Well, this is the first time I’ve managed to get back into wordpress since my last post. It looks as though the site is going to be mostly inaccesible while I’m in Shenzhen, so I’ve been trying out blogcharm instead.
My new site is http://www.blogcharm.com/huohuohuo/. I don’t like the way it looks right now, but at least I can reach it regularly. Besides, eventually I’ll be able to get new templates or learn how to edit HTML.
I’ve finally managed to settle in to an apartment in Nanshan and have spent today shopping for cleaning supplies in order to wage the Lave of Ganjing against the resistance forces of soot, grime and stray hairs that are holding down the fort long after the previous residents of my fangzi have gone. It’s not as though I’m moving in behind slobs, as all visible surfaces in the apartment are spotless; it’s the nooks and crannies and the broad spaces below things that need a thorough going over. The routine bucket of water under the bathroom sink washed out enough hair to build at least a small wig, and the stovetop area has been sadly neglected. So my adopted mode of unpacking has been to clean out an area, then unpack the things I expect will go there, then move onto cleaning the next spot.
The apartment itself is quite impressive–very upscale, and probably nicer than I’ll know what to do with (certainly nicer than I was used to in Bao’an)–and well within my price-range, thanks to very persistent (if not at all times patient) shopping. The experience of apartment shopping is something I’ll have to break down into retrospective chapters in the near future. I hope to be connected in the apartment in a day or two, since my current method of connecting is a rather rough-and-tumble wangba that smells strongly of old, dirty feet. As though that weren’t enough of a motivation for keeping this post short, Nersey has just called to invite me for kafei, and kafei seems a much more pleasant prospect at the moment.
With the second major toy recall in weeks, all hullabaloo is breaking out over toys “Made in China” (cue ominous music here), and the addition of tainted toothpaste and bu hao tires “Made in China” is enough to compound the issue into a general paranoia regarding all things “Made in China” (again, ominous music). As is often the case when it comes to paranoia, everyone’s begun hunting for a scapegoat, and the bigger the scapegoat the better. And scapegoats don’t get much larger (or easier to pick) than China. In the midst of all the blame-laying, though, it’s easy to forget about other people who should shoulder some of the blame: US companies and kids.
I’ll start with the latter culprits, kids, since that’s the the group on behalf of which many will rattle sabers. Many of the recalls are based on the idea (yes, as of yet, only the idea) of toys being broken and ingested by children, particularly the idea that a child might ingest a few magnets, in which case the magnets would link together and create a nasty obstruction that threatens to perforate intestines. Granted, this has happened to children in the past (though not with any of the specific products being recalled), and it’s not an experience I’d like to see any kid live through.
No matter how much I’d like it not to happen though, recalls or not, it will happen. It will happen again simply because kids break things and kids eat things; these are two of the best-developed skills in most kids’ repertoires. Given enough time, most kids will figure out a way to break steel marbles, and the fine line between edible and inedible is fuzzy even to middle-schoolers, let alone toddlers. I tried a few lunch-time, mix-any-and-everything concoctions in my lifetime and at least think I remember eating a live bumble-bee at some point; earlier this year my nephew ate a light bulb (fortunately, with no ill-consequences for himself, however many panic attacks ensued around him). This is not to say that we shouldn’t take precautions on behalf of children, only to point out that their ability to bruise, lacerate or poison themselves will always outstrip our precautions in some cases.
One precaution that seems effective enough, though, is banning the use of lead paint (the other cause of recent recalls) in toy manufacturing. We know kids are going to put toy cars in their mouths, so let’s avoid actually coating those toy cars with toxins; that’s logical enough. So we have to consider whose fault it is exactly when we find out that the toy cars we’re giving kids to put in their mouths actually are coated in toxins. Folks like Dick Durbin have got their answer: “All of this summer’s recalled products have one thing in common, China.”
But question of ultimate responsibility, of where the buck stops, points to a different group. Durbin points out in a letter to CPSC Chairman Nancy Nord (ibid) that top officials in China don’t necessarily acknowledge lead paint as a toxin. It’s not just that Chinese officials aren’t thoroughgoing enough in regulating lead paint; they don’t even agree to the need to regulate lead paint. Little wonder they’re doing an unsatisfactory job (by our standards) of screening for it.
Agree with those Chinese officials or not, we have to take into account that their culture’s ideas and standards about safety differ from our own when doing business with them (just as other countries often have to take the US’s poor–comparative–environmental standards into account when doing business with us). If, in the name of increased profit, a US company sends all or part of their manufacturing to another country, it’s that company’s business to ensure that their products do not suffer (or cause consumers to suffer).
China will be China; if US companies want it to be anything else, the responsibility is theirs.
via Chicago and Hong Kong, officially at any rate. I’ve got 28 hours or so left before my flight takes off from BWI, and I’ll be spending most of those hours doing one of four things: sleeping, sitting in a dentist’s chair, committing random acts of forgetfulness or lamenting my lack of a carry-on-sized TARDIS*. The second and third activities on that list are worrisome.
Tomorrow morning is my second dentist visit in one week, since a recent cleaning and inspection revealed two cavities: maxillary right third molar and mandibular right canine. I’ve known about both for quite a while, two years at the least, and have decided it’s about time to get them filled, mostly due to an overwhelming fear of Chinese dentistry. Most of the dental offices I saw in China were aquarium affairs, operating chairs lined up in windows in the way most Americans wouldn’t accept even for hairstylist chairs, and even were the prospect of Chinese gathering outside of the window to gawk at the laowai flinch under the drill, the arrangement creeps me out; it’s almost as though the idea is to force the dentist to use sanitary measures by subjecting him to increased scrutiny. Then, too, as someone who suffers from ridiculous stage-fright, I imagine myself getting a shaky-handed dentist.
As for random acts of forgetfulness, I’ve had a few instances in recent days. I’ve gone to refill my coffee a few times, left the mug beside the coffee pot, and gone about other business. I’ve headed upstairs to use the bathroom quite a few times, gotten involved doing something else, then been bothered half an hour later by a bothersome pressure in my bladder. And then today, I went to buy socks, browsed through a few racks of shirts, gone grocery shopping, started home, then thought, “Oh, where did I put my socks.” Apparently, I’m a bit preoccupied; hopefully my focus will sharpen as my packing deadline gets closer.
*As in Dr. Who’s “Time And Relative Dimensions in Space” machine, which is larger inside than out and can travel to any point in space and time. As with most of my improbable desires, I want a TAVIS solely for the storage space, while the option of instantaneous travel doesn’t much interest me. (For a long time I nursed a fantasy about being able to travel by tesseract with my car, thus enabling me to “jump” past stoplights; rarely was this fantasy interrupted by the internal logic that I could do without any car whatsoever–or at least “jump” directly from home to destination and back, were the car necessary–were I capable of such tavel.)
”Give that can the whole CSI treatment–you know, lab tests, weird lights, shots from the can’s point of view. Yeah, that’s it–lots of flash, and no meaning.”
–Clancy Wiggum (another Baltimore boy)
The buzz on Buzz Cola is that it’s, well, cola. You pour it into a glass, and it foams, settles; it’s brown, and it tastes like, well, like cola. It’s not particularly bad, not particularly good, and the formula in the cans 7-11 has been selling as a part of their Simpsons cross-promotion shows no evidence of matching the TV cola’s of “twice the sugar, twice the caffeine.” At least, I don’t show any signs of bouncing off the walls, no civilizations seem to be forming on my teeth, and I don’t feel mindlessly bidden to perform stunts for reality TV. It is maybe a bit too much on the sweet side, and even if the promotion were extended indefinitely, I’d stick with good old Kekou-Kele.
The can is great, though, wonderfully true to the cartoon versions (as long as you ignore the little The Simpsons Movie logo on the side), and will make for a nice collectible. Since it’s being sold in all 7-11s and not just Kiwk-E-Marts, I do have to wonder: Is it Homer himself who’s so lazy he’d prefer to pay $10 for a can? Maybe fanboys on the other side of the globe are just keen to get their hands on such a “RARE” item.
Today I tried buying pants, with emphasis on the word tried. It turns out my favorite style of slacks (Dockers Go Khakis) has been discontinued, so I was forced to hunt through the other options available, only to discover that my size was absent from the shelves of five major department stores. When I asked whether my size might be available in the back room, the cashier at one shop told me no and that I might want to try a “Big and Tall” store.
I’ve heard this story before: just the other night I was watching a Beauty and the Geek rerun, in which Mario lamented how any pants that fit his waist inevitably don’t fit his legs, and I’ve heard people complain about having to go to special stores just to find their sizes (and that the special stores never have as good a selection) hundreds of time. But whereas the people I normally hear complaining about this difficulty are generally sort of gourd-shaped and could afford to cut back a bit on pasta, I’m closer in shape to the pasta. Yep, at 6′1″ and 153 lbs., if there were an American Association of Ruler-Shaped People, I’d belong.
The elusive size I was hunting for was a 31-32, which an online check at Dockers and Haggar assured me is not a discontinued size, though not nearly as available a size as anything with a 34-38 inch waistline. What I managed to find close to my size were a lot of 31-30s (which look like Capri pants on me); other than that, I mostly found waistbands starting at 36-30 and running as high as 52-30. 52-30: I’m pretty sure that’s considered a “Big and Tall” size, yet I’m the one being directed to a “Big and Tall” store.
Initially I tried telling myself that my size was maybe sold out, maybe all the people my size had already raided the shelves, leaving me bupkis, but such a scenario isn’t that convincing. Instead, it seems more likely that the scarcity of my size reflects a growing change that I’ve been sharply aware of since returning home–namely, that Americans have been getting bigger, without getting much taller. (After all, it doesn’t take much effort to figure out in which half of a properly divided “Big and Tall” store you’d look for a size 52-30.)
Before returning to America, I’d been curious about just what my reaction to being around so many waiguoren would be (having been set quite on edge by all the pale faces on my first trip to Hong Kong), and it’s been the sheer size of Americans that I’ve noticed since returning. America is big, and growing. Little wonder I can’t find pants that fit: the supply-and-demand gurus have caught on to the fact that the scales are tipping in Mario’s favor.
Now, I’m perfectly aware that much of the reason I’ve heard so many stories about plus-sized people having to hunt for fitting clothing is that weight is often tied to negative self-image, and I’m not going to even attempt flipping the card by suggesting that I feel bad about myself now for being too thin to find pants. However, it is worth noting that Asian-Americans are the thinnest set in America, and that part of the reason I’ve been so shocked by the number of overweight people I’ve seen is because I saw so few during my first year in China. Surely, there are a number of underlying causes to this, none of them so simple as economic status (since I saw both rich and poor in China) or genetics alone, and perhaps one of those underlying causes is just the way Americans and Chinese respond to self-image questions. Whereas most Chinese would probably do anything in their power to avoid having to shop at the “Fat People’s Store” (real establishment), in a country where an organization encourages members to “Picket and demonstrate against governments, groups, businesses, or individuals whose practices discriminate against or offend fat people,” it’s just easier to make the store change its name.
Now playing in my CD player: Tomahawk’s Anonymous. On this, their third CD, Tomahawk is now working as a trio, with only John Stanier (former Helmet drummer and Baltimore-born), Duane Denison (former The Jesus Lizard guitarist) and Mike Patton (former Faith No More, Mr. Bungle, etc., etc. vocalist) appearing in the liner credits; once-bassist Kevin Rutmanis doesn’t appear. Anonymous is a collection of 12 tracks based on 19th Native American music and a 13th instrumental piece, and it’s a bit of a divergence from the band’s normal work. Whereas their first epnymous release had little to do with the avant-garde alternative/noise style almost synonymous with anything Mike Patton and their second release Mit Gas seemed an almost desperate attempt to monopolize on the scattered style of Patton’s other band Fantomas, Anonymous manages to follow a relatively smooth arc of development while hitting a range of styles: a darkly ambient “War Song” pairs chanting and bass for an unerving resonance, ending in a canned thunderstorm a la Brian Williams; “Mescal Rite 1″ pairs layered drum-major beats with a style of futuristic electronica familiar to Patton fans for an edgy but upbeat track; “Mescal Rite 2″ twists New Age and trip-hop together into a bizarre fusion; tracks (and moments) like “Ghost Dance” have a solidly authentic feel to them, basic drumming and chanting with just a few effects thrown in; and then there’s “Song of Victory,” a short, frantic, quick-switch composition that sounds most similar to Patton’s Fantomas work. However much individual tracks hop from genre to genre though, constant tribal hooks pull them all together into quite a solid theme, and no matter how often Patton switches from mumble to scat to shouting, his voice just works with Native American chants (as anyone who remembers “Smaller and Smaller” would know). Final say: Anonymous is one of the best tribal theme albums I’ve heard since Sepultura’s Roots.
My other acquisition while at home has been The Essential Alice in Chains, which was put out within weeks of my arrival in China last year. I’ve waited almost a year to buy this one, and it’s proven a worthwhile purchase. Though I’d rather have seen, oh, 48 instead of 28 tracks, the 28 tracks on the set are about the best Alice in Chains offer. The best points of the collection have to be that all the songs from Sap except for “Love Song” and both tracks from the Last Action Hero soundtrack appear. If only “Rotten Apple” and “Whale & Wasp” were there, I’d be about set.
And then on the television, I heard it . . . well, heard something like it. I was changing channels, looking for a good movie, only to hear a male voice singing, “Mai ya hou, mai ya hu, mai ya ha ha . . .” It turns out that oh-too-cute-nonsense-chorus song that every ex-pat in China has heard playing everywhere from K-TV to streetside speakers to the MP3 rocking cell-phones accompanying ambling teen and twenty-something girls was (at least according to wiki) originally a Romanian song written by some guy named Dan Balan back in 2004. Apparently it’s been remade again and again and again and is popular almost everywhere in the world except for the States. I wonder how many versions existed before the one that’s now maiyahahaing through China . . .
It’s miserable being a minority. According to the self-test on www.bandwidthplace.com, my download rate is 42.5 kilobits per second, meaning that my connection is a little better than average for Maryland dial-up connections. Still, such a connection is painfully slow and places me squarely in the minority among Internet users, according to the March 2007 Nielsen/NetRatings extrapolations posted at www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0703/; over 80% of US surfers have made the jump to broadband. Granted, for the area where I’m staying, DSL is an option (cable, even ComCrap, isn’t), but the price difference is a prohibitive one. Fortunately, I can’t feel too awful about my personal situation, since I’ll soon be heading back to Shenzhen, where my connection speed is bound to fall into sync with the local average.
I became interested in the whole connection speed issue after reading part of Thomas L. Friedman’s The World is Flat; in a section called “Dirty Little Secret #6: The Infrastructure Gap,” he argues that the US is just not doing a good job of keeping up with the rest of the world when it comes to Internet connections, pointing to the US’s 16th place ranking for broadband penetration among developed countries (according to the ITU report for of December 31, 2004) and the US’s low standard (200 Kbps) for defining ”broadband” (350). Friedman argues the the US’s lagging in this area is an example of misplaced priorities and one part of a crisis for US viability in a world that increasingly relies on the Internet for business.
Friedman’s is a compelling argument, especially given that the US’s actual broadband speeds (even at the most optimistic approximations, such as the ITIF’s) remain pathetically slow compared to some other nations’. Just compare Japan’s 61 Mbps to the ITIF estimate of 4.8 Mbps for the US, and you start to feel that the lag is a very real thing: see http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20070529-survey-average-broadband-speed-in-us-is-1-9mbps.html.
Congress at least seems to be seeing the light, with the introduction of the Broadband Consensus of America Act and the Broadband Data Improvement Act. For the State-side sort of thinking this is sparking in small circles (and should be sparking in much larger circles) check out this editorial from Chris Hill on Dr. Blip’s. Could an election be in the balance? It would be nice to think so. The growth in free-market demand that the increasing percentages of broadband users represents certainly seems to present a political mandate.
For myself, I’m more interested in seeing how the connectivity race plays out between the sleeping dragon and the States.
What follows is my take on The Simpsons Movie; don’t worry about spoilers, because there won’t be any, only general comments regarding the writing.
I’d gone into the movie with relatively low expectations, since the Simpsons’ beaux jours passed seasons ago and since I was skeptical about writers’ ability to utilize the comparative freedom of the big screen (after all, what would the television show be without the occasional jab at Fox). Expecting the worst, I ended up being pleasantly surprised.
Despite some signs of strain, the plot holds together relatively well. The beginning is one of the loosely connected justifications that started to characterize the series in seasons 11 and 12: See 2001’s “Tennis the Menace” for the best meta-Simpsons example of this (Abe: “Aw, I can’t believe we went through all of that just to wind up with a tennis court”). There are still charming moments and a good number of gags to the start though, and one decent sub-plot evolves out of it. The plot weakens a little in the middle, using Homer’s (sometimes-on-sometimes-off) brainless irrationality to move it from point A to point B; you can almost hear the writers saying, “We don’t need plausible motivations, because HE’S Homer Simpson. D’oh! D’oh! D’oh!” Shortly thereafter, though, the plotline recovers as the one motivation that’s always held the greatest power in the Simpsons world–family–gains prominence. From thereon out, the plot flows quite nicely to a predictable but satisfying conclusion.
The character development in the movie could have used, well, some development. Granted, we all know who the characters are (and, yes, we get to see what seems like hundreds of second- and third-tier characters), but it would still be nice to have them fleshed out in the movie. Homer and Bart are by far the stars of the movie, their interactions taking center stage along the lines of 1990’s “Bart the Genius,” and most of the good, non-gag dialogue develops between them. Marge is largely relegated to the background, filling the role of mater familias without any real distinction, and Lisa, though very true to form, never gets to bounce off other characters enough to do anything more than drive the plotline along. Maggie is a bit better developed, showing some un-baby-like smarts along the lines of “Papa’s Got a Brand New Badge” (2002). In the end, the Bart-Homer dynamic is strong enough to make up for the lack of characterization elsewhere and is a welcome throwback to the early seasons of the show.
As far as laughs go, there’s a steady stream of sight gags and wise-cracks running through the entire film, and one or two jokes that would never have made it past the small-screen censors had me laughing out loud. The only downside is that most of the jokes are right up front: There’s none of the Easter egg background signs or between-the-lines wordplay that appear in most of the great Simpsons episodes, and this means the movie probably won’t hold up to repeat viewing. Since, let’s face it, the jokes are what really make a comedy, The Simpsons Movie is strong as a one-time view and makes for a nice little homage to the series’ better days.
. . . and gets into a tight place.
I woke halfway through my first China dream today–maybe the first sign of a certain backwards homesickness, or the first sign of my subconscious turning over the uncertainty factor of returning to who knows what apartment. In the dream, Buddha* had been visiting me at my new dream-apartment (i.e., the apartment in this dream, not my ideal apartment) , which was mostly a combination of the elevator lobby from Tao Yuan Ju, Area 3, Building 1 and the main bathroom of my parents’ American home, furnished by a wooden bench and an inflatable ottoman. The most important part of the decor was the nonsensical entryway, a roughly two square foot hole in the front wall.
The dream kicked in just after Buddha and I had finished two large Wave pizzas and as Buddha was getting ready to leave. Without betraying any suggestion of foresight whatsoever, he attempted to squeeze through the ridiculous hole serving as my front entrance and promptly (naturally) became stuck tightly, frantically panting, “Aiya, aiya.” The dream remains unresolved, since I woke up shortly thereafter, but it is worth mentioning that just before I woke, Buddha had gotten into rare form and could be heard calling in a strained falsetto: “Yoo-hoo! Yoo-hoo! Wanna take me home?” Interpret that one.
*Not THE Buddha, just “Buddha”, a former co-worker, names having been changed to protect the innocent.
