Faster Pussycat! To the Library

One of the burning issues consuming the Chinese public at the moment is a public debate over whether or not to recycle school textbooks.
About five or so provinces have tried to start a textbook recycling campaigns for the new semester that aims to reduce paper use and raise students' awareness of natural resources preservation.

According to the State media if all the textbooks in China were reused for five years, the country could save an estimated 225 billion yuan (31 billion US dollars) not to mention saving countless trees that otherwise would have needlessly died doing their part in spreading the word that Taiwan is an inalienable part of China.

But reaction, as they say, has been mixed – in some accounts downright hostile. Cited most often are “health concerns.” (Notably absent in the stories is the fact that the entire publishing industry in China is state subsidized and if “new” school books weren’t pumped out annually the industry would take a serious hit.)

This quote is typical: "Recycled books may carry harmful germs from previous users," contended a father in southeastern Fuzhou City. "I prefer to pay for the new textbooks since they are not that expensive."

I know. I know. This from a country – despite its pending Olympic gloss and glory – still largely synonymous in many foreign minds with terms such as “SARS,” “bird flu,” “toxic pet food/dumplings,” “public spitting,” and “filthiest public toilets in the Third World.”

I wondered if this concerned father had, say, considered the school library or, even better, the actual cash he prefers to spend on hygienic textbooks. Pull it from your wallet, sir. Look at that wrinkled, smudged 20 or 10 or 100 yuan note. Consider how many fingers have handled it before you and where those digits were inserted before the money was passed to you … Now compare that to one schoolbook probably reluctantly opened and thumbed through by a single student as few times as possible.

What was the last school textbook transmitted disease anyway?

As someone who grew up with used textbooks from first grade through university the brouhaha is virtually incomprehensible to me. There was even a remote sense of archeological discovery where some of the previous owners had signed their names.

“The same book as Julie Worley’s older sister? Her fair hands actually touched these same pages! I will never wash mine again…”
“Rick Daily had this? He can read?”

I tried asking some Chinese colleagues about the issue and it was clear as one put it that it is also a “cultural issue.”
“We don’t like anything old or used,” he explained. “It means we are poor.”

“Yeah, maybe, I can sort of see that though it doesn’t bother me,” I said, absently mindedly fingering the 2-year-old patch on my 8-year-old jeans and wondering how I was going to make it the end of the month on 800 yuan. “What about the idea that it’s what’s inside the book is more important than what it looks like on the outside?”

Another Chinese coworker laughed. “If you could read what is inside our textbooks, perhaps you would agree that a pretty cover has more value.”

Axis bold as love
It's been Commie manna from heaven since I've arrived in Beijing. In addition to almost stepping on the Cuban ambassador to China's shoes, I had my first face-to-face with real live North Koreans - one third of Geo W Bush's "Axis of Evil."

Portrayed largely in the news and travel accounts I've read as robotic American-loathing xenophobes it was at at the North Korean Haitanghua Pyongyang restaurant in Beijing where I learned if I couldn't paint the town red, at least I could paint it a tasteful beige. The invite came courtesy of a former Standard coworker, D, a British woman now working as freelancer based in Beijnig.

I was jazzed. Throwing diplomacy and common sense ot the wind, I donned my counterfeit Ralph Lauren stars and stripes shirt - usually reserved for July 4 - and after a convoluted taxi ride was deposited at the door of Pyongyang Lite. Outwardly it appeared to be like any other semi-upscale South Korean restaurant - no garish portraits of Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, for example - though closer inspection of the water bottles revealed the contents were supposedly drawn from North Korea's near-mythical Baekdu Mountain, the same location that Dear Leader's father was allegedly born after a rainbow and swallows foretold his coming.

The waitresses all spoke fluent Chinese as well as very limited English ("thank you") but I compensated with my even more limited Korean. The Uncle Sam shirt did draw attention - though not hostile, merely curious. Upstairs were karaoke rooms where the women, all attractive and in their 20s, also entertained for higher fees.

According to an article in Asia Times Online the restaurants are a revenue source for North Korea and draw a mix of curious South Koreans as well as foreigners like us eager for a glimpse of a semi-forbidden culture. That night we only saw a happily drunk South Korean couple and occasional gaggles of badly dressed, hatchet faced North Korean businessmen and/or aparatchiks with DPRK flag lapel pins irregularly emerging from the upstairs karaoke dens. They gaped quickly at D, me and our two Aussie pals and kept walking as we all gaped back. The waitresses all went to "the finest universities in Pyongyang" - sort of like going to the best junior college in Hibbing, Minnesota? - and then are sent to China as entertainers and waitresses. A wise career move? But it ultimately beats starving in the North, I suppose.

Our Miss Kim, (left, in psuedo-air hostess uniform) told us she had one unspecified day off per week, liked to shop and had no cell phone. This after both D and I had asked for her number. In very bad Korean I told her she was pretty. In passable English she thanked me and then repeated that she had no phone. Get the message? Yes, we see. But she smiled graciously and I felt I'd accomplished, hell, maybe as much as the NY Phil and 6 party talks in reducing tensions. At least she didn't seem to think that all Americans were stone cold killers, merely harmless old goats in garish shirts.

Unbearable lightness of Beijing
Whew, but it's good to be back home. Five days in Shenzhen's smog cooking for C while she was at work and generally hanging out was my initial reentry - an easy, welcome glide back into a better reality.

"That's very nice," she said contentedly as I diplomatically agreed to forgo viewing Apocalypse Now for the 187th time in favor of her watching Sleepless in Seattle for the 6th time. The things you do for love. Then on to Beijing where I'm more or less comfortably settled in a spacious company apartment, scarfing down commie party subsidized Chinese eats at the danwei (work unit) cafeteria - spicy garlic shrimp, pork ribs, rice and spinach tonight - and meeting new expats whose idea of a good time isn't getting wicked drunk and blitzing around nude on a motorbike.

I like what little I've seen of Beijing so far. Unlike Shenzhen's Blade Runner glitz the area I'm in reminds me some of tiny bits of Brooklyn, not all brownstones and charm but settled, bricked and humming comfortably. I've had twi diverse surprises. The first was literally bumping into the Cuban ambassador to China, Carlos Miguel Pereira Hernandez, in the company elevator.

"Congratulations on Raul, sir," I said slavishly after apologizing for nearly stomping on on his mirror bright black shoes. A name tag for a press conference he and a couple other diplomats were attending here identified him. I've never met a Cuban diplomat before - the closest I've come was my high school Spanish teacher and cross country coach who was a Cuban refugee with dark, bitter connections to the Bay of Pigs, or so he inferred at the time.

"Thank you," the Marxist plenipotentiary to China replied before asking me where I was from. This gave me pause, US relations being what they are with Cuba. I chose to hedge my reply.

"Norte Americano, senior," I said brightly, "A little pueblo called Boulder," - inferring, maybe, possibly Canada - is there a Boulder in Canada ? - before deftly stepping off one floor before my designated exit.

The other was more personal, file it in the small world category. Turns out one of my new foreign barbarian coworkers graduated from CU two years before me and knew several of my old buds at the Rocky Mountain News, including an unforgettable character and columnist named Gary Massaro (he's the guy pictured in the Che beret, not the ambassador). The Gary Massaro Experience is hard to define but it makes me smile even more than 10 years since I last basked in it.

I rolled Massaro's name around on my tongue while grinning like a brain spazzed idjit. "Ah Massaro, Massaro. Damn, yes, he's still writing his 'Gary's People' column I believe," I told my new buddy as we bonded over Buffs football and Massaro lore. "He's a legend. Now even in Beijing. As he so deserves to be."

Time of Your Life

Well, yeah...another abrupt departure from one foreign clime for another. This time the plan is to relocate suddenly from Hua Hin's balmy 80 degree seaside skies to Beijing's 20-degree polluted muck and teeming masses. "It's like you've been planning a prison break," one coworker said. Indeed. The details of getting out have been complicated. Normally, I'd feel kinda squeamish (or perhaps squeamishier ?) about pulling what they call a "runner" here but I firmly believe a jury of my peers who have worked for this outfit would not convict me.

I'll be in Beijing for the Olympics which could be excellent, I'll be in the same country as C and we're hoping she can move up north so we're together again in the same domicile.

I leave behind the usual bag of mixed feelings. Good friends I've had, good friends I've lost along the way, etc. but mostly I've been missing C too awfully much and for some reason China also, as chaotic as it is. "Heaven ain't bad," to quote Townes Van Zandt, "But you don't get nothing done" - which sums up Hua Hin on a good day.

On the getting something done side I've lined one young Thai woman who was working at Faulty Towers up with another better job opportunity, so I feel I've done my small part for US-Thai Foreign Relations besides filling the bar and sidewalk meal vendor coffers with baht.

On a bad night it's been getting worse to the point that I genuinely fear for one pal's life and have quit hanging out in general after about 9pm, preferring to retreat to my Apocalypse Now style suite and read rather than watch him ride his motorbike nude through a stack of Thai delivery pizzas. ("By their dead you shall know them...by the trail of smashed pizza boxes, also") I wish him well but don't really wanna be here when the hammer finally falls.

A new blog to be determined later. Catchy titles incorporating "Beijing" anyone? I'm running on empty with that one. Suggestions appreciated.

Road Runner

"I flunked my Thai written driving test today," T, one of my coworkers confessed early Friday evening. It was beer o' clock and we were bitching about work at "Eva's Krug", a small homemade Swedish beer and food garden of sorts very close to work. "Eva" is the Thai wife of the Swedish owner who has retired here on generous Swedish medical pension for a "bad, oh, very! bad back" to grow a stringy blond ponytail, wrap himself in sarong and cook Scandinavian noodles and offal in thick sauces with 17 syllable names for other Swedes who can find the place. Though we are non-Nordic interlopers, we are tolerated because of beer o' clock Fridays.

Flunking a Thai driving test would seem impossible. Though the Thai drivers are nominally more skilled and more disciplined than say, mainland Chinese motorists or a 10 year Congolese child soldier on crank, they aren't up there with the automotive greats, like, oh perhaps, Bobo the Circus Bear Scooter King.

Being callous wannabe Alpha males on beer we hooted. "Sign him up for the Thai Expat Hall of Shame!" I suggested. "Along with K." K is not a coworker, but an English expat with no visible means of support, a Thai wife and bad alcohol habit who recently gained local ignoble status by having the bejeebus kicked outta him by a "katoi" or ladyboy whose new breast job he'd foolishly derided.

T took our taunts well, though and began describing the test questions. There were 28 (in English) and he had to answer 24 correctly to pass. He'd missed five however and described several of them.

"One asked which vehicle is illegal to drive on the road. 1: A farm vehicle. 2. A vehicle with no windshield. 3. A stolen vehicle 4. A tank."

"So what'd you pick?"

"I see farm vehicles and cars with no windshields all the time. A stolen car is obviously a wrong answer. So I picked a tank."

We snorted again. He'd been here longer than several of us, is on his second Thai marriage, speaks semi-fluent Thai but even I knew that after something like 18 military coups since 1950something, it's obviously legal to take the wife and kids on a spin in the M60 Patton to Phuket or wherever the hell you want as long as it's not across the Burmese, Cambodian or Laotian borders. The right answer? No windshield.

What else? "This one even you guys would miss, I think. 'When is it illegal to drive? 1. After consuming alcohol. 2. When you are speeding. 3. As you are having a heart attack and going to hospital.' "

Like him, we assumed alcohol. No. If you believe the test you can get blind drunk and speed - but don't do it during cardiac arrest or you'll be under arrest.

His wife had joined us and laughed when we told her why we were messing with him. She'd taken the test too and had passed with only one wrong answer. We asked how she knew the tank answer was correct. "So many tanks, so many governments," she said. "Tank is law. Can drive anywhere no problem."

Milk Cow Boogie

"I gotta run," said a new coworker, an American guy recently arrived from Cambodia. "Gotta send some money to my girlfriend." We were on the patio of our rented office - an older, cool home in a residential soi of Hua Hin. It was about an hour til quitting time Friday afternoon, another slow, warm and soporific kinda day. I was taking a smoke break between editing the usual titillating stories about aluminum production and sales lawsuits involving Norway, Russia and one of the 'Stanizan countries.

Either that or something filed by a breathless Indian freelancer on an obscure provincial clash between rival political factions in which only surnames and initials were used and that ended with an obscure joke made by a "puckish wag" from Uttar Pradesh about a "rascal" from Uttarakhand. Ha. Ha. Jolly, jolly!

"What's the emergency?" I asked. "The bank is closed. Do they have Western Union in Cambodia?"

They do, he said. But, you see, he had to wire her money immediately so his girlfriend could buy a cow for her mother. Now. At the Phnom Penh airport.

I had one of those "I've been overseas too long" moments when I realized that it seemed perfectly normal for a coworker to leave the office early to wire money to his girlfriend so she could buy a cow for her mother at an airport. And I thought I was on the cutting edge of exotic girlfriend gift fulfillment territory when I bought several grams of birds nest for C's grandfather at a Hong Kong Chinese pharmacy...but a cow. This was a whole new zone. I tried to imagine buying a cow for either of my ex-mothers in law or C's mother. No. Especially Selma, my West Hartford, Connecticut Jewish ex-mother in law.

"You know," I said. "You'll need your passport." Western Union - and banks here - won't wire money elsewhere for foreigners without passport ID.

"Shit," he said. "It's at home." His place is about 10 kilometers from the office and , like me, he walks or uses motorbike taxis. He sighed. "She'll think I'm not sending the money now cuz I don't love her."

"Relax," I said. "Cows don't spoil overnight. Text message her. Tell her you'll send it tomorrow. The cow will keep. It's not every guy who gets to buy a cow for his girlfriend's mother, you know. Savor the moment."

"Supposed to be a funeral, it's been a bad, bad day..." - Gram Parsons, $1,000 Wedding

Actually, it's been a four day funeral outside my rooming house on Soi 51 this week. There's a large, Thai middle class street front restaurant about a block away that has suspended business for services for a woman who was probably an owner. Whoever she was she was "important," say colleagues who've been here much longer than me and attended a few lengthy Thai funerals themselves.

"Anything longer than two days means the stiff was a big deal" said one. Monday evening I initially thought the traditional Thai music snaking into the street and rows of plastic white lawn chairs on the sidewalk and somber looking Thais in dressy casual wear that I threaded politely through in an awkward effort to get into the mom and pop store next to the restaurant for two bottles of water and some toilet paper was some sort of entertainment event sponsored by the eatery. But glancing up into the (empty) restaurant without trying to look like I was gawking, I noted a large color photo of a hefty woman in a bouffant hairdo surrounded acres of garlands as well as about 8 or 9 monks sitting near the display.

After returning to my room the music stopped and the almost atonal, yet sonorous, chanting of the monks began ceaselessly it seemed. That was followed by what may have been spoken blessings and eulogies - all until almost 11pm. The pattern has been pretty much the same all week except last night I was heartened to see a bored boy and girl, maybe 5 and 6 years old, who'd snuck away from the funeral and were dancing to the chanting behind a pickup truck. Walking back into the lobby of my place there was another surprise. It's an large open area that used to be a bar, now with only two large stuffed blue gray vinyl arm chairs. Sitting in one was a stranger, a young man sobbing into his hands. I had no clue. Was he a mourner? Or just a random stranger off the street who just needed a place to sit and cry for a moment?

"Sawahdee krup," I mumbled in greeting and went quickly upstairs. When I came back out 20 minutes later he was gone.

About two hours later I was in a bar with several coworkers watching what one Brit pal calls "Zed-Zed" Top (ZZ Top) videos while a drunk German began lambasting American rock 'n' roll and the varied ways we use the word "fuck." "Eeez digusting!" he opined. "Like your rock and roll. Rude stuff!"

I tried the rational approach first by explaining that the f-word is actually a linguistic marvel. It can express any emotion from hatred: "Fuck you, Wagner, Beethoven, Scorpions and Kraftwerk!" to sheer admiration: "ZZ Top is fuckin' great...Top kicks fuckin' ass!"

I continud. "You see, Franz, it can be used as a verb, both transitive ('Hans fucked Greta') and intransitive ('Marta was fucked by Klaus'). It can be an action verb ('Heinrich really gives a fuck'), a passive verb ('Eva really doesn't give a fuck'), an adverb ('Heidi is fucking interested in Rudolf'), or as a noun ('Gretel is a terrific fuck').

"It can also be used as an adjective (ZZ Top is a fucking great band) or an interjection (Fuck! I'm late for the ZZ Top concert). It can even be used as a conjunction (Heinrich is a fool, fuck, he's also stupid and doesn't recognize how ZZ Top fuckin' rocks)..."

Franz was not impressed and switched the topic why Americans also suck due to George W Bush.

I lost it then. Not cuz I'm a Bush lover, of course. Just sick of sharing the blame and shame overseas. "I'm no more responsible for Bush than your grandfather was for Hitler! Hey, by the way, Franz, what did your Grandfather Schickelgruber do during the war?"

"Phook you, jah!" Franz replied. I foolishly pressed on. "Oh wait! I know! Your grandpapa was a simple shop keeper, right? An unsung ubermensch? But with no clue as to what was going on? Six million, Franz! You know what that number means?"

"Your Red Indians! You Amerikanz killed them too!" he spat back. "Yeah, we did," I snarled as a coworker began to separate us. "But we didn't build factories for it."