Milk Tea Lines, HK, Trump, Bare Midriffs, Pedestrians

• In North America, I remember going to a Crispy Creme Donut shop and seeing long lines. In China, I have heard tales and witnessed long lines at milk tea shops. I had a student once tell me that they went to Shanghai for the day to buy some milk tea. The day entailed taking the train out to Shanghai (probably about a hour and a half), going to the shop, waiting in line (for many hours), finally buying the milk tea, and then taking the train home in the evening. I have seen lines in Wuxi as well for the opening of some popular milk tea chain. Talking about this with a student, I was told that these lines I had witnessed may have been the result of the milk tea shop paying people to stand in line to create the frenzy. Someone told her that someone they knew had been pay a thousand rmb to stand in line for a day. I thought this amount paid for one person could not possibly be, though I could believe a Chinese company using this tactic to create a frenzy for their product. (Another possibility that a colleague mentioned to me was that a person could make that much money by standing in line for the customers. That is, they do actually wait in line to buy tea for other people.)
• “Bad people in Hong Kong are trying to make it independent from China.” That was one student's take on the HK situation. They have also told other teachers that the Americans are paying Hong Kongers 3,000 rmb a day to protest.
• What do I think about Trump? I didn't initially hope for him to become president. I did hope that he would beat Hilary. I currently prefer him to all the other candidates currently running against him for the 2020 election. The only sort of candidate who I would prefer to him would be one who I believe could better accomplish the policy goals that Trump said he had during the 2016 election campaign. A Republican who ran for the presidency in 2020 based on progressive or establishment objections to Trump would not be worthy. The best objection to Trump I have read are from those who supported him and have been disappointed by his not being able to achieve the policy goals he stated in the 2016 campaign. These critics says that his mistakes and omissions have resulted from he not really understanding how government works and not using the powers he does have to battle the entrenched bureaucracy that is clearly against him.
• The hysteria from Trump's election is a result of his having put a “R” behind his name. Nothing more. If Ted Cruz was elected, we would be witnessing CDS (Cruz Derangement Syndrome).
• On many occasions, I have written how on hot days, many local men will take off their shirts or roll them up halfway to expose their stomachs. I am sure that I have reported witnessing many specific incidents of this in blog. So if I am to make another entry in this blog about another specific incident of midriff-baring, I should have something new to report. Here it goes. I was standing at a crosswalk at a street corner down the street from the entrance to the complex containing Casa Kaulins, when I saw a plump local man with exposed stomach trying to cross the street. He was tottering like he was drunk and clutching at his stomach like he was a pregnant woman posing for an expectant mother portrait. He seemed menacing and my instinct was to avert my glance. When the walk signal appeared, I quickly crossed the street, not bothering to see if he was able to cross the street in good time.
• The local authorities are trying to get cars to stop for street-crossing pedestrians. At certain pedestrian crossings monitored by cameras, signs have been posted stating that drivers caught not yielding will be fined. If the authorities can get local drivers to stop their long-standing habit of not slowing down and swerving around pedestrians, I would honor them. But it is hard to change culture. Many local pedestrians are intimidated by cars and not accustomed to being yielded to, so when driving and stopping for pedestrians, I often have to honk my horn at them to get them to cross. They will stand there stupidly waiting for all the cars to pass. As a pedestrian, I have come upon groups of locals standing at a pedestrian crossing waiting for traffic to pass. I have had to take the initiative and begin crossing the road and force cars to yield to me. They inevitably do and the local pedestrians will then follow me.

January 2018 Diary

Email me at andiskaulins@qq.com.

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I am starting to think that anti-racism is more of a problem than racism these days. Because of the anti-racism movement, many persons, who most certainly possess good will to all people of good will regardless of race or ethnicity, are being unfairly persecuted because they are not willing to be blind or lie about the bad things that people, who don't have a white hue of skin, will unfortunately do. In fact, the so-called anti-racists today have given up on the ideas of judging a person merely on the content of their character and their actions, and of trying to ignore their ethnicity or race.

The anti-racists have become in fact the sort of people they purport to hate.

* * * * *

Is China is the best country in the world to be?

Arguments for: Economic potential.

Arguments against: It's government.

* * * * *

I am stopping at zebra crossings to let pedestrians cross. It is not a common practice in China, or at least in the neck of the woods I inhabit in China. Chinese drivers will not yield to pedestrians unless the pedestrian has a claim on space. Driving in China I have had to stop yielding to pedestrians. But now, I have to adopt this habit because it is the right thing to do and because you can be now be fined if you don't. However, many of the local pedestrians aren't used to cars stopping for them and so I often stop and frustratingly watch a pedestrian hesitate and hesitate before crossing. Sometimes I have to give up on them and leave them standing on the curb.

One morning, I was driving on Hui Shan Da Dao, a busy three lane either-way road, and saw a woman standing, waiting to cross a zebra crossing. I was in the left most lane when I stopped for her. She hesitated to cross. Part of her hesitation was understandable because cars in the other lane weren't slowing down. After a few seconds, she did try to cross. But as she walked in front of my car, a van that was stopped behind me couldn't wait and quickly passed on my right, scaring the woman back onto the curb. I finally gave up on her and continued on my way.

Local pedestrians have to learn to be aggressive when crossing. They have to take the mindset that it is their right to cross at the zebra crossings and cars have to stop for them. That is what I do and I have often passed hesitant local pedestrians who end up following me across the street.

* * * * *

To drive a mini-van in China, it seems to me that you need a special license which you can only get by failing an IQ test.

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Slush in Wuxi. [In the first week of January.]

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Steve Bannon. It looks like he is feuding with Trump. Sad. It had my instinct to defend Bannon but it seems that though he is probably ideologically sound, he has made some political mistakes.

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I was at the subway station, about to put my bag on the x-ray machine belt when a woman hurriedly came from behind, reached around me and put her handbag on the belt in front of my bag. I screamed “Bitch!” at her a couple times without getting a reaction. But I had the satisfaction of passing her at the entry gates because she had problems having the scanner read her metro pass.

* * * * *

Tony & I saw the Last Jedi movie on a weekend morning (I won't say which one.) As I watched it, I could see the movie was flawed. I also had the sensation of it being long. Coming out of the cinema afterwards and if someone had asked me, I would have said that the film was okay but...

I very much objected to Yoda taking a stab at Luke Skywalker for keeping old texts. And thinking about it afterwards, I think the movie has a Maoist tinge to it with its characters talking about destroying the past and with what seemed a blatant appeal to Chinese sensibilities with having a Chinese looking character.

There was also the need to have female characters and characters of color appear.

Tony meanwhile thought the film was the best Star Wars movie ever. Or at least better than The Force Awakens and Rogue One.

* * * * *

We have a parking space in our apartment complex which is a good thing because parking spots in the complex are precious.

The parking spot we have had (and hopefully still have) has been good to us. It is not too far from our apartment and affords us quick exit from the complex.

However, this may change. Typically in China, bad things can happen unpredictably, arbitrarily and without warning. One Sunday evening we drove to our parking spot to find someone parking his giant SUV in it. When Jenny asked him what he was doing, he said he had paid for the spot with the security office the day before. In the parlance of this day and age, it was a WTF moment for us. At that moment, we parked the car in the usual spot, and Tony & I went home leaving Jenny to hash the matter out.

After ten tense minutes, she came home and told me that the security had made a mistake and rented the SUV driver the wrong spot. I felt relief and thanked God for the way the whole incident timed out. If we had been ten minutes earlier or later, we really would have been screwed.

But then the next day, the security phoned Jenny and asked her if we could move our car to a spot two spaces over (leftwards) from where we were parking. They wanted to give the guy our spot because that was the deal they had made and the money had been paid.

This wouldn't be such a problem except for the pillars. Our spot, #90, has a pillar on the passenger side blocking the passenger side front door; the other spot at which they would like us to park, #92, has a pillar on the driver's side. I initially thought that the #92 pillar would block the driver door on our car, but after checking I saw this was not the case and that I would be able to get out of the car easily. However, having #90's pillar to back up by makes parking and backing up easy for us, and we are used to it. If we switch to #92, we will have to back up in a different way, and if there is a car occupying the #91 space as we do so, it will be an annoyance. And for the large SUV, it would make sense to have the #92 spot because its width would make it hard for even the driver to get out of the vehicle if a car is parked in the #91 spot.

[The end result was that the driver of the big SUV decided to take the #92 spot.]

* * * * *

It's January 9^th and I feel foreboding because I have read on the Internet that the Chicoms are going to completely shut down all VPNs by January 11^th. I cross my fingers and hope that my VPN router will still be able to do the trick. It has been working well recently so a complete block by the GFW will be a big blow to my psyche as well as Tony's.

Jenny doesn't care and probably won't put up with my moaning about it.

[As January ends, our VPN is working fine.]

* * * * *

I parallel-parked my car behind a van which then drove off about thirty seconds later. This left a parking space in front of my car. I wondered if there was enough space in front of me for a car to easily park because many locals can't parallel-park for shit. And then I saw a white Ford sedan, long like a boat, try to park in that space. I decided to watch, concerned that the Ford might strike my car.

What I witnessed was annoying. The car actually was parked fine on its first attempt to get in the space, but the driver then pulled out and tried again to park in the space and again and again and again and again.... Five minutes passed and I was annoyed to a frothing rage.... The driver was female, and as I learned from a passerby, a new driver. I could only think of how “new” wasn't the word I would have used to describe the woman's driver status and how the word I would have used to have described her would have started with a “C.”

* * * * *

Tony said to me “I want to be a soldier.”

“Which army?” I asked him, “Canadian or Chinese?”

He replied Canadian which was nice but I pointed out to him that the Chinese would probably have more modern equipment.

If only I could find a way for Tony to join the American army.

* * * * *

I witnessed an e-bike rudely cut off another e-bike as I was walking to my school. The two e-bikes were practically side by side when the e-bike on the right-hand side decided to make a quick left turn. The e-bike on the left hand side had to quickly apply his brakes and it was the screeching of them that got my attention. It was as a blatant a cut-off as I had ever seen. I looked for a reaction from the e-biker who had been cut off. With a cigarette hanging from his lip, the cut-off e-biker's face was typical Chinese inscrutable, but he the looked back at the other e-bike.

* * * * *

The best part of The Last Jedi movie, for me, has been listening to the reaction. Many hated it and many liked it, like Tony. I find myself agreeing with Jonah Goldberg who was in between. He said the movie was not great but it was better than the prequels and had some good things in it.

* * * * *

Thinking to see the movie again. I asked Tony. He said yes. Now, we have to see what Jenny says. [She said no.]

* * * * *

Is Haiti a s***hole? Most certainly.

Does America need more immigrants from this and other s***holes? Probably not. These countries need to keep their human capital.

Is immigration an answer to the problem of places being s***holes? Debatable.

* * * * *

Tony said to me “Hitler had a Japanese mustache!” and I was first thinking Tony says the darnedest things. But it got me to thinking some about about his living in China, where he is exposed to lots of TV WWII dramatizations of Chinese fighting Japanese with mustaches under their noses; and so he would think that.

It was only recently that I thought of some of the Japanese as having Hitler mustaches.

* * * * *

Tony says he wants to go to Finland because that is where Santa Claus lives.

Not everything he says excites me.

* * * * *

So much reading I do that I can't think of anything original to say. So in the middle of January 2018, I feel like my mind is a desert.

* * * * *

Am I happier because I became a conservative? Yes.

* * * * *

Trump is more likely to be Joan Crawford than a racist. In fact, he is less racist than all his detractors, especially those who say he is a racist.

* * * * *

If Trump is crazy, how would you describe the media that he is denouncing? It seems to me that they are off their duff....

* * * * *

Some inspirational quotes:

• We never know what we want. So, if you think you want something, you shouldn't want it unless you are thinking that you really don't want it.
• Prefer the paradoxical to the rational.
• There is only one worse thing than not getting what you want; that is getting what you want.
• When should you feel most uncomfortable? When you feel comfortable.
• The only thing worse than being uncomfortable is being comfortable.
• Don't be friends with people you get along with. They will only make you feel comfortable and thus weaken you.
• Pain is good for you because it makes you stronger. Therefore, you should walk barefoot on broken glass at least once a day.
• There is only one thing worse than not being taken seriously, that is being taken seriously.
• We should take our silliness seriously and our seriousness sillily.
• Smile on the outside, frown on the inside or vice versa because you don't want to threaten people with your authenticity.
• People can't bear the truth; but they also can't bear lies that they think are untrue because others might think they are true.
• We should be blind to color except when it is trying to tell us something.
• You can't put a camel through the eye of a needle unless you have a really big needle or a very small camel.
• Don't overthink things or under-think things while always being aware that you are probably thinking about them wrongly.
• Don't let humility turn you into an overbearing egotist.
• What are three assets we really don't need? Cynicism, seriousness, pedantry and an ability to count.
• When should you never be scared? When you are in a scary situation.
• Don't double your efforts. Cube them. That is, no to E × 2, yes to E² (Where E > 2).
• You can always count on people to not be reliable.
• Is it better to have tried hard and failed, or to have had a relaxing afternoon of not having ventured and failed?
• If you make less things, you will eventually have less things to repair.

Maybe, I should say these quotes are perspirational. Not meant to inspire but to make you sweat.

* * * * *

The Wuxi 2018 Snow Live Blog:

January 24: Yesterday, I learned of a forecast that called for two days of blizzard conditions in Wuxi starting tonight. I was worried about the prospect of my having to drive Tony to school with snow and stupid drivers with no experience of driving in snow, and of Jenny picking up Tony in such conditions. The fretting lasted about all of three hours until a student in the evening told me that the schools were going to be closed for those two days. This news gave me so much relief and I became filled with exhilaration.

January 25: Yesterday evening, there was snow in the air as I walked home from the subway station. I saw snow collecting on car exteriors. After getting home, snow started collecting on the ground. Looking out the window of Casa K this morning, I saw a lot of snow on trees, grasses and bushes but the roads looked pretty good which makes the decision to preemptively close the schools look incorrect. Still, a snow day for Tony! I am happy even though I have to go to work.

January 25 later: This snow has fallen almost ten years to the date of the great Wuxi snow of 2008 which you can see video of on my Youtube channel. So far, less snow than 2008.

January 25: I am at school. There is snow collecting in the downtown as snow falls. I just got a coffee at the 85 Bakery and the place was empty. Perhaps, everybody is staying home, not going anywhere. Annoying thing: the zipper on the winter jacket I bought ten years ago has busted, but at least I have velcro to keep the jacket together.

January 26: It snowed last night and so work has been slow on account of no students coming to school. I might as well have gone home at 17:00 yesterday but there was a student who thought that he could drive forty minutes to school and have a two hour class from 19:00 to 21:00. I realized he was crazy when I went outside at dinner time and saw that the streets were very messy. And then I got word that he had cancelled and so I had to think more of his sanity that I had been. If this sort of weather happened in Winnipeg, there would have been no need to cancel school but this being Wuxi, which is not used to snow, it was a good thing that the decision was made. I heard on social media that there had been 6,000 accidents in Wuxi yesterday. I was sure if I could believe this because I hadn't seen any accidents in my travels to and from home to work.

January 26 evening: I hear that it is supposed to snow again on the 27^th. I read that schools will be closed on the 29^th and 30^th (Monday and Tuesday). Tony and I like this; Jenny does not.

January 27 early: I leave home early. The roads, I see, are dry with piles of snow or frozen patches. It is not snowing. I take the subway to downtown. Coming out of the station, I see snow is starting to fall.

January 27 (Saturday) at work: Saturday and I was supposed to be teaching the kiddies. I come to work and am told immediately that my classes with them have been cancelled. There is a 13:00 private class that I will teach if Roy (Roy Boy!!) actually attends.

January 30 (Tuesday. (Sunday and Monday were days off.)): The rest of Saturday, the city was a mess because it snowed heavily, and the streets and sidewalks were very slushy. I spent my days not driving the car and mostly sitting at home. Sunday, I took Tony downtown via the bus and subway. For Tony, it was a chance to experience snow. He had never seen so much of it before.

It was cold last night. This morning, I started the car up and it didn't start so easily. That sound of the ignition turning over was a sound I hadn't heard in years. When I arrived at work, I talked to a Chinese colleague who I knew had a car and she told me that she had the same problem starting her car. It scared her, she told me, and I told her what it was like in cold weather in Canada and how we needed booster cables, things which I don't think they have in southern China.

* * * * *

Am I a Roundhead or a Cavalier? I suspect I am a Cavalier and, while you are at it, a Jacobin.

* * * * *

Because of the snow, I told some of the students and Chinese co-workers, nine months from January 26, October 26 could be a busy day. They didn't get my joke.

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My new passport! My new, expires in ten year, passport is here!!!

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I took Tony to the Subway sandwich shop at Sanyang Plaza. As I suspected, he liked a sandwich heated with bacon, spicy Italian sausage and Cheese, with Ketchup added afterwards. The sandwich maker couldn't believe that Tony didn't want any vegetables on it. The sparseness of ingredients on the sandwich made it seem very expensive: 60 rmb. I can understand the stories I have read on the Internet of the chain starting to fail in North America.

* * * * *

It is lonely life I lead in Wuxi for which there are many reasons. Major reason, I suppose, is that my kind is not here. But then I never meet my kind in Canada. And there so are probably disagreeable things about my personage...

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Email me at andiskaulins@qq.com.

September 2017 Notes

The Kaulins Family China spent the early part of September 2017, recovering from our trip to Canada:

• Tony told me that he would miss Canada and his uncle Ron.
• Tony also missed his Canadian grandfather. One of the strangest and saddest things for me to witness was Tony sitting in the living room of Casa K in early September, crying because he realized his grandfather was dead. Tony had been shown photos of his grandfather wearing military uniforms and was very impressed. When he cried over Grandpa, he was with Jenny and somehow he must have dawned on him then that Grandpa was gone and never coming back. [Moral to others: The earlier in life you have children the better it is for them because they can spend more time with their grandparents. It also gives you one less thing to regret later in life.]
• Back driving on the roads of Wuxi, I immediately experienced spasms of road rage. Three weeks of being in a driving environment, I could understand, wiped away what little tolerance I had for the Chinese way of doing things. I was back to honking horns and giving fingers.
• Jenny complained of not being able to sleep well. It must be jet lag, she said.
• I returned to find the menu of the Expat restaurant, I had been eating at as a treat for myself, to be boring and unattractive.

* * * * *

It seems, as September is in its early stages, that driving Tony, who is in grade four this term, to school and picking him up will be more annoying than it had been when he was in grade three. Xishan School has two campuses for the primary school grades. The newer campus, that was built in time for the previous school year, is for grades one to three; the older became the location for just grades four to six. So Tony's being in grade four means having to pick him up at the old campus where there are less places about to park and stop. Indeed, the first day of the school year at pick-up time, cars were double parked up and down the street. Because Jenny was with me, I had her go to the school to pick up Tony while I stayed in our vehicle which was in a double-parked position. The school location we drove to last year, while not being a picnic as for parking, did have a long enough road leading to it so that one could park without having to worry about being blocked by a double parker. Last year, one also could easily turn around to drive away from the school. This year, the road by the school has a fence barrier in the middle and so, unless one tries to make a u-turn at a gap in the barrier, one has to endure a slow slog as there are a lot of cars on the road as the students are let out.

* * * * *

I had been buying German beers – what I supposed were German beers – in cans from local supermarkets. Some have been quite delicious, but some result in my having a horrible hangover the next day. And this is after having drunk only one beer the night before. Why should I get these painful hangovers? Is the beer way past its best-for date? Is the beer counterfeit? Are German beers that strong?

* * * * *

As I told someone, Trump is a two is a sea of one, zeroes, and I add now, minuses. All the things said about him being a boor and a nincompoop and a vulgarian and an ignoramus are no doubt true; and yet the people who loath him are so unhinged in their criticism of him that one feels one has to say "Viva Trump!"

So here it goes:

VIVA TRUMP!

If this causes you to froth at the mouth in rage, so what. You are the one who's nuts.

And there is some good to be said about Trump. 1) He is an American. Unlike, Obama who seemed ashamed of the country that gave him the chance to lead it, Trump is an American. If it is okay for the Chinese to be ruled by a Chinese person, Japan to be ruled by a Japanese person, and for Africans to be ruled by Africans, why can't America be lead by an American who likes his country and feels no need to please European snobs? 2) He is not the wife of Bill Clinton. 3) He is sui generis. That is, he is one of a kind. Unlike Obama, who was a dime-a-dozen liberal who was very much banal, moral-preening and full of himself (but I will credit Barry for maybe having some political skills), Trump is an original who is, hopefully, breaking the mold of what a politician can be like. Trump fights and never says he's sorry. He doesn't pretend to take the high road. He thinks aloud and doesn't choose his words carefully. He seems more concerned with doing things than putting on a show of saying the right things. 4) He is driving Leftists our of their minds. He is bringing out the true traits of Leftists, and showing how bigoted, rude, ignorant, petty and lacking in proportion they really are. And he is doing this despite being as unideological as Bill Clinton was. The Leftists are criticizing Trump for what he isn't, which is a Racist and a Nazi. They are criticizing him for fueling something which he hasn't, which is the white supremacist movement which is fringe movement incapable of filling a junior "c" hockey rink in Canada. By being this way, leftists have shown themselves to be more boorish than Trump. 5) Trump is great for comedians. There was a fear to lambast Obama, but I conjecture that he had he not been put on such a pedestal and treated like every other president, Obama would have quickly been a bore to mock. As I said before, he was a dime-a-dozen liberal and you can only make so many jokes about someone's boringness. Eastwood's depiction of Obama as an empty chair was very accurate. If a world without PC, the chair would have been the prop used for Obama on an SNL skit.

And if what I have said doesn't convince you, which I expect it won't, consider this: The people who hate that Trump is president of the United States really brought it on themselves. Popular culture has coarsened in my life time so that even people who should know better are engaging in the coarsening. Be that as it may, this coarsening is a leftist project. In rejecting the constraints of a bourgeois society, they created the culture where a Trump could thrive and become elected President. Trump became a celebrity in that constrain-free, undignified culture. He gave money to leftist politicians who didn't mind and probably found him to be one of them until he didn't go along with their program. The bitterness of the Left against Trump is akin in irrationality to the bitterness launched at Trotsky by Stalin, and at Lin Biao by Maoists.

[*Two days after I typed this, I heard complaints on conservative right-wing podcasts, that I regularly listen to that Trump was going Left. Does my "Viva Trump!" still stand? As long as the Left keeps vilifying Trump in an unreasonable manner, it will. He is the best there is under the circumstances. One of those circumstances is the existence of the Left. If the Left wasn't as stupid as it was and if it didn't contribute so strongly to the culture we are currently stuck with, Trump would not have been elected.*]

* * * * *

Why is it that I am most influenced by writers and thinkers that are Catholic? They are more thoughtful and more capable of penetrating observations than the people who espouse ignoring religion and thinking for one's self.

* * * * *

"In 1915," said Tony, "Australia and Turkey went to war." Amazing the things he learns surfing Youtube.

I never knew anything about this till I saw the movie, that starred Mel Gibson, called Gallipoli. And I was in my thirties when I did so.

* * * * *

Some leftover bloggings from my trip in to Canada in August:

• I had coffee with the former King of Wuxi. His son, he told, was in the cadets in Winnipeg. This is something I would like my son Tony to do.
• I saw this very earnest old man in Vancouver. While we were riding the Skytrain, the man came up to Tony and offered him some candy. The candy was old, and to be honest, Tony was creeped out by the old man; but I told him to accept it and not to read anything into it. I then saw the man offer assistance to this old woman who had also been on the train. The elderly woman was hunched over as the aged often were and was pushing a shopping cart. She was a sad sight because someone should have been looking after her and she shouldn't be fending for herself on a subway. The man, full of zeal made pathetic by his elderliness, was clearly jumping at the opportunity to help this woman.
• I asked Tony what was the best store we went to Canada. He told the big toy store in BC. I thought he was talking about a store in Van, but when he told me it wasn't, I had to rack my brain to recall that we had gone to the Toys R Us at the Willowbrook Mall in Langley. That was a mall I spent a lot of time making deliveries at when I was working as a relief courier driver.
• At Winnipeg Polo Park, there was a Lego store where they had a display, full of lego blocks of human bodies, arms, heads and hair with which one could built a Lego figure on one's own. It was actually three for twelve dollars. They wouldn't let Tony build just one so I had to swallow the expense because it was sort of Tony's birthday.
• At the St Vital Food Court, I had an interesting interaction when I was queueing to be served at a KFC counter. Being in China for as many years as I have, I can testify to how the Chinese don't know how to queue and how confusing it can be in China when you come to a counter with a bunch of Chinese people already there because you don't know where the front or the end of the queue is. Sometimes, the Chinese don't know when to move. Sometimes, the Chinese are standing in the midst of the queue, but really they are looking, having not made up their minds about what to order, and are in fact standing in the wrong spot. Stand back and try to decide what is going on and another Chinese person will come from behind and cut in front of you! Anyway, perhaps this is why I was confused at St. Vital. There was a woman standing about five feet from the counter. I couldn't decide if she was still thinking or was waiting to place an order. Unsure, I stood beside her. When the serving of the person in front of us had taken place, the woman did an amazing thing. She asked me what was happening. I told her that I was unsure as to whether she was ready to order or was still thinking of ordering. She responded that she was ready to order and she went to make her order; I going next. I really couldn't ascertain the woman's attitude towards me, but I did appreciate that she cleared the air of confusion. In China, doing what she did would probably have amounted to a loss of face.
• Tony's 10^th birthday was a bit of a dud. It was the day on which there was that typhoon that screwed up our travel plans.

* * * * *

I received a newsletter email from the New Republic asking if the readers were missing Obama yet. I couldn't imagine there being any reader of the New Republic who didn't miss Obama as soon as Trump was inaugurated. So I wondered what the New Republic was on about, but not enough to actually open the email.

Perhaps they were mocking the "Are you missing me yet?" billboards featuring W that were posted sometime during Obama's term.

* * * * *

I have been so long in Wuxi that I don't think of it as an outpost. When I see a foreigner, my attitude is "who are the fuck are you!"

* * * * *

We had a stint of assessing the English levels of workers at Johnson Controls in Wuxi.

Here are some things I observed:

• I saw what looked to be a Communist party manual on a rack in the cafeteria.
• The food in the cafeteria was horrible.
• The tests were done on the fifth floor of a seven floor adminstrative building of what seemed to be a massive factory complex. Could a company like this in West support such a seemingly large administrative staff? I asked a colleague. He answered that he doubted it. Western companies would surely cut such things to the bone.
• Assessing English ability is a hard thing to do in a strict quantitative way. You can tell who has good english, so-so english, bad english and who can't speak the language at all, but for me to explain why I gave a 51/60 to one person and a 48/60 to another is something I can't easily do except to say I was using my gut and the student said something that struck as worthy of a higher sore.
• When I asked some the students to tell me about a famous person, I had a few tell me about Chairman Mao. "Old China was bad and its society was full of problems, New China created by Chairman Mao was good " was basically what they told me. You would think that Chairman Mao would not be the first famous person to pop in these person's minds. From what I have observed, Chairman Mao is not crammed into the people's imaginations anymore. So, why did they bother to tell me about Chairman Mao? Was it something about me being a foreigner, a devil as it were, and they're wanting to show national pride in the only way they have been conditioned to think about it? Was their imagination that stunted? That is, they know their political indoctrination and study nothing but engineering manuals for their work?

* * * * *

Thanks to Radio Derb, I read this magnificent travel book, by George Gissing, entitled By the Ionian Sea: Notes of a Ramble in Southern Italy. What is so great about this work is that the writer travels to these out-of-the-way places, not to check off an item on a bucket list but because of an actual spiritual yearning brought on by a reading of classic Latin and Greek texts. To experience these yearnings, he goes though a great deal of discomfort that no modern day tourist would be capable of enduring.

And along the way he sees some magnificent things and observes novel behaviors that would put 1960s counterculturists to shame. One such observation was the habit of a town in Southern Italy where locals would anonymously pay the hotel and restaurant bills of travelers to whom they never introduced themselves. Actions as far away from virtue-signaling as you can get.

I should perform those acts myself and not blog about them.

* * * * *

I have a nephew who is coming to China. He will be doing QC in Xiamen for the Canadian company that employs him.

Good for him and I hope his mother is proud.

* * * * *

On the 7th of September, in the morning, I drove Tony to school. While still at home, I worried that we were a little slow in getting out of the house, and I was bracing myself for an annoying experience by telling myself to not be, but I got very annoyed and displayed rage anyway.

On the drive to Tony's school in the morning there are three congestion points we have to go through. The first point is an intersection between Hui Shan Da Dao (a major road) and a road I am on, coming from Casa Kaulins. If we can get on this road early enough in the morning, we can breeze through the intersection; if we don't, we can be in a long lineup that takes five changes of lights to get through. This morning, the lineup was long and it was all in the right lane where people were trying to either go straight through or get into the right turn lane. What is most annoying about this long lineup are the cars that drive in the unoccupied left lane and try to cut into the right lane. You curse at these drivers and wonder why they don't just get into the back of queue like you had just done. Nobody wants to let these drivers in, so some pretty harrowing games of chicken are played every time traffic jolts forward because no one will yield to these queue-jumpers. The second point of congestion is at the next light that is about a block after the first one. If traffic is heavy, you have to play the same game of chicken with people trying to cut in from the left lane. But if you get there early enough, it is not much of a problem. At this second set of lights, I make a right turn on the road on which I am to drop off Tony and where there is a third point of congestion caused by an entrance to an apartment community. There is a resulting T-junction intersection where anarchy prevails because there are cars trying to making left turns onto the road from the apartment complex, cars coming from the opposite direction trying to make left turns into the apartment complex, all sorts of cars passing by the entrance and through the intersection as they drop off their children, no traffic lights or traffic monitors, and no rules as to who has precedence. It makes this congestion point the worse aspect of the drive to school. This particular morning, the 7th, I came to the intersection and a White VW coming from the opposite direction, trying to enter the apartment complex, started to make a left turn in front of me. It blocked my path and I had no choice but to let that car turn. At the same time, there was a small car exiting the apartment entrance on my right-hand side that was trying to make a left turn onto the road and it blocked the VW and me as well. These two cars had a stand-off which was resolved with the VW making room for the small car exiting the complex. But then an impatient idiot driver of a black sedan who was behind the VW decided he was going to do a passing left turn on the VW that he was behind. (This maneuver, that I have only seen in China, involves one turning car passing another turning car) This "brilliant" maneuver resulted in a jam that could only be ended by someone reversing; and this standoff only ended when the female driver of the small car got out of her car and got the driver of the black sedan to move. So, the small car made its turn, the VW made it turn, and I proceeded through the intersection by blocking the black sedan and preventing it from turning. I established eye contact with the driver of the black sedan and gave him a middle finger. I was knocking on the glass of my window as I did so; doing it so hard that Tony told me to knock break the window.

I then dropped off Tony, at a crosswalk where a uniformed person stood without doing anything useful like direct traffic at the T-junction. Continuing down the road by Tony's school is annoying as well because e-bikes and cars are all doing their own thing, getting in the way of others without there being sense of order or courtesy. From the road by Tony's school, I make a right turn on another long road where there is another congestion point that is annoying, if only in an afterthought sort of way. The road intersects with Hui Shan Da Dao, that major road I mentioned above. At the intersection, there are two lanes for turning left, one lane for going straight or making right turns, and a right-hand lane used for parking or bicycles. When there is a long lineup of cars by the intersection, some impatient drivers will try to get around the lineup by driving in the right-hand bicycle lane, and then if they are blocked by parked cars or bicycles, try will budge their way back in the proper lanes for cars trying to go straight or make right turns. The impatient drivers making this maneuver are squeezing themselves tightly against the cars in the proper lane. If they beside me, I won't let them in but again it is another game of chicken with these drivers.

What is it with Mainland Chinese drivers? Has the Chinese Communist Party so ruined civil society here that no one can drive like civilized human beings? The stupidest animal in the world is the Mainland Chinese driver.

* * * * *

Every time I go to Canada and drive, I find myself making a thank-you gesture, in the form of a military salute to another driver who has done me a nice turn in traffic.

Not once, I have done this driving in China. Not once. And I have encountered thousands and thousands of Chinese drivers., there being more of them than in Canada.

* * * * *

I happened to talk to a Wuxi Expat who was hanging it up, as the expression goes. Ten years in Wuxi and he was going back to his Anglosphere country. I take he had many reasons for leaving, like homesickness, but I could tell that he was also leaving Mainland China because he was sick of the bad manners of its residents and how dirty its environment was.

As I said in last month's entry, I would like to go back to a third country that doesn't exist. So I stay here as a result of a certain stasis. As well, I am not sure if my wife would want to move to Canada. She sometimes exhibits patriotism to her homeland.

* * * * *

By 9/11, we were back in the boring Wuxi routine where I went to work and did my intellectual hobbies, and Jenny did her business and tiger-mothered Tony with his homework every night and seemingly free moment of the week.

* * * * *

A new part-time teacher, who had some experience teaching English in China, expressed his frustration at how the Chinese students were just so dull and lacking in spontaneity, and how it was like pulling teeth to get them to talk.. He asked me (alluding to how I had been in China so long while doing so) what insights I had into dealing with it. I had nothing to tell him other than I did try some drills with them (tell me about some topic off the top of your head) and to appreciate the precious few who were not in the typical Chinese mold.

He did agree with my contention that the Chinese Communist Party was responsible for the deadening of thought.

* * * * *

This September, I don't have primary classes to do (or should I say to teach?) and so I have lots of free time which I am devoting to language study and reading. I am spending a little time studying French, Spanish, and German every day using the Duolingo app on my Iphone. I do a little more study of French via a podcast I listen to everyday where the teacher speaks mostly in French at a pace I can easily handle. However, I spend the majority of my time studying Chinese. I listen to podcasts and recordings, and I practice reading Chinese characters. Thanks to the Pleco App and Google Translate, I have an easy time identifying characters. I practice typing Chinese characters on the computer with the help of a Chinese text application that transforms my pinyin typing into characters.

I should spend my time doing something that makes me money. I had vowed that in September I would do some serious exploration of ways to earn money via the Internet. I haven't got around to it.

Here is a sample of my Chinese typing:

我是Andis。我是加拿大人。我住在无锡惠山区。我有一个中国的妻子Jenny。我们有一个儿子。他的名字是Tony。他是十岁。

我想大陆中国驱动程序是白痴。

我爸爸出生于拉脱维亚。她在2012年在加拿大去世。

中国司机是混蛋！

* * * * *

I did a conversation class with a pair of women about America. They didn't know much about America so I felt like a veritable expert when I talked about it. I also thought about what I really liked about American culture. To the students I mentioned that I loved American music, tv shows and movies. Thinking about it after class, I should also mention that I love following its sports and its politics.

Thinking about what I like about China, I would have to say I find its entire history very interesting as well as some poetry and Kung Fu. Chinese history is particularly interesting because it is like watching a train wreck. The hubris of Imperial China lead to a comeuppance and humiliation. The attempts to rectify these bad times has only resulted in more tragedy and darkness. The emergence of China as an economic power is not really something for which the Chinese can be proud. Their affluence is the product of the crassest materialism. If the Chinese Communist Party can keep its grip on power while maintaining this affluence, it would be a tragedy for the soul of humanity. Man needs freedom to reason and revelation to know his proper place in existence.

* * * * *

Because I had heard of a campaign the local government would conduct in order to warn drivers to have respect for pedestrians or be fined, I asked a female student in a Speakers Corner if Wuxi motorists were in fact stopping for pedestrians. The woman told me that they were; to which I expressed flabbergastment. I told her that I had never seen a driver do such a thing unless the pedestrian happened to be a position where the driver had to stop or was unable to swerve about the pedestrian. But she insisted that this happened a lot. We argued about for fifteen minutes. The woman said I only saw the bad. I told her that that was all I ever saw and that if there was courtesy I would have noticed it and celebrated it. She continued to insist that the drivers were becoming more courteous and if they weren't, it was because there were so many people in China. That was an excuse which I should have responded to by saying that if that was so, you would see Chinese people practice courtesy in times when there weren't so many people, but this was just not so. I further should have cited an example of my witnessing, on many occasions, situations where a Chinese drivers will cut off other drivers even when there are no other cars on the road.

Anyway, I was aghast at the woman's attitude and I couldn't tell if she was lying to me or was so completely unaware of how others see her culture.

* * * * *

A white sedan comes barreling onto the road, making a right turn, without looking, in front of the bus in which I was riding. The bus blared his horn at the car: an action I would I done but the driver of the bus was Chinese. I thought that being cut off by cars blindly turning right was water off a duck's back to the Chinese; but the bus driver was clearly annoyed at the driver of the sedan. So how is it that blindly turning right is so common in China when it does inconvenience other drivers so much that they will use their horns to indicate disapproval?

The depths of the Chinese mind is unfathomable to me.

[Or have the drivers been told to follow the rules of civilized driving?]

* * * * *

At this stage of my time in China (I am my 13^th year) to complain about the local driving is to risk sounding like a broken violin. As one about-to-be-former Wuxi expat said, when I got on the local driving and complained about a recent outrage I had experienced, he had seen it all and there was no point in me continuing....

But the local drivers always find a new way to get me lathering in pure road rage.

One Sunday, I drove into a gas station lot to put more fuel in the K family Citroen C3XR. I noticed, after I turned into the lot and was approaching the pumps, that a car was trying to pass me on my right-hand side. He then managed to cut in front of me to get served at the one pump that was available for filling. I was livid. I was tempted to punch the driver. I instead blared my horn at him, opened the door of car so I could stand and give him the middle finger while repeating the one English swear word the bumpkin (for that was what he looked like) would understand. The driver's reaction was one of typical Chinese inscrutability. He looked at me and then looked straight ahead and drove very quickly off the lot. Coward.

* * * * *

The students, when I ask them, tell me they have no enemies. (I then tell the students they have no enemies because as as soon as a person becomes their enemy, the person is eliminated.) This answer, which is always the same, is very telling and a further proof of a lack of imagination on the part of the students.

Jesus Christ, a son of God, walked the face of the Earth and had enemies. He never told his followers to not have enemies, but to love them. The students, not being raised on Christianity, brainwashed by the Chinese Communist education system and modern saccharine be-niceism that they are allowed to be exposed to, would think it a loss of face to admit they had enemies. Meanwhile, I could think of many that I had, like Leftists, Atheists, the North Korean leader and local drivers; and I would not think of myself as a bad human being for declaring that I did. I would only be bad if I didn't hope that these people could change their ways.

* * * * *

The Democrats (I am talking US politics now) should be called out for their KKKism which is real unlike the KKKism they say that every Republican has. Besides being anti-black and anti-legal-immigrant, the KKK in its heyday was extremely anti-Catholic. Who is the anti-Catholic party today? The Democrats. That questioning of a Catholic judge nominee by that senator Barbara Boxer must surely have been out of the KKK playbook.

* * * * *

I went to Tesco on a Monday morning. I took a photo of a shelf of Bear Beer which I published in my Wordpress photo blog. I then experienced surreal lineup behavior while waiting to pay for my purchases. First, I witnessed was the woman in front of me evidently deciding that she had forgotten to pick up something, so she left her basket on the ground and walked to some shelf. Meanwhile another women got in lineup behind me and stood so close that she kept brushing against my elbow and making me feel like she was breathing down my neck. I had to tell myself that Chinese people sense of personal space radius is smaller than ours. Meanwhile, a family in front of me decided to turn around their shopping cart, which was beside the register , and leave the checkout aisle. It was like watching someone make a u-turn with a car on a very narrow road, say the width of one car with not many inches to spare. It would have made more sense to pull the cart out backwards. Meanwhile another group that was in front of the family with its u-turning shopping cart had a member come from the store with a bottle of cooking oil that they must have forgotten to pick up earlier. It was disconcerting for me to have people cut in front of me in the lineup. I even had a feeling that the woman behind me was with that group in front of me but I wasn't sure and I wasn't in the mood to have yet another person move ahead of me. In fact, it seemed that she wanted me to get out of her way but I didn't budge from my position right by the cashier who was close enough to serve me.

Queueing up and lining up in Mainland China is – I will use that word again – disconcerting.

* * * * *

One day, I got on the subway to notice I was on the train that had Chinese communist Party plaques and images decorating its interior. I looked at the TV screens to see video of Wuxi Metro workers holding a meeting of its communist party members. All the workers were attentively listening to what the meeting leaders had to tell them and some of them were then shown to be happy at be awarded some awards from the communist party. I got off the train and walked to my place of work and saw those 14 or 15 pair of patriotic characters that can be seen everywhere since President Xi took control of the Chinese communist Party. Rather grim, I thought to myself.

* * * * *

I liked the excerpts of Trump's UN speech that were played on the Andrew Klavan podcast. I particularly liked it when Trump talked about the current failure of Venezuela's socialist state and then added on about how Communism had failed everywhere including places like the Soviet Union and Cuba. It was a nice sentiment but how I wished he could have been really ballsy and talked about how it had failed and been abandoned in the People's Republic of China.

* * * * *

A student told me she had a pet turtle. The turtle was a family pet before she was born, and so this woman could tell me that she had a pet that was older than herself which was a rare thing indeed.

* * * * *

Mango Six, the cafe that moved into a part of my school's location shut down. The business was a complete bust. After a busy opening weekend, word got around that the place was expensive, people rarely came. I know this because I had watched the cafe from our school's new location and it rarely had any customers. Why it stayed open as long as it did was a mystery.

* * * * *

Sure, I read my bible every day. For myself, I put on a show of being sympathetic to Catholicism. But it entitles me to no claim to be a better person, for it has not translated into any virtuous actions. It hasn't even garnered me any criticism. To be thought less of by the people around me for even being sympathetic to Christianity, for rightly seeing me as a Christian who acts selfishly, would be a start for saving my soul.

* * * * *

Tony asking me questions about history was the highlight of September 2017. In particular, he was asking me questions about WW1, WW2 and other wars.

* * * * *

The last Monday of September 2017 was a day of torrential rain. I also was feeling less than tipper because of some bug I had caught or maybe some bad food I had eaten. My symptoms were lethargy, mild diarrhea, profuse sweating and a mild nausea that had my on the verge of vomiting. It was the worst day of the month.

Tony then caught the bug. He vomited at school, then at home and got to not go to school for a day.

I then told Jenny that she was probably going to catch the bug next. [As I type this, I just recently made the prediction. And really, I hope I am wrong. Because even if I am proven to be right, Jenny will blame me for the bug going around and will hate it that I was proven right. [Later: Jenny has succumbed to the bug, as I predicted.]]

[Tony returned to school, only to be sick again. This time, Jenny had to take him to the hospital...]

* * * * *

Did a BMW driver perform a fuck you maneuver towards me?  Or was it just his aggressive style of driving?

Here's what happened:  On the last Tuesday of September 2017, I was making a left turn out of Jia Zhou Yang Fang, the apartment complex which containeth Casa Kaulins, and the BMW driver who was behind me tried to make a passing left turn on me. [A passing turn is a maneuver I have only seen done in China and it involves a turning car passing another turning car.  I find this to be not cricket in the least]  I didn't yield to him.

I continued on my merry way. That is if you can call taking Tony to school in the morning is a merry thing for me to do and for Tony to endure.  The BMW was behind me, making a right turn as I did onto a certain  double-laned road whose name I couldn't tell you.  Approaching some lights with me in the right hand lane, the BMW then raced in front of me, coming so closely to my front end that I, who was in a passive state of mind, reluctantly honked my horn.  

The BMW after doing this then went into the left turn lane.  So the end result of the BMW's driving had me wondering if he was mad at my not yielding to him earlier.  Why swerve around traffic when there was no advantage to be had by doing so, except to show your rage at some other driver?  

The problem with this surmise is that Chinese drivers are often aggressive in a counter productive way.  How often have I seen Chinese drivers never take stock of a situation and just impulsively make an aggressive maneuver that is counter productive or makes a traffic snarl even worse.  And when I didn't yield to the BMW, the driver didn't honk his horn, as even a Chinese driver would do if some other driver annoyed him.

* * * * *

I used to say that NFL football was a game for men. No longer.

The NFL has become Leftist. Sad.

And the NFL isn't a private business, but in fact a quasi crony capitalist racket acting like a institution. By seeking to identify itself with local governments, it has tried to make money by identifying itself with the local communities these governments are supposed to represent: while at the same time holding these communities hostage if they don't shovel them tax dollars to build expensive stadiums that no businessman would in his right mind build with his own money.

The NFL needs to be held to account, and if Trump brings this about... Viva Trump!

* * * * *

Escape the totalitarian impulse.  If only were so easy as to get out of the Peoples Republic of China.  But as David Warren said in a late September blog entry, there has been an irruption of the totalitarian impulse in Anglo Saxonia.  So there may be no escape for me.

* * * * *

I wanted to talk about the NFL kneelers; the student wanted to talk about North Korea.  The student had seen a report stating that Trump wanted to destroy North Korea and that China was concerned.  I went on a rant about the duplicity of the Chicoms in the whole affair.  If there is a nuclear war, it is China that must bear the blame.  It has been aiding and abetting the evil Nork regime all these years. Later, I told the student, who is an NBA fan (hoo-hum!!) to watch how the kneeling controversy affects the NBA which has had a spat of its own with Trump.

* * * * *

I told the students that Chinese eat a lot of rice. One of the students, who had told me earlier in the month that Chinese drivers yield to pedestrians (see above), said that it wasn't so. "You only see the Chinese eating rice and don't see the Chinese who aren't eating rice!" she told me.

This argument didn't happen. But I should have used the example in my argument earlier in the month. It wouldn't have clinched the issue with logic instead of just facts.

* * * * *

The truth is that teaching English to Mainland Chinese students is tedious. It is a rare thing indeed when I find myself not feeling like I am running out the clock. I have been told that in other countries, this is not the case. The students have things to say and things that they want to say.

I can even give an example from when I was studying with a Chinese teacher of how I used my imagination when speaking. I remember once that I wrote a dialogue in Chinese of Xi Jing Ping and I in the bar, and the teacher was amazed by it. While I made many errors, I tried to say things that the Chinese teacher would have never thought of herself.

Disillusioned but persisting.

* * * * *

As September 2017 came to an end, we had the golden week holiday, in the first week of October to look forward to, and so I asked others what their plans were. Some told they were going back to their hometowns, and many told me that to go anywhere in China that was touristy in nature was worth the bother because they would probably be over run with people.

Jenny had thought to go to a place called Chocolate Town in Zhenjiang Province but I vetoed the idea and got Tony to agree with me by telling him that it was going to be way crowded.

We will go to Jenny's hometown for a day but I am not looking forward to the drive to get there and back. Last time, it took us over three hours to go about 97 km on a freeway.

January 2017 Notes

On the 1^st day of 2017, the K family went to Hui Ju Mall, perhaps the biggest shopping center in Wuxi, China. Driving to the mall was fine until we got close to it and had to spend twenty minutes going down a stretch of road that normally could be covered in two minutes.

Chinese have nothing better to do on their holidays than go shopping. [And neither do I, it seems.]

I knew before we went that going to a shopping mall on a holiday in China was asking for trouble. It was so crowded. The best to said for our going was that I bought a pair of jeans at Old Navy for only 168 rmb. The first pair of Jeans I have ever bought in China! [I have been here since 2004]

The big crowds meant there were lineups at all the good restaurants in the mall. The place we wanted to go had a two hour lineup. So, we end up going to a faux German restaurant and had a meal that made one realize why it was so easy to get a seat there.

*

On the 2^nd day of 2017, which was a holiday in China, my son Tony did homework and then did an online English test at 7:00 PM.

Hearing of the test, I told my wife Jenny that it was hard for me to keep my temper. What could be more absurd than for a teacher to give students an online test on a holiday? Jenny agreed but said that all the other parents agreed with the teacher.

What was wrong with the teacher I asked? I already knew what was wrong with the parents. [One child policy.]

*

Tony was back to school on January 3^rd, a Tuesday.

It was a day off for me and I couldn't escape the feeling that I was wasting it. I was spending too much time on social media and too much time transferring videos from YouTube to Youku.

However, I did publish my December 2016 Notes. My impetus was seeing that John Derbyshire had published his.

We had avoided the nightmare that is picking up Tony from his school for a few months because someone else was taking Tony home. However that person had a baby in January so we had to pick Tony up from his school again.

The scene at Tony's school as they let the kids out is horrific. Everything that is wrong with mainland China can be witnessed then and there: the trash on the streets, the filth that is in the air and on everything, the uncouthness of its people, the stupid planning, the congestion compounded by the mainland Chinese ability to not think of anybody but themselves, the rampant materialism which is truly the worst of Capitalism and Communism combined, and rejection of a transcendent force in life.

I stood amidst it all, thinking foul and murderous thoughts and was even self-reflective enough to be ashamed of it. But the self-reflectiveness wasn't enough to stop me from losing it at a driver who didn't yield and made a right turn without looking. I was then stopped beside him at a light and honked my horn at twice to get his attention so I could give him a middle finger. He saw it but then turned away and stared ahead. He must have known he was in the wrong.

Really, I suppose I am fit to be tied. I want so much to be mellow but life and the people in China are so provoking.

Ominously, on January 3^rd, I saw, in a silver Hyundai, this swarthy looking gentleman with whom I had a road rage incident. I was sure that he was the driver, who I had mentioned in an earlier blog entry, who had, one morning, done a cut off maneuver on me with his Hyundai to which I did a cut-off maneuver in retaliation before he thought he had gotten back at me by driving away in the bicycle lane.

I saw this guy and his car at our apartment complex gate as I walking to catch the bus. He was driving out of the complex. I stared at him and he stared back at me, but I was uncertain if it was because he remembered me from that morning or because I was a laowai and thus a rare sight.

I also saw a driver about to make a left turn with his left signal light on coming towards a flashing green light (Which means it is very pale and about to turn yellow.). It was not so unusual for I have seen a few – actually more than a few – local drivers use their turn signals properly. But then this driver reverted to local form. The driver decided he couldn't make the turn in time, came to a stop, and turned off the turn signal. It beats me why he didn't keep it on.

*

On the 4^th day of 2017, I saw that David Warren opened his 2017 blogging year with a tribute to the economist Thomas Sowell. Sowell with his books and columns played a great part in making me conservative and reactionary . Sowell was great at explaining economics in a common sense way. He demonstrated how progressive policies could be used to damage the very people they sought to help, and how progressive policies could be used as weapons by illiberal people to further the causes of racism and segregation.

I tried to take photos and video at the intersection, which I had blogged about and where there was a yield sign, of drivers making right turns without looking and thus cutting off other drivers. I stood there for five minutes but got self-conscious about it and left with just a photo of the sign.

*

On the 5^th day of January or, if you want, 2017, I am thinking that this entry will have 31 *'s (or 30 bullets actually). I mean to say that I will try to do an entry, a bullet point, for all 31 days of January. Of course that will make for what might seem disjointed entries which may span unrelated topics, but what the hay?

I am reading this book by Anthony Ensolen: Ten Ways to Spoil the Imagination of Your Child. It is a great read: gripping and very challenging. It may have clarify my thoughts about the Chinese Education system: not only what it does wrong but what it does right.

Thoughts about this will come to me through the month as I read the book and then contemplate it. [No, they didn't actually.]

I had four days off to begin January 2017. The result of which was that I felt as if I didn't take full advantage of them. One reason for this was that Tony was at school for two of these days. The other was that I didn't know what to do with myself. I did try to keep myself busy somewhat and so I did finish some personal tasks where I can say I know what to do with myself like get my December 2016 diary entry published, but I spent too much time doing stupid things like going to shopping malls and surfing aimlessly on the Internet.

I did watch, on my days off, a movie called the War Lover, starring Steve McQueen. I had read mention of it in John Derbyshire's December 2016 diary. Steve McQueen played a character who loved war and was having the time of his life in WW2. McQueen's portrayal, though interesting, made the War Lover seem more frustrated than gung-ho. The gung-ho aspect of the War Lover seemed more alluded than portrayed by McQueen. Perhaps the novel that the move was based on did a better job of showing this aspect of the character.

*

On the 6^th day of January, I tried not to let a conversation I had with a student the evening before (that be the 5^th), put me in a down mood. The topic of the salon class was the environment. The student John and I agreed that it was terrible in China. When we got on the topic of what could be done about it, the discussion got depressing. What I understood the student to say was that many in China were concerned about a quick buck and not the long term, that the Chinese Communist Party was not going to go away, and that it would take a hundred years to fix the environmental damage that had been caused (he was telling me that the true extent of the damage was being suppressed.)

A little tidbit that I got from that conversation was that there had been shots fired in Beijing between the Xi Jing Ping and Wen Jiabao factions but that it hadn't been reported

Oh! It's a curse to be living in interesting times.

Meanwhile, my reading of the Anthony Ensolen book was making me feel myself to be more of a dullard that I already suspected I was. Ensolen described things that seemingly simple hicks could do that would stump me if I tried them, like tasks mechanical and culinary.

I was thinking a thought, that I should have suppressed, on the 6^th about my intention of wearing the new jeans I bought at Old Navy on New Year's Day. The thought was as follows: I should advertise to everyone in the office that I will be wearing my new jeans and that they would be subject to quite the treat.

*

On the 7^th day of January, the K family went to see the new Star Wars movie: Rogue One. They went to a 9:15 PM showing at the Hui Shan Wanda Cinema multiplex. Cinema #2, where the movie was being shown, was not very crowded.

Tony & Andis enjoyed the film very much and were talking about when they would see it again.

As soon as Andis got home, he listened to podcasts reviewing the film and went on the internet to find reactions that he had been avoiding since the film debuted in North America on December 16^th. The Federalist podcast was particularly gushing in admiration for film, echoing Andis' reaction to it.

*

On a WeChat group, just after midnight, Andis announced that he had seen the film and thought it was wonderful. Later on the 8^th, he was disconcerted to read lukewarm reactions from other expats who had seen it. These nit-pickers hated the dialogue and said there was no character development and that it was full of fan-servicing without being original. While Andis would concede that the movie wasn't perfect and that the nit-pickers did have some valid criticisms, his overall impression that the movie was great fun to watch. He loved the characters portrayed by the Chinese stars, he loved the droid K2, he loved the climatic battle scenes, he loved the scene where Darth Vader was truly a force to deal with, and he loved the fan-servicing. Of the eight Star Wars films to date, Andis put it in the category of a good Star Wars movie, with four being good and four being not-so-good or awful (The four good ones, says Andis, are 4, 5, 7 and Rogue One; the four bad ones being thus 1, 2, 3 and 6.)

Tony liked it as well and seemed keen on watching it again.

*

Andis was reading Jennifer Keishin Armstrong's Seinfeldia on or about the 9^th day of January. He had heard of the book from the Daily Shot, an email newsletter from the Ricochet site which advertises itself as a place for conversation among people who are of the center right to rightwards persuasion on the political spectrum. Seinfeldia tells the story of the making of the Seinfeld television series while providing many details about the people who made the show and the way the show changed the culture.

Like many, I was taken by the character Kramer. Something that I hadn't thought of was the “K” in Kramer. Being a Collins with a “K” and a person who will try to find some relationship with someone or something I like, I am disappointed with myself for not having, myself, thought about the “K” of Kramer. I should have latched onto it a long time ago. But I didn't. I will, however, latch onto it from now on because of this passage in Seinfeldia:

“That plosive consonant K sound is known to be among the English language’s funniest phonemes. (H. L. Mencken argued this in The New Yorker; Neil Simon made this point in his play The Sunshine Boys.) They couldn’t resist.”

It is with great pride that I will spend the rest of my life, telling everyone how the plosive consonant K sound is known to be among the English language’s funniest phonemes.

*

On the 10^th day of January, I was disappointed by Tony saying he didn't want to watch the Star Wars movie again. Asking him why, he told me he wanted to see another movie. Common sense in that I suppose. Tony has a habit of being his own person at times which I will have to accept.

As well, Jenny had a toothache and was in a bad mood, and I thought she was mad at me when she in fact wasn't mad at me at all but someone else.

I tried to put money on my transit card. I thought I had solved the problem, of the Family Mart stopping the service that allowed me to do this, when I learned I could go to a nearby Kedi instead. But then the machine at Kedi didn't work on the 10^th. The clerk told me: mingtian.

Because I couldn't top up my transit card, I had to use cash to buy subway tickets. I thought it would be a great idea, since I was making a round trip costing two rmb each way, to buy two two-rmb tickets at the Nanchang Temple station to save myself the trouble of having to go to the ticket machine at the other station: the Qingmingqiao station. When I got to the Qingmingqiao station, did my duties around there and so was ready to return to Nanchang, I went to the entrance gate and tried to use the second ticket I had bought. I got a message telling me to go to the EFO station aka customer service. I learned from the guy sitting at the service desk that I couldn't use the ticket I had bought at Nanchang at Qingmingqiao. The ticket could only be used to enter at the station at which I had bought it. Who knew?

Joke: He is so rich that when his car runs out of gas, he throws it away and drives a new one.

*

11^th day.

I was thinking about the pollution in China. Why hadn't I blogged about it? I just hadn't, till now.

I can't say that the air has affected my breathing. However, a colleague, who has only recently arrived in Wuxi from New York state, tells me that he finds the air to be horrible, affecting his eye sight and making it hard for him to breath.

I have been affected by the sight of thick smog in Wuxi though I do wonder how much of what looks like smog is really haze which I suspect is natural to this area anyway since it is a wet area with ponds and canals everywhere.

I have tried to wear a face mask but have been stopped by how it fogs up my eyeglasses.

Last evening, my doomsayer student John, who has good English, told me that despite the very bad smog in Beijing, the city's real estate prices have not gone down because everything important in China is in it like the best schools and the powerful government agencies. Xi Jing Ping and his minions aren't so affected by the smog as well, said John, because they have very expensive air cleaning machines in the Zhong Nan Hai compound that put the air to 2.5 PMC.

Students have told me that the pollution in Wuxi is drifting in from other places in China.

Exam Day for Tony. All the parents that know about primary school students having exams in Wuxi have been asking me about this.

Driving Tony to Exam Day, I saw that a car had hit an e-bike at a corner where drivers and e-bikers have to be very aware of each other's presence as there are many cars making turns through the paths of e-bikes. Unlike many other aftermaths of collisions between e-bikes and cars that I have seen, it looked like the car had run over the e-bike. [I posted a photo of this in my AKIC photo blog around the 10^th of January.]

After an accident happens in Wuxi, the vehicles are not cleared until either the two parties involved come to an agreement about who compensates whom or usually until a policeman comes and has inspected the scene. So I passed the accident scene twice, before and after having dropped off Tony at school. The scene caused traffic congestion and traffic to slow down. As I was passing the scene, which was blocking one of the lanes which cars would turn into, the first time, I was bemused by one of the drivers behind me using his horns to try to get people to up their speed. Couldn't he see that there was an accident slowing traffic down?!?

Mingtian, now jintian, I was able to put money on my transit card at the Kedi.

*

The 12^th day of January was a Thursday. Why I should mention the day of the date? I don't know.

The evening before, I had had a salon class (a conversation class really) about divorce. All of the students testified to knowing someone who was divorced. One student told me how her friend had gotten divorced because of having fallen love with another man. Her friend then married the other man and she told me that they were now a happy couple. I couldn't get it out of the student how the first husband felt about it. Another student told me that her parents had divorced in the past year. She was not upset about it. The divorce was something that she had been expecting for a long time. Answering my questions, she said the divorce happened because they were fighting too much. She blamed her father and was happy for her mother.

It seemed like no one in the class thought marriage was sacred and inviolable.

Thursday the 12^th was Tony's last day of school before his winter vacation. I was almost happy as him because I could now get up later in the morning for a month or so. I had to get up at 5:50 AM in order to get ready to take Tony to school.

Driving back from dropping Tony off, I was stopped in the left turn lane at an intersection on the corner of our apartment complex. I was in front of the line, having decided to stop as the left turn green light had started blinking meaning it was pale. A van behind me drove around me and made a left turn completely ignoring the red left turn light. In Canada, I would have been astounded but here my reaction was almost blasé. Drivers of mini vans in China seem to think of themselves as cyclists and e-bikers and therefore immune to having to obey traffic signals. It was a perfect indication that China has no firm and set rule of law, and is in a fact a very corrupt place.

My commute now involves me taking the 25 bus to the Xi Zhuang metro station where I catch the train to get downtown and to the school where I work. To get to the platform at Xi Zhuang station, I take an elevator. This elevator only stops at two floors but it beats having to walk a long way around to get to an escalator, which I will use at all other stations. I was the first on the elevator and then two others quickly got on with me. As I pressed the button to get to the second floor and waited for the door to close, I wondered if one of the other passengers would press the close door button. A woman then did so even though it didn't make the door close any faster. I was perturbed and wished I could have taken a video. I imagined that if I had had someone to speak with, I would have made a “Did you see that!” comment. As it was, I made a slight guffaw.

I have met people who tell me that they read my blog though I haven't gotten any comments in a long time. I have closed the comment section but left a message telling potential comment makers to email me. I have decided that from now on I will make a plea for comments by putting my email address at the end of my blog entries. The first blog entry in which I did this was for my entry listing the movies and series that I watched in 2016. This got me one comment which said that I had been too generous in giving the Angry Birds movie, which I had seen in the cinema with Tony, two stars out of five as a rating. The movie was crap said the commentator. To this, I would say that I agreed with the commentator but the I gave the film an extra star for the animation.

*

Friday the 13^th.

All peace, I read in a Nicholas Gomez Davillia aphorism, is bought with vile acts. I thought to myself how true, especially in my life. But I won't go into that. Instead, I will reflect on a peace that many know about that has been bought with vile acts.

Which one? I 'll give you a clue. It involves China. Mainland China.

The peace the civilized world has maintained with the People's Republic of China has been one bought with vile acts. There were the Americans who – though not fully – threw Taiwan under the bus when they sought to establish a relationship with the mainlanders. And then there have been all the businessmen and governments the world over who in the pursuit of money have chosen to ignore the vile and illiberal doings of Chicom governance.

If Trump violates the balance of the quasi peace around the Southeastern Asia area, it would be because he had backbone and wasn't tethered by a politician's need to gloss over issues of contention that would require courage to take on.

Tony and Jenny saw movie Hacksaw Ridge yesterday evening. He told me he liked it very much and still wasn't interested in seeing Rogue One a second time.

There is a game Tony likes to play very much on the computer called Ravenfield. Said to be a battlefield simulator game, Ravenfield has simple graphics with realistic battle situations. I mean you see the enemy and it is killed or be killed. Tony learned about the game on Youtube and told me to download it.

*

My VIP student told me that he was worried about the current generation of Chinese kids being raised. He said they were spoiled, little emperors as it were.

On the 14^th , we will be having my school's annual Spring Festival dinner. I have heard that it will be at a place that we have held many a previous Spring Festival dinner and so, I am not looking forward to it. The food they serve at this place is pretty dull and there is never any beer to drink, only some cheap wine.

Tony & Jenny won't be accompanying me to the dinner. Jenny has vowed never to go to these school dinners anymore and Tony would have gone had he not had swimming lessons to go to because Jenny pre-paid for a whole slew of them.

*

The 15th. Sunday.

The previous evening's company dinner was about what I expected. The food was so-so. They didn't serve beer, only wine.

However, the company was okay. Eric and Edward, both Americans, seem to be good guys. Not given to vice or strong held but silly political stances as many previous trainers.

And there was a band playing that was actually quite good and one felt cheated that they only performed a few Chinese and English pop songs. But they had to make way for the parade of amateurs.

We took our car to the Wanda parking garage in the afternoon. I prefer walking to this nearby mall, especially on a weekend because it gets so crowded and parking is more of a chore than a convenience for me. But Jenny had coupons for parking.

It turned out I was right to think it would be a hassle because as we were driving to a desired parking spot in the garage (close to an office of someone we knew), we got stuck in a traffic jam. The cars in front of us didn't move for a few minutes. Jenny & Tony got out of the car leaving me to fend on my own. It would take me fifteen minutes to finally park the car. Jenny phoned me to tell that the cause of the jam was a big fight near the exit pay gate. After finally parking the car, I witnessed the scene. There was a crowd of forty or so people, many of whom were screaming. Half of the crowd consisted of security guards or policemen. Some of them were jostling with gray-haired civilians. I can only speculate what the cause of the commotion was, but it was the largest public spat that I had ever seen in my time in China.

I sometimes wonder if I hate China. I do find myself making loathing thoughts about it. But, there are things I like about China. To defend against charges that I thoroughly hate the Chinese, I will say that my attitude to China would of someone having a dear female friend who is beautiful in many ways, but is in a relationship with a batterer or a pimp. You want so much for this woman to escape but she won't. She passively puts up with the batterer, she grows insane on account of the beatings, she takes his flowers and trinkets gratefully, she adopts the mindset of her tormenter and is losing her soul.

*

The 16^th was a Monday.

I felt depressed in the morning. Don't know if it was life or a chemical imbalance that was weighing down on me.

But I felt better when I took Tony to his school in the morning. I dropped him off at his school at 8:20 AM. As I walked him to the gate, Tony said we had gotten there early. There was practically no cars around the school. I was to come pick up him at 9:45 AM. He was going for the short time to see the results of the 'big” end of term exams he wrote last week.

He did not do so well. He got 92 in his English test [an English test designed by Chinese so I am not in a knot about him not getting 100.], 67 in Math and 24 in China. Jenny may be irate.

Whatever.

While waiting for Tony, I got a coffee at a nearby Starbucks. Walking to the place, I saw and photographed a nice traffic jam. (The picture is in my photo wordpress blog.)

I then drove back to his school so I could explore the park (still under construction) that is across the road from his school. Approaching the school, I saw that Tony was right to say I had gotten him there very early. There was now a traffic jam and I had to park the Kaulins Citroen a long way from the school. Still, I had plenty of time to take a leisurely walk with my Starbucks in hand around the park.

The park had many pathways in it, one of which took me under a freeway, past what looked like a rice paddy and along a canal with long barge boat traffic. It was a place I had been to before with Tony when he wasn't being made to go to school. I enjoyed the first time I went to the place and enjoyed it more the second time. I took many photos which you can see at my wordpress photo blog.

Later, the K family went to Ikea and bought a new and bigger study desk for Tony. I spent the evening after dinner putting it together. As with all my Ikea assemblies, one little detail didn't quite work and the furniture didn't seem as solid as it had in the showroom.

The matchups in the NFL semifinals don't impress me. One of four remaining teams is the Falcons: a franchise I loathe. I disappointed to see that the Chiefs got beat out by the Steelers. And don't get me going about the Patriots. Boring they are! Why did they have to change their uni designs? I much preferred the red ones they originally wore to the silver and blue they have been donned in their glory era.

*

The 17^th was a Tuesday which was my Monday. (I work Tuesday to Saturday) I come to work feeling I didn't do enough leisurely things on my days off. I work harder and make more sighs from exertion on my days off than I do at work. What keeps me busy? Tidying up the house and tasks like putting Tony's desk together.

Besides teaching classes this week, I will have some primary school lessons to plan.

Three more days of Obama being President.

Getting back to school, the streets seemed more annoying because of lots of kids not going to school. I became aware of this as I was getting off the train at Nanchang station. They tell riders over and over again that they should let passengers get off the train before they board. Today, there was a kid who expected me to get out his way as he was boarding on the train. I didn't abide him.

My first class of the week, I had a one-on-one class with a teenage student. He walked into the class with a slack manner and when he answered my questions, he mumbled and babbled at low volume. A colleague had complained about him and said he had a bad attitude. I then had him in a class with a few other students and I could had seen why my colleague didn't have a favorable opinion of him. I wasn't too happy to see him today. So when my attempts at conversation were meet with what I perceived as insolence, I, as the expression goes, really tore into him. I told him to stop mumbling. I told him to speak in full sentences in a volume that allowed me to hear him. I asked, sarcastically, if he was on drugs, and told him that his manner was such that one would think he was. I let him sit for five minutes without talking to him. I rattled the kid so much that he was sobbing after the class... Whether I was giving him a valuable life lesson that he very much needed or just picking him because I was having a bad day is a question that I mulled over the rest of day. I suspect that it was for both reasons. I am certainly not consistent in expecting more of my students and laying down the line with them.

*

It rained on the 18^th and so for the second day in a row I went to school in a dark mood.

About a week ago, I noticed a vehicle, parked on the narrow side street beside our school, with two parking tickets stickers stuck on its driver side window. I took a photo of the SUV and published it in my photo blog. Seeing this White Haval SUV then became a daily occurrence and I noticed all sorts of additional details. This vehicle also had two parking stickers stuck on the passenger side window. The vehicle was always parked at a spot near the entrance to the back parking area of the building complex in which our school is located. One day, the vehicle was parked at the same spot but facing in the other direction. I reported these sightings to my colleagues and to students who attended one of my speakers' corners. I even tried to introduce the expression “What's up with that?” to the students as I wondered who the driver was and what his story was.

Well, today, I saw the vehicle and the driver as I was coming to school. The driver was a male with glasses, probably in his late twenties or thirties. He appeared very nondescript, looking like half the Chinese men I see on the train and driving other vehicles. He was in his vehicle and was driving his vehicle from the side street beside our school to Zhongshan Road. He was fleeing the policeman who was walking down the side street to ticket cars parked on that side street. This sighting destroyed my theory that the driver was keeping the stickers on his vehicle to ward off getting more tickets.

My theory now is that he is lazy. That is, too lazy to scrape the stickers off his windows.

I would further theorize that he had connections who could help him get out of paying a fine, but then I have to ask why it was that he was fleeing the parking ticket cop.

An opinion piece that I read that was critical of Trump's declaring that he would make the pharmaceutical companies lower their drug prices got me to thinking long and hard about my father's death. The column by one Megan McArdle said that one of the options, governments or hospitals have in negotiating prices with drug companies is to walk away from the negotiations, like foreigners at fake good markets walk away from hawkers as a tactic in bargaining a price for some piece of clothing. This tactic if used in dealing with drug companies could result in patients not getting some life-extending treatment. McArdle then said it was a dirty secret that single payer systems like the NHS in Great Britain use this tactic all the time, thus denying life saving medicines to some patients. I wondered if this is what happened with my father's death.

First let me tell you my reflections on my father's death. It is a condemnation of our Medicare system, but also me. My behavior at my father's death is something of which I am not proud and would be something I think that I would have to answer for on Judgement day. Why? Two reasons. Firstly, I wanted him to die on schedule. I only had three weeks and the thought of having to delay my return back to China and the cost that that would entail was something I wanted to avoid. Secondly, when the doctor came to tell us his prognosis was not good and that it wasn't worth the expense to keep him drugged up and living, I cowardly demurred to my brother and mother when they gave us the option of keeping him or not keeping him on life support. I demurred saying that by being so far away in China, I had no right to decide what to do in this situation. But, even then, there was a feeling that the doctor wanted us to pull the plug to save money. I said nothing. I was on my schedule, you see. I should have made an effort to extend his life.

Say what you like about Trump. He can be vulgar and a boar. But he would never speak a sentence like the one Xi Jing Ping said in a speech to the world whatever conference in Davos. Here is the report from the English language People's Daily:

Blaming economic globalization for the world's problems is inconsistent with reality and unhelpful to solving the problems, Xi said, underlining the need to act pro-actively and manage economic globalization appropriately, so as to release its positive impact and rebalance its process.

All that can be said about what Xi said in the above passage is that it is a bunch of gooblygook. What, for instance, is with this expression inconsistent with reality? Consistency to me means that one is pursuing a course of action or a flow of thought where the elements of this course do not contradict each other. That is, you do AAAAAAA in sequence, not ABABABA where A and B contradict each other. In the above passage, there are two parallel courses of thought going on here, or so says Xi. That is, there is the blaming and there is the reality. If, from what I take Xi to mean, the blaming is BBBBBBBB and the reality is AAAAAAAA, it can be said that they clearly contradict each other, but are they inconsistent with each other? The blaming sequence I believe Xi has posited is consistent. Reality being what it is, I don't think it can be consistent or inconsistent. The things that make up reality can be consistent or inconsistent, but not I think Reality in itself. Reality cannot contradict itself so there is no way it can be inconsistent. For something to be consistent, it must be capable of being inconsistent. Reality can't consist of elements that are not real and can thus contradict it. So how can a thing which is consistent in itself be inconsistent with reference to a thing that is not an element of itself? Xi should have said that Critics of Globalization are wrong or have been consistently wrong.

You could say that it doesn't matter, Xi's meaning using inconsistent with reality is apparent enough. But this misuse of English is clearly trying to mask a diabolical intent. It reveals a desire for bureaucratic domination by appealing to the bureaucratic types who enjoy using highfaluting and meaningless language. Just continue reading the passage...

*

The 19^th.

Last evening, Tony was laughing loudly as he watched an episode of Seinfeld. Tony thought a diatribe towards Jerry, over a unreturned book, made by a Library Book Detective named Bookman was particularly funny.

I had an one-on-one class with a student named Fiona who had stories to tell me of her time working in Dubai. She worked in a restaurant in many service capacities serving people from all over the world. She served Arabs wearing their traditional head dress and robes. She served Muslim woman wearing clothing that covered every part of their bodies including their faces, leaving two little openings for their eyes. Dubai, she said, had a beautiful downtown with tall buildings, but get out of this rich area and Dubai is not so wonderful.

In fact, Fiona's time in Dubai was not so wonderful. They treated her and her co-workers like slaves, making them work long shifts and sometimes twenty hour days. They would be told to go to bed and then woken up four hours later to get back to work. Dubai people, Dubaibians(?) are so rich that they can bring in workers from all over the world to perform service and menial tasks. Some of Fiona's co-workers were from India and the Philippines.

I will tell you about my podcast habits. Seeing how I have published blog entries about my video watching and book reading habits, I might as well tell you about my podcast listening habits.

I listen to a lot of American political podcasts. I regularly listen to the Three Martini Podcast, a political podcast from National Review. Each episode of TMP is never more that 15 or 20 minutes long: the length of my commute to work. I catch every episode of Radio Derb, a weekly podcast of political and cultural commentary done by John Derbyshire, a former National Review contributor who now writes for V-Dare. I also listen to many of the podcasts, when I am able to download them, that are put out by the Ricochet web site including their weekly flag ship podcast, Need to Know with Mona Charen and Jay Nordlinger, Mad Dogs and Englishmen with Kevin Williamson and Charles C. Cooke, The Law Podcast with Richard Epstein and Radio Free Delingpole.

I listen to religious podcasts. From EWTN, I like to listen to Mother Angelica classics and the Journey Home about Catholic converts. I have been listening, again when I can download it, the First Things podcasts

I like listening to history podcasts. I am working my way through podcasts about the history of the South American revolutions and the Decline of the Roman Empire. There is a podcast, that seems interesting, called Great Lives Tragic deaths, that purports to be historical, but is presented in such a politically slanted way (progressive, cultural Marxist), that I am thinking of giving it up, interesting as its episode subjects can be.

I like listening to podcasts about true crime. Now, I am listening to Stranglers, a podcast about the Boston Strangler, and Crimetown, a podcast about crime in selected communities of America. I given some other crime podcasts a try, like Unsolved Murders, but the acting is awful and off-putting.

And finally, I want to tell you that I listen to the Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast. I like it for its humor and its nostalgic look at movies and tv shows from the past. The podcast sometimes has guest interviews and sometimes the hosts of the shows talk about subjects that strike their fancy. Some of the interviews are great and some I can't be bothered to listen all the way through like one they did with the pretentious Bob Costas and others involving actors complaining about the Hollywood black list. You know. Most of Stalin's victims didn't survive to complain about their treatment!

I just saw the SUV with four parking tickets stuck on its windows. It was parked in its usual spot. I can espy the vehicle from a stairwell that I can get to from a backdoor of my school; so I am three floors above street level and don't have to go outside to check on the vehicle. It was interesting today that I saw two pairs of passersby stopped to examine the tickets that were on the SUV. One pair looked at the tickets stuck on the passenger side window, another pair examined the tickets stuck on the driver's side.

*

The 20^th of January. The date of President Trump's inauguration. I have a feeling that it could be the greatest show on Earth, this Trump presidency. I hope there will be lots for me to cheer.

It is even nicer to see the end of Obama's tenure. Take away his superficialities, and I say that there was nothing to him. To me, he was an annoying liberal progressive cultural marxist with horrible policy ideas and a self-regard that was proportional to the unsoundness of his world view. Unfortunately, his departure from the White House is not the last we will have to hear from people who sound and think like him. Their hysterical gibberings will be the constant background noise of the Trump presidency.

But that is the way of the world, a lot of it is crazy and there is not much that sensible people can do about it. It's why we need religion, aside from the fact that it might be true.

Yesterday, I forgot to tell you about four other podcasts that I listen to regularly. One of these is the Andrew Klavan Daily Wire podcast. Andrew Klavan is a fellow bearer of the initials AK who is more importantly a conservative. I find his take on politics to be interesting and humourous. His podcast is also peppered with some of the more interesting political soundbites of the day. The second one that I forgot to mention is the Commentary podcast featuring John Podhoretz. It is a podcast featuring political commentary from a conservative, Jewish, neo-conish and slightly anti-Trumpish perspective. Podhoretz also appears on the GLOP Culture podcast hosted by the Ricochet site. On GLOP, I listen to political and cultural musing from Podhoretz, Jonah Goldberg and Rob Long. And the maybe the last – there might be more – that I forgot to mention yesterday is, or I should rather say are, the Weekly Standard Podcasts: again, more political commentary.

*

Saturday the 21^st, Wuxi's weather got colder with lows going below zero celsius. To deal with the cold I put on an extra layer: a sweater which I put on top of the shirt. On top of the sweater I wore a hoodie. The jacket I wear outside is not so thick. It seems I am cursed if I wear a heavier jacket because, sure as China is corrupt, I will overheat.

My teeth are in a bad way. They're yellow with no chance of ever being white again. Many of them are horribly decayed. After I eat, I have chew gum or swirl my mouth with water to remove the food that does get stuck in the cavities and the jagged remnants of the teeth I do have.

Trump was inaugurated early Saturday morning, Chinese time. Two years ago, I would have thought it wasn't possible. But at least I had heard of him. In January 2006, I probably hadn't heard of a guy named Barack Obama.

Trump's inconceivable election to the presidency was the result of Bill Clinton getting away with screwing an intern and then the election of an obscure Illinois politician who had no qualifications to be president. Bill Clinton coarsened the culture and Barack Obama lowered the bar for who could be president. Therefore, the Democrats who are responsible for these two events of the last quarter century, have only themselves to blame for the fact that Trump's election was possible.

*

Sunday, the 22^nd was a day off for me. I slept in till 9:00 AM which is late for me to be rising. I spent the morning, via my VPN router, downloading Firing Line videos from Youtube and uploading them to Youku, the Chinese Youtube. Incredibly, these videos featuring William F Buckley, the arch American conservative have been allowed to be shown on Youku.

Yesterday, I really tore into a student for her saying that she didn't want to go to America because it was unsafe with all its guns. It was a lie I told her. Guns make for a safer and freer society, I said, and she guffawed at the suggestion. In China where ordinary citizens are not allowed to have guns, I told her, they cannot defend themselves against the whims of their government. [I should have mentioned the Chenguan] There is more danger to human lives from Chinese drivers, I concluded, than American guns.

The K family will go downtown to get haircuts today. I am hoping that I can shave all my hair off, be bald, because the bald spot in the back of my head looks more and more stark whenever a photo is taken of me from behind. Cruelly – or maybe not so cruelly, I suppose there are two ways of looking at this – I can't see this bald spot when I look in the mirror or see photos of myself taken from the front.

*

January 23^rd.

China annoys. Better to say this than to speak of having a China day. It seems to me that many foreigners like to blame their bad days on their being in China when the fact is life is annoying wherever you are in the world.

Still some peculiar things about China annoy me. This five thousand year old civilization they say it has must surely have been island of refinement in a sea of barbaric ignorance. Either that or the Chicoms have totally destroyed all vestiges of Chinese civilizational refinement.

I say this after two petty kind of occurrences this morning. Firstly, I was on the elevator, on the first floor, which was to go down to the minus one (-1) floor. As the door was almost closed, it was opened by a typically slovenly dressed Chinese peasant male who was probably in his forties. He had a lit cigarette in his hand. He pressed the button for the tenth floor. It took a few seconds for it to dawn on him that the elevator was going to go down first. The elevator went down. I muttered idiot! as I exited. This sort of thing happens so often in China on elevators. I then took an escalator and saw a similar demographic of Chinese male ahead of me. This man was standing in the middle of the escalator with his hands holding onto to both sides so that he was blocking anyone who might want to pass him. In more civilized countries, people will stand to one side to allow people in a hurry to pass. Of course, escalators are a relatively new technology in China, and many Chinese may never have ridden one before and are thus unrefined about it. This guy looked like he was holding on for his life.

Anyway, I can understand why some places outside of China have made attempts to segregate Mainland Chinese tourists from other tourists.

I never did get the baldness I desired. As soon as we we were in the hair salon, Jenny changed her tune about my getting my head completely shaved. “We will make it a little bald!” she said. It turned out that what she thought was a little bald, was not close enough to bald in my books. As the hair-stylist started snipping at my hair with scissors, when he should have been using sheers, I was debating whether I should explode in anger. It is my habit, unfortunately, to go along with things while all the while I fume inside. I did, however, this time, say something alone the lines of “Hey!, they are going to make me bald? Right?” and Jenny responded by saying “a little bald” and telling me to just see what they were going to do. And what they tried to do was basically give me the same hairstyle I had been getting and wanting so much to not get anymore: the one where I look in the mirror and see hair without being able to see the big gaping bald spot which does stand out when you look at photos of me taken from behind.

It had been Jenny's commenting on the standing out of the big gapping bald spot in photos that had given me hope that she would acquiesce to my doing what I have always wanted to do and have a completely shaven head. But when push came to shove, she didn't. I had to insist over her opposition and that of the hair stylists that they cut my hair short. It still wasn't as short as I wanted it.

Jenny said that short hair made me look like a criminal. I responded that I didn't want to look like a politician. Now that I think of it, I should have added that Xi Jing Ping doesn't shave his head as do probably all the members of the Chinese politibureau. What is Jenny talking about when she says that criminals shave their head? They don't, as far as I can tell.

*

January 24^th.

I had a body checkup this morning. Jenny is getting me some kind of medical insurance.

During the checkup, I had to do my blood pressure test twice. First time, Jenny got me annoyed and got my blood pressure rising.

*

January 25^th. Second last day of work before the Spring Festival holiday starts for me.

I entered the school about 9:00 AM. I support explain that the entrance to our school is on ground level and that you then have to walk two sets of stairs to get to the level where our classrooms, library and offices are. At the entrance level, there are some chairs on which passersby can sit. This morning, I saw a teenage male, who could have been a student or a passerby, sitting at the entrance eating an ice cream cone. I wanted to slap the pig.

I am not looking forward to the holiday. Expats who can flee China for the duration of the Spring Festival holiday. I don't need to flee, and I find it amusing that those who do flee often brag how much they like China. They're like the Canadians who are so proud to be Canadian but flee to the Mexico and the Southern states in January and December. I would just be happy if I didn't have to go to the hometown for the holiday. I would rather just stay in Wuxi. Going to the hometown means having to deal with traffic getting to the hometown as well as seeing and listening to all the fireworks. It means having to miss the few comforts that make living in China tolerable like Wifi and the VPN router.

Do the Chinese believe in education? They say they do but I think that most of them are mistaken and that they in fact believe in schooling.

Idea for an SPC: Education and Schooling. Question: Chinese don't believe in education. They really believe in schooling.

Further thoughts on the phrase “inconsistent with reality” which was used in passage from the People's China Daily that I quoted earlier this month. I thought that Marxists of Xi Jing Ping's irk believed that reality was just a construct. I am sure that that is what post-modernists like Derrida would say. But it further proves to me that what Xi Jing Ping was quoted as saying in that passage was nothing but gobblygook and mamby-pamby bureaucratspeak meant to sound like it was saying something important when in fact it signified nothing and was only meant for the consumption of globalists who just want power.

*

January 26^th is the last day I work in the year of the Monkey. If reflect back on it, it really was the year of the Monkey for me, seeing how I had so much time dealing with Mainland Chinese primary schools and Mainland Chinese drivers.

I am born in the year of the Dragon on the day before Christmas. So I love to tell everyone that I share zodiac signs with Jesus Christ and Bruce Lee.

I will present some despairing thoughts about Spring Festival. I blog them not because I believe them but because they have crossed my mind:

• It lacks soul because like China, it has been ravaged by Communism and unbridled greed-driven materialistic Capitalism. [Communism is actually a very materialistic philosophy.]
• I feel like a loser because I am unable to get out of China for the holiday like many other Expats do.
• Chinese family dinners bore the hell out of everyone involved. Most of those attending, especially the younger ones are looking at their smart phones to while away the time.
• You can't do anything during Chinese New Year where you cannot escape the crowds if you are with a party of Chinese people. A foreigner, left to his own devices, can walk in places where there are no Chinese or Chinese won't go, and enjoy peace and quiet.
• Chinese are perfectly content to sit around and do nothing during the Spring Festival.

Student named Tony told me a great anecdote about a classmate who cut a ballpoint pen in two and had ink splatter on his face. It took the student thirty minutes to scrub off the ink.

*

The 27^th was the day before Chinese New Year.

The K family drove to Jenny's hometown which might be called Beixin or might be called Xinjie. [Andis had assumed it was Beixin but when he drives to it, the turnoff sign calls it Xinjie.] The drive was not so bad. Traffic came to a slowdown but never to a grinding halt. Andis did make the mistake of trying to go through a ETC gate at the toll area. The gate didn't open and so he had to back up, thus forcing the cars behind him to reverse as well.

To while away the time, Andis went for a walk on the main street. He noticed that he was the only person walking. Everyone else was either in a car or some form of two or three wheel transport.

He spent the rest of the afternoon smoking cigarettes or wasting time on the social app WeChat. He sent everyone he knew a sticker in which he was making the gongxi gesture. He also posted some memes from the People's Cube site to the foreigner WeChat group of which he was a member. It was his way of responding to all the anti-Trump gibberish that he had been seeing the past few days.

The dinner at the in-laws was a simple affair. There was no brawl as there had been the year before, because the family of the brother who had initiated the brawl didn't come. [Apparently, they hadn't reconciled with Baba.]

*

Chinese New Year's Day: January 28^th.

Around midnight, I heard lots of fireworks. I woke up the next morning to find that the K family Citroen was covered in fireworks debris, much to my annoyance.

Chinese New Year's Day has so far been a dull affair. I have spent too much posting pointless messages to WeChat. I have snacked on food and smoked cigarettes all day. I have had a two hour nap. I have gone for a drive with Tony during which I drove on a crowded street full of people who had nothing better to do with themselves but do some shopping in the few stores that were open on the holiday. I had to park on that street because I had promised Tony I would buy him a toy. I was impressed at how calm I was with backing out onto a street with so many cars and e-bikes and pedestrians. I now park like a New Yorker or a Chinaman now: if there is a spot I just take it. I also drove on the countryside, Sinatra playing on the music player. There really wasn't much to see in the countryside except lots of sameness. The area is basically flat and interspersed with some canals. The fields, the homes and the buildings have an annoying uniformity to them. When we came back from the drive, Jenny decided that we would drive to some relatives. I let her drive. It was her first time driving in her home area. She drove us to the poor relatives. I took some photos of them. The grandfather had a peasant oldness to him which makes for great photographs.

*

January 29^th was the second day of the Chinese New Year. The K family spent it in three places: Beixin, Taizhou and Wuxi.

We woke up in Beixin.

About 11:00 AM or so, we, that is the three K's and some other relatives, drove to Taizhou. It was a two car convoy with the Citroen following a White Nissan Tilda driven by Jenny's cousin Jill's husband. To get to Taizhou, we drove on some minor roads that had single lanes going in opposing directions. Driving I found annoying because we couldn't just cruise down the roads. One has to constantly swerve to avoid slower moving vehicles like e-bikes and three wheeled pedicabs, all the while having to sometimes slow down for cars coming from the opposite direction which were in turn swerving to avoid e-bikes and the like.

Despite these constant annoyances, I was able to observe the scenery we were passing. Sadly, I have to report it wasn't pretty. It was monotonous and drab. Lots of concrete buildings, factories and homes that could benefit from good washings, new coats of paint or an end of neglect. This area is still relatively poor, I thought. But then I got to an area that looked to have been built as a result of the 2008 stimulus. I suddenly saw wide three lane roads with smooth pavement, new looking buildings like I see in the Hui Shan district area I call home, elevated roads and pedestrian overpasses. Nicer than what I had just seen but like all Chinese construction, it was very incongruous with its surroundings.

If you can avoid it in China, don't be the following car in a two car convoy where the driver of the lead car is Chinese. Cousin Jill's husband was a Chinese driver with Chinese driving habits. So he had a maddening habit of racing through pale green lights at intersections. I wasn't going to run a red so I stopped causing our convoy to get separated. Jill's husband also liked to drive in the bicycle lane. One instance, he made a left turn at an intersection and then drove into the bicycle lane so that we were driving on the left hand side of the road (China is like North America in that they drive on the right hand side.) against the flow of traffic. We did this for a block until we got to the next controlled intersection. Its light was red and so I was stopped behind him wondering what the hell he was doing. When the light turned green, he sped into the intersection, at an angle, to cross it and get back onto the right hand side of the road. He hadn't put on his turn signals, so his maneuver was a surprise to me. Seeing the other cars starting to speed up and enter the intersection, I wasn't going to imitate his maneuver. The result was that we got completely separated.

Thanks to mobile phone technology, we were able to join up again. And we went to a restaurant where tables had been reserved for a Chinese New Year dinner. The place was packed and I was the only laowai among a horde of swarthy drably dressed locals. The food was standard local fare only remarkable in that ten more plates of it came out after everyone had lost their appetites. There was a teetering pile of food on the tables that I would have photographed if I hadn't forgotten my phone at the in-laws.

*

It's the 30^th of January and I haven't finished telling any readers, who have stayed with me this far, what I did on the 29^th.

After the meal in the packed restaurant in Taizhou, we drove to another place in Taizhou where there was a touristy style open air market. There were booths selling meat cooked on coals, cheap toys, and other souvenirs. It was crowded with people but after walking through it for ten minutes, it suddenly came to an end and it was decided to go back to Beixin for dinner.

After dinner, we drove back to Wuxi. It was a good thing we did it that night because we avoided having to pay tolls. They don't charge tolls at holiday time. The drive was fine and I can't recall being annoyed at any other drivers so much that I felt compelled to blog about what they might have done.

First thing we did when we got back to Casa K was clean all our clothes and jackets. They always reek of smoke whenever we come back from Beixin.

It has been nice to be back in Wuxi. Our area is quiet. Most people in our complex have gone to their hometowns for the Spring Festival.

This evening, we went to the Mix CC mall for the first time. Not much I can tell you about it except it is another one of those big malls constructed in Wuxi after the financial crisis. I doubt if we will return to it very often. There is nothing in it that isn't in Hui Ju.

About 10:00 PM, I heard news of a shooting at a Mosque in Quebec. Six killed and fifteen injured I believe. Two men were under arrest but not much had been revealed about their identities. The authorities, it seems, have become reluctant to identify them; and so people eagerly await and hope that the perpetrators of the deed are of such an ethnicity as to be able to score political points against their opponents. Progressives are hoping the suspects are white males and Conservatives are cheering for the suspects to be Muslims.

*

Last day of January. There are 31 [or should I say thirty one] days in January. So, I'll leave it to you rare reader(s) to figure out the date at which I purport to have written this final bullit [or is that bullet?] point of this blog entry.

So, it turned out that the shooter at the Quebec Mosque was not an Moslem. And it appears that he acted alone. And the people making a show of tears about it are probably secretly glad it happened because now they feel they can attack Trump and any other perceived political enemy. All I get out of this is that Western culture has a death wish. It mostly doesn't believe in Christianity and is rarely serious about it when it does. It doesn't believe in defending itself. It is having a civil war with itself when it should be defending itself. And it gets joy out of mass murders – this applies to both sides of its civil war.

Really, I should ignore the politics as much as I can. But I am addicted to following it, having given up on following sports. I feel this despair because voices that I find clear-headed and intelligent when commenting on Trump – voices from the reactionary and conservative part of the political spectrum or the political cartesian grid – say contradictory things about Trump. And it seems that most of the people I am in contact with in Wuxi hate Trump. I just don't see how the controversy is going to end well, but perhaps it is necessary in some way.

I should really embrace Christianity and think more about comedy; just be above it all.

The last evening of January 2017, the Kaulins family went to the downtown of Wuxi. On the 11^th floor the Hui Jin Building, which is next to the Ba Bai Ban building, we went to a place which offers living rooms for rent with nice sofas and easy chairs on which to watch movies which are projected on screens that cover one entire wall. I didn't so much watch movies as read Don Quixote on my Ipad Mini. But I very much enjoyed being able to lie on the sofas. I'd go to the place again.

I very much enjoy making GIF stickers that can be used in social media apps like WeChat. The past few days, I have created stickers using the character Kramer from Seinfeld. This evening, I made stickers using the plaintive cries of “Stella!” and “Elaine!” from the films A Streetcar Named Desire and The Graduate.

That's it. If you want to make comments on this entry or other entries or mine you have come across, to get some of the my GIF sticker creations, or to get a PDF copy of the compilation of Don Colacho (Nicholas Gomez Davillia) aphorisms I have made, you can email me at andiskaulins@qq.com or andiskaulins@hotmail.com.