Wo Shi Laowai – Wo Pa Shui

Another Harmonious Day in Socialist China
Part 2 of 3

As I put the previously boiled water in cups, mugs, glasses and other available small plastic containers – of which China knows no bounds, I remembered to rinse all these items first. Why? The oppressive air pollution of course – even living in a small, semi-rural city like I am. Anything left out for a day is covered in a visible film of muck, resulting from the Great Spurt Forwards. Yes, we love to talk about China’s rapidly growing economy, but its twin brother – the Explosively Growing Pollution – should be higher on the agenda than it is. But that didn’t occupy me for long, so I began musing on the massive road reconstructions I have been avoiding for the last few weeks.

They have finally progressed far enough to reveal the purpose of the traffic nightmare for the last few weeks. Not that there should have been any resulting nightmare, the police did a credible job of erecting signs and roadblocks at the crucial leading intersections to lead off the opposing traffic flow onto large avenues well capable of sustaining the load to produce a viable temporary one-way road, but of course, the locals refuse to believe that these signs are meant for THEM, because THEY are important people who can’t afford to waste time detouring 2 blocks. So, during the day they have to park a local traffic police officer, who angrily waves back all the limousines, taxis, tricycles, cars, trucks and even buses who attempt to come through the final bottle neck.

My Laowai drinking buddy and I had been speculating that the purpose of the road-works was to widen the road to help ease the congestion of this busy section; for this section of road contains important essential services, to wit: mahjong table retail, motorized tricycle manufacturers, auto smash repairers for the daily detailing of dents and dings from our dipshit drivers, and the most important, dozens of brothels who trade briskly from breakfast to late night. I know this last fact for certain, being that I have spent many any evening there wrapped in the arms of my free lover and the walls are pretty much plastered cardboard. Now I know that many people will find this somewhat perverse, so I had better explain. She is the prettiest girl in the house, actually has a pretty good idea of what to do in bed, and pays me for sex by bringing me meals and cleaning my house by spending the money that the foolish local men pay her for a disinterested fuck. Watching the local whore mop my floor helps me realize the vast cultural difference between this country and mine; the latter having LEGAL prostitution and the sex industry is just that – another industry.

Anyway, to haul this diatribe back on track, the intersection near her workplace has been reconstructed to provide median strips for turning, to prevent the damned drivers from performing their usual “turn into oncoming traffic way too early to force your way to the left-hand turn without having to wait for the lights to signal such”. Will this improve the traffic flow? I believe it will help reduce gridlocks to a smaller area, my buddy doesn’t but does concede there may be some logic in my argument being that the area they have available for their stunt(ed) driving has been drastically reduced. With any luck the upgrade will also include a street sign with the name of the road, but my pessimistic friend doesn’t share my hope. It is quite probably the cross-road is actually unnamed; sometimes I wonder how deliveries get made. Maybe they use addresses similar to those in the far outback of Australia: Go down The Avenue of Revolutionary Stars until you see the Heavenly Palace of the Eternal Jade Gate and Other Pleasures, turn left, cross the bridge, take the second left and my house is the one with the pink plastic panda’s playing on the lawn. But none of these things are the reason I am writing this.

So, the water chilled and I screwed up my nose and drank some of it because I am feeling dehydrated from the pseudo-ephedrine I take to combat the common cold – unlike my Chinese counterparts who go in to get drips with massive overdoses of antibiotics that do utterly nothing to fix their condition and do everything to smash their immune system to pieces. My SiChuan love child was ready to leave to go and find another crappy, low-paying manual laboring job, and warned me to not drink alcohol and to not let the water chill too much before drinking it. Yeah yeah, whatever, give her a kiss goodbye and lock the door behind her. She doesn’t realize that one of the most effective cures for the common cold in this country is to get out and get righteously smashed on baijiu which has two positive effects; the baijiu in your system is hostile to all life-forms so outright kills a whole bunch of the bugs you have, and it also dehydrates you so the cold has no spare water with which to be fruitful and multiply. It’s about the same cost as the pseudo-ephedrine, take your pick which one to use. I had a cold a week ago which I smashed on its arrival by using the former method, but this time all my drinking buddies are wiped out on antibiotics so I chose to use the latter.

But these things are not why I am writing this either. I promise the next post will be the real reason I was writing this.

– DaBizzare