Wo Shi Laowai – Wo Pa Shui

Another Harmonious Day in Socialist China
Part 3 of 3

The REAL Reason – Chinese Culture

As promised here and here, this is the reason I was ranting for the last few days. I wanted to bitch about the two-faced way the Chinese approach their culture. There have been a number of incidents lately which have pissed me off and I need to get them off my chest. The worst, by a long shot, was what I title “Drunken Instant Friend Wants Free Xiao Jie.”

So, let’s set the scene and introduce the players. My Laowai buddy and I decide to go take in a local seafood restaurant, in the company of a girl I am pursuing who is a local KTV Xiao Jie boss. She has large breasts, similar working hours to mine and works across the road from my home – so she is convenient. The girl, let’s call her Xiao Nao, decides to go pick up a Xiao Jie from her work for my buddy. Unfortunately my buddy is HUGE (tall and broad), and this puts the other girl off. “He’ll tear me in half if we make love” she nervously whispers to Xiao Nao. So Xiao Nao walks out with her to see her off. Unfortunately, on her return she is spotted by someone. Enter Local Drunk Fuckwit (LDF). Oh yes, he frequents her KTV, so he knows her well. He has been slapped off her hundreds of times but that won’t stop him from trying again today. She plays some mild wu shu games keeping him at bay, until he sees who she is dining with. “OMG! Laowai! Oh hello, hello. (Everything said by the Chinese in this story was in Mandarin; I am just translating to make the account smoother.) OMG. Laowai. There aren’t many Laowai in this city, who are they?”
Xiao Nao replies: “This is my Australian friend, and this is his American friend.”
LDF: “OMG, what a wonderful opportunity for me. Two different countries. Hello hello, I want to be your brother.”
Insert a few mild variations along the lines of “Oh, I want to drink with you, order up some beers on their account huh?” which we do to keep him quiet, and “Bottoms up brothers”. She has to go to work, I was supposed to accompany her to such (it was going to be a quiet night there), but LDF has delayed our repast and so we choose to actually consume. LDF continues to repeat his limited conversation.

So, we manage to sate our food appetites and now he is supposed to guide us to her KTV. After going around in ever decreasing circles for a while, he decides on a route and we head off for the 80m walk. Sigh. We get there, and come in; my girl is waiting for us and has found us a room tucked away in a corner where we will get the least interference – except that LDF has come along for the ride. I hold off on ordering beer, I don’t wish to encourage his presence. I try and talk with my girl – the whole purpose of this evening – and LDF constantly interrupts us. Most of the interruptions are concerning the fact that we are in a KTV and Chinese culture demands I provide him with a Xiao Jie because he is my brother. Really? Sometimes the people I am with at a KTV will provide me with a Xiao Jie, but it is the exception – not the rule – and every time it has occurred we have been out KTVing many times and I haven’t told their wives, mistresses or GFs about their exploits. Let alone I have just met this retard, he is smashed, and is the one declaring we are brothers – I have no desire to make the acquaintance of a useless walking phlegm-generator who keeps trying to fondle the girl I am telling him is my girlfriend and who has, on one occasion so far, kneed him in the groin to make her message understood. I explain that we are not buying Xiao Jie tonight; my buddy doesn’t want one and neither do I. My buddy and I are beginning to despair; it seems pretty obvious that this leech won’t let go unless we put some salt on it. So, I start being rude and angry at his behaviour, asking if this is the way civilized Chinese people should act etcetera ad nauseum. He seems to get the general idea we want him to fuck off, and indeed he sadly does. Hoo fucking ray.

He then proceeds to pester every room in the KTV; but the inhabitants aren’t as polite and retiring as I am – we hear angry shouting punctuating his journey. Miraculously, Baccus is watching over him, and no-one actually socks him one – a shame really, maybe he might learn from the experience. In the meantime, we have ordered beer and I have been able to start getting to know my girl. My buddy is happy, when my girl darts off from time to time we have a chuckle about LDF, and we have COLD beer – god bless Xiao Nao’s little plastic socks.

Xiao Nao returns, we settle down, and the door opens again: LDF has returned. We have put a fair dent into the box of beer by this stage, so we don’t get instantly annoyed, just resigned. But no! LDF has friends he wants us to drink with – a small light has appeared in the tunnel of fate and I leap on it. “I can’t go, I want to chat with my girl, but my buddy will come with you.” LDF is delighted – a chance to gain face by showing off his new brother to his buddies. My buddy graciously disappears to save the day for me. Wonderful. My girl and I REALLY get acquainted now we have the room to ourselves, and then I get several phone calls. One is from Ar Yu, a local who has wanted me to bang his missus-of-the-moment while he watches (they are never pleased about this so I decline his insistent offers rather than get tied up in something I am sure will be called rape), but he’s friendly enough so I reluctantly say “sure, come and join me” because both my girl and I know him. Unfortunately a wrong move, because when I hang up she immediately tells me “He is a bad man.” Message arrives on phone: “Come join us, this is FUN!” from my laowai buddy. Great – saved the day.

Ar Yu turns up with a male friend (no mention of this previously of course), we rapidly drink the remaining beers and he tries to order another box on my account. I tell him, “No sorry, my American friend wants me to join him.” He sadly understands, and is forced to leave without having been able to strip me of my salary in one session. He managed to do that a few weeks later by catching me while I was in a nightclub and ordering away before I spotted what he was up to. He even tried to order a 16,000 RMB bottle of Cognac on my account. Fortunately the girls at the Xiao Jie conversation bar know me, aren’t that stupid, and most have, at a minimum, licked my tonsils; so they ask me for confirmation of the order. Fuck me – what an asshole.
Anyway, Xiao Nao takes me down to the room, a large VIP room, filled with elderly Chinese gentlemen and their young “little wives” (as the girls introduced themselves as). How cute, official mistresses. We see LDF trying to fondle a Xiao Jie in the front of the room, she doesn’t like it, and walks off, so he goes to select another. The look on my face says it all, the gentleman I am sitting next to tells me: “He is normally a good man, just today he is drunk.” I find this hard to believe, but take it as gospel because these other fellows are nice and are our new hosts.

I drink to excess by doing a one-on-one bottoms up with the whole room because the second message from my buddy during Ar Yu’s visit was delivered in person which was “Hurry up man, I can’t drink enough to satisfy these guys!” and my buddy is a big drinker. However, I was guessing it was one-on-one’s against a large group – pretty standard cheating practice from Chinese. I was right, so I gave them all another 3 quick rounds which saw the men starting to show signs of bloat – so my buddy was safe for at least half an hour.

So, now that drinking is impossible unless they want to lose face, its time for dancing. None of these guys can, or want to, dance, but they DO want us to dance sexy with their mistresses. No problem, I’ll have a rhythmic bump and grind with your babe, with a grope in the name of good fun. Our new friends are delighted, we exchange phone numbers, promises of doing business together and call it a night.

The only other such incident of note is being invited by others to a KTV and then handed the bill at the end of the night because it turns out that all the others work there. That was a clever trick, but I refused to pay the girl because she had given me no service. Sat there dour as a brick, wouldn’t talk with me, play dice with me, pour my drinks or light my cigarette – very put out they had given her to the first Laowai the place had ever seen. I explained this to my friend after she left empty handed, and he was forced to agree they had given me a very sub-standard girl. It all worked out ok in the end; they have invited me to play in other KTVs on other nights – at their expense. On the night in question I was invited to many other rooms to drink with the inhabitants until the boss recalled me, so I drank a crapload and paid for little – so it wasn’t too bad a sting.

Chinese culture? Don’t wash for three weeks and look in your armpit – what you find there can easily be passed off as Chinese culture.

– DaBizzare

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

Another Harmonious Day in Socialist China
Part 1 of 3

It has been another night of complete insomnia, which on this occasion was happily mitigated by a passing Sichuan lass who has lost her job for the second time this month and is seeking refuge in between the legs of her local meal ticket, err Laowai lover. Sure sure, she can actually achieve orgasm each time she puts out, for the first time her life, but we all know I am either seen as a walking escape route from the Glorious Motherland We Love So Much, or a meal ticket. It has its advantages for us; so much pussy I can’t remember their names for more than a few days. But that is not the reason I am writing this.

Nor am I writing because hiding in my pocket is a pendant from a local whore who comes to bang my brains out for free on quiet nights. Yes, when I met her we played the ancient game of “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours” and verily we inspected each other’s health documents. Yes, that’s right Chinese guys, if your local ho is slopped out and loose, it isn’t from the expensive servicing she provides you on the regular occasions you decide to use her services so long as you wrap up because your local girls won’t touch you with a 10’ pole, it’s because she is banging Joe Laowai for free on the side without a rubber and actually enjoying herself. The money you pay her gets used to pay for my meals, so now when you bang your local ho you can feel proud that you are also helping to pay for a laowai’s dinner at the same time.

So, being unable to sleep, I went into the kitchen to make some malt soy milk to help me sleep. Because of the strange hours I work, and the enormous amount of unpaid overtime I have had to put in lately, I haven’t had a chance to go shopping for basics like fresh cow’s milk (a recent Chinese invention of great intrinsic value for me) so I had to resort to the powdered soy crap I keep in the cupboard to make proper bread with; being that Chinese bakers seem to think that western bread should be a dessert and as such liberally dosed with either sugar or sweet prunes / beans / unidentifiable vegetable matter. I read the instructions for actually turning it into a semi-tolerable drink; add 200ml boiled water. “Boiled water?”, I thought to myself. “Oh of course! This is CHINA! Don’t touch any water unless it’s been boiled to kill a small percentage of the nasties living in it.” But that is not the reason I am writing this.

While I was waiting for the water to boil I couldn’t help but muse over how powerful Chinese gas stove burners are. Why do they have to cook their food so quickly for? I mean, if they go to a restaurant, they are happy to waste hours haggling over the menu, deciding on the exact proportions of which ingredients each dish should have, and changing their mind a half dozen times, none of which really matters because most of it will be wasted and thrown in the bin uneaten anyway. So this being the case, what’s a few minutes more of cooking time? Maybe it is healthier this way? Like the way we mustn’t drink cold liquids, go to sleep before 11, swim in freezing water and eat more unidentified vegetable matter known as Chinese medicinal foodstuffs? But – if that is the case, why is it that I catch a cold well after all my Chinese comrade in pens are down and out? And why is it that Chinese men like to go out and drink until someone in the group is hospitalized? I mean, we don’t finish before 11; otherwise it would be unfair to our KTV Xiao Jie to run out on them so early when they haven’t finished drinking our beer yet. And the competitive drinking and smoking competitions can hardly be called healthy either. Yet, time after time, when I ask my companions why our planned rematch didn’t occur they reply “I was not healthy enough to return.”

But this is not the reason I am writing this either. That will have to wait for another post.

– DaBizzare