The Ass-Munchkin

n 1979, after years of encouraging reproduction, the Chinese government implemented a policy known today as the one-child policy (not to be confused with the "one-China" policy which advocates the reunification of Taiwan with mainland China). The policy has at times been praised as an effective tool for ensuring that China will be able to continue to support its large population and at times reviled as a tool for human rights abuses and female infanticide. The decrease in population growth is a clear indicator that, if anything, the intentions of the policy have been realized. Additionally, there was been another byproduct of the policy that will undoubtedly have a very dramatic impact on the country in the near future:

There are a lot of “only children” out there.

In the United States, the “only child” is often the victim of a societal stigma that labels him or her spoiled, self-centered, and incapable of seeing things contrary to their own thoughts. This stereotype is unfairly tilted toward the negative, as many of us know as many driven, selfless only-children as we do brats.

In China, however, they’re all brats.

As the Chinese are becoming wealthier than ever before, they are instinctively showering their wealth on their only children. It’s not surprising, since the concept of families and bloodlines remains an important part of Chinese culture, and since each family can only have one child, that one child represents all the family’s hopes and dreams. Parents find that they cannot bring themselves to discipline their kids, since it is so much easier just to appease them than punish them.

I encountered this phenomenon about two weeks ago, when I accompanied my family on a casual business lunch with some relatives and another associate. We met at a pretty nice restaurant, one that served delicately decorated dishes of pate, fois gras, and other Western treats.

When the plate of escargot arrived, the kid seated across from me (age 10) grabbed his tongs and started scooping the escargot onto his plate. One after another, until one remained on the dish. On our side of the table, it was Kid 5, Adults 1. As he was hungrily sucking the snails out of the shell, I was thinking about how expensive the dish was, and how the dad must be at minimum slightly incensed at the rudeness of his kid.

He wasn’t. Instead, he said to everyone: “Look at my son’s appetite, this guy could out-eat me!” And with that, he asked his little brat, “Do you want more? I can order more.” I was surprised that the little piglet shook his head. So the father simply picked up the remaining snail and dropped it onto his son’s plate. “Eat up!”

I was horrified. What the fuck was going on here? I wanted to jab my fingers into the kid’s ears, lift him up, and punt him into the next province. I refrained myself, however, because I was actually taught common etiquette, decency, and I figured that eating his food when he wasn’t looking would be a more subtle course of retaliation.

“Where’s my bread?!” he shrieked. He kept looking around for the piece of garlic bread that had moments before sat before him. The same piece that was now sitting quite comfortably in my belly.

“Where’s my bread?” The kid tugged at his dad’s shirt, then grabber his mother’s arm to get her attention. They searched the table for it while their son began berating the waitress, who must have been three times his age. “Where’s my bread?! I’m supposed to have bread, where did it go?!” the little asshole yelled.

In all the commotion, I took a huge forkful of his spaghetti and gulped it down.

I love escargot. That ass-munch.

Poignant Pig Point

“You’re gonna get so fat in China”

I looked at Tina, my chopsticks still clutching the gyoza dumpling just inches from my mouth. It was my third day in Shanghai, back in late September of 2003, and I was sitting at an all-you-can eat Japanese feast, surrounded by veteran expatriates well-versed in the furious ordering of plate after plate of delicately arranged seafood treats.

I paused for a moment at her comment. Here I was, sitting with a horde of upper-middle class Americans in this crowded sushi restaurant, a collective unyielding appetite demanding the locomotive of food travel ever faster to our table. At 150 RMB a meal, the cost constituted about a tenth of the monthly salary of the harried waitress maneuvering clumsily between the tables and chairs, heeding our every beck and call. At least 90% of the entire population of China could only dream of indulging in such a meal. The majority of them were living in violent poverty in the countryside, harvesting meager amounts of rice to sustain their own families with no prospects for any savings. Outside that very restaurant, crawling on the main thoroughfares of Shanghai was an assortment of beggars, many of them with deformed limbs, begging for spare change.

I had come to China for a variety of reasons, but two stridently conflicting ones were 1) to nurture my identification with the Chinese and gain a richer understanding of my heritage, and 2) to have a really great time. In the months after those first few days in China, I began to realize how different an average American life and a Chinese life could be. In many ways, I was in a world much different than the one inhabited by most of the people around me. I was in naïve in thinking that I could wander through the halls of culture here with my very American sense of light-hearted and self-serving fun and leisure unaffected.

I stared at the dumpling, my mouth still slightly agape. Later, I would notice that China is filled with the thin and slender. You don’t notice it when you’re fighting for forward progress in a sea of bodies at the subway station or while shopping on the weekends, but when the crowds are sparse, it’s interesting to notice how there are rarely any people of girth up and about. “Abundance” is a word that the Chinese rarely use to describe their food intake. In the States, Pizza Hut is a convenience; here, it is a treat.

I looked back at Tina, and then down at my dumpling. I had just arrived in China and my first instincts were to thrust myself into the hurricane of opulence and pleasure which the bulk of foreigners in Shanghai had cultivated. Foreigners welcomed themselves into Shanghai with a sense of status and stature that come with their relatively high purchasing power. 150 RMB for all-you-can-eat Japanese food? What a bargain!

I turned to Tina and smiled. “You know what?”

“What?”

I stuffed the dumpling in my mouth. “I already AM fat,” I gleefully told her with my mouth full, the perfect thing to do for the perfect pig that I was.

China has informed me and taught me, and with each experience I want to challenge and improve my way of thinking. The world is large, so large that even in one country can house multiple worlds that brush past each other, but sometimes collide. And sometimes, when a pig begins to see that there is more to his world than himself and his needs...sometimes, the pig can be more important to others than just being a slab of bacon.

Peter Pan

Things really were easier when we were kids, weren’t they? As children, our lives were marked by clear signposts guiding us towards the next logical step in our development. The graduation from each elementary school grade to the next was a greater watershed moment than the previous one. Somewhere between third and fifth grade, it wasn’t cool to cry on the playground anymore. Around fourth grade, curse words aren’t rebutted by a hushed “oooooooh, I’m telling” from the recipient.

The signposts became clearer after elementary school. In junior high, anybody who was anybody wore their backpack with only one strap. We were allowed to play with fire for the first time, in chemistry lab and with cigarettes after school in the park. Some of us were finally allowed to watch Letterman.

It’s easy when the markers indicating how one should behave and think are so endemic and lucid. The passing into each stage is marked by greater freedom and greater responsibility. Driving at 16, voting at 18, drinking at 21. In college, we deal with being far from home, dealing with the sometimes frightening independence that is the starkest reminder of how different adulthood is from the fuzzy down blanket of childhood. And even then, the road is clearly mapped. Prerequisites as freshmen, declaring a major as sophomores, traveling abroad as juniors, recruiting for a salary as seniors.

I wish it were as clear after that. For people like me, who get used to the guidance, the years after college are decidedly blurry. There’s no one around who gives a shit about making sure I know how to get to the next step; it’s entirely up to myself. I look around and I see that the world I lived in during college, one of the best times of my life, is slowly morphing into something completely new. The circle of friends, once ripe with cohesiveness and dependability, has now been chipped away by physical and figurative distance, as old friends have moved on to different places and different relationships. It’s a natural progression that is fluid and dynamic, and not marked in an organized fashion by the passage of time. There is no standard age for marriage, for having kids, for buying a house. Yet somehow, we are not supposed to be complete without achieving those things. In a bizarre way, we are still children without them.

Roger got married last year. Analeah is getting married this one. By the end of next year, I’m sure a few more of my friends will be looking at mortgages and joint bank accounts with their new spouses. Relationships change as people must increasingly focus on themselves and their own lives, as the signposts cease to be shown to us by someone else. People like me, still looking for a good time, looking to enjoy those years when I can treat myself too well with as little sacrifice as possible, are decreasing in number. The circle of friends becomes tighter, and sometimes it feels like a noose.

It’s all completely normal of course. After all, after marriage and kids, who has time to hit a bar every weekend? There are payments to be made, other people’s schedules to be upheld. When we look at the way our parents were when we grew up, how many of them still spent time with their friends from childhood and college? I don’t have a problem with this evolution; I’m just curious about when I’m going to be able to move on to the next stage. When do we really know when we grow up? It’s always easier to prepare for something when you know when it’s going to come.

I’m sure these are questions that everyone asks themselves when they realize they can’t just fuck around anymore. I’m asking them now even though I know the answer, which is that no one really knows the answer. It’s a game of touch and feel, like how the old-time cat burglars used to crack a safe. I guess it’s OK that it’s this scary. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be that rewarding at the end of it if it weren’t, right?

You don’t have to answer that.

Wan Chai

With Hong Kong just being a hop, skip, cab ride, 2 lengthy immigration lines, and a 1 hour bus ride away from Shenzhen, my home the past month, it is natural that I would find my way back there a few more times since I'd last written about it. My 19 year old brother Andrew was on his winter vacation from his sophomore year at UC San Diego, so he and my mom flew out from the States to spend some quality family time together. We had decided to go to Taipei shortly after Christmas to see our grandmother, and ended up spending a couple of days in Hong Kong prior to our trip. It was on our last night there that I accidentally ended up taking him to a brothel. OK, to three of them.

Before you judge me, let me first say that I have always tried to be a good older brother. I rarely beat the shit out of him, I never gave him any of my porn, and even offered to give him an old driver’s license that he could use as a fake ID. So you have to believe me that I didn’t know I was taking him to a whorehouse; I thought it was merely a strip club.

Now, Hong Kong is a very wealthy and modern city, and with all such cities there must necessarily be a place of seediness and loose morals to complete the picture. However, being a stranger to HK, I had no prior knowledge of where exactly lay this seediness. With Andrew being a healthy and robust 19 years old, I felt that it was the right thing to do to insist that we hit the town at night and have a raucous time.

By the time we got back from our dinner, I had decided it was too late to trek all the way out to Lan Kwai Fong and join the rest of the British yuppies in song and dance, so I thought it would be nice to just go to a few places around our hotel in Wan Chai. Somewhere in the inner recesses of my massively empty brain, I could hear the voice of my dad telling me: “Do not, under any condition, go to any of the bars around our hotel.” As a son respectful of his father’s opinions, I responded to the voice: “Well, if you truly object, then please say ‘I object.’” Since I got nothing in return, I figured that it was OK.

The first odd thing that we noticed was that the streets were filled with Filipinos. A word about the social class system in Hong Kong: the lower-working class is composed primarily of immigrants from the Phillipines. Most Hong Kong residents have a live-in maid/nanny who is almost always from the Phillipines. It’s a hard life, cooking and cleaning for a family 6 days out of the week. Sundays is their day off, so it’s not strange to see huge congregations of Filipinos out on the town at select locations. Apparently, Wan Chai was one such party location.

The second odd thing we noticed was that there was a plethora of clubs and bars advertising themselves as “Model bars.” How glamorous, I thought! I told my brother it’d be great to go into one of those places, grab a beer, and check out some models. My brother was a little apprehensive and pointed out that most of the advertisements out front bore pictures of naked women.

I patted him on the head. “Drew, when you get to be a certain age, you will understand that sometimes it’s OK for models to pose in the nude. It’s called ‘high art.’”

“I think these are strip clubs.”

Curious, I felt that we should fulfill our duty as tourists and take a peek inside. But which one should we try out? After walking up and down the streets a few times, we decided to avoid all the places with solicitors outside that called out to us “Young boys! Young boys! Come inside to play!” We didn’t particularly feel like shooting pool or playing darts, anyway.

After walking in circles a few times, I decided that these places were harmless. Most of them seemed empty with a few bored-looking cocktail waitresses. It was getting late, and since all we wanted to do was to grab a few beers and head back to sleep, I decided that we should stop off at a bar about a block from our hotel. It seemed harmless enough, with a bright blue sign and fun party music emanating from behind the curtain that was the bar’s entrance. We walked in, sat at the bar, and were immediately approached by the bartender, a middle-aged dumpy Cantonese woman who excitedly asked us what we were looking for.

“Two San Miguels,” I told her, and took out my wallet to pay for it.

“OK, we’ll send them right over.”

I turned to my brother and started talking about the Lakers. The place was completely empty except for a few young girls sitting around behind the bar. I figured the bartender was happy to see us because it had been such a slow night. The Lakers had lost a few consecutive games, so my brother and I were engaged in a serious discussion, furrowed brows and all, when suddenly…

“Drew, why is your hand on my leg?”

My brother looked quizzically at me. “Why is your tongue in my ear?”

I looked down. The hand on my thigh that was slowly creeping up toward the magical area did not belong to my brother, myself, nor anyone else from the Hu family. It belonged to a young petite girl who, EGADS, had her bare breasts in full display.

At this point, a few possibilities rushed into my head:
a) They had very friendly bartenders at this place. VERY friendly
b) This girl wanted me. Badly.
c) San Miguels now came with naked women as part of a promotion of some sort.
d) We were getting worked by working girls.

It was clear that options A and C were not likely, and option B was against all the physical and metaphysical laws of nature, so we were left with…

“Drew, we should get out of here.”

My brother, who had his own girl draped all over him, nodded in agreement. I calmly called the bartender over, who was clearly not a bartender, and told her that all we wanted were the beers and nothing more. She wasn’t very happy. We did, after all, get to see naked breasts.

“Are you two gay?” she asked.

Sometimes, it’s just easier to tell the truth and walk away. This was not one of those times.

“Yes we are!” I cried. We finished our beers and walked outside. The world had become a lot seedier than it was when we had walked into the place. All the bars were now screaming “brothel, brothel, brothel!” There was no escaping it. Seriously. So we went into another. We were very straight with the solicitors. “No girls! All we want is beer!” The beer, after all, was cheaper than anywhere else we had seen. I figured that if all we wanted to do was drink and talk about the Lakers, we shouldn’t discriminate against the location, right?

“Drew, just make sure you check the seat before you sit down.”

The next morning, my dad asked us where we had gone the night before. “Hopefully, not anywhere around here. This is the red-light district, and this is where all the sailors come once they docked.”

Sometimes, even as merely a voice in your head, father knows best.

Simply Resolute

I’m going to put myself on somewhat of a limb here and risk future ridicule, but being so far away from home, I wanted to feel closer to you back in the States by opening my chastity-belt life up for just a few minutes and display my 2004 New Year’s resolutions for all to see.

First, let’s quickly run through the standards:

- I resolve to join a gym, eat less carbohydrates, and lose 15 pounds
- I resolve to create a budget and not spend money carelessly
- I resolve to volunteer more of my time helping others in need.

Whew! Now that that’s out of the way, here are the ones I think I can actually accomplish:

- I resolve not to throw dense and heavy objects at Mormon missionaries when I see them walking down the street in groups. It is simply not the Christian thing to do. Instead, I will merely hurl insults and grope them in a blatantly homosexual manner in order to make them feel uncomfortable.
- I resolve not to giggle and point hysterically when walking in a group out at night whenever I see penis-shaped shadows on the pavement.
- I resolve not to dance in the courtyard unless I am fully clothed.
- I resolve not to dry-hump my stuffed panda bear at night when I get lonely. I will now only do it after dinner.
- I resolve not to get turned on when watching Sesame Street. However, there is nothing I can do about my strange fascination with Donald Rumsfeld. Please help me.
- I resolve to wear underwear.
- I resolve not to make sock puppets of the Golden Girls and re-enact my favorite episodes when I’m riding the subway. While acceptable in the States, this kind of behavior is embarrassing in Shanghai, and shames my family.
- I resolve not to laugh out loud and when people walking in front of me stumble or trip, even when I push them.
- I resolve not to put flowers in my hair anymore, even though I look very pretty. It’s important not to be so superficial these days.
- I resolve to use less extraneous, superfluous, unnecessary, redundant adjectives in my writing.
- I resolve to use Q-tips. Use your imagination.

The new year seems oddly like the previous year, what with progress in achieving humanity’s full potential still as tedious as ever. Maybe we can do better now that we have one extra day. Here's hoping.

Happy New Year Everybody!