Thor's New China Diary

Somebody Else’s Problem

thormay — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 11:59:33 +0000

~~~~ odd man out ~~~~

Once long ago I was interviewed for a job as language director of the Defence Cooperation Language School in Melbourne, Australia. (The place pretends to teach English in three months or so to exchange military officers from places like Indonesia). It was a pretty strange detour for me from a lifelong aversion to rigid organizations, and needless to say I didn’t get the job. What I mostly remember is being told that I’d have to wear a tie every day (they disqualified themselves right then). But I also recall being advised by a lugubrious air force officer that the main quality sought was someone who would mind their own business. “In this place”, he intoned, “you must understand that most issues you will encounter will be somebody else’s problem. Above all, you must never try to solve somebody else’s problems”. His implication of course was that absolutely every possible issue of responsibility should be shuffled away as somebody else’s problem. It is the bureaucrat’s daily prayer. The fellow would have been in heaven in China.

The Big Parade At Dragon Lake

thormay — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 09:49:35 +0000

The deal was 8am. I’m a just-in-time guy, but here she was knocking on the door at 7:15. Jeez. Can I offer you some breakfast? We sat looking at each other across a big wooden coffee table, the golden drapes suffusing a soft glow of early sunshine. She’d never tried anything like my special concoction of oatmeal mixed in with raisins, sunflower seeds and yoghurt. Foreigners are funny. She picked at it experimentally.

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The Cigarette

thormay — Thu, 01 Jan 2009 05:12:33 +0000

Winter morning light had broken clear and cold, so early that night’s shadows were still about and a wispy moon hung in the sky. A small collection of street food vendors had already parked their hand carts by the college gates, and by this time there was usually a crowd of girls in jeans and padded coats huddled there, refugees from cafeteria food, scoffing thin stuffed pancakes or dishes of steaming noodles. But today the road was clear of its suicidal clutter of electric bikes and buses, and death defying pedestrians. The girls were still in bed. It was New Year’s morning, and a holiday.

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The End of Capitalism is Announced

thormay — Sun, 21 Sep 2008 00:33:00 +0000

The Decider announces the end of triumphalist capitalism.
Whose zoo do these simians belong in now?

(International Herald Tribune 19 September 2008)

The Soviet behemoth with its official fantasy of the communist brotherhood of man looked after by apparatchiks who could make a million shoes to fit the wrong foot and keep everyone in fearful penury finally stumbled into vodka soaked oblivion in 1991. It had taken roughly a generation from the death grip of a psychopathic Stalin for Gorbachev’s glimmer of human decency to assert itself.

Another psychopath, Mao, rightly saw the Soviet transition as a fatal personal threat and did his best to destroy the Chinese people before they got any funny ideas about making a decent living. Luckily good old fashioned mortality dispatched Mao’s corpse to the underworld in 1976, and China could get on with pretending that black cats were white cats, fat cats were alley cats, and gloriously getting rich was socialism with Chinese characteristics.

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Mind Games Under Heaven

thormay — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 04:48:12 +0000

All the world art mad but thou and I. So it seems. The collective mind of peoples as nations expressed either through the ballot box or by the voice of the emperor ( L’Etat c’est moi) seems erratic at best in most locales. Right now Americans are making up their collective mind whether to continue on a downward spiral driven by greed, self-infatuation and ignorance, or try for a bit of self-renewal. The bad old ways have every chance of winning out.

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Choose Your Game

thormay — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 04:30:00 +0000

On the wrong side of the railway tracks in Zhengzhou city, central China, you can find some ugly old concrete classrooms built around a small paved sports ground. It is a railway technical college to train nurses and logistics students, 19 year old kids mostly from the country. Last term they kept telling me that Yao Ming was the most famous person they could think of.

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Australia Blue (cheerfully ripping off Mao Zedong, “Snow”)

thormay — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 04:59:57 +0000

Centre country scene:

A thousand miles of desert,
Ten thousand miles of shimmering heat.

In and out the Dead Heart,
Only one great vastness;
Up and down the Diamantina,
Sand torrents stopped and stilled.

Hills dance like rainbow serpents,
Mirages race like shadowed giants,
Trying to vie with the sun in their reach.

A wild eye is needed
To view this wilderness decked with blue
In all its unforgiving beauty.

Thor

[Thor's other poems at http://thormay.net/literature/timepassing/timepassindex.html ]

The Earthquake

thormay — Wed, 14 May 2008 04:25:49 +0000

The earthquake: I was running back to my apartment from the classroom for something, and didn’t feel a thing. The other foreign teacher here staggered out of her apartment and said she thought she was dying. I told her to put her head between her legs and I’d get a doctor. While I was racing back to the administration building all these people started pouring out of buildings. We had to sit in the sports ground in the sun for a couple of hours. Miss Universe turned up after a few minutes looking sheepish.

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Covert & Overt Values

thormay — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 03:59:46 +0000

My own first introduction to Chinese thought and political economy was a university course in New Zealand in 1974. I especially recall one book, Mark Elvin’s “The Pattern of the Chinese Past”. If you are not familiar with the arguments in this book already, there is a reasonable summary at Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Pattern-Chinese-Past-Mark-Elvin/dp/0413286304 . Of course, China is any number of “countries”. With 20% of the world’s population it could hardly be otherwise. Nothing is more foolish than the outsider who pretends to “know” China, but certainly the second most foolish is the Chinese person who pretends to “know” China. Yet we are generalizing creatures. Probably we have form stereotypes to function at all. Looking at that vast conglomeration called China we can all discern flavours, tendencies, preferences, patterns… that are different from, say, the European mix, although we may argue about what the varieties mean.

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A Child Goes Missing

thormay — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 03:54:35 +0000

Each evening I walk for an hour or two, and sometimes one of the students tags along. This is wonderful, since she can bring meaning to the blur of Chinese street life around us. Yesterday, she pointed out a tragedy that I would have walked right past:

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