Ironic Job Discriptions

Shopping Channel Host in Communist Country:  Host must have a vibrant personality, possibly an ecstatic one, and have a deep passion for equating goods with social standing.  Female applicants should have enormous eyes, male applicants should be slightly feminine.  The ability to ignore humorous paradoxes (or preferably not even realize them) is a must.  Apply now to one of two Chinese shopping TV channels!

 

The things you can discover on mid-morning television.  In the interest of full disclosure, it's possible that one of the channels was just playing an enormously long advertising segment.  But the other one is a confirmed shopping channel!  "Buy in the next ten minutes and we'll pay you!"

 

Yes, I am also aware that China does not operate a communist economy.  Just a communist government.  It's different.

May I take your temperature?

The correct answer to that question is always, "No."  Unless you have no choice, for example you live inside the school and the school gate is guarded by over zealous students with thermometers (see above).  They are there to prevent someone with a fever, the most obvious symptom of swine flu, into the school.  And I appreciate that.  But I will go to all efforts to avoid getting my temperature taken myself-- who knows what happens if you're hot.  

I was also given a thermometer myself today and was told in Chinese to, "Take your temp. daily.  And if it's high, go to the doctor."  What I heard was slightly different: never use this thing, and if you do, guard it like a national secret.  Hmm, lost in translation perhaps.

Creating a Civilized Chongqing

Nothing, perhaps, is farther from reality than the informational video that plays at the train station in Chengdu.  In the video, a smiling family is greeted personally at the train station.  The grinning security officer helps them put their bags through an x-ray machine.  A female attendent gently pats the young child on the shoulder.  A deaf woman receives instructions in sign language and two eldery people are assisted to open, clean seating.  As the train pulls away, another beautiful attendent waves serenly.

 

In reality, the station probably moves somewhere around 75,000 people a day (my best guess).  75,000 grumpy, pushy members of a swarming, heaving society.  People cover every inch of that station, every nook has somebody sleeping in it.  I have never dared to look in the bathroom.  Chinese train stations are not bastions of civilizations, even as the signs on the wall exert us to be.

 

I find that I have become less patient here recently, perhaps even hypocritical in some ways.  As Chinese people swarm around me, surging onto buses to grab the few places to sit, or rush onto trains, I get angry.  I want to smash them all for being so freaking agressive and pushy (literally).  And as I mumble about them all being uncivilized serfs, I use my superior bulk to block them out of the way or push them back. 

 

Is it a good thing?  No.  But that's how I feel sometimes.