Wuxi Tony Canadian Odyssey #28

In this 2010 video, my late father drives Jenny, Tony & me on the "low road" between Shilo and Brandon, Manitoba.  

AKIC's May to Early June 2015 Notes, Observations and Thoughts.

[The Kaulins Family goes to Canada for three weeks (June 9 to June 29).  So I have made this entry to encompass not only the blog entries I made in May but the entries from my time in June before I went to Canada.]

• May 1 was a public holiday.
• I spent that day at a park near Casa Kaulins posing for photos with my family.  
• There were a lot of people in the park that day and I found myself thinking that all those people had souls.  I then thought how that thought didn't really diminish the fact that they just seemed like a mass.
• At the park, the sight of  a  youngish woman, who was standing beside her bag of  cheap plastic toys for sale, seemed so forlorn.
• On May 2, I edited my April entry (my monthly entry previous to this one).
• I have been doing more blogging at my WCE sites.  Double Saint Archduke Sir Harry Moore Emeritus has made a movie  for which he has been awarded the Nobel Prize!
• Mr and Mrs Kaulins.  That's me and Jenny.  After 8 years of marriage, it still seems strange to me that this is so.
• I buy a “I am your father” t-shirt at Uniqlo, a chain clothing store from Japan that is akin to Old Navy.  At Uniqlo there are always some interesting t-shirts for sale.  Last year, I could have bought t-shirts of the Clash and the Sex Pistols.  This year, you can chose from their extensive line of Star Wars t-shirts of which now Tony has one, I have one and my brother Ron will have one, when I meet up with him in Canada.
• Twin students at our school, Iris and Emo, appeared to be reading a book in tandem.  That is the girls were both holding onto one  folio volume — one of the twins holding the left page, the other holding the right  –- and scanning together its text.
• I went to Hen Long Mall and Hui Ju  Mall one day; and I couldn't help but notice that there were many, many empty store fronts.
• My life is dull I will admit.  I can't find anything better to do on my days off with Tony than to take him to a mall.  This has got to stop.  It is so soul destroying.
• Being stared at can cause me to swear at the locals, whether they be children or adults, who are doing the staring.
• I took the Metro from the Civic Center to Yanqiao. About 21 stops!!
• I sleep with Tony in Tony's bed after a winter of having him sleep with us. Slowly, it seems, he is realizing that it is good to have a private spot of one's own.(or so I thought) 
• I eagerly await for the day when Tony kicks me out of his room. I'd rather be with Mommy if you know what I mean. (He in fact kicked himself out of his room.  Of this, I will say more anon.)
• I got an email asking if I wanted to take part in an Expat in China interview podcast.  Part of me thinks the email was a joke so I won't answer it, but if I did and they were serious, I would decline the request.  I think my experience in China has been rather pathetic in a way and my attitude to other foreigners in Wuxi is very negative, so I would feel very uncomfortable doing such an interview.  I want to be the subject of a podcast only if there is something of which I could be proud and at ease to talk about.  And currently there is nothing.
• How the last three American presidents could  inspire you: 3) President Bush was an alcoholic who cleaned up his act and became President.  So he should be a hero to alcoholics.  2)President Clinton was able to get away with being a pervert.  So he should be a hero to perverts.  1)President Obama overcame prejudice to become the President of the United States?  Okay.  I am going to have to work on why Obama is so inspiring to those who aren't blessed with victim or minority status.
• Tony was excited because he had a new class at school. When he first tried to tell me this, I couldn't quite get what it was he was trying to tell me  because his pronunciation of “P.E” was slurred.  But he then told me how he liked to do “this” in class:  this being jumping rope which he happily acted out for me.
• Katherine Hepburn spat in the face of the director as soon as he told her that her scenes in his  movie had been completed.  “This,” she said to him, was for some resentment she had towards him.  I will have to remember that.
• Despite saying I couldn't stand to watch Major League Baseball anymore, I am reading a collection of essays written by Roger Angell about the major baseball seasons of 1972 to 1976.
• I am without friends in Wuxi, I admit, but that is because the social options for me make this loneliness my best choice.  (And I say this while wholly admitting that I am not a great social option for anyone else.)
• There was a power failure at school, but of course it came back when it was time for class. 
• I am reading Paris 1919, a book about the peace conference held after the end of the Great War.  The author does a great job at outlining how the treaty affected each country.  I learned so much about the Balkans, Austro-Hungary and the Ottomans.
• On a recommendation from a Gilbert Godfrey podcast, I downloaded the classic Western film My Darling Clementine.  I then put the film on my Ipad.  Ipad in hand, I went to the empty theater in my school to watch because one of the teachers was in such a bad way (drunk) that I couldn't  stand to even have to overhear him.
• I finish watching My Darling Clementine and come out to see that it has begun to rain.  
• I love my son.  I love my wife.  These two things are the most important facts of my earthly existence.  I will sacrifice other things for this because I must.
• Summer is coming to Wuxi and I can see lots of female legs and thighs.
• Here's another rant, from me, about Chinese drivers.  The rant occurs to me after yet another driver made a right turn on a red without yielding to a pedestrian who happened to be me:  Perhaps the Chinese should all go back to riding bicycles.  Barbarism at a slow speed is much safer than barbarism at high speed.
• Is the problem with Chinese drivers due to the traits of the Chinese or of the car itself?  Chinese society has been demolished by the modernizing of Socialism and Capitalism.  No where is this exhibited better in the Chinese driver's inconsiderateness.  But then it is the nature of automobiles to make people solipsistic.  You can get people in Canada ranting like nothing else if you start talking about driving and traffic.  So perhaps, the devil matched cars and the  Chinese together.
• You have to love God with your whole mind.  A jarring and deserved slap in my face statement from David Warren, my favorite blogger.  I don't spend enough time thinking of Him.
• In the middle of the month, Tony was sleeping in his own bed in his own room and I still had to sleep with him.  I tried to get back to sleeping with Jenny in our bed in our room one night but Tony, in the middle of the night, came to sleep with us.  He said he was still scared to sleep by himself.
• One of our teachers came to work drunk, again.  It was my good fortune that the day he did so, I had already chosen to retreat to a quiet room in the school and read a book as well as watch another movie on the iPad.
• I was getting excited about my upcoming trip to Manitoba.
• My wife, who controls the finances of the Chinese Family Kaulins tells me that we could get a car if we wanted to, but she and I don't, thank God.
• If I drove in China, I would be hating the locals more than I do now.
• Getting off the train one morning, I very nearly gave a righteous elbow to a young man who was boarding.  It seems that he was very eager to get a seat and and  so he rushed onto the train despite the fact that several passengers wanted to get off.  He in fact got in my way and instead of backing off and letting me get off the train, he tried to dodge around me.  I was so annoyed that I gave him a shoulder and brushed him with my elbow.  I then wished the elbow had been more vicious.
• Is all this technology making the Chinese so inconsiderate?  Look at their behavior with cars and of course, you have to look at them staring at their mobile phones oblivious to all else.
• How are you Andis? (Asked the teacher who was drunk.)  I say one word in response: Sober. (That's what I should have said.)
• Reprobate.  That's a word that I should have been using to describe that person.  [I wish say this for the first time in this entry: so much reprobatity, no sanctity to be found anywhere in the Wuxi Expatdom.]
• It is a hot day and the girl wears black clothes and complains about the heat.
• Tony brings his boots with him to school one morning.  The forecast is for thunder showers.
• I am living for a future, but not one where I have resolved my issues.  There is no point in resolving my issues if this life is all there is for me.
• A story about Jack Benny.  It was said that Jack Benny was very gracious and patient with the many people he meet :  all of whom seemed to ask him the same questions over and over again  about his fictional persona and world.  One time, he and a companion were taking an elevator down from a high floor in a hotel.  Everyone who got on the elevator recognized him and would then ask him those kinds of questions.  Was he that cheap?  Did he underpay Rochester?  Did he have a man imprisoned in his vault deep below the earth's surface?  As the elevator finally emptied, he said to his companion:  “Sometime you just want to tell them to fuck off!”  I can say I know that feeling in China when I get treatment tantamount to someone running into a celebrity.
• Despite my experience of celebrity, I am as far as a person can be from the well-connected of the world like the Clintons.  I have no connections, no close friends and no talents or abilities.  I just don't know how I do it.
• What's so disappointing about my social life, is not so much that I don't have friends; it is that I have not meet anyone who comes close to having sanctity.  Everyone I get stuck meeting here is a person of the world: a collection of experiences and anecdotes without a soul. [I've started reading this book A Humane Economy by Wilhelm Röpke , an economist  that my favorite blogger David Warren wrote about recently.  Röpke  who wasn't a socialist or a Keynesian, was  a free marketer, up to a point.  Warren says  Röpke  basic point is that you can get too much of a good thing and that is what the free market does.   Röpke talks about the boredom of mass man cut off nature, his soul starved because he consumes too much.  Anyway, Röpke brought out another reason why I hate meeting foreigners.  They are the product of modern enmassment.]
• The Chinese government is cracking down on strip tease shows at funerals.  I asked my wife Jenny if there were such shows at funerals in her home town.  She said that at a recent funeral, of an uncle that she attended, there was a performance of Chinese opera.
• Jenny tells me that we, that be her and I,  have a reputation for cheapness.  What a slap in the face this is because there is no denying it! 
• It is the slaps in the face that are deserved that really hurt.  I would rather be slapped undeservedly.
• Bad weather on my days off keeps me in the house.  So, I watch the latest episode of Game of Thrones and read Paris 1919 to pass the time.
• I see a foreigner at the Hui Shan Wanda Plaza and my first instinct is to look away.
• There are many disagreeable people in the world and I am one of them.  I sometimes think I am all of them.
• A student tells me that her baby was crying on the plane, annoying all the other passengers and so she was moved by the staff into the business class section.  Apparently, no seats had been sold in that section.
• Sure, I hate, but I hate passively.  The problem is that I also love passively.
• In a previous entry, I had prematurely stated that the 637 route had been changed because of lack of ridership.  What happened was that  that one evening, the buses weren't running normally but the next day they were...  Well, it seems that this change that I had foreseen has actually come about and is permanent.  Since mid-May, it has to be that when I take the train home in the evening, I have no choice but to walk home unless I want to wait twenty five minutes for the next bus to leave. It used to be that I only had to wait five.
• I was quite taken with a documentary about Vivian Maier that I had downloaded and watched.  Maier was this exceedingly marginal figure who died and was then discovered to have been a very talented photographer.  I was inspired to take more photos for AKIC Wordpress.  Alas, I don't have the sort of camera she has.  It is hard to take street photos with an iPhone.
• On the train, I looked up to see a young man wearing a three colored Montreal Expos cap.  I doubt if he would have understood what a Montreal Expo was.  I wish I could have taken a Vivian Maier style photo of this.
• Since seeing that Vivian Maier documentary, I have noticed there are many opportunities for good street photography in Wuxi.  Of course, I am limited by the camera I have and my nerves to just directly point my camera at someone.
• Temperatures were high enough that I could wear short sleeves on my way to work.
• One Monday, the three of us, that being the Kaulins Family, went to Taixing, about an hour by car from Wuxi.  We had to pay sympathy to a relative who had spent some time in the hospital.   The day was uneventful except for my having eaten frog's legs for the first time.  They taste like chicken.   This Monday was a day to to observe a lot as we took the bus to Taixing and then got a return ride in a car back to Wuxi.  I saw never ending people and buildings.
• The Tuesday following the Monday, I went to the Taihu New City area to teach a company class.  I wanted to walk through the Coastal City mall but it was too big for me to look at in the five minutes fate had given me to survey its premises.  The whole area seems a colossal example of overbuilding. {I would go later with Tony.]
• Wuxi, way back when I've been told, was a walled city.  Now, that wall has been completely taken down and any parts purporting to be of the wall are merely restorations.  One student told me that the wall may have been knocked down during the Cultural revolution though he couldn't say for sure.
• But there can be no doubt that the Cultural Revolution destroyed a lot of old things in China and anything purporting to be an historical site in China is probably a fake rebuild.
• Tony says “Oh! My Goodness!” a lot.  He picked up this expression from a Minecraft Youtube channel where the British host always says that phrase.
• I suffered from a bad cold in late May.  It came with a cough that I would say was “high up in the throat” making me feel at times like I am on the verge of choking.
• A student was going on and on about the Japanese and their not apologizing for what they did in World War Two.  The fact of the matter is that the Japanese have apologized on numerous occasions. To be fair though,  there is something to the Chinese complaint that many Japanese have a amnesia about the time.  But you have to couple this amnesia with the fact that the Japanese are a very civilized people these days — much more civilized that the Chinese — and there is no danger of a return of that virulent militarism. The Chinese government harps on the Japanese and World War Two because they want their population to forget the more recent horrors that they inflicted on their own people.  In fact if the Japanese prostrated themselves every day to apologize for what they did in World War Two, it wouldn't be enough for the Chinese Communists who need the experience of World War Two as a  way of not having to apologize for the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. Maybe the Chinese Communists should set an example of how to apologize by apologizing to their people and giving up power.
• Another issue that the students tell me about concerning Japan is that there is this Shrine that  the Japanese go to to honor the soldiers of World War Two.  Well, if this is the case, then why do the Chinese TV people seemed compelled to show these propagandist World War Two recreations where Chinese – Chinese Communists actually -- are shown to offer heroic and decisive resistance to Japanese forces?  I happened to catch one of these shows where after wiping out a Japanese battalion, a closeup shot of a Chinese foot stomping on a Japanese flag was shown.  If the Chinese Communists are truly interested in peace then perhaps such programs should not be shown either.  
• Communist resistance to the Japanese, I have heard, is a myth.  Mao stood aside and let the KMT get bloodied by the Japanese.
• A Def Leopard T-Shirt.  Riding the shuttle bus past a kindergarten one morning, I saw that the foreign teacher, who was out front greeting arriving children, was wearing a Def Leopard T-Shirt.  Interesting it was for me and it lead me to many speculations.  None of which I will enter here.  But I will say this about Def Leopard.  They had a good first album with some great songs but then I found their later efforts to be dull.
• A Chinese study project for myself:  learn the Chinese National Anthem.  I do know one refrain from the song by hear already: 起来！起来！ 起来！Arise!  Arise!  Arise!
• One thing I find funny about the anthem's lyrics is this urging to build a new Great Wall. (筑成我们新的长城）There was no Internet when the song was written so how could they have known to put that bit in the anthem? (Or was it added later, 1984 style?)
• Jenny says that I snore very loudly.  In fact she complained to me after a night in which I had slept  by myself in Tony's bed in another bedroom.  
• By the end of May, Tony was sleeping with Mom in the big bedroom and I was sleeping by myself in the little bedroom.  Tony has dashed my hopes that I had had earlier in the month and earlier in this blog entry .
• Tom, the student I can have a good conversation with, was telling how when he was young, he suffered from hunger.  Thirty years ago this was and so then, he and his young buddies would pry open a food warehouse door (that was then in the area near the three world department store) to steal bags of potato chips.
• Tom also explained the admiration I had witnessed for Chairman Mao in the countryside where images of him could be seen in prominent display areas of a few private residences I had chance to enter.  Some people, despite the bad things Mao did, did like the fact of everyone being equal and no one having more than anyone else and didn’t so much mind the poverty and shared misery.
• And speaking of chances, I had a chance on the last Saturday evening of May to go to Wuxi's Nanchang Jie Bar Street.  I very much enjoyed walking the area before having to join up with colleagues at a pub.  During these perambulations, I noticed two things:  1) That just away from the retail portion of the area, there were nauseating sights to smell and look at: abandoned buildings filled with trash.  So, Nanchang Jie Bar Street basically runs through a dump.  2)An area of residences near Nanchang Jie was enjoyable to walk through.  I saw a lot of those sights one associates with older China:  the compact neighborhoods where people don’t live behind locked doors but on the sidewalks and the doorways.  Where in Canada would you see an old woman eating at a front door?
• On the last Sunday of May, I took Tony to the Coastal City Mall near the New Wuxi Civic Center.  It was big , had many stores, was clean and was ominously under-utilized, but I decided to not invite Jenny to join us. I instead left the mall to join up with her because that mall, even with its vast size had nothing special in it for I to get her to take such a long trip on the subway.
• I ran into some South Africans near the Hui Shan Wanda Plaza.  They asked me some places that they could visit in the area and I had to admit that I was stumped.  It took me a minute to think of the Wu Culture Park and it turned out that they had already seen it.  And so there wasn't much else that I could think to suggest other than some parks down Hui Shan Da Dao  way.  For me the Hui Shan area is a place to move to and wander around because there are interesting things for a Westerner with an exploring urge to see.  It’s just that there’s no place I could tell a person or tourist passing through to visit.
• I don't go to Expat pubs in Wuxi because I am living my life in Wuxi.  And because I live in Wuxi, I don't normally cross paths with tourists and so have nothing to tell them about where to go in the area.
• One thing about my isolation is that I avoid questions.  Talking to the South African made me realize that there a lot of things about myself that I couldn’t explain.  I hate been confronted about myself because I am such a mystery and am so inexplicable to even myself.
• Again I say that I would like to meet people who have the quality of sanctity.  I so hate meeting foreigners because ultimately they have a very disappointing lack of it.  They are materialist and full of experiences, but soulless.
• I am going to publish this entry on the day before I leave for Canada.  My time in Canada will be an entry all of its own.
• So, June 2, it rained heavily in Wuxi.  Even though it wasn't windy, the rain was heavy enough to soak even the person who had an umbrella.  In the evening, I was hoping that the rain would subside by the time I was to go home, but it got worse.  As I arrived at the Yanqiao Metro Station, the rain was at its worst.  The wind had picked up and so one was greeted with a blast of rain as soon as one got off the train and onto the platform.  The rain was so heavy that I had to retreat against the wall of the bus shelter to minimize my exposure to it.  And I stood at the bus shelter for over 15 minutes.  The rain was too heavy to walk in with a backpack containing electronic equipment.
• If I didn't have all that electronic equipment (one  Ipod, one  Ipad and one Iphone), I would have walked home.  It was a Singing in the Rain kind of rain that I could have sung and danced in and it wasn't that cold.
• In the week before my flight to Canada, I sent out some emails to some people there to let them know I was coming.
• One thing I would like to do this Canada trip (my third since becoming AKIC) is take Jenny and Tony to the Peace Gardens, south of Brandon on the U.S. Border, so they can see the USA for the first time.
• I read a Chinese Science Fiction novel, the Three Body Problem.  The book was as good as Science Fiction books can go, but I found it a little too much when the author said that Science Fiction had more to say about the human condition than ordinary literature and religion...
• I see a person by Zhongshan Road with a t-shirt bearing a bad word that starts with the sixth letter of the alphabet.  On the shirt, the word was used multiple times in expressions telling everyone in the world, including the t-shirt wearer, that they should perform some unnatural act.  I then wondered what I would do if I had a student come into class wearing that t-shirt.  Hopefully, I thought, I would have the gumption to either kick the student out of a group class or refuse to teach him one-on-one.
• The redoubtable Edith will leave the school.  I learned on June 2 that she found another job.  HyLite's loss, is New Oriental's gain.  It could be said that she was the most attractive girl that ever worked here.  You can see her on my Youtube channel.
• June 4, I arrive at school and one of the Chinese workers ask if I had money stolen.  I didn't and I asked the co-worker for details of the theft but she didn't provide many details.
• On the night of June 3-4, I was able to get Tony to sleep in his own bed.  To get this to happen I had to get him in trouble with Ma.
• On the morning of June 4,  Tony said “Happy, happy, joy, joy” with a sinister smile on his face. He didn't tell me where he picked up this expression, but the chances are he picked it up on the Internet.
• Another favorite expression of Tony's:  “I'm going to kick your ass!”
• I see a dog on the subway.  It was accompanied by two police officers and was wearing a vest that said, in English, “police dog” which was a good thing because it wasn't a breed of dog that I would have thought was used for police work.  Not knowing much about dogs, and being overwhelmed by the listings of dog breeds on the Internet, I would say the dog was some kind of hound or perhaps the Australian Shepherd.  The Ozzie Shepherd was near the top of the list of dog breeds in the Wikipedia article that I gave up scanning all the way through.  The police dog had long ears and definitely wasn't a German Shepherd or a Poodle.
• Less than a week before my Canada trip, I am no longer excited to go, but full of dread.  I have a lot of idea for things to do but the grim facts of my past existence in Canada and my mother living a widow's life will damper it.
• Nonetheless, onward to Canada!