Lao Wai

The new year celebrations were hard for everyone this year, even man-sized teddies. This sad corpse was lying outside my hotel in Kunming, I’m guessing thrown angrily away by some girl who had expected diamonds or hard cash. Men! Man-sized (or any sized) teddy bears are not good as presents to anyone above the age of six!

Anyway – Kunming is a big city and they’re used to seeing foreigners. But still, many inhabitants felt the need to point out to each other that we were foreigners. The streets reverberated to the sound of “Lao wai” (Caucasian in Mando) as we made our shuddering way away from the station looking for a taxi.

But the “lao wai” thing has definitely decreased. When I first came to China in 1988, people used to crowd around me just to get a good look. I often counted 30 or 40 people audiences, or spectators, rather. Of course I loved the attention! Now everything has become so normal. Sigh. However, a thing happened in Hong Kong before I left that I really didn’t like:

Not in my ‘hood. No no no.

老外 – “lao wai” (I’ll never teach you any more mandarin, promise!) Old Outside
鬼佬 – Gwai Lou (Devil geezer)
鬼婆 – Gwai Po (Devil hag)

Cantonese – The Easiest Language in the World?

When I started learning Cantonese there was no shortage of Chinese people warning me against it. At that time the most common refrain was: “It’s too difficult – for you“. OK, maybe they didn’t emphasise →

Enormous Oversight

About those language teaching videos (one Cantonese for beginners, one Cantonese for the more adventurous and, yes! I admit it! Even a survival Mandarin video called Stay Grounded) – all these years they’ve had this →

In The Market for Grooviness

Here is an excellent way to practise and learn more Cantonese: Going to the market with your very own Happy Jellyfish People’s Democratic Language Bureau. This is how it works: First we sit down with →

SUNDAY: Semi-Dignified Farewell

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What Are The Chances?

Yesterday I got a new student and bugger me if he wasn’t … Mexican! I mean, what are the chances? Before I went to Mexico, I had only ever met three Mexicans: Hector, a guy →

Burglary Warning To Lantau People (and Everybody)

So on Saturday I hosted a Sichuan dinner for twelve people, three of whom called and said they were lost. I had to rush out in mid-stuffing of dumplings to fetch them. (It was the →

Long Live the Entrepreneurial Spirit! And Beer!

I can’t control myself – I must show it: Mister Public Security Uncle photographed by a professional photographer! It was the night before Halloween and I was strolling around Central with my vice-Security officer, Bak →

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Booooooze

A highlight of my recent trip to the USA was visiting a bourbon distillery. A lowlight, or, shall we say, nadir, was getting drunk on bourbon the week before. It was so good to see →

Nightmare or Living Hell?

Sometimes you (or some people) do things only because it feels so good when you stop. Bashing your head against a wall is one of those things. Moon Trekker (running around or across or round →

Book Review!!!!

Wei wei everybody, wei! After a long absence caused by circumstances beyond my control, I’m now itching to write again. And what could be better than to start with something written by somebody else?

Yep, it’s a review of my new book Don’t Joke On The Stairs.

and it’s written by John Cairns of Cairnsmedia and no, I’ve never met him. Wow and wow, I say. I thought the book was a long tirade against the mainland government, but it appears it’s an ode to life. So there you go, please buy vigorously!

Order a copy through www.http://localhost:8888/Fish and I will deliver it to you personally or by carrier pigeon.

Book Reviews
Don’t Joke on the Stairs

A Norwegian-born language teacher, Cecilie Gamst Berg makes an unusual tour guide. No wonder! When traveling herself, she dislikes guides, preferring to explore alone or with trusted friends, always ready for the unexpected.

Berg presents a humorous book about her adventures when living in Hong Kong and prowling on the Chinese mainland. Irreverently, it’s titled Don’t Joke on the Stairs, How I Learnt to Navigate China by Breaking Most of the Rules (2011, Blacksmith Books, 354 pages, US$16.95).

Within a few pages, readers begin to experience a surprising wish to meet the author. She conveys such a vibrant joie de vivre, making it easy to smile and adopt the same zestful attitude. She must be fun to know, a talkative live-wire. Certainly, she gives an impression of having written this enjoyable book with ease - by starting to chat and not stopping until the end.

Whatever Berg does, she enters into the spirit of things. That approach helped her to learn Mandarin and then Cantonese and to earn a living, lucrative enough to travel often, mainly by teaching the latter. It also prompted her to pose for a cover photo sprawled upside down on a grimy staircase?

The book takes its title from a memorable sign that Berg once spotted on her travels. To warn against the danger of tumbling downstairs, it read: "Avoid exchange of jokes while using the stairs and don’t concentrate on stairs that cause trip and fall."

Healthy attitudes and positive outlooks make for pleasant lives. Overall, the author has both. For example, why doesn’t she worry more about becoming a crime victim? "Personally I’ve only been robbed twice in my life and both times were in Oslo. In Shenzhen, like the rest of China, I have never been robbed or mugged. I have probably been cheated many times, but everyone agrees that cheating is clean and honest - the cheatee has only himself to blame. But robbed? No."

Berg calls China "the world’s most happening place" because it’s highly surreal. With 1.3 billion people wandering about, the strangest things can happen. "So… I have set out to describe the surreal reality that I have met in China for better and for worse…."

Most Chinese people along the way help to make her feel welcomed. "That’s one of the many things I love about China, and which separates it from western countries. If I were walking down the street in, oh, let’s say South London, or maybe inner-city Washington DC, and I saw a group of spiky haired, no, hooded, thin and saggy-trousered young men, I’d feel… if not exactly worried, at least decidedly middle-aged and terribly bourgeois. Perhaps I’d clutch by handbag a little harder, avoiding eye contact - what do I know?
But in China! Not only can I talk to these guys with impunity, more often than not they will invite me to actually socialize with them. Where else does that happen, I wonder?"

So the author loves China almost unconditionally. "I say almost, for there are a couple of things about China that even a mother couldn’t love."

Always candid, Berg shares her views on every topic that springs to mind, including "sensitive" ones. "The official name of Xinjiang province is Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. That sounds fair and reasonable, but not surprisingly, the Uyghurs (and Kazakhs, Uzbeks and Tatars, forced into a common nationality under Chinese suppression) have no more autonomy than the donkey has from the farmer."

Furthermore, "Tibet is not China! Call me old-fashioned, but I’m for Free Tibet. And also I’m for Free Inner Mongolia and Free Xinjiang, and Free Everywhere where the indigenous population is not Han Chinese."

She scorns the Communist Party’s reluctant admission that its former chairman Mao Tse-tung may have been only 70 per cent good. "The guy was 100-per-cent bad. And if percentages by their very nature hadn’t ended at 100, we could safely say that he was 1,000-per-cent bad, and more."

Of course, the author also discusses food, downplaying what she dislikes. "Chicken feet are still one of the biggest delicacies in China, but to be honest I can’t quite see the charm in eating feet that have been plodding around in shit."

Never overlook eating etiquette. "All unwanted things are thrown (or spat) straight onto the tablecloth or floor. Everything can be used as an ashtray, but the floor is recommended. To smoke and eat at the same time is okay…."

As for modes of travel, Berg favors trains. "If there weren't so many things to do on the train, you would be glued to the window all day marveling at the scenery. For landscape-wise, China has everything.
There are lush and mysterious tropical rainforests and stern rocky deserts, majestic mountain ranges and mighty, raging rivers, scraggy crags shrouded in mist looking exactly like a thousand Chinese paintings and fastidious paddy fields where peasants plod barefoot behind oxen.
China has ultra-modern cities and medieval villages, narrow, teeming alleyways and vast, empty country. You can see it all from the train."

Berg bemoans the lack of heritage protection and the misguided property or infrastructure developments. "Guangdong, without exception the most fertile province in China, is now a province with only a third of the arable land per person of the rest of the country. Most people in this huge land could easily live off what this one province could produce in the way of rice, vegetables and poultry. But that’s the very province the progress-blasters need to cover in concrete, to build millions of factories with Hong Kong and foreign money in order to satisfy the western world’s (and increasingly China’s own) insatiable craving for useless crap."

Prime topics even include Berg’s persistent fondness for Chinese young men. "They are so unthreatening. And so beautiful. Lovely skin, no facial hair…. My, oh my. And there are so incredibly many of them!"

When traveling, the author wants to "go everywhere and meet everybody". Many of her travel tips never appear elsewhere. For example, how do you spot Communist cadres? "They are taller than average. They are fat. They walk with their stomachs in front of them and a slew of sycophants behind them. They sport comb-overs and big, square sunglasses."

Even more valuable, she tells how to gatecrash parties (this time meaning festive occasions): "Be a foreigner who can speak a little bit of Chinese, preferably Cantonese. That’s it."

Constantly observant, ready to learn and teach, the author tells of special techniques. "In China, spitting is an art form which takes years to perfect. Every muscle in the body is concentrated in the one purpose: To get as much slime as possible away from where it currently is, with as much power as possible, while making the process last as long as possible.
It begins by tipping one’s head back a little and drawing in a great amount of air. Then follows a long hacking and roaring, like that of a helicopter approaching at great speed. The whole body is stretched to breaking point with all its energy gathered in the lip musculature, whereupon the projectile is hurled out through the mouth and away from the owner."

Readers share the sights, sounds, tastes and humor of the author’s travels without facing the bad weather, hassles and long train rides. That’s worth the price of a book.

Don’t Joke on the Stairs isn’t the most comprehensive book ever written about China. It’s not the best-researched, the most insightful or the most enlightening. But it may be the most fun to read.

Approval rating: 83 per cent.

For more information: www.blacksmithbooks.com or www.http://localhost:8888/Fish.

(October 21, 2011)

New Podcast: TRAINCAST

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At Last: My Own Podcasts. Called OUTCASTS.

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