some strange acid trip of a feeling of having someone else touching your scalp and there being no ability to communicate. It gets weirder when sharp objects enter the picture and the actual haircut begins.

Now is a good time to point out a big cultural difference between Americans and Chinese. The Chinese viewed my presence with curiosity and benign humor. Never did I feel like I was being made fun of. Everyone felt bad for not being able to speak in each others language. In America, most barbers would be profoundly annoyed if a Chinaman came in speaking hardly any Chinese and wanted a haircut. You're in America, speak English[!], right?

I think that's been one of the biggest buffers keeping me sane in China as a non-Chinese speaker. The Chinese seem to have endless patience for foreigners, want to be helpful, and what comes off as rude - the endless staring - really is just an inordinate amount of curiosity. It's nice living somewhere where a sense of humor can come across even without words.

Tags: Treyopia short stories stories haircut hair cut language humor China Chinese Shenzhen alleys streets salon

Chinese Ratings

Inspired by the Book of Ratings, and in desperate need of new material besides short stories and photos to post, I present...

The China Book of Ratings

Fengyoujing
I must confess that I don't know what exactly it is, but I suspected it involves concentrated menthol. It's green, it's cheap, it comes in oddly shaped bottles, it's Chinese traditional medicine. It acts as mosquito repellent, headache cure, and an agent to awaken the user. Apply on temporal lobes, forehead, and underneath your nose. If you're lucky, a little bit will get in your eye and it won't exactly hurt, but you'll be more alert than your last cappuccinos. Bottom line: I like smelling a little minty when I'm not feeling so fresh. A-

Baijiu:
Chinese grain alcohol. Imagine the worst qualities of gin and Everclear mixed together. Imagine this being the national drink of China. Imagine it being so powerful and foul that you can still taste it in a cup that's been washed. The mere smell of it puts this college veteran out of service. You see businessmen tearing it up during lunch for sport. Bottom line: National drink? Try again. F


Chinese Wine:
Great Wall, my preferred brand, is about on par with your typical $7 bottle back home. Except that it costs 32 RMB / $4. I've tried spending a little bit more for aged Cabernet, but it was hideous. For about 60RMB / $7 you can find an excellent bottle of cheap French wine. I've found that if you drink it out of a dixie cup instead of a wine glass, expectations drop drastically enough that you begin tasting the delicate fragrance of strawberry and perhaps a dab of lavender. Bottom line: there's no reason not to find a bottle of French wine. C-

The Chinese Language:
"Car water horse dragon." Is this a sentence to you? No? It is for 1.2 billion people. It means that there are so many cars on the road that it looks like a horse trying to cross a river that is shaped like a dragon. No, you're not going insane. There were no verbs. There was no subject, no object. Just four nouns. Add to this that it is a tonal language. The word "ma" means five different things, it's all in how you say it. You could be asking a question, talking about your mother or even marijuana. The written part is worse. It's non-phonetic. Every single character represents a syllable. Every one. There are 5000 plus characters. It's even worse in HK and Taiwan. A curious idea, sure, but you know what would be really handy with the most precise oral language ever devised? Cues on how to speak it by looking at the word. Bottom line: Mao was on the right page when he thought about replacing characters with pinyin. "A" for creativity, "F" for sticking with it for 4000 years. F

Tags: Treyopia China Chinese ratings book of ratings baijiu wine Fengyoujing traditional medicine language characters

Chinese Wedding

My roommates description of a Chinese wedding...

I accompanied two friends to a Chinese style wedding this past weekend. I figured, why not go? I've never been to a Chinese wedding and I haven't seen my friends in awhile. The bride is Chinese and the groom is actually British. He doesn't understand a word of Chinese and the bride's guests don't do so well with English.

There was free wine and beer. Everyone was drunk before the event even began.

So, the ceremony, if you will, was conducted by two friends of the bride, half in Chinese, half in English. The happy couple were then asked to exchange something like vows. The bride give a heartwarming speech about how she met this fat, ugly, boring Englishman and fell in love with him...awww isn't that sweet. Then the groom's turn. He explains how he couldn't stand the bride when they met. He thought she was bossy and annoying....but he loves her! awww

Then for the dinner. The groom goes around to every table (about 8 of them with 10 people each) and does bottoms-up with every person. His face was the color of the red wine by the time he got to our table.

The dinner was followed by "games". These included a line of females and the groom, blindfolded, had to feel each one and guess which was the bride. You'd think it would be easy to tell which one was wearing a wedding dress but, he was so far gone he had no clue.

The rest of the evening is a blur. (not because I was drunk. No, I was quite composed. But because everyone else was so drunk and off the wall that I couldn't keep up with everything that was happening) Let's see, the groom tackled the bride and they were rolling around on the floor, the groom decided to chew out a work colleague for acting above everyone else at work (I thought I saw a fist fight coming), and the bride, who knows why, got angry and started to smash plates on the floor. She then took a large knife, slashed her wedding cake in half, threw the knife against the wall, and stormed out.

As entertaining as this was, I thought it was a good time to leave.

tags: Treyopia China Chinese weddings weddings stories short stories

Reflections

So I've been here almost four months now. I'm a month passed when serious homesickness should have started setting in. To be honest, it's not there. At least not in any way that I imagined. I miss my family and friends, sure, but I feel like there's supposed to be distance right now. It's been my plan to move away for some time. I'm also pretty bad at staying in touch when I'm at home, so in a lot of ways it's not all that different being out here. There were certainly month-long stretches where I wouldn't see my Dad or sister or a certain friend and I wouldn't even notice. I'm bad like that.

That said, I was awed about an hour ago showing my Chinese roommate, K., photos of a Jacksonville sunrise. I did a Flickr search and just browsed through all the seagulls, sand, and waves that align perfectly almost every morning in north Florida. I remembered my first day back home after my first international trip, a month in Europe, and walking on the beach jet-lagged as the sun rose and dolphins swam beside me. And I miss that. I miss the beach. I miss thunder cells developing against a blue sky over open ocean. I miss the sound of waves. I miss the smell of salty air. I miss the acoustic guitars and conversations that happen at night on the beach waiting for the sun to rise. I miss the marshes. More than the people, that's home to me. Florida.

My old Spanish professor asked me in an email if I could ever settle down in China. My response was that I couldn't. There's an aesthetic that's missing here, cultural and natural. You can't just sit back and watch the clouds because most days a blanket of carcinogenic gray pollution hangs over everything. Some days I can make out the mountains of Hong Kong from my school, which sits up against a bay I can never see.

There's a deeper cultural aesthetic that's also missing. There is no underground or independent music outside of Shanghai and Beijing. There is no art "community" in Tianjin or Shenzhen - cities both larger than NYC. There are no slackers who just want to sit around and draw, or play guitar, or take photos at the cost of not making too much money. I'd be glad to have more kids doodling during class, but I don't.

You can blame it on the Cultural Revolution - which I do - or Chinese society. You can hope, like Dr. Echols does, that if "[it took] 30 years after WWII for Japan, and 30 after the Korean War for S.K [to develop an art scene], so if you take 1980 as your starting point for China, then maybe that would put the sprouting of an interesting music scene around 2010."

You can hope for the future, but it's not here now. For now blue skies and clouds are hard to come by, independent art is even rarer. You know my roommate has never seen a sunrise before? I think that is what I miss most.

Addiction

The first step in solving a problem is admitting a problem, right? I've grown up terrified that if I ever touched a drop of alcoholic I'd turn into a raving drunk. Not even close to true. I've played with things I shouldn't have and haven't done the worst more than a few times with little desire to try again. But, alas, I am an addict.

I love Coca-Cola products. Love them. I mean I hate them. Love them. Hate them! LOVE THEM! HATE THEM!!!!!

I can't win. I destroy myself over it, but it's clear now. Coke and Fanta have a hold on me.

I was winning the battle earlier this week and last week. I thought about why I wasn't loosing more weight walking everywhere and eating healthier. I get more exercise than I ever did back home, and yeah, I've lost a little weight... but... not as much as I should. And then it hit me: I'm downing two soda's a day. One in the morning as a caffeine boost and one after lunch as a sweet desert. I needed to cut it.

So I switched to black tea. It has all the caffeine [plus booster alkaloids] I need to take me through a long day of teaching, but it's mostly just leaf flavored water. All Chinese businesses and homes have water coolers with hot and chilled water on tap. I went out and bought a special tea mug [it has a mesh net to keep the tea out of your mouth] and now drink about five classes of water a day with no high-fructose corn syrup. I can feel it working already. I feel more energized. I come home and not only want to ride the bike, but I get up and do it instead of vegging out!

Then today came...

Things were good till lunch. Then I had a craving. I needed an orange Fanta. I was in luck... the closest ATM was a fifteen minute walk and I had only enough change on me to take the bus home. Soda or a ride home... easy pick. So I got through it...

When I got home I coaxed Lyndsey to hop on the bike with me to go to a pizza place I found about a mile away while exploring. So we ride out, China-style, girl balanced on the small carrier-rack on the back and arrive after much wobbling. Pizza! I can splurge... I've been good, right?

It comes with coke. I devour it. I order another. I devour it. I come home. I need more! I find leftover coke from the party. I drink 2 cups worth with one gulp. I tell myself to stop. Another giant gulp.

I looked over and noticed an empty 2-liter of Sprite bottle left over from the party that I destroyed without even realizing it. I felt like I was staring at a pile of used hypodermic needles I suddenly realized were mine. I half expected to see the baby from Trainspotting crawling up the wall.

And so, friends, I pledge now... no more. I will not let soda keep me the skinny guy stuck in a slightly chubby body. No more!! For now, anyways.

Three Steps to Anger

Today was the first time I seethed in anger at the powers that be* here. When I decided to come to China I was expecting a police state. I was expecting to see troops in the street, propaganda everywhere, and little school children practice handling an AK-47 while rolling underneath barbed wire. Maybe not the last part, but I certainly expected an actively repressive system*.

Upon arrival, I was floored by people openly criticizing The Chairman* and bemoaning the CR*. I even heard little jokes here and there about Beijing and curious looks when I asked why people weren't out in the streets celebrating National Day. "That's their day," I was told, "not ours." I assumed that the order here was a less benign version of the de facto single party rule in Japan or [previously] Mexico. China is a huge ship of state to manage and those in charge were doing a remarkable job letting the economy grow and thus most people were content.

My previous apologetics are over. I'm angry. The first thing that got me is the crackdown going on against the street vendors. I watched a poor woman trying to grab her wok and coal heater from her small wooden cart as The Blue* came and took her small potato & dumpling stand away. Earlier in the day I had seen the Pakistani sheep kabob man [who always tries to initiate conversation and always asks if the (different) girl I'm with is my wife] hanging out on the steps. I asked him where his stand was and he walked us into an alley at the bottom floor of his apartment below and grilled my dinner. He told L., who speaks much better Chinese than I, that he and his friends were hiding out from The Blue.

While I have some issue with the trash disposal systems of the street food vendors in Tianjin, there are no such problems in Shenzhen. The streets here, where vending has gone on since I've been at my new apartment, are nearly as clean as the streets in the uber-rich neighborhoods of Shukou where vender's only come out at night. Other than making the Little Guy pay off the powers that be, there is no good reason to walk around stealing their carts.

Crackdown and send KFC running; leave the real entrepreneurs alone.

On to specimen #2; monkeys on the street. I got off the bus today and was entranced by a man whipping at a monkey. He had three Patas Monkey's attached to a single rope. He was agitating them until they would comically come after him and grab his hat or steal the whip or pounce on his head. It was amusing and horrifying all at the same time. Amusing in that it would be funny if they were trained to do this, which I'm sure his audience thought. It was horrifying because they were just animals reacting intelligently to a belligerent keeper. There are no animal welfare laws in China, as witnessed by the recent "animal olympics" in Shanghai and this charade.

And then the kicker...

I have a huge soft spot in my heart for the disabled in China. You see many of them as beggars on the street. Shenzhen being what it is, people come from all over China to escape the grinding poverty of the countryside. It's worse for some than others. It's always angered me that there really isn't much of a social safety net here, certainly no workers comp, and poor cripples fall through the cracks and end up working for gangsters who extort them into begging.

Walking out of dinner with my friend Lilly I saw a man crawling through the street. He wasn't using his feet at all, which were cocked awkwardly in a L shape behind him. He was crawling on his stomach. You could make out a barely audible weeping or moaning each time he moved. Saliva fell from his mouth as he inched forward, skin scraping the road, pushing along a small beggars cup in front of him.

It hurts seeing that kind of stuff. It angers me seeing resources being spent to harass the working poor, who are trying to earn an honest buck, while people like the beggar are ignored and monkey's are being whipped on street corners for amusement.


* going out of my way to use vocab that doesn't draw too much attention

Tags: Treyopia stories disabled China cripples beggars beggers poverty animal rights street crackdown vendors; entrepreneurs; entrepreneur

The End of the World Party

from right to left: Kelly, Adrian, Reagan, Greg, Lilly, me, Connie, Brendon, Tom, Leaf, Leaf's 14 year-old girlfriend[!].

Vision

I am a man of vision if nothing else. I awoke from my after-lunch nap [one more thing I love about teaching in China - a two hour break after lunch plus a nap room :-)] with two visions. The first vision was that in an alternate life I was meant to be a rock star. Just as I enjoy running around a classroom full of kids pretending to be a ninja, I could have pulled off a fun stage presence for the masses. It wasn't meant to be. Vision dead.

The second vision was of a margarita and a mushroom cloud. Being so far away from home crystallizes in minds eye what things you really like. Me? I really dig me a well-mixed margarita with some Mexican food. I envisioned quesadillas and tacos, margaritas, and a party with my limited social network in Shenzhen. Mexican food is too hard to pull off, but after some Googling I found some recipes for homemade margarita mix. So tonight, friends, we celebrate the beginning of the next chapter of nuclear proliferation in Asia with...

Pictures from Hong Kong

Incence in front of a Buddhist shrine in Lamma Island, Hong Kong


Beach at Lamma Island, Hong Kong

Hong Kong, Pt. I

Henry David wrote that we always devolve into systems. That was one of his primary observations after an experiment in anarcho-primativism at Walden Pond over 150 years ago. He left society and all it's nuances and found that he was only creating new systems and recreating old ones - habits, thoughts, patterns - deep in the woods away from civilization.

"Hong Kong, Pt. I"

Half a globe away from home I find myself repeating similar systems I've routinely employed. I find a few restaurants that I visit often. One has to be quirky, another has to be imminently simple and family run, both have to be cheap. I have to visit the simple one before I travel. In Jacksonville that was Flip's, in Tianjin and Shenzhen it's the local Muslim noodle restaurant with the horrific Photoshopped wall-mounted menu [on the right side] of a lake and mountain with the most common dishes and their prices floating in the foreground. An occasional copy + pasted sheep and cow are added to the side of the lake. Every cow and every sheep are the same, with the same pose, no matter where by the lake they stand. I love it and bask in it's ugliness.

And it so it went, systematically, that R. and I downed a plate of noodles before heading to Hong Kong. A week earlier I was angry that I was being made to go to Hong Kong to get my work visa during my break. But as the planned trip to Guilin fizzled for everyone and I read more about Hong Kong I was getting excited.

Shenzhen is to Hong Kong what Tampa is to St. Petersburg - right on top of it. I can see the mountains of the New Territory in Hong Kong coming home from school. Shenzhen was built because of Hong Kong. It was Deng Xiaoping's first bold experiment in making China what it is today when he established a Special Economic Zone where free markets could flourish. A city larger than New York has arisen where a sleepy fishing village stood 25 years earlier. Getting to the border, then, is a 30 minute subway ride from my apartment.

Hong Kong has been a part of China for most of a decade now, but the "one country, two systems" policy extends beyond just politics and currency though. Getting into Hong Kong is in every way like crossing an international border. I get new stamps on my passport, you fill out customs sheets, and not everyone is allowed in - especially poor mainland Chinese.

The line was about fifteen minutes long, much less than the hour that Frommer's predicted. I pushed down my traditional anxiety I always get when confronting authority like this. My mind digs deep wondering if there's anyway someone else's bag of high-grade heroin somehow accidentally found it's way into my satchel, whether my passport was pickpocketed sometime in the last 20 seconds, or any number of ridiculous suppositions.

"Your visa is expired."

"What?," I responded.

"Your visa. Is expired. You overstayed your visa."

I stared back blankly. Rage consumed me. My company needlessly waited till the absolute last second to send me for my work visa and they miscalculated.

"What do I do?" I pulled out 100 RMB expecting a small fine.

"You see," the agent said as he pushed my passport back at me, "you overstayed three days." He started writing down how many days were in each month to prove beyond doubt that I had indeed overstayed my tourist visa by three days.

"Do I pay you or... ?"

"No."

"I was going to Hong Kong to get a new visa."

There was no response as he stared at my visa more.

I was beginning to worry. They weren't taking my money, they weren't letting me through to Hong Kong... what were they going to do?

After a minute or so of waiting a lady came and escorted me to the side. She stayed behind railing and went into a room, leaving me without any directions or expectations. I frantically started calling staff. They were clueless. I tried explaining as unbiased as I could, saving as much "face" for the responsible parties as I could while still clearly letting them know ACES was to blame for waiting so long. It was senseless... I was in Shenzhen for two weeks not working. I asked repeatedly to go to Hong Kong to take care of it. "It would make a lot of sense to do it now," was the best reply I got.

Alas, systems pervade everything. The Chinese business system is not like the American system. Things take time, things take clearance and consensus at all levels. It is not a system that encourages quick movement, prodding, or making someone lose face by telling them they're not doing their job well enough or fast enough. Unfortunately I was at the nexus of a governmental system that demands arbitrary order and a business system that demands slack. I stood on the sidelines and waited for the results.

To be continued...

Tags: Treyopia short stories stories Hong Kong customs passport visa l visa z visa Shenzhen Thoreau Henry David Thoreau anarcho-primativism Frommer's

Wikipedia Ublocked

Chinese readers, go ahead and check it out. I accidentally opened a Wikipedia link [about grey goo, nonetheless... lol] without using Anonymouse first and whattayaknow, it opened :-)


Treyopia.com, however, is still blocked. It amazes me that my site was singled out like that. It amazed me more that whoever blocked it didn't realize it was DNS forwarding service and failed to subsequently block the host, http://trinarian.blogspot.com, too.

Internet blocking was one of the biggest concerns I had about coming to China before I left. It hasn't been an issue though. It's amazingly ineffective. There seems to be two levels of blocking, which is curious. The first level is partially blocked, meaning you can easily get around it with a proxy like Anonymouse. Wikipedia, Technorati, and Blogspot are/have been in this catagory. The second layer of blocking is in effect on BBC, where proxies don't help at all. I'm guessing the first layer, the loosely-blocked material, exists to draw red flags when users are trying to access "potentially subversive" material whereas the second-layer of blocking is considered outright subversive. Like the incideous rebels at the BBC.

The irony in that is that I read scathing articles about China frequently on der Spiegel, the New York Times, and blog entries. The English-language sites just aren't that restricted. On the domestic front, I've heard that if you query Google or IM the name of a certain religious cult that was supressed a few years back you automatically get logged off.

Tags: Treyopia China Chinese Great Firewall news current events Firewall blocking Wiki Wikipedia banned blocked unblocked unbanned censorship

Honesty

I'm going to call it what it is...

I have writers block. Ey, all around creativity block. My photos are sucking lately too and I haven't been playing with my new guitar too much either.

Maybe it's that I'm working more than I ever have before sense coming and I'm tired, maybe it's that I've hit some different stage in how I'm experiencing China, maybe it's that my readership has plummeted to a third of what it was two months ago... but the words just aren't coming like they were.

Be patient. I have many stories to tell. They will be told.

I leave you with a photo of the owner of a massage parlor burning paper in front of his store to keep ghosts away.

CouchSurfer

I am now part of the CouchSurfing collective. It takes the community aspect that I love about hostels and takes it another step. You register and make your couch [potentially] available to travelers [you have veto power and can read other peoples experiences with them] or you can just show them around your neck of the woods. In return, you have access to other peoples couches and personal tours the world over. I think this might make for a great experience during the Chinese New Year when I explore Southeast Asia.

Stories from my Hong Kong visit will be up in the next day or so. I leave you with a picture from Lamma Island.

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man [Review]

I picked up John Perkin's latest book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man in Hong Kong this week. It was a hefty sum - 115 HK dollars(!) - but I needed more books. I'd seen this one referenced around MetaFilter and picked it up when the bookstore we were visiting failed to produce any substantial modern fiction.

Perkin writes a cloak-and-dagger account of being an obviously underqualified "Yes Man" economist for one of the original multi-national construction and energy companies called MAIN. He outlines a clear and systematic approach of trapping developing nations like Indonesia and Columbia with massive loans to develop their economies in the early 1970's. His company specialized in energy so his job was to invent electricity demand forecasts, tie them in with potential GDP growth, and use the reports to justify massive loans.

The loans themselves were too massive to be repaid. That much is obvious today when countries like Argentina and Ecuador are spending half of their national budgets supporting ancient loans. Furthermore, the loan money never made it down to those most in need because it circulated amongst the corrupt government officials and the American contractors who planned and built the power stations and electrical grids.

Anyone who follows current events closely should know this. There's not much of a confession yet, at least not a useful one. So what we get out of the book are two contentions he makes from this. The first is that this was on purpose, the second is that the NSA was involved.

I think the first contention is very plausible. American companies and the US government colluded to shackle developing countries in massive debt so they could be easily manipulated later for UN votes, military bases, and other services. His first boss at MAIN pretty much verified this when he said that, "what John's book says is, there was a conspiracy to put all these countries on the hook, and that happened."

The NSA contention is sketchy at best. He draws as his only source for NSA intrigue was that he was profiled and offered a job by them before he decided to join the Peace Corp. Someone in his wife's family sets him up with the interview and tells him it's OK that he's going to go into the Peace Corp because there will likely be a lucrative job at the end of his service. When he gets offered the lucrative job, he assumes it's an NSA front. He wavers in his own belief that this was the case, but ultimately he sides with it when he outright calls his first MAIN boss and recruiter an NSA liaison. Furthemore, a State Department rebuttal of the book is correct in saying that the NSA is a cryptographic [codes] and SigInt [tracking telecommunications] intelligence agency and isn't involved in the same kind of intrigue as the CIA.

I just wished he'd leave his NSA hunches as just hunchs and stuck with the facts. Perkin delivers in showing what happens when the "jackals" come out when politicians don't play the game: air crashes, riots, and coups. These aren't mere conspiracies, but documented practices of the corporocracy in action. He demonstrates vividly the links between government and the companies that get massive rebuilding contracts. Cheney being CEO of Haliburton is just the latest in a long history of tainted dealings in "development" and "aid." Americans need to know what's been done by their government and business leaders in the name of altruism and modernity.

Tags: Treyopia news current events current events book reviews John Perkins Perkins confessions of an economic hit man globalization development aid China NSA corporocracy

The Situation

There's not a lot about living in China that worries me. The situation in North Korea worries me a little bit. As I'm sure most of you are aware, the People's Democratic [Super Free and Happy] Republic of Korea has announced its intentions to conduct a nuclear test. Some are speculating that it might come as soon as this weekend.

So what is it about this affair, besides nuclear weapons exploding next door, that worries me?

Statements like this [Washington Post]:

"[North Korea] can have a future or it can have these weapons. It cannot have both."

"We are not going to live with a nuclear North Korea, we are not going to accept it."

- Assistant Secretary of State Christopher R. Hill

Woah, slowwwww down cowboy. Gettin' a bit existential, are we? North Korea can either test a weapon or it can have a future? It will cease to exist if it tests a weapon ... this is our response? [pssst, we've tested over 1,030 nukes - the last time less than 15 years ago]

That's an open declaration of war if I've ever heard one. Test it and die. Perhaps we can ponder whether Mr. Hill meant something different saying that America annot live with a proven nuclear armed N. Korea. Perhaps he meant something more polite when he said that N. Korea will not have a future if it proceeds, but this administration isn't known for it's subtleties is it?

So what happens when N. Korea tests? Are we going to sanction them [more]? Perhaps we could punish monks by depriving them of sex. Either Bush is blowing a lot of hot air or he plans a military response. A military response would be, in a word, horrific. We can run down a million scenarios for how it could be carried out, none of which involve open-heart surgery precision and the world cheering on our daring raids that didn't involve Seoul being pounded for weeks by 155mm artillery buried in the mountains along the DMZ.

China's relations and involvement with these issues are complex to say the least. I don't even fully understand them. I won't pretend to fully understand them. China has strongly rebuked N. Korea over this. It was front-page news in the state-sponsered media yesterday. Something is about to happen and China doesn't want it to happen. I hope China's response is something along the lines of what the Ralph A. Cossa recommends:

"Beijing should also note that economic sanctions imposed as a result of a nuclear test will be accompanied by an "open border" policy and the establishment of UN-sponsored refugee camps on the Chinese side of the Yalu River. China, at North Korea's insistence, presently forces most refugees to return, where they meet a most unpleasant fate. This policy must change."

and

"Beijing should also set a certain date for the next round of six-party talks, while making it clear that a "six-minus- one" session will occur if the North refuses to come."

My fear is that an American military response could send my coworkers and I home. China is a country where politics and popular thought can change on a dime, having gone from fuedalism to collectivism to free market economy in a single generation. The Chinese still haven't forgiven the Japanese for World War II and in fact openly hate them today. I wouldn't want to be around here when the public reacts to an unpopular American military campaign against a neighboring country. I also wonder how the Chinese Communist Party would respond and whether or not work visas would be a front in diplomatic warfare.

My own take on nuclear proliferation is simple: every nation deserves the right to self-defense in accordance with international norms and it's threat situation. Every permanent member on the UN Security Council including the "leader of the free world" is armed to the teeth with nuclear warheads with no intention of getting rid of them. The Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty [NNPT] cuts both ways - that current non-nuclear nations withhold from going nuclear and that current nuclear nations make serious efforts to create a future free of nuclear weapons. No such effort has been made by the current nuclear armed countries, so why should we expect follow-through from the non-nuclear signatories? It's a mute point now with N. Korea, because it legally removed itself from the treaty.

If the White House wants a nuclear-free Third World, it needs to make serious overtures for liquidating existing stockpiles in the developed world.

Like any sane man, I think it's obscene that the DPRNK spends so much money on it's arms industry while it's citizens starve. I have no desire to see men like Kim Jung-Il possess such power. The fact of the matter is that he's daily threatened by a nuclear power with troops massed on his border and having a nuclear weapon is his only viable insurance policy to prevent an Iraq-style "regime change."

Hong Kong

I'm going to Honk Kong tomorrow to get my work visa. Being that I have the week off for National Day, I'll likely be gone for a few days exploring. Take care.

Happy National Day

A year ago some roommates at a Venice Beach hostel and I were having lunch and they started going off about the level of flag-waving and patriotism in America being a bit unsettling to them. I found it hard to believe then, but I'm begining to understand. Other countries are proud but they just don't display it as openly. This is very true of China. I've had adult teachers seriously tell me they think China might win every gold metal in the 2008 Olympic's, but I don't think they would ever have thought to display the Chinese flag on a pin, shirt, or bumper sticker*.

National Day has to be the most anti-climatic holiday I've ever experienced. I was expecting people to come out for some kind of public gathering with massive firework displays and maybe even some MiG's doing acrobatics in the sky for The People. I mean... this is THE day of the founding of the People's Republic, right? So what has it amounted to? A week off and flags on lightpoles in the street. That's it. No fireworks, no parades, no laser light shows at Stone Mountain. People were just chilling out walking around with their families and playing badmitton..

I was really looking forward to fireworks! The Chinese invented them!

In any case - all those kids, all those classes, all those noon naps on chairs in conference rooms, and soar throats all paid off with paycheck twice the normal size and a week off for National Day. All the teachers went out for dinner and hung out last night at our apartment in celebration. It was nice. A lot of the negative vibes from previous weeks have subsided. I even went out and bought a guitar with my new wealth. I leave you with a photo of me learning some Nirvana songs while knocking off some beers after dinner with other teachers.



Brendon [Australian], Me, and Tom [British]

* bumper stickers aren't as popular here, but vinyl stickerwork on the sides of SUV's is common. You'll often see a map of China with a superimposed flag on the same Toyota Prado's that have snorkels coming up the side of the windsheild.