Idea #1; Idea#2; Jenny Loses It; What Should I do?; Do Chinese Women Understand the Concept of Cultural Differences?; Talking Politics with Jenny; Talking Politics with anti-Trumpers;

• Citizen: Hello handsome officer! I think I have an illegal firearm on my person! I will have to be searched. Police Officer: Okay! Just let me finish eating my donut!

• I made a cops and robber video with Tony. Tony wore a balaclava; I had a donut in my hand.

• As I have been saying (blogging), I love being a homebody, during this virus crisis, but I am always on eggshells because of my wife Jenny's bad temper. After nearly 14 years of marriage, I know some ways in which to placate her and thus not trigger her; but there are times when I can feel the storm coming on and feel absolutely helpless. (Two ways to see the storm coming: 1) Jenny scowling 2) Tony scowling). What really gets Jenny off is Tony's schooling. She can scream at Tony for two or three or four hours on end while tutoring him. One afternoon, I went out of the apartment to get some things and came back. Jenny was in the kitchen preparing supper; Tony was in his room at his desk. I could tell from Tony's manner that Jenny had been reaming him out while I had been out. And it got worse. At a certain point, Jenny was so enraged by Tony not being able to solve some problem, that she suspended making supper, sat beside him at his desk, and then went to find a ping-pong paddle. She slapped him with it fourteen times, hissed at him in Chinese, and called him a "fucking idiot!". She would have broken a laptop of mine and have went after him with a baseball bat if I hadn't stopped her. While I was doing this, she said that Tony & I were both losers, to which I replied that she was the loser, we weren't the ones who couldn't control our tempers.

• What can I do about this? I first have to try to understand what is causing her temper tantrums Am I the cause? Yes, of course: but this is because I am near her and I am a human with flaws. I have seen my wife have violent disagreements with strangers in public. I have even seen her not talk to her parents for a year or so because she got mad at them about something. Is it because she's a woman? Partially, she has a woman's viciousness to other women that I don't have to other men, and there are a lot of men I know that I don't like. She is illogical. She is incapable of arguing without using ad hominem arguments. (Men do do this until the logical error is pointed out to them. Jenny just insults me more when I try to point this logical error out to her.) The idea of arguing about something in good will is something that I don't think would occur to her. Is it because she's Chinese? She has told me that she loses her temper because of pressure that she is getting from Chinese society. She always says Tony doing poorly in school causes her, in her words, "to feel shame" (lose face!). I know that many other local parents have a similar approach to their child's education, and when I point out the nuttiness of their approach to them, they say they have to because everyone else does it, and it is for their future (stupid argument) anyway. Is it because she is, in fact, crazy? Crazy as it may seem, to me and many other western parents, to bring out a baseball bat because a child is having trouble with some math problem, this is part of Chinese culture. I have heard of Western parents going nutty like this but having remorse after; and apparently some Chinese parents have remorse after doing such things, but I have never heard Jenny express remorse but instead say that I am not helping her and so that it is really my fault that she is beating Tony. So. What can I do about this? I am still not sure if I am stuck in a situation that would be universally considered poisonous or if the cultural differences between Jenny & I are so wide as to be insurmountable. (It would seem to me that I would have to turn off my critical faculties and half my brain before I could ever become a Chinese parent.) All I can do now is gently encourage Tony and be patient with him, and hopefully Tony can do well and thus show Jenny that there is a more humane approach.

• I have had many male expats, married to Chinese women, complain that their wives have trouble grasping there are such things as cultural differences. So often with Jenny, when trying to get this message across to her, I have ended up exasperatingly telling her that I am not Chinese, and what she is thinking does make sense to me and accepting it would require me to ignore glaring contradictions and illogicalities.

• I don't bother talking politics with Jenny. One time we talked about Trump and she didn't like it when I told her that I didn't hate him. Sometimes, I have seen her taking the Chicom line on some issue of the day. It would seem that having been told what to think, she doesn't care what I think, or want to hear counter-arguments.

• There is a Canadian I know in Wuxi who has a Chinese wife, and they have a daughter, a little bit younger than Tony. We talk about life in Wuxi and dealing with our Chinese wives (I have warned him of the hell to come when his daughter gets into primary school). However, he doesn't like Trump and it seems that his hatred of the president is very visceral. So, I don't bother talking politics with him unless he brings it up. Recently, he told me about Trump doing things at a press conference about the coronavirus that were bad, and Rush Limbaugh saying that the virus was a hoax. As I suspected, when looking into it, it was the left-wing media lying and taking things out of context. I have noticed that every anti-Trumper I know has to tell you about their hatred, and when they find you disagree with it, they aren't at all curious as to why you don't share their hatreds. (If asked why I never got along with a person, politically: we didn't hate the same things.)