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The powers that be, the ones that decide whether our school can open, are inspecting it on Friday. Or so I have been told. What exactly they are inspecting the school for is beyond me. Are they looking for the virus? Bribes? I will not be very happy if I get word that the school still can't open. (And I won't be elated if the place does open. I will never give up the resentment I have felt on account of the further-furloughing that happened to the school in the middle of the month.)
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Now just mostly thoughts. (I have published photos from my Friday morning walk here.)
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As my wife Jenny pointed out to me just recently, it is embarrassing that my Chinese is so crappy. So why is it so crappy? Do I not have a faculty for languages? Perhaps. Have I been lazy about studying Chinese? Yes and No. Everyday, without fail, I do practice Chinese in an app and I spend a few minutes reading Chinese characters in a Chinese textbook. However, I never practice speaking it with any locals. And it doesn't help that the locals don't speak the textbook mandarin that I look at everyday. Am I an expatriate who lives in an expatriate compound and never talks to the locals? Yes and No. I don't live in an expatriate compound and haven't since 2008 and maybe earlier. I live in the Andis Kaulins Compound.
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Perhaps, I should change the name of this blog to the Andis Kaulins Compound in China blog. (Too much work! I will instead refer to the apartment I live in as Compound Kaulins instead of Casa Kaulins. Better yet, maybe I should call it Cell Block Kaulins. This latter name will better convey the smallness of the apartment, and how trapped I feel...)
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The previous thoughts come to me on account of a WeChat moment I just saw. Over a year ago, I was collecting WeChat contacts and though nothing has ever came of them, I haven't deleted them. So, I will see these expat moments postings on the popular mainland China social app. What I saw today was of a photo of a group of about 30 expatriates who had gotten together to do some sort of thing in the evening at a park. I had run into a few of the people in the photo over the years, but most I didn't know and don't want to: just a bunch of millennials. And I haven't been face-to-face with a foreigner for at least a month.
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Better to be stared down by a Chinese mob than to have my wife cross with me. I did have the former experience, for reasons I can't yet get into, so what I say I truly mean.
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If this was truly a pandemic, it would have been nice to have had the satisfaction of having our upstair fourth floor neighbors, who aren't above the level of savages, suffer or die from it. Hatred of these people is something on which Jenny & I do agree. They're always making strange noises at all hours and mistreat their child worse than Jenny ever does to Tony. Jenny has referred to them as country bumpkins.
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I pray for Xi Jing Ping. That's what I will tell the students, if I ever get a chance to talk to them again.
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How about I call this blog A Catholic Misanthrope in China? Misanthropy and Catholicism are the only viable ideas (ideologies) in this world at the moment. But I really to have to work on my Catholicism.
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Evelyn Waugh is a role model for me. He was Catholic and a Misanthrope and had a great sense of humour. I think about this because my son Tony loves comedy. When I see Tony laugh, I think he gots great potential to be a paid member of an audience for a sitcom or a comedian performance. Tony laughs earty laughs at the Three Stooges, the Naked Gun Movies, the Marx Brothers, About and Costello, John Candy and recently Chris Farley.
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I came across a blog entry about what is going on in Hong Kong written by an expatriate who is very knowledgeable about China and mandarin Chinese. The gist of the entry was that Hong-Kongers are so bad that they should be subsumed by the Chinese Communists. The blogger's hatred of Hong-Kongers was even more rabid than my hatred of the local mainlanders. This blogger also came across as having a high regard for his China expertise and his Chinese language skills. In the blog entries there was pushback against his dismissal of Hong Kong. I had to agree with one commenter who pointed out that mainlanders are crude. (the blogger responded to the pushback with insults) I didn't bother making a comment, but if I did, I would have asked if the Hungarians, the Czechs, and the Latvians were so bad that they should have be subsumed by the Soviet Communists. Anyway, I don't know anything about Mainland China except what I have seen.
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My email address: andiskaulins@protonmail.com.
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