The anti-corruption, pro-Xi juggernaut

Yet another kingpin going down in Xi Jinping's anti-corruption campaign. (A factional enemy of Xi Jinping's, of course.)

This one is especially interesting, because he's the first major figure who's still active in the government. The others so far have all been minor officials, or else retired heavy-hitters. That Xi should go after a currently-active government official, signifies a major tipping-point in the anti-corruption campaign. If he's successful in taking this guy down, it's deuces wild for the whole lot of them.

Part of me thinks Xi Jinping should actually be thanking this guy, not taking him down. If this guy's son hadn't slammed his Ferrari into a restraining wall on one of Beijing's ring roads in the wee hours of the morning, Xi's goal of eradicating the influence of Hu and the other retiring leaders would have been essentially impossible to achieve. After that event two years ago, the entire Hu Jintao faction was massively embarrassed.

Nonetheless, as one commentator said in the NY Times (I think it was), Xi almost didn't have a choice but to go after this Mr. Ling. Having pushed his hand so far, if he stopped short of going after Ling, he'd have been seen as just another pretend reformer.

Some evidence is starting to emerge that Xi has run his course, and that the military in particular has lost its patience with his anticorruption campaign. Nonetheless, he's already worked the Chinese political system far better than I would have considered possible. It remains to be seen whether he will be able to hold out against the enemies he has created for himself, but so far he has been incredibly deft and crafty at taking out his rivals inside the Chinese system.

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/china-investigate-ex-president-hus-top-aide-ling-122915758.html

Peccadillos and evils

Peccadillo is a wonderful word which gets used too frequently. It comes from Spanish, meaning "small sin" or "small error." "Pecado" means "sin," and the "illo" ending means "small."

Smoking in the elevator is a peccadillo. Forgetting to repay $5 to your buddy is a peccadillo. I don't believe there's an equivalent term in Chinese, but there definitely should be.

Peccadillos are small things, not evil in themselves, but steps on the road toward much larger evils. And there's a huge amount of empirical evidence that peccadillos in fact metastasize and become full-on evils.

China is full of peccadillos, and if they want to reduce major corruption, I would submit that the peccadillos are the place to start. Common manners would be a good first step.

There are many, many examples I could draw from, as I've written about in the past. Today, I had just one other set of experiences that made me think about the issue once again.

My students sometimes ask me a forlorn sort of question, to the effect of "when will China take its rightful place in the world?" I.e., when will China be a world leader?

My answer always surprises them.

China will be a world leader when old men don't hawk and spit on the sidewalk.

China will be a world leader when children don't pee inside the building.

China will be a world leader when its bathrooms don't reek.

China will be a world leader when men stop hitting their wives.

China will be a world leader when manners become common.

Here's an example:

In China, it's quite common for every public doorway to be covered by these huge, heavy, army-looking blankets to keep out the cold air. They work well, but they're filthy-disgusting, and they are really heavy to lift. I always get a little allergy twinge after walking through one, and I definitely feel like washing my hands if there's anywhere to do so. (There seldom is.)

I try to avoid walking through such doorways as much as possible, but today I had occasion to go through six or eight of them, including one on the way into the Walmart.

I happened to be doing so during daytime hours, today being my day off teaching, so most of the other customers were women. As an American, I just naturally expected to hold the giant-army-surplus-blanket for women, as we always do in America.

But that particular bit of manners requires a bit of reciprocality. The woman needs to expect that the man will hold it for her, and quicken her pace to fit with the rhythm of his giant-blanket-holding. She's also expected (in both my culture and the Chinese) to say a quick thank-you.

My wife gets super-pissed when I hold doors for people and they don't reciprocate in any way. It happens often enough in China, that I'm actually afraid to hold doors for people when my wife is around. If they blow me off, it's just one more little thing adding stress to me... but she gets ready to cuss someone out.

I think we have the same standards, we have very different ways of processing the frustration. I usually just say "Aw, hell, it's China!" But she goes to rip someone's head off. My way is more peaceful, but the stress gets internalized a lot more. I'll get high blood pressure long before she does.

Today, of the six or eight women for whom I held the blanket, exactly one quickened her pace and said thanks.

Three that I can remember were too busy on their phones to pay any attention or quicken their paces, so I gladly dropped the giant thing right into their faces. I'm not going to wait all day.

Two pushed right past me, ducking under my armpits without so much as a "fare-thee-well." They were at least alert enough to get that I was holding the blanket for them, but not polite enough to acknowledge it.

So I'd say Dalian's manners quotient for the day was about ⅕. 20% is probably a good estimate of the not-totally-ill-mannered population in this city.

Heating in China

They've turned on the heat in Dalian. Actually, in most of China. It's all scheduled by government decree: if you're north of the government-defined Mason-Dixon Line of China, you get heat on such-and-such date, and it gets turned off on such-and-such date. South of that line, there’s no heating. By common assent, the coldest you’ll ever feel is living in an apartment on the wrong side of the heating-line of China.

In the old days, the heat was provided by the government, but nowadays it's from a company (probably government-owned or government-sponsored). You pay the equivalent of about $250 by a date-certain, and you get radiator heat throughout the government-defined winter. If it's cold before or after the pre-defined dates, tough noogies. If it's warm before or after the pre-defined dates, open your windows. If you don't pay by that date-certain, you don't get heat. Just like Obamacare, if you don't enroll in time, you pay the penalty: in this case, a long, COLD winter.

We paid, of course, and our radiator is nice and warm. But it was making a lot of noise the other day, so Ma Lei opened an escape valve to let some air out. The water that squirted out with it went into a little watering jug, but got quickly poured down the drain. I figured we should use it to water the plants, or give it to the dogs, but she'd already disposed of it before I even had a chance to ask. "It's not safe," she said. I sort of shook my head at that. What do you mean it's not safe?

Ma Lei told me that the residents of her former apartment used to collect water from their radiators to wash their clothes, in order to save a few pennies on their water bill. With the whole building doing so, the company that was responsible for steam heating was losing money, so they started putting antifreeze into the radiator water. The first few people who didn't recognize what they were washing with, ruined their entire wash loads. I hope no one gave it to their dogs to drink.

In other heat-related news, Ma Lei's Little Brother told her that the guy at the head of the company supplying heat for the apartment complex just behind where Little Brother lives, absconded with all the money the residents had paid for their heating. By my back-of-the-envelope calculations, that's probably about $150K, perhaps a bit more. Once the money’s been paid and stolen, that’s it: they’re all going to be freezing this winter. And for what?

If the guy managed to escape down one of the tropical wormholes south of here, he could live on that for a while. But really, it's not much of an annuity for the entire rest of one's life. And if he doesn't manage to escape the country, he's going to find it was a very bad bargain. And also, he can never return to China. 

The Chinese government isn't very efficient, but it has a long memory. The papers are full of stories of people who absconded after committing crimes, then 25 years later they returned for what they thought was a brief visit — perhaps a parent's funeral — only to find themselves quickly clapped in irons upon their arrival.

Maybe the guy had already been collecting illicit money for a while, and he just needed $150K to top off his retirement fund. But seriously, I can't believe it was worth it.

Nevertheless, the people in the apartment building are well and truly scrod. In China, if your money didn't get to the proper authorities, it's not going to be the authorities who lose out. Get yourself a lawyer, try to raise a court case, protest all the way up to Beijing, and all you'll earn for yourself is an illegal detention for being a troublemaker.

In order to make a little extra money so my wife can open her pet supply shop next year, I recently started teaching a few classes on weekends at a English school for little kids (ages 4-7). It's exhausting work — not exactly what I had in mind when I went for my PhD — but that's where the money is, and we need money to start the business.

The first couple of days, I absolutely hated it. 

I'm not really teaching English. I'm teaching words, and playing games. "Father." "Grandfather." "Giraffe." "Play." Walk in a circle around flash cards laid out on the ground, until I call out "Shirt!" and they all jump on the right one. Dance around the room to a song that goes "Itchy, Itchy Insect, i-i-i!"

The most complicated sentence I got to teach them, the one that made them tremble with fear whenever it popped up on the screen, was "I like to do things with my family." (Incidentally, I'm kind of on their side: "do things" is far too vague a verb to be throwing at a five year-old ESL student.) The ones they could manage were things like "I like to cook with my mother" and "I like to play with my sister."

The job isn't mentally stimulating in the slightest, but it is physically exhausting. At first, I was thinking "why the hell am I doing this?!"

Eventually, I came to enjoy the work quite a bit, just as I imagine I'll enjoy fatherhood. The kids are adorable, and their personalities are disarmingly simple.

There's poor William, who enthusiastically volunteers to answer every question, but consistently gets them all wrong. I swear, his percentage of correct answers would be below random, if anyone bothered to conduct a study. But he is undaunted: he jumps up at every opportunity to jab at the wrong answer on the screen. Especially when we get to use the extended magnetic pointer to bang dents in the Smartboard at the front of the classroom. He wields that thing like a monkey with an epee. I expect eyes to be lost at any moment.

Then there's Tony, whose father already taught him the alphabet, so he's at a tremendous advantage. Just as adventurous as William, yet armed with a lot more knowledge. He's got the alphabet down, though when you put it together into actual words, he's not always on the spot.

Little Sir, the youngest of the boys, jumpy and distracted. He's smart as a whip, and gets the material when his mind focuses on it for even half a second. But it doesn't always do so.

Grace, the older girl in her class (at all of 5, I think it is). She's too shy to jump up most of the time, but she usually knows the answer if I ask a direct question.

The one who intrigues me the most, perhaps, is Yun Hang, the tiniest little apple in the class. Her features are exquisitely sculpted, like a classic baby doll — she'll be a model in 15 years, if she wants to be — and she's as silent as a doll in my class. If I ask her to say a word, she mumbles it. A sentence as long as "I like to shop with my mother," she can barely manage even to mumble. Yet she's got a functional grasp on the vocabulary that bests even Tony with his alphabetic advantage. She understands and gets the right answer, even if she can't express it. She never, ever volunteers: I always have to pick on her, but she almost never disappoints.

I look forward to Ma Lei starting the pet supply shop, so I can quit this job and we can focus our attention on something with greater long-term benefits and more intellectual challenges. However, in the mean time I've found out that teaching the little critters can be fun and interesting.

The end of the road

There have been a number of well-publicized cases in recent years of local governments grabbing land from farmers who didn't want to sell, then paying them ridiculously low prices for their land (if they paid at all). The government tried to hush these up at first, but eventually the protests became too big to hide any longer. In response to public outcry, the government (at least in my part of China) has recently been treating reluctant homeowners with kid gloves. Sometimes the results are tragic in their own right.

There is a new road that makes our trip to the farm much more convenient, shaving twenty minutes or more off the drive. However, in two places along the road you can see where holdouts have forced the government to build the road around their houses. Here's what we saw last weekend on our way home from the farm.

Here is the newly-constructed road. It's a big, beautiful boulevard about five kilometers long.

This picture is taken at one end of the new road, standing right where the lane was SUPPOSED to go.

This is the view 180 degrees behind the last picture. There is supposed to be a lane through this farmer's back yard, to connect with the road off in the distance.

Cars barreling down the road at 80 km an hour have to make a pretty sudden swerve around the farm house. You can see there's just one little tiny blue sign to indicate the sudden end of the road. There's no signage to warn you in advance, no red plastic cones or barrels — nothing.

Wait a moment. What's that on the side of the house?

I guess this guy didn't see the little blue sign in time! I'm guess that the black tarp over the truck's cab is not a good sign. It probably indicates that there's stuff inside there that you don't want to see. Given how few Chinese drivers wear seat belts, that's a fair guess.

You can just barely see it in this picture, but the truck smashed into the wall of the house pretty hard. There's a big cracked-up place right between the two windows.

I don't know how he got dug in so deep.

Here's the little cut-out where both directions of traffic share one and a half lanes. It's a little unnerving when those giant lorries come rumbling past in the other direction.

By the way, we went past the same spot again today. The truck has been removed, leaving no trace except a big smack on the side of the house.

A failure of corporate communication

This post is completely off-topic, but I can't resist. I hope you won't mind too much.

In Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, he recounts Jobs' having told him that the one industry he would most like to have worked in, if not computers, was the automotive industry. Today I watched the online video of the unveiling ceremony for Mazda's 25th-Anniversary MX-5 Miata (http://www.mazda.com/stories/craftmanship/mx-5/mx-5_25th/thanksday/ustream/), and I was struck by how very much Mazda needs the ghost of Steve Jobs.

For several years during grad school, I drove a cherry-red 1990 Miata. It was the best car I've ever owned, a sheer joy to drive. I miss that car like an old lover.

It's a common experience. The Miata inspires love in its customers like few products except those made by Apple. Like an iPhone, it's not bare-bones practical — its selling points are style and fun. The Miata makes you want to drive it, and any other car is disappointing. A new edition of the Miata is anticipated by its fan base with the same excitement as a new iPhone.

So it was that Mazda prepared an unveiling ceremony clearly inspired by Jobs' keynote speeches. Except that they did almost everything wrong.

First there was the introduction. The designer who did the presentation seemed almost to be downplaying the greatness of the achievement that was the first Miata. In a risky and daring business move, Mazda revived a category that had been dead for ten years. Roadsters were considered a low-volume, no-profit niche market, yet Mazda sold millions. They were the low-cost tail that wagged such giant dogs and Porsche and BMW. It was an act of scrappy corporate audacity on par with the first iPhone.

Mazda's presentation said some of those things, but in such a jumbled-up, understated way that the message had almost no impact.

There was a nice little video, reasonably well-done, at the end of which the car quickly rolled onstage. Too quickly: there was no build-up, no drama, no music. Just a few puffs of smoke from the sides. In fact, the sound was still on the video, so you couldn't even hear the car!

If you're not a Miata fan, you might not be horrified by this omission, but the sound of the Miata is one of its major selling-points. Mazda spent countless dollars and man-hours into carefully engineering a satisfying exhaust rumble in the first-edition Miata. It's one of those perfect, Steve Jobs-like details that make the Miata such a full-body joy to drive. So it's a dreadful failure of communication to have the new edition of the car roll onstage in silence.

Once the car was there, the designer went on to show off the new look. This is the part I had been looking forward to, because I'd already seen some great-looking photos here: http://www.mazda.com/stories/craftmanship/mx-5/mx-5_25th/movie_photo/

This car was designed to be aggressive, where the first-generation Miata was bubbly. It's been aptly described as looking like a Maserati. The front end is low and wide, like a race car on the track. It looks fast and hot. It makes all the testosterone in your blood sing like a tuning fork. One look, and I felt an irresistible compulsion to be the one behind the wheel.

In the entire 23-minute video, there was not one single shot of the car from the front.

The interior of the car looks to be yet another design masterpiece. It's a gorgeous steampunk union of pre-computer-era knobs and dials with slick high-tech chrome-on-black style. The short-throw shifter in the middle speaks of control, responsiveness, and twisty, wind-whipped mountain roads. The palm of my right hand longed to rock-solid snicker-snack Miata shifting. The calves of both legs felt chills anticipating lightning-fast clutching.

There was not one single shot of the interior. The designer hosting the unveiling ceremony spoke in adjective-rich prose about the beauty and attention to detail Mazda had invested in the interior of the car, but he did not show it. Not once.

The car got driven onto the stage, presumably to show that it did in fact have an engine, but otherwise it sat static throughout the demo. There wasn't a turnstile to show it from different angles, nor did it move around at all. There was no video of the new Miata, only the intro video showing older generations. Even the driver seemed awkwardly immobile. This aggressive-looking, nimble little car looked stuck in mud.

Half the unveiling was spent on a concert by Duran Duran. I suppose this is appropriate to the Miata's sales demographic, but if I were planning the event I'd have skewed a little younger. The whole point of a car like this is to make people feel just a little younger than we are. Perhaps Duran Duran was supposed to remind us of our youth, but to me it was just a reminder of aging. The band has lost a lot of the spring from their step. They had an almost perplexed look about them, as if they, too, we wondering why they were there.

None of their songs had any obvious connection to the car, which sat forgotten on the opposite side of the stage. Rather than take the opportunity to cut away to exciting footage of the new Miata zooming down the road, the producers stayed glued to the aging rockers for a dozen long minutes.

I haven't been so disappointed in the work of a highly-paid, supposedly professional communicator since — well, now that I think about it, the Isaacson biography of Steve Jobs. If you wanted to un-sell a car, Mazda just provided a great example of how to do it.

A hitchhiker in my class

Another first:

Last week was the first week of classes. In European Civilization class, I gave a general introduction to European Civilization (overall outline, breakdown into Ancient, Medieval, Renaissance, Industrial Revolution, and Contemporary periods, with a few very rough dates). Then I gave an introduction to some key themes of the course, by way of a lecture I call "Three Ideas That Made the West Great." The three ideas are Logic, Individualism, and Freedom. It's a very generalized introduction, the purpose of which is to get them thinking about some of the terms and themes that are going to come up throughout the semester.

At the end of class, I asked the students to write a simple self-introduction with their contact information, something about their background, reasons for taking the course, and a little bit about what they're interested in. Here is one of the responses I got. I'm quoting here in its entirety, with the very slightly rough Chinese grammar (not bad at all, by Chinese standards), so you get the flavor of the student's thinking.

So glad to participate in your class, sir. Actually I'm not your "true" student. I am a post-graduate majored in Labor Economics. I was looking for place to read books when you are preparing your class. [The class meets at 6:30PM, and it's common for students to use classrooms as study space in the evenings.] 

Anyway I feel happy, which you said is the most important thing for human being. Western civilization is great and Chinese culture is also special. I want to learn more from you, a foreigner, to see a world in your eyes, if it is allowed. [Allowed?! I'm THRILLED!] 

About the three ideas you talked about tonight, I can't agree more. Logic makes the world scientific and put the way to knowledge, so that we human can know better about everything around us. Individualism makes people live for themselves so that we can realize a harmony society, in which everybody is equal. Freedom is the vital factor to push a country moving on. We Chinese is waking up from the less free past. Though we have a long way to go, we still have lots of problems, we will not stop changing...

 In other words, this grad student was sitting in the classroom studying on his own, when our phalanx of 50 students piled into the room. He must have asked one of the students what class it was, and had enough interest in the topic to stick around for the first class. I guess our first night of class caught his interest enough that he wants to keep coming back.

This sort of thing almost never happens in the US, unless you're lucky enough to be at a superstar university like Chicago, where students are motivated by pure love of knowledge. Nor is it the norm here in China, where the vast majority of students are motivated by pure love of grades and credits. But I have had more auditors in my classes here in China than I ever did in the States.

Paradoxically, the Chinese focus on "hard sciences" gives my philosophy and culture classes a certain niche popularity. Students who are relentlessly hammered with business management classes sometimes long for something different, and there aren't very many offerings that can satisfy them.

I've had auditors before, but this is the first time my class has picked up a hitchhiker!

Working at Ikea

In all those years shopping at Ikea, I never thought I'd be working there. No, I'm not wearing a blue shirt and driving a forklift, but I am working at Ikea now. Today I started a seven-week Business English class for ten or fifteen of their employees who already have pretty good English at the start.

 I can already tell it's going to be fun: unlike worker/students I've taught at some other companies, these guys are super-talkative. There are two class clowns who should keep things interesting.

The Chinese employees of the Development Zone have a definite sense of hierarchy of companies. The Scandinavian, German and American companies are regarded as the very best, with Ikea at the top. All these Western companies are known for relatively good pay (Germans and Scandinavians somewhat higher than Americans) and great office atmosphere.

Chinese companies suck, but no worse than Chinese companies in the rest of China.

Korean companies are known for low pay and bullying bosses. Japanese are regarded as the very worst. The pay is ⅓ lower than at a Chinese company, the bosses are extremely condescending and demanding, and the office atmosphere is authoritarian.

A student in class today said "Japanese boss tell me 'Do this, then do this, then do this.' Ikea boss tell me 'Solve this problem, up to you how.'" I could clearly see the results of that respectful atmosphere in the attitudes of these students.

Now that I'm living in the Development Zone, these kinds of classes should be plentiful. It's a shame I love teaching at the university, because I could probably make twice the money with a lot less stress and hassle just by chasing down jobs like this in the Development Zone

The Development Zone has this great combination of lots of foreign companies, but almost no foreign teachers. That means parents out here see the value of English for their kids, companies need to teach English to their workers, workers earn a hefty premium (sometimes 20% or more) for knowing English — and there's only little-ole' me and a few others to teach them! I like that particular mixture of supply and demand.

The only trouble is, I don't love teaching English as much as I love teaching content classes like Business Ethics, European Civ, The Moral Foundations of Capitalism, and Entrepreneurship. So I'm actually taking a relative pay cut, working longer and harder, for the privilege of teaching what I most love to teach. Teaching English is a blast, too, but it just doesn't exercise my capacity the way that teaching philosophy-related courses does.

So for the time being, I'll carry on working at the university while making my real money on the side at lovely little gigs like this.

New interview on Philosophy in Action radio

Philosopher Dr. Diana Hsieh recently interviewed me about "Love and Sex in China" on her live internet radio show, Philosophy in Action. You can listen to or download the podcast any time. You'll find the podcast on the episode's archive page, as well as below. About the Interview:

What are the traditional ideas about love and sex in Chinese culture? How did those ideas change in Mao's time? How do Chinese men and women approach romantic and sexual relationships today? Is homosexuality accepted? What is the place of mistresses and prostitutes? Moreover, Robert Garmong told us of the pitfalls of marrying a Chinese woman – and explained why he did exactly that anyway.

Listen or Download:

• Duration: 1:25:11
• Download: Standard MP3 File (29.3 MB)

Topics: Topics:

• The teaser about Robert's marriage
• Traditional ideas of love and sex
• The changes under Mao
• The one-child policy
• The influence of western culture
• Dating in China today
• Sex education
• STDs and abortion
• Married life
• Infidelity
• Homosexuality
• Robert's marriage

Links:

• The Good Women of China
• In Asia, The Perils Of Aborting Girls And Keeping Boys
• Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Sex (But Didn't Learn Because You Grew Up in China)
• Population Control not Rely on Abortion

For more about Philosophy in Action Radio, visit the Episodes on Tap and Podcast Archives.

Ma Lei on a tear!

Oh, my wife! That mouth of hers is going to get her in trouble someday. She's awesome!

This noontime, she was down buying some cold noodles for lunch. There were a couple of 50-something guys shooting the shit about an unfortunate young, 20-something woman who lives somewhere in our apartment complex. According to these guys, that woman is of a type I'd thought existed only in America: so morbidly obese as to be completely housebound. As they described her, she weighs about 400 pounds.

Of course, it’s totally normal for the Chinese to tell someone straight to her face that they think she’s fat. There's no sense of avoiding affront, at least not yet. Let this country pudge out for a generation or two, and I expect the norms to change radically. But for now, fat-shaming is pretty normal.

Once when I was teaching a class of kindergarten students, on the very first day I walked down the front row chatting with them. The first one looked up at me and said “you are very tall!” The second one said “Your hair is very curly.” The third one said “You are very fat.” Good student, good student, BAD student! 

Another anecdote: When I used to teach Oral English, I frequently had students play a game of Taboo. If you’ve not played that game, it’s a team-based game in which one person picks a word card off the top of a stack. The card will have one target word and five “taboo” words. Using only words, not gestures or pictures, the person who’s “It” has to lead his or her teammates to guess the target word without using any of the “taboo” words. 

First I had the students come up with vocabulary words to test, along with a list of five or six “taboo” words. Invariably, every class would have at least one card where the target word was “Fat,” and one taboo word was the name of a classmate of theirs, as in “Alice is very…” In some cases, among the taboo words would be MY name — suggesting that the Chinese clearly don’t get how offensive this kind of talk is to foreigners. If they knew how foreigners feel about being called fat, they’d never, ever call their own teacher fat! 

However, there’s a fine line to be walked, even in Chinese culture. As Ma Lei explained her feelings about this conversation, it's one thing to talk about how obese this woman was, but these guys were going way above and beyond. "How does she go to the toilet? She must crack the porcelain every time she sits down on it!" Ha, ha, ha!

Ma Lei lit into those two older guys. Translating loosely: "Is it any of your damned business how she goes to the toilet? Why do you care so much about her? Is she your girlfriend?” Whoof! HUGE insult to a China-guy.

The guy whom she'd addressed most directly tried to dismiss her by saying — translated literally — "shut up, woman. We're not talking about you."

Oh, poor him. He SO didn't know whom he was talking to! In all of China, you couldn't run into a more intransigent buzz-saw when she gets her dander up.

If you could take the soul of a feisty South-Side Chicago ghetto woman and pour it into the frame of a five-foot-nothing China-girl, that’s my wife. It is an explosive kind of beast.

The literal translation of her response is as follows, but it should really be read in a ghetto-sass accent: “Of course I know you ain't talking about me. You know how I KNOW you ain't talking about me? It’s because you're still alive. If you WERE talking about me, I'd have already beaten you to death.” That’s literally what she said: 打死你！(Hit-to-death you.)

Whereupon these two big bu-bu-bu-boom guys were stunned into silence, looking down at all five-foot-nothing of Ma Lei, going "What just happened?" They grabbed their cold noodles and got the hell out of there.

Man, I wish I'd been there to see it!

Then again, just minutes ago, Ma Lei was riding down on the elevator with the two little dogs. There was a youngish guy, perhaps 20-something, who was looking at her and plucking at his genitals. Not playing, but plucking — like plucking a harp, or picking weeds. 

(We foreigners almost never see how insane Chinese men are with regard to their spastic sexuality, but apparently it knows very few bounds.)

When he saw her looking, he just smiled and carried on plucking, as if he were encouraging something to grow.

Ma Lei turned to him, full-face, hands on her hips, and said “Okay, take off your pants and let me see.”

The guy flushed and put his hands behind his back. He didn’t make eye contact again.

I didn’t marry any submissive wet noodle, that’s for sure!

A friend of mine who goes all the way back to my University of Chicago days recently asked, in her romantic sort of way, "how did you meet your Chinese wife?" The question seemed fairly simple, but the answer comes only in installments.

When I came to China, I had no expectation to meet a wife, though nearly everyone else I knew expected me to. 

I'd heard too many horror stories about marriages between American men and Chinese women, and too few success stories. None, actually. Not a single story of happy union of the kind, and plenty of stories of unhappy ones.

China is probably the only nation on earth with a stronger sense of so-called "exceptionalism" than the United States. It's right there in the name: Zhong Guo, which means "Middle Country" (though it's often translated "Middle Kingdom"). Another way of describing China, usually used in the context of the realm ruled by China's emperor, is "Everything Under Heaven.” Never mind a century and a half of ignominy at the hands of the yangguizi — literally, "Foreign Devils" — the Chinese still feel their own superiority to everyone else. 

Even people who would give anything to get out of China and go to America, still say "and when I get there, I will find a Chinese girl/man to marry." Their modern, internet mythology abounds with stories of evil foreigners, specifically evil foreign men who come here with bad intentions.

Add to that, the Chinese people are essentially binary: the good ones, I would trust with my life without question. The bad ones would steal the clothes off your back and leave you in the middle of the Gobi Desert. The trouble is, the bad ones vastly outnumber the good ones, and for sheer two-faced manipulativeness those wicked Chinese take second place to no other country I know.

And lastly, I have a certain premise about romantic partners, Garmong's Rule. It's perhaps a brutally cruel rule, but one to which I have never personally encountered an exception. It's definitely a relationship guideline for me, personally.

The rule is this: Any woman who is profoundly alienated from her family is almost certainly too full of conflicting desires, fears, and neediness to make a good romantic partner for me. 

I admit the possibility of exceptions, of course, as there always are with psychological phenomena. And other men may have a higher tolerance for the "issues" that arise in that situation, but it's not for me. I am too trusting a person to be with someone who doesn't trust me, and I've got no interest in entering the swirling eddy of comparisons to her abusive or absentee father — or her controlling mother — or her religious-fanatic aunts and uncles — or whomever she was raised with and hates. I'll support her in her struggles, I'll wish her all the best, but I'll back away from romantic involvement. I'd rather be her best friend than her boyfriend.

I suspect that the same problems arise when a woman is alienated from her culture. She may be right to be alienated — it may be a rotten culture, as China is in so many ways — but unfortunately for her and for any man who chooses to be with her, the penalty for being born in a rotten culture is almost always loose screws deep, deep down in the machinery. I don’t have the patience to spend enough time with a spanner such that I might help her solve all her problems, whereupon my great reward is that I get the same relationship I’d have gotten with an un-conflicted woman. “Issues” girls are clearly not for me.

As I've said, my theory is cruel. But to make of oneself an exception to that rule requires an independence so heroic as to be very nearly legendary. I’ve not yet met that woman.

The Chinese women I've met or heard about who've been specifically seeking foreign husbands, have typically fallen into a very small set of neatly-defined categories.

There are the gold-diggers who associate a white face and a paunchy belly with wealth. I’ve got the paunch and the white face, but I'm fairly safe from that category, because I have no wealth until I get around to inheriting it.

There are the green-card-diggers who see an American husband as a "bridge" — literally the word they use when talking among their Chinese friends — to get the hell out of this country. I can't blame them, but I don't care to let them walk to America across my back in stiletto heels to go find a younger/handsomer/wealthier man.

There are a few devoted Christian Chinese women who associate their religion with the West and so wish to find a foreign Christian who can take them away to a more Christian-friendly country. Of course, these tend to overlap with the two previous categories. Not being a Believer, I regard this type as thrice-over hideous, no matter how pretty they may be.

Then there are a minority of Chinese women who have fallen in love with American culture via TV shows and movies they've downloaded from the internet, and who genuinely respond to the freedom and independence of American people.

This last is the only category that I find plausible, but even those are bound to fall afoul of Garmong's Rule. If she's so enamored of the image of the dashing foreigner, she's very likely alienated from her own home environs. And in that case, whether or not she makes a good friend, she surely can't be a girlfriend. Besides which, I want to be loved as one specific person, not a representative of a category.

Oh, and I'm only attracted to women of intelligence and independent, feisty spirit. No limp noodles or subservient Asian stereotypes for me.

So, for me to have fallen in love with a Chinese woman was statistically all-but impossible. 

I would have to find someone who loves her family and her country, who is essentially well-adjusted, yet independent enough to judge her own country objectively. (Lovers of Ma Ze Dong NOT welcome.) She has to NOT be looking specifically for a foreigner, nor for money, nor for an exit from China. And she has to be a woman of extremely high intelligence and a degree of honesty and integrity that is extraordinarily rare in this largely unethical country.

To find what I wanted would be like threading a needle from ten feet away while Fruit Loops kept trying to intercept my thread. It was, of course, impossible. And yet, it happened.

__________________

I’m really excited to have started the renovation of Ma Lei’s apartment. It came on us rather suddenly, with a phone call from Ma Lei’s father yesterday afternoon. His friend and sometimes co-worker, whom we’d wanted to hire for the work, is unexpectedly available to start RIGHT NOW. So today, rather than spending the afternoon doing the grading I should have been doing, I jumped in the car with Ma Lei and drove out to the apartment.

It looks as though the bulk of the remodeling will be done before the end of May. Today we got rid of all the furniture except the bed, tore up the cheap flooring that was in there, and also talked to the workman about what Ma Lei wants done. I took a few pictures while we were out there. 

(The bed stays for now, because the worker will be staying in the apartment for the week and a half he'll be working on the project.)

The apartment is shaped roughly like a squat mushroom, with a long great room like a shotgun shack, and a stubby little kitchen sticking off the side like the base of the mushroom.

Here’s the kitchen and the front door, photographed from the long living room.

That awful cabinet will be replaced, and there will be new cabinets installed over the sink. 

There’s going to be a drop-down table on the right, next to the door. The table will fold up when not in use, but can be used for food prep and eating.

I missed a lot of what Ma Lei was telling the workman, but I was fascinated by some of her conversation. She extolled American kitchens for the clever and creative ways we make cabinets. I heard her explain the concept of a lazy Susan, which seems to have impressed her quite a bit on her trip to the States last year. (She might have been telling him to install one, but I think she was just describing the concept in theoretical terms rather than making a request.) 

She also tried to tell him about garbage disposals, but I don't think he ever quite understood that one.

This is taken from the same spot. I’ve just twisted to the right. That bed will be replaced with a built-in bed that has storage underneath. There will be a wall blocking this area off as a proper bedroom. Note the really cheap flooring. We’ll be replacing that with some nice hardwood flooring. 

It wasn’t too hard to convince Ma Lei to splurge on the flooring, since there’s so little of it. (The apartment is only 54 square meters, made even smaller because we obviously won’t be flooring under the built-in bed and cabinetry.)

Another picture of the bedroom, this time with the Boss.

Turning around to see the other end of the apartment, which will also be walled off as an office/guest bedroom. We'll probably eventually install one of those loft units with a bed on top and desk space below. The ceilings are pretty high in this apartment, so someone sleeping in the overhead bed would not feel as though his nose was being squished into the ceiling.

Mimi making friends with the workman. She's such a blonde!

Here’s the view out our one little window. Way off in the distance, just in front of that low range of hills, you can barely see a little sliver of the ocean from our window. I don't think you can quite see it in this picture, but in LA the "ocean view" would add $200,000 to the price of our condo.

It seems a bit unfair for me to hog the window for my office, but I do really enjoy having a window in my workspace. The door to the office will be frosted glass, so at least the natural light can get through to the living room.

 Looking back from the window at the rest of the apartment. Those sliding-glass doors leaning against the wall used to be there to close off the kitchen, but they will become my office doors after the renovation.

The bathroom is through that door, off the kitchen.

I took out most of the money to pay for the renovation this evening after we got back from the Development Zone. This is 15,000 yuan, which is about $2300. All told, the renovation job is supposed to cost about $3200. The labor, 10 days of full-time work, will come to about $320. What would that be, about one day for an American workman?

Ma Lei, who does not understand my obsession for having all my money lined up and facing in the same direction, teased me for having all those Ma Ze Dengs kai hui (hold a meeting). She asked what all those Maos were discussing in their meeting, and I speculated that perhaps they're planning to make it legal to smack your wife if she teases you too much.

Hopefully very soon the pictures of our apartment will look a lot better. Ma Lei will be going out there every day to keep an eye on the work in progress, so I’m quite confident that the job will be well-done. I've seen her in action: she doesn't miss many details, and she doesn't mind telling someone what-for when she thinks he's done a substandard job. 

The amazing thing, which I know I've mentioned here before, is that she manages to cuss people out with such good humor that they're laughing right along with her, even as she's cussing them out. She really should be running her own company!

Early experience of Chinese traffic

This little event happened during my first week of car-ownership, when I was still learning to Drive Like the Tao (to be the topic of a future essay). It was Friday afternoon, and I was coming home from work down the back roads. As I approached the final left-turn before climbing the hill to my apartment complex, I got stuck in the following traffic jam.

 Then I looked to my left and saw this motorcycle zipping down the empty oncoming-traffic lane...

 ...followed by this car...

 ...and yet another motorcycle. Finally I figured I'm being an idiot sitting here in the left-hand lane 100 meters from the actual left turn, so...

 ...I swerved out into the lane that was supposed to be for oncoming traffic, my heart beating as only a rank foreigner's would.

The few oncoming cars swerved around me as if it were perfectly normal and acceptable for me to be in their lane — as in fact it is, in China. In due course, the lane I was squatting in actually became an appropriate left-turn lane, and I fell into line.

 At the intersection, there was this poor, pudgy policeman attempting to impose some sort of order by the mere waving of his hands. Note the bicyclist happily riding the oncoming lane.

After all this, I made my turn without any trouble, and I trucked right up the mountain to home. I'll eventually learn not to worry about this stuff, but for now it's still rather stressful.

Resting, at Last!

People have an image of the leisurely life of a university professor, but that's at least outdated (if it ever was accurate). There are some periods of leisure, to be sure, but the year is punctuated with waves of work (marking papers, meeting writing deadlines, etc.).

The academic semester ends with three or four weeks of howling tornadoes of work. The stress of marking papers builds to a crescendo over the weeks, with the Wagnerian peak of stress coming at the very end, when one has to certify that every detail on one's grade reports is correct.

That morning, one wakes up (or doesn't, having worked through the night) in time to pore over all the numbers one last time, prints everything out, looks over them one last time to make sure there are no typos, then signs one's name literally 60 different places to certify each number. Lastly, one gathers the whole mess of paperwork along with one's giant stack of exams — 300 of them, in my case — for the long march down the hall to the registry office.

If you're like me, by this point your eyes are wide awake but you can't see much; your head is drooping and there's a throb behind your temples; your hands are shaking from exhaustion and caffeine. You finally reach the office, where a staff-member who is probably just as overworked and stressed as you are checks that you've done everything right. (In my case, there are usually a few signatures missed or put in the wrong place.) Then you're done, and you go home to...

... nothing. No work at all. There's nothing to do, but your stressed-out brain can't quite believe it.

So the rest of that day you're in an agitated stupor, shell-shocked, not quite what to do with yourself. If you have a favorite movie, now is a good time to watch it. Don't bother renting a new one to watch, because you won't remember a thing from it anyway. Yesterday was that day, for me.

Today is the first real day of rest after fall semester finally ended. I believe the stress hormones have finally been flushed from my bloodstream, and now I can lean back, relax a little bit, and get started reading up for next semester's classes. There's a lot of work to do during the next six weeks, but I can do it on my own time and wherever I want.

(Old grad student joke: You know you're a grad student when you catch yourself saying "I'm so glad the semester's over so I can finally get some work done! The thing is, that doesn't end after grad school.)

By sheer coincidence, this morning we received a belated shipment from Taobao: three bottles of a really good Chilean Cabernet Sauvignon Ma Lei bought for a song (about $6 apiece). We've been expecting it for days, but the motorcycle-delivery guy was stopped by snow and ice.

His timing couldn't have been better. If they'd come while I was still marking papers I probably would've blasted through all three in as many days, without really tasting a drop. Now I can actually enjoy!

I used Amazon and iTunes Christmas gift cards (thanks, Mom!) to download several books to help my teaching, as well as some good music to listen to while reading.

I also bought one pure pleasure read (Qiu Xiaolong's murder mystery Death of a Red Heroine, set in early 1990s Shanghai). I've already started reading it with my first glass of wine.

It starts with a great "hook" — literally. A riverboat captain plays hooky with his old high school friend whom he hasn't seen in 20 years, to go fishing in a secluded river not yet polluted by the march of factories. They have tremendous success until, just when they're ready to go home, they find the body of a murdered woman. Now the day is ruined: the lovely fish they've caught will have died by the time they wait for the police, make their statements, and fill out the necessary reports. The captain will also have to admit on the reports that he was fishing with his buddy when he should have been moving cargo. Nonetheless, he picks up the phone and calls the police.

That's as far as I've read so far.

I've vowed to savor this wine, so I'll hold myself to two glasses a day. Likewise, the mystery story: I'll read it only while I'm drinking my two glasses. That way I have more incentive to draw out the pleasure of the wine, while at the same time forcing myself to savor the story over more than just a day or two.

Class prep will give me plenty of real work to do this break. Next semester I'm teaching four different classes, three of which will require significant prep work. Two I've never taught before, and one I'm teaching from a very different syllabus than in the past.

I've also vowed to start on my research agenda, which should be fun but a lot of work. I also want to do some more writing on my books about China (both fiction and non-fiction). Also important to me is to start back on my Chinese-language studies. I made a lot of progress last summer, then lost most of it when the teaching year began. I hope I'll be quick to recover the vocabulary and sentence structures I've forgotten in the past 20 weeks.

Crucial, too, is what I am not doing: for the first time since I came to China, I have declined all holiday teaching jobs. I'll probably still tutor my three students, but beyond that I'll do nothing but my own work.

And I can't wait!