November 2017 Diary

Comments about my blog or general enquiries can be sent to andiskaulins@qq.com or andiskaulins@hotmail.com.

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The first major news story of November was the Terrorist attack in New York City where the Islamist rented a truck to mow down cyclists.  I mentioned it to the students and one of them said she was glad in live in China.  I could only wonder to myself about where she got her news.

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November is going to be my no WeChat month.  (I mentioned what I will be not doing at the end of my October entry.) There are two reasons I am doing this.  The first is that I realize I have been wasting lots of time looking at the app.  The second is this compulsion I have always had to re-enforce my isolation from others.  That is, to further keep myself alone from others.

I will make a log, written in the present tense, but how I am getting along with this vow.

As of November 2, I have looked at WeChat once but I haven't looked at any group postings or moments posting.  Moving the WeChat icon away from the home bottom App row of my Iphone screen has so far helped me with this vow.  So, I have avoided accidentally getting onto WeChat.

It is November 7th.  I wish I could make a posting about the 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Coup in Russia, but I made a commitment and I must stick to it.  It's not like anyone cares what I think about that event.  [No responses to my plea at the end of the October 2017 entry for correspondents.  So it looks like I will have to be a correspondent with a better and more-listened-to blogger.]

On or about the weekend of 11/11:  Remembrance Day (single's day in China), I decided to extend my WeChat moratorium from a month to forty days.  I was listening to a podcast where the host sought to explain a duration of not podcasting by stating he had spend forty days in the wilderness.  He obviously got this line from the Bible and the forty days spent in the wilderness (or was it the desert?) of our lord and savior.  So, forty days of staying away from WeChat is what I will now do.
At 6:00 AM on December 11th, I will be posting a Nicholas Gomez Davilia aphorism to WeChat moments.  Will anyone on WeChat have noticed my absence?  I doubt it but it is always good to confirm.

On the weekend of the Grey Cup Game, I started toying with the idea of extending my WeChat avoidance through the whole month of December, thus avoiding contact through Christmas and Western New Year's.  Seeing how that the truth is I haven't completely avoided WeChat because I sometimes have to go to it to get messages from my wife Jenny or from people at work, I could say that sixty will make it seem more like the forty that our Lord endured.

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I have made no Chinese friends in my 13 years here in China.  I find their company, with a few small exceptions, to be boring.

I have no friends in the Wuxi expat community as well, for which I can offer many excuses.  My location in Wuxi and the worn paths I go on to get through my day:  both seem to serve to isolate me.  The Wuxi expats with whom I do have acquaintance are on the other side of town and even having a car, it is too much trouble to go see them.  Through the years, many of the Wuxi expats I have known have been too left-wing, too drunk, too perverted, too dishonest, too untrustworthy, too middle of the road (the most untrustworthy), too screwed up in their personal lives, or too atheist for me to stand their company or for them to stand mine.

I could also offer many mea-culpas.  I have to face the fact that I have never fully recovered from my adolescence which was very lonely for me. In fact, I had no friends as a teenager.  This loneliness I have come to see as a cross I must bear, so I have, through my years in Wuxi, made efforts to further isolate myself.  I have chosen to not talk to people.  Now some of these people did do things to irk or annoy me, and some of these people were best avoided anyway; but the fact is I deliberately made myself unlikable to a whole host of expats.

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Tony made a middle finger gesture to me and asked me what it meant.  Geez....

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My school is not getting many students these days.  On the first Thursday evening of November, I had one class with just one student in the evening.  I am supposed to have three classes with many times more students.

Why has the school's enrollment declined?  Many reasons.  The fashion for learning English has gone away in China.  The Chinese school system, thanks to Xi Jing Ping, has placed less importance on learning English in its High School qualifying exam process.  The Chinese government also has made it more difficult to bring foreign teachers into the country.

Specific to the school itself, there are many more reasons as well.  Our location is no longer so ideal.  I say this because I have seen many businesses in our complex shut down and because the big department store we are close to, Ba Bai Ban, has been eclipsed by Sunning plaza as a place to go downtown.  I also don't think we offer a very good service.  The education model is based on the superstitious belief that talking to foreigners will make Chinese students speak English get better.  It doesn't for most Chinese students.  Learning another language is a lot of work and the students have to be committed in a big way to doing it.  And many students just don't have the ability to do it and there is nothing we can do for them.  Language classes are tortuously boring as well for the students and the teachers.  Most attempts to make the classes interesting don't work because the teachers and students have very different interests.  It is almost like a dog trying to teach cats how to be dogs.  Also, our lesson plans are not very inspiring for the teachers or the students.  Sometimes, I am getting them to make sentence after sentence.  Sometimes, I am just running out the clock.  Sometimes, I am showing flashcards and trying to make talk about them.  I often leave the class thinking I wasted my and the students' time and that they didn't learn a damn thing....  And it is very rarely that I like the classes....

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I was in our third floor apartment, sitting by its entrance, getting ready to go to work, when someone came to our door and turned the handle of our front door which was locked.  I heard the person quickly let go and I then heard what sounded like rapid footsteps going down the stairs and out the apartment building.  I opened the door and then looked out our window but I didn't get a glimpse of the person.

When I left our apartment and went downstairs I saw that a brick was holding open the front door to the our apartment building.  I kicked it away and shut the door.  I didn't seen anyone suspicious when I continued down the lane on my way to the bus stop.

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Kindred spirits.
Have I ever been part of such a pair?
Or larger group?
Thinking back, I recall not and despair.

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Take all the people away.
Let me walk about their rubble.
It would be akin to a walk in nature.
I could easily commune with spirit.

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It was very sunny today.  There must have been four suns in the sky.

It was very cloudy yesterday.  I lost count around a million.

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I try to read a poem every day, for as some wise men have said some truth is only available to poets and some truths are only accessed through poetry.  Something about school introducing my to poetry turned me off poetry for a long time because of the exercise where they would ask you to explain the poetry and find its symbolism.  They should have just told me that poetry has effects on us that often can't be explained by only appreciated.

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There is sponge cake but why isn't there cloth cake or rag cake?

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[November 7th] The school is shrinking in size.  The old school location, which is nearby the new school location, had been turned into a school of Sinology and then into a daycare and then into a kid's school.  None of these operations got enough students to make it worthwhile to have such a large premises.  So, the staff from the kids school have been moved to the new location; and under-used offices and classrooms at the new location are being converted into classrooms for the kids school.  By the middle of November, the school, both adult and kiddies, will be under one roof.

I am not sure about what is going to happen to the old location.  The speed at which the school was moved out [only half a year after it had been decorated to be a kid's school] seems to indicate that someone else got the premises.

On November 7th, I have but two classes to teach.  Ideally, there would be five.

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It seems that this English-teaching gig of mine is coming to an end.  So what will I do if the school shuts down?  Hopefully, I will go back, with Tony, and hopefully Jenny, to Canada.  It may be late in my life to start on a new path, but I can't curse my fate.  I choose it.

Do I have any skills I can offer to anyone in Canada?  I do have some good personal habits.  I am reliable.  I don't do drugs.  I don't drink to excess.  I never call in sick for work. I never come to work late.  I keep myself busy as my language study and the fact that I have kept a blog going for so many years shows.  I am loyal and I will put up with a lot of inconvenience and indifference from the world rather than give in to it.  Surely, that must mean something in this world.

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Another mass shooting in America.  This time at a church in Texas.  A lot of good Americans killed.  It's the price you have to pay for freedom, I would suppose.  China could boost about those things not happening in China but then the numbers of victims of the Communist government's misrule are probably many times greater as a proportion of the Chinese population than of mass shooting victims in the U.S.

Think of it this way:  these shootings could happen every day for a year in the States and they will still not close to matching the victims of Chairman Mao's Great Leap Forward.

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Sometimes I get annoyed at other drivers because they are just in my way.  This I shouldn't be doing because it does take the ground from under my feet for when I do have legitimate reasons to gripe about the local drivers.

On the morning of November 8th, I was driving Tony to school.  I was in the long lineup of cars going down the road by Tony's school.  I got to an entrance to an apartment building complex where, as I told my rare readers in a previous entry, the road becomes a uncontrolled T-intersection.  Confusion results as cars try to turn into the intersection or go through the intersection, and no driver dare yield to another.  My yielding to one car, that had beaten me to space, resulted in a black sedan, coming from my left and behind, passing me.  The black sedan then proceeded rightwards into the bike lane to stop. Our car was then besides the sedan and Tony wanted me to stop so I could drop him off.  It has been my practice to never go into the bike lane when I drop Tony off because I would only end up screwing up the traffic even more by trying to merge back into it. (Merging is hard to do because of the local drivers' desire to never yield.）The black sedan was in Tony's way.  My annoyance at the car being there resulted, after Tony had gotten out, in my making faces at and giving a finger to the black sedan's driver who was a male with a cigarette drooping so low from his mouth that it might has well have been glued to his chin.

I really shouldn't have been rude.

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The weather in November has not been anything to complain about.  It has been sunny without excessive heat or humidity.  I think it is a shame that young people in Wuxi have to be in school.  Really, this should be holiday time for students and their parents.  Summer in Wuxi is a time when people should be shut indoors or attending school.  Autumn in Wuxi is when it is ideal to be outside and not in a classroom.

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November 11th in China is single's day though recently it has turned into a shopping holiday as bad as Black Friday in America and Canada.

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Tony is being bullied at school.  Jenny is angry.  I have these questions:  What are the teachers doing?  Is the bullying because Tony is different?  Should I be angry about it?

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On the 10th of November I learned that all the taxi drivers in Wuxi were on strike.  Reason?  Didi, which is the Uber style app in Wuxi.  I didn't know about the strike till a colleague told me about it.  Apparently news of the strike was suppressed on WeChat. (Which reminds me of the news blackout that initially happened during the Wuxi Water Crisis of 2008. No bad news happens in Wuxi...)

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Tony wants to listen to Beatles songs.  A stage in a boy's development?  I think I discovered the Beatles at a similar age.

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Hearing about the taxi strike gave me something to talk about with students.  One student told me that she was able to get a taxi driver to come pick her up at her company but the driver came in his personal car and gave her a pre-printed receipt.  The driver, I told the student, was scabbing which I found interesting because it re-enforced this suspicion I had that the locals will cheat whenever they can.

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A student guessed that the population of the USA was 2 billion, after I had told her that the population of China was 1.3 billion.

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On Sunday, November 19th, I took the 25 bus all the way downtown, instead of transferring to the subway.  I listened to a Mother Angelica podcast and looked out the window where it seemed to me that the economic development I was looking at was spotty.  I would pass some finished construction projects alongside vacant lots full of trash and subsistence farming; and as I got closer to downtown, I saw a lot of closed storefronts in buildings that had been around since before I had moved to Wuxi thirteen years ago.  The older storefronts closed down were an omen, I thought, of what was going to happen to our school.

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On Sunday, November 19th, Tony lamented that he had to go to “frigging school” the next day.

His lament was mine.  I mean I hate it when he goes to his school.

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Down the road, that Casa Kaulins faces, is the Hui Shan District Government Building.  It has been a site for protests, and as I was about to drive past it on Monday, November 20th, I saw a group of older locals walking towards its entrance with signs.  I would have loved to have seen what would have transpired but I was in my car and had no place to stop, along with the fact that I am too conspicuous as a white foreigner to be a lookie-lou.

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I phoned my mother in late November and we got onto the topic of her family's escape from Latvia and the Soviets in 1944.  The Soviets and Germans were shooting at each other from opposite sides of a river near my mother's family farmstead.  Her mother faced with the prospect of the Soviets coming and sending all her family to Siberia, decided to put my mother, my mother's three sisters and my mother's brother on a wagon and horse with a few possessions, and head to the coast of Latvia.  From there, they were able to board a boat to Germany.  They spent some time in Germany and Poland, and were able to get out of the Soviet occupation zone and apply to immigrate to Canada, which they were able to do in 1955.

It must why I have always felt I have a lead a charmed existence.

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Maybe, I will have Tony move to Canada in time to start his junior high.  I don't like the idea of him living in dormitories for his middle school life.

This gives me two years or so to plan.

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I made a joking sort of Christmas/Birthday* wish list for my Speakers Corners which went as follows:

Lego
Iphone
Ipad
Macbook Pro
Size 47 shoes
a leather bound edition of the complete works of Shakespeare
silk sheets
dryer sheets
rosary beads
a Donald Trump tie
a Hamilton Tiger-Cats t-shirt
a “Make America Great Again” hat
Dove Chocolate with almonds
Crown Royal Whiskey
an AR-15 rifle
a Lugar pistol
Starbuck's gift certificate
a Fred Astaire poster
a map of Latvia.

You many be surprised my wanting a Hamilton Tiger-Cats t-shirt.  I saw a person wearing a Hamilton Tiger-Cats cap on the Skytrain and I have to admit it looked good.  It was probably the first time I had seen anyone wearing Tiger-Cat stuff.

You may also be appalled by my wanting weapons.  Well, gun owners are persecuted and so having some guns would be a great way for me to carry a cross for Christ and defend myself from the atheistic state.

*My birthday is December 24th.

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 It stabs my heart to the quick to hear that Tony is being bullied at school.  The who is not so important to me as the why of this?  Is it because Tony is a little different?  Or is Tony asking for it?

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I was annoyed by Jenny telling me that I was seen to have not been watching Tony at a swimming class.  All the other parents, Jenny told me, were.  First off, this was annoying because someone reported this to Jenny.  Second off, the idea of closely watching Tony in his swimming class is totally anathema to my idea of what kind of parent I want to be.  I don't want to be a Chinese style, Helicopter Chairman Mao, Xi Jing Ping, authoritarian style parent.  And anyway, Tony needs time to be by himself and he doesn't need me to be tiger-fathering him.  It is enough that Jenny tiger mothers him six nights a week.

I love my parents so much for just leaving me alone when I was growing up.  Now, it could be argued that I suffered a lot because of their just letting me do what I wanted to do, as I did  a lot of bonehead things when I was growing up and adopted a lot of stupid attitudes and failed in many ways.  But these failures would have destroyed a lesser man, and if my mediocre fate is what I deserve that I shouldn't complain or let it get me down.  Wanting freedom means you can't be blaming others for what is wrong in your life.

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As November comes to an end, I look ahead to the next holidays which are Christmas and the Western New Year.  I have decided to throw in the towel for planning or wanting something interesting to happen.  Last year's Christmas dinner at the Kempenski which I had so looked forward to and ended up being so disappointed by** has made me resign myself to letting Jenny plan what we will do at Christmas.  As far as I am concerned, I will be happy to not go out during those two holidays.  The only things I will care about is that Tony is happy with the Christmas presents he gets and that I observe the holiday in my solipsisticly religious way.

**The dinner was a money making exercise for the hotel.  They packed as many people as they could into the banquet hall so the end result was a Christmas dinner with 500 Chinese buffet attendees and my wanting to get out of the place but not being able to because of the money we had shelled out.

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The government office got word that they were about to get a surprise inspection visit from a higher-up.  The woman who got the heads-up informed everyone but a person who had closed his office door.   When the inspector came, everyone put on an appearance of doing something except the man who behind the door.  He was discovered to be watching a video on his computer and was given hell for it with his name being posted on a big shaming poster.  The woman felt bad for having not told him.  When she made this confession, she also said that the surprise inspection was creating an atmosphere of extreme tension at work.  Anyway, it is said to be one of Xi Jing Ping's initiatives, these surprise inspections.

November also ended with news of suicides of Chicom government officials like a mayor who was caught embezzling funds and a high ranking military officer who was also said to be facing charges of corruption.  Talk of Xi Jing Ping wanting to take China back to the 1970s can maybe be replaced with his wanting to bring the Cultural Revolution.  It seems that the level of suicide in China is approaching Cultural Revolutionary levels...

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Since, I won't be publishing another blog entry till 2018, I'll wish my rare readers and even rarer readers who have managed to make it to the end of this entry, a Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas!  And that's all you're going to get!

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If you have any comments on anything you have read in this blog, please send an email to andiskaulins@qq.com or andiskaulins@hotmail.com.  Please mention that you are making a comment on my blog in the email title space.

December 2014 AKIC Notes

December 2014, I did the least amount of writing for this blog since I started it in 2005 (2006?). Why? I had been occupied with other things like my son Tony and whatever my wife Jenny wanted me to do, so there wasn't time to sit down and type my attempts at observations and thoughts. When I had spare time – actually a lot despite what I just typed – I was studying Chinese and reading books. I finished reading my 60^th book of the year just after Christmas because I had decided in late December 2013 to keep track of the books I was reading and was as a result, wanting to achieve a milestone number of books read. The 60^th book was the novel True Grit that had been the basis of two movies of the same name including the one starring John Wayne. The novel was amazing. It was a simple enough story but was so well written: a good way to end a list of books read. I also read the blog of my favorite living writer David Warren who became amazingly prolific in December, publishing a gem of an essay every day. Warren is a traditionalist Catholic, who despises Liberalism, Capitalism, and other Materialist philosophies. Instead of trying to find a middle way between the competing materialist ideologies of Socialism and Capitalism, Warren tells of how Catholicism properly practiced, transcends these false choices and did so before the Enlightenment. Warren writes so well that I have practically given up any desires I had to be a writer. Good writing is re-writing I have learned from another favorite writer of mine and Warren is always tellings his readers how he is junking entries or always rewriting them. I find the time that I have for rewriting for even one monthly entry is not enough.

So the following is a series of recollections of things that happened near me or to me in December 2014. Some of them were made close to the event in question, but I didn't write anything from the middle of December till after Christmas. The writing about these times may not be in chronological order. I am typing them as they come to me.

• I was born in December 1964. Do the math.
• The first thing I witnessed of interest in December was the public safety bully boys of the Hui Shan District surrounding the driver of a three wheeled pedicab taxi. They had used two pick-up trucks to corral the pedicab so that it was against curb on the side of the road. Five of the black uniformed men stood around the pedicab driver as he stood, his head lowered, beside his vehicle. I have heard that the pedicabs are illegal but I have used them on numerous occasions. They are cheaper than a car taxi on a rainy day.
• Within a period of twenty hours, I had two men come up to talk because they had seen me appearing in those short commercials for our school on the Wuxi Metro television screens. One of the guys was gushing and said that I was handsome. He also said that he saw from the commercials that I was teaching pretty girls English. What he meant was that I was appearing in these commercials with the redoubtable Edith who is a very attractive girl. Anyway, this kind of celebrity recognition seems strange to me because I find I am in the midst of a spiritual crisis and mostly feel isolated in my life. Really, this “fame” I have does nothing for my soul or even my earthly self-esteem.
• It is early December and I am befuddled as to what I should buy Tony for Christmas. It had been an easy and enjoyable task to do this previous Christmases, but in 2014, I find it very problematic. I can't think of a toy that excites me, and now Tony has suddenly changed his mind about what excites him. He had been on a Ultraman kick but it suddenly ended when Jenny bought him a yo-yo in late November. He now doesn't want more Ultraman toys for Christmas and wants a yo-yo, even though he can play with the thing properly (I can't either I must confess). He doesn't care for Matchbox toys anymore. I would buy him Plarail accessories or even more engines, but the toy stores that I frequent don't sell them anymore. (Has Takara TOMY Plarail given up on China?) I would buy him some Lego but Jenny opposes the idea because Tony's habit is to play with toys and not put them back when they bore him. What Tony really wants is an Ipad but that would be like buying a drug addict cocaine for Christmas – not done.
• A lot of our students have the Iphone 6.
• With so many Chinese having cars, there will of course be fighting about parking spots. At my apartment building, the people living above us bought a Suzuki Swift and seem to be zealously trying to keep the parking spot in front of the building. On many occasions, they have parked their old e-bike in the spot as a way of trying to hold it. But for a few days, a white Toyota has taken up the spot and I can certainly detect the look of consternation of the face of the owner of the Suzuki Swift. One Saturday morning, I could hear screaming in front of our building and I looked to see a woman pointing in the direction of the parking spot. Jenny tells me that the owners of the Suzuki Swift have not paid for the parking spot... Which explains why they bought a Suzuki Swift.
• I was with Jenny & Tony riding the subway when I noticed that these young women, who were sitting down from us, were looking at Tony. I could have sworn that one of them got on her phone and called some other friends, who must have been sitting in another car on the train, about Tony. Tony sensed that the girls were staring at him and looked away. The girls, eight of them, as a group, then came over and asked Tony & me if they could take a photo with Tony but he ran away into the corner of the car and looked away. I had never seen him so shy and scared. [I took video which can be seen on the Internet.]
• David Warren's description of Saint Nicholas was inspiring. The son of a rich person, Nicholas was not a rich spoiled brat (like some of our students). He lived simply and gave his inheritance away, anonymously tossing bags of gold coins into people's houses. Sometimes, he even sneaked down chimneys to deposit the inheritance. He was also so orthodox that he decked the leader of the Arian heresy, who was really an enlightenment (we can figure it out all on our own) type. A very un-bishoplike thing to do but it was something he did for the love of Jesus.
• Do you have a form showing you changed your passport? I was asked this question by a bank worker. I suppose she meant, or maybe my recollection was wrong, to ask if I had proof that I had updated or renewed my passport. My thought at being asked that question was incredulousness. Could there be such a form? My next impulse was then to say sarcastically, that here was my current passport: all the proof I needed to show I had changed my passport.
• I had to go into the bank and be served by human beings and deal with the bureaucracy because our school had told us that the bank was updating their plastic cards, making them more high tech and all that. If it would improve our service, I had in theory no objection to going to the bank and getting the card updated. I did worry about the time it would take – especially if I had to wait in line longer than it would take to have the card all changed and updated. I was told it wouldn't take that long, just bring the old card and the passport, and all would be looked after.
• But of course, I had to deal with the bureaucratic curse. To get my new card I had to make two trips and spend nearly two hours in the bank.
• On the first trip, the process seemed to be going along smoothly enough. (I did forget my password, having transposed two digits of it in my memory, but a phone call to Jenny set me right.) The clerk – or I should say one of the clerks – noticed that the passport number they had on their records did not match the number on my current passport. This, I told them, was because I had gotten the account over ten years and – as I would later discover – two passports ago. It was then that I was asked if I had any other identification I could show them or proof that I had changed my passport. That ended my first trip to the bank. I was to go home and find my old passport.
• I phoned Jenny about this and she told me that I should have just gotten a new bank account. I felt dumb at first after she said this and wondered why I hadn't thought of doing this myself. And so for a short time I was committed to getting a new account at the bank. But then I wondered why the bank workers hadn't suggested this either.
• One of the reasons to not get a new bank account was that it was a stupid and bureaucratic and onerous process that was best avoided. So, in the evening after my first trip to the bank, I got Jenny to retrieve my old passports. She in fact realized that I had to bring two old passports – not one – to the bank because I had in fact renewed my passport twice while in China.
• So the next morning, having no classes at school, I went to the bank with my old bank card and three of my passports: two expired and one current. (I have another old passport at home but that had expired in the 1980s.) It took them one hour to change the passport number in their computer system. The clerk who was processing this change didn't want to make any mistakes and evidently, had never seen a Canadian passport before. She continually asked questions of other clerks and supervisors (there was one supervisor whose job it was to stick her finger into an electronic fingerprint reader in order to authorize whatever it was the clerk was doing. I saw the supervisor stuck her finger in the machine four times.) The clerk was confused with how to enter my name (Andis Edmunds Kaulins) because she was wasn't sure which name was my family name and which name was my given name, and she didn't know what to make of my middle name Edmunds. (This confusion is a result of a differing practice of placement of family names in the West and in China. In the West, the family name is the last name; in China, the family name is the first name.) When asked to print my name, I caused further confusion by printing “Andis Kaulins” and they made me change it to “Andis Edmunds Kaulins.” A further delay was caused by my not knowing my address. They had to ask around to get the address for my school. Yet another delay occurred and I was then asked it there was an address on my passport. Having gotten annoyed at this point by the clerk's constant questioning of her co-workers and her evident confusion at looking at my passport, and her further studying line-by-line some kind of page-long directive she was consulting which must have dealt with how to change passport numbers in the system, I told them there wasn't. The clerk who spoke English – not the clerk who was processing the passport number change – told me that they needed a Canadian address in their system because five letters, not three were require in the system's computer data base. I told them that I had been in China for ten years and would have to make address up. I then swore at them, saying that I had been told that this card change that I was told that I had to do would take no longer then ten minutes. I can't recollect whether it was before or after the swearing bout that I noticed a back log of people were waiting to be served. So, I decided to make a show of it for them and got up and started pacing, my hands on my hips. This caused one of the people who had been waiting a long time because of me to approach the window I was being served at and to ask what the delay was. Mercifully for them and for the clerks and for me, I finally got my new card and was able to go on my way. With a sense of relief that the process was finally finished, I thanked the clerk and sheepishly apologized to her for my swearing.
• I had hoped to get my Christmas shopping done the day I had my bank card changed. I wanted to buy Tony a Tomica Parking Garage. There was one at the Sunning Grocery Store but it was 599 RMB. So, I thought I would ask Jenny to see if she can buy it on the Internet. I also looked at Lego toys. Tony would love them but Jenny had expressed strong opposition to buying them – Tony would be leaving the pieces in every possible nook and cranny of our apartment. [Jenny vetoed my wanting to buy the Garage on taobao saying it was a stupid idea.]
• When I go to 85 degrees to buy coffee, I always have to tell the clerk to not put my take out coffee in a bag. When I go to McDonalds to buy a meal, the drink gets put in a bag because I can't be bothered to tell them to not bother. I mention this little detail because it is a cultural difference between China and the land I had lived over a decade ago.
• What is the point of me following news or politics? Having a view on it does necessarily make me a superior human being. Having the proper view of President Obama or even Prime Minister Harper is easy to do and requires little effort on my part. And really they don't matter a fig to Jenny or Tony or anyone else I come into contact with.
• In a Speaker's Corner I did about the topic of blindness, a student said that the United States had been discovered to have tortured some people. Later, this same student then understood what I meant when I when I talked about how blindness was not only physical and involuntary, but could be willful and chosen. However, he managed to show he got what I meant about this kind of blindness while at the same time demonstrating he was blind in this way. “The Japanese,” he said, “were blind to the truth about the islands.” He was referring to those disputed Fishing Islands.
• Every once in a while, a student embued with political emotions will expose himself to me and the other trainers bringing up issues of political controversy in the midst of a discussion. I sometimes choose to parlay with these students but mostly I don't bother because I can't speak in a manner about these topics that the students could understand. In the case of the student at my Blindness SPC: I had taught him in a the class the evening before, and I saw that he loved to talk, but had poor listening.
• All the best restaurants in China serve white rat meat, I was told.
• December 13^th was a solemn day in China, especially in Nanjing where the anniversary of the Nanking Massacre was marked.
• December 15^th, I went to the underground of an apartment building in our community – that is, not our building – to retrieve our e-bike which was being recharged, and discovered that the extension cord we had been using had been stolen. We had had the charger for six years. Likely culprits? Some other e-bike owner or maybe some worker who needed an extension cord very quick and knew that e-bike charging areas are a great place to find one quickly.
• Refer to the first bulleted item of this entry and you may guess my feelings of bemusement are the fact that I may be going to the 60^th birthday Party of Someone's grandmother this month.
• Tony's Canadian grandmother had cataract surgery done on one of eyes this month. I have confess that I feel guilt that she is living by herself in the harsh climate of Brandon, Manitoba while I am here in China. For 24 hours, her eyes were bandaged and she had to pay someone to look after her for that time. [Tony's Canadian grandfather had similar surgery done on his eyes. He had to go to Minnedosa (a hour's drive from Brandon) to have the surgery done. There were no local operating rooms available. Mom had her surgery done at the Hospital where Dad had died.]
• The Damnedest thing. Some buildings in Wuxi are heated. You would think this was a good thing and that I would love going into those buildings, but I in fact hate them. I don't mind cold weather because I can dress for it. What I really hate is being overdressed. So when I go into a heated building when I am dressed for a cold building, I suffer.
• One of my students works for a company that designs satellite dishes. The users of his products are in the poor and rural parts of China that don't have access to cable or internet. I asked him if he could point his satellite dish at foreign satellites and he told me “it was forbidden.” [How often students tell me something is forbidden.]
• The Wife is on the ball. Jenny is already thinking of booking a flight to Canada in June. I have floated the idea of her and Tony staying in Canada for an extra week. I only have three weeks to spend in Canada. She wants to spend a month.
• Someone gave Tony a Lego Fire Rescue Helicopter toy. It took an hour for me and Tony to put the thing together. When I say “me and Tony,” I mean to say that I tried to get Tony to help in the building but as it got to the end of the process, I lost patience and did the finishing assembling touches myself.
• With the two cops being shot in New York, I can't help but be tempted to say the Left in the United States, starting at the top with Obama and working down to De Blasio and Sharpton and the hash-tagging mobs have blood have on their hands. For they have all been propagating a lie that the police are out to kill young black men every chance they can get. So big a lie it is that has been advanced, that you would have to think they were crazy, like the cop killer was, to actually believe it. In their sane moments, the Left, from Obama on down, surely does recoil from the assassination of the two cops. So it probably is over the top to say the American Left has blood on its hands in this particular incident, but it doesn't excuse the stupidity or willful blindness of the irresponsible rhetoric the Left has advanced in their stupid lie-filled campaign against supposed violence of cops against black people.
• Before Christmas, Tony spent many an evening leafing through the Lego catalogue I had snagged from a toy store in the Hen Long Plaza.
• For the secret Santa exchange held at our school’s Christmas Party, I bought a Lamborghini.
• A toy Lamborghini.
• On December 27, Tony & I rode the Wuxi Metro Line #2 for the first time. We took it to the Ikea station where I bought much needed shower curtains and was gladdened to see that Tony liked eating Ikea hot dogs.
• I walked past what looked like protesters at the big government building near our apartment complex. As I was approaching, I decided to cross to the other side of the street and get as far away from the scene as I could.
• Stupid man walks into elevator entrance blocking those trying to get out. I swear at him and turn around and give him the evil eye as the door closes.
• I worked Christmas Eve. Thoughts of the modest circumstances in which the nativity happened made me enjoy the fact of it.
• I buy Tony a lot of Lego toys for Christmas.
• Tony watches the Lego movie twice.
• On a Saturday morning, I parked the e-bike in front of our apartment building for Jenny and I later learned that it had been knocked down so that both its mirrors had been smashed. I suspect that a car may have backed into it.
• Part of the Wuxi Metro Line #2 runs above ground along empty fields which are surely going to be developed.
• Christmas Day was a day off for the Kaulins Family China. We slept in late, did some chores around the house, and then had a big supper at a Japanese restaurant in the Hen Long Plaza. I did post a lot of nativity scene paintings to a social app to try to impress upon my Chinese contacts, the real reason for the holiday. Most of the students I talked to however, told me they weren't going to do anything to celebrate Christmas. They saw it as a foreign holiday that had nothing to do with them. Feeling somewhat annoyed at one student who said this with a smirk, I said that Spring Festival was a parochial Chinese celebration that had no significance, no positive message for humanity in general.
• Come to think of it, almost anything Chinese is only of significance for the Chinese, not humanity in general.

The Andis Kaulins in China Diary Entry for December 23 to December 29, 2013

Highlights of this entry:

• Andis weighed in on the Duck Dynasty controversy.
• Andis didn't celebrate his birthday.
• Andis & Jenny bought Tony lots of presents for Christmas.
• Construction around Andis's school was very annoying.
• Andis was listening to one particular son by the Yardbirds.
• Andis got Friday off because his school had no electricity.
• Andis listen to the audiobook version of the Politically Correct Guide to Socialism.

Monday [December 23]

[Home Laptop]

• I now know who is Phil Robertson. He is the cool old dude on Duck Dynasty. Based on what I have seen of him in the show, I would trade him for a million progressive-metro-sexual-socialist men any day. He is the salt of the earth.
• I watched the Halloween episode of Duck Dynasty – it ends with a prayer.
• Tony slept the afternoon at home. Jenny pulled him from school when she went to bring him his lunch.
• Tony spent the evening on the Train Simulator program. He was taking a passenger train and stopping it at stations.
• He also understood what I meant when I told him that he had to put the train in gear before he could apply the throttle.
• No work today.
• I had a conversation on Twitter with a PhD student who had spent two years in China. He was very good at speaking Chinese and drinking so he had a good time in China. He now studies ancient middle civilization and has had to learn Greek, Latin, and other languages.
• Having not spoken Chinese for eight years, he says he has forgotten it all.
• I may publish Dispatches from Akicistan tomorrow.

December 24 [Tuesday]

[School Laptop]

• I work 13:00 to 21:00 today.
• It isn't my birthday today, or so Tony said when I tried to tell him that it was. “Not your birthday!” he said. “It is me birthday!”
• I will indulge myself best I can today since it is my birthday. I won't worry so much about my to do list.
• I won't mention it being my birthday to anyone at school. I only let my family and you, my rare readers, know.
• I spent the morning at the dentist. I had to wait a little longer than usual – two people showed up before me. I then had to spend a longer time than usual on the chair – seventy five minutes. I choked when the dentist put my upper teeth in a mold. I started breathing through my nose and the dentist said Yes! Yes! Yes! Jenny wasn't with me at that point.
• I indulge myself by watching video on the bus: I am watching the first part of the Franco Zeffirelli four-part series about the life of Jesus of Nazareth. I am at the point where Joseph & Mary are heading to Bethlehem to take part in a census.
• I didn't publish Dispatches #4 today.

December 25 [Wednesday]

[Home Laptop]

• Yesterday, my birthday, was a day of inconveniences. I went to dentist and spent longer there than I had planned. I then worked and didn't get any breaks like a no-show or a cancellation of a class – I had to do my full slate of classes. Taking the bus home, traffic was slow enough so that I missed my early connection with the 635 bus and so then had to wait for a later connection with the 635 which meant I had to stand for about thirty minutes on the way home.
• At least, Tony was happy to see me when I got home. He had been eagerly anticipating my arrival home last night with his Christmas presents.
• This morning, we slept in. Tony had opened all his presents on Christmas Eve.
• We are not having a traditional Christmas day. There is no snow, no tree in the house, no decorations, and no Christmas turkey or Christmas ham. For lunch we have gone to the Xinjiang restaurant in the nearby Wanda Plaza. This afternoon, Tony is playing with his toys in the living room along with Jerry, the son of Jenny's friend Ling Ling. We will have dinner at home. Jenny is cooking up some chicken, her way.
• On Facebook, I had a lot of birthday greetings. At school, I had one and I was embarrassed to get it. I said nothing about it to anyone there. Some things are just not shared.
• I tried to wish to Merry Christmas to as many Chinese as I could today. However, I told the motorcyclists running a red light as I was crossing the street to do something nasty to themselves.

Thursday [December 26]

[School Laptop]

• I work 10:00 to 21:00 today.
• Christmas was too short. At 8:00 PM last night, it was time to pack things in because we all had things to do early in the morning like go to school or go to work.
• And while I am in the complaining mood, Downtown Wuxi looked gruesome. Construction and the fog gave it a gray and brown tinge.
• Walk into the McDonald’s near the construction and the floors are filthy with trodden-in sand and muck.
• What happened in 2013? What happened in 2012? I am doing some English corners on the year 2013 and I don't want to get things mixed up.
• Just for the record, I am listening over and over again to a song called Stroll On performed by the Yardbirds in the film Blowup. Listening to that song prompted me to listen to more songs in the Yardbirds' oeuvre, as I suppose the French might say, and I can say that Stroll On is the only good song they ever did and even then the song disappoints you with an abrupt end when you wish they could have carried on for another minute or so.
• The teachers at the local high school in my area were working yesterday. Poor sots. All the teachers at Wuxi Public Schools had to work Christmas.
• One of my students went to see the musical Momma Mia last night. He didn't like it and didn't much care for my singing ABBA songs for him either.
• It is 11:10 AM and it is freezing in the office. So, I will put on my toque again. I am wearing my green military long underwear.
• I told my students jokingly that Boxing Day was the one day of the year when you can walk up to a foreigner and punch him.
• I read an article at Taki's Magazine site that said the whole Duck Dynasty controversy was a publicity stunt to get the hicks who like the show and support its morality to get up in arms and buy more Duck Dynasty merchandise. If that was the case, why would A&E suspend Phil Robertson? The writer would say that Phil Robertson would be reinstated after Christmas and sales of Duck Dynasty merchandise would have peaked. I think the writer is of a conspiratorial frame of mind.
• Morrissey's published an Autobiography. I found an epub version of it on the Internet. I have started reading and have picked up many examples of bad grammar...
• The construction around the school, that I have been complaining about, has given me one benefit: Friday, I have just one class to do because our building is not going to have any electricity. My class will be at the City Hall.

Friday [December 27]

[Home Laptop]

• I just have the one English Corner at City Hall to do and I am free the rest of the day.
• I had been hoping to have coffee with the True Git this afternoon but he has a bad cold and has to stay in Shanghai. I am not sure what I will do instead....
• [Later]
• Instead, I took photos of a subway stop in the Hui Shan District. As I took the bus to school this morning, I saw the subway station looking very forlorn beside a big empty field. I decided that in the afternoon, on my way home, I would get off the bus and take photos of the station. [You can see the photo at AKIC wordpress.]
• On the way to the City Hall, I saw a government building – I could tell from the emblem over its entrance – and asked the handler what its purpose was. He told me that it the headquarters of the armed police of Wuxi. Military Police? I asked. He said it wasn't that kind of police but a department of the civilian police force that was armed.
• During the English Corner, I learned that many of the civil servants had done a lot of traveling during 2013. They had gone to Moscow, Denmark, Finland, Sweden, Germany, and Chattanooga. I was embarrassed to admit I had gone a day trip to Shanghai once but otherwise did absolutely no traveling.

Saturday [December 28]

[School Laptop]

• I work 10:00 to 17:00 today.
• The intersection of Zhongshan and Xueqian Roads is ugly. The road and the sidewalks around it have been torn up. In the center of the intersection, a big hole has been dug. It isn't easy for pedestrians to make their way around the workers, holes, equipment, and piles of debris.
• Yesterday afternoon, I was on the computer while Jenny was making and helping Tony do his homework – something I don't like to witness. Jenny, the tiger mother, screams at him, and Tony, the tiger mother's child, cries in terror.
• In the evening, Tony & I walked to the Wanda Plaza Mall. We had dinner at McDonald's. I had a burger and wings. I had ordered the wings for Tony only to have him tell me he didn't want them. So I ate the wings and bought Tony chicken nuggets. While he ate the nuggets, I read to him from some storybooks which I had found for free on the Internet in pdf format. It was a nice moment and I couldn't have thought of a better way to spend a Friday evening.
• A thought that came to me: Like my Dad who isolated himself in Brandon, I isolate myself in the Hui Shan District. He held and I hold political beliefs, and each of us probably obsessed or obsess about them. I at least know that it doesn't matter what I think, even if I am correct and the others are wrong. I suspect that my Dad was bitter because he was never listened to.
• I shouldn't have asked the civil servants if Wuxi had a good year. They all seemed hesitant to answer the question. Finally one of them offered up the fact that some magazine said Wuxi was the best city in live on the Chinese mainland.
• I just got a phone call from Jenny. Tony was looking for my Ipad Mini. I made the mistake of downloading a train simulator program on it last night and then showing it to him.

[Home Laptop]

• I drool looking at this girl at school, but to talk to her.... uggh. Not much there.
• I lost my temper in my second last of today. A student didn't understand the word “boat.” “What is a boat?” she asked. I tried to explain it to her using the word in three or four sentences, but then one of the other students, a little kid of 13, said 船! I wanted to smack him in the head but thankfully didn't. As it was, I called him a stupid monkey three or four times, and told him and the other students that translating wasn't helping them...
• It not the first time I have called the students and it won't be the last. Some of the students make sentences that aren't worthy of a monkey. Examples: “Everyone must eat vegetables to healthy!”; “I broke my pencil.”; “I sleep in my bedroom!”; and “I eat salad everyday!” [The student who made that sentence has earned the nickname salad boy from me!]
• It isn't racist to call them monkeys because they aren't black.
• I do call my son monkey even it is only to take the curse off calling the students at school monkeys.
• I finished listening to an audiobook, on my Ipod, called the Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism. Its author is Kevin D. Williamson. The book was great. Books denouncing Socialism are a dime a dozen but this book did mention some things I hadn't thought of myself. For instance, Socialism is such a bad system that even the best managers can get it to work. If you take a successful businessman from an industry and place him as the socialist head of the industry, with all the power of government to bear on the industry, he will achieve results no better than bureaucrats in the industry. Why? He won't have the proper price signals to help him make decisions. Also, the American education system is so bad because it is socialist.
• I was reading about the War of 1812. That the British could have held the Americans to a draw was quite something. They were fighting the Napoleonic Wars in Europe at the time. The Brits were fortunate that many of the Americans didn't want to fight the war in the first place.
• I am listening to the 23 albums of the Smiths and Morrissey that I downloaded via torrent.

Sunday [December 29]

[Home Laptop]

• Didn't go to Church today. My excuse? No churches in the area...
• I did take Tony to Pizza Hut for lunch.
• He has a horribly running nose. He went through four Kleenexes while at the restaurant.
• We were seated at a window and thus subject to gawking from passersby.
• I then took Tony to his afternoon drawing class.
• Then I meet Jenny. She took me to get my haircut at a salon in the Wanda Plaza. She was dismayed to discover that my head is unsymmetrical. She had been giving the hairstylist heck...
• The hairstylist was a short slight fellow with thick lips and a pompadour haircut. Having listened to some Morrissey albums last night and thus perused the album covers, I couldn't help but think that the stylist would have been a Morrissey fan if he had lived in England.
• Afterward, Jenny & I went to the Wanda Plaza grocery store. I took the groceries home, a rather arduous task, and Jenny went to pick up Tony at his drawing class.
• I read that Phil Robertson had been reinstated on Duck Dynasty. Perhaps it was a marketing stunt.