East-West Station

When I went to live Hungary in 1991, it was not that long since the fall of the Berlin wall, the lifting of the iron curtain, and all the consequent changes to the region. And so there was still a fair bit of talk about “the bad old days” and my curiosity about what life under Communism had been like was satisfied by normal conversations without me having to be overly nosy about it.

And people at the time still told “Communist jokes”. These were largely concerned with how inefficient Communism was (or rather had been) or how stupid the police/soldiers/politicians (enforcers of Communist doctrine) were. And often they had an anti-Russian slant to them.

Some samples…

A man is queuing for food in Moscow. Finally he’s had enough. He turns round to his friend and says “That’s it. I’m going to kill that Gorbachev,” and marches off. Two hours later he comes back. “Well,” says the friend, “did you do it?” “No,” replies the other, “there was an even longer queue over there.”

Capitalism stands on the brink of the abyss. It will soon be overtaken by Communism.

Three prisoners in the gulag get to talking about why they are there. “I am here because I always got to work five minutes late, and they charged me with sabotage,” says the first. “I am here because I kept getting to work five minutes early, and they charged me with spying,” says the second. “I am here because I got to work on time every day,” says the third, “and they charged me with owning a western watch.”

And there’s even an Olympic related one…

Brezhnev reads a speech at the Winter Olympics “O-O-O-O-O.” “No,” his aide whispers to him, “that’s the Olympic logo.”

Well, we live in a Communist country here in China, don’t we? And have I ever heard any Communist jokes here? No.

I can only guess at the reasons really, but the first thing that springs to mind is that while the Soviet Union was presiding over an unconcealably crumbling and risible economy during the 1970s and 80s, China’s economy under the stewardship of those Commie bastards has quite obviously been on the up and up since the death of Mad Mao. (Maybe it was an ironic joke to put him on the banknotes?)

And so a fair few of the kind of Commie jokes told above simply wouldn’t be applicable for modern China, and so would not be funny.

But if it is true, as one pundit has it, that “The Communist joke was by nature deadpan and absurdist—because it was born of an absurd system which created a yawning gap between everyday experience and propaganda” then there should have been jokes-a-plenty during the years of Mao’s misrule, where the gap between reality and government propaganda was more than yawning, it was gaping and gigantic…it was sound asleep. But I have never heard or read any jokes from the Mao era. Perhaps everyone was too shit scared or starving hungry to tell jokes. Political jokes are dissent and dissent was deeply dangerous during Mao’s murderous reign. Or perhaps I have just missed them somehow because they never got translated from the Chinese and published in places I might read.

But another reason I don’t know any Chinese Communist jokes is probably because the Chinese don’t actually make as many political jokes as Europeans. After all, this Soviet Union era joke would certainly apply to China today…

When was the first Russian election? The time that God put Eve in front of Adam and said, “Go ahead, choose your wife.”

Now, credit where credit is due…since Mao shuffled off his mortal coil China has progressed a lot in several ways, not simply economically. And the CCP has to be given some credit for that. But the government in China needs more jokes to be told about it. It deserves some satire and some jibes for locking up decent people like Hu Jia, and for censoring anything it doesn’t agree with, and for treating its adult citizens like children (not least by refusing them the vote), and for trying to erase or alter its sordid past.

Not to laugh at the CCP would be laughable.

Anyone know any good Chinese Commie jokes??

This year’s Reith lectures are about China and are being given by Jonathan Spence, a Sinologist of some renown. His best known books are probably “The Search for Modern China” and “Mao Zedong”.

The Reith lectures are held annually in honour of John Reith, who was the first and probably the finest Director-General of the BBC. He was the guy who coined the wonderful mission statement for the BBC, namely that it should “Educate, Inform and Entertain”. Astonishingly, Reith was given the position despite having absolutely no experience of broadcasting. He simply had a feeling that he would be able to run any company he put his mind to and so when he saw the advert for the job in the paper, he applied. That sort of thing doesn’t happen any more.

The lectures are being held in the British library this year, home to the oldest book in the world… printed in 868 AD in China. The Reith lectures are a rather “British Establishment” affair and if you listen to them you will hear they are chaired by the prim and plummy sounding Sue Lawley and feature questions at the end from people such as The Archbishop of Canterbury and Oxford Professors of Chinese.

Spence himself is a rather phlegmatic sounding scholarly type and his lectures are solid and well-crafted rather than inspirational. More informing and educating than entertaining. He is also himself an establishment figure, having been educated at Winchester and Cambridge.

Why am I banging on about their backgrounds? Well, these are the kinds of people who ran the British Empire and I can’t help thinking how much things have changed since those not-so-distant days. Spence himself is married to a Chinese, something that would have been rather shocking/baffling until quite recently. And, generally speaking, the Chinese are talked about with respect and Chinese journalists are invited to ask questions at the end. Again, until quite recently, the British Establishment wouldn’t have given a toss what the Chinese thought about what they thought about China…intercultural dialogue was not really their forté.

Spence is giving 4 lectures in all and the first, on Confucius, has already been given and is available online.

Worth a listen. Especially as Confucius is such a hot topic these days.

I remember reading about China in the British papers about 20 years ago and one story that stuck for some reason was about how horrible it was to go shopping in China. It wasn’t really the fact that the choice was so limited, apparently, it was that the shop assistants were surly, unhelpful and almost always answered “mei you!” ( not have/we haven’t got any) when asked where something was. The writer, who had been living in China a good while I remember, said that he had come to hate that word more than any other.

Well, China is changing and China has changed. I find shopping in China to be a pleasurable experience most of the time as there’s somewhere to find anything and the staff are usually helpful, if sometimes a bit thick. But it seems that old habits die hard and that the old enemy “Mei you!” is around more often than it should be.

I was in my local Tescos with my wife a couple of days ago and we wanted to buy a plunger. We were looking around the bathroom section and not having much luck when along comes an attendant and so my (Chinese) wife asks where the plungers are. “Ah, Mei you!” she said confidently and went on about her business. Fine, but as we turned the corner of the next aisle we were faced with a fairly large selection of plungers. So of course I picked one up and used it give a good plunging to Miss Mei You’s silly snout. Anyway, not a big thing of course, and you have to expect idiocy from time to time but “the curious affair of the plunger in Tescos” reminded me of another baffling incident quite recently.

My parents were here for a short visit a few weeks ago and as my mum is an inveterate postcard sender, off we went to Xinhua (the national bookstore) to purchase postcards. My mobile has a handy little dictionary so I looked up the Chinese character for “postcard” and presented it at the help desk. We were told by the lady that postcards were up on the third floor but just as were about to trot off the help desk lady had a thought and asked us whether we wanted postcards of Dalian…yes, we said, that would be nice and she shook her head sadly and gave us a “mei you”. Ah, really, what a shame, so I thought I’d ask her where it would be possible to get postcards of Dalian and was struggling to understand her answer when an English speaking Chinese bystander saw the situation and stepped in to help translate. “She thinks you can get postcards of Dalian at the museum” (miles away) ah, thanks, I said, but there are none here, right? The kind lady checked for me… “mei you!”

In any case, my mum decided that generic postcards of China would do, so off we went to floor 3 and found a postcard rack at least half full of postcards of Dalian.

Odd! Not to mention silly. Especially since that was the only postcard rack in the shop,so it wasn’t as if there were lots of them and this one could have been overlooked.

I’m not sure why on either of the two incidents I got a “mei you” but it could be something to do with the shop staff not wanting to admit ignorance or just not really caring if they sold anything or not. Anyway, if I was dictator of China I would introduce compulsory memorization for all shop staff of the phrase “Sorry, I’m not completely sure, but you might try looking in ….”

gotta go now…off to the shops.

The other week I had to give a talk about argument in academic writing. Argument is an interesting enough topic but academic writing can be a bit dry and dusty, so I thought I’d “spice up” the talk a bit with some references to argument outside academia.

One of the texts I chose as a condiment was Deborah Tannen’s “The Argument Culture”. Tannen is a discourse analyst/professor of linguistics and also a bestselling author: Respect. The Argument Culture is subtitled “Stopping America’s War of Words” and its main point (argument) is that western-style discourse is all-too-often aggressive, polarizing and counter-productive. She also argues that too many modern Americans (and by implication westerners) believe that the best way to demonstrate intellectual prowess is to criticize, find fault, and attack. Does that ring any bells for you China Xpats?

This thesis is used to examine gender differences (her specialty), the education system, the legal system, and the media. In the light of what’s been going down recently with the “CNN versus all right-thinking Chinese” ballyhoo, I thought the media section was particularly appropriate. In this part, Tannen chronicles the emergence of an “attack dog” media from the days of Watergate, and shows the damage this can do to the political process and the people who serve in public office.

Point taken. But, it must be said, if America has an “attack dog” media then China’s is a “lap dog”. The media in China is the party’s pet poodle and this is a worse state of affairs, I would argue.

I also found a review of “The Argument Culture” that contains the following:

what this terrific American scholar suggests, to a large degree, is going Asian. Asian cultures…place great value on avoiding open expression of disagreement and conflict because they emphasize harmony.

Yeah…right! That is just such total crap it’s difficult to know where to start ripping it to shreds! Just joking. But actually this sounds quite a lot like one of Tannen’s other books, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation which argues that: “Men grow up in a world in which a conversation is often a contest, either to achieve the upper hand or to prevent other people from pushing them around. For women, however, talking is often a way to exchange confirmation and support.”

So can we say then that the east is feminine and harmonious and the west is masculine and divisive? Well, we can if we want to piffle away with unhelpful and massive generalisations. Actually, China seems a fairly argumentative place to me, with a fair amount of shouting and finger wagging on the streets and at a national/nationalist level there is a readiness to take umbrage at perceived slights that often leads to noisy demonstrations and internet vituperations.

Ask my students what they think of CNN and they won’t wax harmonious. Walk around a Chinese town wearing a Free Tibet T-shirt and I’m fairly sure you’d get a harmonious pummeling.

In fact, it could be argued that it is the very lack of argument in China’s media that leads to such inflexible opinions (aka pig-headedness) and those notorious “hurt feelings” when the western media presents an argument “the Chinese people” haven’t heard before.

But then again, undeniably, there is CNN’s recent bungling reports of the riots in Tibet and, in general, too many knee-jerk criticisms of China the big bad bully.

There’s no easy answer to all these misunderstandings and confusions of course. Broadly speaking, China still doesn’t “get” western points of view because so much is censored, and the west indulges in sloppy criticism of China because of arrogance or because we cant be bothered to read up about a complicated state of affairs.

Just “Imagine” this though…cue Lennon’s familiar riffs…Less censorship, less aggression, more research, more consideration, more reflection, more patience. World Harmony! Peace and Understanding between Black and White and Yellow and Brown and Emo and Punk and Goth! Wouldn’t that be nice?

What…you don’t agree? Go fuck yourself.

The following is about a book I read a while ago. Not sure why but it “set me off on one” and prompted an old-style book review-ish type of musing.

Dean Barrett is an “Old Asia Hand” and a serious writer of accomplished prose and thoroughly researched historical fiction. His Hangman’s Point, for example, has been much lauded for the way it brings old Hong Kong to life and has been optioned for film 4 times. He has also had plays on Broadway, and has written several well-praised thrillers set in Thailand such as The Kingdom of Make Believe and Sky Train to Murder. He also likes to occasionally indulge in the knockabout prose of the “hard-boiled” detective genre and anecdotal accounts of his time in Thailand, and so we have his latest book Murder at the Horny Toad bar & other OUTRAGEOUS tales of Thailand.

Outside the office, he is that old guy who you can see hanging around the bars in South-East Asia with a beer in one hand, a bargirl in the other, and a big shit-eating grin on his face. He’s the kind who has an attitude about his lifestyle and will hold forth at length about his right to do what he wants, live how he likes, and his inalienable right to the pursuit of happiness. And he is a hard sonufabitch to gainsay because he sure isn’t stupid and he has a voice that rings with conviction. But does he have a point? Well, assuming you’ve never hung around to listen much to that kind of guy, why not spend some time with Murder at the Horny Toad and see what you think?

Murder is a collection of fiction and non-fiction. It contains 3 “Harry Broditsky” detective stories, 4 Thai-themed short stories, 3 longish accounts of travels around Thailand and 28 vignettes that make up a separate section entitled Memoirs of an oversexed Farang. The title story is a detective story starring “Harry Boroditsky”. Boroditsky (“Sure, I know, the name sucks…friends just call me Boro. Enemies call me Ditsky. But not for long. If you get my drift”) is a classic of his type. A stereotype, that is, of the hard-boiled detective. Harry is a bit of a ladies man who will shoot men dead without hesitation or regret and who has a nose for a case and sex on the brain. “Condom-grey clouds scudded across a Viagra-blue sky”, being one of the most memorable images.

And when there is a murder at the Horny Toad go-go bar, the mama san knows just who she’s gonna call. But as to why Harry is given the title of the book, I must say I find it a mystery. Why draw attention to this story? I found the characterization to be flimsy, the humour strained, the imagery and atmosphere unappealing, the plot unconvincing, and the punchline lame beyond belief. I did not like this short story! But my expectations were high because I’ve read some of his other novels and because before reading the title piece I had (as I suspect many readers will) gone straight to Memoirs of an Oversexed Farang and had been treated to some laughs, sly wit, and classy prose.

The confessions/memoirs section is by and large a well-executed blend of self-exposure, self-mockery, and fond erotic memories. Actually, the collection kicks off with the 4 accomplished and interesting Thai-themed short stories, and in the first of these, The Death of Ron Adams, we can immediately detect the obsessions of Mr. Barrett’s book. Sentence 3 mentions a go-go bar and sentence 8 talks of how irresistible Thai women are. The other obsession comes on the third page when we are told that the go-go bar the eponymous Ron Adams decides to buy is called “The Feminist Nightmare”. A charitable critic might call this a sly dig, whereas a feminist would probably call it a cheap shot. In any case these are the two obsessions that run through the book, the Thai hooker and the Western female/feminist. Mr. Barrett’s binary for the significant other. He is obsessed with women.

This is the kind of thing that drives the Thai Tourist board and the good burghers of Bangkok up the wall because of its reinforcing of the negative image of Thai females. It’s also a convenient dichotomy I suppose, a muse you can love and a muse you can love to hate, but in any case, if not done deftly then this well-worn topic can quickly go back over ground well-trodden by the tedious, repetitive chunterings of the chauvinist bar-room bore. I found there is a definite difference in the quality of writing involving the not-so-witty point scoring against western women, who seem to very much get his goat, and the passionate portrayal of eastern women he obviously cares very much for, and/or is erotically bewitched by. Why could he not write about the latter without bringing up the former? An old flame? A guilt trip? A misjudgment of taste? As the Thais often say, “Up to Yoooo!”.

In any case, for this reader it is an important point in his favour that Barrett’s work evinces so much affectionate eroticism. The image of the Thai woman is often not such a positive one in texts by western men and this kind of writing stands out from the slew of bragging, condescending, body-obsessed, and affectionless pornography that all-too-often gets put on the internet.

Barrett is maybe at his most eloquent when waxing lyrical on the beauty of Thai women, particularly their skin and hair. This is not surprising perhaps as he is after all the proud author of two photobooks on Thai women, The Girls of Thailand, and Thailand: Land of Beautiful Women. If you ever forget or doubt what he is talking about you can simply take a glance at the front cover of Murder at the Horny Toad, which is graced by the kind of smoldering exotic Thai beauty to make an abbot kick a hole in a Watt window. Or if you live in Thailand you could just leave your house and head in any direction.

Yes, you can judge this book by its cover because this book is all about Eve. There is hardly a mention of Thai men (some taxi drivers and a DJ) and there’s not much Thai culture either. Both the fiction and the non-fiction sections contain very few of the sights, sounds, smells, or tastes of Thailand, other than those referring to the female form of course! Barrett can evoke Thailand and has shown how well he can in, for example, The Kingdom of Make Believe, but, in any case, the focus on the female is probably representative of his own preoccupations in Thailand. He is not alone in this…Thai women are the reason why thousands of foreign men come to Thailand. The beauty and attraction of Thai women (all women, all humans) is not easy to capture without sounding banal, but Barrett does a pretty good job.

He can be rhapsodic in his descriptions of Thai feminine features and can explicate and play up his helpless fascination with Thai girls tellingly and amusingly. Not only is he a helpless “ladies man,” but some of his most endearing and witty prose comes when he is sending up the “man’s man”, such as in the following where he writes of his bafflement as to why it should be that in Bangkok sports bars

despite the presence of gorgeous (and available) women, all of the men around me were watching and sometimes cheering hideously overpaid, half-men, half-boy jocks running madly about destroying a good lawn…and of course, once a ball was actually kicked into a net, the men watching the game acted as if they’d had their first orgasm in five years.

Now, that (and available) in brackets is worth a second look, because “available” is a word that is stressed throughout the book. He is at least honest and true to the mark in his analysis of why a certain type of western man, of which he is a representative, is so obsessed with Thai women. There is, of course, the outstanding beauty of Thai women…but it is the availability of these beautiful women that really gets them going. And here is the rub. Barrett’s appreciation of the beauty of the female form is affectionately and caringly crafted, and there is surely nothing wrong with that, but some readers may find a problem with his ready and even gleeful admittance that he sleeps with prostitutes. A lot. Almost exclusively it would seem.

For some people this kind of behaviour is to be condemned out of hand, and Barrett of course realises this. There may be a certain frisson of “épater les bourgeois” to his unabashed tone (I mean what would mummy think of it all?) and in some ways I want to congratulate him for his honesty and for his comedy on this touchy topic. Importantly, he sends himself up nicely and is capable of cutely exploiting the absurdities and double-edged exploitation of the economic transactions of paying for sex. An unusual and striking example is when he is called in to act in a film which is depicting the bar scene in Bangkok, and he hits on one of the actresses.

She gave me a friendly, don’t-be-silly, smile, an affectionate pat on the arm, and said in English: “Grandfather!” Oh. Ok, I see how the game is played. These actresses pretending to be bargirls are Bangkok girls from financially stable families as opposed to real bargirls from northeast Thailand from impoverished families. In other words, actresses posing as bargirls wouldn’t have quite the same alacrity to jump into bed with me. OK. I didn’t just fall of the durian cart yesterday. But I could handle the situation: Bangkok girls would simply be more of a challenge, that’s all.

But, revealingly, he didn’t get his girl, or at least I’m pretty sure he didn’t or he would have bragged of it! Now, Mr. Barrett can speak Thai and is a clever attractive guy, I’m sure….but outside of the bar scene he loses some of his lustre it would appear. Back inside the bar scene, however, all is well and good and Mr Barrett can indulge himself to his cock’s content. It does not make it any “better” but he is neither proud nor ashamed to be a whoremonger. He is simply delighted that there are so many beautiful women available to him…for a fee. This may or may not be a problem for his intended audience, but it is of course a problem for the other obsession of his book, the western feminist…and he is less than affectionate with women who do not see things his way and who attack him for his whoring. His “playful” term for them is the flippant and offensively stupid coinage “feminazi”.

Could this be a generational thing? Is it an American thing? Is it easier for us these days now that “western women” are more comfortable with “Men Behaving Badly” and are themselves better off and more powerful? I do not know.

In one of his pieces from the Memoirs there is a wish fulfillment fantasy in which Barrett is in a go-go bar surrounded by gorgeous Thai women and has a feminazi grovel for apology in front of him and admit that she only attacks him because she is jealous. Erm, like, what’s that all about? Hold on though because it gets all subtled up when his dream turns into a nightmare and he realizes that… I had been set up! This whole dream had been a feminazi trap of some kind. Somehow they had managed to penetrate my subconscious! And after being thrown out of the bar he ends up complaining that “I had just been thrown out of a bar in my own damn dream; a dream which showed me that feminazis were attacking me even in my sleep.

The lady-killer doth protest too much, methinks. He obviously feels stung or at least bothered by what they say. Is he scared of them? Is it because they are his superego? Because they make him realize that he is not having any kind of intelligent conversation with women? Why does he expend so much ink on them? Why are they his muse? Ok, enough of the ham-fisted psychoanalysis…yes, he is worried that they have a point. They disturb his dreams and he is honest enough to admit this, but not honest enough to dig down as to why they worry him so much. Would he mind, I wonder, if I had a stab at this for him?

No money, no honey. That hoary whorey cliché. Mr Barrett has money, so he can have sex with wonderful looking women. If Mr Barrett has no money, he cannot have sex with these wonderful women. If Mr Barrett were really to be “thrown out of the bar” he would have to start treating women seriously in order to get sex from them. He does not want to do this and is perhaps even embarrassed by his sexual urges. He is afraid that if he had to face women as equals then they would throw the horny toad out of the bar and leave him to slobber in his own juices in the gutter outside. They would mock his animal urges and leave him a lesser man. But he has money, so he can pay to avoid this fate. His dreams will tell him this, in “Freudian code”, but his waking mind does not want to decode the message into such straightforward unflattering terms.

Or so it could be put. I leave it to you to decide how unfair an interpretation this is. It is certainly an unflattering and over-dramatized one. However, as an intelligent man, Mr. Barrett of course knows full well that the kind of Thai woman he so adores would not be with him were it not for his money, and he demonstrates this amusingly in one of his vignettes called A Test of True Love. But as an intelligent man he must also know that his dichotomizing of women as either educated and aggressive and western, and therefore unsexy, or as eastern and uneducated and as erotic as hell, is a false and crude distinction. For Mr Barrett is an intelligent man.

Just to illustrate the kind of mismatch between him and his hookers, what about this dialogue from one of his vignettes in which Mr DB is having an inter-coital chat with one of his Thai take aways…

“What you do?”
“A ballad. I’m writing a ballad.”
I knew she didn’t know what that was but I also knew it would buy me a bit of time to write.
“What ballad mean?”
“A kind of poem.” I knew she didn’t know what that was either but I thought she might go back to watching the ghost story soap opera in the other room.

And soon, predictably perhaps, he stops writing and they start fucking. Well, I presume that he would prefer a soul-mate to a shag-bag, or at least a shag-bag he could talk to perhaps? But the kind of educated woman who could hold their own with Barrett and with whom he could really talk about his interests in literature, history, politics, philosophy etc, would most likely not be too taken with his bragging about whoring. And so he would have to reject a whole side of himself, which is not the kind of thing a man like him is likely to do in a hurry.

And although he says that he is happy with his Thai women, whether they love him or not and whether he can talk to them or not, he remains angry and dissatisfied about something, and he seems to be taking it out on western women.

Hold on a moment though before we finish off. Let’s not get too somber and po-faced here. Cold beer, flirty small talk, and great sex is enough sometimes, of course. And it is great fun. And many many men come to Bangkok for a sexual holiday, right? Old Dean is just having a bit of fun, right? He doesn’t want us to take him too seriously, right? Wrong. Mr. Barrett wants his world-view to be taken seriously. He thinks it is an excusable way to live, certainly an exciting and rewarding way to live, and he dedicates the book

to all farangs (foreigners) who washed up on Thailand’s shores and at some point came to realize that they are far beyond hope of redemption. And especially to those who have yet to realize it.

Having read the book, this dedication seems to me to be really more like an invitation to a male audience to join him in the cosy camaraderie of a whoremonger’s club, and I would like to refuse the invitation. I am glad I bought this book, it made me laugh, and smile, and it made me think. I would gladly read more of Barrett’s work, but to accept his invitation to lose “hope of redemption” seems to me to be a glib refusal of emotional maturity. There are some men who have washed up on Thailand’s shores who think that the relationships brought about solely by the financial disparity between east and west are usually unsatisfying delusions. The economically impoverished women of Thailand would by and large be better off spared the horny toads’ immaturities, inadequacies, and sexual cravings. I am not sure I would go so far as to deprive Mr Barrett of money by not buying his books, but it would probably be a good thing if the horny toads were to be thrown out of the bar a bit more often. It might be good for them too: some of them might sober up and turn into handsome princes.