Wo Shi Laowai – Wo Pa Shui

I haven’t written much lately. Well, I’ve been quite busy, as it happens. In fact, if the truth be told, I’ve been busier than a one-legged man in an arse-kicking competition.

Why?

Let me put it to you like this:

There are two methods to deal with any situation. They are:
A. The simple, efficient, effective way.
B. The excessively complicated, massively inefficient, hopelessly ineffective, overly expensive, time consuming, way that doesn’t work.

Which option do you think 99.99% of all Chinese would choose? B, you say? Correct. Efficient and effective methods make it harder to extort, steal, pilfer, blackmail, embezzle, defraud, filch, fleece, misappropriate, rip off, swindle act like a normal Chinese, and you are more likely to be held accountable for your lies, distortions, deceptions, fabrications, dishonesties, falsities, fibs, porky-pies, inaccuracies, prevarications, whoppers normal Chinese language statements. Which is why Chinese don’t like efficient and effective methods. Put bluntly, the vast majority of people here are as crooked as a dogs’ hind leg. They lie, cheat and steal in much the way as sheep eat grass, bee’s buzz, and you and I breathe. Hell, your ordinary Chinese couldn’t lie straight in bed. Yes, there are a few good ‘uns, but they are in a minority so tiny, and they suffer for it so much at the hands of their countrymen, that you’ve little chance of encountering more than one a year. And none at all in business.

The point of all this, is that I’m the guy who has to pick up the pieces when my customers (who are not Chinese) get shafted by the rough-sawn length of 4″x2″ timber that is normal Chinese ‘business practice’.

The thing though, the actual thing that really pisses me right off, is that no matter how badly a Chinese fucks you over, they will always consider themselves the victim when the subject is brought up. You certainly can’t hold them to account for the things they’ve promised. “Oh no”, they will tell you, with that lying mouth of theirs, “I didn’t promise. It was just a suggestion. It’s not my fault that you misunderstood. It’s not my fault”.

It’s never anyone’s fault but yours. And in a way that’s true. Anyone who gets involved in any dealings with these lying, deceitful bastards has only themselves to blame if when it all goes pear-shaped. And that applies to me, too. I know better, I understand how these evil-minded pricks operate, I see them for what they really are, and I run the risk of doing business with them. I’m buggered if I know why, sometimes.

In other news, here are just three of the other things that have pissed me off this week:

1. Someone I know works at a Consulate here in China. I won’t say which one, but it is European. I also won’t detail what I know about the relationships certain high-level people have with certain ‘Snake Head’ human smuggling gangs. What I will say, is that two Chinese illegal emigrants (a husband and wife couple) to the country represented by this consulate, returned to China for a holiday. Possibly they also wanted to see their daughter, whom they had abandoned as a baby and had been in the care of relatives for the last four years. Anyway, when they attempted to return to [unknown European country], they were stopped at the airport. So off these people went to the Consulate of [unknown European country], where they started complaining about the treatment they had suffered. The theme? They were the victims. Illegal immigrants who abandoned their child as a baby, who have had a number of good years at the expense of a foreign country, who were too fucking stupid to even get a fake visa stamp – and somehow they are the victims?

2. There’s been yet another mine disaster, in which 172 miners are admitted to have died when the mine flooded. It’s been several days now, and only a token effort has been made to ‘rescue’ the (probably now dead) miners. Officially, about 5,000 miners die every year in Chinese coal mines, but the true number is somewhere between 40,000 and 80,000 (including those who die of ‘Black Lung’ and other related diseases). At this particular mine, management have now put up a banner over the South Gate that reads: ‘Heaven is merciless, but we love you and the Communist Party loves you most’.

3. A friend of mine, who has a business here, employs a cook. The cook works in the kitchen, providing meals for the Chinese staff. Free meals. A couple of days ago, this dumbfuck cook is shuffling across the road without looking, and gets hit by a bus. This didn’t happen at work, it happened in the cook’s own time, near his home. He didn’t die, but he was injured a fair bit. His entire extended family immediately swarmed in from all over China. Not one of them went to the hospital, though. Oh no. They all went to pay a visit to my friend, the cook’s employer, and demanded compensation from him. Paid directly to themselves.

…

General Douglas MacArthur was right – we should have nuked this place when we had the chance. I see in my mind’s eye a great glass-floored, self-illuminating carpark, stretching from Beijing to Guangzhou, and it makes me smile happily. This week in particular.

It’s no wonder I drink.