Rapid Descent into Hong Kong

I’ve never been a thrill-seeker per se. I’d say I’m adventurous, but thrills also come with chills and spills sometimes, which I’m none too crazy about, so I back off at that level. But I have friends who’ve bungee jumped off the Royal Gorge Bridge near Canon City, Colorado; I have a couple of friends who sky-dive, and I’ve known a bunch of people who ski the black-diamond hills. And I’ve got a friend who’s a fighter jockey and had to bail out when both his engines failed, going over 450 knots – something he was very lucky to survive.

Me? I don’t even do roller coasters. Ferris wheels? Forget about it. I’ve been on Splash Mountain at Disneyland, and almost shit an entire brickyard. I’ve been to the top of the World Trade Center a few times, the observation deck of the Empire State Building, and inside the crown of the Statue of Liberty, but each time, I would grab hold of the rail, lean backwards away from the edge, and peek down, always keeping my center of gravity low, and leaning backwards. Lame, ain’t it?

But one thing I do love despite my avoidance of heights is flying. Whether it’s in a real airplane or in front of my computer, flying Microsoft Flight Simulator. I just love to fly. The closest I’ve ever come to flying for real was taking the co-pilot’s seat in a United Airlines 767 simulator at their Flight Training Center in Denver. The pilot/instructor who was demonstrating allowed me to overfly the Golden Gate Bridge and the Bay Bridge. Incredible experience.

In real life, I’ve been on a Continental MD-80 whose nose-wheel snapped right after we’d rolled off the active runway on landing at Sea-Tac; another one that had to be emergency-evacuated because of a leak while refueling in Spokane; and I’ve experienced a couple of aborted crosswind landings, which can be extremely unnerving, because they’re so unexpected. I also flew out of Denver a day or two after a Continental DC-9 flipped over on takeoff, the wreckage still sitting in the grass between the north-south runways.

THE FLIGHT

I was on a United Airlines non-stop flight from Seattle to Hong Kong a bunch of years ago, before Kai Tak was closed in favor of Chek Lap Kok. The plane was a 747-SP, which I believe no longer fly — that was the short, fat, long-range version of the widebody, a Special Performance model. And it was a 13-1/2 hour flight.

United Airlines Boeing 747-SP

We took off and headed north/northwest, over Vancouver Island, and then over some of the most beautiful, pristine scenery I’d ever seen – the Aleutian Islands. Thankfully, the skies were clear, visibility was unlimited, and I was on the right side of the plane in a window seat on the upper deck, with a front-row view.

Here and there I could see lakes on some of the mountaintops. Heated by the volcanism that makes the Pacific rim the Ring of Fire, they steamed as their surfaces shined. Only a thin film of wispy clouds ever came into view; this was a flight I’d always remember. We also overflew Wake Island, its distinctive shape making it look like a lone galaxy surrounded by an infinite universe of water.

I had one last Black Russian and went to sleep for awhile. Woke up just in time to see Mt. Morrison, the highest mountain on Taiwan, below us. It’s part of a range of mountains that runs north-south on the eastern side of the island. Breathtaking scenery. Makes me wonder how come Taiwan isn’t a traditional vacation destination?

It was getting close to evening. We’d taken off from Seattle at 1:30 in the afternoon, and it was getting towards early evening as we began to approach Hong Kong. We encountered some clouds, and then we flew into a thick layer of them before the air brakes were extended and we slowed down for the approach.

It began to get bumpy as we descended through 10,000 feet, and the weather wasn’t improving any as we continued to bleed off speed and altitude. Every now and then we’d hit an air pocket and drop suddenly, and the engines were whining some kind of spooky sounds, and I was getting a little nervous.

We were still in the clouds when the announcement came that we were on final approach, and as we finally broke through the clouds a few seconds later, I looked out the window, and saw a woman in her high-rise apartment watching television,  in a 6- to 8-story building, not much taller. My next thought was, “Oh no….”

I honestly thought we were going to come down in a residential neighborhood. I could see people sitting down to dinner, and watching television, and I could see the clothes on their clotheslines so clearly, I probably could have ballparked what size they were.

As I dug my hands into the arms of my seat, we banked slowly to the right, then leveled out, and the next thing I saw was the airport’s inner marker, and then the stripes on the wet runway beneath us. I sat back and waited for the bump of the wheels, and as they touched the ground I began breathing normally again.

The arrivals area was a sea of humanity; the taxi area worse. It was by now almost 8 pm in Hong Kong, and a day later, and it felt like the middle of rush hour. I soon learned it was always rush hour in that city, but from that day on Hong Kong was my base of operations in Asia, and my hometown away from home.

Here are two videos for your reference. Unfortunately, the site admin is a dickhead, and refused to allow me to re-post them here.

Landing at Kai-Tak in the rain, cockpit view: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8g-ArLYsloI

What these approaches look like from street level: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyU9OLqQ8XA

NEXT: FORCED AIR CONDITIONING

The Black Cloud of Beijing

I’m talking about the hazardous level of air pollution in Beijing, not the litany of crimes against humanity the Communist Chinese government visits upon its citizens every day, although The Black Cloud of Beijing can be counted as one of those atrocities.

A clear day with fresh air has become a thing of the ancient past in the Chinese capital. People ride around on their bicycles, now less and less common as more Chinese can afford cars, with inefficient paper filter masks, as many of the particles pass right through the filter as easily as water through a strainer.

Imagine a United States without an Environmental Protection Agency. That’s China today. Think about that shit before you vote for President this November. Yeah, that’s right, Teabaggers, I’m talking to you.

Out past the city limits you can still find an agrarian culture mixed in with modern factories that were moved outside the cities to pollute the suburbs. And in front of the shiny new facades of office buildings or heavy industry plants, you can still see evidence of that: tractors, three-wheeled passenger scooters, all made in the 1940s-1960s, before China opened up to the West, and all puking out clouds of black sooty exhaust, which mixes in with dust from the fields, and smoke from the stubble of previous crops.

The sun sets behind The Black Cloud of Beijing, looking over The Forbidden City in the near background.

The Chinese knew decades ago that their cities would become unlivable as they modernized their machine. But all they did was spread the pollution across a much wider area. An hour from Beijing, there are enormous paper-recycling plants, fed by garbage from your dumpster or mine, or the store down the street.

Waste paper exports to China are huge. Ask any steamship operator that runs the Asia routes; they stay alive by loading up with waste paper before they sail back to China. Otherwise, they’d be empty.

Profits on the importation of foreign waste paper undoubtedly contribute to the Chinese navy’s modernization, and the commensurate gearing up of their entire military.

When you boil it all down, the United States is doing now what they did before World War II; we helped gear the Japanese up by shipping them scrap metal, which was returned to us as bombs and bullets, starting with Pearl Harbor.

We made the same mistake again when we gave Japan the transistor, which of course led to the Made in Japan era and the downfall of the American education system.

“How’s that?” you ask. We send Japan scrap metal; they make bombs and drop them on us. We send Japan the transistor, and they make Nintendo, thereby bombing Americans of school age into vidiots. Now, we send China our garbage, and they build up their military with the profits.

And which two rogue countries are on the brink of obtaining nuclear weapons? North Korea and Iran, the two countries with the most brain-fucked leaders on the planet. And they’re both asshole buddies with who? China.

Do we need to be reminded every single day how our dealings with unfriendly foreign powers have come back to strike us in a deadly manner in the past?

Sadly, we do.

NEXT: Rapid Descent

In China, they’re all five-star hotels.

Dear Reader: This post has been updated and now includes the entire story in proper order. Had I posted the second half at a later date, new visitors would have seen the end before the beginning. (It’s like time travel, only without all that quantum crap.)

The Arrival

A corkscrew and a bucket of ice.

You’d think it would be simple enough, wouldn’t you?

I checked in at the Grand Regency Hotel in Qingdao, China, and expected, understandably, to get the special treatment promised by the hotel that boasts itself as the first five-star hotel in Shandong Province. The lobby was ornate, modern, lots of polished marble, and literally an army of bellhops, ashtray-cleaners, table-polishers, you get the idea. I was impressed from the start.

I had just come from Dalian, across the bay in Liaoning Province, and wanted to be spoiled. Dalian was a gray, dreary city, right out of the pages of Orwell’s 1984. I’ll save the rest for another time – Dalian deserves its own space.

The Luggage

So, back to the hotel: I sign the papers, get my card and my passport back, and I bend down to pick up my laptop bag. Two bellhops were on it in a flash, blitzing me from both sides. “No, Sir, I carry,” they said in stereo.

“No, that’s OK. I’ll take this; you can take the rest,” I said to either of them.

The elder of the two made another try for my computer bag.

“Hey! I said I’ll take this one.”

“Please,” he says, not making direct eye-contact, but focusing on the bag, “I will carry. I take it to your room in few minutes.”

I took the laptop bag, picked up my papers and room-key card, took a couple of steps toward the elevators, and pointed to the rest of my luggage for the overzealous lobby-monkey. Unless you have a badge or a gun, possession of my computer, even temporarily, is not tolerated. Especially in China. Story for another time.

The Surveillance

I step out of the elevator on my floor, check the sign, and made a right towards my room. Right outside the elevator, on the ceiling, and not concealed in any way, was a security camera dome. OK. As the hall bent toward the right, at the apex of the bend, on my left, was another security camera dome. Hmm.

As I passed some rooms, I noticed that there were still more security cameras. One on the ceiling directly over each door; and another one straight across the hall, which was mounted where the wall opposite the room met the ceiling. All angles covered. I was not liking this.

About a step inside the room, on the ceiling, was another goddamn security camera. “Better not leave the bathroom door open,” I’m thinking, but the bastards probably have a couple in there too. And… another pair of cameras, strategically placed, of course, in the bedroom. Great! They had every goddamn inch of the room covered.

I sat on the straight chair at the desk they provided with this deluxe king-sized room, slogged down a locally-brewed Tsing Tao Beer, and read through the Official Hotel Rules for Visitors to The People’s Republic of China while I awaited the arrival of my luggage. I was looking forward to taking a nice hot shower before my first meeting, which was in about three hours.

The Meeting

A different bellhop arrived with my luggage. I learned later that the guy who wanted my laptop bag hadn’t worked there long enough to deliver luggage; he was only the luggage collector. Impressive — I was being served by specialists.

I closed the door behind the bellhop, locked it, put the chain on the door, and plugged the peephole with a piece of tissue. What I really wanted to do was to cover the camera domes with shaving cream or something, but I went about the business of settling in and preparing for my meeting. I’d have time to make my political statement. Instead, I took a shower and got dressed.

My guests arrived right on time, 9:30 PM, and buzzed me from the lobby as I’d requested; told them to come on upstairs and gave them the room number. Another lobby monkey brought them up, dropped them at the doorstep, and did a swift about-face. Visions of PLA marching through Tiananmen Square.

The office manager, whom I’ll call Xiong, because his breath was like a bear’s, and his assistant? interpreter? date? - I wasn’t sure which – came in; I greeted them and they both welcomed me to their city. Then Xiong asked me if I’d ever heard of their “fay-merce” beer, as he pronounced it, which was much more potent here in China than the swill they export to the United States.

“Yes, of course,” I answered, thinking I’d missed the opportunity to offer them something to drink. I smiled uncomfortably, but continued smoothly, “and forgive me for not offering you a drink….”

“No problem! Don’t worry. I can order some tea,” he said, waving off the apology, “I call downstairs,” and he picked up the phone on the table and ordered. I signed for it when it arrived, we had our tea and made our conference call back to the States, and they were gone by 10:45. “Rules say Chinese must be out of room by eleven o’clock. Hotel for foreigners only,” Xiong said as they left.

The Basket

I locked the door and flipped the bird to each of the cameras that had me in view. “Fuck you, Deng Xiao-Ping, and Li Peng, and their mothers too.” Business was mercifully over. I sat down on the bed to swap my shoes for my slippers, and felt like I’d just sat on a block of cement. What the fuck? I’m supposed to sleep on this… this slab?

I made a post-meeting call and was done in about a minute and a half. But only the bar downstairs was open, and I was hungry and tired, and now I was really steamed about the goddamn concrete bed. And I didn’t want to wait an hour for limited room service, which was all they had after eleven.

Then I noticed a welcome basket on the dresser next to the armoire. Damn! How did I not see that? Apples, oranges, a little basket of tiny sweet cherries, a triangular box of Toblerone, some cheese and crackers, and two bottles of local wine, a white and a red! And a card from the people I’d just met with and hadn’t thanked because I just noticed it.

The Soup Commie

I picked up the phone on the night-table, and punched the Room Service number. They picked right up, and I asked for a corkscrew for the wine, and a bucket of ice to chill it in. The guy asked someone there a question in heavily-accented Chinese. I understood a few words. “Shenme?” was one of them. It means “What?” After he got his answer, he comes back to the phone, “OK, ten minute. Thank youuuu….”

I turned the TV on, flipped through the channels, and was pleasantly surprised to find CNN International, as well as Star News, which I knew from Hong Kong, and a number of CCTV channels, one of which was in English. Knock on the door. “Room Service.”

Things were looking up. I open the door, and the first thing I smell is soup. Huh? He lifts the metal cover for a moment to reveal what’s under Dome #1: a bowl of soup. “Corn soup,” he says. I suppress a laugh. I notice there’s no ice bucket.

“Where’s the bucket of ice?” I’m not pleased.

He gives me a quizzical look, and says, “We… do not have basket… for rice. I apologize.” And he lifts Dome #2 to reveal a huge bowl of rice. “Is large bowl OK?” I look up toward the ceiling, wanting to ask God a rhetorical question, but I looked right into the camera dome above my head. Steaming now.

“No! Not OK! Bu dui!” I turned around, picked up the phone, and called Room Service. “Excuse me, this is Room 815. I just called and ordered a corkscrew and a bucket of ice, and the guy’s standing here with corn soup and a freaking bowl of rice! Do you have anyone there who speaks English!?”

“Moment….” Man with slightly less affected English comes on the phone. “I’m sorry, sir. What was it you ordered?”

“I – ordered – a – corkscrew – and – a – bucket – of – ice,” I said, enunciating every word, careful to cover my New York accent. He’d never get “kawks krue” in a million years. And I repeated it, explaining as I went along: “A bucket of ice, to chill a bottle of wine, and a corkscrew, to open the bottle,” as if I were teaching an English class. How could he possibly mess up? “OK, ten minute. Thank you,” and he hung up.

I turn back to Mr. Room Service. I couldn’t resist: “No soup for me!” and I politely closed the door. Back to investigating the incredibly solid mattress. I lift off the bedspread and toss it over the side, and continue to pull off layers until I reach mattress. There’s not very much soft to be found below the blanket.

I slap my hand on the mattress, and there’s maybe a couple of centimeters of ineffective padding above and below, and an even thinner layer on the sides. Inside, springs — probably like the ones they have at NORAD — and a thick wooden frame and a metal rim that jabbed me in the ass when I sat on the edge of the mattress. You could bounce a dime off the goddamn thing, and it sounded hollow. Where the hell is that goddamn corkscrew and bucket of ice?

The Last Straw

Knock on the door. Now they’re tuning into my thoughts. It really had been an exhausting day, starting with a 5:00 AM wakeup call in Dalian. Same Room Service guy, this time with a bottle of wine in a bucket of ice, and two glasses. Nice presentation, but we still have a failure to communicate. I take the open bottle out of the bucket, put it on the tray, and take the bucket of ice.

I put one of the two bottles I’d received into the bucket of ice, and put it down by the mini-bar, and I give the guy a buck and send him back. By now it’s after midnight, and I’m wearing a pair of Denver Broncos sweats and a Bruce Springsteen “Born In The USA” album-cover t-shirt. But the bar is open, so I take the bottle and my room key, take the elevator down to the mezzanine, and walk into the bar.

The Victory

Not surprisingly, it was almost empty, except for some suits. I signal to the bartender, show him the bottle I’m holding and pantomime a corkscrew. He takes a good look at this fat, pissed-off American, and motions for me to give him the bottle, then takes it to a machine mounted behind the bar, and pops the cork in a second flat. Then he hands it back to me with the neatly-pulled cork.

I handed good old Jeeves a couple of dollars, and padded my way back to the elevator, bottle in one hand, cork in the other, got off on the 8th floor, looked up at the camera over my room door, took an Animal House sized gulp from the bottle, and thundered a belch that would have made Jon Belushi proud. Victory was mine!

The Five Stars

I managed to drink enough of that wine to get a good seven hours of sleep on the China National Institutional Rock-Hard Mattress Import/Export Co. Factory Number Three deluxe king-sized slab, and checked out right after breakfast. I had my people pick me up in front of the hotel, and let them check me into a smaller, more personal, hotel right across the street from a beautiful string of waterfront parks.

Xiong put the cap on the trip by advising me that ALL the hotels in China are Five-Star Hotels — just count the stars on the flag out front.

National Secret? It’s just an old plane.

Taking a Chinese friend to the Museum of Flight in Seattle

One of the reasons I used to travel overseas on a regular basis was that very few people who flew eight thousand miles to do business in major port cities wanted to waste time in Denver, Colorado. Unless they were forced to change planes in Denver, and/or they got snowed in, we rarely saw foreign visitors; and on the rare occasion when we did, they stayed overnight and then split town the very next morning.

So, it was a very special occasion when, after I’d moved to Seattle and left the industry, one of my friends and former associates from Shanghai was in town, and spent a couple of nights at my home in between business meetings. Franz had chosen the name he did because when he started doing business overseas, he mostly interfaced with companies in Germany. He would have used “Fritz,” he told me, but that was the name of a big company in the shipping business, whom its competitors disliked.

Franz was a brilliant guy; he’d just missed out on going to Columbia University by a few points on some exam, but he’d been on track to become a physician until then. He ended up in the shipping business, and luckily he eventually found his way to the West, as did a number of my friends.

I had a lot of time to think about where to take Franz on his first-ever trip to the U.S., and the first place I came up with was The Museum of Flight at Boeing Field/King County Airport in Seattle.

They had a number of hands-on exhibits (my kids loved to climb in and out of the planes and choppers) and one of the features was the original Boeing 707 Air Force One that was used by Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and by such sinister figures as Khrushchev and Kissinger. It was an attraction the likes of which didn’t exist in his world.

The first jet Air Force One

The United States may not have man-made wonders like The Forbidden City or The Great Wall, but we do have some great museums where you can actually play with some very cool stuff.

I previewed him on the exhibits he could expect to see, and he was really looking forward to going on the old Air Force One.

We set out for the museum early so we could maximize our time there. We were behind a few groups who’d arrived shortly before we did, so we paced around the entrance area, and suddenly Franz looked up as if he’d forgotten something.

“What’s up, guy?” I asked him.

“I need to get my passport; it’s in the car,” he apologized.

I asked him why, and he postulated that surely a foreigner needed to hand his passport over to gain entrance. “No, why would they need your passport?” I asked him.

He thought about that for a moment and said, in a hushed voice, “Because I am from a Communist country, and that was your president’s plane. Isn’t it?”

“Well, yeah,” I told him, “but it’s open to the public, which means you can go on it and take pictures and do whatever anyone else can. These things aren’t national secrets; it’s just an old airplane.”

Nikita F. Khrushchev's fat ass never sat in this chair

I think he was confused by how casually I referred to it. To him it was a really huge deal; to walk through the airplane that used to carry the President of the United States of America, leader of the free world. To me, well, I never did like Henry Kissinger, and I spent my last year of high school protesting in the streets to demand Richard Nixon’s impeachment. So it was for me a reminder of my tumultuous teenage years.

I’d also stood in the shadow of President Clinton’s Air Force One, a mighty and impressive 747 a couple of times, and although I never had the chance to see the inside of it, I was quite impressed by it.

Franz and I walked back to the car anyway, but not to pick up his passport; instead, we went to get his camera and a spare roll of film, which he’d left behind because he never expected to be allowed to take pictures there. He was pretty excited to see the American fighter jets, but even moreso to see the Chinese MiG-15 a North Korean defector flew to freedom during the Cold War.

I really didn’t think much about it, because I’d seen the Thunderbirds and the Blue Angels many times before. But it was the first time he’d ever seen one of his own country’s fighter jets.

NEXT: In China, they’re all five-star hotels.

Just be careful not to call him ‘monkey’.

If I had to pick one place in Asia that I would call my favorite, it would without question be Sentosa Island, off the coast of Singapore. Formerly a military base, it was turned into a tourist attraction in 1972, just five years after Singapore became an independent nation.

At only one degree north of the equator, Singapore is a hot place. Hot and humid. Really hot and humid. But its residents are, as a whole, the happiest people I’ve ever met – and I’ve never been challenged on that.

But Singapore has got a bad rap in the minds of most Americans because of its tight relations with Communist China, and because of its strictly-enforced laws, which include caning for some offenses. Corporal punishment may or may not be why Singaporeans are so polite, friendly, and proper, but I think they’re just reflecting the common social priorities of this very developed little country.

Anyway, I was on Sentosa one Saturday with a Singaporean friend and business associate, guy named Anthony, who always physically reminded me a little of Mick Jagger. Anthony had a sense of humor rivaling that of anyone I’ve ever worked with. He had the ability to crack me up without saying anything, and I was able to return the favor.

We’d taken a ride on the monorail, gone to Underwater World, a most incredible place with great air-conditioning, I should mention, a very important thing when it’s 95 degrees with a THI near 190. From there, we hopped back on the monorail and made our way to the other side of the island, where Anthony wanted to take me to see this park.

Anthony had told me the park had a free-roaming monkey population — a few different species — who occasionally threw stuff out of the trees, but were otherwise well-behaved and fun to watch. And there was both shade and fairly open space, as opposed to jungle. “Just be careful,” he said, “not to call him ‘monkey’ or you’ll f**king piss him off.”

I asked him who. He said, “The monkey. He’ll get pissed off.” Just hearing this sent me into almost convulsive laughter.

When I stopped laughing and had washed off my face in a nearby water fountain, because by then I was sweating puddles, I asked him, “Dude, do you honestly expect me to believe that?”

“Yeah, Big Guy,” he says. He always called me Big Guy, but in good fun. Mostly because he weighed like 130 pounds and I weigh like 130 kilos. I didn’t mind – I outweighed everyone I ever met in Asia, although to be fair I never did meet a sumo wrestler (although I did actively look for one at Narita Airport once). “If you call him ‘monkey’ you will piss him off. Just be careful of that.”

Well, we walked another hundred yards into the park, and came to a row of benches, behind which was a wall. On top of the wall sat a monkey. He (or she) had what seemed to be a friendly look on his face, and he appeared to acknowledge our presence, gesturing toward us with his arms and making a cooing sound.

Very automatically, and totally without thinking, I turned toward the monkey and said the magic words, channeling Seinfeld’s greeting to Newman: “Helloooo monkey….” Before I had the word completely out of my mouth, the little bastard had jumped off the top of the fence onto the bench, put his arms up, and screamed and spit at me like he wanted to rip my face off. I made some kind of unintelligible sound and literally jumped back about six feet, ready to try to defend myself against this wild beast.

Now it was Anthony’s turn to have a laughing fit. “Ahhhhhhhhh hahahaa!!! I told you not to call him ‘monkey,’ Big Guy, are you crazy??? What the bloody hell did you expect? They bloody hate it when you call them ‘monkey!’”

Next: Taking the freedom to go to a museum for granted.

Misogyny in the Middle Kingdom – Part 2

Author’s note: It was not my original intent to divert from the more lighthearted and general nature of this blog, however the recent story that’s been unraveling in China grabbed a lot of people’s attention, so I felt it necessary to follow the tangent. This is the concluding installment of  the series on women’s issues.

I walked into the coffee shop of the Wangfujing Grand Hotel in Beijing, about a mile north and a mile east of Tiananmen Square. The restaurant is more crowded today than most mornings, and even the hotel lobby is full. I pick up pieces of Spanish, French, German, Italian, Hebrew, and a Babel of others that I couldn’t quite place.

CNN International is showing on about a half-dozen televisions in strategic places around the restaurant, and the closed-captioning was on – a good thing because it was almost impossible to hear.

I sat down at a table right under a TV, while ‘Sophie,’ my waitress for the past five days, poured coffee and greeted me in English. I thanked her and we exchanged smiles. I’d been here for a week – a really long week – but tomorrow I was going home.

Over the pleasant din in the room, I heard the CNN International Breaking News alert tones. Ronald Reagan was dead. People began shushing others, and heads throughout the restaurant turned towards the TVs. Even the waiters and busboys stopped to look up at the screens, then got right back to work.

After a long minute, people began resuming their conversations in a slightly more hushed tone. The only sound that didn’t stop at all during the few minutes of almost reverent silence was the happy squealing of infant children. Slowly the noise level returned to normal as the adults resumed their conversations.

All around me were young and middle-aged couples with baby strollers and diaper bags, Snugli baby-carriers, bottles, pacifiers – the whole works. Each of the couples had a newly-adopted baby girl, between a few months and maybe two years old.

New families were eating their first meal together. People were exchanging cameras back & forth to have their neighbors take pictures of them. The place had a glow to it. Couples from all over the world were now the parents of beautiful baby girls that not one person in all of China wanted.

China’s one-child policy, made in 1980 and toughened in 2000, has resulted in a current birth rate of 118 males for every 100 females. Over 15% of pregnancies are willfully terminated for no reason other than the sex of the child.

In addition, many of the girls who are fortunate enough to survive for nine months in utero will often be given up for adoption, sold to human traffickers, or sometimes just discarded. Many special-needs children – boys, and especially girls – are routinely given up for adoption or simply discarded.

I reflected back on former President Reagan, whose face was up on CNN-I again, and how maybe the fact that Jimmy Carter had closed our embassy in Taipei, and instead recognized Beijing’s communist government, had something to do with Reagan’s making the latter a one-term president.

All I knew was that they don’t expel little girls from their families in Taiwan, and I’d just spent a week in Beijing during which I saw way too much evidence of the systematic persecution of women in China, and it left me wondering why the rest of the world doesn’t do something about it.

Also worth reading:

http://www.worldpress.org/Americas/2518.cfm
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hihttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5953508/ns/world_news/t/china-grapples-legacy-its-missing-girls/

Next: Something way more light-hearted.

 

Newborn found in Chicago dumpster is an Asian girl – it’s a pandemic

Today I am outraged.

During church services on Sunday, someone left a newborn baby in a bag with a teddy bear and a towel on a car in the church parking lot. The baby is a seven-pound girl of Asian origin.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/45015781/ns/us_news-life/#.TqWxCt4g9kY

The mother is being sought.

Call 1-847-882-3534 – Schaumburg, IL. Police

Little girl run over, ignored, and left to die

Skipping to the present for a moment, please see the stories I’ve linked to for the full (free-world) news on the story of the 2-year-old girl run over by a truck and left to die on the street in Guangzhou. Thanks to The Epoch Times for their courageous outspoken support for a free China.

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/toddler-crushed-by-two-vehicles-ignored-by-18-passers-by-62945.html

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/anguished-china-reflects-after-toddler-crushed-63056.html

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/chinese-toddler-dies-after-being-crushed-63121.html

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/china-news/two-children-crushed-by-trucks-in-one-week-63131.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bNEbZoZ0iH0&feature=relmfu

The next post in my series on girls in China will appear this weekend.

Misogyny in the Middle Kingdom – Part 1

NOTE TO PARENTS: This post is not suitable for young children.

Four incidents in Beijing:

[1] Ignoring sure signs of child abuse.

It’s early Thursday evening, June 3, 2004, just starting to get dark on the pedestrian mall on Wangfujung Avenue. The mall is just north of Chang’An Street, about a mile east of The Forbidden City and Tiananmen Square, if you’re familiar with that part of Beijing. I’d landed in Beijing around noon and I’m out on my own, in search of dinner. It’s a good time for people-watching too.

Tourists, local teenagers and just lots and lots of people are milling around. Taking pictures, window-shopping, walking into and out of the stores, people-watching, flocking to the fast-food restaurants for a bite after work or school. Obnoxious salespeople stand outside souvenir stores, screaming at people to buy their cheap shiny crap.

I spotted a gangly-looking character – a local – smoking a cigarette outside a shoe store across the street. He looked to be in his 40s, on the way to losing his hair, and weathered, almost sun-burnt looking skin – I assumed he was from the countryside. He looked like a common street thug: slicked hair, fake Ray-Bans, and a black pleather jacket.

He was holding the wrist (“How odd!” I thought) of a tall, thin girl who looked to be about 10-12 years old. She was wearing a short-sleeved shirt over a skirt, and I saw that she had a number of round blistered spots on her free arm.

I sat down on one of the stone benches that run up & down the mall and watched as a woman walked out of the shoe store, said something to the guy, and walked up the row of stores. He stepped on his cigarette and yanked the girl’s arm, and they followed the woman to another store a couple of doors down, where this scene was repeated as she shopped. Now I’m looking around for a cop. (Damn it! I knew I should have brought a camera.)

I asked a local in bad Chinese, “Police? At what place?” He points and there’s a Beijing police station right across the street and around the corner. I’m second-guessing myself now; I don’t want to walk into a police station without an interpreter. I decide to take a closer look at the girl’s arms to make sure I’m not just imagining things.

I get up from the bench and walk over to the store he’s standing outside of, and begin to fake doing the tourist thing: looking at stuff in the window from different angles, and covering the fact that I was scoping out the sores on the girl’s arm. Now, up close, I could see that she had them on both arms. I was right. Cigarette burns, some of them pretty raw, including one just above where he was holding onto her wrist.

Turning my back to them, I scanned the street for a uniform. Great! Three cops walked out of the McDonalds at the corner and turned in my direction. As they came closer, I took a step toward them and asked them politely to “Look at girl’s arms,” since she’d obviously been abused.

One of the three looked in the direction I indicated; the other two didn’t respond at all. I repeated myself a little more urgently, “Please look at girl’s arm!”

The one cop who bothered to look at her took off his hat, casually scratched his head, then put it back on and gave me an authoritative look. “This is normal. Normal, OK?” and on they went, walking up the street towards the police station I’d decided not to go into, a wise one considering where I was.

I stood there amazed and confused, trying to scan through the locals for a pair of eyes I could talk to; nothing. It was out of my control. I decided to call off the hunt for dinner, cut my walk short, and go back to my hotel. I didn’t have any appetite left after what I saw.

[2] Objectifying oneself – a more personal form of abuse.

Disturbed by the previous incident, I walked back up the street towards my hotel, not bothering even to notice people – just avoiding walking into them. A few blocks before reaching the hotel, I stopped and bought a Coke Light from a vendor cart.

Across Wangfujing Ave. and a little south of my hotel stands St. Joseph’s Cathedral, set back from traffic, and fronted by a pretty little square with grass and benches and flowers. It’s generally a nice place to hang out in, and it’s usually a pretty quiet place.

I sat on a stone bench in front of the cathedral, and thought about how out of place this building looked on a street like this, drank my Coke Light, and lit a cigarette.

After a few minutes, a young woman sits next to me, facing the other way on the flat bench. I exhaled a small cloud of smoke, and I thought I heard the woman sitting on the bench drop the f-bomb! Huh?

Maybe the smoke had blown her way? I took another drag off the cigarette and made sure to blow the smoke in the opposite direction.

A few seconds later, I thought I heard her drop another f-bomb, but I was sure the cloud didn’t end up anywhere near her. I turned around to look at her – her face was about two feet away from mine – and she says, “F–k? You want f–k?”

Caught me totally off guard. “Are you, out of your f–king mind!?” I say. I’m standing up, facing her now. She looks at me, having caught the magic word in there, but she’s clearly confused by my usage.

“Yes, you want f–k? Sex, yes?” she says, tilting her head and looking at me with a George Bush “I don’t have a clue what you’re saying” look.

“No! I don’t want ‘f–k. sex’.” I yell at her, loud enough to draw the attention of about a dozen bystanders. “You’re selling ass in front of a goddamn church! Are you crazy? What the f–k is wrong with you?” She really has no idea what I’m saying.

She’s standing now too, and even though there’s a stone bench between us, she backs up a step, because I kinda did go a little Brooklyn at her. I step around the bench and walk towards her with a sarcastic smile on my face, point at her face, and say, “Ya know, honey, I’m not a Catholic, but you are going straight to f–king hell for this,” and I walk past her toward the street.

I’m just about at the curb now, waiting for traffic to stop so I could cross the street, when one of her co-workers who was also working the church that day walks up to me and says, “Sex? Sex?”

“No,” I say to her, stepping into the street, and I point back to the hooker I’d just walked away from, “but I’m pretty sure she does.”

[3] A public grope at the Saturday market.

The outdoor market in Beijing was packed on a muggy Saturday morning in June. Wall-to-wall bodies shuffled past booths and stalls full of people, many of whom were smoking nasty Chinese-made knockoff Marlboros. There wasn’t even a rumor of a breeze.

I was there with ‘Jenny,’ the sister of one of my business associates. Apparently this was a popular place for foreigners to shop – especially Americans – because it was literally within blocks of the U.S. Embassy, so she felt it was a place I had to experience. OK, I hate shopping with a passion, but it was good to walk around with someone I knew, and who spoke passable English.

Jenny was tall – over 5’10″ barefoot – and in her late 20s, with a body that could stop a military parade on Chang’An Road. Heels, painted-on jeans, wispy designer silk blouse, real Oakley shades. (I only describe her physically because it’s relevant to the story, I assure you.)

I picked up some silk things for my wife, and a couple of big flowing silk robes that have cutouts instead of sleeves, for my cousin Melissa, who’d just broken both her arms in a bike accident, poor kid.

Mission accomplished, bargain scored, we were making our way through the swamp of people toward the exit. Think of a steaming lahar of bad melted cheese with extra onion & garlic.

We shuffled past a knockoff Adidas stall, and Jenny wanted to look at this one-piece swimsuit. No fitting room at the outdoor market, of course, so she asks the guy at the counter to hand her the swimsuit so she could size it up. She takes it from him with one hand at the neckline, holds it up to the approximate spot on her chest, and she reaches toward the bottom of the suit with her other hand to check the length.

The guy evades her hand, takes the bottom of the swimsuit and literally holds it right up against her crotch, wiggles his hand, and grins in her face! Jenny jumps back as I put my left arm between them, and graze the guy’s face with my right fist. I grabbed at the guy, but the slimy bastard slipped out of my grip, by which time Jenny was dragging me by the other arm toward the exit.

[4] Slave girls.

Exiting the pungent market we made a left turn, walking parallel to the main street. It was a few short blocks to the nearest hotel, where we’d catch a taxi to a Peking Duck House, our lunch venue.

The first corner we came to, maybe 80 yards from the market, was crowded with tourists who were gathered around a few young girls with boxes of socks of all sizes and colors. The girls looked to be about 10 – 12 years old, and they were all dressed in soiled school uniforms. Saturdays are half-days in many, if not most, of the schools in Asia.

A 北京 street-urchin hard at work.

I noticed one of Beijing’s infamous street urchins – you know, guy who looked like Jethro Tull was singing about him – walk over to a girl who’d just made a sale, hold his hand out, pocket a few bills, and pat the girl on the back of the head, then walk back down the side-street. The look on his face said, “Good girl. Get more.”

I watched the guy walk back to where he and two buddies were hanging out between a couple of dirty Shanghai Buick Regals, smoking cigarette butts and debating the state of the economy, no doubt. One of the other urchins was now on his way over. He too walked over to a girl who’d just made a sale, pocketed some cash, and walked back. It was apparent that the little girls were more than just a crew of cheap workers. They were property.

I told Jenny what I’d observed, and asked her what she made of it. She was still trying to shake off the Adidas incident while I was scoping these guys out and wasn’t really paying attention.

“You know many girls from countryside are sold by family and forced to stay with bad men like that,” she said. “China has big problem for baby girls because of one-child policy. If only one child, most people want to have one boy.”

It was something I knew, but had never seen any evidence of child slaves in a dozen prior visits to China. I’d seen it in Jakarta, away from the center of the city, where many of them probably work for the police. (I have very little faith in Jakarta policemen – another story.) But this was Beijing – presumably a civilized place – where the cops didn’t stand for shit like that, especially within clear sight of foreign embassies and foreign journalists. And I really expected a better answer than the equivalent of “That’s normal” from her.

Next: Misogyny in the Middle Kingdom – Part 2
Little rays of pure sunshine on an incredibly cloudy day.

Map not to scale, no train in subway

Having traveled around Asia, I’ve encountered my share of surprises. And although I tried my hardest to learn about the cities I was going to visit before I even left home, no amount of planning would have prepared me for a lot of this stuff.

In the days before Google Earth, a person had to be pretty resourceful – or persistent – to get guides, maps, and the inside information that’s so easily available now at the click of a mouse.

What I didn’t take into account was that sometimes the cities I was visiting didn’t want visitors to know exactly how far it was from one point to another. In the ’80s and ’90s, it was nigh impossible to get a proper scaled street map of Taipei, or of any city anywhere in Mainland China. Seoul was another place I could never get an accurate map of.

First trip to Taipei, finally had my feet on the ground, and was heading out on my own to visit a computer parts factory on Fu Hsing Bei Lu. There’s a Canadian trade office there now. I was coming from the Hilton International on Chung Hsiao Dong Lu.

Chung Hsiao East Road was a 12-lane road — six lanes in each direction — which meant it was 8-10 cars wide, plus as many scooters as would fit in between. Lane stripes in Taipei are just for decoration, I learned rather quickly. I headed out of my hotel and made a right, walking along this huge street, where traffic didn’t let up for a minute.

Every five or six blocks there was a large stairway marked “Subway,” like I used to ride in New York. It was one of the few signs in English. I thought they were pretty close together for subway stops, and there didn’t seem to be crowds of people rushing up or down the stairs, but I didn’t think much of it.

At some point, maybe a mile or two later, I came to the spot where I would inevitably have to cross this major thoroughfare and peel off to the left. I waited for the light to change at the corner, but the drivers wouldn’t necessarily stop at the lights; most of them either inched their way, or simply raced, across the intersection and went on their way, oblivious to the lights or the cross-traffic, and there didn’t seem to be many pedestrians around to group up with — you know, seek safety in numbers.. Well, this wasn’t Hong Kong, and that wouldn’t work here.

I stood there for about five light cycles — about 10 minutes, maybe more — and finally timed it so I’d make it at least halfway across the street to the narrow center island without having to dodge a truck or anything bigger than a scooter.

I might as well have been holding up a red cape in a bull-ring. Horns rang, people yelled from their car windows; I could make one person who was carrying his entire family on a scooter yelling “you faaking idiot” at me. Funny. He had his wife riding sidesaddle on the back seat, with one kid strapped to her chest, and another one strapped to her back on a 6-lane road that was packed ten vehicles wide, and I’m the fucking idiot?

So, I made it halfway. Another ten or fifteen minutes later — people seemed to be having fun with the fat white guy standing in the middle of the road, and they were passing through the intersection with even more abandon — I managed to get across, this time getting brushed by a red taxi whose driver was probably stoned on beetle-nut.

Although the map indicated I was more than halfway there, the walk from that point to the factory was almost twice as long as the walk from the hotel to the point where I’d crossed the street. Finally, feeling like I was wearing an inch of soot and traffic grime, I arrived at my destination about an hour and a half late. Success, finally! And I didn’t even get lost.

I apologized to the factory manager, which he accepted graciously — it was my first time in a new city, after all — and he asked me how I got there. When I told him I’d walked from the hotel, he was quite surprised I’d set out to take a walk like that.

“You didn’t take subway?” he asked.

“No,” I said, “I didn’t know what train to catch, and I didn’t want to get lost.” He looked at me quizzically, but I thought maybe he didn’t understand me, and he called over one of his assistants, asked him a question in Chinese. The guy answered him, and they both started snickering; then he went back and told a couple of his co-workers, and apparently they thought something was amusing too.

Well, now I was pissed. Not only had I spent the better part of two hours walking alongside a dirty, smoky, polluted major thoroughfare, but I’d had to dodge traffic, and it took me almost half an hour to cross the goddamn street.

So, I said to the manager, “Hey, you know, would you mind telling me just what the hell is so funny? That was a long walk, I’m sweating my ass off, I almost got hit by a car when I was crossing the damn street, and I’m not in a real good mood right now, and you all think something about that is funny!”

He stopped laughing. “I don’t mean to laugh. But there is no train in subway. It’s just a pedestrian tunnel to cross underneath street. Very dangerous to cross street with all the crazy drivers in Taipei!”

Lesson learned.

Next: Misogyny in the Middle Kingdom
Human Rights Watchers, please tune in.

 

“Don’t tell the American he’s eating dog.”

Since Boss punked out and went directly home from Kong Kong, my first trip into Mainland China was a solo venture. Just as well; that allowed me the freedom to walk at my own pace. But it was pre-1989, and the government still controlled pretty much everything. Foreigners used “funny money” – Foreign Exchange Coupons – instead of Renminbi, and couldn’t shop just anywhere. I decided I hated it. In those days, I couldn’t even go outside for a cigarette without being watched by two plainclothes cops.

First day, I met my colleagues in our Shanghai office, which was managed by the brother of the Hong Kong sales manager, a Shanghai native and a good Communist named Bao Jin-Long (real name). I spent as little time with him as possible. His brother Larry told me when they were kids, his brother turned their parents in to Mao’s terrorists. I decided it would be nice to see this guy fall off a cliff.

My primary contact at that office was a pretty young woman named Eileen, with whom I’d developed a close working relationship. She was by no means a Communist; Eileen was a free-thinker, not too long out of university, and in fact we are friends to this day. She and her family are now Canadian citizens, living in Ontario. We’ve been friends since 1987-88, almost 25 years.

One of my major agenda items in Shanghai was to meet a guy from Beijing Arts & Crafts Import & Export Corporation — the government — and get the grand tour of a stuffed panda-bear factory for one of our importers. He ran the factory — a guy named Wang Li — and when his car pulled up to my hotel to pick me up, he was wearing knockoff Gucci sunglasses and a knockoff Rolex watch, and he just looked like a million yuan. I knew without being told to keep an eye on this guy, just because he was with the controlling state agency.

Our traveling party was Bao, Wang Li, Eileen, me, and our driver, whom Eileen had told me was also a Party member. Our destination was a town in nearby Jiangsu Province called Kunshan. The drive took us past a number of checkpoints – nothing fancy; a guard in a shack checking IDs – and out into the countryside.

I remember it was flat, and the road wasn’t entirely paved; there were ancient-looking farm vehicles and horse-drawn carts and the usual scooters, and occasionally a big smoking truck that the farmers used to take their crops into the cities, all sharing the same road.

I also saw people with bird-guns (they looked like .22 caliber rifles and were probably loaded with bird-shot) every few hundred yards and was surprised that any Chinese citizen was allowed to own a gun, but apparently it was OK out here because the people had to be able to get some kind of meat.

The road paralleled a river that was separated from the road by 200 yards or so of relatively well-kept grass, and there were huts made of grass and sticks that some of the farm-workers lived in. It was about a two-hour ride, maybe a little longer, before we reached the town, which looked to have been almost deserted.

The factory was on the outskirts of town; in fact, the entire town seemed to be made up of semi-deserted outskirts. I’ve seen a few of these ghost-settlements (which is what I call them) around China over the years. Maybe they were deserted Vietnam-era movie sets, who knows?

I had started taking Mandarin Chinese classes two nights a week at an adult-ed center in Denver, so I knew enough to have a simple conversation. I’d also made sure to learn many of the phrases every traveler to China should know. Forewarned is forearmed.

So after the factory tour — another story for yet another day — Wang Li, the big macher from Beijing, had the factory manager take us all to the conference room for tea, and we all sat around and I listened to them bullshit, nodded occasionally, and drank tea. Occasionally either Eileen or Wang Li would relay questions about clearing U.S. Customs or preparing documents or some other thing, and I actually used a little of my Chinese and tried to make myself understood with very limited success.

We adjourned to the parking lot, where we packed into two cars — there were about 8 of us — and we met four other guys from the factory, I presume, who weren’t at our meeting but got back and met us at the hotel in time to eat on Beijing’s tab.

There were two lazy susans on the long table, and we all took small bits from the plates and put them onto our own and then spun them around for the next person. There were vegetable dishes — gai lan and oyster sauce, something with mushrooms and carrots — and some cold appetizers also. One of them, some kind of sliced, smoked meat, tasted incredibly similar to sliced, pickled beef tongue, which is a common Jewish deli favorite (along with the more well-known pastrami and corned beef), and something I grew up with. Either Wang Li or Eileen, who sat on either side of me, usually started me off with a taste of this or that.

And of course, after I’d tried each of the dishes, the others would ask me how I liked each one; so after I’d tasted some of that meat with the dipping sauce it came with, I remarked as to how much it tasted like something I grew up eating, “Oh, this one is good! I’ve had this before. I like this. This is beef tongue, right? Beef tongue?” Some of them smiled, one of them nodded and said, “Yes, yes. Beef. Good yes?” “Yes, very good!” I took another slice with my chopsticks, dipped it in the sauce, put it in my mouth, and began to chew it.

At that point, a couple of them — two of the guys who’d met us at the hotel but weren’t in the meeting at the factory where I tried out my elementary Chinese — looked at each other across the table and one of them said to the other, not even looking at him, “Don’t tell the American he’s eating dog meat.”

I chewed once more, smiled, and washed it down with a glass of their tasty formaldehyde-loaded beer, but I sat there as straight-faced as I could. Reached into my pocket and opened the small bottle of traveling drugs and remedies I always carry with me; ate two Pepto Bismol tablets, and asked, in Chinese, “Cesuo zai shenme difang?” Where’s the toilet?

One of them pointed and looked a little embarrassed; I was on my way to the room with the hole in the ground and the faucet on the wall to flush things. I saw it, did a 180, went back to the table, and didn’t really touch anything until lunch was about over.

The waiter brought over a plate of breaded, deep-fried tofu cubes. Mmmm. There’s something I could eat, And it smelled great too. Picked one up with my chopsticks – man, it looked good – and because it was hot I took a small bite. I hadn’t even got it to whatever part of my tongue that could taste it and this awful, stinking, rotten smell hit me square in the nostrils, and I almost gagged. I spit the piece I’d bitten off into my napkin, looked at Eileen and excused myself from the restaurant.

After we all split up, Eileen told me that awful, rotten stuff was actually a favorite dish in those parts called “cho dofu,” or “stinky tofu.” Looks great, smells great, but once you bite into it, it’s like releasing all the evils in Pandora’s Box directly into your throat. After that, knowing I ate sliced dog was a little easier to handle.

Next: The concrete cave-dwellers of Beijing will be posted at another time…. Have decided to do a more timely and relevant piece.

I love you, no shit

After digging the last inch of my fingers out of the arms of my airplane seat (which will be the subject of a “prequel” to be posted at another time), making our way through the crowd at arrivals, and a cab ride that would have scared anyone but a native New Yorker like me, we got to our hotel in Hong Kong at about 7:00pm; still time to eat dinner and get to bed at a reasonable hour.

I shlepped along after my boss, who was pumped on scotch and coffee and always in a rush, and caught up to him at the check-in counter. It was a very nice hotel – 4 stars – in Ocean Centre in the Tsim Sha Tsui neighborhood at the tip of Kowloon. But our rooms weren’t ready, and they wouldn’t be ready for a couple of hours. But they did check our luggage. How accommodating of them. I kept my carry-on bag with me because it held my meds and a convenient change of clothes.

Boss, being a raging alcoholic, was as happy as a clam. “Come on, let’s get us a couple of drinks!” Um, OK. The hotel bar was just around the corner, past the elevators. He grabs me by the arm, “No. Not there. This way,” and he points me back out the way we came in.

I had been traveling for well over 20 hours, getting up three hours before my flight from Denver, then changing planes in Seattle, for our incredibly long non-stop flight to Hong Kong. And it was hot in Hong Kong. Stifling hot. 80-something degrees after the sun was down, and humidity somewhere around 90 percent.

The bar was in the basement of the New World Centre, at the very tip of Kowloon, right on the water. Ahh, a breeze. Fifteen seconds to get a whiff of the breeze, and Boss couldn’t stand still any longer. We go inside, down to the basement level, into a screamingly loud place called Bar City. Seven different-themed bars in one big space, sectioned off as in a multiplex theater. Since Boss is from Denver, we go into the country bar. This should be interesting. I wonder how many people will be in a country-western bar on a weeknight in Hong Kong, and decide (since he was paying) to stick around rather than go back out and just grab a bench by the water.

Before we went in, we stopped in the men’s room — I needed to wash up, and I also changed my shirt – from a short-sleeved business shirt I wore on the plane, and which was now quite drenched with sweat to an orange Denver Bronco jersey – light mesh, air could circulate. I really didn’t give a crap what I looked like – I was clean and felt a little better. Boss gives me a look, shakes his head, then leads me into the country bar.

The entrance is at one end of the bar. Left and right are tables on the same level; down one or two steps was the bar level. The bar was curved, shaped like a big horseshoe. The bar was in the center, ringed by stools, and there were some more tall stools with tables around the inside of the ring the entry-level tables sat on. I sat on one of those inner-ring tables while boss ran to the bar — what, wait for a waiter? Are you kidding?

He got himself a double of Johnnie Walker Black and came back to the table. I looked at the little shit, and signaled a waiter, ordered a liter of the coldest beer he had on tap. “San Miguel?” he asks. “If that’s the coldest, fine.” San Miguel, I came to learn, is the national beer of The Philippines, and the most common one you’ll find in just about any bar in Hong Kong, where it is known as “San Ba pi jiao,” pi jiao being the Chinese word for beer: very easy to remember — it makes you “pee, Joe.” Simple.

The ubiquitous San Miguel beer can

The country music, I have to tell you, sounded like authentic country music you’d hear in a bar in Denver or Nashville or Reno or any of those other places I don’t visit country bars in. (Reykjavik, Recife? Same fuckin’ thing – I haven’t been to either one.) Anyway, my boss seemed to like it, and he was paying, so what did I care?

So, the boss is sitting there tapping his fingers on his knee, and I’m just sucking down the ol’ San Miguel. I must have been dehydrated, because I put down almost three full liter mugs before having to relieve myself. It was an epic piss, literally.

I get back from the bathroom, and there’s a tiny but well-stacked Filipina wearing a western outfit that looked more like a Halloween costume sitting on my bar-stool. “Hiii, big guy!” she says, looking up at me and flashing a big toothy smile. “Hey, you got pretty beeg number, don’t you?” I was wearing a Rulon Jones jersey – he wore number 75 for the Broncos. I’m preparing myself for a sales pitch, no doubt in my mind.

She continues, “I like guys with big numbers.” It came out sounding like nomm-burse. “But you know who I reeeeely like?”

“Um, no,” I said, playing along. “Who do you reeeeely like?” Expecting her to say something like “You!” and poke me in the gut, then ask me to buy her a drink.

“I like nomm-burr SEBEN, John Elway. He’s de BEST!!!” she says, and she twirls around and walks onto the stage as the all-Filipino band kicks off a country-sounding song called, “I Love You, No Shit.”

After that, I knew Hong Kong was going to be a fun place to hang on company-financed R&R&R.

Next… “Don’t tell the American he’s eating dog.”

Would you mind repeating that?

On Day One of my first trip to Taiwan, we (“we” is in most cases me and the drunken, abusive panty-chaser I worked for, who traveled with me on a few trips) went to visit our representatives; walk around with the other suits and nod every once in a while, have a meeting with the teams we worked with every day, and drink a lot of tea in some very ornate offices.

It was a ceremonial thing, really, but it was an important lesson in doing business overseas. At the time, the early 1980s, communications consisted of telexes and faxes. Faxes were the cutting edge, but international phone rates were costly and transmission time was slow.

We also had Telex terminals, something I was very familiar with, but those weren’t cheap either – you paid by the keystroke, as I found out after my first month with the company. So, we had a language informally called “Telexese,” but it was really the grandfather of texting. It was like Twitter, just r-e-a-l-l-y  s-l-o-w. 75-baud slow, and not limited to 140 characters.

And it was easier than English for my colleagues in Taiwan, because by learning to read English phonetically, they were also learning to speak it in proper post-Reagan English, as opposed to post-WWII English, which is what their English textbooks were like. And as you’ll see, sometimes with pretty strange results.

So, after our walk-and-nod, the grand tour of the offices, and the tea ceremony, because their offices were at container yards that were set outside the city, there wasn’t much choice when it came to lunch.

Luckily, there was a cafeteria on premises. Oh joy. I’m on the ground for something like 15 hours, my stomach is gurgling because I’m still nauseous from the stench of the Taipei Hilton International rat mausoleum I was staying in, and we’re going to eat in a cafeteria in a cargo terminal. No fucking way.

By the time we got ourselves seated on a long metal bench reminiscent of a prison cafeteria, the last shift was clearing out, so we pretty much had the place to ourselves, except for the staff, who ate after all the other workers were done. I poured some tea for myself, and washed down two Pepto Bismol tablets just for reinforcement. Quite honestly, I was afraid I’d get the shits just from the smell of whatever the catch of the day turned out to be.

We all walked the cafeteria line — lunch was steamed or roasted chicken parts, hard-boiled eggs, some kind of vegetables mixed in with noodles or fried rice, white rice, and some cloudy, creamy-looking yellowish soup of some kind.

I chose not to eat anything; I politely told our hosts my stomach was unsettled from the travel, and I just stuck to tea. My boss took a little of everything they offered him on the serving line, and he slurped away at his soup even after the others were done. I tapped the pads of my fingers silently.

After a minute or so, he realized we were all waiting for him to finish, and he looks up at one of our hosts (David was his English name) and says, “Boy, this stuff is great! What is it?” And David, in his thick Chinese-accented English, says, “Cum shupe.” At which point, I exploded into an uncontrollable laughing fit. My boss had put a spoonful of it in his mouth as the guy answered, which he promptly spewed across the room in a similar fit of laughter.

Of course, David said “corn soup” as well as he could pronounce it, but the final “-rn” sound is completely foreign to the Chinese language, so instead of saying “corn” or “born” or something like that, it comes out sounding like “cum” or “bum” — the easiest phonetic equivalent. Most of the time, it doesn’t end in a fit of laughter.

David sat there and looked at us like we were out of our minds. Finally, we composed ourselves and we all left the cafeteria and we split up and went to whatever we were all going to do that afternoon. David was going to meet me for dinner at my hotel’s bar that evening.

Skip to the hotel bar that evening: The boss is paying, and he’s off fucking his Taipei girlfriend, so I’ve got a Black Russian in my hand when David walks in, comes over and says hi, and shakes my hand, and in the same breath says, “What the fuck did I say?” He had that down perfectly. It came out, “HiWhatTheFuckDidISay?”

Not wanting to be overheard discussing this subject, I sat down with David at a table, and explained how what he said was misunderstood, and when he got it, he got a pretty good laugh himself, and with a couple more drinks in us, we laughed on through the night.

Next… I love you, no shit.

Arriving in Taiwan for the first time

Taipei was the second stop on my very first trip to Asia. At the time, April 1985, it was still under martial law. When I was a kid, I knew the country by an assortment of names: Taiwan, Formosa, Nationalist China, and Free China. I liked the sound of “Free China.”

Clearing Customs was no big problem, even though I felt it necessary to apologize for having two shirts that were made in China. All the literature I’d read on traveling to Taiwan warned that items made in China were prohibited, so I tried to mitigate my political faux-pas. What could they do, take my shirts away? The Customs inspector nodded as his hands flipped through my luggage, but made no comment.

Once cleared Customs and allowed out into the teeming, sweating masses of the arrival mob, we made our way into the main terminal and I experienced total culture shock. Every 100 feet or so, there were brown-uniformed soldiers in full battle gear, carrying M16 rifles. To me, they looked like Viet Cong. A chill ran down my spine and squeezed my adrenal glands. It was only ten short years after the Vietnam War had ended.

Our hosts picked us up at the airport. The head guy, Joseph, was a jovial but all-business guy. (I crossed him once. Once.) My boss told him he looked like the Dalai Lama. It was said that Joseph never met an animal he wouldn’t eat.

We drove out of CKS airport towards Taipei; I remember it as a long drive, not unpleasant. Modern highway, not as crowded as Hong Kong, and nice rolling terrain. Joseph pointed out rice paddies, cemeteries built on hillsides (so the deceased would have a good view – seriously), the Grand Hotel; I was impressed.

Until we got to our hotel, the Taipei Hilton International. Despite the Hilton brand, which I reasonably assumed was one of the classier places to stay, the place looked and felt like WWII had just ended, and it smelled about the same way.

next: Cum Soup