November 2015 Notes (Part 1)

In this entry, written in the first part of November 2015 (the 1^st to the 15^th actually), I discuss my driving, I complain about the driving of the locals, I actually mention something that was agreeable to me, I notice the brainwashed nature of the locals, I canvass for David Warren fans who happen to be in China, I tell you what a student told me about algae in Lake Taihu, I quote Theodore Dalrymple, I update you on the plan to homeschool Tony, I tell you why Tony must be homeschooled, I confess and note some things about me, I report on how I avoided foreigners, I disclose how I later talked to an actual other Canadian living in Wuxi, I plead guilty to Remembrance Day negligence, and I surprise myself with my brilliance.

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I picked up Tony and school and drove right into the midst of the jam of other parents getting their kids at the school. Jenny had already done this and so I didn't want to seem a wimp.

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Chinese drivers will make right turns without looking, but do they have to make wide two-lane turns when they do so?

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We can't get a card that can be used to open the security gate for cars at our apartment complex and so we have to have the guards open the door for us. We want a card but aren't willing to backpay monthly charges for the card since 2008. We have permission to use a parking space from an owner who doesn't use it, but the apartment complex company wants us to back pay monthly charges (50 rmb a month) for the card since 2008. (By my calculations, they want us to pay 5,000 rmb)

Sometimes, the security guards hassle us about not having a card but Jenny tells them to stuff it and so they back off.

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Walking through the People's Square near Casa Kaulins is agreeable for me. I can see cultural differences that make China seem attractive like the public group dancing and the Tai Chi.

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It is forbidden! When Chinese say this, I feel like I am being admonished by a Red Guard. Something brainwashy about it. Of course, it could also be that those are the only words the Chinese know to express that statement. This expression has often been used by students in my classes during discussions about what can or can't be done in Wuxi.

It really got at my craw though when I was playing with Tony in the pool, sort of horsing around as it were, and some other swimmer came up to me and said something Tony was doing was forbidden. I didn't quite understand what the swimmer meant and I don't deny that we were in the wrong, but his full-eyed expression and his stern manner of saying that expression was creepily big brotherish.

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Am I the only person in China who reads David Warren's blog Essays in Idleness? If you are also in China and read his blog, you can email me at andiskaulins@qq.com.

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"I am marrying a young girl!" said a student in one of my Speaker's Corner. Wrong choice of words I should have told the student. The story I got from him later was that he was 25 years old and he was marrying a girl who was 20. The numbers are unusual in China. I then told the student that his statement sounded to my ears like he was going to marry a 14 year old.

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Jenny scratched the car again. She backed to close to the pillar on the passenger side of our parking spot and scratched the mirror. Damage was cosmetic.

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Student tells me the algae at Lake Taihu was very bad and that the odor could be smelt in the western part of Wuxi.

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Something Theodore Dalrymple noticed: He was a large man, both physically and in personality, with a booming voice, and I dare say some people found him egotistical; certainly he exuded self-confidence and enjoyment of life which, however, I found neither offensive nor excessive, since he was a man of accomplishment. He rose in my estimation when he told me that he did not drive; I have found that men of high intelligence who do not drive are almost always distinguished. Why this should be so I do not know; but it is so.

[Link: http://www.newenglishreview.org/Theodore_Dalrymple/Let_Us_Now_Praise_Famous_Men/]

Here's what I have noticed about drivers: the bigger the vehicle, the more vulgar the driver appears.

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Live Blogging: In early November, the problem with Tony being homeschooled is that we have to find some doctor to sign a note saying that Tony is sick and can't attend school for a year. This note will be fake.

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I hear that Tony falls asleep in Chinese class which explains why he is handing in blank test papers to his teachers.

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I hear that Tony was hit on the hand with a ruler for some bad thing he did in class.

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News from China was a warmup topic for one of my speakers corners. I try to emphasize that I don't mean News in China. Could the students guess what it was? One did: China ends the one-child policy.

I then asked the students if the one-child policy had been a good idea. Most of them said it was because China had too many people. A few of the woman said that the policy was a boon for women because freed them from the drudgery of looking after children. I guffawed mentally when they said this. You need the government to stop you from having children? You are incapable of making your own decisions? Having children is drudgery?

I openly oppose the one child policy in class by saying that I love the Chinese people and would like to see more of them.

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One Monday morning in November, I was in line with five other cars waiting at a set of lights, when I saw a Red Audi come from behind the lineup and pass, on the left, all the cars, including mine, in order to make a left turn. The Audi then, at the interesection, forced the oncoming car, which had just started off on the green, to stop. The Audi, continuing on with its left turn, then had to skirt around pedestrians and e-bikes who also had started off on the green. I was completely aghast, especially since I was waiting in the lineup to make a left turn myself. With resorting to using bad language, I would say the driver of the Audi was overly aggressive and deserved an admonishment that was verbal and physical.

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Will there ever be a day when driving in China doesn't make me angry? That such maneuvers, as the Audi driver did, are done in China only serves to prove what a corrupt country it is. It was breathtakingly brazen, but the driver has probably been getting away with all his life.

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5,000 years of civilization and that is how the Chinese drive? [This gushing admiration of China based on it having a long history. Bah. 5,000 years of being human. China has had its moments of greatness. But what ever came of the Classical Greeks? Look at Greece now. And for that matter, look at China.]

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Lunch Money Day is the tenth of each month. On November 10^th, I was going to go to a foreign-operated restaurant that is down a back alley near our school and the #2 Hospital. I was all set in walk in and order a bowl of their perogies when I saw an unshaven foreigner on the patio talking to other unshaven foreigners... I kept on walking, and decided that I was going to eat at Burger King instead. I am so unaccustomed to meeting white foreigners except at work that when I see them, I turn shy.

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Jenny told me that "Tony was number one in his class's English Test," while holding up her small finger. "Well isn't that nice!" I said not immediately detecting her sarcasm. Tony in fact was #55 out of 55 students in the English test, a most embarrassing result.

How could this be?

1) Tony doesn't seem to care at all about school. Proof of this is that he didn't seem to care that he had the worst result in his class.

2) Speaking English at home will not equip one to pass an English test in a Chinese school. It may well be an hindrance. There have been times when students have justified their English mistakes by saying that their English teacher at school (a Chinese person) told them it was so. This poses a dilemma for them when writing English tests: write the correct answer or write the answer that will pass the test.

3)I have been negligent about his reading. I am going to have to start teaching him English phonics because his reading is atrocious as I discovered when I spent some time with him, the night Jenny told me of his last place test result.

4)Tony may not be all that bright. While he doesn't care about his school, he didn't seem to understand that he was the worst student in his class.

5)Tony may well be stuck in an impossibly stupid and inhuman school system which is the product of a very dysfunctional society. [More about point 5 anon.]

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I want my Tony to be a Saint, not a success.

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Would taking Tony to Canada to be schooled a solution? From what I have heard, the school system in Canada has vices of its own which are the product of insane progressivisim that has taken over Western education systems. While going to Canada can rid Tony of the enormous workload and long school days that make him want only to play the Ipad as an escape, it is incapable of giving Tony the discipline and challenges that the Chinese system does give its students. But on the other hand, the problems with the Chinese system are that it robs children of their childhoods, controls them too much so that even leisure time is depressingly drab, and destroys their souls so that even the successful children are unimaginative and lacking in spiritual depth. I would homeschool Tony forever if I could.

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Jenny has found some doctor who can make a note to allow us to take Tony out of school. Hurray!!

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I meet a Canadian in Wuxi. I haven't spoken to one in the flesh since I was in Canada in June.

He lives in Wuxi, has a Chinese wife and a child who is being educated in Wuxi. He hates the Chinese education system, wouldn't put his child in it and has the child in an international school (This is not an option for Jenny & I with Tony because we can't afford it). Like me, he thinks the Chinese system insanely overdoes it making primary school students go through a tough regimen at so young an age. He didn't however share my concerns about the vices I see the Canadian education system having. In response to my concerns, he immediately cited surveys he had heard that said that Canadians were the happiest and most satisfied people in the world. They must not have asked all the people I knew in Canada in these surveys. People are miserable everywhere. Some are just doing a better job of fooling themselves than others.

Canadians are a laid back people, my fellow Canadian continued. I had never thought to describe Canadians that way. In fact, I think this joke from National Lampoon best exemplifies the Canadian spirit: What is the difference between a boring white guy and a Canadian? The Canadian is wearing a parka. Canada, before Trudeau came along, was a boring place but didn't seem to be in self-denial about it. After Trudeau, there came along this sort of "I am Canadian" nationalism that didn't much change the fact that Canadians were dull, and didn't make Americans or Chinese (as I have learned in my over ten years in China) any more than passingly aware of Canada's existence.

Finding out he drove a car in Wuxi, I had to discuss Chinese driving with him. His philosophy for going on the roads in China was just to drive fast. I haven't formulated my philosophy. I can't decide whether to drive slowly or quickly or aggressively only when a victim of some other driver's rudeness. The Canadian gave me a anecdote which I will tell every student whenever I talk about driving. There was foreigner who lived in China for 14 years and loved China very much. He then got a car. Driving in China caused him to leave the land he thought he loved. Road rage was making him hate the Chinese as well as what it was doing to his personality.

One of the reasons I was happy to not have a car in China because I imagined the driving in China would make me hate the Chinese more.

[One thing does bug me about this anecdote. How could this foreigner have lived in China for so long and not noticed what rude and inconsiderate drivers the Chinese were?]

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[LIVE BLOGGING] Tomorrow, (Friday, November 13^th) Tony, if all goes to plan, will attend his stupid primary school for the last time till September 2016 and hopefully longer. Jenny says that a lot of other parents are watching her. "They'll all laugh at me if Tony does not do well!" she told me last night. I said something to her along the lines of: Who gives credence to what a bunch of fools have to say?

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November 11^th, I didn't shop on the Internet for bargains and I didn't post a poppy on my website. I didn't do the latter because I was lazy and had read Peter Hitchens discuss how he felt a contrarian urge to not wear a poppy because of the intent of doing so has probably taken on a phony modern sentimental posing.

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About me: I have bouts of dourness and silliness. I tend to be both Jeevish and Woosterish. I want to be a staunch reactionary Catholic and a complete rebel against everything that Canadians take for granted.

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About me: In the ways of the world, I am pathetic. I was embarrassed to say that I had worked at the same school for over ten years when I talked to that Canadian. Later, I got depressed when I thought about other embarrassing aspects of my life story like how I spent seven years in university like a career student (But at least, I did pay off my student loans though unlike some English teachers in China who I learned hadn't.) and was working in a fast food restaurant in my thirties (At least I was working unlike the types I saw sleeping in the streets of Vancouver saying they were doing so because they couldn't work for corporations.). I sometimes hug Tony and think I should be pathetic for being his father. And yet strangely, I have been blessed in this life because I do feel shame and embarrassment.

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[LIVE BLOGGING]

1)Today, (Friday November 13) will be the last day Tony goes to a public school this year. Jenny is angry at the school's English teacher who told her or insinuated to her that Tony is dumb. I was curious how good this English teacher's English actually was. Jenny said I would have to talk to her.

2)Last night, I worked through a phonics textbook with Tony. He needs to learn to read by sounding out the words, not knowing them by sight. We then read a Star Wars Rebels comic book. Funny, how some things he knows dead-on like the names of all the characters in the show while my grasp of them is fuzzy.

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I have got to be more mischievous in this Blog. [Jenny worked in Pubs selling Chivas Whiskey. She was Miss Chivas girl. I want to be a Mischievous Blogger.]

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Friday night, I had gotten off the train at Yanqiao Station. One of the exit gates had a big red "X" on it, meaning it was not working. I went to the next one over which had five people waiting to get through and went to the back of the line. As I stood in that lineup, I saw a woman approach the gate with the red "X" on it. When she saw it wasn't working, she shuffled over to the next gate and basically cut in front of all the people who were lined up, including me. It was just so mainland Chinese.

[To those who say, that this was a unconscious blunder on the part of the woman, and not a trait that I can attribute to the mainland Chinese, I say that I have witnessed so many examples of a selfish mainland Chinese person lacking situational awareness whether they be on roads (mainland Chinese drivers who park their cars so as to cause traffic jams, mainland Chinese drivers not sure where they are blocking two lanes of traffic and so on), on escalators (how many times I have had mainland Chinese blocking me by standing in front of escalators at both the top and bottom), at elevators (a mainland Chinese person who will wait for people to get off elevators before getting on is a rare person indeed), and in queues (cutting in queues is so bad that even some locals comment on it).]

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At my apartment complex, I took a photo of this sign featuring a photo of Xi Jing Ping (known affectionately as Xi Da Da). This sign which was full of patriotic slogans had previously had a photo of two young students, dressed like young pioneers, striking a patriotic pose. I took a photo of this sign because it has been my experience that images of Chinese Chairmans being posted in public are very rare in China. I have only ever seen one photo of "the Great Reformer" Deng in public, a few photos of Hu Jiantao when he was the Chairman, on a billboard, and now this photo of Xi Da Da on a sign at the security gate of the Casa Kaulins apartment complex. I wonder if Xi Da Da is trying very hard to make himself the figurehead of a Chinese patriotic movement and if perhaps I will see a lot of photos of him posted in public places.

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I heard the news of the Paris Attacks just five minutes before I was to start a class. It made it hard for me to teach. Thankfully, in the second class in the next hour, the student wanted to talk about it.

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On the 15th of November, I couldn't even get out of the parking garage without having another driver annoy me. I am always careful getting out of our parking garage and turning onto the lane because you can't see vehicles coming from either way, and there has been a serious accident there in which a car hit an e-bike. As I was pulling up to the entrance, I had a driver come from behind me, pass me and cut me off as I was trying to get out. I blared my horn at the white BMW in an angry manner.

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Another reason to homeschool Tony. I don't have to deal with the zoo that picking him up at the end of the school day is. Jenny tells me that I would be swearing at other parents every day like the one I swore at in October.