Worst Christmas Ever; Tony Wants to Play Basketball but...; Argument with My Chinese Wife; The Chinese Idea of a Good Imagination; Am I All Alone?; I Wouldn't Be So Bitter If;

• Sad to say but this will be my worst Christmas ever because my son Tony will not get to experience it. He won't get any Christmas presents. He won't get to experience the excitement of a Christmas morning. He instead will be going to school during the day and then probably being tormented by his mother at night.

• Tony would like to play basketball. I took him to this basketball complex because of a flier he saw and he got get a demo coaching session, after which said he wanted to do more. But my Chinese wife Jenny seems to have put the kibosh to it. They want her to pay for a year of coaching which would mean three classes every Friday, Saturday and Sunday. I now realize that the reason Tony was going to swimming classes on a similar schedule because that was what the swimming place offered. Jenny just took it. When I asked her if she could pay for one basketball practice a week, she said that that was not done. Thinking about my hockey playing days, I recalled that we would play games during the week and once or twice on the weekends. Because of the stupid school system here, the idea of letting kids do something on weekday evenings instead of homework just doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone. And so you have this situation where it is not possible to any free time on weekends. There is always some fucking practice to go to every goddamn evening!

• With these complaints in mind, Jenny & I have had a big argument. Her basic point during it that because I am in China I have to do things the Chinese way even if no one seems happy about it, and the basic argument about it all being for a better future is nonsense. During the argument, she told me to ignore the thoughts of foreigners with similar complaints and I lost my temper and said something about not wanting to only listening to f***ing Chinese people. And as of this moment of typing, I assume I am really in for it.

• I asked a student if he thought he had a good imagination and he answered that he did. When I then asked him why, he responded that he could imagine himself being rich. I suppose his idea of a good imagination was to imagine good things. It was not the answer I was expecting and of course, I was again baffled by the Chinese mind while having my prejudice that Chinese aren't capable of imagination confirmed. I and most foreigners would think of a good imagination involving being very creative and original as well as being realistic and detailed. A good imagination looks at things in many different ways and is never trite. And so to live in the Chinese mind would seem to be like living in a ghetto.

• Is there a foreigner who is in a similar situation as me? If you reader have a Chinese wife and your child is in the Chinese education system, please email me at andiskaulins@hotmail.com or andiskaulins@qq.com. I want to know your experiences and if you are happy in your situation.

• If I wasn't married to China, I would have left it a long time ago. So as it is now, I am stuck here. If my wife wasn't so narrow-minded like most Chinese about educating children, I wouldn't be so bitter about it. I have a hard time liking people who mistreat their children so.