An Englishman in Changchun.

English graduate plays on the title of an unspectacular record by Sting to provide the title for a mundane blog he writes to help justify his time spent as a kindergarten teacher in North-east China.

[rjchina-blog]

... In all seriousness, if anyone is thinking about a year in China, I would highly recommend Bai Da Wei foreign language school as a reliable, considerate employer that offers a good wage and consistent support. Applications are always welcome...

[rjchina-blog]

Chinese Children

       Between posting things on this website (less and less frequently), eating as much imported cheese as my wages can buy (often) and fighting off hordes of adoring Chinese women (almost never), my Chinese employment VISA dictates that my stay in the Republic must be made financially viable by an approved job of work.  Like most other westerners in the city I have put my two greatest god-given gifts, namely my white skin and my remarkable ability to communicate fluently in my own mother tongue, to work as an English Language teacher. My own area of expertise, as it happens, is kindergarten teaching.

                I don’t know whether it is my love of children, when they’re being absolutely silent and still, my positive outlook (a vital attitude to maintain when your life is as dreadful as mine) or my expensive Oxbridge education, but I wake up each and every morning with a burning passion in my heart and skip gaily to my hour-long van ride, warming up my throat in preparation for my trademark version of ‘Wheels on the Bus’ to kick off another day of sculpting the young minds of future Olympic gymnasts, Politburo members and giants of commerce.

                In all seriousness though, it is a remarkably easy, hassle-free job that requires next to no - by which I actually mean no - experience, qualifications, or, in many cases, ability. And, it pays a good salary with which I can comfortably finance my cultural discovery of the Far-East. It’s remarkable how children are children wherever you go, despite the suppressive weight of non-elected government, the lack of any green space in which to play, occasionally psychotic Chinese teachers and the fact that many of them aren’t legally allowed siblings. And one will occasionally vomit, urinate or defecate at an opportune moment, which is always pretty funny.

                We are taught that ESL teachers must cater to the four different learning styles that typify the various ways a child learns to communicate. Namely; the visual learner that learns from illustrations and texts, the auditory learner that learns through songs, chants and story-telling, the tactile learner that learns through touch and the kinaesthetic learner that learns through movement. My year and half has thus far taught me that most children can easily be redefined according to the common types I have had the pleasure, or extremely bad luck, to have taught. Here goes.

       THE VISUAL LEARNER – A.K.A – THE SWOT

OK, so every nationality has these (always female) children. Within five minutes they can reel off every flashcard that you’ve got. They get annoyed when you make deliberate mistakes in songs and are prone to episodes verging on the manic when the fat boy with what looks like a spleen hanging from his nose isn’t playing a game correctly. I have taught four year old children - and, by children, I obviously mean girls – that within three weeks have a wider vocabulary than most English adults (from Wigan). By the time they are five and six, learning to read and write, they are correcting my grammar and telling me that I don’t write the letter B properly on the board (which I definitely do). These are actually my favourite kids to teach, a sentiment that my own five-year-old self would bitterly resent. Girls in China seem to be better adjusted than boys, particularly when they are young enough not to be worrying about getting married or having nice skin. The fact that they don’t get pampered into little princes like their male counterparts actually works in their favour. Their relative lack of attention at home makes them even more determined to blow everybody else away in class, without being too much of a pain about it. It’s a joy to have taught a girl for eighteen months and to have single-handedly, with the help of her incredibly expensive extra-curricular English tutor, coached her to the stage at which she can ask and answer questions, make jokes and, invariably, insult you in ways only a six-year old can.

       THE AUDITORY LEARNER – A.K.A – THE UNWILLING VICTIM

These kids, according to the usual TPR (Total Physical Response) definitions, are quiet, sensitive and react to repetition and aural stimulants like songs and chants. In my experience they react to pretty much nothing you say for the first six months, then about twenty percent of it for the rest of the time you know them. They are never any trouble but are capable of driving you to distraction in different ways of their own. For example, there are kids I’ve known who will walk to the front of the class and stare at me with a complete absence in their eyes whilst I repeat “I want to eat an apple” in about fourteen different pitches and stresses, contorting my face into bizarre and vaguely painful angles in an effort to inspire any reaction at all. The prompt usually progresses into “I want to eat an apple. Say, I want to eat an apple. Alice? Alice? I want. To eat. Alice? To eat. An apple. I want to eat an apple. Alice? Alice? Alice! ALICE! SAY: I WANT TO EAT AN APPLE! Right, forget it, SIT DOWN”. I try not to take it too personally though. To be honest, if at the age of three I had been sat in front of the largest Chinese-man I’d ever seen whilst he talked complete gibberish at me for an hour a day, I’d probably resort to faking zombification as well, in the vague hope that he might go away and let me carry on stashing coloured building blocks in the various orifices about my body.

            THE TACTILE LEARNER - A.K.A – THE WEIRD KID

There are always one or two in every class. It seems to me like any child that doesn’t learn by one of the other three ways is probably just too much of a handful to really consider, so they sort of invented this one out of sheer convenience. Frankly, I doubt any English child learning French is going to fondle a carrot for five minutes and suddenly be able to recall ‘des legumes’ in a flawless accent.  So, I’m taking ‘tactile’ to cover all of those particularly odd kids that don’t quite fall into any other category. There is Leon, in Little A, who moves everywhere in the style of a crab, regardless of what he’s actually asked to do. Jack, in Middle B, who takes his shoes off during writing exercises and sees how far up the wall he can push his piece of paper using his feet. David, in Big C, who sneaks up behind you whenever he feels like it, very loudly sniffs you then pronounces in Chinese that a very specific part of your anatomy smells awful, which is actually pretty awkward because whilst I know it isn’t true, the young, female Chinese assistants might feasibly retain some semblance of doubt about my personal hygiene.

       THE KINAESTHETIC LEARNER – A.K.A – THE HELLRAISER

This type of child will come to embody everything you love and hate about teaching kindergarten. If you’re in the mood they can be hilarious. If you’re even slightly hung-over, they are the last children you want to see. I have one boy, for instance, that constantly doles out physical punishment to the rest of his class: a characteristic that I may applaud or condemn depending on how annoying I’m finding the rest of the class that day. These kids will push your patience to the limit. They will regularly provide the words ‘monkey’, ‘teacher’ or ‘Rob’ as the answers to all of your questions. Any time you want them to be quiet they will be as loud as they possibly can, and vice versa. They will do an obnoxious Gangnam –style dance whenever required to move anywhere. They crave attention, and your attention most of all. It is ridiculous to lose your temper with a three-year old child, however, so we as kinder teachers are forced to come up with subtler ways to take our revenge upon these little vagabonds as and when we can. A colleague of mine had one such child, Toby, in his middle class, who simply did whatever he wanted whenever he wanted, by virtue of the fact that his mother worked in the same kindergarten. He took to playing musical chairs in his class and rigging the ‘stop’ moment so that Toby would have absolutely no chance of getting to an available chair. Toby would spend the rest of the game on the sidelines crying and shouting whilst his classmates enjoyed themselves playing. The piece de la resistance, though, came at the semi-final stage of the game, where he would relent and reintroduce Toby, as if to offer him a tantalizing slither of hope, only to inevitably crush it again at the dénouement before showering praise upon his victorious opponent. Genius.

[the-next-emperor]

“Virgin eggs in China are chicken eggs cooked in the urine of young boys. It’s said that the eggs have curative elements for spring drowsiness and summer heat.”

...

Hungry?

[rjchina-blog]

"Chinese KTVs also known as karaoke bars are extremely popular in China. With fans at all levels of society, companies regularly plan parties at high priced KTV lounges, and students celebrate the end of school by singing at a local KTV. Unfortunately this entertainment has acquired a bad reputation amongst foreign tourist as being too noisy, too smoky and acting as poorly disguised brothels full of Chinese prostitutes."

[rjchina-blog]

Chinese Karaoke

          Let’s get one thing straight: what we think of as karaoke in Britain – a small, greying man with portable decks, a dingy pub on a Saturday night, a surprisingly hairy middle-aged woman booming her way through ‘Avenues and Alleyways’ by Tony Christie – doesn’t come close to resembling karaoke in China. Though both countries bring their own unique styles to the art-form, their respective takes on how best to cater for drunks wanting to audibly forget the words to ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ are worlds apart. Even attempting to compare the two would be a an exercise in sheer futility, comparable only to large-rock racing, or selecting various disciplines of combat from stages of the past and pitting them against each other in an empty, grey present on cable television. But, if it’s good enough for the Bravo channel’s Deadliest Warrior, it’s certainly good enough for me.

http://v.youku.com/v_show/id_XODYyODA4NDQ=.html

The Venues

China:

Chinese ‘KTVs’ are amongst the most unnecessarily flamboyant buildings you will ever see. They are gold-painted palaces that house a myriad of winding corridors, leading you past hundreds of individual karaoke rooms that can be rented by the hour for anything between four and ten English pounds, depending on the size of your party and whether or not you want there to be attractive Chinese women inside (not a joke). In Changchun, the City that never sleeps, but wakes fitfully in unpleasant bursts throughout the night, coughing, KTVs are like golden teeth in a mouthful of really grey, concrete teeth. Your private karaoke room comes well equipped with two microphones, a touch-screen on which to select and customise your choices of backing track, various percussive instruments, and usually some communal popcorn, or something like that. They are open pretty much 24/7, allowing one to croon to the Commodores around the clock, and security is fairly lax, so smuggling in as much alcohol as you like is pretty easy, not altogether unlike Sunday morning.

England:

Basically anywhere with a bar is a potential karaoke venue in the UK, but the local pub is the perennial favourite; at once a social hub, a cradle of local traditions, a lonely watering-hole, a knock-off-goods emporium and, on special bi-weekly occasions, a karaoke paradise. However, the pub’s versatility, as a venue not primarily designed for howling in the night, can be both a blessing and curse. On one hand, there’s no denying that special sense of occasion when the Ford Transit pulls up and the mobile karaoke station is unloaded. But what happens on a rainy Wednesday when it’s three A.M and all you want to do is, firstly, buy more beer, but secondly, sing your heart out to re-recorded backing tracks of Neil Diamond’s greatest hits?

The Verdict:

Personal hi-tech sound room vs ‘Disco-Dave’ at the Horse and Crown? First blood China.

1-0

The Music

China:

Obviously I’m approaching this from a typically biased, Anglo-centric point of view. Complaining about a Chinese Karaoke Venue in China having too much Chinese music is sort of like expecting the workers dining hall downstairs to morph into a carvery and stick Goals on Sunday on the big screen. They do have a fair selection, particularly of the more modern Stateside stuff, which I personally enjoy hearing about as much as the news that I’m going to need invasive bowel surgery, but there’s usually enough to please everyone else there. And, if you delve deep enough, you can usually find the classics that no drunken sing-along can possibly be complete without – the ‘Hey Jude’s, the ‘American Pie’s, the ‘I Don’t Wanna Miss a Thing’s – but these are often bootleg backing tracks played on a keyboard to an inexplicable “music video” of white people from the 1990s on a beach in what looks like the Ukraine. Yeah, it’s pretty weird.

England:

The only drawback here is the fact that you are subjected to everyone else’s choice, as well as your own. But, if you don’t mind the socially awkward pair of 16 year old girls getting up to do ‘Don’t Speak’ by No Doubt every other weekend, the sloshy hen-party cackling through the Spice Girls or the spritely older gentleman who mumbles off-tempo to anything by the Rat Pack, it can be bearable if not entertaining. And, at least you can understand the lyrics (if only because they appear in words on the screen).

Verdict:

The latest hit from one of South Korea’s 5 billion boy-bands or a slow group-kick to New York, New York? The Empire strikes back. 1-1

The Final Showdown

Not to get too poetic about the whole thing, but let’s pause a moment to consider the very concept of karaoke. The word itself is of Japanese origin, and translates into English as ‘an empty orchestra’; a phrase quite hauntingly loaded with paradox. There is a pervading melancholy captured in that image of vacancy; we hear the warm colours of the orchestra more clearly because of their absence and the perception of something larger than ourselves that was but isn’t there only serves to emphasise our own sense of present isolation. Much like they were with conveyor-belt sushi and Hollywood martial arts, the Japanese are right on the money. Karaoke is a stolen glance at dreams that have long-been defeated for all of us who were in the wrong place at the wrong time, who never got that lucky break, who froze up when their nine-hundredth phone-call to ‘Stars in Their Eyes’ was actually answered. In this sense, the British take on karaoke is the most faithful: failures singing to an audience of drunken failures, reminding themselves and each other of the gaping hole in the life they wish to lead.

On the other hand, China really dislikes Japan anyway, and getting five or six of your mates together in a private room doing Nickleback impersonations whilst off your face on rice-wine is an unbelievable way to spend the early hours of any morning. For my money, China wins.

[emmaindalian]

[rjchina-blog]

"Fake Johnnie Walker is so prevalent that Diageo, the brand’s parent company, has teams in China that spot-check bottles to insure that they are legit."

[rjchina-blog]

Chinese Alcohol

This may come as a shock to many, but not all Chinese cities are flashing metropolises like Shanghai or Beijing, or cultural palaces like Xi’an or Lijiang. I live in a city called Changchun, as you may have gathered from the title of this blog, the largest city in the North-eastern province of Jilin, sandwiched between Russia to the north and North Korea to the south. Its temperature averages about ninety-four degrees Celsius in the height of summer and somewhere vaguely beyond the Antarctic in winter. Spring and autumn are so short as to be effectively non-existent, so you find yourself spending six months sweating and six months shivering, sort of like the basic events of a fever in super, super slow motion. As a result, possibly because of the climate, the location, possibly because China is so ridiculously big, probably because almost anything of historical/cultural value was intentionally destroyed by Mao during the 1960s, the place is not exactly Paris. Couple this with the fact that China’s north-easterners are famous mainly for their consumption of beer and cigarettes and you will find that occasionally, and I mean very occasionally, the only thing to do is to get horrendously drunk. Here is my guide to drinking in China.

BEER

                Cheap. Almost too cheap. Classic Chinese beers in my neck of the barren tundra (woods seem to be in fairly short supply) include Qingdao, Snow and Harbin. Coming in at around three kuai, or thirty English pence, per 570ml bottle, it’s of a fairly decent quality that I’d pitch somewhere about the middle of the standard lager spectrum. It’s no frosted glass of Peroni but it’s no Australian dog-urine either. The fact that Changchun as a city seems to have absolutely no inclination to enforce any kind of public consumption limits means that you can drink your dirt-cheap beer almost anywhere, which makes it a convenient option indeed. From pool-halls to bowling alleys, even to restaurants that actually sell their own beer, you can lubricate proceedings as you see fit. I personally draw the line at taking a few beers into kindergarten, but it’d probably only be a slap on the wrist if I decided to give it a go. Especially if I made sure the headmistress’s glass was always full.

IMPORTED SPIRITS

                The Chinese seem to love whisky, although they remain strangely sceptical of vodka and tequila. Most nightclubs will offer pitchers of whisky-plus-a-mixer for a reasonable price, and as a white person you will be repeatedly coerced into drinking this at tables of overweight Chinese men that you’ve never met before, which, depending on your mood, can be either a blessing or a curse. Changchun boasts it’s very own ‘Russian Café’, taking the word ‘Russian’ to mean ‘vaguely depressing place that smells strongly of cheap potato-based ethanol’, which is appropriate enough. Inside you can pick up a bottle of “vodka” for as little as 60 kuai, or six English pounds, which was brilliant until I typed ‘Chinese alcohol’ into Google as part of my ‘research’ for this blog post, and discovered several articles warning against the consumption of imported spirits. Apparently it is fairly common in China for these products to be counterfeit vessels containing a heady, yet toxic, mix of formaldehyde and methanol. “Does the smell of paint thinner permeate your nostrils?” Check. “Do you see something swirling around in your glass, like a clear oil slick?” Check. “Have you been experiencing problems with your eyesight, tantamount to the onset of blindness?” Not yet, baby. Pour me another shot of that “Stirnoff” and I’ll let you know.

CHINESE WINE                           

                Avoid, unless you have practically no taste or experience in what wine should be like, in which case you’re presumably from the United States and, as you’ve never drank alcohol before without being involved in some sort of ping-pong ball-based party-game, you should fill your boots. Popular varieties include ‘Great Wall’ and ‘Dynasty’ and can be picked up relatively cheap, depending, of course, on quality. White wine hasn’t really caught on at all, with 90% of all wine consumed in China being red, and I think that’s something we can all be grateful for. You can find imported wines from the usual real countries like France or South Africa knocking around, but these will cost you a fair bit so tend to be saved for special occasions. Like most things Western in China, red wine is a symbol of affluence and a luxury item that the everyday Chinese person would never consider buying or drinking. Given the taste, I can’t say I blame them. What is brilliant about Chinese wine, though, is its marketing, which usually boils down to a photo of a middle aged white man who could have been a celebrity chef circa 1975 staring awkwardly at the bottle.

  BAI JIU

                Bai Jiu, or ‘white alcohol’, is a drink so close to my heart I’m going to devote a special section to it. It is to China what vodka is to the Russians, what tequila is to the Mexicans, and what Special Brew is to the homeless. Sold in a myriad of huge glittery boxes that become more and more extravagant according to price, Bai Jiu is the standard alcoholic currency of any social affair, from weddings, to birthday parties, to high-powered political drinking sessions (meetings). It’s crystal clear, around 50-60 percent proof, and smells and tastes like industrial cleaning product. I have seen bottles for sale at literally thousands of RMB, or literally hundreds of English pounds. On the other hand, I have bought a bottle before for two kuai, or twenty English pence, from a stall outside of a nightclub. It was actually undrinkable. A fellow ESL teacher once recounted a tale told to him by the daughter of a high-ranking police officer, a student of his at the time, about a bottle of Bai Jiu so revered, so loaded with social prestige, that it can't actually be bought for money; it just circulates amongst the upper echelons of communist society. On the other hand, Bai Jiu is what taxi drivers in Changchun use as windscreen wiper fluid when the temperature drops to minus 25 in the winter and the entire car becomes a block of ice. It is a drink that has to be experienced to be believed, and, if you can stomach more than a glass, your recollections of that experience will probably be hazy the next morning, when you wake up in a puddle of blood and broken glass and have to start trying to fish the gravel out of your ears.

[rjchina-blog]

"Japanese launch 4.5-tonne gun-toting robot controlled by smartphone

Kuratas is 4 metres high and capable of firing 100 rounds a second – or even working as a cleaner or firefighter"

...

Unbelievable.

[rjchina-blog]

"Robots in demand in China as labour costs climb

Higher wages due to growing affluence and the one-child policy prompts move towards use of robots to fill the lower-paid jobs left behind"

... 

[rjchina-blog]

Image courtesy of the camera on my iPhone, thanks.

[rjchina-blog]

Chinese Halloween

       One of the best things about living here, in one of the People’s Republic’s less fashionable cities, is witnessing the local take on Western culture. It’s easy to think of China in this sense as the standard “geek” in an American high-school romcom. Whilst England, the USA and Australia cruise through the typical house-party scene sporting Letterman jackets and those plastic cups which for some reason are always red, China hovers, leaning awkwardly in the hall. It hates every minute of its own existence yet remains perversely desperate to prolong the social discomfort for as long as possible in case the impossible occurs and attractive women start to recognise what a unique and interesting individual it is. 

China’s mid-to-younger generations often try extremely hard to become familiar with our trans-Atlantic fashions and trends but usually tend to miss the point. Luckily for them they are surrounded by a population of people their own age also missing the point in equally embarrassing ways. As a result the only ‘popular cheerleaderguitarjocks’ left to run them up the flag-pole in their underwear are arrogant foreigners such as myself who couldn’t accurately convey to them the error of their ways anyway because the cultural discrepancy is simply too big. So; we are left desperately poking fun at them in dark cyber-spaces such as this. And you’d be right in telling a fun-poker such as me to grow up and stop being such an intercultural bully. It’s an easy laugh to aim for. It doesn’t require any analytical or observational skill. And, if anything, are the wishes of young Chinese people to imitate the fashions of Britain and America not actually rather tragic subconscious statements, from a youth that can’t help but look jealously at us when they are frequently denied the freedoms of expression and upbringing that we enjoy in our own countries? The thing is, though, that they’re usually really great.

One of my personal faves has always been the time I saw a twenty-something Chinese man walking down a busy street in a turquoise t-shirt with nothing but the words 

THE RAMONES

POPULAR CULTURE

emblazoned across it in white capitals. 

Despite the fact that not many Chinese people in Changchun will have heard of the Beatles, let alone a New York punk band from the mid-seventies, it was the words ‘popular culture’ that I loved the most. A real investment in popular culture is something that people silently aspire to, and often believe they have, but rarely ever talk about because it would be really un-cool if they did; almost as un-cool as using the word ‘un-cool’ in any sort of sincerity. This blatant disregard for any sense of the unspoken was sort of like a man walking down a busy street with his girlfriend in hand, wearing a hat that says

I CAN CURRENTLY HAVE SEX WITH A WOMAN WHENEVER I WANT TO, WITHIN REASON

in lightbulbs on it.

It’s this sort of behavioural nuance that is obviously lost in cross-cultural translation, but there are more glaring errors as well. As a kindergarten teacher I am no longer shocked to see four-year-old girls wearing sweaters in the winter with massive ‘Playboy’ bunnies on the front. I’d absolutely love to show their mothers a copy of the magazine but I think the psychological ramifications would be just too damaging. A Canadian teacher at a university here told me the other day about two of her male students (or male ‘legends’ as I prefer them to be known as). When it came to submitting their English names to her, by which they would be known for the subsequent three years at least, they decided to go with ‘Kobe’ and ‘Bryant’ respectively and then sat next to each other in every class so that taking attendance would never fail to be hilarious.

I think a new standard has been set, though, by a six-year old student who came to my school’s Halloween Party this year. A perennial pain in my arse, these “parties” are an opportunity for the paying students of our school to enjoy a free evening of Western culture virtue of the foreign teachers and their Chinese counterparts who are contractually obliged to work them for nothing. They occur around Halloween or Christmas on alternating years, and the kids are encouraged to dress up as would befit any normal Halloween party back home, if ‘back home’ is a juvenile playground that takes any notice at all of Halloween, like the United States of America.

In another classic example of getting anything Western wrong, I was put in charge of ‘bobbing for apples’ -  a timeless tradition that had somehow morphed into five apples, skewered by chopsticks, hanging from pieces of string that were attached to the ceiling. The object of the game was for the children to devour the apples hands-free and the fastest eater would be the winner. As I stood gazing out over the rows of tiny tots in witches hats and skeleton masks, whilst simultaneously shoving a large piece of fruit into the mouth of a child with wobbly teeth, I caught sight of a large boy clutching a red Angry Bird, wearing a rubber replica of Osama Bin Laden's face over his own face.

Priceless.

[rjchina-blog]

[rjchina-blog]

Chinese New Year

The Chinese are a deeply superstitious people. In a couple of weeks it will be national ‘Tomb Sweeping’ day, upon which thousands of Chinese will flock to the graves of their family to clean, commemorate and communicate with their ancestral dead. A colleague of mine (a bloke I work with) recently described the time that he accompanied his Chinese partner’s family on one such occasion, and his surprise when, on the way to the graveside, his partner’s brother audibly announced that “this year they were bringing a foreigner”.

Later, the family stood by the side of the grave, drank Baijiu1 (whilst pouring a glass for the deceased) and lit cigarettes, placing them in the ground, as if to recreate a Friday night at the local BBQ restaurant for their dead relative. Despite the delicate, memorial nature of the day I couldn’t help imagining a frantic voice from the afterlife shouting back “YOU F-----S, WHAT DO YOU THINK KILLED ME IN THE B-----D FIRST PLACE?!”

Whilst moving around the city at night it’s hard not to notice small, sporadic fires burning on the roadside, carefully tended so as not to blow out, which does wonders for the atmosphere of the place but little to help the fact that the streets are already horribly dirty. Eventually I found out that this was another semi-symbolic memorial gesture. The surviving family burn paper, representing money, to aid their deceased relative financially in the world beyond (“YOU CHEAP C ---S!”)

China is a place where the past rubs along uncomfortably with the present and the potential future. This friction can result in an unexpected jolt of pleasantness, like in examples listed above, or, on other occasions, an unseemly rash which might manifest itself in the sight of a man painfully encouraging a donkey laden with vegetables along a duel-carriageway as Audis and VWs scream past, or a child defecating in the street outside an Apple store (both things I’ve genuinely seen).

Whilst in the West New Year’s Day is traditionally spent feeling like your insides are melting in a bed which has been stained by the smell of pure ethanol escaping from the night before, the Chinese usually wait until mid-to-late January, when they choose a week to induce headaches around the nation by entirely different means. There are literally fireworks going off around the clock, with all the ferocity of a shelling attack on a well-lit trench at the Somme for a week. I suspected from the off that no-one could genuinely enjoy the ensuing atmosphere for more than approximately fourteen seconds, and that there must be an ulterior motive. And, I later discovered that I had been right to be suspicious. The Chinese actually let off these unreasonably loud fire-crackers to ward away evil spirits that might descend from the sky.  

This January 23rd (coincidently my own birthday) saw the turn of the Chinese New Year and the commencement of the Year of the Dragon. The Chinese zodiac is another part of the Spring Festival that I have a real personal problem with. The story goes that the animals of the Chinese Zodiac were placed in order, on a twelve year cycle, based on the results of a race to meet the Jade Emperor.

                    The Rat managed to persuade the Ox to carry it on its back (having pushed off and drowned the Cat that the Ox was already carrying, despite the discrepancy in size and lack of real hands). It jumped off and crossed the finish line in first place ahead of said moronic Ox that was foolish enough to trust a Rat, as if popular culture had taught it nothing. The Tiger comes in next, which seems reasonable enough, followed by the Rabbit. In fifth place arrives the Dragon (WHICH CAN FLY AND IS A DRAGON)followed by the Horse, the Goat, the Monkey and the Rooster.

Now, I was born in 1990, which was a Horse year, so my Chinese zodiac sign is, appropriately, the Horse; an animal famed for its speed, elegance, and power. You might think that there are worse animals to be, and there are (see Goat through Rooster - the asthmatic, broken-spectacles contingent of the Chinese zodiac). But still, I have several problems with the Horse. Firstly, in a detail of the story I missed out deliberately in order to spring it as a surprise now, the Horse did not finish directly after the Dragon, in a semi-respectable sixth place. It actually finished seventh, a mere one place in front of the ‘special-needs’ section, of Goat, Rooster and co.

As ‘legend’ (Wikipedia) has it, the Snake managed to sneak ahead of the Horse at the last possible second. Having cleverly hidden itself on the horse’s hoof for the duration of the race it proceeded to jump out at the finish line and scare the Horse into a frankly embarrassing seventh. I take real issue with the likelihood of this. Any reasonable person would surely expect that either:

                A -The Snake, as a vertebrate creature that lacks an impervious exoskeleton, might possibly have been damaged, or quite probably killed, having been smashed up and down on the bottom of a large horse’s hoof during a sprint race.

                Or B – The Snake, an animal that usually out-sizes the relatively small diameter of a single horse’s hoof, would have done well to hide there for the duration. More likely would have been the Horse noticing a snake on its foot much earlier, if not at the very beginning of the race, thus saving itself the whole humiliating experience at the finish-line.

Not only that, but it seems odd to me that the Horse doesn’t actually win the race, given that it is an animal bred almost solely for the purpose of winning races. Frankly, in terms of experience, it out-ranks even a Tiger when it comes to a Derby, and pisses all over an Ox which is a notoriously cumbersome mammal bred almost solely for transporting cargo, slowly. And this cargo rarely, if ever, includes a Cat and/or a murderous Rat. These observations, I hope, will encourage the nation of China (and, as a consequence, most of Eastern Asia) to alter its ancient Zodiac cycle and replace the Year of the Horse with the Year of the Nervous, Semi-sighted Show-Pony.

1 – Bijiu is a lethal Chinese rice wine that will be discussed at a later date. Needless to say though, it is disgusting.

[rjchina-blog]

Rob Jones

"Music for Sunday Afternoons"

Copyright 2012, Twat Records.

[rjchina-blog]

Chinese Massage

Chinese people believe that almost any ailment known to science can be cured by massage or across the counter medicine. Perhaps the only establishments I notice more regularly than karaoke bars (or “KTVs”) in China are chemists. Amongst foreigners in Changchun, it would be fair to say that Chinese medicine has a fairly mixed reputation. But, there inevitably comes a point in every ex-pat’s stay when the stomach decides suddenly to melt into burning gloop and head for the two most convenient exit points out of the body (inconveniently located at opposite ends of the body). The constant advice from their Chinese friends will be to “take medicine”.

Seriously, I’ve encountered elderly Chinese women who can speak absolutely no other English but for the words “take medicine”. I imagine that the Chinese speaking clock probably gives you the time, reels off three beeps, then tells you (in English) that you need something for that cough. It’s almost as if the entire population of the country is on commission from Boots. Except, in this case, Boots is an anonymous chain of vaguely similar 24-hour chemists in which you can by antibiotics for one RMB (the equivalent of ten English pence) or various pills made from the penis of a panda, or the chin of a badger, or the horn of a fucking unicorn.

A friend of mine, who has been prone to epileptic fitting since childhood recently took a nasty turn and fell quite ill afterwards, with all the symptoms of a flu-like fever. When “strongly encouraged” by his employer to seek medical attention from a Chinese doctor, I overheard him shout down the phone in no uncertain terms that ‘to be honest, I don’t trust your advice 100% considering the fact that the last time I went to see your doctor he prescribed me medicine made from crushed deer-antler, which in the West still hasn’t been recognised as the cure for epilepsy.’

When Chinese people aren’t advising you to take medicine, they are almost certainly advising you to get a massage. Perhaps the only establishments I notice more regularly than karaoke bars or chemists in China are massage parlours.

Recently, in a bar one night, myself, a Dane, a Moroccan, a Californian, a Chinaman, another Englishman and an Irishman decided to form the world’s greatest (and most multi-cultural) 6-aside football team. On a cold Sunday afternoon my teammates and I arrived (hung-over) to face a team of Korean students.

Having already enjoyed two crushing victories over the same team of disorganised Frenchman we were fairly confident, particularly since the average age of our opposition appeared to be about twelve. Unfortunately for us, we hadn’t counted on several Korean stereotypes in terms of incredible self-discipline, tireless work-rate and surprisingly fresh-faced-ness being so very accurate. We were humiliated.

The next day I felt like rusting metal. It was as though the spritely Koreans hadn’t only punished me mental and spiritually, but they had also taken a break at half time to use me as a pasty-white trampoline. So, I went to get a Chinese massage.

45 RMB (the equivalent of four English pounds and fifty English pence) bought me an hour with a blind female masseuse.

Before the massage began I was warned to tell the masseuse if it became too painful at any stage. Clearly, being English, this wasn’t something I would ever be prepared to do, particularly considering the woman administering the massage appeared to be a tiny mouse-like creature made from pipe-cleaners and wool. It was a decision I would later come to regret when she was jamming the balls of her elbows into the small of my back and the base of my neck at the same time and I was lying, face down, in silent agony. I also found myself in the odd position of having to fight the simultaneous urges to a) break wind and b) become sexually aroused at the same time, a situation I had never previously found myself in.

And, in an effort to nip any facile ‘banter’ in the bud, there was nothing remotely sexual about it. I was fully clothed, in a room with three other massage-ees. Having said that, if one wished to (not that one ever has), one could very easily locate a massage parlour that would throw a few extras in. These places are overtly advertised in Changchun by a large, red-neon foot flickering above their door.

Though I left the massage parlour still walking as though I’d been sodomised, I was assured that, if I occasionally did any exercise, or stretched my body at all on even a semi regular basis, the massage would work wonders. To be quite honest though, I think next time I’ll probably stick to the Chinese pain killers, even if they are made from a giraffe’s toenail, or whatever sodding else.

[rjchina-blog]

Chinese Vegetables

Forget the "alright Wall of China" (Pilkington, 2010) and the Terracotta Warriors, the Chinese vegetables deserve far more world-wide recognition.*

The thing is that Chinese vegetables, right, taste like absolute vegetables. 

It takes a while to dawn on you, because when you first arrive in China you spend most of your time wondering which animal's tentacles you're currently sifting through, or whether the meat with the greenish tinge might actually be dog. But, eventually, the realization will hit you like a Chinese vegetable.

After a couple of months, when it has become apparent that every other ex-pat in China has also chosen three digestible dishes that they then eat every day, and you start to feel a tiny bit less of an English twat, there arrives a moment when you bite into a bit of carrot and think 'shit me, that really does taste like carrot'.*2

Because Chinese vegetables taste like the Utopian dreams of English vegetables. Eating a Chinese carrot is like eating a FUCKING CARROT. When an English cucumber casts a thin, grey stare from its thin, grey eyes into the mirror and pictures the muscle-bound demi-god it always thought it could, but knows it never will be, it sees a Chinese cucumber smirking.*3

It isn’t even that Chinese vegetables are more delicious than any other nation’s vegetables. They just taste like they’ve had their DNA analysed and reanalysed a million times, before the microscopic strand that contains the essence of pure vegetable taste has been removed and blown up to the size of a walnut before being rammed back in to a bit of vegetable skin. It’s sort of like a high-grade military green pepper has abandoned the helicopter, paratrooped into your mouth, whipped off his 10kg rucksack and is rubbing his sweaty back on your tongue.

We are often reminded of the old adage ‘quality over quantity’. Chinese vegetables don’t necessarily provide a greater quality of taste at all, just a much greater quantity of it. Sort of like a beautiful middle-aged woman, who, on closer inspection, wears far too much make-up, whitens her teeth on a weekly basis and can’t fly in an aeroplane in case her chest spontaneously explodes. Or anyfood from North America.

Now, it will probably come as little surprise to learn that, in the 1990s, China became the world’s number one importer, exporter and user of chemical fertilizer. In 2007 the United States Food and Drug Administration even subjected all vegetable proteins imported from China to detention without examination. And, of course, you hear many grape-vine horror stories, 90% of which sound 100% implausible. Having said that though, if the vegetables are anything to go by, I wouldn’t take the piss out of a Chinese grape-vine.

Frankly though, for a nation that has to feed one fifth of the world’s population on 7% of the world’s arable land, it would be almost inconceivable to expect a radish that tastes like sweet kick to the mouth to be anything other than inorganic. Especially when you can buy a potato the size of your head for the equivalent of four pence. And once you’ve got a taste for them, you will never want to go back. Though perhaps that’s got something to do with the hormones.

* – I haven’t actually seen either of these yet.

*2 – This is an exaggeration, Chinese food is actually very good once you can speak enough Chinese to order what you want, rather than poking hopefully at a picture-menu, which is the culinary equivalent of playing Russian roulette with the gun pointed at your bowels.

3* - Cucumbers don’t actually have eyes.