November 2016 Notes

Disband the Chicago Cubs.

Their winning the World Series makes me glad that the Montreal Expos no longer exist. As an Expos fan I can wax poetic about what could have been and what thankfully can never be.

The Cubs World Series victory had a novelty to it that lasted about one week till Trump became the US president.

*

Eric, a colleague here at HyLite English, became a father.

I was with him at the start of his grand day. On the first Thursday of November, we went to the Big Bridge Primary School to teach some classes. The baby hadn't come, as has been hoped, in the early part of the week. Eric came back to work, after four off days that had been scheduled for the baby's birth, still not yet a father

However, the morning of Thursday, he told me that his wife was experiencing pains. I immediately had premonitions that today was going to be the day for him and his wife. At lunchtime, I told him that I would cover that evening class that he was scheduled to do.

We then taught two classes in the afternoon at the primary school. At the conclusion of the second classes, I asked him how his wife was doing. As I asked, he got a phone call from his wife. She told him he was going to the hospital. He said he would get there as soon as he could.

The drive from the primary school to the downtown was about thirty minutes. The two girls that were with us (our handlers in the primary school) and I were excited to be sending Eric off to the hospital.

When we arrived downtown, that was where he went.

Covering his class and doing my classes, I excitedly told the students what was happening. I monitored Wechat for news of the baby's arrival.

At 7:10 PM, I found Eric's posting of his son's photo on Wechat and immediately ran around to show everyone. I don't know why but I was very excited to get the news.

*

I was traumatized when I saw a local man wearing what appeared to be a thong.

What happened was that I was walking along a lane in our apartment complex and passed a man who was bent down, working on the tire of a car. I inadvertently caught a glimpse of the classic bent over look of a person whose pants dip down to reveal the top of his buttocks. Only this time I didn't so much see a "crack," as what struck me – I quickly averted my eyes – as a thong.

The first thong that I remember seeing was in Seattle. One of the servers at a bar near Husky Stadium was turned away from me when I espied her wearing of a thong. That I or anyone could see it was the intent of how she wore it.

*

My son Tony says he is a Canadian. Asked by a local if he was Japanese, he strongly insisted that he wasn't and then proclaimed he was Canadian.

*

Tony doesn't like me taking photos of him.

One morning as I dropped him off at school, I wanted to take a photo but he ran away.

These are also times when Tony can sense my derangement at being in China. As I walk him from our parked car to the school gate, he senses my annoyance and anger brought about by some stupid local driver I had chance to encounter.

*

Walk below my office at Hylite and maybe you will be able to see the NGD quotes I have placed in the window.

I looked up at the sign I posted and it seemed to me that you have to make a special point of spotting the sign, but when you do, the sign stands out like a beacon. I am glad that I can post a message in public in Communist China like that.

*

Student's father had blood in the brain. A blood clot. [His father recovered to be able to go back home, I am glad to report.]

*

Closing off of one of the two entrance gates at our apartment complex made for quite a traffic jam in the apartment complex during the rush hour. Because the lanes in the complex are about one and a half car widths, it made for tight driving conditions. One morning, I was stuck in a lane and had to wait for twenty cars to pass me before I could proceed to my parking spot.

*

I saw this old man at Ikea who seemed oblivious to lining up and other people. I noticed that he mistakenly went to the serving area of the hot dog stand instead of first going to the area in which you make your order and pay for your food. Rebuffed, he went to the cashier and barged right into the lineup of people already waiting to make their orders. He didn't seem aware of the other people who were lined up to pay. The staff ignored them and thankfully the line was short enough that there was no untoward incident.

*

I made no predictions for the Trump Clinton election result. I learned my lesson after the 1996 election that Clinton I thought was doomed to lose.

I saw that for 2016, the conventional types predicted a Clinton victory while a few voices proclaimed a Trump upset. I hoped that the predictors of a Trump victory were correct...

And they were... [I switch to present tense]

Like many, I take delight in seeing the end of Billary.

To those on the left who are appalled at the victory of Trump, I say that I suspect that they will find themselves liking him more and more as time goes on. Trump is, or at least it would seem to be, a Democrat lite. David Warren categorizes him as a 60s liberal. From what Warren observes, I add that this would mean Trump is Kennedyesque. Though the leftists who read my blog would certainly balk at this suggestion, the truth is that a person with JFK's views would not be welcomed in the Democrat party these days. Some Democrats who can stop having a cry baby fit and stop calling Trump a fascist, a racist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, etc. may actually notice this.

Trump may achieve bi-partisan consensuses that Obama talked about in 2008. [Bi-partisan consensuses in this day and age are evil, however.]

Not that I would really welcome this. I was hoping for a Cruz or Scott Walker presidency.

*

Almost immediately after thinking I could conquer my temper, I walked from the Nanchang Metro Station to our school. I first almost got hit by a car that wouldn't yield to me as I was crossing the street at a crosswalk. I then had a man try to cut in front of me as I was lining up to buy coffee at the 85 bakery. Immediately after the first incident, I thought that I should given the car a swift kick. At the bakery, I swore at the guy a couple of times, telling him to f-off and calling him a meat-head. I couldn't tell if he understood me, he was being inscrutable.

*

I got to visit a laowai in the New District. A rare thing for me to do. When I moved to Casa Kaulins in '08, the isolation began. Recently, thanks to a Wechat app, I am in contact with more Wuxi Expats but as it is, our schedule keeps me away from the places where Wuxi Expats may meet.

*

At the Hui Shan Wanda shopping mall, Tony & I were walking on the second level when we caught sight of four young foreign women and four young foreign males standing abreast on the first level in the mall corridor. The males wore pants and were topless; the females wore bikinis. They seemed rather embarrassed.

They were modeling. But for what? I didn't bother to investigate. It would have been too embarrassing for me.

I suspect that these foreigners were probably Russians and other whites who come from the poorer stretches of the European world and Asia.

*

Traffic Lights not working in the Hui Shan District was becoming a daily occurrence. Getting through most of these intersections wasn't so bad even though none of the Chinese drivers followed the rules for what to do in uncontrolled intersections.

But then one day as I was taking Tony to school – morning rush hour time – lights at a very major intersection, with six lanes of traffic crossing four lanes, were not working. There was no policeman in sight and so the intersection was majorly gridlocked. Chinese drivers are not wont to yield in any circumstance, so this intersection was impossible to get through. I got around it by making a right turn, thinking that I could make a turn at lights that were just down the road. But those lights were out as well, and there I was hoping to make a left turn. Words fail me as to how to describe the chaos of that intersection. Perhaps, if you took a photo of that intersection from above, you would think that a child had taken all his lined-up Matchbox or Hot Wheels cars and pushed them all together with his two hands. I was between cars trying to go in every direction. A car going south was blocked by a car trying to make a turn east which was in turned blocked by a car trying to make a turn to the north.... I only got through this intersection because a path, created by the other cars blocking each other off, opened up for me and I was able to cross three lanes as the cars whose path I was crossing angrily honked their horns at me. [It was a miracle now that I think of it: that getting through.]

*

At the primary school, grade five class, I had students come up to me to tell me about Donald Trump winning the election.

"Donald Trump is very happy!" one student told me.

"I hear he is seventy years old!" said another.

"He was born in 1946!" said another. [I was born in 1964 I thought to myself.]

*

I have seen a few Hilary supporters (or is it lefty Trump haters?) say they can't understand why anyone could have voted for Trump. These same people also like to think of themselves as being so much better educated than Trump voters.

Well, if they are so better educated, why can't they understand? Surely part of one's education should involve finding out what your opponents really think and then offering a sophisticated argument about why they are wrong. Instead, the lefties simply resort to name calling.

*

I read The God that Failed, a book of confessions of ex-communists. It was published in the late 1940s or early 1950s, and with the end of the Cold War, one would think it was antiquated. The communists, the full-on communists, are gone and instead we have the technocratic Chicoms who have given up on communism but can't be bothered to change their name. But the essays in the book did talk of patterns of thought that still exist today among the Left or progressives or cultural Marxists. Good will about solving a problem was not enough for the communists; they needed complete loyalty in what had to be a ruthless way to achieve a utopia on Earth. The progressives today have their concepts of dog whistles and language patrols that convict even the most good willed of people because they don't follow the party line absolutely.

I then read at Crisis magazine, a Catholic site, a review of a book by a Polish member of the European parliament which put forth the thesis that communism and liberal modernity have common philosophical roots although they follow different methods. Living in a state that has been ruled by a party that calls itself communist, I can say that I have witnessed the local government do things that would not at all be uncommon in a modern liberal western state like Canada. The Wuxi communist government builds subways, builds green spaces, provides a bus service and publishes admonishments to its local citizens about things like traffic behavior and littering. They try to put on a friendly face like all western government departments do in their presentations to the public. You can't even say the local governments are different because no one voted for them. In the west, one should realize, we only vote for a change in the high administrators of the system.

The more I think about there is not much difference between a communist and a modern liberal. Perhaps in the West, we have a sham democracy that gives the bureaucracy a sort of legitimacy that the Chicoms are too clumsy that set up for themselves.

*

The solution to Tony's education problems and the losing of his childhood? Homeschooling.

Never was I so happy as when I didn't have to take Tony to school.

I don't want him attending school in the Chinese or Canadian education systems.

*

There are two things I want Tony to be: aloof from Modern Mainland Chinese culture and a Saint in the Catholic tradition.

*

One morning as I was driving back from having dropped off Tony at school, I got cut off.

Actually, this happens many mornings.

But this morning after I had told myself that I would deliberately be cool and not annoyed at something a local driver did, I got very, very angry. I honked and honked at that driver who cut me off and was afterward stopped in front of me at a red light. I got it into my head that I should get out of car, knock on the driver's door and punch him (it was a woman it turned out) in the face. I didn't but as soon as the light turned green I did some driving to cut that woman off, honking my horn as a wild man as I did so.

Did I commit a sin? Did I get mad for no reason?

*

In a class about manners and etiquette, a student told me of a co-worker whose rude action was to go into the desk drawers of her co-workers and steal their food. The student then said she went to the length of hiding the food so her co-worker couldn't find it.

I told the student that that was stealing, not just bad manners, and asked for more details, like how long this had been going on for and whether anyone had confronted the co-worker about her pilfering.

I couldn't believe it when the student told me that this had been going on for two years, but then the student added a crucial detail. The co-worker was extremely generous with her food and was bringing in lots of food and asking everyone in the office to help themselves. So this co-worker had this idea that her generosity gave her the right to help herself to the food of everyone else in the office.

I asked the student if she thought this was weird and she said she did, so this wasn't a Chinese thing.

I wondered if this was even a case of bad manners, but more appropriately weird manners. I also wondered if the television show Curb Your Enthusiasm where the comedy stems from people's weird ideas of manners ever featured such a happening in one of their episodes. I think for instance of an episode where a man who got upset when people put their garbage in his trash can.

*

November 22^nd, the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination, Tony had a hooky day. We pulled him out of school and let him accompany me to work where he was by himself for five hours will I was off site teaching at the primary school.

It satisfied my urge to fight the Chinese system, Tony's urge to get away from it, and Jenny's urge to have me go along with the system.

I hope that Tony can do more hooky days in the future as a safety valve. What set it off was that Tony get an 11(out of 100) on his Chinese mid-term which lead to Jenny's reaction and then my counter-reaction.

*

Tony told me that some girl at school, a classmate, told him to "fowking go back to his own country" after he didn't finish the food they had provided at lunch. Apparently, the class is praised for finishing the food and chastised if some of them don't.

Relating this episode to a colleague the next day, he suggested that Wuxiren were xenophobic, thinking Wuxi was the best, and would even telling non Wuxi types to go back to the countryside or whether it is they came from.

*

On hooky day, I took Tony to the Burger King at Mao Ye. We sat in a narrow sectioned off area of the restaurant. Afterward, we saw a mother with a son of primary school age sit at a table at the end of the section we were occupying. I saw the son pull out a homework book at the mother's bequest. I also noticed that they had not purchased any Burger King food which threw off the impression I had of them. Looking at the mother's face closely, I detected a meanness in her visage. There was something about her face, particularly her lower lip. She was teaching her son to squat, as it were, all the time wanting him to fulfill his homework obligations.

*

Castro died. I got the news from David Warren's blog. Both were good things.

However, Castro's death was like Stalin's. He died a natural death.

I went on Wechat and proclaimed my wish that he rot in hell.

The only response was from someone from Taiwan who approved.

They tell me Castro is revered in China. I wouldn't know about that. I don't think the students knew of him. They may know of him if they saw news of his death in the news.

In the twelve years I had been at the school, I never talked to the students about Castro. I never thought of Castro as being a source of conversation with the students whose knowledge of the world outside of Wuxi can be very limited. [In a speaker's corner, most of the students told me that they hadn't heard of Castro till his death.]

*

Was Castro a friend of the Chinese people as trumpeted in the Chinese media? Did he ever invite them over to his place for cigars and rum?

*

Jenny told me that Tony's natural grandfather had cancer and had six months to live.

Jenny has mixed feelings about this because the man had given her away when she was five months old.

Tony will visit him, hopefully, on his winter holiday.

*

With the constant use of horns in China, you would think by now that it would be white noise for me. But there are times when the use of horns does rouse my curiosity like the last Saturday in November when I heard about ten cars honking their horns outside of the Hui Shan Wanda.

What happened was that a car was stopped at a corner in a right turn lane and was blocking a lot of cars from making turns. The driver and the occupants of the car seemed to not notice that all the horn noise was directed at them. They were in the midst of some quandary about who was to get into the car. The obliviousness on their faces was out of an episode of the Beverly Hillbillies.

*

Local drivers park or stop their cars in ways that make it hard for other vehicles to move about by narrowing the room others have to proceed. Often these local drivers park or stop near corners or right on the corners making it hard for other vehicles to turn. Seeing this I wish these drivers would experience some sort of comeuppance.

I witnessed a few get theirs at an intersection near the auto dealership and auto maintenance plaza in Hui Shan District. A truck with long trailer, used for transporting new cars to dealerships, was trying to make a right turn from a narrow road, with one lane going either way, onto a two lane wide one-way section of road. [The wider road had fences put up to divide its four lanes.] Two cars had made a right onto the narrow road and then stopped or parked right by the corner making the truck's turn more difficult. The truck attempted to make the turn but the back end of the trailer struck the two cars which should not have been stopped where they were.

You would hope that the drivers of the two cars were the ones with the liability but alas I think the driver of the truck would get it.

*

Impatience of Chinese drivers was in evidence one morning at the gate to our apartment complex.

The apartment complex management is trying to get all cars in the complex registered on their new computer system. To do this involves paying some fees. We would get on the system but Jenny refuses to pay the eight years of fees that the management is demanding from the owner of the parking spot we use.

We are able to get around the gates because of an arrangement Jenny has with the security guards: if they don't let us in, she gives them hell.

One morning, a new security guard was stopping cars that were not registered on the computer system, thus causing five or six cars to line up behind, and their drivers to honk their horns so loudly that Jenny could hear it from our bedroom. I witnessed the horn blaring as I walked to our car and then experienced the blaring as the new guard wouldn't open the gate for me.

*

A month full of annoyances, but at least there was the dismissal of the Clintons.

"Yes! Yes! Yes!" to that.

And Eric became a father. Wonderful.

October 2016 Notes

Taking Tony to school for 7:30 AM and later coming home after 8:00 PM to see Jenny still having him do his homework was more than I could stomach. How could I put up with this till June? Something had to give.

And boy, did it ever! On October 3, the third day of the Golden Week in China, I had Jenny demand that I move out because I told her to stop "overdoing" it with Tony. She said that I was being ungrateful of the sacrifice she was making. Hard to be appreciative if your full of fear of her temper tantrums.

*

We were able to reconcile but not till after the holiday had been wasted.

*

I can't stop blogging about the local driving.

I saw a big dump truck drive the wrong way against three full lanes of traffic. The vehicles got out of its way. The detail that made this bit of driving memorable – for I have seen drivers do so many things that I wouldn't do in a traffic jam – was the fact that the driver was talking on his mobile phone as he was doing so. Talk about nonchalance! Jenny, who tells me that she knows how the local drivers think, was wishing she had taken a photo.

*

Glad to see that Trump gave it to that woman about her rapist husband.

Supporters of Clinton [Are there really such people?!?] say that she is being held to higher standards.

Well, she is running for the Presidency of the United States of America!! This talk of it being unfair for her is only proving what her many detractors have always said: she is not Presidential material because they can't brag about how well she has stood up to this unfair attacks or any accomplishments she might have.

*

The Chinese are inscrutable. I screamed at this fellow in a van which was blocking my car and he just looked straight forward like he was deaf or had a stone face.

*

A student told me that she to finish her homework on a Friday night. The teacher wanted her and her classmates to email photos of the finished pages that night.

A common practice I learned from a math teacher at #1 High School.

And on top of that, the students had had a stretch of seven days in a row (starting on the Saturday previous to the Friday that the student had to have here homework done by) of attending classes and doing homework every day.

*

Young student was telling me about pieces of paper that could get you meat and rice. His parents had these pieces of paper as sorts of souvenirs from the old days in China.

I told him I had heard about those things. They were called Ration Coupons.

*

A female student has one child. Asked by me if she would have a second, she said she wouldn't because of the work involved in having them go to school.

With my Tony in primary school, her thought really struck home.

*

A student living near the Xi Zhuang metro station had some interesting things to tell me about the Xi Zhuang area. Xi Zhuang is two stops down the line from the Yan Qiao Station. I used to park our car at Xi Zhuang and then take the subway downtown. The station had lots of places to park unlike Yanqiao station.

Xi Zhuang's most interesting landmark is this ten year old empty shopping mall, complete a with 100 meter tall Ferris wheel. The owner of this mall, the student told me, ran away, leaving the property in limbo. No other developers seem willing to take on the property and so it seems doomed to crumble.

The second most prominent landmark in Xi Zhuang is the metro station. The metro station first attracted my attention because it when it was being built, it was surrounded by empty fields. Since the metro opened, those fields are still empty. The student told me that the Xi Zhuang government didn't have any money to build a planned shopping mall in one of the fields surrounding the mall. [I have posted some photos to my AKIC Wordpress Photo Blog.]

Thus the hoped for economic development hasn't taken place. And to plan to build a shopping mall when you already have a perfectly good one that is empty seems the height of economic folly to me – at least a little higher than building a metro station in an empty field.

*

Jobs people want in China, I asked. Teachers and Translators, said the student in response.

Lame answer! I told the student.

*

"I don't want vegetables. I will have meat instead."

That was a sentence a student made with the word instead.

In real situations, I tried to tell her, you would use instead with things that are better substitutes for each other.

*

Students think it strange that I would want to put margarine in hot rice. It gives it flavor I tell them.

*

Tony & I found a Iphone 6 on the road near our apartment one Saturday morning, as we were going to catch the bus that would take us downtown. I picked phone up, saw that it was fully charged and had 4G reception. I decided to take the phone to work with me, thinking that even though I was taking the phone far out of the owner's way, there wasn't much else I could do. My intention was to see that the person got their phone even though it may inconvenience them. I

While I was making my way to work, however, I turned off the phone so that if the person phoned me, I wouldn't be in the awkward situation of trying to use my poor Chinese.

When Tony & I arrived at work, I turned the phone on and handed it to one of the girls at work, telling her to wait for someone to call it. I was relieved, as I handed if off, to see that no one had called it yet and so they weren't thinking at that moment that their phone was lost forever.

The owner did phone about fifteen minutes later. He then immediately came to the school to pick it up and wanted to take me for lunch for what I had done.

I was surprised at how quickly the fellow came all the way from Hui Shan District to the downtown to get his phone.

I was also surprised at how grateful he was. Jenny later told me that often lost phones get sold in secondary markets. Was my doing the proper thing such a rare occurrence in modern Mainland China?

Mobile Phones, as this incident shows, have become an addiction. It was like I picked up a bag of cocaine and the user coming from thirty miles away to retrieve it.

The man had lost his phone while driving his e-bike which explains why I found it on the road.

My reward for returning the phone was a big box of Three Squirrels brand nuts.

*

Big Bridge Fatigue blues.

During my first stint at Big Bridge as a High School History teacher, I came down with a flu whose symptoms were extreme fatigue.

I came down with the same bug at the Primary School this month.

As on the first occasion, I got through without having to call in sick after thinking that I would have to and so I maintained my streak of never having ever called in sick this millennium. I spent the day sleeping and not eating.

*

I published a photo in the AKIC photo blog where I called a driver, of the car parked next to us in our apartment garage, an idiot. Look at the photo to see why.

I should be thankful I have a post on the other side to park beside. I wouldn't want to park between two drivers who are dumber than posts.

*

As October closed, I was praying for a Clinton loss. Bad as Trump is, he isn't as corrupt, conniving and unaccomplished as Bill's wife.

*

In my sour moments, I really think I hate the mainland Chinese. I think how ugly and cloddish are the men, how plain are the women, and how their children are barely removed from monkeys. But I have been living here for 12 years and so I sometimes forget my misanthropy.

China is a great place to be a misanthrope, I'll give it that.

*

Going to pick up Tony at school can put me in a sour mood. From the photos I have taken of pick up time at Tony's school and have published in my photo blog, you can see that many parents drive like inconsiderate idiots when they come to pick up their children. And when I hear someone say look at the laowai while there, I get the impulse to teach Tony swear words.

Let's get the f*** out of here!

Homework is ****!

Stop honking your horn *********!

*

Tony wanted to dress as a German soldier for Halloween.

I wanted to dress as Hilary Clinton.

*

In the West, they put fences by roads.

In Communist China, they put fences on roads.

*

I have renewed acquaintance with some old friends in October: Peanut Butter & Jam Sandwiches and Couscous. The latter comes out quite nice when I use to the rice cooker.

*

Now that the Chicago Cubs have made the World Series, they no longer have a point to their existence. Suffering, if I understand David Warren right, is good for our souls. Now that Cubs fans aren't suffering, they will soon become soulless, like Red Sox fans.

*

On the second last Monday of October, Jenny was tiger-mothering Tony till 11:00 PM and so I couldn't sleep.

Next morning suffering from a tired induced grumpiness, I snapped at this old woman in a bakery who put her tray in on the counter in front of me as I was trying to order coffee. My screaming at her made her pull it away. But I couldn't resist the urge to call her bitch.

Thinking about the incident afterwards, I could say that the woman wasn't budging in front of me as so much as she was trying to put her tray in the space that was there on the counter in front of me. This seems from my observations of the locals a not unusual practice. Unfortunately when she put the tray in front of me, I was tired and not able to control my impulses which were set off when she got into my space as she placed the tray on her counter. And I have had locals, who were behind me in lineups, in train stations and at McDonalds, reach around me with cash in their hands in some bizarre attempt to get quicker service.

*

A student told me that he hated his boss for not accepting the excuses that he had given him for being late to work.

The student was late once every week. His excuse was the traffic.

The student told me this in the midst of a group discussion so I had to let it pass with much comment.

I will comment now. I would like to think that my rare readers would realize how weak the student's excuses were. But in my days as a supervisor I met far too many people with the mentality that this was a legitimate excuse that you could use on a continual basis for being late for work. So I will state what would seem obvious to me. Maybe, that student should leave for work earlier.

*

We, that be Jenny & I, celebrated our 10^th anniversary on the 27^th. [If you visit my photo blog, you will see a picture from the day in 2006 when we went to Nanjing to get the marriage certificate.]

Apparently, we have beaten the odds by making it to our 10^th anniversary. If anyone would ask how we did it, I would offer only a reactionary observation: asking how a marriage has lasted is a stupid question that a modern would ask.

When it comes to marriage, heed what the Catholics say about it.

*

Two months of teaching primary school makes me wonder what child labor is considered a bad thing.

There surely is an advantage to using all the energy they have for some productive purpose instead of wasting it on educational endeavors that won't benefit them in the future one iota.

*

"Where you from?" I asked the male foreigners who happened to sit across from me and Tony on the Metro.

"Tajikistan!" one of them said.

I heard what he said, but since it wasn't the answer I was expecting, I asked him to say it again.

I learned that the two gentleman were studying Chinese at the Zhangnan University.

They asked me how long I had been in Wuxi. I told them 12 years. I pointed to Tony, who was sitting beside me, as I told them my reason for being so long in Wuxi was that I married a Chinese girl.

I then pointed to Tony to tell them how his Chinese was already so much better than mine.

Our Tenth Anniversary

September 2016 Notes

Better late than never.

Here are the few notes I made during the month of September 2016.

*

Tony cried on his first day back to school.

Tears came to my eyes as well.

I also swore a lot as I got to experience, instead of just witness, the traffic jam by the school as parents drop off their children.

*

I vowed to stop blogging about local drivers and just become resigned to their ways in order to spare my rare readers lots of carping. But I need to vent and that are breeds of idiot drivers on the road in China that one would never see in Canada unless they immigrate there from mainland China.

One type of local driver is always honking the horn out of sheer impatience. If they are behind several other cars stopped at a light, they will immediately honk when the light turns green. And they will honk at the car that slows to make a turn. And they will honk at a car that slows down for pedestrians or cycles. Why? They are very impatient I suppose.

*

A student was showing me videos of security guards and parents fighting, first, at Tony's school and, then, in front of the government building that is down the street from the Kaulins Family China apartment.

This fighting was on account of the bad materials that were used in making the sports field at Tony's school.

*

Thirty one students in Tony's class. Better than forty, but because it is a odd number, Tony is sitting by himself. He has no deskmate.

*

A fellow foreign trainer who has driven in many places in the world tells me that the mainland Chinese are the worst drivers in the world, only exceeded in badness by the local drivers of Papua New Guinea.

*

Long days in September and I'm hating it. I am up before six so I can drive Tony to school. I have three days of the week where I teach English to primary school classes of 35. Some of the classes have been okay as some individual students are good, but overall, it hasn't been a satisfying appearance. Most of the classes have been full of rowdiness, and many of the students haven't been paying attention or are not motivated. I had to whack one kid -- he kicked me -- and I wish I could whack a few more. And at the end of the day, I come home to see Tony still doing homework and being tiger-mothered.

*

One morning, after dropping Tony off at school, I was driving back home in busy traffic and I had this fellow cut in front of me, annoying me greatly. He was driving a cheap gray beat up Hyundai. In a fit of pique, as some space opened, I drove past him and then cut in front of him. I wasn't at first sure if he understood the meaning of my maneuver. Looking in my rear-view mirror – he was stopped in line behind me – I couldn't make out an expression on his face. But he then decided to drive into the bicycle lane as the boulevard just so happened to have a gap in it. It was a maneuver – an illegal maneuver – that I had seen many a local driver do in order to get out of traffic jams. As he did so, I looked over, to my right, and I saw he was was definitely looking at me. He then looked forward and I could see him laugh to himself in a hearty way. I gave him the middle finger salute but he had turned his head and driven away too fast to see it. I guess he figured he had "beaten me" because thanks to his maneuver, he was going to clear the intersection before I did. But the way I saw it was that he had proved the point that I had made by my maneuver. He was an inconsiderate S.O.B. By his manner of response, he showed that was a coward because he drove away without apologizing and was dishonorable by his very act of cheating.

That's Mainland China and the Mainland Chinese for you.

As for me, I should resign myself to Chinese traffic behavior. I am not going to win in Chinese traffic because I don't play by their rules or rather their lack of rules. And maybe one of these idiots will want to fight me.

Even if I win and even if I am in the right in these situations, I will lose.

*

Offer the students the straight goods. If they don't like it, there is no point in trying to appeal to them All that can be done is to hope they go away and to flunk them if you are in fact grading them. Give all your attention to those who might be interested and award them generously.

These ideas came to me from a David Warren Blog entry which just so happened to be published after my first week of teaching primary school and after a second Saturday of trying to conduct a speaker's corner with these kids from Meicun High School whom I despise.

*

Drove to Xinjie one day. Had lunch, hung out, then went home. It was a rainy day. Why don't the local drivers turn on their headlights? I wondered.

*

I am deplorable. How? Let me count the ways.

*

I have discovered that a Cubit is eighteen inches or the length of my forearm. Back in my couriering days (oh! how certain assholes who were in Wuxi have held that against me.), I had a quick way of measuring box dimensions by stretching my thumb and little finger nearly perpendicular to the other fingers. I had determined that from the tip of my thumb to the tip of the little finger, the length was 9 inches or as I now know, half a cubit. Two of these half cubits are equal in length to my forearm.

*

Tony had a reprieve in the middle of September. It turned out that the protests about the sports field were heeded and the authorities redid the sports field. While this work was being done, Tony had a week away from school.

*

But because of this reprieve, Tony will be having a series of six day weeks at his school.

Poor Fella!

*

One way to meet a foreigner in Wuxi is to just knock on the wrong door in an apartment building.

What had happened was that Jenny had lead me on a wild goose chase. She was in a spa while Tony was doing a writing class at a teacher's residence. Having got there early – that is before Tony's class was finished – she had me go pick him up. Problem was that she didn't know the exact address. She said it was in apartment 801 in building 16 or building 18.

I went to the apartment in building16 and knocked on the door. To my surprise, as well as the person who opened the door, there were two foreigners staring at each other. I had to tell him how it came to be that he was answering the door. I learned that he was from Kenya and was teaching Math at the #1 High School. I got his Wechat ID and who knows, maybe we will be friends.

*

As I was saying, I am doing a primary school gig, teaching English to grades Two to Five at Big Bridge Primary School which is on the same campus as the high school where I did my history teaching gig last year.

Do I like doing it? I can't say as I do. The children aren't at all very nice or respectful. I was delusional to think that by being nice to them, I could teach them something and have fun while doing so. After the first week, I had to take into account that anything I did do with them should not get them excited or even amused because anything that was amusing or exciting for them turned them into a loud unruly mob. Being nice and humorous to them the first week was probably a mistake from which I might never recover with these groups. To try to soften the blow from this mistake, I tried to ignore them as much as I could after the first week by not responding to their hellos to me and not answering their questions in the hallway. I tried to overlook their many acts of disrespect to me, but I couldn't hold my temper when before a class, they swarmed my desk as I was trying to set up a projector and my materials. I whacked one kid of the mob on his back. [I should have gotten the assistant to deal with them.] After the class ended, another brat grabbed my backpack, twice, and I very much lost my temper so that it looked like I was going to beat her. It was just my luck, that this incident happened in front of six or seven female teachers. The incident immediately had people talking. As I was in the car taking us back to school, my assistant was already answering a phone call from someone at my school about it. I was brought on the carpet as soon as I got to my school and made to explain myself.

The Chinese teachers do whack the students at the school. They also speak in the strongest language to them to get them to behave. As a foreigner, I cannot do this. I have to rely on the assistant but even she can't do much about the unruly students it would seem. As a laowai, I am going to have a hard time controlling the students, and it would seem that my only recourse is to walk out of the classroom or have the assistant do more.

And then there is the question of actually teaching them something. Some of the children I have discovered can't even read the text and maybe can't speak more than a few words of English.

August 2016 Notes

 I wrote something earlier about Tony's bad time at the pool and my subsequent temper tantrum.

I can't find it on my school computer. Perhaps, I left it on my Mac book.

[Later] I didn't. How did I manage to lose it?

Anyway. What happened was this: Tony & I went to the swimming pool near Xishan High School on a Monday afternoon in early August. For the summer, the pool place had opened its outdoor pool and filled it with these large plastic floating slides and other sorts of playground like props on which Tony liked to play. So after his class which was in the indoor pool, Tony & I went to the outdoor pool. I watched Tony as he played on an floating saddle with a group of boys and it gradually became apparent to me that the boys didn't want Tony playing with them. On a couple of instances the boys made a point of pushing Tony off the top of the floating saddle. Finally, a pair of the boys pushed Tony away from the saddle. Tony cried as they did this and I had to intervene.

I very much would have like to have grabbed the heads of the two boys and knocked them together so they had concussions, but I decided that it wasn't a good idea and instead splashed them. To let off my anger that I still had, I swore at a man who I presume was a lifeguard and had a weaselly China man smirk on his face. I pointed at him as I yelled the f-words at him a bunch of times.

The incident put me in a dark mood and filled me with foreboding for a long time afterwards. Tony is always getting picked on, apparently, whether by other boys or girls or adults or teachers. The incident brought back bad memories from my school days and made me wonder if I wanted to stay in China.

As I consoled Tony afterwards, he said he hated China.

*

Tony has developed an interest in flags. Because of this interest of his[I thought to call it a fetish but thought better of it], I downloaded the opening ceremonies of the Rio Olympics so we could watch the parade of nations and their flags.

Like 2008, it became tedious after awhile. Now, I don't want to say that there are too many countries in the world because that would mean being on the side of people who are dumb enough to think that the EU is a good idea, so my solution to the tedium of the parade of nations would be that each country only have one athlete, the flag holder in the parade. I don't need to see all the goofing off and waving from the other members of the country's Olympic team.

One big observation: the North Koreans and mainland Chinese teams were full of dead stiffs.

*

I don't much like the Suning Plaza parking garage. In early August we went there and its parking garage was stifling hot, I suppose, because of the need to air-condition the mall's nine floors of open space. I also don't like the SP's parking garage because it doesn't have stairs that one can take to avoid the tedious wait that taking the lifts up to and from the upper mall floors involves. Often the elevators are so full of people that one has to watch the elevators make several trips up and down before one can get on one: unless, one takes the elevator even if it is going in the opposite direction from one desires. This tactic seems necessary in order to secure an early place on an elevator.

Jenny also doesn't like the SP parking garage as well and has thought that it may be better to park at the Hen Long Parking Garage. [Hen Long is another larger shopping mall located a block or so south from SP on Renmin Road.]

The first time we parked at Hen Long, I was brain dead. I first drove past the ticker dispenser when entering the garage. My excuse for this gaffe is that the parking garage at the Wanda takes a photo of your license plate upon entering and out of habit I assumed the same would happen at HL. And then when exiting, I expected to have to present the ticket I had to a human in a booth. It wasn't till a minute after we went to the exit gate and saw that there was no attendant that it dawned on me that we had to pay at a kiosk before getting into our car and exiting.

*

Expats are so tedious. I say this fully admitting that I am the king of tedium.

So I am going to have to revert to my Wuxi Expatdom Blogging days and just make stuff up about a universe where Wuxi expats are actually interesting. Now instead of doing this in the Expatdom blog, I will just do it in this entry. I will mix these bits of fiction with my real life notes.

It will be up to you from this point in the entry to the end to determine if what I am writing is a product of my fancy or did in fact happen.

*

I met a Catholic reactionary who happens to live in Wuxi. He puts me to shame with his sanctity and piety.

*

Teaching a class about adventure to a student going into high school, I asked her who had more adventures: adults or children. She said adults. I said children. I told her she probably thought this because Chinese children aren't allowed to have adventures. They are stuck at home all the time doing homework.

*

The only adventures that Tony likes to have are in computer games. I can't get him to accompany me on drives to the countryside.

*

Crossing the street, I was able to get two BMW drivers to stop and not cut me off as they were making turns.

*

Doing some one-on-one classes with a girl who is about to go to high school in Langley, I decided to talk to her for a half hour or so about the social ills that befall the lower mainland of British Columbia. I told her of car theft, property crime, drug use about students, welfare moms to name but a few. It was enough to make me wonder if having Tony go to school in Canada is such a wonderful idea.

*

A funny ugly English mistake:

A student describing her charitable activities said that she gave her useless clothing to the poor.

*

A company class I had been going to had done something to their parking lot. Asking about it, I learned that because the company workers had too many cars, the parking lot lines were repainted so that what once had six parking spots could now have seven.

*

Jenny may be pregnant.

It is a scary and yet wonderful prospect I think. Tony very much needs a sibling. But for me it will mean that I could never retire, never fade into the sunset as it were. I will have to be hustling till my final breath. I am too old to be having another child and the child could well be diminished in ability because of my age That is, he or she may not be smarter than a bag of hammers. And yet, the child will be something for me to love till the end of my days, and Tony will have something to worry about besides playing the iPad. Maybe it will make him more responsible. I pray.

[you will have to scour this blog entry for the answer, in code form, to the question of whether she is or she isn't.]

*

I was able to take the family vehicle for a drive in the area near our apartment. I discovered the road in Jiangying that Hui Shan Da Dao runs to has these side roads that are pleasant for cruising. The roads are tree lined and empty of traffic and run past agricultural fields and numerous ponds.

*

I very much want to despise Trump but the left wing media's coverage of him has been over the top hysterical and untruthful. The guy can't even make a joke without that media lying about it. It is like they are in the bag for that wife of that pervert and are going over the top on Trump in hopes of not having to deal with the fact that their gal is a crook.

*

I was taken back to see a woman fast asleep on an Ikea display bed that was in the lobby of the Livat (Hui Ju) mall. I very much wanted to take a picture but ultimately shied away from doing so.

*

On Monday, August 15, Tony and I went to the IKEA. Usually, we don't go through the display area of the store. It has been our habit to just go to the register area where the IKEA food shop can be found. But on that day we went and we were disconcerted to see just how many locals actually go to the store to take afternoon naps on the display beds. One old man was right out of it and was under a sheet. I don't know if he was using the display sheet or had brought a sheet with him.

*

On that Monday, I drove to the IKEA by a different route. It was sort of back way. I took it instead of going on the elevated road that gets us to the IKEA normally. I found myself driving through large areas that I had never been in before. Wuxi is just much bigger than I could imagine.

*

Tony can now eat a double – not a single – Texas Stacker burger, with bacon, cheese and meat sauce, at Burger King. It has become our habit to first feed him at Burger King and then to feed me at the Subway.

I like to call Burger King, King Burger because Tony will instantly correct me.

*

The Clinton foundation, the so-called charity, is really, as John Derbyshire has said, the personal ATM for the pervert and his wife.

If they were truly engaged in public service, they would not be millionaires.

*

My 7 all-time favorite movies:

Lawrence of Arabia

Wizard of Oz

Kiss Me Kate

The Long Voyage Home

The Producers

She Wore a Yellow Ribbon

Top Hat

#8 is Patton.

*

10 Canadians I like:

Preston Manning

Stephen Leacock

David Warren

Stephen Harper

Bobby Orr

John Candy

Mordecai Richler

Marc Steyn

Conrad Black

Kathy Shaidle

*

My 10 favorite hockey players

Bobby Orr

Guy Lafleur

Ken Dryden

Yvon Cournyer

Peter Mahovlich

Denis Savard

Mario Lemieux

Bobby Hull

Tony Esposito

Gary Cheevers

*

Ane My 10 favorite baseball players

Ichiro

Gary Carter

Carlton Fisk

Johnny Bench

Joe Morgan

Andre Dawson

John Olerud

Joe Carter

Bill Lee

*

August Zhejiang trip notes

I had a nine day vacation - 4 days off and 5 leave days - around the middle of August. The Kaulins family spent three days in the Wux, then 3 days in Zhejiang province and then 3 days back in Wuxi having a mini vacation on account the the mini vacation we had just had.

We drove to Hangzhou which wasn't what I wanted to do. I wanted to take the train. I didn't fancy the prospect of a three hour drive amongst Chinese drivers.

As it was, The drive was tiring and didn't offer any great views till we came upon a high speed rail track running parallel to the toll highway on which we were driving. As we got close to Hangzhou, we drove on a stretch of road where on our left, there was a lake and then a city in the distance while on the right, there was an elevated high speed rail track on which there was a train.

Hangzhou, I learned in an internet article I happened to come across after we had booked and paid for our hotel, was to be gearing up for a G20 meeting to be held in August. The article advised to not go to Hangzhou.

Hangzhou definitely was gearing up for the G20 meeting. As we entered the city, we were stopped at a road checkpoint and had to present our IDs. In the city, one would have been hard-pressed to not see signs, that were everywhere, mentioning the fact that the G20 meeting was taking place in Hangzhou. In the subway stations, soldiers wearing olive green combat uniforms and toting shiny black rifles scared the heck out of Tony. By The Xi Lake tourist area, roads were closed off, only G20 vehicles being able to go about in an area where many G20 tents were erected.

G20 meetings, are not about motor oil but supposedly about economics and finance. The over top expense on this meeting on the part of the hosts would seem to violate principles of sound economics and finance. The people who should know what they are doing don't seem to really.

We inadvertently entered Hangzhou twice within half an hour. After we had entered the first time and gone through the check point, we were off to our hotel. To navigate to it, we used the GPS on Jenny's phone. The GPS gave us ambiguous instructions and so we chose a wrong turnoff from which there was no turning round. We found ourselves at a toll gate entering a freeway we didn't want to enter. When we told the attendants of our plight, we learned that there was nothing we could do but exit at the next toll gate. This was to cost us five RMB and thirty minutes. The exit was a clutter fest of trucks and cars queuing in a Chinese manner. We found ourselves surrounded by large lorries that were jostling for position in either one or two exit lines -- we weren't sure. At one point a driver of a truck behind us was pounding on our window and gesticulating in a manner that I think meant he wanted us to get out of his way or go to another line. Whatever. We survived. We got to the toll gate, paid the toll and then had to go through a security checkpoint to again have our IDs examined.

Be that as it may, our sojourn in Hangzhou was okay. We saw the lake, took Tony to a playground, added to our fridge magnet collection for the places we have been in the world, rode the Hangzhou Metro: the seventh Metro system that Jenny and I have ridden in China (others have been Shanghai, Beijing, Nanjing, Hong Kong, Wuxi and Suzhou) and we rode a boat on the Grand Canal.

My assessment of Hangzhou? Too touristy, but it would be a nice place to live. If you do visit, go in the spring or autumn. It is far too humid in August.

Also, don't drive in Hangzhou. The traffic is heavy.

From Hangzhou we drove to Anji, a small town also in Zhejiang province. We booked a hotel there so we could go on a white water rafting experience. The drive out of Hangzhou was harrowing. As I was saying traffic was heavy and I wasn't aware that in some places the road was narrowing which made for some near collisions. But out of the city, the driving became enjoyable as traffic lightened and the hills made for nice scenic views. On some stretches of road, the views were quite spectacular as the mountains thrust high in the sky and we had to go through some rather long tunnels to get to our destination.

I first found Anji disagreeable. Its drivers and cyclists made some swear-inducing maneuvers in traffic. The hotel in which we were booked seemed to have been hastily built without the construction process having completed its cleaning up phase. The hotel was incongruous with the plot of land in which it had been built. The new road around the hotel was in the midst of tall, uncut weeds. The underground parking garage was mostly without lighting possibly because they wanted to hide the dirt, dust and trash that was still there. And when we went to the lobby, there was a Chinese family with loud kids running everywhere. Our hotel room wasn't as nice, to say the least, as the one we had in Hangzhou. The view from our window was of construction. The area was following the typical plan of Chinese city expansion: wide boulevards midst tall apartment buildings. Not a wonderful sight at the best of times, but what I was looking at outside the windows wasn't completed yet. As I went to the parking garage to bring up some bags, l was on an elevator with a father who thought it was okay to bring on a lit cigarette. As I grumbled, his daughter appeared to admonish him. Settled in our room, we decided to go to downtown Anji for lunch. It was an annoying experience because we had a hard time finding the restaurant we wanted to go to, a hard time finding a place to park, we were sweating a lot on account of the humidity and the restaurant was closed anyway since it was a little past 13:00. That's the way it is the countryside said Jenny. We ended up having KFC for lunch.

From the KFC, we drove to the white water rafting activity site. The roads were narrower and we saw some nice hilly scenery. We got to our destination by finally taking a narrow road through a valley that was advertising itself as a canyon. The site's parking lot was packed and so we were told to park snug against a decorative rock, that was at the entrance, that was the site's sign.

There were a lot of people, all Chinese, waiting to get into rafts. They were wearing helmets and life jackets. I walked to a railing overlooking the top of the water course and was disconcerted to see fifty rafts all bunched together at the route's launch point. Many of the rafters were having water fights. I was wishing we hadn't gone.

Dressing ourselves for the raft ride further put me in a foul mood. We were not prepared. We all should have brought a change of clothes and plastic bags to keep our things like electronic devices and documents dry. I was not comfortable wearing my waist bag because it wasn't water proof. But we were able to buy cases to put in our phones and which I also used to keep my passport and drivers license dry.

Once we were afloat on the raft, things got better. I was glad Jenny was of a like mind and we stayed away from the gaggle of rafts at the launching point. When they let the rafts down the course, Tony very much enjoyed himself. I was still a little worried when my waist bag got soaked as our raft hit the first surge of white water, but Tony's joy made me feel sheepish.

Driving home, I was shirtless because my t-shirt was soaked. Back at the hotel room, I saw that none of my things was damaged by water.

That evening, we took a taxi to a hot pot restaurant. I drank not one, but two beers.

Then was back to our hotel room and then back to Wuxi. The drive back took us through some newly made roads and then along freeway that had nice scenery, tunnels and bridges. We experienced some temporarily heavy squalls of rain that cleaned of the dust that had accumulated on our car during the 500 KM of driving we had done.

*

I hate going to a restaurant between 12:00 and 13:00 and between 17:00 and 18:00. Too crowded. On work days, my habit is to have lunch and dinner at other times, even in the mid-afternoon.

*

Other than the opening ceremony which I watched because of Tony's flag fetish, I haven't watched any of the Olympics

I have been reading reactions to them though. I was pleased to hear about a few of the medal-winning athletes who were practicing Catholics. One of them was Bolt and another was a black American gymnast or swimmer. The girl had the good fortune to be raised by Catholics. The best reactions to the Olympics, for me, were written by Theodore Dalrymple and Peter Hitchens. Dalrymple praised India for its utter lack of success at the Olympics. It showed that India had its priorities proper about something, said Dr D, who went on to observe that countries that do win lots of Olympic medals often do so as a result of totalitarian government impulses like the Soviet Union, East Germany, Canada, and Great Britain. It was GB's success at these Olympics that resulted in a nice rant by Hitchens that backed up Dr D's point. Hitchens said GB's success came from subsidizing athletes in the newer and marginal Olympic sports that no one much cares about like synchronized swimming and the 123 m slow walk.

To live in a country that didn't win any medals when it hosted the Olympics. That is surely Canada's finest moment. Unfortunately it probably resulted in the Johnson fiasco of '88.

*

Tony watched the film Patton. He told me he very liked it.

*

I phoned my Mom. Life goes on in Canada. Sad news I heard about a cousin's husband whose garage had been burnt. The house is condemned and it will cost 70,000 bucks to fix it.

*

Tony is fat. Mind you, he is not obese and I doubt if anyone would call him "Fat Tony" if they ever talked about him in the third person, but a little fat he is which makes him obese for a Kaulins boy. When I was growing up, I was constantly told I was skinny, skinny, skinny.

Tony has to eat more vegetables and fruit, and less meat but it is hard to overcome his resistance to any food that does not suit his picky tastes.

*

Tony's Birthday Celebration.

If you care to know, Tony was born on August 23, 2007.

The celebrations for his birthday were low key. We bought him a few presents but nothing spectacular. (If you have to live with the pile of toys that he has now, you wouldn't be so enthusiastic to add to it.)

We invited a few buddies of his for a pizza party at Mr. Pizza for lunch, then took them to an arcade and then to a park to play.

There was no birthday cake and we never did have that paintball party we had envisaged.

I found that being around five noisy nine-year boys got on my nerves.

Because I had to work on the 23^rd, the festivities I mentioned took place on the 22^nd.

Some of the presents that we did get Tony we ordered online or as the locals would say, on Taobao. The toys arrived the next day and were dropped off at the parcel drop off point which is in the lobby of a building near where we live. Between the time they were delivered and Jenny & Tony went to pick them up, they were stolen – there was security cameras that recorded this. Jenny was refunded money by the delivery company and will have to order the presents again. Tony was upset but will eventually got over it once he got the presents which were a bunch of military toys: soldiers, tanks and guns.

*

With my vacation ending with a week to go in August, I was full of foreboding as September approached. I very much dread Tony's going back to school because of the bullying I suspect he will be subjected to from teachers and classmates, and the tiger-mother frustration that Jenny will experience and how she will deal with it.

*

I hear that Double Saint Archduke Sir Harry Moore Emeritus will be canonized again this September. At the ceremony in the Vatican, Mother Teresa is going to be canonized as well.

Congratulations Harry!

It makes me think of a scene in the great movie Patton where the General is putting on his three stars despite it not having had official confirmation of it by a vote of the US senate. When Bradley offered his premature congratulations, Patton said that they has their schedule and that he had his.

How I love to re-create that scene in Melbourne will good old Harry. There I would be offering my premature congratulations while he, putting on his triple halo, talks of God having his schedule and he (that be triple saint Harry) having his.

*

A student has a friend who works for the electric utility company. This friend gets to look at the numbers and she reported to the student that electric usage by industrial companies was seventy percent of what it was in the previous year: an indicator that the Chinese economy is going down.

*

Many Canadians – far too many, I'd say – like to think they are superior to the Americans because of government programs like gun control and medicare. I'd say that if Canadians were truly morally superior, they would be so as individuals, not as sheep. We wouldn't need these government programs because morally superior individuals would be able to control their urges despite having the means to not to and morally superior individuals would be able to take of themselves and of those they encounter in their day to day lives who cannot. They wouldn't be shirkers which is what the nanny state government allows them to be. They wouldn't be moral preeners because the responsibility if placed on themselves as individuals would make them more humble.

*

I can't say that I was born in the wrong time in history or that I am stuck with the wrong sort of people. Choices that I made in my life, my meekness and my being content with being like a reed subject to the wind are the reason for what is lacking in my life.

And what is lacking in my life? Friendship.

Of course, it could be the price I pay for the solitude which I do enjoy.

To be ungrateful would be worse than being lonely.

*

Here comes a bad joke. If Tony was in Canada and he had an interest in flags, would he be chided because it is considered gauche to salute flags, and anyway, in Canada, they now salute f......

*

On August 25^th, Jenny got a phonecall from the people who had taken the package containing Tony's birthday presents. They told her that they had taken it by mistake. Jenny gave them an earful.

*

On August 25^th, I understood that Jenny was to see a doctor about whether she is you-know-what. I find myself hoping she is even if it means a whole load of inconvenience coming down the pike for the rest of my life.

*

I was approached by locals on the subway two trips in a row.

On the first trip, which was in the evening after work, a youngish man was trying to sell me insurance. I told him I already had some. He wanted my phone number but I gave him my Wechat ID instead.

The next day, as I was going to work, a middle aged man, possibly mad, I couldn't say for sure, sat beside me. He asked if I needed help to which I at first felt annoyed, as I said I didn't, but as he began to talk some more, it seemed to me that he wanted to practice his English on me. Finding out where I was from, he loudly proclaimed to me, "Welcome to China!"

Twelve years in China I have been and they are still welcoming me.

*

Tony got his toys. They were Lego knock-off types that required assembly – lots of assembly in fact. When I arrived home one evening, Tony got me to build his battle tank toy. I spent a couple hours putting the thing together and still wasn't close to finishing it when it was bedtime. For my troubles, I had a sore back, walking about hunched till circulation was restored to my full body, and I got a creeping suspicion that I am going to have to get more powerful glasses. Reading the assembly manual and searching for the little pieces very much strained my eyes.

*

Jenny isn't pregnant. The information left me feeling hollow. I looked at Tony and felt that in the long run, it would be bad for him.

*

After that, everything was almost an anticlimax for the rest of August.

I use the term anticlimax because stuff did happen that would have been anticlimactic otherwise.

There was my last weekend before Tony's return to school. I actually was able to do some driving around the area seeing parts I hadn't seen before.

The first evening of the weekend, I parked the car at the Hen Long Parking garage. It's our parkade of choice downtown because it's clean and cheap. The only thing is that it's entrance tunnel is tight like a piece corkscrew pasta.

The next two days found us paying visits to the local home decorating mall. We went there to find a new light fixture to put above the bathroom mirror. While we were there, we decided that we would also get a new bathroom mirror that had a shelf and for which the mirror opened like a door.

We had to go to the place a second time because the bracket we had for the new light fixture we bought didn't match up, hole wise, with the holes that we already had on the wall.

While doing this, we were able to drive around the area, explore as it were. We found the location of Tony's primary school's new campus. Sadly, it is located in an area that has just been opened up for development. So, the area is rather a pile of rubble. There are the remnants of old houses in factories that have not been completely torn down yet. And there is still rubble from the work that has just been done. We also came upon a truck that had flipped on its side. It must have tried to make too quick a turn with a very unbalanced load in the back.

[The reason that there will be a new campus at Xishan Primary School is that they have 8,000 students! The old campus will be used for grades four to six. The new campus will be for the grades one to the three.]

Tony & I ended the weekend by going back to the pool. We hadn't been there for a while, having lost our enthusiasm for it because of the incident that I mentioned way back at the start of the entry. We didn't want to go back but we were ordered to by Jenny. We have a lot of money, unrefundable, on our swimming passes, she told us, much to our consternation.

So we went. I wanted to arrive late and leave early. While Tony had his class, I stood in one corner of the pool and watched the clock. I tried to think pleasant thoughts while doing this, but I couldn't. I hated that I had to be at the pool. It was shallow and crowded, and I was bored. Being bored, I start to think resentful thoughts about Mainland China. I told Tony that I wanted the pool as quickly as possible and just get back home. Tony however wanted to go play after his class. I told him that I was going to get dressed and then come to get him. I first went to shower.

While I was doing so, some kid really got on my nerves. He walked past the shower, yelled waiguoren at me. I am used to that, but his sneering insolence while he did so got under my skin. I then happened to see that the coach, Tony's swimming coach, give the boy heck. I decided to go watch Tony instead of getting dressed because I didn't want to encounter the kid in the locker area. But after watching Tony for a minute, I changed my mind. I went to my locker. Much to my annoyance, I got a locker right in the midst of a bunch of kids. So I took all my stuff out of the locker and went to an empty area of the locker room. But that damn kid was there. He sneered at me again and I lost my temper. Remembering what Jenny said about the locals using the f-word, I spoke it liberally to the kid. He called me monkey. I would have struck him but I chose instead to squeeze my wet shorts over his head. I got dressed, went to pool, and told Tony it was time to leave. As Tony was getting dressed, I saw the obnoxious kid again. He sneered, I swore and chased him away. The pool orderly, an older man, thought to get between me and the boy. The boy fled and I turned to Tony who told me that he wasn't impressed with my outburst. Why are you being so bad Daddy? Tony said as he looked behind me to see the Lookie Lou's that were congregating.

Two trips to that pool in August; two times I left in a huff after a temper tantrum. I wish they would ban me.

Damn, I hate losing my temper. I hate more that I know better and that as soon as I tell myself to not do it, I do it anyway.

*

I hate spending more than twenty minutes putting together a Lego type toy. After the building the tank, I spent another evening putting together a toy rocket launcher.

*

As much as I get angry at the locals, I don't find western expats to be much solace. On a Wuxi Expat we chat group, the day of my second episode of cussing at the pool, the discussion was about it being Penis Day.

Perhaps the kid is right. Foreigners are monkeys.

*

Student told me what the government was doing to make Hangzhou look good for the G20. It was encouraging residents to leave Hangzhou during the G20 conference by offering discounted prices for parks in areas outside of Hangzhou. To lessen traffic in the highways around the city, they instituted an alternating odd-even-license-plate-this-day-only policy on highways. Having chosen to go on a trip to Zhejiang province on the wrong day, she had to pay a fine because a camera caught her car.

*

Nothing frustrates a foreigner like me more when trying to learn Chinese than a gaped mouth bellow of incomprehension of someone you are trying to practice your Chinese upon. Sometimes, another Chinese person can translate what you have said for the one who made the cow like guffaw. Still, a few of these incidents are enough to make an aspiring Chinese speaker give up. Some foreign speakers have assumed that the inability of Chinese to understand them is the result of a prejudice of the Chinese person that foreigners can't speak Chinese or an appalling lack of imagination on the part of the Chinese person.

Imagination is not a typical Chinese person's forte.

Well, a student tells me that the Chinese have this problem when they speak to each other as well. The reason is that a unit of Chinese sound (equivalent to one character) used to make words will have many different meanings even if it has the same tone. So, the unit of sound can throw off even the most fluent of listener who is wondering what word the speaker is meaning.

*

It turns out that that boy that I was swearing at was mentally-challenged. Way to go me! You are a bully! You are going to have to ask the kid's parents for forgiveness. It may well be that the kid won't understand an apology.

*

You can't drive in a Wuxi summer without a/c. It is hot, deadly hot in the car without it.

Jenny told me of a 10 year old boy that died in car because he had been left there for five hours by his father. What happened, apparently, was the boy fell asleep in the car, unbeknownst to his his father who parked the car in the sun. When it became apparent that the boy was missing, they looked for him and found him dead in the car. A horrible story and you can help but feel for the father who will have to live with the mistake for the rest of his life.

*

On the morning of the last day of August, Jenny, Tony & I went to the new campus to find where Tony's classroom was. If I could use only word to describe the campus it would be: totalitarian. The school buildings were three or four floors high and organized in a confusing maze of annexes and hallways. The main administration building was full of offices and conference rooms: a bureaucrat's dream come true, but a joke to anyone who has spent time in any Chinese office building. I couldn't help but giggle at the signs for some of the offices like TV and Radio office, conference room #4, moral development department, to name a few.

The place was jammed with parents, students and cars. A mob formed in one part of the campus apparently because the parents where not happy with some of the construction materials used to build it. They said they were poison. I missed seeing the mob but I did see a bunch of black uniformed security types gathered around who I assumed had made the crowd disperse.

The campus is a thirty minutes walk from the Xibei canal subway station. I found this out because I had to go to work and it didn't look like whatever they were doing was going to end in time for me to make it to work on time.

I cold write another five hundred words on what I saw as I walked from the campus to the subway but I won't.

*

I learned later that the parents who complained about materials used at Tony's primary school were taken away by police. It was ugly said Jenny. The parents said that that their children had been playing on the sports field for an hour and had gotten nose bleeds.

*

I got onto the subject of shopping carts with students in one class. I told them about how shopping carts were stolen in Canada and observed that in China now, you have to use coins to unlock them. A female student then told me that some locals steal carts and take them to parks to use as barbecue grills.