This Spring Festival, aka Chinese New Year, we didn't go to my wife Jenny's hometown. We instead stayed in Wuxi. Here is what I have to report and opine about it:
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We spent New Year's Eve and Day at a five star hotel in the area of the Ling Shan Buddha. We had a buffet dinner and then a buffet breakfast. Buffets are okay but the novelty of them has diminished for me. At the dinner buffet, I was able to drink a lot of beer without worry of having to drive, so I discovered my limit is about four bottles. Our room were comfortably furnished and heated. Unfortunately, though the beds we were sleeping on were nice and soft, we didn't sleep well because of the heat. The hotel's setting was nice and you can look at photos on my photo blog to see this. However, it had to rain in the evening and I wasn't able to go for a stroll outside. And there was nowhere I could go to buy some snacks and drinks. So, I was happy we didn't spend two nights there.
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Chinese New Year's day was going fine until we checked out of the hotel. In the lobby, I was pulling the one big suitcase we had brought when one of the concierges took it from me. It is a sort of service that they have in a five star hotel. I asked Jenny if we should tip the guy. She told me I should and asked if I had change. From what she said, I presumed that 100 rmb would have been too much. I saw a fiver in my wallet and thought to give him that. That was to prove to be a mistake. The guy took the luggage to our car and I gave him the fiver after we had loaded it in the trunk. This was not enough, in Jenny's eye, and she chased the guy down and gave him a hundred note. My cheapskate way had made Jenny lose face, she told me and I was in the doghouse for the next 24 hours. It was a shame because the scenic drive we had around Lake Taihu was ruined. There was nothing for me to do but go home, battle despair and wait for Jenny to get out of her bad mood.
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The roads to the Livat Shopping Mall were empty and I experienced what I like to call dream traffic. But it seemed that the few cars I had seen on the road were all heading to Livat. The parking there was nightmare and when wandering around Ikea, we were constantly bumping into people or being slowed down by the flow of people going through the store.
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I did a lot of reading during the Festival. I started reading Crime and Punishment, I finished a collection of poems by Christina Rossetti (great!) and I kept up my daily devotional reading. I read a lot of articles on the Internet, including a book review by John Derbyshire of a recently published book entitled What's Wrong with China? In the review, the Derb mentioned a book he had on his bookshelf with a similar title that was written in the 1930s. This lead me to look for copies of these books on the Internet. I was able to find a copy of the earlier book at the archive.org site. The book was well-written and I couldn't put it down or, because it was an e-book, pull myself away from it. The author's attitude to the Chinese wouldn't pass muster with PC types today. In the book, he scoffed at the notion that China's long history gave the Chinese some mature wisdom that Occidentals didn't have. The Chinese, he said, were like children, precocious children, but children all the same. Their attitude to foreigners, and here I am paraphrasing was of a solipsistic child: they were superior to all foreigners. Looking at them this way, explained the author, we could explain a lot of their culture and explain what is wrong with them. [There are times when I am inclined to agree with him.]
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