Alright, enough.

Enough with the shitting on China already, I can't help but self-admonish. 

My tone has been wildly negative for the last little while because I've had to examine the state of things here as closely as my laser-focus obsessive brain possibly can.  Why?

The decision whether to come back here next year came up recently, so I needed to weigh some pros/cons.  It's kind of a big call, as I don't see myself as the type to take off partway into a contract - unlike certain Ontarians...  if I decide to sign on again, I'm committing to another full year of annoyances to go with the good stuff.  Let's get mathy!

Cons:
1.  It's easy to get annoyed by wildly illogical things that happen here all the time.  I don't look at it as an issue of cultural difference as much as an insatiable desire to cut every corner possible at all times.  Just remember, every product you get that was made in China is 'EXPORT QUALITY', and every odd thing you see a Chinese person do outside of China is 'MAGNIFIED BY 1.4 BILLION' here.

2.  This place can't be good for your health.  The water is hard as hell, you're randomly assailed by sewer gas anywhere/anytime, and the air can be incredibly chewy from time to time.  It takes extra effort to eat well, and to resist the urge to anger-drink on occasion.  People still smoke everywhere here, including (but not limited to) restaurants, on bikes, banks, enclosed train/bus stations, and in front of you wherever you are unfortunate enough to have to walk... it's all part of how...

3.  The country is arrested in a culture of semi-permanent adolescence.  Teenagers can be selfish, destructive to themselves/the environment, really into vomiting in public from drinking, and obsessed with keeping up with the Wangs when it comes to material goods use/consumption.  A guy who has lived in town for 7 years once told me that given the choice between a knockoff Gucci bag and an indestructibly well-constructed handmade italian leather attache, the Chinese would take the 'Gucci' bag 100% of the time.  I thought "generalization!", but have subsequently seen nothing to contradict this.

Pros:
1.  Loot.  It's pretty unlikely I would be walking into a full-time job at home, let alone one that pays all my accomodation/bills/etc.  I get free dinners with all the beer one could possibly need on a regular basis too, which doesn't hurt.  I still owe a shitload to Canada student loans too.. good times.

2.  I've 'figured out' virtually everything I'm going to need to know to survive here another year.  I know how to get all the various foods/drinks I want (alas for milk, which I will enjoy before leaving YVR at the end of June - and then probably go into stomach convulsions from drinking something healthful), I've scoped out a few restaurants that are easy to eat at (and am making inroads to tricky ones by getting menus translated etc.), I now know exactly what level of entertainment to expect on a weekend, and I know a cadre of expat townies I can see when I want to speak some English.  Long sentences!

3.  Travel opportunities.  I'm going to Japan for the second time already this year at the end of April (flight= about $450 return), which is fantastic.  Thailand was hot and delicious.  I've seen some provincial highlights and am going to go visit friends in Bejing from my ed program sometime soon.  Imagine what I could do with another year...  Korea? India? Tibet? Australia? Who knows.

4.  Stuff.  I have improved this apartment (added u-bends to sinks, got an oven, grew plants, etc.) significantly since I got here, and could come back from Canada with any products/light foods/etc that I feel like I'm missing (shoes!) after having left bulk stuff here for future use.

It looks like a 4-3 margin, and without even factoring in the career advancing experience I can garner with another year it wasn't that hard of a choice.

I'm in.

I'm in for another year of wishing I lived in a country of people forced into competence by the fact that they could possibly lose their jobs.  I'm in for another year of delayed gratification, if I define gratification as being composed of getting to do the vast majority of my hobbies - like breathing clear air and mainlining Mexican food.  I'm in because despite all of the annoying things that China has to offer, I can almost completely control the level of their involvement in my life.

I'm meeting interesting people, stockpiling 'WTF' stories for when I reconnoiter with whatever friends remember me when I return (I'm thinking single digits), and enjoying the satisfaction of living an 'adult' existence for the first time in my life. 

I owe it all to Chinese people being spectacularly lazy and bad at English...so maybe I should stop bitching about it.  I mean, I won't, but I could.  From time to time.

See you at the end of June, trees/nature/air.  Who wants to go salmon fishing with me when I return?

What's that, you say?

                I’ve been settling back in in a fashion roughly approximating ‘nicely’ since my nearly month-long exodus from the PRC.  After an initial comedown period of disappointment and disillusionment I’ve re-established a connection with the reason I’m here after all (LOOT), and found my way back into my old routine of attempting to eat well/stay hydrated to combat the worst effects of The China.

                This isn’t to say that things really get that much easier here.  At the core of every outing to the grocery store/restaurant/mall/etc lies the same issue: I will have to attempt to make myself understood, and understand in kind.  The fact that I have collected some elemental mandarin since I’ve come here helps less than you would think, though, because it puts you in decided danger of thinking you might be understood when you speak.  Explanation!

                Mandarin is a language that dearly holds on to its multiple-intonation format.  They literally can’t get enough of it; it’s the reason you can’t even pretend to speak mandarin without feeling like some kind of closet racist.  If you don’t do all the crazy ups, downs, recovered dips, and high level tones *just so* you will be looked at like a dog that is trying out its speaking legs for the first time… and not even some kind of adorable Hanna-Barbera creation, either.

                Part of the issue is the antiquated (yet quizzically still clung to) language, but a larger part is the near complete lack of multiculturalism here.  Now, you might say, “what do you mean, look at all the white people on the billboards?” – a semi-valid point, in a way.  I don’t hold the fact that the entire world seems to want to get ‘a bit closer’ to white people as valid multiculturalism, though: Orlando Bloom and an endless succession of anonymous blondes aren’t bastions of cross-cultural exchange – they’re just sexy as all getup.

                It’s hard to even come to visit somebody in China.  They need to send a letter of invitation dictating their address, job, and own visa status before you can even be considered for a visitor permit – after which you can stay in the country for no more than 30 consecutive days on a typical tourist visa.  You think you can come live in China? You better have a post-secondary degree in a field that the Chinese literally CAN’T do to even think about applying.

                Plus you have to remember that as a result of decades of unbridled (by reason, empathy, or environmentalism) development, much of the country is barely habitable by comfortable western standards; those with any lung, allergy, stomach, or immune issues have no business doing more than crossing the airspace.  What’s that, you’re a vegan/vegetarian? Get out of here you wuss, before you are forced to eat the boniest possible fish (which is the selection process for fish served across the country…jesus I miss halibut).

                Thus people of the Caucasian persuasion are actively discouraged from coming to live in China.  You’ve got to be a particularly hardy brand of weirdo to make it more than one day (the length of time a teacher recently lasted at our school… ah, Ontario, you make good people) in this country, and even then it’s only despite the best efforts of the Chinese service industry. 

                I’m not trying to say that helpful people don’t exist, I’m trying to say that the vast majority of people have no idea what to do with someone that doesn’t speak the wacky language like their neighbour.  This is why ‘po-tone-hwa’, or however you want to spell it, even exists: making effort to divine what someone who can’t exactly intone your way(even if they’re just from a different part of China) is seen as too much work for any day ending in ‘day’.

                In Canada it is common to encounter somebody with a thick accent (or no English at all) who wants something.  You think about the situation, use simple/slow language, point at things with your hands, and usually sort things out in a remarkably short/easy period of time.  In my experience here, the preferred way of dealing with such situations is to keep your hands at your side and speak mandarin increasing in speed by the moment.  This leaves the hapless foreigner again using their skills, but to help themselves through a situation – which is a situation that doesn’t have to be! 

                It’s not the peoples’ faults at all: clearly they’re not the leading intellectual lights (products of Chinese school system, currently working at KFC etc.) and they are completely unused to helping anyone who isn’t part of the clan.  Aggressive mono-culturalism (hello, ‘southern Chinese’ mountain people) has hobbled peoples’ ability to relate, and the breath of relief when people finally see us turn away is as palpable as it is audible.

                It’s just the way things are here.  If I ask my class about why such things are never addressed, or encouraged to change, the more glib amongst them announce “this is CHINA!” (or more commonly ‘the China’ after hearing about me/Hoochador’s go-to explanation for anything odd here).  If you can’t get used to constant disappointment over the little things – that don’t have to be that way, but damned if they are going to change – you don’t have a lot of business here. 

Thankfully I can laugh most such inconveniences off – if only a few hours after the fact.

A stark contrast

 It has been a little difficult to collect my thoughts about China in the last while; part of this can be chalked up to the general busy-ness that accompanies the job, but the greater part really falls into the lethargy/depression camp.  I wouldn’t say that I’ve become actually personally or professionally depressed – it’s just that the ‘what the hell!’ moments that still occur on a near daily basis have led to more sighs than tapping keys.  Allow me to explain.

 I went to Japan for the greater part of my spring holiday period, and it turns out that I both love and hate that country.  Allow me to explain, with the help of some visual aides:

 This is a picture of the gates that organise admission to subway cars in Tokyo.  When the train comes it stops exactly in front of the doors, which then open to allow people out.  Meanwhile, people have been standing in straight lines in front of these doors waiting to get in… once the people leave, they file on.  The whole thing is remarkably efficient.

 It was fun to watch before I realised that it was throwing China into a bleak relief.  In a similar situation in China everyone would be clustered around the gates, which would be stuck open (or operated by a dirty piece of rope) and covered in spit marks.  Once the train stopped 9 inches off the target the fight would begin, and with it the concurrent seagull-like screaming of Chinese people moving inordinate amounts of baggage behind them on the quality of dolly that you see only in fish market back rooms in the real world.  The whole thing would take 3 times as long, and given that it is public transit you would be bathed in halitosis the entire time.

 This is a picture of the canopy along the main pedestrian thoroughfare in Meiji Jingu park, Tokyo.  What you see are wonderful old trees and blue sky over an expansive walking area as well-constructed as it is meticulously clean.  What you can’t hear is the serene atmosphere, quiet but for the hushed speech of friends walking and the birds of the forest.  It’s one of the biggest tourist draws in Tokyo, and always busy.

 This would be different in China, or I’ll eat my Yomiuri Giants hat.  The path would be crumbling due to the constant passing of motor scooters and the ‘chinese mini-vans’ (three wheel motorbikes that have been encased to protect the rider from the elements, rather like a very dirty popemobile), and the trees would be a quarter the size – and leafless.  Every 20 yards or so there would be a stall selling plastic garbage or some kind or other, or some kind of food stand with a mechanized voice stridently proclaiming the same 8 words over and over on a 6 second loop.  Garbage would be everywhere it collected from the wind that the denuded trees couldn’t block, and toddlers would be running around in ass-less pants urinating and screaming about how great they are (one assumes).

 This view of Tokyo – I believe facing south east towards the rainbow bridge – was remarkable in that visibility (in this city of 13-14 million) stopped just short of the curvature of the earth.  The cars are kept under strict emission guidelines, the power for the city isn’t generated by burning coal, and the industries are kept in line by crazy things like environmental laws – rather than abject individualistic profit.

 Nijo-jo castle in Kyoto, the former residence of the Shogun.  This is an austere wooden building with some minimal gilding, and for some reason completely without hundreds of people smoking or inflatable red fake gates run by never-off air compression units you’d expect to see on an illegal Phillipino pearl diveboat.  Note, also, the blue skies.

 This river in Arashiyama, a western section of Kyoto, does not have homemade motorboats running up and down it at all times… nor is it full of never-decaying plastic bags or discount-brand beer cans.  There were many types of waterfowl, and a variety of fish living without the benefits of pens and nets – to keep people out, mind you, rather than fish in.

 Ah, a glimpse of bad English writing on a product… nothing better than an unnecessary use of ‘The’…though I wouldn’t put it past the Japanese to just be trying to be ironic.  Irony here is how you describe the sky, not a mode of address.  Also, hooray for DIP HOP.

 It was so great being in Japan (I’m currently considering a return in early May, as evidence of this), that it left me a bit dumbstruck on my return.  So many of the issues with everyday life in China could be ameliorated if anyone took a bit of pride in the products they make or the systems they devise for organisation/transport/etc… but everyone is too busy trying to make money and get places/RMB before others do to notice.

 The depression I felt upon returning from a country designed by – and for the easy use of – grown-ups to an embarrassing free-for-all was palpable, but receded with work and time.  I think I know what astronauts returning to the space station after a relaxing/luxurious recess back on earth might feel like now.  The first week you’d really be wanting that Caesar salad with the brick oven-baked focaccia bread, but eventually you’d settle back into your synthetic chow and do what must be done.

 Thus, I returned to The China.