Wo Shi Laowai – Wo Pa Shui

Here’s a little experiment you can try at home. That is to say, you can try it at home if you live in the Sahara or the Gobi or the Kalahari. Or pretty much anywhere in Australia. Death Valley even. If you’re in South America and have a holiday home in the depths of the Patagonian Desert, then this is definitely for you:

Walk out into the middle of nowhere, look around to ensure that you are absolutely alone, and proceed to build a bus stop. Actually, just push a stick into the sand and tape a piece of cardboard to it that has the words “Bus Stop” written on it in crayon. It’s the general effect you’re looking for here, not a recreation of the Realism Art Movement. Then, imagining that you are at a bus stop in the middle of nowhere, all alone with not another living thing in sight, stand at the bus stop.

I give it all of two seconds before a Chinese pushes past and stands right in front of you.

Actually, there’s probably not a lot of point in moving your caravan or RV to the depths of the Great Western Desert and constructing a bus stop, because now you already know what is likely to occur. That, and your wife will probably have you declared insane or legally dead or something. So yeah, maybe we should call it a thought experiment. Philosophers do those all the time so it must be fine, right?

Anyway, the point is, Chinese simply must push past you and stand right in front, no matter what you are doing, why you are doing it, or where it might be being done. Some of the rungs in their twisted little double-helical ladders are missing I reckon, although of course that is the technical explanation that geneticists give. Most people just call it being fucktarded. And fucktarded they are – if you want an insta-crowd in China, all you need is two Chinese and an object for their myopic attention to focus on. Bingo! They’ll start pushing past each other to be at the front, others will notice and push past them, and in the blink of an eye you have a mob of pungent, feckless savages jostling and straining to be at the front of the herd.

I kid you not, I watched the other day as a Chinese was reading a newspaper in the street, while a random passer-by tried to push in front to see what he was looking at. Another saw the action and joined in. Within minutes there were no less than forty of the muppets, all of them trying to be in front. Lord knows what happened to the newspaper – someone probably ate it for all I know.

It’s this bloody obsession they have with being first. First, best, biggest, loudest, most, before anyone else, ahead of the rest, you get the point. It doesn’t matter how insignificant the deed is, they have to be Numero Uno. And if they can’t, they lie and say they are. And if they can’t do that, then it simply didn’t happen. And it doesn’t matter what corners they cut to get there, who they step on, who they cheat along the way, how pointless it is… They will be First, legends in their own minds. If Jacques Piccard and Don Walsh actually went back to the Challenger Deep today, they’d probably find a Chinese flag there that had been dropped by a surface ship, and weighted with a plaque stating that China had got there first. Neil Armstrong, were he to return to Tranquillity Base today, would no doubt find a gilded bust of Chairman Mao and a sign saying that the moon was discovered in China five thousand years ago. Walmart, despite revenues of nearly 422 billion U.S. dollars in FY2011, is still not as big or as important as the bloke in the wetmarket down the street from where I live.

China has the best Olympics, the biggest Expo, the most developed industries, the best roads, the longest penises, the fastest cars, the tallest buildings, and the most powerful neon signs. The people are the most diligent, hardest working, longest lived, happiest, most affluent, healthiest and politest ever to walk the face of this green Earth. They were here before the dinosaurs and invented civilisation and cities and agriculture. In fact, they invented everything, even things that haven’t been invented yet.

And I pity the fool who tries to claim otherwise. He’ll be torn limb from limb by an uber-nationalistic mob of shrieking imbeciles who will not ever accept that they are not First.

The thing is, you see, that the Chinese psyche is a brittle one. One and a half billion tantrum-throwing children who lob their toys out of the pram the very instant things look like they aren’t going their way. The only thing that holds them together emotionally is Being First. If you are First, then you don’t even need to acknowledge the existence of anyone else. If you are First, there are no problems worth mentioning. If you are First, nothing else matters. Delusion it may be, but when Chinese meet actual emotional adversity, or what we refer to as ‘reality’, they shatter. Their whole world comes crashing down. You and me, we dust ourselves off and think “must try harder next time”, or “well done, that other chap”, or “so what?”. A Chinese is more likely to to take the long jump off a tall building.

This is why China is and must always be Number One. Why the Chinese are always Number One. Why Chinese culture is always Number One.

Ironic, isn’t it, when one considers that this is a nation of Number Two’s.