china likes to rock the party

during the past week, i have been to a few parties, which have been most interesting. the first was the birthday party for the young girl whom i am teaching, her 13th. all of her classmates from her school were in attendance, singing karaoke, playing games and generally having fun. there are a few western fast food joints in shunde, pizza hut, kfc and mcdonalds, all of which comprised the menu for the affair. pizza hut in china is an especially interesting place as it is a full-service sit-down restaurant where people go for a fancy night out. it is relatively very expensive and is almost treated as a gourmet establishment. similarly, the upper middle class people of this city are also under the impression that the fords that they drive are quite luxurious.

the people that i work for are very wealthy and have a brand new seven series bmw, but all of the things that make a luxury car a luxury car are in english, so they are of no use to them. it is awfully contradictory for a people obsessed with industriousness and maintaining economies of scale to have things that are completely useless. i guess that this family is rich enough to not care about being able to read the gps screen in their new bmw.

the birthday party was quite entertaining and i was very popular as all of the kids got a chance to practice the english that they had been learning at school. one little guy was especially funny. he asked me if i liked living in china. i told him that it was really cool. he had a very confused look on his face and asked me why. when i responded with the standard, diplomatic answer of, “the people are all really nice,” he looked even more confused and said, “what people have you been talking to?” i found this to be extremely funny and came clean with him, that it wasn’t an ideal place to be. he appreciated my honesty.

a few days after the birthday party, i was invited to attend a housewarming party for one of the extended family members of the people for whom i am working. when people here move into a new house, they throw huge blowouts and this one was in a giant room of a posh restaurant. before things got underway, everyone was chatting, smoking and not letting a single toothpick go unused, per usual. all of the guests sat down and all of a sudden the lights turned off and disco balls began shining, smoke machines were going full-blast, lasers projected designs of happy faces and stars on the walls and of all things, the theme song from the magnificent seven began to play. as quickly as it started, it ended, and no one in the room seemed to be impressed by this. it seemed as if this is something that happens at every gathering. maybe it is.

a man jumped onto a stage at one end of the room and began yelling into the microphone. chinese people love microphones. they have some sort of obsession with them that, like most things here, i can’t quite wrap my head around. everyone applauded at intervals of the man’s speech and then the food was served. it is easy for me to eat at these kinds of places because the head of whatever animal is being presented is always on the plate. i had never eaten piglet before. well, maybe i had. i guess i never would have known it without the head of the animal being displayed.

they do a great job with doing different things with shrimp here and all of the shrimp dishes are always fantastic. the shrimp that were served at this meal were served whole in their shells as usual, but this time, everyone was eating the entire thing, head and all. i tried this but found that it was not worth the trouble that came after eating one whole, which included spending ten minutes picking the shell and legs out of your teeth. this could be part of the appeal, as these people love picking their teeth almost as much as they love screaming into microphones. i decided it was more effective to peel the shell off of the damn thing and just eat the meat. it certainly tasted better.

the night after the party, i walked around the corner to the market near my apartment to get some drinks and a snack. while i was on my way, i noticed a very large and very dead rat in the street. it was the first one i had seen in over a month here, which is why it attracted my attention. dead rats and lizards and things of that nature are extremely common in cambodia and people there are way more hungry than they are here. i bought a bottle of iced tea and a bag of cookies and headed home. as i turned the corner, i noticed that a person was holding the rat that had been in the street and that person then turned and took the rat back into his house. if my cantonese were any better,

i would have taken the time to explain to the man that i had just seen something on the news about the prices for pig products dropping below the price of corn, forcing the government to put a floor in place – surely he could spring for at least a trotter. maybe he knows something the who doesn’t know, that you can get swine flu from eating pork. or maybe its just that dead rats are in season this time of year.

now i know why i haven’t seen many dead rats around town.

a few hygiene issues

i haven't been sleeping very much (or at all, really) since i have been in china because i can't seem to adjust to the sheet of plywood that i have for a bed. its not literally a sheet of plywood, but it might just as well be one. i took these pictures last week from the balcony of my apartment. the one on the left was taken at 7 a.m. and the one on the right at 7 p.m. shunde is a city of a little over one million people and it is astonishing how dirty it is, even after having been to other drastically underdeveloped places around asia and also to massive cities. this place makes bangkok look like something about which al gore could only hope to dream.

this place, however, is quite developed. in fact, it seems to be drastically overdeveloped. there are highrise apartment complexes all over the place. these places just can't be full because there is nowhere for all of these people to work in this city, unless they are driving an hour each way to guangzhou. they could be, but it seems unlikely given the way in which these people operate.

while i was on my way to hong kong and macau a few weeks ago, i met a dutch man who was very funny and the first person i had met in shunde who spoke fluent english since i came here. he was, of course, leaving. we were joking about the swine flu outbreak and as i write i am remembering that we were going through hong kong border checkpoints joking about it on may 1st, the day that the first case was confirmed in hong kong. anyway, he was talking about a previous business trip to china, which was before the sars outbreak in 2003. he recalled seeing a sign in an elevator that read, "no spitting."

before coming to this part of the world, i was under the impression that people in asia were obsessed with cleanliness, that it was something over which they took great pride. i found this to be the case in cambodia, where people would sweep the dirt off of their floors made of dirt until their brooms were worn all the way down. they did the best with the cards they were dealt. people in thailand are of a similar mindset. but the people in china, at least in this city, really are not concerned with cleanliness, hygiene or generally just doing things that are in the best interest of one's health. i tried to find dental floss the other day to no avail. the concept of a daily shower is lost.

these people don't have the same viable excuse as the rest of seriously impoverished asia, or even the rest of seriously impoverished china - they all have running water, electricity, cars, etc. both of the apartments i have lived in here have given me nightmares. i couldn't sleep in the first one most nights because it was so disgusting. i am still cleaning up after the previous tenants of my second place.

instead of taking their garbage from their apartments to the garbage bin on the ground floor of the building, people just let it pile up in front of their doors until someone else handles the situation. certainly it saves them the trip, but it also attracts massive amounts of massive cockroaches, rats and other critters. it doesn't seem to me to be overly difficult to take out the trash with you when you leave the building. it is what i do each day to keep bugs out of my apartment, but all of my neighbors keep so much waste around that there is nothing more i can do to combat the bugs than keep a full arsenal of various anti-bug weaponry on me at all times.

i guess these people are used to having filthy, disease ridden insects and rodents in their general vicinity, but there is no reason for that kind of thing. there is no reason to spit in an elevator or anywhere else for that matter. there is no reason to use the horn on your car when you are turning instead of your blinker. since nobody pays attention to horns being honked any longer, i asked one of the people that i work with what they do to get someone's attention when there is an actual traffic emergency. this question was met with utter confusion and is a perfect example of the disparity in methods of logical reasoning between the east and west.