October 2015 Notes (Part 2)

In this entry, the second one from October 2015, I will blog about my driving in Wuxi, the Baoli Carrefour, Jenny's driving, Canada's New Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (JT), JT's father the Antichrist, interesting sights, some Chinese female opinions of our new Prime Minister's looks, scratches done to the family Citroën, possible nicknames for the new Canadian Prime Minister, my being a mover, English names of some Gissing company students, the ratio 1-4-4-1 as it applies to students and Wuxi expatriates, driving in the countryside of Wuxi, a Wuxi girl who went to London, my ninth wedding anniversary and when I celebrate it, homeschooling Tony, what I think of Chinese complaints about Japan, and a spanking.

• I shouldn't talk about driving.  I shouldn't talk about driving!  I AM going to talk about driving!
• LIVE BLOGGING:  I have driven the Citroën to work for the first time on Saturday, October 17.  From the school, I have gotten a parking pass that is good for four hours at a parking complex underneath the school.  But I need nine hours of parking for work today.  What am I to do?  Jenny tells me to leave the parking lot for a short time and come back.
• LIVE BLOGGING LATER:  It turned out that I was able to park the car at the school building without paying.  At lunch, I took the car to the Baoli Carrefour and did some shopping. I returned to the parking lot with no problems.
• The Carrefour was surprisingly empty.  I had heard rumors that the Carrefour Baoli will soon close.  If it is Saturdays are that slow, it may well be.  This is too bad because I like how easy it was to find parking there.
• Jenny & I went back to the Citroën dealership (which is not far from the Wuxi Ikea) to have a camera installed in her Citroën that will record "incidents."  There are kamikaze bikers and pedestrians it is said who love to be hit by cars in order to extract monetary compensation from car owners.  And there are just so many idiots who don't know how to drive.
• Jenny, when she picks up Tony, does something with the Citroën that I wouldn't dare do on my own initiative.  She will drive the car close to the school and deal with all the e-bikes and cars that are there.
• Came into work on Tuesday, October 20, and immediately got onto the Internet to find out the results of the Canadian federal election.  I wasn't pleased.  The result I feared had actually happened.  Justin, the son of Pierre Trudeau is now our Prime Minister   The father was such friends with Fidel Castro that the dictator was a pall-bearer at his funeral.  Oh!  God help us all!
• Pierre Trudeau was the Antichrist, the devil in the flesh.  Canadian history since the late 1960s was as follows:  Trudeau was Prime Minister from 1968 to 1984 more or less.  Trudeau did such a terrible job that succeeding Prime Ministers like Brian Mulroney, Jean Chretien and Stephen Harper had to spend a lot of their administrations cleaning up the damage he had caused.  And some of this damage hasn't been repaired.
• This begs the question why Trudeau's son could be elected PM on the basis of having his father's last name.  The answer is very easy.  A majority of Canadians are idiots, or left-wingers.  I say this despite the fact Trudeau's party actually only got 39 percent of the popular vote in the election, meaning 61 percent of Canadians didn't vote for them.  But of that 61 percent, a little over half were conservative.  A big chunk of the rest of the vote was for the NDP which is a very socialist party.  NDP and the Liberals (who are socialist as well when it is the glamorous thing to be.) together got a majority of the popular vote in the election.
• I remember the first Trudeau saying that deep down he really was a NDPer.  His son probably is as well.
• Rather then getting upset about what is happening in Canada, I will have just have to think about my life in China and hope my relatives in Canada are doing well.
• I saw seven old men, thin and weather-skinned and looking to be of peasant stock, piling in the back of an old-fashioned e-bike pickup while all around people were most driving solo in their much bigger automobiles.
• I visit Facebook occasionally when I can get my VPN to work.  The day after the Canadian election, I visited the site and had to look at a bunch of postings celebrating Justin Trudeau's victory.  One proclaimed that change was good, to which I could say change is good except when it isn't.
• I have shown a couple of the girls a picture of Canada's new Prime Minister to get their opinions.  Crystal said Justin was handsome, but young and not to her liking.  The second girl I asked, whose name I can't recall, said he was young and handsome but a little fat.  Justin reminds her of North Korea's Kim Jung Un?  It seems that they were very struck but Justin's being so young.  And their comments on his good looks could be translated into them saying he was a pretty boy.
• How should I refer to our new PM?  JT?  PM Trudeau II?  Son of PET?  Trulander?  Son of the Antichrist?  Jethro?  Justhro?  Justru? [These are a reference to the Beverley Hillbillies]  JT Un?
• Jenny made mention to me of JT's being elected.  Jenny and I never discuss politics; and I never mentioned anything about the election to her.  She got the news of it on WeChat from an acquaintance who was living in Canada.   "Canada has a new president!" Jenny said.  "He wants to legalize prostitution!"
• Jenny scratched the mirror on the Citroën   She did this when she was trying so hard to find a parking spot that didn't require her walking so far.  When she told me, I felt pangs even though I had actually been thinking the day before I learned of the scratch that the car was destined to be dented or scratched, and that I would just have to resign myself to it.
• Tony is not doing well at school.  Jenny says he is humiliated by his teacher giving him back his work later than the good students.  The idea of home-schooling him was aired but never acted upon.
• I am not a traveller.  I am not a tourist.  I am a mover.  I can say that I have lived in many places in my life:  eight or nine towns, two countries that are thousands of km from each other, four provinces in Canada which are the equivalent of four large countries in Europe.  The number of addresses I have lived at, I am sure, is over 25.  But while I was at these many addresses, I didn't tour or travel much.  I stayed close to home.  When I was in Winnipeg, I rarely got outside of the perimeter of the city.  [Thoughts come to me after I read a David Warren blog entry deriding the Universal tourist.  The type who travels with the modern comforts like Internet and vehicles, and doesn't really suffer enough to actually experience the lands where they travel.]
• On Friday evening, October 23, I went to Gissing company in the Dong Bei District of Wuxi where I did two hours of speaker's corners with about 14 students.  Some of the students gave themselves interesting English names:  Tandy, Jersey, Roy and Raul.
• Saturday, I took the Citroën to work.  On the way back home in the evening, I got onto a faster road with a speed limit of 80 km/h.  I was riding in the left lane of this road when I saw a young boy jump over the barrier fence (that separates the lanes going in opposite directions).  I easily avoided him but got close enough to see that he had a stricken look on his face.  My first thought was that he was mad at his parents for some reason and was running away.  But what did I know?  He could easily have been lost.  Being in a car, there was no way I could have stopped and tried to help him.  It would have endangered me, the boy and other drivers.  The road is set up so that cars just can go-go, go-go, go.  This anecdote shows how cars and the infrastructure to supports them are so dehumanizing.
• As a driver, you have to wonder about the locals who take their e-bikes on these roads; and even more you have to wonder about the people who walk on these roads.
• Around the Hui Shan Wanda Plaza, drivers will park where ever they can to avoid having to pay for parking in the mall's basement levels where it is said to be expensive.  One of the places they will park is this road that runs along the nearby People's Square which is across the road from Wanda.  The road is narrow:  about three car widths wide.  Local drivers will park in any nook they can and so they park on both sides of this road leaving a narrow lane in the middle for cars to move.  I hate having to park there but Jenny insists.  I have already hit a mirror on another vehicle because some other idiot parked his van so that his back-end was sticking a couple of feet out into the already narrow enough lane.  
• Another problem with the road, that is about 500 meters long, is that it only has three points of exit and entry: two at the ends and one in the middle.  Sometimes, you can end up in a stand off if you have cars approaching each other like I did on Saturday night.  What happened that night was that I had parked near the entry point that was farthest from the Wanda Plaza.  I find that as you get closer to the Plaza, the cars are packed much tighter together:  too tight for me.  When I parked the Citroën  I thought I would be able to back up a bit and exit from the entry point.  But when I returned, I was chagrined to see that all around where I had parked, the area had filled up with more parked cars and that were more cars looking for parking space.  Parked cars and moving cars behind where I was parked left me no choice but to try to go forward and try to exit from the middle entry point.  But after I had driven forward about 50 meters, a car approached me and wouldn't back off.  There was a car behind me and I thought that being in the majority the car facing us would back off.  But the car behind me backed up.   So I was forced to back up, ending up by the parking spot I had just left.  Needless to say, I was cheesed off at all the drivers of China.
• Being in a foul mood, I decided to blare my horn at every person who cut me off or didn't put on his turn signals when changing lane.
• The next day, Sunday, Jenny parked the Citroën on that road.  She did a good job actually when I walked past to see how she did.  Continuing on, I met Jenny at Wanda for lunch.  Afterwards she stayed at the Wanda and I took Tony with me to the Citroën so we could go for a Sunday drive in the countryside of Wuxi and Jiangying.  When we got to the Citroën, I was stricken to see that someone had scratched the driver side front corner of the car.  The damage was strictly cosmetic thankfully, and once I cleaned the dust, I saw that the scratches didn't stand out so much.  I was upset, but I was struck by how I wasn't so upset.  I had had premonitions that this was going to happen.  
• I can say that the accident happened because we were parked on a road where its sheer narrowness of space between the two sides of parking increases the odds of being hit.  Parking on the road was asking for it.  But was the Citroën hit by a car, a three-wheel wagon or an e-bike?  Was whatever hit us trying to avoid something?  Was whatever hit us trying to park?  Was whatever hit us trying to get out of a parking spot?  That I will wonder about for a while.
• The scratches didn't stop me from carrying on with my plan to go for a Sunday drive to explore the areas where previously Tony & I had gone on e-bike and then to go to areas that were just a little beyond.  
• What struck me was how in the countryside areas, you have to drive among e-bikes.  Poorer areas, more e-bikes.  And then there was an idiot do 80 km/h on the road.  He seemed to be from the city, looking for a place to throttle up his sporty Honda festooned with spoilers.  As I approached him, I thought he would have slowed down since the road was narrow but he just kept driving at that speed.
• How I love the poorer areas.  They seem authentically Chinese.
• 1-4-4-1.  These numbers, if I am reading David Warren's blog entry right, are the distribution of humanity in the following categories: exemplary, okay, not okay, should be hung.  His classification was people he would trust his life with, people he would trust his luggage with, people he would not trust his luggage with, and people who should be hung.  When I think of the students I have meet, that distribution would seen about right.  That is, one in ten are really nice people.  
• When I think of the distribution of expatriates I have met, the distribution would be as follows:  .01-2-2-5.99.  [Ha ha ha. Controversial I hope.]  
• Who am I to judge? you ask.  Well, I would ask:  who are you to judge?  You are welcome to disagree.
• Anyway, I will say that I don't think I 'm not part of the first "1" or the first "4" of 1-4-4-1.  I hope it is not a false modesty, borne of a deep-sown sense of righteousness, when I say this.  I hope I am just being honest.  And I think that I can say, without boasting that I am probably part of the second "4" of 1-4-4-1 or the second "2" of my expatriate distribution.  
• I am as self-serving and as unable to live up to my high ideals as the next guy, I am sure.  But I am not Stalin or Hitler or Pervert actively trying to rationalize his bad ways.  I am aware that I have bad tendencies that I have to battle, and I should be thankful that I have Jenny and Tony to take up my time.
• Is parking talking about driving?  I ask this because my thoughts are full of driving and I want this blog to be more observing than complaining.  Driving and complaining do go together like a horse and carriage.  
• So, how about I talk about my cursing?  That is more confessional than complaining. Here is the story.  Monday afternoon, I accompanied Jenny as she drove to pick up Tony.  Unlike I would have done, she parked on the road by the school, drove into a parking spot (instead of backing in).  She can back out of the spot into the jammed street, unlike I who can't do it calmly...  But anyway, that is the not point of this anecdote.  It is about why I used foul language.   In way of explanation first, I will say that some Chinese drivers don't parallel park properly.  They no scruples about driving into a parking spot and having the back end of their car stick out into traffic.  I remember how, on that road near the Wanda Plaza, one parked van with its rear-end sticking out caused me to hit a mirror of a car I was trying to pass...  But there was no parallel parking in the anecdote.  But the point of my general observation was more broadly that many locals have no consideration when they park.  And it was proven by a driver who parked sort of alongside where Jenny had parked the Citroën but more so that he was blocking us.  It seems he saw a open space beside us but hadn't taken into consideration that there were e-bikes parked along the curve.  So he quickly decided to stop and park at an angle so that his back end was sticking out into traffic and so that that his car was blocking our car and the e-bikes that were parked along the curb.  He left his car running and ran so that we presumed that he was quickly going to get his child and return.  Since the time was about 16:05, we thought he would be back before 16:10 when we would pick up our Tony.  But  at 16:10 when Tony was with us and we were ready to leave, the guy hadn't returned and his black VW Sedan was still blocking us.  And then one of the e-bikers parked beside us, a woman who had just picked up her child, came on the scene.  I stood in the narrow path between the Citroën and the VW to stop her from trying to get through it because she would have most certainly scratched our car.  The e-biker and Jenny ended up commiserating in only the way strangers who have been inconvenienced can.  And then at about 16:15, the driver of the VW finally came with his child.  Jenny said something to him and I swore at him so that he winced.  I guess he knew what English word I was using.  I suppose I should have been merciful but really I think he deserved to admonished.  It wouldn't have surprised me if the guy kept his car running as a way of stopping us from telling him to move his car in the first place.  Nothing has happened in China to spare me from being cynical about how people operate.  [But if a Martian came to my planet and admonished me for something, how would I react?  [As I the guy got back into his car, I looked around and noticed some guys in a police car having a laugh at me.]]
• One of the new students in one of my company classes is a girl who spent a year or so at a university in London, England (not London, Canada) studying marketing.  It was quite the experience for her getting to go to pubs in England and seeing all sorts of live bands.  How I would have longed to do such a thing back in the day.  As it is, I don't go anymore because it was a desultory life.
• It was my ninth wedding anniversary this month.  Jenny & I agree that our official wedding anniversary is the day we got our wedding license in Nanjing.  I would rather forget the actual wedding party.
• In a previous entry, I discussed homeschooling Tony, and I said that it appealed to me in so many ways.  And I may have mentioned that it was Jenny's idea that we do this.  That talk came to nothing.  We just carried on with our routine of sending Tony to school and having Jenny make him do his homework while I would try to help Tony when I could.  It turned out that I didn't much help Tony, and that now, Jenny tells me that Tony has made no progress in school, and is in fact handing in blank test papers to his teachers because he just doesn't understand them.  His constant refrain now is that he doesn't want to go to school.  Jenny further tells me that Tony's desk mate is being really hostile to him.  So, something has to be done.  
• Tony is wasting his time by going to school because his teachers can't or won't help him.  I suspect it is probably a case of can't because there are 39 other students they have to teach as well.  So what to do?  Jenny again talks of wanting to homeschool him and to find ways in which he can get more of the help he needs.  And I think she is serious about it.  But there will be problems.  Jenny & I will have different ideas about how to help him.  I like to think that I would be more open-minded and willing to give Tony some freedom, as well as give myself some freedom of approach when teaching him.  
• I take my ideas of educating Tony from David Warren who is a traditionalist Catholic with a heavy distrust of public schooling and the modernist tendency to over-coddle children.  Warren's parenting style is neo-medieval.   Jenny would be more stern in her approach, and she has a bad temper and a woman's emotional temperament.  She worries about "face" and lacks my alienness to not give a darn. She criticizes me for my lack of sternness and I will readily admit that those criticisms are valid.  And there is  the problem of Tony himself.  Maybe, he is just not that smart.  Maybe, he is addicted to the Ipad.  Maybe, he has got me for a father.  He doesn't seem be interested in much but playing GTA.  He doesn't seem open to other things.  He can't be reasoned with. [I can say he got that from his mother.  Pardon, my moment of comic levity.]
• Tony sees me working on this blog entry.  He looked at all the writing and said "You wrote all that!"
• After the evening in which Jenny talked about homeschooling Tony, I wanted to talk to Tony.  My opportunity in the morning is when I walk Tony to the spot where he gets picked up to go to school.  I wanted to ask Tony about school and try to get his thoughts on being homeschooled.  But as soon as we closed the door of our apartment, Tony spoke first  and said he loved me because I let him play the Ipad.  Mom must have broached the idea of homeschooling to him in Chinese beforehand.  And all Tony could say about it was that it sounded like a great opportunity for him to play more Ipad....
• I want to homeschool Tony.
• Talking geopolitics about the USA, China, Japan and the Middle East with a student can get me worked up.  I find that I have to defend Bush and his ultimate sincerity about what he wanted to do in the Middle East.  America's problem was it went into Iraq wearing idealistic blinders.  Trying to instill democracy in Iraq was a dumb idea; toppling Saddam Hussien wasn't however.
• The Chinese Communists should really be thanking the Japanese militarists.  For one thing, during WW2, the Japanese militarists by fighting the KMT softened them so the Communists could beat them in the ensuing civil war.  Secondly, the grievous behavior of the Japanese during the war makes them the perfect subjects for "two minute hates" which the Chicoms can fan when it suits them such as times when they don't want the Chinese population hating them.
• Strange things to be witnessed every day in China.  The last Friday of October, I was heading to the 85 Bakery to buy a coffee and a loaf of bread, when I was stopped in my tracks by the sight of a young slightly chubby man, who was drawing up the hood on his jacket, deliberately and menacingly approaching a young woman from behind.  A thought flashed through my mind that he was going to pull out a knife and stab the woman who was attractively wearing tight blue jeans and a leather jacket.  He instead, when he got close enough, bent down and  proceeded to spank her bottom with one hand.  The woman, who was slim and pretty, immediately turned around and I will never forget her facial expression: her mouth was formed into a big "oh!"  The man, wearing sweat pants and sneakers, quickly turned around and ran right past me.  I stared at him the whole time he made his escape.  He had a strange look of amusement on his face.
• Now, I would mention my thoughts about the spanker.  I thought it fortuitous for my blogging that I was able to witness the incident from start to finish.  How often, is it that you see the tail end of the incident and not be able to watch it from buildup to climax?  I wonder what the man's motivations were.  Did he know the girl and was playing a prank on her?  Or was he a strange person who had this urge to spank women's bottoms?  I wonder also if I should have done anything.   If this guy had done this to Jenny, I would hopefully have chased him down and given him some admonishment.  As it was, it was slightly amusing and I imagine that it would have in olden times be dealt with with a slap in the face with no need to bring in the constabulary.