bighairylaowai.com

I said a couple times before that I didn’t want to narrate the great sagging vacancy of my office existence on this website. But like John Prescott’s meaty shagathon, such grotesque lurid things always come to light. None of that background padding. No story-telling scaffolding. Simply, I came across a letter that had sent out to a client from one of the administrators in my firm. It consisted of seven tranches of indented text, not long enough to be termed paragraphs as they only contained one or perhaps two short sentences each. Each of these fragments began with the phrase I should be grateful… save for the third which surprised with the variant I should be most grateful… and the sign-off paragraph that left nobody in doubt with I should therefore be grateful…

This is probably the only time that I will invite comments. FYI absolutely no fence-sitting. Your reaction to this will determine your station, should you be granted one, in next month’s Global Restructure.

I have chosen to place this hotly anticipated blog entry under the category of teaching. Think well upon that.

So, OK, I came back to the UK, and NO-ONE was squatting in the streets and shitting, or klacking and sweeping Mah Jong tiles, and bicycles didn’t out number cars, and cars weren’t snarling and cutting unpredictably across adjacent lanes (disputable -ed), NO-ONE was carrying bundles of chickens bound around their feet, or monotone whistling while they held pissing babies above cracks in the pavement, hunched slurping over noodles, dolloping large clenches of phlegm thereabouts, or staring at me like I was an escapee from the orang-utan house, or a walking amalgamation of passport, dollar and giant phallus. And not one fucker said Hellloooo! and then scampered away giggling. And there were all these round-eyes absolutely EVERYWHERE! Thus goes the template for the Reverse Culture Shock blog that the returnee laowai is obligated to write. It’s a bigger spin says the stubbly receding Canadian with the rigidly shelved forehead, his dinky Leshan girlfriend rubbing the hairs on his fore-arm and staring into the smug face of a syphilitic gorilla. You expect yourself for the bicycles and the spitting and all the Chinese. But going back is different. You don’t get ready for going home, do you? You’ll find out. Write about it. Put it on your blog.
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8 hours every other day on rickety buses skipping along unsealed roads, cramping legs stuck to ears, an old man’s dozing head slumped on my shoulder and his drool slipping precariously down his lip, cut-and-paste hostel placards shoved in my face on arrival, itchy sheets, bed bugs, underlying planks broken in 2, snoring (often my own, needs to be said)…

For these reasons, 2 hours tapping away amongst the spitting, slurping, tunelessly wailing, shouting, staring, raspingly chatting on mobiles and farting denizens of a net cafe late at night is becoming unpalatable.

Close your eyes, stick your fingers in your ears and sing la la la la la la until I have the leisure to write it all in an unseemly batch and back date them.

Lead with your headline story they say, so in a Tarantino style fractured narrative, it is day 4 of Big Hairy Laowai’s journey through Western China, and he is being unceremoniously sheperded into the back-seat of a Police (Jincha) Car, to be taken to the station for questioning.

It was my first full day in Dali. I grabbed some breakfast baozi, picked up my mountain bike from the hire shop and rode to nearby Erhai Hu (Ear-Shaped Lake). This meant traversing the cobbled streets at half seven in the morning, dodging commuters, school kids, the open stream that runs through the town, people lugging baskets, motor vehicles and everything else a semi-pedestrianised Chinese street can throw at you. I slalomed with considerable finesse, passed through the eastern gate and rode down to the lake for an early morning view, before rejoining the main lakeside highway. Field workers were lazily pedalling their way to the day’s crop, so I rode half a foot outside the bicycle lane. Bulky tour buses blaring their horns chugged incessantly past my left shoulder.
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Summer in Chengdu progresses like the JinJiang, the river that flows through the heart of it; an indolent, viscid drift deviating reluctantly around sluggish bends. Just occassionally, the stolid current will squall over a decaying bank of rubbish and human faeces, or to persist with the analogy, an anecdote.

1. Wrath of the Golden Yeti
A nation of dreamers, subjugated and censored by the greater logistical might of a neighbour regarded as coldly bureaucratic and soullessly pragmatic; limitless creativity bursting out in performing arts; a tradition of oral story-telling; isolated by geographical features from the rest of their continent; a resulting psychic symbiosis with the land itself; the irresistible onset of an international religous movement subverted by a far older native mysticism; crudely romanticised by Americans (whose philanthropy towards non-oil rich sovereignties is known the world over) - which country do the previous generalisations suggest?

If you’re still reading, two should spring to mind, Ireland and Tibet. And as I’ve learnt in Chengdu, Tibetans share the proclivity for a few drinks and then acting as mad as f*ck. After laying out generalisations about 5 countries in the space of a single paragraph, I’ll use the standard Brent (Office reference #236) get-out clause and say I belong to two of them, OK, and one of those owned a third for a fair while, so yeh, not larfing at them, but larfing with them, at us…
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Wake up to the mid-morning bustle of the vegetable market in the alley outside your window, and the dull drone of the kong tiao (air conditioner). Do not lie in further. You could; the invasive hammering of the drill on the main road until late, the intermittent squeals of a dog spanning the night, a subsequent, aggravated series of yells, the impassioned chorus of several roosters at dawn, the crash of stalls being set up soon after and the babble of the early morning, all leave you in a fug. Fall out of bed, and drag somnambulantly to the shower. Don’t linger. The hot water will fade within a couple of minutes, and if you’re unfortunate the passage of your neighbours’ waste through your semi-open, communal drain will suffuse the 4 foot square chamber with an acrid tang of sh*t and piss.
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I’m a sweater. This damp affliction is borne both of my physiology (a lumbering 100kg +) and personality (regrettable tendencies to be swamped by anxiety and to lend disproportionate emphasis to the scrutiny of others). Some would question my choice in coming to China, a land where foreigners are especially rare and invariably elicit a broad spectrum of astonished reactions, and Chengdu in particular, an intensely humid basin, circumvented on all sides and smothered by a thick canopy of smog. Being the sweltering height of the summer, my routine has consisted of dashes between kong tiao (air conditioning) vents, shorts and loose open shirts at all times, frequent swims, frequent loads of washing and naps during the claustrophobic hours of the mid-afternoon. As such, I have crept towards living nocturnally, save the necessity of my 3 hour teaching shifts every morning.

So upon the telephone jarring me out of one of my Sino-Siestas on a particularly hot-wet-towel day, and being invited out for an afternoon stroll, I began to have unpleasant premonitions of overwhelming moisture. To the majority of callers, the offer of an excuse of some teaching emergency or personal mission, and the promise of meeting at a more temperate time, 3 feet at all times from the breath of kong tiao. However, the caller was the attractive N-, whom I had met 2 weeks previous.
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The way was clear only briefly. A single shrill cry of laowai! brusquely interrupted my daze, another of Tom! confirmed my mistake of walking past the first grade classroom on the way out. A trickle of them scampered over and grabbed at my legs, clung onto my arms and tugged at the hem of my T-shirt, followed by the crash of another thirty pair of feet. I was engulfed within moments. My arms were being squeezed to see just how big they were, my sideburns were being violently pulled and patches of stubble pinched and ripped at. One student was hanging off my daypack, drawing me backwards with his suspended weight. The few cries of Tom had given way to laowai [old outsider], which swiftly gained the synchronicity of a chant, Lao – wai! Lao – wai! As the first few had clambered on me, I feigned difficulty in walking, but as the Lilliputian load increased I became absolutely immobilised. I searched around for help, but I was met only with the shamelessly broad grin of their Chinese form-teacher. Gulliver had been subdued by 40 rampaging Chinese five-year olds.

This was the clamorous moment of comprehension. I had employed a consciously nonchalant, intriguing spiel detailing my future plans the length of the Australian East Coast, but only now, on the first day of a 6 month contract, did this pretentious pontification mean anything. My employers termed themselves as a School of English, and from the images on their website, I assumed that these modern offices in the central business district would house corporate work. The logo, coloured with cold blues and whites, depicted two businessmen, stiffly postured, their fore-arms allowed the liberty to share a deeply formal, unquestionably symmetrical handshake. The days would require preparation, I would need a vast bank of technical knowledge to satisfy the demands of these motivated learners, but having garnered the respect of these gentlemen, it would transmute into nights of being showered with Beijio (56% proof clear spirit) at expensive, neon-soaked Chinese bars, all the while their behaviour expressing to me Yes. We respect you as a teacher, and believe we have achieved the optimum symbiosis between the hungry student and the wise, generous teacher. Indeed, your tender years that we so doubted at first, belie the strong current of sagacity within. Ha ha. But enough of such matters. Let us drink and prove ourselves to be so very crazy at such times.

Instead, I was informed that I would be teaching 24 lessons a week in a Chinese Primary school. Average class size: 50.
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Ole tells us in his blog that one of the highlights of living in China is the surprise of having semi-competent English speakers (no, he doesn’t mean me) spontaneously greet laowai with the refrain Welcome to China! Happy every day! I’ve heard the Welcome to China! part a lot, addressed to the unsuspecting roundeye whether or not he has lived in the country for a day, 6 months or 50 years. I have not encountered the Happy Every Day! coda until today. It is the upbeat denouement of the first e-mail from my first Chinese pen-pal, a stand-out participant in a summer-camp where I supplied the occassional guest-spot. She is the 13 year old cousin of one of the scheme’s teachers (referred to as the teacher’s sister - this one child policy is playing havoc with the semantics of familial address), who requested that I help her out with a writing-piece for a competition, and also e-mail her. Considering this side-gig pays me more than 3 times the hourly rate of my standard contract, and that I am a lazy feckless whitey with reams of leisure time, I could not reasonably refuse. I even gave her a magazine about Channel Island Sport featuring the Siam Cup, to which she makes one of the two generic compliments of Chinese youth, cool and handsome.

Its fortunate she didn’t use the second option, as I could have gotten into trouble publishing personal correspondence with a 13 year-old girl featuring the term handsome on the internet.

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John:
Happy to meet letter to you!

Your friend: V-

So, the evil empire graciously permitting its employees a 3 day holiday (read - could not attract any potential students), I took the cue and shot off to Emei Shan with Caligula and the boy. Emei is one of the 4 principal holy Buddhist mountains in China, and offers a rewarding, atmospheric ascent to its 3099 metre peak and several fascinating cultural sites on the way. More importantly, it is infested with monkeys. My Chinese experience has shown me that monkeys are the base currency of universal humour. See mancub, they wanna be like you (ooo), wannna talk like you (ooo), walk like you (ooo ooo ooo) but are stupider and clumsier, while there’s none of the taboo of laughing at mongloids, Farrelly Brothers style. Oobee do. It suited one of my classes to change my name to monkey, and whenever I held up a picture of a monkey in an animal vocab lesson, it drew peals of laughter. And I just thought it was an example of British irony. What other word could you spontaneously utter, aside from flange to liven up the dullest of dinner conversations, job interviews or court proceedings? I would have ticked the Emei Shan box at some point anyway, but stories from travellers of these Tibetan Macaques jumping out from the trees to steal from hapless climbers, hopping around temples and battling with government appointed old-women-with-sticks for mountain supremacy made me approach the trip with unconcealed relish. Monkey relish! See how funny that was?
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A fairly painful looking injury happened in a class this morning. To drum the requisite 6/8 new items of vocabulary into little kids, I often play a TPR (Total Physical Response) game to finish with. It involves sellotaping flashcards (have a word with yourself) which is teaching-speak for A4 sheets bearing large, colourful pictures, at various points around the room. Oh, little jokes along the way - where to stick this one? Maybe on your head a ha ha, or no, I’ll stick it on the window. What, why is it not sticking? O bless me the window is in fact open and I had not noticed the fact that this window is open as I am such a clumsy feckless laowai. Brings the class down that one.
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My friend Ole (n) is one in a million. Maybe a million and a half. That’s roughly the population of Santai, a relatively small county in Sichuan province, and he’s the only one who needs to shave daily, celebrate Xmas and sit while he sh*ts - he’s the one resident whitey. Although he has constantly visited Chengdu, I have never been out to Santai until 2 weeks ago, and have since been again.

Its always welcome to get out of the city in much the same way as its a pleasure to get back to it. Your bus extricates itself from the encircling tangle of ring roads marking the liveable city, passes through the wheezing chimney stacks and factory yards of the industrial belt and enters into everyone’s image of China proper. The horizon expands until it is boundless, and you are among the wide open farming plains. Vigorous, fecund vegetation strives above the competitive mass and arches shoots across the bows of its neighbour, swamps buildings, infests dividing hedges and threatens to dominate. Narrow, labrynthine chasms are cut into these imposing fields, through which families knowingly weave in order to tend their crops. As the city is left further behind, small hills approach and become rolling mountains, little brothers of the great ranges that enclose the Sichuan basin. Those nearest are pocked with swathes of trees, those in the middle distance coloured with lifeless dull blues, those behind shrouded with the layers of mist that characterise all landmarks in this province to a degree.
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The following are extracts from blogs that I have encountered. Dear God, this is why I was worried about the loneliness of the long - distance blogger. It really is the worst kind of sixth-form poetry, a strong example of a muddle as opposed to a mystery, with a well thumbed thesaurus by the deskside. Shoot me if I should display such symptoms of rabid poeticising. Got to be a joke.

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Extract 1: Of Venice
They say there is a place between Heaven and Earth.

However, this place brings patience and consequence. In the far heavens, a rain cloud gathers and drops herself on a corner of the sea. The boatmen, like all boatmen, talk amongst themselves, in the way only boatmen can. There is a little breeze, a jovial pint of sea salt with a touch of a mandolin. Longs shadows pontificate on their existence, rising and falling with the coming dusk.

Extract 2: Of China
The streets are quiet, hushed. Like a patter of rain, the sounds of rolling wheels and a light breeze through the trees. The clack-clack of keyboards, the random sick cough, and the squeal of an old bus coming to a stop, the doors rattling open, and the sound of a paint chip falling to the ground.

I see bikes outside the window. Wagon-bikes, sport bikes, motor bikes, garbage bikes, speed bikes, dirt bikes, police bikes, silver and black and red, smudged by spots of dry mud; they lean against curbsides, old bricks, white tiled walls, and lightpoles. The people walk by, the mother with one small bag of groceries, the man carrying a white sack of grapes, the pair of girls holding hands, and the older woman across the street selling socks, shoe fillings, and toy trinkets. I forget the memory, reclaim it, but decide that more will come and release it.

I’ve always had a downright disregard for blogs. Some detail verbatim the acts and occurences of their daily life, and their reactions to them, as if they are the only person who has eaten a hamburger or been late for work or watched a particular television programs. Though this is naieve and annoying, it is a blessing compared to sophisticated bloggers who know we all live the same lives but feel that their sensibilites provide far more insight into life’s various mysteries and banalities, and egotistically believe that they can make you accept their perceptive dissection of day-to-day experience as your own, and resultantly imbue you with greater self - awareness. The waves of blog - parodies mocking the trivial, self-important pretension of the average Joe Blogger have had quite an effect of me.

The e-mails at the start of my trip were many and personalised, they became general and addressed to larger groups, and now I think its fairly obvious that they’re just one-off, impersonal discourses. But as long as China’s still got interesting things to offer up, and everyday it invariably does, then I’ll write it up. Hopefully it is interesting to anyone at home who reads it, while it is also enjoyable to put down my thoughts on the page. It should also keep me in contact with peeps from back home, although it feels more and more like a one-way thing.

I might do well to look back at the well-meaning hypocrisy of this despatch while I am preparing the tenth draft of went to work… then the gym… watched big brother… in six months time.

Last week was a welcome break. Not that I needed the week holiday, sandwiched between the end of school semester and summer camp, for any kind of recharge of the teaching batteries, far from it. The last couple months have been cruisy. More a chance to get out of the city and escape the everyday’s-a-Friday-when-you’re-a-flaky-laowai-teacher hedonism bubble. Nearly didn’t do it - the prospect of another easy week in Chengdu - to complement the previous 12 - nearly swung it. But myself and Eva, ex-co-employee of the Evil Empire, made our way to the train station late Sunday night. Train stations, considering the immense city populations, are always thriving, constant rushes for departures, swathes of people settled outside on mats, or squatting down, passing the time with newspapers and dojitsu, hours and hours at a time, cabs rushing in and out, and the inevitable calls of the hawker.

The guy next to me in this net cafe keeps drawing all of his phlegm up through his nasal passages and just unloading it on the floor. Doesn’t bother me on the street, but when its in this proximity, I can hear every fricative scrape along the canal, and its spattering an inch from my be-sandaled feet. The worst though is the noodle eating - first of all the tumorous, invasive suck then the wet slap of the lips as it is ingested - real personal bugbear. You’re allowed the occasional I-hate-China moment for sanity’s sake.
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Lessons 7 & 8 : Pat and the role of the round-eyed laoshi (teacher)

The first 2 periods were not quite as smooth this morning, a consequence of the DVD remote playing up. Though still possible to play DVDs, you need it to activate the Chinese subtitles, and although this is an English lesson, there’s no way they can follow the audio. Cue lots of fiddling with batteries, points of contact and swapping batteries from student’s MP3s. Awkward.

Maybe I could have sent this as a single e-mail but I was very conscious of the overall running time. Sweet Jesus let it end.
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Lesson 1 : The Set Up
Chamone. This is the first of 12 vignettes to update people on what’s happening out here. This is not some stylistic invention to prod people into reading past the 5th word, just a result of my passive resistance against the various and manifold evils of my company. This is my week off, but its not, thanks to Crazy Pat (more of whom later) who has landed me with an extra 12 lessons instead. Its a typically broken promise on the part of North America ESL (MUCH MUCH MORE OF THAT LATER), and while I would be happy to help out a reasonable, rewarding employer, this just feels like anathema. So following in the bare footsteps of Ghandi, I have decided to display my emotions in a non-threatening, stoic manner. Namely, a 3 minute spiel Hi I’m J-. Can you guess where I’m from? No, not America, though yes I do seem a little tall and may have eaten too many McDonalds. Can you guess my age? No I am not f*cking 30. So here are some new words. [writes on board] Zombie, monster, blood, infection, bite, epidemic. Well done. Who can connect this DVD player? Cle - ver! Now here is a British film called Shaun of the Dead. [presses play, draws breath]
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Well, he actually popped up on Thursday, and it was delightful to see him after an 8-month absence. Anyway, enough of the fnar-fnar Carry On Humour, if you know the eponymous Woody then the previous has been a lame contrivance, if you don’t, then Paul Woody / Woodrow Woodcock is a Rugby-Playing, Trust-Managing Fellow-Islander who deigned to visit my sh*t-hole province (his words, in case this e-mail is intercepted by the Great Fire W*ll of China) for a weekend whilst on a 6 week placement in Hong Kong.
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The following is a reference letter that the Head of English in one of my Primary Schools wrote for me on the last day of the school semester. Written with far better handwriting than my own (which isn’t particularly difficult really), I genuinely treasure this thin leaf of lined paper torn from a student’s exercise book. If I was being sappy, or reeling in slurry drunkeness, I’d suggest that it validates my time here.

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Jon had been an English oral teacher in Yucai Primary Foreign Language School Attached to Chengdu no. 7 Middle School for half a year.

Jenny
6.15.2005

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The next is a letter that a middle school student gave me as I was leaving a classroom after acting as a substitute teacher for a single lesson.

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Dear Jon,
I’m so pleased to meet you.

From Junior Class4 Grade 8
Write to me soon.
Tony

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My gut instinct was PISS - TAKE, either of me, or an effeminate boy in the class. But the earnest smile of the boy who ran out to give it to me, the reaction of the Chinese teachers I showed it to and the fact that it is common for middle school kids to try to correspond with the roundeye teacher has since convinced me otherwise. I sent a letter back trying to reassure and compliment this apparently fragile boy, and included the line I like many kinds of food except French food, I hate the French, so that through our rampant xenephobia we could be kindred.

Feel like pure filth today, sitting in the staffroom with an age before my next and last class of the day. Overslept the alarm and have to do a single make-up class post lunch, which of course spans a deathly dull 3 hours, accompanied only by the faltering tinkle of Nutcracker being practised to death in the music room above my head.

I went to the small mountain town of Songpan in the first week of May, during the Labour Day holiday, one of China’s three National weeks of holiday per year. I was accompanied by 4 other ESL teachers. Well, 3 other teachers, as a ticket was lost in the ether during our journey to the bus station. This brought to a head the frustrations between 2 of the them, Evan and Richard (or Eva and Richar according to most of our students, who lack the ability to end any names with consonants), who are also conveniently apartment-mates. Richar threw the ticket at Eva (more of a symbol than anything else - that leaf of paper ain’t hurting anyone) and yelled just go! Slow burning tensions nurtured over 8 weeks blew up at that moment. I can safely say I had nothing to do with this unseemly business, because from half five in the morning I had been repeatedly purging the contents of my stomach, hunched over Eva’s porcelain. The anticipation of spending the next 10 hours sitting on a cramped Chinese coach juddering and rocking over a poorly surfaced winding mountain pass was not pleasant.

Having been in China for 2 1/2 months prior without illness, I had been strutting around, proud of my cast-iron constitution as others were falling prey to various ailments. Eva had the sh*ts in school, which would be an unthinkably terrible scenario - running out halfway through lessons to the school squatters, all to the amusement of your students? Forgetting your paper? Not quite getting there in time? I however, thought I was a contender. I could have been somebody. It was not to be. The root of this illness was late-night saokao. This translates over as Street Barbecue. Enough to start the alarm bells. Entrepeneurs wheel out portable trolley / grill combos, on which sit plastic trays replete with morsels of meat and veg impaled on wooden sticks. You pick out your selection, and then it is heavily brushed with oil and constantly doused in blizzards of chili powder and MSG as the stall-holder dextrously turns the sticks.
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Top o’ the morning. What a f*cking way to start a day. Just tried to put down a deposit at the internet cafe with a 50 kwai note, and the guy mimed to me, ignominiously shaking his head and holding the note at arms length, that it was fake. I’m fairly decent on spotting them normally, and upon finally escaping this nasty beijiu hangover, I recognise that its glossy, near fire-retardant surface and bright, blotchy colours are tell-tale signs. A standard Chinese 50 is inked with variagated greens that run the spectrum and occasionaly lapse into blushing pinks and aquamarines. This counterfeit one seems as if it has been set at by one of my students with leaky felt-tips. On one side of the standard fifty, an elderly, benevolent Mao is austerely simpering, gazing out into the far distance. On the other is the vast majesty of Lhasa’a Potala Palace, built into an immense escarpment. Its not for me to point out the irony of these two images sharing the same note, as I possess neither the inclination nor the political astuteness to do do. Everyone’s familiar with the T-I-B-E-T controversy already and there are a multitude of political blogs and Hollywood actors outh there pontificating upon the same issues by rote. The 50 kwai note is a nice symbol to consider though.

I was slipped the dodgy one late last night by a taxi driver after a few drinks. It must be the easiest way to ship fake notes out, drunken laowai getting out of a taxi at night. I’ve been ripped off five quid!
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Euufff. That’s the sound of having just had my first tough week in China after 3 exhilarating ones. I suppose the honeymoon with the kids wears off eventually, perhaps the big hairy laowai novelty that has veiled my ineptitude thusfar won’t last forever. One particularly wet Wednesday, 8 x 40 minute periods and 10 hours in total spent at the school will cause sweat-soaked Nam-style flashbacks for years to come. The kids weren’t allowed out into the pouring rain for their morning exercise or break-times, so they were confined in their classroom for the 12 hour duration of the schoolday. They were absolutely seething with aimless energy, fighting, shouting, chasing, playing with toys, throwing putty, smearing eachother with chalk, all-the-while the great white baboon was standing shell-shocked in the centre vainly trying to catch their attention… Apocalypse Now.
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Time for another update I guesses, I would have sent one sooner, but the first month has been pretty draining, and any leisure time has seen me visit one of the ex-pat pubs, or retreat to fortress Lau-wai for a swift dvd from the knock off shop..

There’s been a little turmoil at the organisation, with one American dude leaving after a week, and an Aussie so p*ssed off at the behaviorial standard of the Middle School he’s been sent to that he can’t speak to the Chinese directors of the company without yelling at them but you lied to me! They respond by retreating into complete ignorance, spurious logic, pragmatic modification of reality (lying then), or even leaving the building, all reactions that the Aussie has compared to the temper tantrums of his young sister. Myself, I found out that I was getting ripped off a little in my contract, so I brought some of the famed Jonny B aggression to the negotiating table a couple weeks back, and threatened to leave that day… It sounds harsh and uncharacteristic but you realise that is the typical pattern of commerce over here, from a fruit and veg stall right up to contract negotiations for a job. Any attempt I made to use logic and describe my teaching qualifications were spuriously brushed aside, so I suggested that I would leave, which brought an immediate improved offer - no further bone of contention.
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The following was my first attempt to transform wildly disparate, invigorating first impressions into something coldly formal and journalistic.
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Somewhere on the way up to Cairns I met an eternal backpacker, an Irishman who had lived out of a bag over 4 decades and across the span of every continent. He had briefly taught in China, but told me little that was insightful, aside from the most popular joke in China, and suggested it to me as an ice-breaker for my upcoming classes. How many steps does it take to put an elephant in the fridge?
1. Open the door.
2. Put the elephant in.
3. Close the door.
How many steps does it take to put a giraffe in a fridge?
1. Open the door.
2. Remove the elephant.
3. Put the giraffe in.
4. Close the door.
Although the British media was constantly informing me that all kinds of social, political (I refuse to use the term socio-political) and economic (the same with socio-economic) barriers were falling, apparently China was still locked in the tyrannical grip of end-of-the-pier music hall humour.
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Well, this is the first despatch from Chengdu, from a conservatively sized internet cafe of about 150 or so, and what an incredible week and a bit, seems to have lasted far longer the way everything does when its all new and diverse, like Xmas day when you are a kid, but to the power of 10. To the Chinese guy chainsmoking 5 inches from my face and staring at my e-mail, well if your english is that good then you’ll understand me when i call you a tw*t.
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