Observations from Shanghai and the Middle Kingdom

Holy balls, is there wealth here. Take a step into a major shopping mall in Shanghai, you will see more consumables on sale and being purchased than anywhere in the States. There are tablet computers, smart phones, advanced home theater equipment. It seems that middle class status has discretely packed up its things in the US and migrated to China. You can even see all the standard sights of any Western shopping mall: self-indulgent girls chattering on cell phones and carrying a designer handbags. Oversized advertisements featuring famous Western actors, endorsing crap. Starbucks, KFC, Pizza Hut, they all have their Chinese presence. In Shanghai it's possible to occasionally forget that you have left the West, but the US no longer has a city anywhere near as remarkable as Shanghai.

In Shanghai, McDonald's delivers. Drivers hop on motor-scooters donning red McDonald's helmets and insulated backpacks, dropping off fast food orders to their recipients. I'm thankful this concept of delivery has never been adopted into the Western business model, as I can imagine Americans abusing that kind of service. Many Americans use the drive through at McDonald's to avoid the agonizing discomfort of walking around. If they were to discover that they never have to leave home at all, well that could prove a fateful blow to Western civilization as other fast food chains would follow suit. I can already imagine McDonald's adjusting to their slogan to declare, “No, don't get up, fat ass! We've got you!”

Traffic

Chinese people love their car horns. And they honk the fuck out of them with great zeal. Let me put it this way: The Chinese people have a fever, and the only prescription, is more honking.

The Chinese also hate orderly traffic. If you have never seen a three lane road turn into five rows of traffic spontaneously, you will in China.

This is because the dashed line is only a suggestion. If you feel like riding down the middle of the road on occasion, you can just go ahead and do it. Feel like swerving between cars, and obnoxiously honking your horn like a jackass? In China, it's standard procedure. As soon as a vehicle hits the road, human decency evaporates. They will not brake for pedestrians. They will not wait for lights to turn the right color. There is no turn signal, they just swerve around people and traffic until they get to the place they want. That's how the Chinese get down.

Perhaps it has to do with a lack of regulation, or some kind of education issue. Perhaps China's economic growth has caused the country to get a little too big for its britches. The injection of wealth has put people behind the wheel that would have ordinarily been wheeling around a bicycle cart. Never does it seem to occur to them to say, “Hey guys, this is disorganized and dangerous. Maybe we should behave more cautiously.” Nope! Fuck that! Honk!

Going to the Doctor

Chinese medical care is another point of interest. I went to premium hospital in a major Chinese city to get a diagnosis for an ailment, and when I made into the doctors office, there were numerous people inside, all chattering at the doctor simultaneously. I have no idea why common sense wouldn't dictate that one patient should be seen at a time. Also, the room was filthy. The paint was chipping off the walls and the floor needed to be swept. I'm not going to go into detail about the diagnosis procedure, but let me just say that they are still using glass slides on old-school microscopes in their labs. Hilarious.

Which brings me to one of the strangest paradoxes of life China. How can a nation obtain this much wealth, yet still be marvelously obstinate about the most rudimentary aspects of modern life: such as basic hygiene, the sensibility of cleanliness, the importance of disinfectants, and how to stand patiently in line (for fucks sake)? The Chinese do not seem to get this wait-your-turn concept at all. This petulant rejection of common sense reminds me of an ill-tempered child having a fit at the dinner table. Someone needs to be sent to be bed without desert.

The Ladies

Let's talk about the ladies in China. For the longest time after getting here, it was very seldom that a woman would turn my head while walking around in public. I've heard other Western males declare, “C'mon, Chinese girls are hot!” But from my own shallow perspective on human beauty, I've felt that attractive Chinese women are few and far between. Most of them are shy, pale, mousy girls with glasses and skin problems. They're rail thin, seemingly malnourished, and most of them look like they're twelve years old regardless of their actual age. Very few appear to have fully developed breasts, and the only indication that they're over thirty would be a few gray hairs. They provoke the same sexual attraction in me as a four-foot-tall lamppost. And no, I have not developed a fetish for lampposts.

Then one night I went to a club in the city, and lo and behold, I discovered amazingly attractive Chinese ladies! They had incredible figures, fashion sense, and knew how to properly use cosmetics. Yes, attractive Chinese women do exist, at the right place and time. Unfortunately, in a later discussion, someone explained to me that all of those women (or most) were probably prostitutes. Oh. Well, they certainly didn't seem like they were there to dance or enjoy themselves. Then I started thinking about the way that if any girl in China possesses beauty, it is likely that she will be shucked like an ear of corn and thrown into the sex industry. That's some elegant stuff.