Accidents, death, and confrontation

No mom, not me, I am OK. Breathe a sigh of relief. But I thought it was a pertinent time to discuss the above topics, as China is a constant reminder that accidents happen, death happens, and of course not every purchasing event ends in ‘thank you’.

First, the grim topic: accidents and death. Riding my bike home yesterday I road by the saddest scene of a dog that was just hit by a car. Not a stray dog, someone asked me, there are no stray dogs in China, each and every dog here is someone’s pride and joy. He had no leash, but the woman standing over him, yelling something at him, was holding the leash of another cute little white dog. When will they learn to keep all their dogs on a leash? The dog was not dead, but still moving, which made me wish I was a Charlton Heston gun-touting American, no not to shoot the driver, but to shoot the dog, get him out of his misery. And the driver? Where was he? Nowhere to be found. A grim scene, but a good reminder that accidents happen, death happens, dogs die. Please keep your dog on a leash.

Pat’s words of wisdom on the subject: “dying not dieing. Who should know better than I? I'm in the business..”

Confrontation. Summer and I were walking to dinner last night, to meet her current man, “the swiss” [because we both cannot pronounce his real name, which sounds something like “Autie”] we walked by two well dressed men attempting to converse with a newsstand man. He asked, do you speak Chinese? And said, yes, meaning Summer speaks Chinese. He explained that he bought three cell phone cards [these cards are bane of my existence, the card that puts credit on your phone so you can use it] and one was bunk, like there was no pin number, he was ripped off. So Summer politely asked the already rage-filled newsstand man just what was going on, his response was rather unintelligible, because he was some country bumpkin and spoke the Chinese equivalent of banjo-speak [term courtesy of H. O’Brien, describing the dialect of some deep-kentuckiens, more on country bumpkins in a minute], in essence said something like it wasn’t his card. Don’t know how that works considering he sold the man the card. The German man talks back to the bumpkin, poking his finger into the bumpkins chest, which is not too smart, the Chinese are small people but they come with an army when the going gets tough, so I tried my diplomatic skills, telling the man, “mister, us foreigners all love china. We are in china to spend money. To give you money. Why are you causing us mafan [difficulty]? We don’t want to have to call the police or the embassy. If you sold him the card and the card doesn’t work, then it is your problem. Why not give the man back his money?” The German continues to yell at the bumpkin in English, then steals other phone cards that were on display, and leaves. So much for helping the situation, seems he used me as a distraction. Summer said the display cards are just for show anyway!

People regularly ask me what country I come from. I in turn ask them where they are from, because 9 times out of 10 the people I am buying my beer from are clearly not from Beijing. If you are from Beijing you can hear it immediately in the way they speak. They speak standard Chinese, the Chinese that I learned, and if you are from another place, they are sometimes unintelligible and speak banjo-talk. The city is slowly filling with ‘wai-di ren’, outside place people. I wonder how they are living legally.

To close, something I enjoyed hearing from one of my roommates from CU:　 “I’m happy that you finally made it back!!”　－Meredith. Thanks, Mers.