And I Bring You Fire (safety)

Fire continues to flicker as a theme here at the mighty Chinese news compound where I labor. In June (see: Working Class Hero, 6/22) I recounted my "heroism" in dousing a motorcycle battery electrical fire with only three cans of 3.6% Yanjing beer and more recently we had another hot incident involving a first floor apartment occupied by a New Zealand intern who was at bar when a cell phone call alerted him to the fact that his first floor apartment was on fire.

Damage was confined to a lot of smoke damage after a plugged in, but empty, unused water cooler that had been in his living room since he arrived had zapped, undoubtedly due to substandard electrical wiring. The cooler and a back pack next to it melted down and many of his clothers were uncleanable after the fire department arrived, broke a window and sprayed the place down.

The group responsible for foreigners here, though, would have none of the "substandard wiring" explanations and grilled him mightily about the cooler. It was unauthorized.
When had he bought it? Never bought one. It was here when he arrived. Was he sure he hadn't bought it? Yes. Trick question - how much did you pay for it? I DIDN'T BUY ONE. YOU DON'T PAY ME ENOUGH. Did he use it regularly? Never used it once. Why was it plugged in? It was like that when he arrived. Etc, etc.

Nonetheless, though he wasn't booted or punished, an awkwardly written email and paper copy along with photos of the smoke damaged apartment and warnings in Chinese were posted throughout the area warning that "due to extreme carelessness by a foreigner a fire becoming danger to life" and reminded us to unplug all our appliances before leaving the rooms.

More worrisome was the fact that another foreigner on the 9th floor had smelled smoke and begun running throughout the halls breaking all the fire alarms and looking for extinguishers. The alarms didn't work, nor did others he tried on lower floors before realizing the fire truck was arriving (alerted, we learned later by a security guard returning from a long noodle and tea break). And there are no smoke alarms in any of the apartments. An email to this effect was sent to our Foreign Affairs department which replied that the pyrowhining barbarian was simply wrong.
1. All alarms work.
2. Fire extinguishers are working and plentiful
3. A special unit of the Beijing Fire Department is on vigilant watch to deal specifically with fires at the aparmtment complex and will respond quickly in each and every incident.
4. A "fire safety" demonstration will be held at an uspecified time and place to further reassure us.
Not mentioned were the lack of smoke alarms in our rooms. That's harder to deal with because they can't pretend they work or exist so - obviously from their point of view - it's not an issue.

The whole thing was more or less forgotten until late last week when we were summoned to the front parking and entrance area for the demonstration. It was held entirely in Chinese, though rough translations were available for those who couldn't get the idea of the term "Chinese fire drill."

About 12 extinguishers were lined up beside seven men in blue jump suits and white hard hats. We listened for about 20 minutes of unintelligible safety yammer and watched in awe as the lecturer pointed at one junior fire safety cadet in safety goggles who ceremoniously removed a manhole cover with a crow bar, gingerly picked up an extinguisher, pointed it down into the manhole, slowly pulled the extinguisher pin, looked away and squeezed gently.

'Pfffft!' went the foam. A very short, soft burst and the extinguisher was whipped back and handed to another guy in goggles and a hard hat.

"Ahhhhh!" went the Chinese onlookers. "Giggle" went the foreigners. The process was repeated several times as a photographer documented it. Then a foreigner was selected. Me, in fact, perhaps due to my past rep as a fire extinguishing hero. Lacking three beers, however, I donned the glasses as instructed, pointed the extinguisher down pulled the lever hard, yelling "Yaaahhhh! Die fire" as the foam spewed like berserk cotton candy.

"AHHHHHHH!" went the Chinese. "Nice one, dude" said an American coworker. The extinguisher was taken from my grasp rather quickly and the lecture was over.

The lesson? "In case of fire, remove manhole cover..."

Obamatastic

Chinese reaction to Barack Obama's historic US presidential victory went from mildly curious to ecstatic in two offices on the third floor of China Daily newspaper Wednesdy noon after the lone American employee on the floor went to the Holiland pastry shop on Huixin Dongjie street and bought two 64 yuan (US$9.35) victory cakes.

"Here," he said smiling and distributing tiny plastic forks and paper plates as CNN's election coverage boomed in the background from a TV hanging from the ceiling. "From Obama! My new president."

The Chinese staff laughed, grinned, looking up from the rice, pork and spinach dumplings, fish heads and "Jew's ear fungus" lunches they'd been scarfing from their tin and plastic lunch pails and clustered around the cakes.

"Really? From Obama? He won? Your new president? Thank you! Thank Obama!" one said.

"Well, not really from him. Me. But I pay American icome taxes with my Chinese salary, so it's kind of my tax dollars at work for you," I said. "Consider it my part to futher international relations and do my part to help stem the global financial meltdown."

Meanwhile my cell phone text message alert was beeping non-stop. Victory bonding messages from one Canadian, two English citizens, three Chinese and two other Americans from Beijing to Shanghai and Shenzhen on the Hong Kong border were flowing in. "Yabbadabba doo!" "PARTEEE!" "He won! He won!" "Congratulations on your country's good sense!"

"It's cool and weird," another American pal in Jakarta, Indonesia texted me via Skype. He'd been watching CNN too. "How could this have happened?. It's like an unbelievable dream watching people celebrate a black American president."

"...like a beggar going door to door"

Sunday morning brunch in a north Beijing dumpling restaurant. "Road," my quirky Chinese pal who calls herself that because "life is a journey" has been helping me find a new charger for my cell phone in between badgering me to let her tutor me in Chinese lessons.

"Be the best person you can be, professor!" Road commands between bites. She knows nothing of the old US Army recruiting ad, but she's a natural and always on a self-improvement kick, mostly for herself but often for me whenever she gets the chance. "I hope you can understand China better from learning Chinese. And I can teach you because, because ... I am how-to-say? How-to-say? A genius!" She grins and laughs self consciously. No lack of self esteem there. "Yes. I think. Am I?"

I smile, nod and look outside, attention drawn to the sunny, autumn sidewalk where a tall, weathered, and solemn looking extremely weather-baked old man with a large high quality brown leather satchel and a nice black leather jacket met my eyes, then opened his mouth wide and pointed emphatically twice inside it. An elderly woman dressed in a tasteful modest embroidered black and white dress, with silver hair pulled back tight in a bun - obviously his wife - sits on the pavement beside him in a near-fetal position, rocking back and forth and wailing, though I can't hear through the glass.

"Road, look. Beggars? But their clothes...so nice. Too nice."

Most Chinese beggars look the part, sometimes with a maimed baby or child or their own limb to emphasize their plight. These two look as if they'd come straight from CCTV central casting as a dignified country couple. A middle aged woman stops, drawn by the old man's plea, looks at his keening wife and gives him about 10 yuan.

That is rare too. I've given to beggars but rarely recalled seeing any Chinese do the same. Road's response explained why.

"They are maybe, how-to-say, not true? False. False beggars. I see TV and newspaper stories, many beggars have much money and are not poor."

I wonder, while trying to avoid the old man's gaze as he stops panhandling and comes to the restaurant door where a manager approaches him. I think he is going to be thrown out, but the manager listens to whatever the pitch is and heads for the kitchen while the man shoots me another pleading look and rejoins his wailing wife outside.

"Where are their children?" Road asks. "If they are not false beggars, maybe their children can help?" I wondertoo, thinking about another Chinese friend who'd recently confessed to me that she was frequently short of money because she was paying off her father's constant gambling debts. "Why?" I asked her at the time. "Just stop." "Because it is my duty," she told me. "I must."

Another passerby doles out a few yuan and then the manager comes with a plastic bag containing about eight dumplings for the old man who bows slightly in gratitude and takes it to his wife who has stood up and stopped her sobbing.

"If they are fake, it's a good act," I say. "You know Oscars, Road. Movie awards?" She nods. "They should get one."

The begging couple has apparently left, and Road and I exit heading for a pedestrian overpass when I hear sobbing on my left and see they'd only relocated out of my sightline. I can't bear it anymore. "Ask him what is wrong, please, Road."

A short exchange follows as the wife keeps moaning. "He says his son died in the (May 12) big Sichuan earthquake and these are almost only clothes," Road says soberly. "No home. It is gone too. No family."

I open my wallet and gave him 12 yuan, nod at the wife, turn with Road and leave. "You give too much money, I think, professor. Too much," she says scolding me a little. "Maybe not true."

"Yeah, probably, But if it is true ... who knows?"

Safe as Milk

This one goes out to a reader in Iowa whose been bugging me to update. There've been a lot of problems with Blogspot and combined with my chronic slothdom, it's been a near-fatal combo.

So, I was drinking a cold refreshing glass of Chinese milk the other day as I watched continous reruns of China's first space walk and flag waving along with 24/7 flag waving repeats of the same Beijing Olympic highlights and I began to feel a little queasy.

"Can we change the channel?" I whined to C. "I'm not feeling so good and I don't know if it's the milk or what we're watching. Doesn't China know the Olympics are over and that space walks have been routine for decades? If I didn't know better I'd say this was a calculated government effort to divert attention from the bad milk deal. It hasn't been a great year here overall."

I was back in Shenzhen at our apartment for the country's week long October 1 National Day holiday.

"That milk is safe," she assured me. "I saw it on the Internet. The Chinese government and scientists say it is."

Or maybe one of the astronauts brought some back. One Internet comment I'd seen translated concerning the milk disaster wished them well and asked them to bring back some "moon milk."

"Oh, then it must be true," I replied trying desperately to quash any hint of sarcasm in an attempt to keep the love light flickering. "Especially if Chinese officials and scientists say so. Tell me again what Chinese scientists have done lately, or in the last 100 years?"

I'd noticed that since the tainted milk scandal that has killed at least 4 children and brought one major dairy manufacturer to the brink of bankruptcy and is threatening more than 20 other poison moo juice firms, that the once suddenly bare dairy shelves are slowly being refilled with brands I'd never seen before ("Pink Fun Milk Monkey!"). These strange brands were all presumably cleared by the same authorities who'd so expertly dealt with a similar bad milk problem that sickened more than 200 infants two years ago.

"This Pink Fun Milk Monkey stuff isn't bad, though, except for the 'funky flavor chunks'. What's up with these?"

"Tofu, all natural," she reassured me. Here try some of this Wild Jew's Ear fungus! It was on sale at Jusco! All natural!"

Moonstruck

"Gee, but it's good to be back home," I mumbled to myself like some half-wit Paul Simon imitator marveling a little at the irony of coming "home" to Shenzhen where I'd spent a considerable portion of three years after first arriving in China. In a combination of impulse and romantic gesture, I'd flown south 1,200 or so miles from Beijing to Shenzhen to be with C during the Mid-Autumn or "Mooncake" Festival over the weekend.

Lovers are supposed to gaze at the full moon on the 15th of September to see a princess, Chang'e, and her jade rabbit who've been exiled there waiting for Chang'e's husband/lover to visit once a year from the sun. There are multiple versions of a somewhat incomprehensible legend and a plethora of mooncakes, China's version of the fruitcake, to mark it.

The myth - which explains why the Chinese see a rabbit on the moon, rather than the man westerners see - involves Chang'e stealing a pill for eternal life from her husband. She is then either exiled or flees to the moon with a rabbit. Questions to Chinese friends about why she ripped off her husband (they are ''happily married'' in the versions I read) and why she took the rabbit with her and what happened to the magic pill were met with shrugs.

"I had a pet rabbit when I was a little girl,'' one told me in a sort of non-sequitor. "But my uncle ate him.'' One version of the story has the rabbit pounding out herbs to remake the eternal life medicine immortalized by mooncakes.

Much like the Halloween and Christmas geegaws that begin slithering into the US supermarkets in early September, stacks of elaborately packaged and sometimes outrageously expensive mooncake gift boxes began filling Chinese grocery aisles in early August.

Mooncakes are a culinary atrocity - as dense as iridium, usually the size and shape of hockey pucks, greasy and fried in pork lard and often stuffed with as many as four duck egg yolks, red bean paste and lotus seeds. They also have the half life of plutonium, approximately 2,400 years. (One I choked down for a Mooncake festival two years ago is still lodged in my upper colon, according to X-rays that continue to baffle researchers at the Mayo Clinic and the US Food and Drug Association.)People give them but rarely eat them which was the quandry C found herself in as we prepared to go to a Sunday Mid Autumn Festival barbecue hosted by a friend of hers.

C had an enormous promo gift box from a gazillion star Shenzhen hotel stacked with glitzy wrapped mooncakes. Neither one of us wanted any of the mooncakes or the tiny ceramic tea pot that came with it and she was anguishing over whether to take it as a "gift" or give it to someone else.

"No one you know eats them," I said. "Why bother giving them? Or if we must at least let's take a bottle of wine."

"You cannot bring mooncakes and a bottle of wine to a Chinese party," she said firmly as if explaining to a cretin why it's impolite to urinate on your grandmother's shoes. Though tempted, I didn't go there. We haven't survived four years together with long separations by niggling over obscure points of Chinese party etiquette.

Suffice to say we were drinking the wine several hours later at the party, a rooftop affair that kind of encapsulated the State of Modern Urban China. The hostess was a divorced single mother living on the ninth floor of an apartment with no elevator. We should have hired sherpas to stagger to her door. She was throwing the party with her ex-husband with whom she's still close, and her job as a marketing manager for an Chinese-Australian alligator meat company apparently pays her enough to afford the flat screen plasma TV covering her living room wall.

Her parents and ex-in laws were playing mah jong in one room as the rest of us ate barbecued meat, vegetables and fish (no gator meat, though) and listened to remixed old school hip-hop - (Who Let the Dogs Out melded with Chinese pop - an unholy though amusing combo) and watched the little kids shoot each other with plastic guns that screamed, "FIRE" when the trigger was pulled.

I was still wondering how the hell someone makes a living selling alligator meat to Chinese (though they'll famously eat "anything", I've never seen it here) when C nudged me.

"See the moon? See Chang'e and the rabbit?" she said. Sure enough, through Shenzhen's polluted skies it glowed until a cloud covered it.

"Oh, no...She's hidden now," I said.

"Her lover is visiting now," she said. "They need some privacy."

I took the hint, we thanked China's 'gator meat empress and left.

The Bargain Store

Part of China's obsessive effort to put its best face forward for the Olympics(or what it assumed to be its 'best face') was, in addition to closing down select live music clubs, installing air-to-ground missiles outside the Bird's Nest and Water Cube and "security watch" retiree block captains on every street corner, evicting the homeless etc, was a crackdown on vendors pushing pirate merchandise.

It was remarkably successful. My trusty local counterfeit DVD mom n pop shop was torn down overnight with the owners gone as if they'd never existed. Ditto for elsewhere throughout many parts of Beijing. My son in Denver had been extolling the glories of Dark Knight and Iron Man, neither of which has been released here, though I knew I'd normally have been able to score copies easily so we could bond. So much for family values. Ditto for pirated Olympics merchandise which was seemingly non-existent also, to the dismay of many visitors who'd hoped to save a few bucks on souvenirs.

But last Sunday it was clear to me that Beijing is slowly getting back to normal. I was near the old American Embassy area, outside a French bakery and a Friendship Store when an elderly woman with a stuffed rucksack approached me and began her hustle.

"You want Olympic watch? Hat? Olympic sock?" She began pulling a treasure trove of bogus Beijing Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (BOCOG) merchandise out of the sack. An Olympics "Rolex" commemorative pocket watch, "Nike" Olympics socks in four colors, enameled pins, baseball caps in three colors, phony fuwa (Smurfs on mescaline) mascots, DVDs of the opening and closing ceremonies ... everything but Michael Phelps autographed Speedos.

I eyed the merchandise, especially the baseball caps, and asked about more DVDs. She signaled to a guy I assumed was her husband who hustled over with copies of, yes, Dark Knight and Iron Man.

Praise jeebus and all the fake Fuwa! The Pirate Olympics Closeout Sale had begun. Some intense bargaining followed and I left with five hats and my desired DVDs for 60 yuan, or about $8.75, went home and slid Dark Knight, to find it had been seemingly shot underwater by a palsy victim with a North Korean Super 8 camera. Buyer beware. But Iron Man rocked and I've got some friends who'll look spiffy in the caps.

Just the Two of Us

Western musical acts are no longer novel in China since a bouffanted George Michael and Andrew Ridgley of Wham! (Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go)baffled 15,000 Beijing youth and their connected cadre parents in 1985, so when I happened to see an ad last week for an Al Jarreau, George Benson "Just The Two of Us" concert, it just kinda came and went with me.

Though I once faked admiration for Benson in a telephone interview with him about 25 years go, I was never a fan and usually slept through or threw a shoe at whatever device was playing Masquerade or Greatest Love of All. Al Jarreau I respected, but not enough to pay to hear him.

Then I was offered four free tickets to their show by my curious Chinese editor who'd received them from the concert hall, the Beijing Exhibition Theater. "They are famous?" she asked.

"Oh, yeah," I assured her sounding like Voice of America. "American jazz and soul legends. In fact, I interviewed George Benson once."

"Oh!" she gushed. "Perhaps again? Today? For our paper? He will remember you, of course!"

"Mmm, no, unfortunately," I said. "It doesn't really work like that and it was a long, long time ago. (Pause) But thanks for the tickets!"

I found an musically opened minded US expat pal, Dave, to accompany me and gave the other two to a young Chinese reporter I'll call Wang who'd once asked me for a primer on American jazz and blues.

The best I could do at the time was hand him a stack of CDs, write down some names and pray the CDs got back to me undamaged. Not like when I did the same for another novice Western rock Chinese fan who'd returned my Zeppelin, Neil Young, Beatles, Stones and Nirvana discs 6 months later looking and sounding as if they'd been used as chew toys for weasels. To add unintended insult to indifference he told me the only songs he'd liked were Heart of Gold, Yesterday and As Tears Go By. "All others are too CRAZY! ... Do you have California Hotel and Every Shing-a-Ling?" (His decomposed unidentified remains were found 8 months later with a Carpenter's Greatest Hits disc jammed up what remained of his left nostril ....)

But I digress. Wang, a somber, wry fellow who rarely shows emotion, thanked me sincerely and I promised to check back with him after the show to see how he'd fared. Dave and I found the hall and joined a crush of mostly young and middle aged Chinese being squeezed through one of about 20 entrances and a security check.

"What's with the metal detectors?" I asked. "It's not like we're going to an East Coast vs West Coast, 2Pac vs Suge Knight kinda deal."

"I dunno," Dave mused. "I hear Benson and Jarreau been dissing (sickingly cute mainland China female pop idol) Han Xue, saying she puts out for Tibet separatists...This could get ugly."

The show was pretty damn good, though I can still die perfectly happy if I never hear Summer Breeze or Greatest Love of All again. Still Jarreau and Benson (when he bothered to play guitar rather than croon) had the hall jumping, such as usually undemonstrative Chinese audience do, unless commanded and then about half a beat off the rhythm.

I spotted Wang as we left to beat the post-encore rush. He was sweating and grinning, clapping happily off rhythm and ectastic. I leaned into his ear and said: "Well? How is it? You like it?"

His grin got larger. "F..F..F-f-fu###ing GREAT!" he yelled.

I smiled and clapped him on the shoulder. My job was done.