English Banditry

The Chinese are real practical jokers. Sometimes it seems they can't take anything seriously. The station master of the Shanghai city subway system seems to be the biggest joker himself, and this morning again he caught me with one of his dirty tricks.

One of the survival strategies I employ during the commute to and from work is to keep headphones in my hears and a PDA screen glued to my face at all times. It may sound like an annoying anti-social behavior, and surely the people who have to avoid me because I am about to walk right into them without looking probably think I'm a dick, but after getting way too angry and frustrated at the impenetrable mass moving human wall that pervades the entirety of all public areas in Shanghai one too many times in the past years, I realized the best way is to just forget it exists, forget that I cannot possibly hope to ever move more than 20% faster than the slowest mosier in the crowd, and just assume the identity of a slow motion human pinball.

The problem happened when, gazing with full attention at my PDA screen, I stepped on to the up escalator at my destination station. The spontaneous sensation of an earth-quake took to my senses as the masses of humans around me moved upward on the escalator as in correlation with my expectations, but my own body, on the other hand, seemed to have no stair propelling it forward and upward. I lost my footing and very nearly fell on my face when I came to realize that once again they must have randomly decided to pull the "turn the escalators off in the middle of rush-hour" prank. As I climbed the stationary escalator steps all the way to the top, a strong feeling of sea-sickness overwhelmed me. Last time I'm pretty sure the steps spontaneously stopped moving when I was half way to the top, but I really can't be sure.

The thing is—this kind of stuff happens every day, all day in Shanghai. One week you go down to wait for the train to work and see that every single one of the LCD TV screens which show the time till the next train arrives have gone missing. A week later they magically reappear, but they won't be there more than a few weeks before they disappear again. Another day the screens will work all day, but when the last train for the night in a particular direction has left the station, they will turn the screens off to "trick" everyone into waiting for a train that will never come. In the office I work in, the handle for the faucet in the lavatory has disappeared randomly and inexplicably, as in the "here's a sink but you can't wash your hands after taking a dump" prank, more than 10 times in the past few months. That's not nearly as good as when you put soap on your hands FIRST and then realize the handle is there but is glued in place. WHEN IN THE AIRPORT, THE ASSIGNED GATE NUMBER FOR MY FLIGHT WAS CHANGED 2 MINUTES PRIOR TO THE FINAL GATE CLOSING CALL ON THREE OCCASIONS! I ALMOST MISSED THE FLIGHTS! AND I KNOW THOSE FUCKING JOKERS IN THE AIRPORT WERE TRYING TO PULL THE PRANK ON ME BECAUSE THEY SAW THAT I WEAR HEADPHONES TO PASS THE BOREDOM AND THOUGHT I WOULDN'T HEAR THE ANNOUNCEMENT.

The thing is, pranks are really cool and all, but myself coming from a culturally where they are generally reserved for friends, acquaintances, and enemies, I have had a lot of trouble adapting to the Chinese prank style of giant corporations (i.e. "melamine poisoned milk and the kidney stone joke") and, indeed, the city government itself (Mr. Subway Station Master) trying to fuck with me. That's why it's very hard for me to condemn my fellow expats when they get fed up and do something incredibly anti-social to "cope" thinking, mistakenly, that they can "teach Chinese to stop pulling these ridiculous tricks".

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It was pouring cats and dogs outside. A young foreign man entered a Shanghai McDonalds both hungry and with an intense pressure in his bladder. Longing for a swift and relaxing visit to the little boy's room, our hero was not looking forward to yet another round of Chinese practical jokes. He marched swiftly to the bathroom only to stop unexpectedly, dumbfounded with exasperation that the door refused to open. He opened his eyes wide to take note of his surroundings. Oh not again! The Chinese had succeeded in pulling the "we know you really have to piss, that's why we're going to fuck with you and close down this whole bathroom" prank yet again. A sign was posted on the door that directed the would-be race horse urinator to climb several flights of stairs with his already painfully full bladder and expel his waste in a porcelain bowl on the third floor.

"No! Not today I'm not", he thought as he smiled smugly at the ingenious Chinese sign. Taking no further consideration of his surroundings, the man spontaneously whipped out his cock and began spraying a stream of dark yellow urine on the battered wooden door. A stream not dissimilar except in size to those left on department store floors across China by children with open-crotch pants at the direction of their parents flowed swiftly down and away from the door itself. A river of yellow spontaneously streaking across a large expanse of the floor further magnified the conspicuousness of an already larger-than-life utterly inconceivable spectacle.

Soon, a nearby security guard took note of the odd transpiration. Shocked far beyond the wildest expectations he had had in 15-odd years of humdrum play-with-your-cell-phone-and-act-official guard duty, the poor man's mind couldn't even begin to conceive of a possible appropriate response to the obvious violation of the building whose sanctity he was employed to protect. The guard approached from a distance, rustling his keys enough in the process for our hero to take note of his presence, and then stopped dead in his tracks gawking and thoroughly disoriented. Our hero, having a bladder still not satisfactorily relieved from its prior state of fullness, took note of the guard's presence and returned to the more pressing matter of pissing at hand, literally.

A few seconds later, an eternity to the guard or any other passerby happening to pay witness to the absurd sight, the otherwise respectable young man pulled the elastic flap of his underpants over his cock and zipped up his fly. Nonchalantly he returned to the table he had come from to join his friend and enjoy a fine meal.

A few minutes later a more official looking head security guard approach the table. In Chinese he said, "Which one of you just took a pee on the door over there?" The two foreigners at the table feigned inability in the Chinese language and continued their conversation in English. The head guard repeated his words, but, assuming doing so in a language that wouldn't be understood by the "foreigners" was in vain, he soon gave up, turned and left.

If we were to discuss the greatest virtue Chinese have, I think with little doubt I would have to say it is: tolerance for one's fellow man. Damn!!!

For nearly nine years now I have been enthralled with the concept of foreign languages. This represents a marked departure from the entirety of my adolescence in which I passionately and contemptuously despised the very idea of other languages. And while in these ten years I've made a substantial stab at two languages, I could most certainly respond without hesitation to the question: "Have you spent more time actually applying yourself and learning or researching the means by which one can learn." The answer, emphatically, is the latter. This is indeed a dismal state of affairs, for in the massive vortex of black hole consumed time I have expended browsing every website and article known to man on the topic of second language acquisition, I could have surely, and even with the most idiotic or inefficient of methodologies, reached full literacy and fluency in at least one additional language if not two or more. This habit of researching more than doing is by no means new to me, as my adolescence was spent doing exactly the same thing—with the singular exception being that the object of my affections at the time was computer languages rather than human ones.

I must resolve to read and reread Quantity Always Trumps Quality. If you can relate in the least, you won't regret doing the same.

Very recently I made a universal and eternal life-long resolution of the sort that is generally broken sooner than if I had just said to myself, "Okay, I'm going to try really hard to do this"—I decided that the methods I had collected couldn't be particularly far from optimal, and that it was time to hit the ground running without looking back. Such are the timeless ideas of: SRS technology to maximize vocabulary acquisition efficiency, a preponderance of sentences as 'questions' on flash cards having no 'answer' in order to gain the value that can be gained by imprinting correct sentences on the brain as opposed to using context-free random single lexical elements on flashcards, and Krashen style comprehensible input to the extent possible within the limits of one's vocabulary including reading without breaks for at least an hour.

What precipitous event was it that drove me to shatter my resolve? I've added a new idol to my collection. He's one of the world's most accomplished polyglots, he is of the comparative philology school and does not take interest in cheap fluency (as in guys who learn 2,000 words for daily conversation and sloppy grammar and add a language to their list as "learned"), he does not use flashcards, wordlists, or Supermemo, he does not study language with any techniques I had heard of before this week and he is highly accessible and willing to advise aspiring polyglots. All in all a true inspiration.

Dr. Alexander Arguelles - professor, polyglot, and scholar of the highest caliber.

Key concepts he has introduced/promoted in the polyglot world: shadowing, scriptorium.

Essential Reading:

Arguelles' personal website - read in full, don't miss the Great Books section.

Thread with a profile of Dr. Arguelles

The Linguist Blogger - A more in-depth profile

A forum the good professor himself moderates - approximately 20 hours of reading, I have copy & pasted the best of it to create a word document with more than 80 pages of his wisdom. (To be attached/linked here later.)

The Linguist Blogger - Interview with Dr. Alexander Arguelles

Youtube - Videos of Arguelles reviewing language courses (see Assimil) and explaining various languages.

In this ever changing age of technology, it's always comforting to know that some things never change: people cheating on their wives, computer crashes, students' lack of enthusiasm for school after returning from the summer holiday—and the Chinese postal service beating the living fucking hell out of your packages with a baseball bat before delivering them. I assume my birthday present didn't look like this a few days ago when my parents sent it:

The good thing about all of this, though, is that they were polite enough this time to affix a sticker to alert me to the fact that they bashed the piss out of my gift before giving it to me. Kudos to the genius who thought of that. If I hadn't seen the sticker there, I might have just assumed it was a modern art box design. This is definitely an improvement over a box I shipped from China to the USA five years ago which they had beaten the shit out of then poked a hole in the side and poured in dirt to mix with my books and clothing, but to which no such sticker had been attached.

The other really great thing about the Chinese post office is that THEY WON'T EVEN ACTUALLY DELIVER. That's right—if you get a box, they'll send you a postcard which says: "We have your box, come get it your damn self cause we are so busy bashing the fuck out of people's packages we don't have time to come give you". Of course, pray to god the sender didn't write your name in Chinese on it, because if you're like me—having graduated long ago and pitched my only ID (my student ID) that actually had my Chinese name on it—you're going to have a helluva a time trying to convince the counter lady that the English letter composed name printed on your passport is the "equivalent" of the Chinese name on the box. And, yes, you do need to take your passport. No, they won't let you use the postcard as "proof" that it's your package.

This might just be one of those days when a picture is worth a thousand words:

Yes, small titted chicks, there is hope --- as long as you can read Chinese, you can get this book and find out the diet and tit message techniques that will take you up one cup size or more in no time flat. If the cat had been let out of the hat earlier none of us would have ever even know what the big stink about silicon was all about!

IANAD: THE ABOVE POST IS NOT INTENDED NOR IMPLIED TO CONSTITUTE MEDICAL ADVICE, DIAGNOSIS, OR TREATMENT. ALWAYS VISIT OR SPEAK TO A QUALIFIED HEALTH SERVICE PROVIDER IN PERSON PRIOR TO STARTING TO RUB YOUR TITS ACCORDING TO A CRAZY CHINESE BOOK ON A DAILY BASIS IN A VAIN ATTEMPT TO INCREASE YOUR CUP SIZE IN LIEU OF PROVEN AESTHETIC SURGERY BREAST AUGMENTATION METHODS SUCH AS SILICON IMPLANTS.

Case 1: Cutting In Line

If you were waiting in this line would you (a) jump out and try to steal a cab with a 1 in 100 shot of succeeding and a 99 in 100 shot of being bitched at by a line guard and police officer or (b) wait your turn?

So there's a certain part of the city where it's generally exceedingly difficult to catch a cab. On one side of the road you have the "free for all" war zone taxi flagging area where you have a shot at getting a taxi in 5 minutes or less -- but it takes a lot of energy because you have to be aggressive and keep cutting in front of the people that cut you by moving further and further down the road and towards the middle of the street. On the other side of the road there is an orderly line with two full-time traffic employees: one to flag down taxis and send the first person in line to the next cab, and one at the back of the line to protect the entering and unloading taxis from being snatched by line jumpers.

Every time I go there it's the same story... 20 minutes of waiting, and about every 10 minutes some smart fella at the end of the line decides to pull a traditional Chinese "I'm blind, I'm blind" trick -- pretending he doesn't see the line of 30-40 people waiting, or pretending the line is a bunch of idiots standing in a line next to the road for no particular reason. Every time it's the same story: the guy moseys up to the end of the line, looks around to see if anyone is eyeing him, jumps out, grabs the cab door and tries to get in... at that very moment the "end of the line" guard jumps out and starts screaming at him, and with a feigned look of bewilderment he exasperatedly acknowledges the line of 40 people, "Oh! It's a line! Oh dear golly, I hadn't any idea! I thought these people were just standing here looking bored as balls for the fun of it."

The only way I can explain it is that Chinese brains seem to have some sort of "boundary of reality" checking algorithm such that they must always check that the rules of reality still apply just so they can be sure everything is right with the world. I guess the simplest analogy would be if someone's brain were preprogrammed to jump off a building every time he saw a ledge just to be sure that there is nothing wrong with "the matrix" and the law of gravity is indeed still in effect. Really -- it's a total waste of time. Between the two line guards and (often) a police officer, I have yet to see a single one of these suckers get away with snatching a cab. But if you're Chinese -- I guess it's worth a try, right?

Case 2: Dirty Laundry Pile

If these were your new clothes would you: (a) throw them in the washing machine or (b) take them out to the dumpster?

Without fail visitors like the real estate lady, the night guard, and the repair man see my pile of dirty laundry, which, mind you, is comprised mostly of clothes which were very recently purchased in the U.S.A. for a total of some hundreds and hundreds of dollars, and ask me if they can help me throw them all out in the garbage. The first time I was asked, it was the real estate lady asking. I dismissed it very quickly thinking "oh she's a bit of a crackhead anyhow". After all, she was the one spontaneously start plungering my toilet, without my asking, when she saw it was backed up with disgusting shitty water some months prior. (Bless her heart.) The repairman, however, had seemed more revolted and less enthusiastic a year back when I DID request his help in plungering -- and I had thus presumed him to be more of the sane variety. When I had him come up to change a ceiling light bulb requiring a ladder, he ALSO asked if he could throw all of my dirty but new clothes out. I patiently explained to him that in my understanding the apartment had come equipped with a washing machine under the assumption that I might actually like to wash the dirty clothes and then wear them a second or even third time before discarding them, thereby saving myself perhaps a thousand dollars or more per month in clothing store fees. By the look on his face after I finished explaining -- I'm not entirely sure whether or not he bought into my strange argument...

Not to laugh at them or anything, but I thought these folks --- earn like --- not even enough to buy that pile of clothes in a few month's time??? So why on earth do they think I have money to wear clothes once and throw them out instead of throwing them in the wash machine as, I presume, a considerable portion of the Chinese population does??? Ah.... the every elusive Chinese mind and it's many preprogrammed environmental responses. It'll always be a mystery to me.

So the other day I'm doing a job interview, yeah? And I was thinking "this one really takes the cake", that is, until I mentioned it to a friend and realized just how much deeper the rabbit hole goes. There's a huge difference in tolerance for sharing one's "body waste" between Chinese culture and the West.

Case in point:

A Scab In The Interview

Guy shows up to a job interview for a managerial level position in shorts which reveal his battered legs. As one is APT TO DO WHEN NERVOUS, he twitches away and finds a "outlet" for the nervous energy as he speaks. Personally I prefer scribbling on a slip of paper, clicking a pen, or screwing and unscrewing a pop bottle cap. Hell, even if he went crazy zipping and unzipping his fly it would have been better than .... THE HORROR THAT MANIFESTED ITSELF AS HIS OUTLET FOR NERVOUS ENERGY WHICH CONSISTED OF PICKING AT HIS KNEE SCABS FOR A FULL HOUR. I wanted to puke like --- THE WHOLE TIME.

Nails To Be Cutten

I don't even have to get specific with this one. Everyone who's been in a Chinese office has had the pleasant experience of being rained on with stray finger (or god forbid TOE) nails from a neighboring desk or cubicle farm. Why do at home that which can be done at work? **click-keh** *click-keh*