Catching Up

---

Been a long time, shouldn'ta left you
without a witty and insightful blog post to step to

Part One: Medieval Storks

One of my coworkers James, is a 50-something-year-old man who is currently starting his fourth or fifth life here in China. He works at the downtown school, so I don't see him that often, but he's definitely a trip. He's been here in Dalian for about two years, and he has a Chinese wife. A few weeks ago, she gave birth to their first child (not James' first, but his first Chinese baby), and since this was the first time I have ever had a chance to celebrate the occasion of one of my friends having a baby, I decided to go down to the hospital after work on the day she was born. My roommate and I went looking for cigars, which was an interesting tradition to try to explain to the Chinese staff, but cigars apparently aren't that popular here. We were first presented with flavored cigarettes, which wasn't quite the same thing, but we finally managed to find some real cigars; at two kuai apiece (that's like 20 cents), they were really something to celebrate with. Anyways, we went down to the hospital with a case of Chinese beer, met another downtown teacher Miles, and waited at the entrance, afraid what would happen if we tried to walk in the door with that in our hands. But James came down to greet us at the door with a cigarette ablaze, and assuredly told us not to worry about the beer, as this sort of thing happens all the time. As we walked in, I noticed a pool of blood sitting in one of the plastic chairs in the waiting room. A harbinger of things to come.

The hospital was a bit of a labyrinth, and since it was night time, all the other doors we passed on our way to the maternity ward were padlocked shut. James pointed this out and then commented on what would happen if there was ever a fire in here, at which point he flicked his cigarette butt on the ground. Like most buildings in China, the halls were poorly lit, and dirt was smeared all over the floor. We climbed a few flights of stairs and came into the room, where James' wife Linda was recovering from her C-section. James told us that the first night they were in a room with other patients, and they were all coughing or screaming or snoring, and he had to sleep sitting up in a chair. A nurse came in the room to change Linda's IV, which task she did with a robotic focus, not even shooting a glance at Linda herself. In China, the doctors and nurses are purely there to administer medicine; there's no care for the post-op beyond the strictly clerical tasks. So if a Chinese person is sick, their entire family is expected to come stay with them in the hospital and do all the daily-life type tasks, like bathing, changing bandages, feeding, etc. Along with James, a few of Linda's friends were staying there, one of whom knew some of the nurses at the hospital and apparently was the reason they were able to swing a private room.

We cooed at the baby for a little while, then went out into the hallway to smoke our cigars and celebrate properly. James and Miles regaled us with some of their harrowing Chinese hospital experiences. James noted the complete lack of patient privacy here, which makes sense in a country where the concept of private space doesn't exist. He said complete strangers were swarming around his room once they heard a white man had just had a baby, hoping to catch a glimpse of this strange half-breed. He also said he witnessed a doctor come out of a surgery room and proudly display to whoever was passing by some bloody artifact he had just extracted from the screaming patient within. "Everyone applauded," said James.

This isn't to say that the level of medicine is sub-par. The hospital has state-of-the-art procedures and equipment. It's just, as James put it, "like having 21st century medicine in a medieval castle." I think the Chinese hospital is a nice little living parable about the strange deficiencies of a developing country. I think it would be easier, in a way, to live in a completely undeveloped country, because your expectations wouldn't keep getting blown to bits. You'd have some hard time adjusting once you got there, but I think it would be easier to accept the things that are lacking. China, on the other hand, is not completely 3rd world, so you kind of get used to expecting certain amenities that you would have back in the States, and then are sorely jolted back into reality when you realize that they simply don't exist here. I call them the "oh yeah I'm living in China" moments. For example, Miles told us about the time he had some serious stomach bug and was in the Infective Gastrointestinal Diseases Ward, where he received the same kind of top-notch anti-bacterial medication you would get back home, but then he went to the bathroom and they didn't have any soap.

We concluded our little toast to James' new baby, who was a girl (even though he was told four times before during ultrasound sessions that it would be a boy) named Jasmine, and packed up to head home. While we were waiting for the cab to come take us back home, Tim and I watched two or three poor Chinese guys getting wheeled into the hospital on stretchers, with seven or eight family members in tow, and I made a decision: I'm not getting sick in China.

Part Two: Bar Babies

There's not a lot to do here during your free time. Kaifaqu is a pretty small little suburb, even though there are at least a couple hundred thousand people living here. Most of the restaurants and stores close around 8:30, and unless you're into karaoke, there's not much of a night life other than the infamous Five Color City, which I'm sure I've mentioned in these posts somewhere before. Every now and then, we get a little sick of the school's basement (where we usually hang out after work; it has a sound system, big-screen projector, and a kitchen) and we make our way out to the old Five Color. It is a little maze-like red light district, 80%!o(MISSING)f which we haven't explored, because 80%!o(MISSING)f it is Japanese massage parlors. Anyways, we went there a few nights ago to blow off some steam and run into some of my boss' seemingly infinite acquaintances. My boss has been here for going on two or three years, and he apparently knows everyone in Dalian. His face is in various Polaroids in all the local bars, and sometimes in the Dalian foreign business magazines Who's Who sections. I used to think he was a social whore, and I guess he partly is, but mostly I think that's just the way business is done here. Also, the foreign population is so small, you kind of have to know everyone else, for the sake of conversation.

Anyways, this story isn't really that long or interesting. We met up with one of the Five Color regulars, this character Dean who is straight out of a Guy Ritchie movie. He runs some kind of kitchen supply business here in Kaifaqu, because as he puts it, "Me choice was move to Choina, 'r gow ta jail. So I ain't no dummy, I chose Choina." He is a formidable British gangster type; 6'6", shaved head, build like a UFC fighter. But he's hilarious, and actually a really nice guy if you can see through all the bullshit. Anyways we went parading around with him, to our favorite little dive where they let you write on the bar with a white-out marker, and let us go behind the bar to make our own drinks, change the music, etc. We have impromptu dance parties there all the time, which usually consists of me, Tim, and my boss going around humping any object in the room, animate or otherwise. But not this night; we were feeling more subdued, so we went to a new place, a bar on the top of a swanky hotel outside the Five Color.

This is where the crux of the story occurred. It was about midnight, and we go into the bar to encounter a 3-year-old boy with a candid cell phone camera. He came over to our table and started taking our picture, accompanied by a couple doting bar servers/local college girls. He was definitely a white child, but he only spoke Chinese to the girls and to us. We learned, as he opted to join us on the couch and consume our bar nuts. that he was the son of a severely soused Austrian sitting at the bar. Our boss, of course, knew the guy, so we went over to talk to him before we got out of that creepy situation. His English was slurred and incomplete, but I gathered that he was some kind of businessman, married to a much younger Chinese woman, as usual. We introduced ourselves, and I mentioned how adorable his son was, which inspired him to launch into a drunken and emotional speech about how his poor white son was being ostracized at Chinese pre-school.

"None of the other boys or girls will be playing with him, they are always saying that he is a different than them." I nodded knowingly, and said something about how he shouldn't worry, because his son is doing a fine job of socializing with us complete strangers.

"I am so worry about him, they are just taking the knife, and twisting it in him slowly," he slurred, still talking about his son's schoolmates. He seemed inconsolable, so I just looked concerned and shook his hand. After that, we paid our outrageous bill and went to McDonald's, patting the poor child on his head on our way out.

---

Comments

[sam bentson]

wowzers
sad/scary story