Newborn Baby Girl Pulled From Toilet in China

JINAN, CHINA — A willful baby-killing has been foiled in Jinan Province, China, thanks to neighbors who heard the infant’s cries from the bottom of a public toilet.

They called the authorities, who pulled the newborn, who had been dropped head-first, to safety, saving her life.

Thankfully, as CNN reported, the local police were diligent in saving this child. They are, as this reporter can tell you from personal experience, not always as helpful. Much credit goes to the police and to the citizens who came together to help this poor child.

http://www.cnn.com/2015/08/04/asia/china-baby-toilet-beijing/index.html

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.

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.

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.

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