I don’t want to ____, but….

Ok so this started because I did a ride yesterday that I’d been looking forward to doing for a while, there’s a part of the great wall that you can actually ride your motorbike onto. I just couldn’t miss out on something like that. A friend has done it twice before, and it’s detailed on some of the motorbike forums in China.

I posted some photos up on Chinese social media, and I instantly got a whole bunch of people commenting, ‘wow that’s great, how can I go? I really want to do this too…’ etc.
From both Chinese and foreign riders alike.

So I posted the information on one of the motorbike groups for Chinese and foreigners using WeChat (Chinese social media)

For example, you can’t look at this and not be intrigued:

Absolutely amazing views, and such a hidden and interesting ride, and on top of it all, nice to get out of Beijing and do something that not many people have done.

Most people were just like ‘wow…yes…I’m doing that’

And then you always get one, one person that feels it’s his/ her duty to stand up for those that didn’t ask standing up for… and just generally to be ‘the voice of reason’ when reason was not called for…or actually constitutes ‘reason’

Which….starts me off on a rant about such douchebags.

So what was actually said:

Some dude:
-I don’t want to be a dick so I’m only going to put it out there. You think riding a bike on an already crumbling world heritage site is a good idea? I’m all for exploring and I’ve ridden out that way many times but for me I’d rather hike it than bike it. [Awkward]

-Just saying.

Me:
-Yeah it’s a good idea

-Like many Chinese friends have said to me, you think too much

I dislike these comments so much because there’s too many things to pull apart and analyse and to shout at this person at, that you inevitably end up just stating such a brief point, like ‘is it a good idea….nanh nah nah?’ ‘yeah it is’ translation- shut the hell up you moron.

“I don’t want to be a dick, but…”
“I don’t want to do ____ but…”
Well we know you’re instantly going to do whatever ___ is.
“I’m not racist, but…” You know whatever comes next is going to be racist right? Oh what and because the person has clarified up front, it makes it instantly acceptable?
No， it means the person stating this shit is unsure how its going to be taken….

“Just saying”

How about you have some adventure and if you think the Great Wall is worth saving how about you complain to the gov that’s been destroying it through ‘restoring it’ for the last 20 years or so??
Huh?
Mr fucktard?

” I prefer to hike it than bike it”

What?, you think because it rhymes it adds strength to your argument?
No, fuck off.

“Do you really think it‘s a good idea?”

Yes, motherfucker I do.

Did I mention Baam !

And its crumbling because
1. It was built with shit materials in some parts… and
2. Because people have been stealing bricks for centuries to make walls for their farms etc. Because guess what?
They were too poor to get normal materials.
And who’s fault is that?
Foreigners?
Because they decided to park a motorbike there decades later?
No. Fuck off.
Learn some real history and some modern happenings.
And don‘t let your Chinese wife influence your opinion with her propaganda tainted mind.

All those propaganda tales that the government came out with, like documentaries stating ‘oh yeah you can see the great wall from space’

‘The chief engineer in charge of the wall at the time calculated down to the brick just how many bricks were needed for the completion of the wall’
‘it really showcases the prowess of Chinese construction knowledge’

What? ??

Just think about that for a moment, instead of doing the usually Chinese thing and just believing it straight away. First of all …you’re American, you don’t have the fall-back excuse of a crap education system that doesn’t teach ‘why?’ or critical thinking.
In fact if you don’t apply critical thinking….that’s just dumb.

You can see it from space? Bitch please… you can’t even see it from the horizon, there’s too much pollution, or ‘fog’ and its way too deteriorated anyway; its not a wide wall, most of the time its as wide as the width of 3 cars parked side by side.

Can you see cars from space?
No.
Then you can’t see the fucking wall, can you?

See…. Critical thinking.

You can….probably….probably see the mountain range… , but that’s not the wall is it?

And ‘the Chief engineer calculated it down to the last brick just how many bricks were needed, and as proof he made one extra and then placed it on top of the wall in a certain area to showcase his achievement’

That kind of claim is just so beyond stupid, it’s so beyond trying to understand it, it’s so ignorant to the history that is the Great Wall…. that to recite something like that makes me feel sad.

Sure, lets go with ‘he calculated it’ Sure, but he could have just calculated it incorrectly. That way you can still claim that you ‘calculated it’

That’s like…

quick mathematics

you can claim something, but other should looks carefully at what you’re claiming.

13.pic_hd

As beautiful as this is, and it is beautiful, do you really think these ‘bricks’ were part of the whole ‘calculation’??

Oh yeah and the history of the wall…. it wasn’t built in one go, it was built over dynasties, in irregular locations as well.

How do people believe this kind of obviously fake claims?

Americans… well I guess they have a fall-back of some rather dodgy public school systems too.

Is this where babies come from?

I was talking to a friend yesterday, and she said her colleague apparently until the age of 17 didn’t know which part of the body babies came from. Well she did know, or rather she THOUGHT she knew, somehow her mum had convinced her that they were born from the armpit.

The Armpit…..

& like a dope, she didn’t think…. ‘but there’s no hole or anything in the armpit’ ‘i wonder how that works’ …..she just thought.. ‘oh yep, ok’

The armpit?? damn.

And until she was 17??

—

Insights?

The only thing that justifies this thinking… or rather this ignorance, is in knowing the Chinese education system and culture a bit.

There is pretty much zero sex education.

And there is not a lot of thinking about ‘why?’ , as you’ve probably noticed from previous articles.

Also sexual experience and talking about it is pretty much zero apart from with very close friends, but it’s still majorly seen as taboo.

There is definitely no ‘talk about the birds and the bees’ between parents and their children. And in many family situations, even though they do love each other and apparently ‘family values’ is something that’s placed above most western cultures, which I’m actually really not sure is true; they don’t show any of this, not really within the confines of their home and especially not in public.
Basically it works out that generally information is not shared so much between parents and children. When a child asks why, generally (not all the time) but generally the parent in China is not confident enough (maybe confident is not the right word) to give their child the correct and informed answer. So instead just say an answer, and hope that the problem will go away.

Sometimes they’re ignorant of the answer themselves, but don’t have the heart to say ‘I don’t know’ (as that’s a losing face thing. .even if it’s in front of their own child) But in a situation like this, clearly the mum knew because…she actually HAS a child.

And relying on the education system to teach the child sex-ed in china is just a fail.

Something a bit disturbing is that again, generally, people, both male and female don’t ‘maintain’ their bodily hair.
So it can be quite daunting for a foreigner when they come to China. A nice pretty, cute, and quaint Chinese girl and then Baaam armpit hair.

I don’t know if this plays into it at all… but there’s a lot of hair there, and down there… so maybe this girl just thought… ‘hey, they both have hair…why not?’

Although that’s pushing it.

Imagine though 2 people coming together, both knowing absolutely nothing about sex, the girl thinking that babies come from armpit; and there being way too much hair down there to make sense of things.. and then they’re expected to produce a baby.

Not even have sex, just ‘make a damn baby’. Wow….. what a fantastic sexual experience that must be.

How to score a sweet date

I knew a person that she called her friend (our mutual friend) on her cellphone on the subway, and was talking to her using earphones and the microphone from the headphones, and had the phone palm up.
She saved my friends picture to the profile. And a Chinese guy looking over her shoulder saw the pic thought ‘hey she’s pretty’ ; copied down the phone number, and then afterwards gave my friend a call.

My friend was like wtf?? Why would you admit that when you called me?

So… lesson learned.. you can look over the shoulder of girls making phone calls to their hot friends, and if you like what you see for that person’s saved profile…just write down their number.

That’s the Chinese guys way.

What’re you waiting for?

Be the creep you know you can be!

What’s considered intelligent…

Went for a massage with a friend because we were feeling sore after trampolining. Yes I said trampolining, but that’s not the point of the story because there’s nothing illogical about that.

At the start of the massage I raised my head out from the little hole in the massage bed to scratch my chin, and was met with ‘怎么了？ ‘ what’s wrong?

And I said 我就。。。痒。 I just ….itch.

And she’s replies. ‘Wow 中文这么好。’ wow this Chinese is of THIS level. But meaning to say that it’s pretty good.

And I was thinking…hang on, I know that 痒 yang = to itch, or tickle (yes it’s the same word in Chinese, pretty funny considering it has a big difference in English)

I know that this word isn’t learnt by many beginners, nor is it even the word that intermediate speakers of a language know because they don’t need it in their daily lives, but for you to judge my entire Chinese speaking ability on 3 words….that’s pretty impressive.
Impressively naive/ stupid I mean.

She then proceeded to talk to me… and I’m sorry… but please just concentrate on the massage, but err anyway…..proceeded to talk to me, and quoting the recent news… about the tiger (read about it here, opens in a new page), and defending the woman that stepped out of her car because her husband was driving too slowly. (after which point a tiger came out and took her away)
The massage lady said, well yeah I think she thought she had enough time.
No. that’s a really shit excuse.
Well anyway, then she quoted some sort of Chinese poem, or extended 成语, (idiom) to explain the Chinese stance…
and I’m like… ‘I’m sorry I don’t understand what you mean’ after she prodded me and asked ‘你明白吗？ ’ do you understand?

No. I don’t.

To which she replied ‘什么都不知道‘ wow you don’t know anything.’

And later in the conversation, ‘there’s so many things you don’t know’

Really? Really? I’m speaking your language, talking about recent events, for which you apparently admitted before (albeit rather naively) that you thought my Chinese level was decent, and now you’re quoting ancient Chinese poems to back up your shit-for-brains reasoning of why the husband driving the car was doing the wrong thing…. And you have the audacity to say… ‘you really don’t know a lot’

Lady, wtf is wrong with you?

The ancient Chinese poems by the way are a normal thing. Once you really get into Chinese language learning, you’re expected to know some Chinese poems. They’re meant to teach morality and reasoning, and lessons to be learned, just like we have in English and any other culture. But the difference is that in Chinese there are thousands of them. Same with idioms- hundreds of them. And if you want to seem like you’re intelligent in China, you don’t show it by how rationally and logically you can prove your point; you show it by working one or more of these ancient poems, or idioms into your story. A retelling of what someone already said is considered intelligent.

Of course we do that in English too, a retelling of a quote at just the right time IS intelligent, however when it is a large basis of one’s culture…something feels slightly wrong there.

Also learning about all these things in school is a convenient way to shift focus away from learning about modern history… history that China obviously isn’t too proud of, and onto history from hundreds of years ago and the ‘lessons’ learnt from them.

I have heard before the message that they sometimes play on long distance buses as a public announcement of sorts, to ‘remember to compliment foreigners on their Chinese’
It was something like this, I heard that they do that before I heard it myself, and then even when I DID hear it myself I was unsure if I actually understood it correctly.
Basically the reasoning as I understand it, is that they want foreigners to study Chinese and the government acknowledges that it IS a difficult language to learn, but if they’re discouraged by people constantly not understanding them, then will stop studying… and it will affect China negatively somehow.

But many Chinese people often have this ‘wall’ of incomprehension, where they just don’t WANT to understand you. So if they can understand you enough, they will begin working in things that are more and more native until you eventually can’t understand them unless you’re Chinese. People you’ve just met seem to do that a lot.

When that happens in OUR home countries, and we’re talking to a non-native speaker, WE don’t do that; because we know that it will discourage the person from improving their language ability. And, moreover…it’s just rude.
But for the Chinese you have to remember that there is an overall sense of ethnocentricity from the general populous, so proving that they are better that you, (yes it sounds stupid) a native speaker of the language is better than a non-native speaker) in the comparison of who can speak that particular language … is one way to show superiority; whether it’s done consciously or subconsciously.

My show of intelligence; ie combining rational and logical thinking into wit; was what silenced her though.
So that keeps me happy.

See the next article, or click here. Opens in a new tab

Curly hair = smart?

Hahah yesterday, I got a massage with a friend,
and the lady told me… I think black people are very smart…
and when I asked her why?
She said, I think people with curly hair are really smart, yes I think having curly hair means you’re smart.

To which I asked, errrr so what about Chinese people then?

….silence.

Using logic against her… poor lady she didn’t stand a chance.

Logic that what she alluded to, what she simultaneously, apparently unknowingly inferred was that the more curly your hair was, the smarter you were; and that those with straight hair…weren’t that smart.
Yet Chinese people all have straight hair… so?
Really? She didn’t get that from her own argument?

The good old 山寨车 (Copy car)

For the pictures above, one is the RangeRover Evoque, and the other is the Landwind L7, but which one is which?
(obviously the one that says RangeRover is the original one)

Apparently… and I didn’t know this before, its the same factory that makes them here in China, which makes it even more amazing that the Chinese court ruled in favour of the copy car. (Copy for design)

The Chinese have a word for this its called 山寨车 Shan zhai che, everyone knows this happens, which again makes it impressive because if everyone knows it, yet the courts still rule against it… well thats just extra special.

Trials in logic

– never under-estimate the ability of illogical people to do illogical things

Month: August 2016