Scary World We Live In; Was He Yelling at Me?; Return to the Scene of My(?) Crime; Back to Work (Sort of); Tenuousness; Praying Habits

• More and more it is becoming obvious to me that the lockdown in the West is insane I am sitting here in China and when talking to an Australian friend of mine about the current lockdown procedures being followed in his country(or enforced, I should say?), I had to remark that it was more Communist than what I was experiencing in the People's Republic of China.

• I picked up my son Tony from school on the sixth of May. I was driving him home when I came to this corner where I have to make a right turn. The way it is set up is that the right turn lane is to the right of the straight head lanes. That is it is not a case of a straight-ahead lane being designated a turn lane; it is a lane that appears on one's right as one approaches the corner. So I went into the turn lane, passed through the whole lane and started to make my right turn. But you can't make a quick turn because you do have to be wary of e-bikers who are going straight through the intersection (the bike lane is to the right of the right turn lane, and so it leads to encounters between turning cars and bikes trying to go straight ahead.) I instinctually looked for this and saw this e-biker right beside me, maybe closer than I was used to. So I slowed down and I saw that the man riding the e-bike was very upset. I let him go on his way and then I made my turn. I observed him turning around and screaming. And I thought perhaps he was screaming at me. I do recall that I went into the turn lane rather quickly, but I don't see how I could have cut him off because I stuck to the turning lane and didn't lead into the bike lane until I had to make my turn. But the sight of him bothered me all that evening. I still wasn't sure that it was my bad, and suspected that the man was mad because I got in his way even though he wasn't obeying the rules. Still, the first rule of China is not to hit anyone, even if they are breaking the rules, so I told myself that I just have to be on much more of a lookout for e-bikers when turning.

• The next morning, after dropping off Tony, I turned at the same corner. I observed a car ahead of me turning right causing an e-biker to slow down. This particular e-biker wasn't upset by being cut off, but cut-off she was, all the same. And I had a good idea what had happened the evening before. I got too close to this e-biker. My bad? Up to a point.

• Maybe I will be going back to work on the 18^th. It all depends, I have been told, on our school passing some government inspection on the 15^th. What this inspection will involve, I have no idea. And if we do get back to work, we won't be working full-time, just half-time till the school can adjust to the post-lockdown situation. Everything that had been going on before has been obliterated beyond recognition.

• I can't help by think that my position in China is becoming more and more tenuous. I can see the demand for the services I provide drying up very quickly. The Decoupling which others had foreseen coming seems to be coming.

• I pray the rosary every day. I then go through the fourteen stations of the cross. I feel it gives me strength to get through my life, though without improving it. I think it is presumptuous to ask God for favors, and the best we can ask for is strength for whatever he, life and our actions ends up giving us. I should also pray more than just in the mornings. I neglect to pray before meals, in the evenings, and before bedtime. I neglect to offer thanks for the small favors life does grant me: like for only being yelled at for having a near collision.

Lots of Uniforms and Signs; Coding with Python; Don't Go Anywhere During a Chinese Public Holiday!; Chinese Restaurant; Photos;

• Thursday, the last day of May, I walked to my Wife Jenny's office building to get some packages which had been left in lockers for pickup. Along, the way I had to get through a couple of intersections. At the first one, which is near the entrance to the Casa Kaulins apartment complex, I took photos that could convey the chaos that takes place at intersections when turning cars don't yield to oncoming traffic. At the next intersection, I would have loved to have taken photos of what I saw but didn't because I didn't think it would be a good idea. I saw these guys with signs. At first I thought they were for a store doing a promotion. But when I came back to the intersection, after having picked up the packages for my wife, I saw that each intersection was manned by a person in security uniform holding a sign. I wasn't sure what the signs said but it looked like the government trying to tell the motorists something. As well, I saw about six of the yellow traffic storm troopers looking to pull over motorists and e-bikers and crappy-looking commercial vehicles.

• I have gotten back into Python coding. I want to try to get Tony to learn it. I learned Python a few years go for something to do. For some reason, I gave it up it. Recently I got the idea (I can't remember how now) to try to teach it to Tony. My work was on file so I was able to bring it back and get it to work. Now, for fun, I have been working on making the old code better. I had made programs that could create sports style standings for 4 team leagues and 5 team leagues. Just in the past week, I coded so I could create standings for 6 and 8 team leagues. I found it very absorbing to get the bugs out of the code. It is sort of detective and tester work.

• May 1^st, my wife had this idea to go to some park in Wuxi (in the Li Hu area if you care.). When she told me the idea, my first reaction was that I hoped the place wasn't crowded. Jenny then put pressure on me to not be so negative, so I said I wanted to go, even I couldn't hide my misgivings very well. And went we did. And the place was crowded as I expected. When we saw all these people and a traffic jam of cars, we decided immediately to go back home. And on the way back home, we had to get through three traffic jams. We should have just stayed home. So despite knowing better, I went out on a Chinese public holiday. And I have to wonder about all the Chinese people who were out on a holiday. Why didn't they know better? Mass stupidity.

• May 2^nd (or was it the 3^rd?), we went to this restaurant in the Dong Ting area of Wuxi. It was the first time we had been in a sit down Chinese-style restaurant since before the Spring Festival. We were invited by some friends of Jenny. They all spoke Chinese. I basically sat mute. Sadly, I haven't learned to speak much Chinese after all these years. Anytime I do try, I am not understood by the locals because of my bad tones, my bad pronunciation or the locals inability to believe that foreigners can speak Chinese; and so I give up and I go mute. I try to listen to what is being said, but I can only pick up the stock phrases I have learned from my Chinese study (which I do do daily) but everything else is goobly-gook. At the restaurant we went to, we were in a private room with a round table with a rotating pedestal in the center. I noticed that every dish placed in the pedestal came with these serving chopsticks, which I later confirmed had been placed there on account of the virus. I used them every time when I took food from the pedestal dishes though I noticed that most of the others, especially the kids, weren't following the protocol. So, there were kids at the dinner and they were all playing games on an electronic device. The male adults all smoked and I was given about six cigarettes which made me ill when I tried to smoke them. (I am not a quitter when it comes to smoking but I think I will be now. The cigarettes really disgusted me.)

• Tony was back to school on May 6^th. That morning, after driving him there, I went for a walk and took a lot of photos which I have published in my photo blog.

Wisdom to Live by in This Competitive World of Competition

• Never check on what your competitors are doing. In this competitive world of competition, that is a distraction, a way of causing you to lose a precious moment of striving. Assume your competition is doing infinity, and you will have to do infinity times infinity to the power of infinity.

• Never be a leader. In this competitive world of competition, it makes no sense to be a leader. Leaders have followers, some of whom will want to overtake you.

• Don't be successful. In this competitive world of competition, merely contemplating that you might actually be a success is akin to resting on your laurels. The competition is too intense to be doing that for even an instant.

• Be still. In this competitive world of competition, movement only draws attention to yourself. You don't want your competition to know you even exist or even that you are competing.

• Be stupid. In this competitive world of competition, it makes no sense to employ common sense. Common sense places limits. And even if it isn't as common as it should be, there are still too many using it for anyone to get a real competitive edge from it. The real strivers, the leading competitors are always counter-intuitive. And there is nothing more counter-intuitive than doing things in an idiotic way.

• Don't have competitors. You must strive to be in a class by yourself.

• Strive not be a manager. Managers are merely the head sheep. In this competitive world of competition you don't want to be any sort of sheep.

• Walk into an office and tell them you have an appointment ten years from now. They'll will be very impressed with your promptness. In this competitive world of competition, you can never be too prompt.

• Fail. Success, as just stated, has a way of distracting you from your ultimate goals.

• Don't plan. In this competitive world of competition, those who are planning are merely delaying the moment when they start to compete. It's akin to freezing at the starting block when the gun sounds.

• Don't double-check your work. In this competitive world of competition, everyone must move forward and never be looking back. Double-checking is back-tracking.

• Don't dress well. In fact, don't wear clothes. There is a chance that clothing can be the uniform of success. Recall, that in this competitive world of competition, there is no time to be successful. Success merely courts failure.

• Don't have goals. Goals are merely ways of limiting oneself. You must be beyond having goals. You must be striving to achieve infinity times infinity to the power of infinity.

• Don't practice people skills. In fact, try not to have any. In this competitive world of competition, everyone is a rival. No point in being nice to them.

• Don't focus. In this competitive world of competition, focusing can cause you to miss the necessary distractions. You must be open to what is necessary.

• Don't play to your strengths. In this competitive world of competition, your strengths are not enough, you must have strengths that you don't have.

• Sleep late. In this competitive world of competition, you can't be losing the edge that sleep gives you.

• Try not to be happy. Happiness is an offshoot of success which as previously stated is an unnecessary distraction in this competitive world of competition.

• Procrastinate. This competitive world of competition is causing a lot of the competition to start when they aren't ready. That is why, it is best to bide your time.

• Shirk your duties. In this competitive world of competition, the duties imposed on you by others are in fact distractions placed on your by rivals trying to put your off your game.

• Kill yourself. In this competitive world of competition, one should never be pleased with oneself. And what better way to show how unattainable your standards of competition are than by killing yourself?

• Go to extremes. In this competitive world of competition, it makes no sense to be conventional. Strive to be so abnormal that you end up, conversely, being the normal standard that others strive to be.

My Podcasting Listening Habits; James Delingpole Interviews an Old China Hand; Scott Arthur and Me; My Being Amongst the Chinese Conceit; Can the Chinese Take a Step Back?; What about the Lowest of the Low?

• My podcasting listening habits have changed in a slight way. I still listen to them but there aren't any podcasts I listen to on a daily basis. The ones I am loyal to don't put out so many episodes, and at best, they put them out once a week. I like listening to those that have views that challenge my previously held neo-liberal views but aren't progressive. (More than ever, I hate progressivism.) But be that as it may, I listen to all of James Delingpole's podcasts. He certainly is a conservative libertarian type and sometimes when he rants in those ways, I just to think myself that I have heard this all before. Not that he is wrong in what he says, but he is flawed in his degree of emphasis when he talks about how great Capitalism is and how bad government is, and doesn't say much about Logos. Still, I listen to him because he is like comfort food for the ears. And he does have interesting guests.

• Just this past week, Delingpole put out a podcast with a man who has been living in Mainland China since 2001: Scott Arthur (maybe an alias). Arthur reported that horrors had taken place in Wuhan, that he suspected that virus did come from a Wuhan lab in a mishap that could be attributed to the Chinese habit of being lax and cutting corners on necessary procedures, and that the powers to be in Mainland China have sinister intentions.

• What I found personally interesting about the Scott Arthur podcast was what he had to say about why he had been in China so long. Most foreigners don't last in China, he said, very long. Eighty percent of them don't stay in China for more than a year. (I took it that people, like me and him, who have spent a long time in China, are in the 99^th percentile.) China he said was a very tough place to live in, because it is the most alien place on Earth. It is so alien that you might as well be living on another planet, he added. He then attributed his having been there so long in China to having had a upbringing where he was often alone. This struck a chord with me because I have been alone for many long stretches in my life. I remember that in my middle school (or junior high days as I would have said then) that I had no friends and much as well have been an untouchable with my age-cohorts. As well, I moved a lot and never stayed in any community for long. (In China, I was loosely part of the local expat community, but now can say I am part of no community. My wife Jenny complains that I live in my own world.) So, it made sense to me, for Arthur to say what he did, as well as satisfying my conceit about being strong. (However, he did talk about having an 8 year old son in the public school system of China, and I wonder if he is still in China because he is married to it, and can't get away from it, which I would have by now if I hadn't been married.)

• What else can I say to satisfy my conceit about being in China? In China, I can be a misanthrope. That is someone for whom Misanthropy is a sort of ideology that can satisfy one by coming upon examples of it being true and thus making one feel clever for holding its views. There is so much going on in China to convince oneself of the wickedness and weakness of human nature. In China, Ias well, I can literally not care what everyone else thinks. The Chinese are not my people, and it doesn't phase me that I can't conform to them. Thousands of them I see everyday and I have no desire to be like them.

• Are the Chinese capable of taking a step back from a situation? When I wait for an elevator, they will all be impatient to get on it. When I wait for an elevator, I always take a step back to avoid colliding with the person trying to get off the lift. When the Chinese are driving, they are so reactive to any traffic situations. When a car slows down, they immediately start to weave to get around it even when it would be impractical to do so because they have other cars beside them. When a Chinese parent gets angry about yet another poor test result from their child, I don't think any of them think that in the future, none of this will matter in the least. The Chinese, as an author of a book called What is Wrong with China, says, and I can confirm from observation, go through their day focused solely on what they are doing without regard for others.

• Nothing gets my wife angrier than when I say, on the topic of Tony's poor school performance, that someone has to be last, and that not everyone can be above average. She says that Tony's poor performance is bad for her "face." When I ask her if the family with the last place kid should kill themselves, she says that she didn't care and that that family probably had at least one parent who wasn't focused enough on their child's schooling. Because of my wife's anger, I don't ask the next question: But what if every parent was focused the proper amount on schooling? There would still be the last place student. Either my wife is being illogical or very un-Christian. This Chinese logic is materialistic and cruel.

E-Mail from the Derb; Tony Goes to School on a Sunday; Small Acts of Kindness; Starbucks Back to Business; The Sending of Face Masks; Sometimes You Got to Wait; My Other Blog

• I sent a email to John Derbyshire who is the host of my favorite podcast, a bit of a sino-observer and who like me has China for an in-law; and I got a reply in two days. My email had to do with the travails of being married to a Chinese wife slash tiger mother. I asked whether Derb's wife was a tiger mother. He response made me feel better. While I didn't get any advice about how to deal with my tiger mother wife, I did learn of his experiences, and it was good it know that I was not alone.

• My son Tony has to go to school on Sunday because of the labour day (May Day) holiday.

• Based on my meme posting, you would think I am not but a person of dark and sick thoughts. But I am capable of small acts of kindness as long as they aren't sentimental.

• Saturday (the day before Tony goes back to school), I mule it to Jenny's office building. (By "mule it" I mean pick up delivery packages for my Chinese wife Jenny). There is a mall near Jenny's building so I decided to walk about it and see what I could see and report. The Mall was back to business with no evidence of a lock down. I walked past it's Starbucks and saw people happily seat at tables, san masks, in groups, and felt annoyance. If people can sit at tables at Starbucks, why can't we open our school!?!?

• Sunday evening, Jenny asked me how it was that when the "pandemic" started in China that overseas Chinese were sending face masks to China and then when the "pandemic" spread to overseas, you didn't hear stories of Chinese expats sending face masks to their home countries. I suppose the intent of the question was to show how the overseas Chinese or the Chinese in general were more caring than foreigners. My first response was that to say it would never have crossed any of our minds for it would have been like being in Africa and sending food to the first world. My second response would have been how no one abroad wants Chinese-made crap.

• Sometimes when you impart some wisdom to your child, it is wise to not expect the lesson to set in right away, but to give it some time, maybe even years. Immediate learning is not possible if the person is not receptive to what is being taught.

• Here is my photoblog: www.wuxiandis.wordpress.com. I have just published some photos on it.

Is China Asshole?; Hate Coming Home; Not a Good Sign; No Talking to Angry Jenny; Domestic Drama; Tony wants to move; Email Me! Please!

• There was some Hong Kong person who has been praised for saying "China is Asshole!" To be honest, it is a sentiment that in my angry moments, I am fully in agreement with. But that is a horrible thing to say about a in-law, for China is my in-law. So, I am going to have to fair and sympathetic to China as I can. But far as I can tell, the Chinese authorities screwed up big time with this virus. (Note, I say the authorities.) The reason the authorities screw up is the political system that is in place in China. This has to be changed. If it could change from within the system, this would be a nice thing and a way for the Chinese authorities to redeem themselves. But I'm afraid it ain't going to happen. The Chinese authorities don't want to lose face. And this losing face thing is a Chinese thing as far as I can tell.

• Coming home is not a pleasant thing for me. Because my wife Jenny is tiger-mother hell-bent on Tony's schooling, she can be in a foul mood when I get home. Sometimes, I arrive home and my wife will have a scowl on her face which means she is frustrated by Tony's schooling. Sometimes, if the door is open, I will walk into the apartment and be hit by a eerily dead silence. If I do say something, I will be growled at by either Jenny, who is frustrated by Tony's schooling, or Tony who is frustrated by being reemed out for hours on end by Jenny.

• And I just witnessed how it can be bad for Tony when he arrives home. Upon arriving home with Tony on the evening of the 22^nd, I saw Jenny ask Tony what his marks had been on some tests he had just written. He told her and she became very angry. "Oh no!" I muttered. "This is not a good sign!" For it appeared that I was going to have to listen to three hours of Jenny scream-tutoring Tony. You can just imagine how Tony must feel. Anyway, this was never my idea of a happy home. Never, once I have come home and asked how my day was in a pleasant manner. Why do Chinese women (or women in general) think vile bile is the way to make things better?

• There is no point in asking Jenny why she is angry. She will say that I am not a good father and blah, blah, blah... I can't argue with someone who only responds in ad hominem arguments.

• In turned out, on the 22^nd, that Jenny did scream-tutor Tony for three hours. During this, Jenny & I had an argument. It started when Tony couldn't take Jenny's reeming him out, and he started waving his fists at her. I had to go to the study and get between them. Jenny then decided to attack me. She pushed me into the living room. Meanwhile, Tony put a set of dog tags on his neck found a hook on the wall and acted out trying to hang himself. I stopped him and then I tried to appeal to Jenny to do something about her temper. She just complained about how bad I was and how Tony's poor performance at school was making her look bad and how everyone was looking down on Tony. (Alas, Jenny's Chinese Face was the reason for this insanity.) She then said she wanted a divorce. She even offered to give all the money she had saved up if Tony & I moved to Canada. It wasn't worth responding to that. The only comfort I can take from this is that these sorts of domestic dramas are happening a lot in China and all over the world.

• Tony tells me that he wants to move to Canada. I can blame him for wanting to because I couldn't handle my mother screaming at me for three hours every night in a desperate attempt to save her face.

• Comments? Email me at andiskaulins@hotmail.com.

04/20 Morning Traffic; A Trump Meme; My Driving Juju; Patton & Trump & Me; I have failed the Lockdown/Quarantine Character Test; Three Hours of Tiger-Mothering; My Future;

• Monday, April 20, I drove my son Tony to school. I noticed that traffic was busier than it had been the week before. One of the reasons may have had to do with the Grade Three Primary School students going back to school.

• I love posting memes onto WeChat. Recently, I have been posting lots of memes related to the virus and lots of memes related to American politics. I have resisted the urge to post those critical of China and Mister Eleven. On Sunday, I posted a meme that said that the only thing that had gotten worse in the years of Trump's presidency had been the Democrats. Someone thought they were very clever and reposted the meme with the words "the Democrats" changed to "Democracy." I know many anti-Trumpers believe this and so that is why the person who changed the meme's wording thought it might be a clever riposte. But it is a bit of mystery as to how they think they going to convince Trump-supporters to change their views with that. Has Trump made himself president-for-life like a certain Chinese leader who I am scared to mention? Does Trump ever not hold press conferences where he doesn't have to confront members of the opposition media like any Mainland Chinese leaders? Does Trump live in a country where leaders from opposition parties don't hold important positions in other levels of government? The answers to all these questions are of course no, so one has to wonder why the person even bothered trying to respond to the meme in the way he did. It could be because he couldn't argue with the substance of the meme which was the that behavior of the Democrats has been shameful.

• I admit when I am driving in China, I have a conceit about being a better and more reasonable and more proficient driver than the locals. That is, I have better driving juju than these just-gotten-off-their-bicycle hayseeds. The local drivers however can rattle my conceit when they do some clever maneuvers and are able to foresee an opening in traffic that I didn't. I assuage my wounded conceit by thinking what assholes those local drivers were. And I think I can make a case that many of these local drivers are assholes. Because I, having superior driving juju to the locals, I know when to pick my moments. When traffic is heavy, I stick to my lane and am patient. When traffic is lighter, I strut my stuff.

• Interesting to listen to a podcast where VDH said that Trump had some General George S Patton qualities. (Or did he say Patton had Trumpian qualities?) Patton was considered by many of his colleagues to be gross, obnoxious and thus a deplorable, and yet Patton was admired by many a common man because he had the right set of skills for the moment. Ditto Trump. I have only one thing I can think of in common with Patton and that is that we both got in trouble for slapping people. In Patton's defense, you can say he didn't shot them like many German officers did to their soldiers in the same war. The only thing I can say in my defense is that the people I slapped deserved it more than the soldiers Patton slapped.

• This lockdown has been a test of my character and probably one that I have failed. While I can say I have endured my wife's moods very well, I can't escape this feeling of being useless and impotent. I am faced with the question of what I am going to do after this, and I am nothing but indecisive. Right now, my actions are that of someone who just wants to stay in China and hopes that things can carry on as they did before; while my thoughts are of someone who knows that it can't carry on, but can't muster the resolve to do anything about it. My quandary is that I have to keep my marriage but I have no loyalty to or interest in China. Jenny is staying loyal to China. Tony wants to go to Canada. Choice is stay in China, stay married, but wish I was in Canada; or go to Canada and put my marriage in jeopardy. My stomach sours when I contemplate this.

• My son Tony got 62 on some test and my wife spent three hours tutoring and screaming at him. All I did in the meanwhile, was sit nearby and try to calm my nerves. I have been putting up with this for six years. How this is supposed to make for a better future (which is how this tiger-mothering has been justified to me) is beyond me. All that are being created are bitter memories and regrets at the time wasted. I would like to see a future where kids are free in the evenings and parents don't feel a need to tutor their them.

• When my wife says it is for the future, I think what about my future? My future is now? I never envisaged a future where my wife would spend three hours of her life being angry over something so ephemeral as a grade six school test.

I Contain Solitudes

I Contain Solitudes

Inspired by Dylan's I Contain Multitudes

I don't know about multitudes but I contain solitudes.

I lived in Canada where they had at least two.

I am descended from Latvian Diaspora and so there was three.

I lived in NB, PQ, MB & BC which makes four.

And now the five-starred pariah PRC where

I'm just a laowai who minds his own business

and wants nothing more than to be a poet fly on the wall.

Now that I think about it some more, I see that like Dylan,

I contain multitudes by the score.

I have multitudes of interests in my solitudes.

But I don't want to bore with a litany of things I like.

There is only one thing that I should tell you I love and that is Christ.

Whats on the litany, I love too, of course, but that love was unrequited,

but deservedly so for I had multitudinous ways of thinking only of myself.

I Should Have Taken a Picture; Protests! Yes!; My Favorite Blogger Says; Back to Work in May?; I Contain Solitudes; A Trip to the Livat Mall;

• On a Thursday just past, I went to downtown Wuxi to pick my passport. The visa had to be renewed. On the way, I walked pass the Xin Kai Hu Xiao Xue apartments which I had lived in many years ago when I first came to Wuxi. I saw that, to accommodate the virus crisis lockdown, a new and bigger gate had be put up at the entrance. As well, I saw that they had put up two five star PRC flags. I should have taken a photo of this because what I was beholding was iconic and symbolic of all that has taken place the last three months.

• I am glad to see that some Americans are protesting the lockdowns in their country. (And some Germans are too, in theirs)

• My favorite blogger wrote another entry about the PRC. He thinks that its politburo has been making many, many mistakes lately, and the world will hopefully not put up with it anymore. We'll have to see. If my Chinese wife is anything to go by, they have an irateness coming from their instinctual need to save face, and many will be intimidated.

• Latest rumor, I heard, is that our school will open after the May holiday. I had hoped that I would go to work now that my son Tony has gone back to school, but the lower primary grade and kindergarten students have not gone back yet. Training centers, like the one I work at, will be the last to be allowed to re-open.

• Bob Dylan just released a song called I Contain Multitudes. It has inspired me to start a poem called I Contain Solitudes. It is and will be a work in progress and I will publish it over and over again. until I get sick of trying to improve it.

• Saturday, my wife Jenny wanted all three of us to go out. So we went to the Hui Ju (Livat) Mall, the biggest mall in Wuxi. On the drive there, we had to go through the area where, in the before times, there had been an overpass. It took us forty minutes to get through it, when with a fully functioning overpass, it would have taken but thirty seconds. The congestion took place at an area where five lanes of traffic, of vehicles of all sizes, had to merge into two lanes. So, our little Citroën was stuck behind and between some long flat-decks and trailers. But at least we didn't have trouble getting a parking spot at the Mall. For a Saturday, it wasn't very busy. We stayed in the Mall enough to look around, become bored, get some sandwiches at Subway, and buy frozen hot dogs at Ikea. In the Mall, everyone was wearing masks and the atmosphere was subdued.