Supposedly a melting pot, America sometimes seems more like a meltdown of minds on pot.

The U.S. culture tries to dominate the world. That’s why other countries call it the vulture culture.

According to the Internet, the United Nations conducted a worldwide survey whose only question was:

The survey failed because nobody understood the question.

Europeans often say:

But one person objected:

An Internet chatter named “Rhov” invented this variant:

Another chatter, named “dman,” invented this:

Here’s how the captain of a sinking cruise ship convinces the passengers to jump overboard:

The world keeps changing. Here’s an expanded version of statements by Charles Barkley and Chris Rock, a few years ago:

Let’s look at the U.S. then its alternatives.

 

Jessica Booth wrote a list of 24 things foreigners consider peculiar about us in the U.S. You can read her original list & comments at Insider’s Website:

She based it on comments written elsewhere, such as on this Reddit blog:

Here’s my revision of her list, rewritten as 24 paragraphs.…

National pride

We put American flags in front of our homes, businesses, and historical sites. (In other countries, national flags are displayed rarely.)

We think “America” is just the United States, so “Americans” are just people who live in the United States. (Other countries realize “America” includes all of North America, Central America, and South America, so “America” includes Canada, Mexico, Brazil, and beyond. All Canadians, Mexicans, and Brazilian are Americans!)

Units of size & time

We measure in inches, feet, yards, miles, ounces, pounds, teaspoons, tablespoons, pints, quarts, and gallons. (Other countries use the metric system: meters & grams.)

When writing a date, such as Christmas 2020, we write the month’s number first: 12/25/2020. (Other countries write the date’s number first: 25/12/2020.)

Money

Our money all looks alike: our $1, $2, $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100 bills are all green and all the same size. (In other countries, their bills have a variety of colors & sizes, so you can notice faster which bills are worth a lot and which are worth less.)

Our advertised prices aren’t usually the prices you pay, since you must usually add sales tax, which varies from state to state and city to city. So if you travel to different states & cities, you’re not quite sure how much you must pay until you reach the cash register or server or online checkout button. (Instead of a sales tax, other countries have a value-added tax, which is paid by the merchant but not by the consumer, so the advertised price is what you pay, without any surcharge.)

In our restaurants, taxis, and hotels, you’re supposed to donate a tip to the people who serve you. For example, in our restaurants you’re supposed to give one of these tips: minimal (15%), normal (18%), generous (20%), extra-generous (25%), or wow (30%). So you need a calculator or be good at doing math in your head. Some restaurants provide calculators that are mean to you: they compute that percentage on the price of the “food plus sales tax” instead of on the price of just the food. (In other countries, tips are not expected and are considered rude.)

Our colleges charge students a lot for tuition, so graduates must repay a lot of debt. (In other countries, college is free.)

We work long hours, sometimes even while we nibble our lunches, and take very little vacation. (In other countries, employees work shorter hours, get 6 weeks of paid vacation every year, and don’t work during lunch.)

Advertising

Our major TV stations show lots of commercials. (Other countries show fewer.)

TV ads tell us to yell at our doctors and demand they write prescriptions for the drug brands advertised. (In other countries, TV ads don’t tell you to control your doctor.)

Our drug stores (such as CVS and Walgreens) also sell junk food, junky snacks, and shampoo. They act like convenience stores. (In other countries, drug stores are strictly pharmacies and sell just drugs.)

Food

Many of our breads contain sugar. (In other countries, breads are always sugarless.)

Our restaurants give ridiculously huge portions of food. (Other countries give smaller portions.)

Since our food portions are huge and hard to finish eating, our the restaurants offer takeout containers, called “doggie bags,” to carry the excess home. (In other countries, portions are smaller, so asking for a “doggie bag” is unnecessary and considered rude.)

Drinks

We put lots of ice in our drinks. (Other countries put little or no ice in drinks, unless a customer is weird enough to request lots of ice.)

Our restaurants give free refills for drinks. (Other countries don’t. To protect public health, France now makes it illegal for restaurants to offer unlimited free refills for soda.)

For coffee, our restaurants give big to-go cups. (Other countries drink smaller quantities and finish them in restaurants, not to-go.)

We often drink alcohol out of red plastic cups. (Other countries use red plastic cups just when throwing “American-style parties.”)

Toilets

Our toilets contain lots of water. (In other countries, toilets contain less water.)

In public bathrooms, the doors on the stalls have big gaps underneath and tiny gaps on the sides, so you can peek through and see whether the stall is occupied. (In other countries, the stalls are completely private.)

Relationships

We often start friendly conversations with strangers we meet on the street, on buses, and in waiting rooms. (In other countries, people are more reluctant to chat with strangers.)

Shortly before a woman gives birth, we give her gifts, by having a party called a “baby shower.” (Other countries don’t have baby showers, though they might give her gifts at other times, much sooner or later than the birth date.)

Our women cover their breasts & bottoms whenever in public. (Other countries permit toplessness & total nudity on beaches.)

51 weirdos

Nature World Today collected this list of 51 things about the U.S. that other people think are weird:

Details are at:

Hitler

How can you summarize the United States in just one sentence? Adolph Hitler said in 1940:

 

My friend Professor Pfumpfernichel (Chancellor of the University of Pop) teaches foreigners about America. He reveals lots about America that most Americans don’t know! Here are paragraphs from his lectures, but beware: he has a slight problem with his eyesight and hearing.

 

To challenge your friends, ask these tricky questions about U.S. geography:

Americans often forget where the rest of the world is. For example, Americans forget these facts:

More geography puzzles & facts are in the geography chapter of Peter Winkler’s Mathematical Puzzles. (The other chapters are about advanced math.)

And now, from DOSJOKL (the Department of Stupid Jokes Only Kids Love), here’s a geography riddle:

Capital quiz

Here’s a list of country capitals, but each is spelled or spaced wrong. Can you fix each? And name its country?

Here are the answers — but don’t peek until you take that quiz!

 

Vermont is a bunch of farmers manipulated by outsiders.

Even the name “Vermont” was invented by an outsider, Dr. Thomas Young of Pennsylvania, in 1777. Since the place was full of green mountains and a bunch of radicals called “Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys,” Dr. Young named it “Vermont,” which is archaic French for “Green Mountain.” He named it in French instead of English to make the place sound as high-falutin’ as a French restaurant.

“Ethan Allen and the Green Mountain Boys” tried to keep Vermont independent from the evil colonies of New York and New Hampshire, which wanted to capture it. Vermont stayed an independent republic until 1791, when it became the 14^th state.

For a while, Vermont was full of dairy farms and had more cows than people. During the 1970’s, many hippies from New York moved to Vermont to get away from the city rat race and commune with nature. They tried to become farmers but discovered they were more successful at milking tourists than cows. Many tourists visit Vermont in the fall to see the leaves turn color while the cows moo.

Ben & Jerry

Ben and Jerry were a pair of New York Jewish hippies, both born in Brooklyn, 4 days apart. In 1977 they moved to Vermont, where they started a factory that turned Vermont milk into fattening ice-cream for hoity-toity New Yorkers, who felt less guilty about getting fat because Ben & Jerry gave them just tiny portions and donated part of the profits to liberal causes. In the year 2000, the company became secretly owned by Unilever, a Dutch-English conglomerate.

Farmer talk

Vermont farmers have an amazing gift of language. They talk in a slow drawl that’s very effective at deflating the egos of their natural enemies, such as bureaucrats, academicians, lost drivers, tourists, spendthrifts, New Hampshirites, and Texans.

Vermonter versus the bureaucrat This is a true tale. A Vermonter fell off the roof of a barn and died. The insurance company gave his family a death certificate to fill out. The certificate was long and complicated. At the bottom of the certificate was a space labeled “remarks.” For “remarks,” the family wrote, “He didn’t make none.”

Vermonter versus the academician A Vermonter riding a train struck up a conversation with the passenger next to him, who happened to be a Harvard professor. The Vermonter admired the Harvard professor’s brilliance, and the Harvard professor admired the Vermonter’s common sense.

The professor suggested a contest to see who could “stump” the other person. The person who couldn’t answer the question would have to pay 50¢.

“Okay,” said the Vermonter, “but since you’re so much smarter, I think it would be fairer for you to pay me a dollar.”

“Okay,” agreed the Harvard professor. “You go first.”

“Well,” said the Vermonter, “What has 3 legs and flies?”

“I give up,” said the Harvard professor. “Here’s your dollar. What’s the answer?”

“Darned if I know,” replied the Vermonter. “Here’s your 50¢!”

Vermonter versus the lost driver Walter Piston (a famous Harvard music professor) was driving through Vermont, got to a fork in the road, and asked a Vermonter, “Does it make any difference which road I take?” The Vermonter replied, “Not to me, it doesn’t.”

Vermonter versus the tourist Many tourists visit Vermont in the summer. One of them told a Vermonter, “You have a lot of peculiar people around here.” The Vermonter replied, “Yep, but most are gone by mid-September.”

Vermonter versus the spendthrift Vermonters don’t like to spend money. Vermont legislators say, “When in doubt, vote no. Let’s not get something we don’t need and pay for it with money we don’t have.”

Vermonter versus New Hampshire Robert Frost wrote a long poem called New Hampshire, which proclaimed page after page of praise for New Hampshire’s beauty. But to understand the poem’s true meaning, you must read the last line, which says simply and proudly, “I live in Vermont.”

Vermonter versus the Texan A Vermonter was chatting with a Texan, whose drawling wisdom was no match for the Vermonter’s.

Recorded tales Those tales were collected by Al Foley, a Dartmouth College history professor who became a member of the Vermont legislature and president of the Vermont Historical Society. He speaks on a 33 RPM record called A Vermont Heritage.

 

Like most Americans seeking adventurous fun, I moved to New Hampshire, the laughable state nicknamed “New Ha-ha.”

Laws

New Hampshire’s the most libertarian state. It believes in the fewest laws. The state’s motto is “Live free or die,” uttered by General Stark centuries ago and interpreted by modern New Hampshirites to mean “Get the government off our backs.”

Taxes New Hampshire brags that it has no sales tax,
no income tax, and no other “broad-based tax,” which means “no tax affecting everybody.”

That sounds great and makes many idiots move here. After moving, we discover that the Machiavellis who run the government created many “little” taxes that affect “just a few” people. Here are little examples:

So in New Hampshire, you can “live free of taxes” just if you hide under a rock.

No restrictions In New Hampshire, you can do whatever you want, if you don’t get dangerously huffy about it.

For example, you can drive a car without getting a driver’s license. I was really surprised about that. When my stepdaughter wanted to learn how to drive, I asked the Department of Motor Vehicles about how to get her a “learner’s permit,” so she could practice; but the Department said she didn’t need one: she could just go ahead and drive. The only restriction is that a licensed driver must be next to her in the front seat and she has to say she’s “learning.”

In New Hampshire, you don’t need car insurance — unless you’re such a dangerous driver that the state declares you an exception. So I don’t have car insurance. I don’t have home insurance or general health insurance either. If my car hits you, or you trip on my lawn, just take me to court and take my house. Then I’ll have the pleasure of sitting outside and not having to pay the property tax.

New Hampshire is the only state where you don’t need to wear a seat belt if you’re an adult, even if you’re the driver. New Hampshire believes you have the God-given right to kill yourself on the highway. Seatbelts are required just for kids under 18, who are too young to appreciate the finer pleasures of suicide.

If you want to ride a motorcycle dangerously, go ahead:
you don’t need to wear a helmet. Massachusetts bikers love to come to New Hampshire and discard their helmets when they reach our border, so they can feel the wind blowing in their hair — and later feel their heads bobbling on the asphalt. As a result, New Hampshire is the state that has the most motorcycles per 1000 people.

Want to buy a gun? No problem. Just go to a store, say you want to buy a gun, and in less than half an hour you’ve got it. You don’t need a license: just wait the half hour for the store’s computer to check you’re not a felon.

You can carry a gun with you, loaded, practically anywhere you wish, without a license — even into your local bank or convenience store. The only restriction is you can’t take it onto a plane or into certain government buildings. If you carry a loaded gun, just make sure it’s visible, so everybody can see it and get properly scared and nervous: don’t hide it! (If you want to hide it, you must remove the bullets first, so you don’t get arrested for carrying a “concealed loaded weapon.”) But if you’re stupid enough to carry a loaded visible gun into a bank or convenience store, be prepared to get tackled by a nervous rookie policeman — who’ll then apologize to you for having impinged on your New Hampshire rights.

If you don’t want to pay a highway toll, you don’t have to. That’s because New Hampshire lawmakers made a mistake when writing the highway-toll law, and they’re too lazy to fix it. The law accidentally says it’s illegal for New Hampshire to arrest you for not throwing coins into the toll basket.

Want to kill your mom? Well, that’s against the law. We New Hampshirites need to have some limits! But it’s okay to strangle a squirrel.

Politics New Hampshire is run mainly by Republicans who tote guns. But they’re kind enough to donate shelters to Democrats who escaped from Boston when Boston’s real estate got too expensive for normal folks to live in.

For a while, the Republicans were kind enough to let a Democrat lady become governor. She was a kind lady who believed in education. When she had trouble balancing her budget, she decided the fairest solution was to add a sales tax and income tax. The voters decided the fairest solution was to get rid of her. They did. So we still have no sales tax and no income tax. We also got a new governor —Republican, of course — who still couldn’t balance the budget, so he got voted out too. The next governor was a Democrat (John Lynch) who succeeded — for 4 terms — by being quiet, so nobody could object to him. Next came a Democrat woman (Maggie Hassan), whose husband ran prestigious prep school (Phillips Exeter Academy); but she didn’t really want to be the governor, and her husband got in trouble for being too kind to a bad employee, so she became a U.S. Senator instead. Now voters elected a Republican (Chris Sununu), whose dad was governor back in the 1980’s.

Since I’m a Democrat, I’m morally required by the Democrat religion to believe the fairest tax is an income tax, since it taxes the rich more than the poor. But I admit I secretly enjoy the evil pleasure of being in New Hampshire, since it’s sure nice to avoid the bureaucratic hassles of figuring sales tax and income tax and filling those stupid forms all you Non-Hampshirites must fill each year.

My friends back in Massachusetts love to taunt me by reminding me that “New Hampshire is great place to live, as long as you don’t have a handicapped kid or break a leg or need any other kind of social service.” New Hampshire ain’t keen on offering such services. Remember the New Hampshire motto: “Live free or die,” which means:

Snow

In New Hampshire, God is a frustrated artist: He keeps trying to draw out the perfect snowstorm. He keeps dumping his efforts on us in His attempt to create the perfect snow landscape but never quite gets it right. Finally, one day, the frustrated Deity of Dramatic Weather gives up, smiles, and breaks out singing:

Then He creates — for His finale — one final gigantic snowstorm, called “The Oy’s of March.”

Afterwards, he takes His bow. That’s called “spring.” The flowers come up and applaud his past achievements but are secretly relieved to see the concert’s over.

Oops! I said the forbidden word “spring”! I shouldn’t have said that. In New Hampshire, we’re not allowed to say “spring.” Natives say instead, “It’s the mud season,” because that’s when the snow starts melting and all the shit is sopping wet. Each “yard” becomes a series of rivers and waterfalls running under the snow — until finally old man Sun gets really hot and angry and lets the birds chirp. But then “The Old Man in the Mountain” (New Hampshire’s godlike mountain stone face, still alive in spirit) gets grumpy, tells the birds to shut up, and throws snow on them — for many days in a row — in April or May. That’s called “Whitey’s surprise party.”

In New Hampshire each year, the weatherman admits again that “March came in like a lion and went out like a moose: a big, lumbering surprise whose journey was unpredictable.”

In other states, pixies sing “April showers bring May flowers.” In New Hampshire, we sing “April crud brings May mud.”

But if life here weren’t an adventurous challenge, why would anyone come?

During what month does snow here start? The answer is: “Whenever you don’t expect it.” For example, on a bright, sunny day in mid-October, I was foolish enough to ask my neighbor Tom (a policeman who’s lived here for many years) when snow would start. He said, “December or late November, but never before November 15^th.” I shouldn’t have asked. Just asking the question sealed my fate: the very week I asked, it snowed many times, to drive home the point that newbies shouldn’t ask such stupid questions. It also reminded me that to find out what goes on here, don’t ask a policeman.

While other states have a storm that “rains cats and dogs,” in New Hampshire it “snows bears and moose.”

Since our gigantic storms hit us unpredictably, here’s how we New Hampshirites chat with our next-door neighbors:

During winters, New Hampshire farmers don’t say “Have a nice day.” Instead they say, “Have an iced hay.” That sounds the same but is more realistic, since you can never have a “nice day” during a New Hampshire winter.

Dartmouth College

New Hampshire’s most famous college is Dartmouth. It was started centuries ago as a missionary school to teach Indians about religion and English. None of the Indians got to speak English real well, but the best of the bunch was sent to England to try to raise donations. His pitch was, basically, “Me Indian. Me speak English. You want more Indians to speak English? Give money.” Nobody gave very much. The idiot who gave the most was the Earl of Dartmouth, so they decided to name the college after him, in the hopes he’d give more. He never gave another cent.

Like New Hampshire weather, Dartmouth College is full of extremes: a hotbed of liberals peppered with silly arch-conservatives. For example, the arch-conservative student who lived down the hall from me hung a Confederate flag on one wall, hung a Rhodesian flag on the other, and wore an upside-down peace button showing a bomber and the words “Drop it!”

When Democrats vying to be U.S. president visit New Hampshire, they love to give speeches at Dartmouth College, so the college liberals will cheer them and make them feel good. The rest of the state, which is mainly Republican, ignores them.

Manchester

I live in New Hampshire’s biggest city, which is spelled “Manchester” but pronounced “Manch has duh.” That pronunciation summarizes the city: Manch has, duh, stupid people. When I lived in Boston, I had the pleasure of chatting with advanced Harvard and M.I.T. students about the meaning of life; but now I’m stuck in Manchester, where the main intellectual question is:

At first glance, Manchester is just a dying mill town, full of abandoned boarded-up textile mills along the river. But at second glance, Manchester is… still an abandoned mill town. Not until you take a third glance do you realize Manchester is full of secrets, such as:

Manchester contains many cultures:

Manchester is where you could find the hotel on which this poem is based:

Okay, I confess I exaggerated a bit: not all the rooms have blood in the drains.

Years ago, I moved to Boston and made it my home town. Here’s why.

Who lives in Boston?

Boston is America’s most intellectual city. It bulges with about 100 wonderful colleges, and its suburbs contain others that are even more prestigious, such as Harvard University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), Wellesley College, and Tufts University.

M.I.T. is New England’s top engineering school. Most students at M.I.T. are tops in engineering (and science & math) but weak in humanities. Many students at Harvard are the opposite: bright in humanities but weak in science & math. Hence this incident:

Boston subways are packed with students. The main subway station treats you to free music by student musicians.

In Boston subways, the image is “students” — unlike New York subways, where the image is “drunks.”

Many Bostonians are escapees from New Jersey. As youngsters, they lived in New Jersey, graduated from fine high schools there, and got admitted to prestigious Boston-area universities. When they graduated from the universities, they’d fallen so in love with Boston that they didn’t want to leave, so they decided to live in Boston permanently. On the walls of their Boston apartments, they hang Kliban’s cartoon showing a man running away from a smokestack and entitled “Houdini escaping from New Jersey.”

Though Boston can charm you awhile, many Bostonians eventually move beyond it, to Maine’s countryside, just a few hours away. Maine is populated mainly by escapees from Boston, just as Boston is populated by escapees from New Jersey. Ornithologists call that the “migration pattern of creative humans.”

Before escaping to Maine, intellectual students are torn between a love of Boston and a love of San Francisco, whose suburbs include the great universities of Berkeley and Stanford. But San Francisco is worse than Boston in 3 ways: its monotonously foggy climate denies you the thrill of seeing golden sunshine and snowstorms; its steep hills, like warts, prevent you from jogging across the city smoothly; and it lacks Boston’s old-world charm. On the other hand, Bostonians visiting San Francisco are forced to confess that compared to San Francisco, Boston is a third-world country, technologically and socially 3 years behind.

Visitors

Boston is a magnet that draws visitors from all over the world. We get to shake hands with proud parents (of Harvard students), French Canadians (coming “south” to Boston to spend an enjoyable day), history buffs (gaping at the birthplace of the American Revolution with its Boston Massacre, the Boston Tea Party, Paul Revere’s ride, and Battle of Bunker Hill), engineers (analyzing the high-tech companies encircling Boston), and nature lovers (wandering through Boston while searching for beautiful fall foliage).

Yes, they come from all over. On the sideway leading up to my Boston apartment, I even found a matchbook saying, “Toot’n Totum is the only home-owned chain of convenience food stores in Amarillo.” I feel proud that my sidewalk’s magnanimous enough to receive litter from Amarillo, Texas.

What Europe gave Boston

Boston is America’s most European city. The street I’ve lived on is so pretty and quaint that my visitors believe they’ve been magically transported to an English fairy tale.

Boston has a history of being loads of fun, beginning with how the city got its name. Centuries ago, England had a saint called “Saint Botolph,” who started a town called “Botolph’s town,” which got shortened to “Bo’s town,” then further shortened to “Boston.” That’s how the English city of Boston got its name. America’s Boston was named after England’s.

Neighbors

Boston’s a patchwork of hundreds of tiny neighborhoods, each 4 blocks long and a fascinating microcosm of society.

The most famous neighborhoods are:

But those neighborhoods are just the obvious ones. Walk 4 blocks in any direction, and you’ll discover yet another neighborhood!

Moreover, in Boston, every single block has its own character — and its inhabitants are proud of it. Whenever a Bostonian reveals his address, he gives it with pride.

My own neighborhood I lived in Boston on Saint Botolph Street, which years ago became famous for its prostitutes. One of my elderly readers sent me a letter admitting that while a student back in the 1940’s, he flunked his freshman year at M.I.T. because he spent too much time on Saint Botolph Street.

The prostitutes eventually left Saint Botolph Street and moved to lusher pastures, but the street’s reputation lives on, and it’s attracted a strange bunch of folks — such as me!

My own neighbors My neighbors on Saint Botolph Street were lots of fun.

Down the hall from me was a pair of bedrooms whose occupants shared my kitchen and bath. That pair of bedrooms became home to many of Boston’s finest citizens:

Those characters living down the hall can’t compare to the neighbors in the adjacent buildings.

But before that latest fire, I got a real kick out of the people who lived in that building:

In that building, the main source of income was drugs and fencing stolen goods. Truly an outstanding tribe of entrepreneurs!

But in that building, my favorite family was the one where mom and dad would disappear each day and leave their two 5-year-old girls alone in the apartment.

Edwin Arlington Robinson When I was hunting for a room to live in, I happened to wind up at “92 Saint Botolph Street,” because it was fine but cheap. After moving in, I discovered that one of my neighbors was one of my heroes: the famous poet Edwin Arlington Robinson lived just a few doors away, at 99 Saint Botolph Street. Years earlier, when I was a high-school kid in New Jersey, I loved reading his poems, so I was thrilled to discover he lived just a few doors away. Unfortunately, he died 22 years before I was born. We were both tortured writers.

In case you don’t remember who he was, here are my abridged versions of poems he wrote in 1897, as part of his book called The Children of the Night.…

Recite this poem when you’re jealous of a rich person or think of killing yourself:

Recite this villanelle (poem with repeated lines) when you move out of your home (or the White House’s occupant changes at the end of the 4-year term, or the House of Representatives goes on vacation):

Give this retort if your friends complain you waste too much time writing poetry instead of making big bucks:

Boston’s old-world charm keeps getting struck by lightning thoughts from its professors and students:

Street people

As you walk down Boston streets, you’ll meet the Dickensian characters who give Boston its special charm.

Friendliness

Boston is friendlier than New York. In New York, everybody is distrustful, expects to get ripped off or mugged, and lives in fear. In Boston, muggings are equally popular and prices are even higher — but nobody minds, because Boston’s crooks all smile.

Boston is more manageable than New York. New York is too big: it overwhelms. Boston’s buildings are shorter and its neighborhoods tinier, so a brief walk through Boston lets you feel you’ve mastered it all. In Boston, you feel you own the city; in New York, you feel the city owns you.

Fantasyland

My dad called Boston a “toy city” because of its tiny buildings, tiny neighborhoods, and tiny inhabitants (mainly kids who are students). He preferred New York, which he called the “real” city. (Cynics call New York the “real” mess!)

I love Boston, because I love to live in fantasyland.

Boston’s in Massachusetts, whose biggest fantasy was George McGovern. In the 1972 Presidential election, Massachusetts was the only state that voted for McGovern instead of Richard Nixon. After Nixon won, botched Watergate, and had to resign, Massachusetts cars sported proud bumper stickers saying, “Don’t blame me — I’m from Massachusetts!”

Weather

Boston is the 3^rd windiest city in the United States. It’s much windier than Chicago. Th only U.S. cities windier than Boston are Oklahoma City and Butte Montana (if you don’t count Washington D.C.’s windbag politicians).

Boston’s average wind speed is 12½ miles per hour. But that “average” is misleading. Sometimes, the air is perfectly still. At many other times, the wind whips by at 100 miles per hour — especially near Boston’s Hancock Tower.

Boston’s in New England, where the weather continually changes, quickly and unpredictably. Back in the 1800’s, Mark Twain said, “If you don’t like New England’s weather, wait a minute.” He also said:

Driving

Here’s mankind’s biggest challenge: driving through Boston.

For example, suppose you’re trying to visit a friend who says he lives on “A Street.” If you look at a map, you’ll find that Boston contains three streets called “A Street.”

Similarly, Boston contains three B Streets. Boston also contains five Lincoln Streets, five Pleasant Streets, and six Park Streets.

After figuring out which A Street to go to, your next problem is to figure out which streets will take you there. That’s a major challenge, since practically every street in Boston is curved.

Boston was planned by meandering cows: each old street was a cow path, curved to avoid hills and ditches. When Boston city planners lopped off the hills to fill the ditches, they forgot to straighten the cow paths, so Boston’s streets are still curved, to avoid the hills and ditches that no longer exist. In Boston’s intellectual suburb (Cambridge), Massachusetts Avenue curves so sharply that the natives describe Harvard University as being “at the corner of Massachusetts Avenue and Massachusetts Avenue.”

Traffic signs To make Boston driving a challenge, most of the popular streets are marked “One Way,” usually in the opposite direction from where you want to go, and with no obvious alternative route in sight. To increase your challenge, Boston city planners consider street signs to be optional, so that you’re never quite sure which street you’re on. The few street signs that remain are often wrong.

My favorite signpost is on Boston’s outskirts. At the top of the post, a sign says you’re going south; underneath is a sign saying you’re going north. Altogether, the signs say you’re going south on route 93 and north on route 128. Which direction are you really going in: south or north? The correct answer is neither: you’re really going west!

But suppose you’re nerdy enough to bring a map that shows which streets are one-way. Your troubles aren’t over yet: you’re just about to turn left onto the street you wish, which even goes in the direction you wish, when all of a sudden you’re confronted by a sign saying “No Left Turn.” To be legal, you try to somehow drive around the block, but you get a surprise: each side of the block has a combination of “One Way” and “No Left Turn” signs designed so that you can’t reach your destination. “You can’t get there from here” is a popular saying in Boston. Every taxi driver knows the only solution: interpret the “No Left Turn” sign to mean “Turn left as fast as possible, before anybody notices.”

Traffic lights You can tell a newcomer to Boston by the way he reacts to traffic lights. He’s under the mistaken impression that a red light means “stop.”

Rotaries Boston city planners suffer from one major fetish: rotaries. Boston and China are the only places in the whole world that have so many rotaries.

Driving into a Boston rotary is like jumping into a washing machine filled with sharks during the “spin” cycle: coming out is either miraculous or bloody.

Jams Boston traffic is so heavy that you’re guaranteed to find yourself in a massive traffic jam before you reach your destination.

Parking To park, seasoned Boston drivers use the “Braille method”: bump the cars surrounding you until you finally nestle into the space between them.

When you come back the next day to retrieve your car, don’t be surprised if it’s gone. Boston’s the car-theft capital of America. If you park your car, and it’s still there the next day, you’ll pat yourself on your back for being lucky — until you burst out in tears when you see the parking ticket. Nearly every parking space in Boston is marked “illegal.” A parking ticket can cost you $100 or more.

No Republicans

Boston’s a Democrat city. In Boston, calling somebody a “Republican” is equivalent to calling the person an “ass.” The Phoenix (Boston’s underground newspaper) has run many personal ads where women say they want to date a man, any nice man, but “no Republicans.”

In Cambridge (the town containing Harvard and M.I.T.), Democrat Al Gore beat George W. Bush during the year 2000 elections, of course. But here’s the shocker: during that election, even Ralph Nader beat Bush. Yes, Bush came in 3^rd.

Little peculiarities

Boston’s peculiar.

Charles River The Charles River separates Boston from its intellectual suburb, Cambridge (home of Harvard and M.I.T.). Three major bridges cross the Charles River: one bridge goes to Harvard; one goes to M.I.T.; and the middle bridge comes from Boston University and goes to nowhere.

The bridge that comes from Boston University is called the “Boston University Bridge.” But the bridge that goes to M.I.T. is not called the “M.I.T. Bridge”; instead it’s called the Harvard Bridge, because Harvard owns it.

As you walk across the Harvard Bridge, from Boston to M.I.T., look down near your feet: you’ll see a surprise! Painted onto the sidewalk is a marker saying “10 Smoots.” As you continue walking, you come to a marker saying “20 Smoots,” then markers saying “30 Smoots,” “40 Smoots,” etc., until you reach bridge’s far end, where the final marker says “364.4 Smoots, plus one ear.” Here’s why:

The Charles River is beautiful, especially during the spring, when it’s dotted with sailboats. But its beauty is just on the surface: underneath, it’s polluted. One hot summer day, the water’s surface evaporated, to let the polluted water underneath reached the air and give off such a strong sulfurous stench that the drivers on Storrow Drive were overcome by the fumes, lost control of their cars, and crashed into each other!

Scrod Boston is famous for a fish dish called scrod (young Atlantic cod & halibut, split for cooking) and for intellectual cab drivers (often foreign students), which combine in this tale:

Wednesday Boston’s the only city where “Wednesday” has a special meaning. In fact, the best way to determine how long a person’s lived in Boston is to ask, “What’s Wednesday?” If the person can’t answer the question correctly, the person isn’t a true Bostonian.

John Hancock Tower The John Hancock Tower is Boston’s tallest building, but you can make it disappear! Here’s how.…

Stand on Boylston Street, on the block between Clarendon Street and Dartmouth Street. Stand directly under the “R” of the green “STATE STREET BANK” sign.

From that position, the entire John Hancock Tower seems to “disappear.” Specifically, the building’s longest sides (which are a whole city block long) hide from your view (because they sit at a peculiar angle), so the entire Tower seems to be just a narrow, fragile, tall wall of unsupported glass.

Street performers The best street performers are the ones you find each summery day in front of Quincy Market. One group, called the “Shakespeare Brothers,” has an amazing way with words. The other group, called the “Dueling Bozos,” juggles on unicycles. Both groups include magic, audience participation, and practical jokes; they give you the best laughs to be had in Boston.

I remember the first time I saw the Shakespeare Brothers; I’ll never forget their act, which consisted of fake magic.

And that’s why we all love Boston. Boston isn’t a city: it’s a joke. It’s the world’s best-kept zoo. And we love it.

 

New York City is divided into 5 boroughs: Manhattan, Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Staten Island.

Queens

This borough was probably named after Queen Catherine of England in 1683, though historians aren’t sure. In 1988, the government of Queens decided to erect a huge statue of her,
35 feet high, facing the United Nations (which is across the river in Manhattan), with encouragement from Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter. But when the statue was built, Queens citizens refused to let it stay in Queens, because of these objections:

Queen Catherine quickly became the most disliked woman in Queens. Now her statue hides in upstate New York, where her face got mutilated by Mother Nature and poorly reconstructed by an apprentice sculptor.

The Bronx

This is the only borough that requires you to say “the” before it: you must say “the Bronx.” Here’s why:

Manhattan

Some folks say the Indians named the main borough “Manhatton” when they saw it get overrun by European men wearing stupid hats.

Staten Island

Some folks say “Staten Island” got its name when Henry Hudson first saw it and asked his crew:

Some say it should be spelled “Statin Island” because its residents love to pop pills that are statins.

Brooklyn

People from Brooklyn have an accent, explained on page 269.

Canadians love telling this tale:

Yes, Canadians have trouble dealing with their southern neighbor! In the same bloody vein, here’s a riddle:

Answer:

Margaret Atwood said:

Pierre Trudeau (who was Canada’s prime minister) said:

Justin Trudeau (Pierre’s son who became prime minister) said:

Will Ferguson said:

Laurence J. Peter (who invented the Peter Principle) said:

Mike Myers said:

Andy Barrie said:

 

The most important foreign country is China. Here’s why.…

China is slightly smaller than the U.S. but contains 4 times as many people. There are over 1.44 billion people in China, compared with .33 billion in the U.S.

There are 6 billion people in the whole world. A quarter of them live in China.

At first glance, China doesn’t look crowded; but it is. The U.S. has just one crowded city (New York); China has several. The U.S. has vast unoccupied areas (forests, deserts, mountains, canyons, and swamps); China’s are smaller.

To prevent further crowding, the Chinese government passed many laws encouraging couples to have just 1 child (though the government later switched to recommending 2 children and now recommends 3, because now too many of the Chinese are retired, there aren’t enough young workers, and too many Chinese parents want to spend money on just 1 child).

India is even more crowded: it’s much smaller than China but contains almost as many people (1.39 billion). India permits couples to have many children, and they do. In the next 25 years, people predict India’s population will increase to 1.4 billion, making it even more populous than China; but for now, China is still the most populous country.

Of all the languages in the world, Mandarin Chinese is the most popular native language. For every person whose native language is English, there are 2½ people whose native language is Mandarin Chinese. (The world’s other popular native language is Hindi, spoken in India; it’s just slightly more popular than English.)

If you travel all over the world, you’ll discover that more schools teach English than Chinese. In all countries, students study English, usually as a foreign language. Even students in China study English! That makes English the most popular foreign language; but Chinese is the most popular native language.

China is modernizing fast. Chinese consumers are rapidly buying Western goods, and Chinese factories are rapidly making goods to sell to the West. The Chinese are very excited about all that international trade in both directions, and the Chinese have been quickly constructing fancy factories, fancy stores, and fancy housing. China’s stock market and real-estate market have both been generating huge profits for investors. China is exciting — a hot marketplace.

The Chinese government’s challenge is to control the bubble so it grows safely without bursting. China’s immediate concern is to slow down construction somewhat (to give the electric utilities a chance to catch up with the increased demand) and to fix the banking system (where half of all loans are never repaid, because they’re given too easily to friends, politicians, and failing government-owned businesses).

After the Soviet Union disintegrated, China was left as the only big country worrying the U.S. (Of course, the U.S. worries about smaller countries too, such as North Korea and battlers in the Middle East.) China is worrisome because:

Goods from China have cost little because the Chinese government kept an artificial exchange rate of about 8 yuan per dollar, even though most economists say a fairer rate would be 5 yuan per dollar. Other countries have asked China to change the exchange rate, and China’s promised to do so by the 2008 Olympics. So far, China has let the exchange rate dip to about 6 yuan per dollar, so a yuan costs about 17¢. When China eventually lets the exchange rate fall to 5 yuan per dollar, the whole world’s trade could be thrown out of kilter, unless China handles the change carefully.

China’s borders touch many countries that the U.S. worries about. Though most Chinese people yellow-skinned, some are white (near Russia’s border) and some are brown (near India’s border). Like the U.S., China has many minorities, which celebrate their own cultures, though not as freely as in the U.S. (since the Chinese government frowns on religions and anything threatening the Chinese Communist Party).

The world’s first humans began in Africa 14 million years ago, where they were black. Some of those migrated north to the Middle East, where they turned lighter. Then some migrated farther north to Europe (where they turned white), while others migrated to India and then China (where they turned yellow) and then to Alaska and the rest of the Americas (where they turned red).

Dynasties

China had many dynasties.

Xia dynasty At first, China’s inhabitants were just a bunch of disorganized hunters and farmers (starting half a million years ago), but in 2200 B.C. a kingdom was finally established. The king’s family name was Xia. His kingdom, called the
Xia dynasty, was ruled by him and later by his descendants.

Shang dynasty In 1750 B.C., a rebel leader overthrew the Xia dynasty. His family name was Shang. He started the
Shang dynasty. During the Shang dynasty, the Chinese people became excellent at working in bronze, and they also began to write more (often by carving characters into pig bones).

During the Shang dynasty, whenever a king would die, he’d be buried with his possessions and more than 100 slaves, who were thrown in his burial pit while they were alive or after being beheaded. (Later dynasties were kinder and threw in terra cotta statues of slaves instead of real people.)

During the Shang dynasty, whenever an important building was finished, the building would be consecrated by sacrificing some humans. Unlike other dynasties, the Shang dynasty used this strange rule: whenever a king died, the next king would be the dead king’s brother (not son); and if there were no more brothers left, the kingship would pass to the dead king’s cousin (the king’s mother’s oldest nephew).

Zhou dynasty The last Shang king, who was ridiculously mean, was overthrown in 1100 B.C. by a chieftain from the frontier tribe called Zhou. That chieftain began the Zhou dynasty. It was more normal than the Shang dynasty: it used father-to-son succession and avoided human sacrifice. In 771 B.C., the Zhou dynasty’s capital was sacked by barbarians; the king was killed. His relatives fled east, where they set up a new capital and continued the Zhou dynasty.

During the Zhou dynasty, 3 conflicting philosophies arose:

Today, Chinese people are still confused about which of those 3 philosophies to follow — whether to be kind, tough, or mysterious — and many heartaches are caused by modern Chinese governments who switch erratically among those 3 philosophies.

Toward the end of the Zhou dynasty, the Zhou controlled just the eastern part of China and was fighting other states in battles that grew gigantic, with 500,000 soldiers on each side.

Qin dynasty In 221 B.C., the western frontier state called Qin finished winning against all rivals (mainly because Qin had lots of iron to make iron weapons). That began the Qin dynasty. (The English name “China” means “Qin’s country.”)

The Qin’s king, Qin Shihuangdi, called himself “emperor” (a title previously used just for mythological gods). He followed the advice of Legalists: he was tough, killed (or banished) all Confucian scholars who disagreed with the Legalists, burned Confucian books (and most other books too, keeping just books about medicine, pharmacy, agriculture, and divination), and had a policy of executing generals who showed up late for maneuvers. He created the Great Wall by combining little walls the warring states had created for themselves. (His Great Wall was made of just packed earth. Later dynasties turned it into brick.) To control what had become a big country, he divided it into 36 provinces, each headed by an official reporting directly to him.

That emperor died in 210 B.C.

Han dynasty Shortly after Qin Shihangdi’s death, a soldier bringing in draftees was getting delayed by rain. He feared getting executed for tardiness along with his draftees, so the whole group of them revolted. Those revolutionaries got executed, but the turmoil they fomented led to new leadership in 206 B.C.: the Han dynasty, which is considered China’s best dynasty. (Most people in modern China proudly claim they’re “Han Chinese.”) During the Han dynasty, China gained many improvements:

The Han dynasty ruled until 220 A.D. — except for a brief interruption by a reformer named Wang Mang. (He’d worked in the royal palace and was appointed “emperor” by the Han household from 8 A.D. until his death in 25 A.D.)

In 220 A.D., the Han dynasty fell apart. Here’s why:

350 years of confusion After the Han dynasty fell, China got 350 years of fighting & confusion, during which the Han people kept moving south, while barbarians kept moving into China from the north and assimilated themselves into the northern population. During that period, Buddhism (which had come from India) became more popular and started including features from Daoism.

Post-Han dynasties Finally, China got major dynasties:

The Sui dynasty (589-618) unified China again. This dynasty was based in the north (so partly barbarian).

The Tang dynasty (618-907) was almost as good as the Han. It was based in the north (so partly barbarian). During the Tang dynasty, block printing was invented, which helped spread the written word to the masses.

The Song dynasty (960-1279) was almost as good as the Tang. During the Song dynasty, use of the printing press spread, and better ways were invented to grow & harvest rice. (One trick was to use fast-growing rice from Vietnam.) Before the Song dynasty, Chinese people had just 2 ways to get rich & famous (be in the government or own land), but during the Song dynasty a 3^rd rich&famous class was formed: merchants.

Unfortunately, the Song rice system worked so well that future dynasties saw no need to improve it further, no need to do more research, no need to industrialize, so China’s progress started to fall behind Europe’s.

The Yuan dynasty (1279-1368) was established by Mongolian barbarian horsemen who attacked from the north. The Yuan dynasty was a puppet government controlled by the Mongolian Supreme Leader, Kublai Khan (Genghis Khan’s grandson). Those Mongolians were kind enough to leave Chinese culture intact and not destroy it.

Two Italian brothers, Niccolo & Matteo Polo, were the first Europeans to travel across Asia. In China, they met Kublai Khan, who gave them a letter to take back to the Pope, saying China wanted the Pope to send teachers. On their second trip to China, they took a letter from the Pope (along with 2 missionaries who chickened out before reaching China), and they also took along Niccolo’s son, Marco Polo, who impressed Kublai Khan and became Kublai Khan’s advisor and a governor of big provinces. After 20 years in China, Marco Polo returned to Italy and wrote a book telling Europeans how great China was.

Unfortunately, the paragraph you’ve just read might be full of lies and exaggerations, since our only source of info about the Polo family is Marco Polo’s book, which historians don’t completely believe, because:

Regardless of its truthfulness, his book had a big effect on Europe: it made Europeans curious about China.

Land travel from Europe to China became endangered by bandits in-between, so Europeans started searching for a way to reach China by sea. (Later, that searching made Columbus accidentally discover America.)

The Ming dynasty (1368-1644) was started by a rebellious army officer (who was Han Chinese and had previously been a peasant and Buddhist monk), so it was a true Chinese empire: it threw the Mongolian leaders out. Life during the Ming dynasty was peaceful, except for this: when that first Ming emperor discovered his prime minister was plotting against him, he beheaded the prime minister and the prime minister’s family and 40,000 other people too.

The Qing dynasty (1644-1911) was run by Manchurian barbarians who attacked from the North, so it was disliked.

During the Qing dynasty, China was approached by Westerners (the Portuguese then the Spanish, British, French, Germans, Russians, and Americans), who wanted to buy Chinese tea, silk, and porcelain. But the Qing dynasty didn’t want to buy much from Westerners in return, so trade was stifled.

British traders solved the problem by encouraging people in the Chinese city of Guangzhou to buy raw cotton & opium that the British shipped from British-controlled India. Opium was illegal in China, but the British got it in by using Chinese smugglers and corrupt officials.

The Qing dynasty sent a commissioner to Guangzhou to stop the illegal opium. He detained all foreigners and destroyed 20,000 chests of British opium. The British retaliated by starting the Opium War in 1839. China was surprised at the strength of the British navy and lost the war in 1842 to Britain, which won many concessions from China, including the entire island of Hong Kong, plus tax breaks and freedom from having to obey any Chinese laws. That made the Chinese more curious about Western thought, so Chinese scholars started studying Western thinking.

After several more revolts, famines, and foreign takeovers of China’s puppets (the French took over Cambodia & South Vietnam, the British took over Burma & Kowloon, the Russians took over Turkestan, and the Japanese took over Taiwan & Korea), the Qing dynasty finally was overthrown by dissidents in 1911. It was the last dynasty!

Republics

In 1912, a republic was formed, whose presidents would be chosen by legislatures instead of heredity. The first president was Dr. Sun Yat-sen (“Sun Yixian” in pinyin). He was born in China but grew up in Hawaii. He’d also been a physician in Hong Kong, lived in Japan & the United States, and raised donations from Chinese people around the world. Nearly everybody liked him. He’s called “The Father of Modern China.”

But a military leader, Yuan Shikai, wanted to be president too. To prevent civil war, Dr. Sun agreed to step down and let Yuan Shikai be the leader.

But Yuan Shikai turned out to be a despot. He changed the constitution to give himself more power. Dr. Sun’s friend,
Song Jiaoren, created a political party (called the Nationalists or National People’s Party or Guomindang or Kuomintang or KMT), which campaigned against Yuan Shikai and won most seats in the legislature. Yuan Shikai responded by getting Song Jiaoren & several pro-KMT generals assassinated. Then 7 provinces rebelled against Yuan Shikai, but he suppressed the rebellion. Scared, the legislature agreed to confirm Yuan Shikai as president. Then he outlawed the KMT and removed its members from the legislature. Then he suspended the whole legislature and forced onto China a new constitution that made him president for life. Then he decided to become a monarch. Then everybody revolted against him; but before they could lynch him, he died of natural causes in 1916.

Then China broke apart: regional warlords fought each other. In 1919, Dr. Sun reestablished the KMT, and in 1921 the KMT controlled southern China; but warlords still controlled northern China (and Beijing). Dr. Sun tried to get help from Western countries; but they ignored him, so he turned to the Soviet Union, which agreed to help his KMT but also help a smaller party, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). The Soviet Union started trying to convince those 2 parties to merge.

In 1923, Dr. Sun’s lieutenant, Chiang Kai-shek (“Jiang Jieshi” in pinyin), went to Moscow for military training. When he returned to China, he set up a military academy in China.

In 1925, Dr. Sun died of cancer. Then Chiang Kai-shek started battling the northern warlords and became the KMT’s leader. In 1926, he conquered half of China.

But after thwarting a kidnapping attempt against him, he got nervous about Communists, dismissed his Soviet advisors, and prevented Communists from holding any KMT leadership positions. Then he declared Communist membership a crime punishable by death, and he started killing Communists.

One Communist who managed to escape was Mao Zedong (who’d been a peasant, student, librarian, and poet). He and other communists fled west, so China had 3 capitals: Beijing (in the north, controlled by warlords), Nanjing (in the southeast, controlled by the KMT), and Wuhan (in the central south, controlled by the Communists). In 1928, the KMT conquered Beijing. In 1934, the KMT tried to conquer Communists also, but the Communists escaped by fleeing to the west then north then east, traveling a total of 6,000 miles, which took a year, mainly under Mao Zedong’s leadership; that’s called “The Long March.” During that, the Communists developed a reputation for being nice (especially to peasants), while the KMT were considered mean.

Meanwhile, the Japanese started invading China (Manchuria in 1931, Shanghai in 1932, the rest of China in 1937). Eventually, the Japanese killed 20 million Chinese people (and raped many Chinese women).

Chiang Kai-shek still wanted to concentrate on fighting the Communists, but his KMT associates finally convinced him to fight the Japanese instead. The Communists fought the Japanese also.

At the end of World War 2, the Japanese lost, and so did the KMT: the Communist Party emerged the winner for the hearts, minds, and bodies of the Chinese. Chiang Kai-shek and his KMT fled to the island of Taiwan, where he became Taiwan’s leader. (Under KMT leadership, Taiwan gradually improved. Now Taiwan’s a good, democratic country, full of freedom. It’s modern and financially successful. It’s particularly strong at manufacturing computers and other electronic devices.)

On October 1, 1949, the Communist leader (Mao Zedong) stood in Beijing and proclaimed that the mainland was now under Communist control and called the People’s Republic of China (PRC). It was indeed a republic, except that just members of the Communist Party could run for office.

The PRC’s leaders divided into 2 groups: the leftists versus the rightists:

Mao tended to be leftist (because of his peasant background), and his wife was even more leftist. The leftists tried many extreme experiments, such as these:

Some of those policies had disastrous results. For example, now China is short of trees, so China has bad air (full of pollution & dust). China’s commune experiment was unsuccessful and caused a famine that killed 30 million Chinese people.

The leftists decided: big projects should be run by socialists, not technologists. They said “Better Red than Expert.” The result: many projects failed, and many factories produced goods having poor quality.

Mao died in 1976.

In 1978, a rightist named Deng Xiaoping gained control. Many state-run businesses were privatized. (Unfortunately, some then went bankrupt and stopped paying pensions due to retirees, who suddenly became destitute.)

Deng was practical: he let technologists & capitalists run projects, regardless of ideology. He said:

He also said it’s okay to let some people get rich. He even said:

Deng died in 1997. After him came his protégé, Jiang Zemin, then Hu Jintao, then Xi Jinping, who’ve all continued Deng’s rightist policies.

Now Chinese citizens are allowed to criticize the Chinese government — but permissible criticism is limited to attacking screw-ups (corrupt bribed officials, inefficiency, and inertia), not the Communist system itself.

China’s new worry is that China’s economic boom hasn’t benefited the peasants yet; the income gap between China’s rich and China’s poor has widened. For example, half the Chinese people are poor peasants who don’t have any electricity yet, not even for light bulbs, while many of China’s rich buy air conditioners & cars. In cities, rich people live in condos in new high-rises built by companies whose rich investors haven’t yet paid the migrant laborers who actually did the work. Those migrants are dirt poor, still waiting for the pay they were promised but never received. In some cities, the electric and water companies haven’t been beefed up enough yet to handle all the new factories and high-rise apartments, so people suffer from rationing & brownouts. Half of all bank loans aren’t repaid on time. In March 2004, Hu Jintao gave a speech in which he promised to solve those problems by changing the tax rates (to favor the poor) and handing out fewer private construction permits, until the infrastructure has time to catch up. He also promised to make factories obey China’s minimum-wage law, which most companies have ignored, and that’s why China’s goods have been so cheap!

Frontline In the U.S., public television’s Frontline showed a documentary film about how life in China changed dramatically, with some folks becoming lucky capitalists and others becoming ill beggars. The documentary tracked the lives of several people from different walks of life, in different parts of China, from 1998 (when the Chinese government decided to become more capitalist) to 2002. The documentary had surprisingly sad endings:

Constitution Since China is supposed to be a “republic,” it needed a constitution. China’s constitution is a bizarre mix of leftist & rightist thinking.

The Communist Party is the only party mentioned in the constitution. The constitution’s Article 1 calls China a “democratic dictatorship.” Here’s the full text of Article 1 (in its final version, as revised in 1982):

Article 34 says you’re guaranteed the right to vote — unless the government doesn’t want you to:

Article 36 gives you freedom of religion — unless your religion causes protests or seems physically or mentally “unhealthy” or is controlled by a foreigner, such as the Pope:

Article 40 protects your privacy — except when the government wishes to censor you:

So long

As you can see, Chinese history is quite long. Chinese centralized government (the first dynasty) began in 2200 B.C., which was about 4200 years ago. By contrast, U.S. centralized government (declared by the Declaration of Independence) began in 1776, which was about 250 years ago. That makes “China” about 17 times as old as the “United States”! Compared to China, the U.S. is just a baby country, too young to have any serious history yet.

A Chinese friend attended a party in the U.S. and heard a guest say she was getting a Ph.D. in U.S. history. He laughed and said, “How can you get a Ph.D. in U.S. history? The U.S. has no history!”

Chinese people love watching, on Chinese TV, dramas about Chinese history, especially the intrigues of the emperors and the women who lived with them. They’re much more fascinating than U.S. battles between cowboys & Indians (whoops, I mean “Native Americans”).

What to read

For a funny romp through Chinese history, read:

Then grab more details by reading “History of China” at —

but make sure you type the “www.”

The full Chinese constitution has 138 articles plus 13 amendments. You can read them (except the 10 new amendments added in 2004) on the Internet in English at:

 

I’ve always been curious about Chinese language and culture. When I lived in Boston, I loved to visit Boston’s Chinatown. I even joined some Chinese clubs. Six years ago, I married a Chinese immigrant, whose nickname is “Donna.” In a section of this book called “Donna’s comments,” you can read her comments about China, the United States, and me.

Though I married Donna, I never had a chance to visit China or her relatives — until 2004. What a treat! Visiting China was eye-opening fun!

I told Donna I wanted to meet her relatives and also see how Chinese people live, rather than just hit tourist spots. So she let me visit Chinese homes, take walks with her friends, and go shopping with them for everyday needs.

China is too huge to be seen completely, and my time was limited to 2 weeks (so I could return to New Hampshire and resume answering the endless phone calls about life and computers). I had to adopt this strict schedule: in January 2004, I flew into the capital (Beijing), then quickly flew to Chengdu (a beautiful city in Sichuan province), then got driven to her home town, Jiangyou (2 hours north of Chengdu), where I spent 9 days (with side trips to nearby towns), Then I retraced my steps back to Chengdu (where I lingered 2 days), Beijing (2 more days), and the U.S., so the whole experience lasted 15 days (including transportation).

Beijing’s become quite westernized. The first time I saw it, it looked like an American city (Washington D.C. or the Queens part of New York City), except its signs were in Chinese.

Chengdu has more Asian character but is also partly westernized. Jiangyou is much smaller and hasn’t been westernized as much yet, so I found it the most fascinating, the most “authentic,” the most memorable.

Here are my comments. Most are about Jiangyou, but some apply to the other cities too.…

China’s 3 moods

China is dominated by 3 moods: a rush to westernize, a willingness to bend, and quiet.

Rush to westernize For many centuries, China was isolated from western culture. Now China is rushing to catch up. China is rushing to grab ideas, languages, appliances, cars, language, music, software, the Internet, consumer goods, brands, lifestyles, ideas, and everything else, from the U.S. and Europe (with some help from Japan). But while rushing to do all that, the Chinese take short cuts, which result in poor workmanship and lack of finesse. My summary of China in 2004 is this:

Willingness to bend To understand China, look at its trees. Many of China’s trees have branches that bend wildly, unlike American and German trees, whose branches are boringly straight. China’s culture is inspired by Chinese trees: the culture bends.

For example, Chinese characters have strokes that bend: there are no simple, straight strokes. Traditional Chinese buildings have roofs that are slanted (pitched), but they bend slightly up at the edges and bend up even more at the corners, to form dramatic curves. Chinese people love to bend the rules: they interpret every rule and law “flexibly.”

If a person creates anything exactly straight or acts properly straight-arrow, the Chinese would consider that person too Germanically rigid, an uncultured goose-stepping Nazi asshole, though Western technology keeps trying to impose that requirement.

Quiet Chinese people tend to act quietly, mysteriously.

The love of mystery comes from Daoism. The need to act quietly — tactfully — stems from many centuries of fearing the wrath of Chinese government leaders and officials: if you open your mouth, you might get beheaded, figuratively or literally. Even now, the Chinese government accepts no criticism of its system. Since Chinese households have traditionally been large (including grandparents, grandkids, and other relatives) and close-knit — and since friendships are also tightly woven and are needed to get job references — speaking your mind can get you booed by many generations of people and the whole town and make you become a worthless person.

So Chinese kids still learn this rule: you’d better shut up!

How to travel

Traveling to and through China is an adventure.

Get your visa If you’re an American who wants to visit China, you must get an American passport (from the U.S. government) and a Chinese visa (from the Chinese government).

Be careful what you say on your visa application! On mine, I made the mistake of saying my occupation was “publisher and author of computer books.” I should have left out the word “author,” since the Chinese government doesn’t trust “authors.” The Chinese consulate phoned my wife and grilled her about me, with questions such as:

They’re paranoid about foreign journalists interviewing real Chinese citizens, especially in Tibet!

Donna said I was just a dumb computer guy (which was true at that time). The consulate said that was okay. But I might not be allowed to return to China in the future.

After America’s September 11^th tragedy, the U.S. government got meaner about foreigners visiting the U.S., so the Chinese government got meaner about Americans visiting China: the visa fee has been raised, and you’re not allowed to get your visa by mail — you must personally walk into the Chinese consulate (or bribe a friend or travel agent to walk in for you).

Beijing-airport tax Whenever you want to fly out of Beijing airport (to the U.S. or other countries or other Chinese cities), you must get a ticket but then, afterwards, stand in a special separate line to pay an airport-construction departure tax.

If your travel agent forgot to mention the airport-construction departure tax, or you were duped into thinking your ticket includes all taxes, tough luck! No ticket sold in the U.S. or China or anywhere else ever includes that airport-construction departure tax: you must go stand in the tax line and make sure you haven’t spent all your money already — or you won’t get home!

Warning: the tax is very high and depends on where you’re going.

7 road vehicles Chinese cities (such as Beijing, Chengdu, and Jiangyou) all have modern streets, like U.S. cities.

In Jiangyou, you commonly see 7 kinds of vehicles: bicycles, tricycles, motorcycles, taxis, cars, vans, and buses. (Trucks and trains are rare.)

The typical bicycle has a just a tiny basket in front. It doesn’t hold much.

Tricycles come in 2 forms.

Most motorcycles resemble the ones in the U.S. and Japan.

Taxis, cars, and vans are slightly smaller than the ones in the U.S., because most Chinese people are short and thin and have less money. (If you’re 6 feet tall, you’ll need to duck.) 10 years ago, most of China’s cars were made by Volkswagen, and many of them are still on the streets, but newer vehicles have a wide variety of brands, especially Changan (which is Chinese), Citroen (which is French), and Buick (which is American). Minivans are too expensive for normal use: they’re used mainly by government-employee car pools. Cars and minivans cost more in China than in the U.S.; for example, a minivan in China costs $60,000. (Most other goods cost slightly less in China than in the U.S.)

In Jiangyou, the buses have no doors. Instead, the bus’s doorway has strips of clear plastic hanging down from the ceiling; to enter the bus, you push the plastic strips aside. Most stores are the same way: no doors, just plastic strips to push aside. That’s because Jiangyou is in Sichuan province, which is always warm. (You’ll find more doors in Beijing, which is farther north.)

Besides the bicycles, tricycles, motorcycles, taxis, cars, vans, and buses, the streets also contain pedestrians.

How to drive Here’s how to drive a car, Jiangyou style:

Since Chinese drivers don’t leave much distance between themselves and other cars, crashes are common. When driving on the expressway from Chengdu to Jiangyou, I saw a 40-car pileup: the highway suddenly turned into a junkyard full of dented trucks, buses, minivans, BMW’s, and all other vehicles imaginable. Very impressive!

To encourage drivers to stay farther apart, expressways have signs showing what “50 meters apart” looks like and what “100 meters apart” looks like. But drivers ignore them.

Intersections Though Chinese drivers don’t take traffic lanes and distances seriously, they respect traffic lights. As in the U.S., red means “stop” and green means “go.” In the U.S., the red light is always above the green, but in cities such as Jiangyou the lights are mounted randomly: sometimes red above green, sometimes green above red, sometimes red left of green, sometimes green left of red. That confuses the colorblind. It also confuses tourists from America, since in America “red left of green” means “don’t go in the left lane but you can go in the right lane.” Traffic lights are usually polite: they show a countdown of how many seconds remain before the light changes.

That’s how traffic lights work, but they’re rare. Most small intersections have no lights. Most big intersections have rotaries instead. The typical rotary is huge (2 blocks wide), with a center that’s a grassy park full of strolling pedestrians (plus the elderly doing aerobic martial-arts exercises), who get into the park by playing a game of chicken with the cars. At night, the park’s grass looks so green that you’ll wonder how the Chinese got such amazing fertilizer, until you look more closely and see the trick: the grass is lit by floodlights that are tinted green.

Careless drivers At night, many cars turn on just dim parking lights or don’t turn on any lights at all. Seatbelts are usually ignored — even on expressways, where they’re theoretically required.

Expressways The typical expressway has 3 lanes in each direction. They’re labeled in Chinglish. For example, on the expressway from Chengdu to Jiangyou, the left lane is called the “overtaking lane”; the middle lane is called the “main lane”; the right lane, which is for breakdowns and other slowed traffic, is called the “parking lane.”

Atop the expressway’s tollbooths, you see a giant surprise: a huge, surprising billboard ad that’s hundreds of feet wide, so it stretches over all the lanes and all booths. Wow! U.S. highway departments would raise lots of money (and complaints) if they’d do the same and turn U.S. tollbooth roofs into billboards.

Ask for directions When you try to find your way through small cities (such as Jiangyou), you discover there are no available maps and no numbers on buildings. Sorry, guys: you must “act like a woman” and continually ask for directions from knowledgeable local folks (handsome policemen, taxi drivers, tricyclists, and neighbors).

Housing

Rural peasants often live in shacks. City folks usually live in apartments (rented apartments or condo apartments). In Jiangyou, for example, many huge condo complexes are being built fast; each complex holds thousands of people.

Cheap luxury Housing is cheap. For example, my wife (Donna) bought a brand new 3-bedroom condo apartment in Jiangyou for just $12,000. That price includes just bare cement walls and floors; she added $10,000 for appliances, furniture, and décor (with help from her brothers in choosing and installing it), making a total of $22,000. The result is drop-dead gorgeous, the kind of place that would cost a million dollars if it were in Manhattan on Park Avenue.

Her daughter (Mimi) bought an even more gorgeous condo apartment, also new, in a fancier city (Chengdu) for $20,000, plus $10,000 for appliances, furniture and décor (including the fee to the interior designer). That apartment has just 2 bedrooms, but the décor and location are superb.

Exteriors Most of China’s beauty is hidden: the insides of apartments can be gorgeous, but the outsides are drab. Many apartment buildings are just raw cement; others have the cement covered by a tile façade.

(Wood is rarely used in Chinese construction, since most trees were destroyed and burned during the “Great Leap Forward.” Brick is rare also.)

Some buildings have gigantic ornaments mounted on their roofs to make the buildings look taller, more impressive, and classy.

Stairs The typical apartment building is 7 stories high but has no elevator. If you live on the top floor, you need strong legs! One reason why Chinese people are thin is that they get lots of exercise running up and down stairs. (A few apartment buildings have elevators, but those buildings cost too much.)

Even in the nicest apartment buildings, the stairwells are disappointing. The stairs are just cement slabs, covered with dust instead of carpets, and the stairwell’s walls are gashed by people moving furniture in and out.

To save electricity, the stairwell lights are usually off. They’re supposed to turn themselves on when noise is detected, but they’re not sensitive enough, so they tend to stay off until you stomp hard on the stairs. As a result, you’ll see a lot of Chinese people stomping and hollering in stairwells at night, just to get the darn lights to turn on. That’s another example of how things in China “almost work.”

One reason why the stairwells are a mess is that nobody’s responsible for making them better. Condo dwellers pay almost no monthly maintenance fee, so almost no common-area maintenance gets done.

Ceilings Americans like to decorate apartment walls, but the Chinese prefer to decorate apartment ceilings instead.

For example, in Donna’s Jiangyou apartment, the living-room ceiling has edges hiding dozens of recessed colored lights. They’re turned on mainly to celebrate holidays and amuse visitors. Many restaurants use those same kinds of lights.

Many restaurants also hang red paper Chinese lanterns from the ceiling, since red is the Chinese color for happiness. (Americans seeing red think of cherries or blood, but the Chinese think of cheer instead.)

Walls Chinese wall decorations are plain: just a few photos or simple art.

Floors For flooring, you’ll see beautiful woods, tiles, and throw rugs, but no wall-to-wall carpeting.

Dirty shoes Since the stairwells and streets are so dusty, the Chinese typically take off their shoes when entering homes or apartments. The homeowner tries to lend everybody slippers.

If a big crowd of visitors enters the home, there might not be enough slippers to fit everybody, so people try this alternative: when they enter the home, they put blue plastic bags over their shoes, then walk in the bagged shoes. The bags act as galoshes but look ugly, like Wal-Mart shopping bags. To a toddler looking up at the crowd, the people look like gigantic carrots sprouting from shopping bags that are hopping across the floor.

Where’s the toilet? If you’re an American visiting a typical Chinese home, your biggest culture shock will be when you visit the bathroom: there’s no toilet to sit on. Instead, there’s just a hole in the floor: you piss or shit in the hole (while squatting), then push a flush button on the wall.

The hole’s made of porcelain and includes a long shitting area (so you can’t miss). It looks like a urinal that fell over and sunk into the floor.

Since you must squat rather than sit, the typical Chinese bathroom contains no magazines to read.

Just the most westernized homes (such as Donna’s and Mimi’s) have sitting toilets. They require you to flush twice (press the left button and also the right button).

Where’s the bathtub? The typical Chinese home has no bathtub. When you take a shower, there’s no tub and little or no curtain, so the whole bathroom floor gets wet. That’s why the typical Chinese bathroom floor has a gigantic grated drain hole, plus a mop to help you push water into that hole.

In Donna’s apartment, which is luxurious, the bathroom actually includes a shower stall, with a sliding door and its own drain! That stall is quite fancy, with water squirting you from the stall’s sides, the stall’s roof, and the stall’s hand-held hose. Whee — it’s fun! The stall looks like a Jacuzzi that was tilted on its side to stand upright. It even includes a ledge to rest your foot on while the foot is washed. Like most other things in China, when that shower stall was first installed it failed — the hot water turned cold after about 10 seconds — but her brothers grabbed their wrenches and fixed the plumbing themselves, rather than go through the trouble of yelling at the “professional” plumbers they’d hired to construct the bathroom.

Hot water In China, hot water can be temperamental because the typical home has no hot-water tank.

Instead, the apartment’s hot-water heater is tankless, gas-fired, and hides in the kitchen. When you turn on a hot-water faucet anywhere in the apartment, the heater senses the drop in water pressure and turns itself on, instantly heating the water passing through the heater’s pipe.

If two people try using hot water at the same time, the heater is usually inadequate.

Hot air To heat the air in winter, Beijing (which is cold) uses American-style piped heat.

Sichuan (which is warm like Atlanta) uses big electric space heaters instead, which are stashed in corners or mounted on walls. In the summer, those space heaters act as air conditioners: they have secret pipes to the outside, to the blow heat out.

Windows Many apartments have luxurious big windows (which Americans call “picture windows”).

But like most other things in China, those beautiful windows are made cheaply: just single-pane. They offer little insulation. Especially in Sichuan’s winter, they collect so much dew that they look like somebody dumped a bucket of oil on them: they’re too blurry to see through, until the dew evaporates in the afternoon.

Cheap workmanship Here are other examples of cheap workmanship I’ve seen in new products:

Appliances The Chinese homes I visited in Sichuan typically had a big T.V. screen, a CD player, a DVD player, nice furniture, and a washing machine. But you get no clothes dryer, so you must hang the clothes somewhere (a room, patio, or porch) and wait for them to dry.

There are two kinds of washing machine: the newest kind (called “automatic”) resembles American kinds, but a cheaper kind (called “semi-automatic”) is still popular and works like this:

You get no “dishwasher” machine, but upper-income folks (like Mimi) have the next best thing: a “dish dryer” (which looks like a microwave oven).

Light switches The typical American light switch looks male: it’s a prick that sticks out of the wall. The typical Chinese light switch looks female instead: it’s a rounded button (which you press or rock).

In a Chinese bathroom, the switches are covered by a clear plastic shell that keeps humidity out of the electronics. To access those switches, lift the shell first.

Water Though China’s tap water has improved, the Chinese still don’t trust it, so they boil it before drinking. Then they drink it warm, or wait for it to cool, or make it cool faster by refrigerating it.

Protective ornaments Where the hallway meets the living room, the wall’s protruding corners are covered with dark-wood protective ornaments, so if you accidentally bump into the corner, you’ll be banging those protectors instead of wrecking the wall.

Hotel frugality When we visited Beijing, Donna treated me to a “4-star international hotel.” (It was called “international” because it included a bathtub.) It used two tricks to discourage us from being wasteful:

Department stores

China still has many small shops but now also has huge department stores, many stories high, new and chic, full of luxurious high fashion and cosmetics from around the world.

Jiangyou’s main department store has two sneaky tricks for keeping customers in the store:

Discounts are advertised differently than in the U.S.: instead of a sign saying “30% off,” you’ll see a Chinese sign saying just “7,” which means “you pay 70% of list price.” As you walk through the store, you’ll notice that some racks of clothes say “7,” while others say “6” (meaning you pay 60% of list price) or “5” (meaning you pay 50% of list price).

Though a department store looks like just a huge single store, financially it resembles a mall: each part of each aisle has its own salesperson, who rents space from the store. To buy an item, you must first hand the item to the salesperson, who scribbles a purchase order for you; then you hand the purchase order to a cashier (elsewhere on the floor) with your payment; then the cashier hands you a receipt, which you bring back to the salesperson, who finally hands you the item you bought.

Food

To get food in China, you have several choices.

Supermarkets China’s supermarkets are like department stores: huge, several floors, including imports, with salespeople in every aisle to offer you advice about what to buy. Some supermarkets are even part of department stores.

If you want to buy fruit or fresh vegetables, don’t just bring them to the supermarket’s main checkout counter: instead, bring them first to the produce department desk’s own clerks, which weigh what you bought.

The Chinese government is trying to convince its citizens to drink more milk (for vitamins and calcium) — and so are milk’s marketers. Milk is not refrigerated; instead, you buy stay-fresh cartons (which you can keep at room temperature) or powdered milk (which you mix with water).

China offers many kinds of “milk,” just like the U.S. offers many kinds of “multivitamin pills.” When you walk down the milk aisle in Jiangyou’s supermarket, salespeople accost you and try to find the best kind of milk for you: for example, you can choose “milk for seniors” or “milk for infants.” In China, all stay-fresh cartons and most powdered milk is whole milk, with just slight modifications. Skim milk is available just as a powder and just if you look hard for it among all the other milks.

As in the U.S., China’s supermarkets include bakery and deli sections, which provide meals cheaper than restaurants.

Fast food In big cities (such as Beijing and Chengdu), you can easily find MacDonald’s (look for the arches) and Kentucky Fried Chicken (look for “KFC”). In Beijing, a Japanese fast-food chain competes against American junk by offering dishes based on rice instead of French fries.

In Beijing, the fast food places are so busy that it’s hard to find an empty table, so they hire ushers who look out for empty seats from departing customers and guide you to them.

Several Chinese companies have started their own fast-food chains. Jiangyou’s best (run by Donna’s sister’s friend) serves American fast food (hamburgers, hot dogs, and soft-serve ice cream) along with European pastry and Chinese-European loaves of bread (thick, dark, tasty, and tangy, with a touch of blueberry jam hiding inside). Instead of buying a hot-dog grill (and finding room for it), this place deep-fries the hot dogs, as if they were French fries.

Tables of fine food In a Chinese home, the typical table is a double-decker: it has a glass surface (to put your food and drinks on), with a wooden surface below (to put knickknacks, napkins, and other distractions).

Most tables are rectangular, in homes and restaurants; but restaurant tables for big groups (6 or more) are round, and the glass surface rotates (and is slightly smaller than the wooden part), so the glass surface acts as a lazy Suzan, holding the pots of food that everybody shares.

You don’t say “pass me the turtle soup”; instead, you just rotate the glass until the turtle soup comes to you. Then you get as much of it as you wish into your individual bowl, which is on the wooden surface.

By the way, about that turtle soup: it really has a dead turtle floating in the middle of it. You see the whole turtle, even its head. Chinese people prefer to eat meats and fish with the head still on, to prove that it’s freshly killed. In restaurants, if you want to order fish, you walk over to the fish tank, look at the fish swimming there, point at the fish you want to eat, and say “kill this one.” You’ll receive it, cooked, with the head still on.

In homes and restaurants, the Chinese eat family style: everybody shares the pots of food that have been cooked. There are no serving spoons: instead, everybody grabs his own spoon or chopsticks and digs into the pots, transferring as much as desired to his personal bowl.

Sharing food like that is unsanitary: if one person is ill and goes back for a second helping, everybody else at the table will eat his illness. On the other hand, the food itself is quite healthy: the food eaten in Sichuan contains lots of watery broth and vegetables, with very little saturated fat, and it’s hard to overeat, since the chopsticks and tiny spoons slow you down, though when rushing the Chinese take this shortcut: raise the personal bowl to the mouth, then shovel food from bowl to mouth as fast as possible, using chopsticks to help push it.

The typical American quickly chomps through a hamburger or a Big Mac. But in Sichuan, you’ll slowly manipulate watery noodles with weird things sitting on them; you won’t get fat.

The Chinese stay thin because of their wet diets, chopsticks, stairs, human-powered transportation, and realization that there’s more to life than just staring at TV screens and computer screens.

Guangzhou’s reputation Guangzhou is the pinyin name for “Canton,” the city that invented Cantonese food, and where people are willing to experiment by eating different kinds of animals. Chinese people say:

No surcharges

In China, you don’t have to tip waiters, taxi drivers, hotel maids, or anybody else. Tipping is never expected.

There’s no general sales tax, either: the price you’re quoted is the price you pay, not a penny more!

That’s why Chinese immigrants to the U.S. don’t tip — and don’t expect to be taxed — until Americans reeducate them.

Time

Most Chinese office workers take a two-hour lunch break, from noon to 2PM. That long lunch is like a Mexican siesta: very practical on a hot day! During lunch, the workers go home if they live nearby.

To take that long break and still finish the day’s work, the workers come in early (8AM) and leave late (6PM). So the day consists of two 4-hour shifts: 8AM to noon, then 2PM to 6PM.

The U.S. has several time zones (Eastern, Central, Mountain, and Pacific) plus Daylight Savings Time. China has none of that silliness: all of China is on the same clock, all year. All China is forced to use Beijing’s clock. Since Beijing is in eastern China, workers in western China must come to work in the dark before sunrise, though after work they enjoy lots of sunshine — like U.S. construction workers.

Entertainment

The Chinese have many ways to amuse themselves.

TV On Chinese TV, the mouths aren’t quite in synch with the sounds. That’s partly because some shows are secretly dubbed (Cantonese actors are dubbed into Mandarin) but also because China’s long-distance satellite-TV system isn’t accurate.

Historical dramas are particularly popular. The typical drama includes lots of talking (among the royalty and occasionally the peasants), interrupted by an occasional kung-fu skirmish. The talk-to-fight ratio reminds me of “The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly” (the famous Clint Eastwood cowboy movie that was mostly talk but interrupted by an occasional fight).

As in the U.S., China TV includes ads. Many of the ads are for health (milk, pills, cosmetics, and toothpaste). The ads show Chinese characters supplemented by some pinyin, English characters, and Internet addresses.

The Chinese leave the TV on, for background sound, when socializing or eating meals. But some TV ads are inappropriate during mealtimes. Reacting to citizen complaints, the government promises that during dinnertime the TV will run fewer ads for feminine-hygiene products.

If you visit China and have a chance to watch TV, turn to channel 9 (CCTV-9). It’s all in English! It’s the international channel, to teach foreigners about China. It’s a pleasant mix of news, views, travelogues, and introductions to Chinese art, culture, language, and regional differences. I wish America had a channel like that to teach foreigners about America!

Chinese New Year Chinese New Year is based on the lunar calendar and comes in late January or early February, depending on the moon’s mood. It’s the country’s biggest holiday, and the whole country gets a week-long vacation, optimistically called Spring Festival (even though it’s really winter), during which the Chinese visit their relatives by fighting to get on overcrowded planes, trains, and buses.

During that week, TV presents the Spring Festival Gala, full of gala spectaculars that are glitzy and mindless. Some folks complain that the gala doesn’t devote enough attention to minorities and social issues. In 2004, the gala’s planners tried to loosen things up by including more audience-participation shows.

During Spring Festival, lots of kids and families shoot off fireworks, from rooftops and parks. They’re not the dinky little fireworks that American kids shoot at July 4^th; instead, they’re industrial-strength fireworks, many feet tall, the size of surface-to-air missiles, shooting hundreds of feet into the air, with multiple payloads, colors, ba-ba-booming sounds, visible from miles away — the kind that Americans would permit only when shot by professionals protected by a moat and a fire department. On Chinese New Year night, the sounds and sights will make you think you’re in a war zone. Chinese families schlep oil drums to the park, then launch the many rockets hiding inside, by remote control, and just hope no girl walking by at the wrong moment has her guts propelled to heaven.

Mahjong When Chinese folks have nothing else to do, they play mahjong, which is a form of poker. Instead of “hearts, diamonds, clubs, and spades,” the suits are “sticks, circles, and chickens.” Instead of being thin, the cards are thick, so they look like wooden dominoes (or big Scrabble letters).

Mahjong players usually gamble small amounts of money. Elderly people like to spend their days relaxing in teahouses while playing mahjong.

Badminton While waiting for customers, shop assistants sometimes stand outside, on the sidewalk, playing badminton. It’s good exercise for the employees, and it attracts attention to the store. But if you try that in the U.S., some bureaucrat will probably complain that the store doesn’t have a badminton-on-sidewalk permit.

Drum corps When a new store’s been constructed and has its grand opening, the store hires a 100-woman drum corps, which marches back and forth in front of the store, banging their drums. It attracts attention to the store and the whole neighborhood.

Hey, kids, why not start a similar service in the U.S., to attract attention to new businesses? Just make sure you get permits!

Historic sites In the U.S., historic sites are rather boring: you usually enter a building, hear a lecture, and get tired. Chinese historic sites are more fascinating, because they’re surrounded by beautiful parks.

To enter a Chinese historic building, you must hop over a wall that’s nearly a foot high. That wall’s the threshold: it marks the doorway’s bottom. All old houses and buildings had those thresholds instead of American-style “doors,” which weren’t needed since Sichuan usually has pleasantly warm weather, no snowstorms, no rainstorms, and no crime.

In the Northeastern U.S., many places brag that “George Washington slept here.” In Sichuan, many towns brag that
“Li Bai lived here.” He was China’s most famous poet. He lived from 701 A.D. to 762 A.D., during the Tang dynasty. He’s called the “drunk poet,” because his poems are full of drunken hallucinations. His most famous poem begins like this:

Like most of his poems, it begins by describing China’s natural beauty, but American men notice it’s also a good poem to recite to a urinal.

Another Sichuan attraction is Du Jiang Yan, the world’s first major water project, built in 250 B.C. by the Qin family (who, 29 years afterwards, conquered the rest of China and called themselves the “Qin dynasty.”) The project was hard: to divert water to Chengdu, Qin’s peasants had to build a dam and blow up a mountain, but explosives hadn’t been invented yet, so they broke the mountain’s boulders apart by lighting fires on them, then dousing the fires with cold water, to make the rocks fissure. After 8 years of that, they finally created a mountain pass for their canal to flow through. Now the canal, dam, and reservoir are surrounded by a park with scenic views of mountains and rivers.

Weather

Sichuan rarely gets rainstorms but often gets drizzles. The drizzles dampen the streets but aren’t strong enough to wash dirt away, so city streets and sidewalks stay dirty and dusty awhile, until finally attacked by city employees who grab huge brooms (resembling tree branches) and sweep every street and sidewalk in the whole city, by hand.

Since Sichuan is usually warm and balmy, retired folks love to relax by sitting outside (playing mahjong at outdoor cafés) or doing aerobic martial-arts dances in parks.

Beijing is farther north, much colder, and much windier. It’s also less relaxed: there are fewer benches to sit on. In winter, Beijing’s grass turns pale, while Sichuan’s stays green.

Trees

In many cities (such as Mianyang in Sichuan province), the bottom 4 feet of each tree trunk are painted white, to discourage bugs from eating the bark.

Hanging roots Especially in downtown Mianyang, you see trees that have strange things hanging down from the branches. Those “strange things” are roots! Yes, roots grow down from the branches and search for the soil. If those extra roots don’t succeed in reaching the soil, they shrivel; otherwise, they grow strong and look like auxiliary trunks.

Painting If you want to become a landscape painter, look at the trees on the hills near Mianyang. The branches bend in strange ways. Especially in winter, the leaves are sparse but come in bunches, which look like powder puffs, so they’re easy to paint: just one dab from a splayed brush will give you a whole puff. New England is best for colors, but China is best for shapes.

Bulges Many trees look pregnant: they have huge bulges around their trunks. If you look at the bulges carefully, you discover they’re bales of hay, tied into balls and hung there by farmers.

Relationships

When I travel, I’m more interested in the people than their wares.

What the Chinese think of America The Chinese are eager to learn English (because they want to understand American music and movies and earn more money from international trade). They like most Americans, though they think Bush was an idiotic callous jerk to start a war with Iraq.

Though Americans often visit big cities such as Beijing, Americans are rarer in small cities such as Mianyang and Jiangyou. Many kids in those cities have never seen an in-the-flesh American before — though they’ve studied English in school and seen Americans on TV — so they stare at me when I walk down the street or sit in a restaurant. They treat me as if I’m a cross between a Martian and a superstar. A 7-year-old girl kept staring at me while I was eating in a restaurant; finally, when I was leaving, she shyly said “Hello” to me in English. I said “Hello” back to her. That made her day. She beamed.

Dancing The Chinese people are proud of their culture. Donna’s relatives showed me their dancing skills and asked me to show them my American dancing, so I showed them the most advanced American dances I’ve mastered: the Bunny Hop and the Hokey-Pokey.

All her relatives started freakily copying my Bunny Hop and Hokey-Pokey, and Donna made me teach those dances to all senior citizens in the park, too! So now I, too, can put on my résumé that I’m an “American who corrupted Chinese culture.”

Advice The Chinese love to give advice. In fact, they insist on giving advice, even when you don’t want it.

A friend of mine visited China for many months and became part of China’s culture. When she returned to the U.S., her roommates complained her personality had changed: she’d turned into an annoying authoritarian asshole, telling them all how to act. She apologized and returned to the American philosophy of “do whatever you want.”

Donna’s daughter explained to me that in China, each group of people (such as a family) develops a leader who tells everybody else in the group what to do; and if anybody asks why, the leader just says, “That’s a rule.” The leader keeps inventing more rules.

Because of China’s history of repressive governments and mass slaughters, survival’s often meant being warned what to do, before you get in trouble. But now that China’s government is starting to loosen up, maybe someday the Chinese will become as free as Americans.

City reputations Sichuan province’s most famous city is Chengdu, which produces beautiful women. (My wife was born there.) Married men who visit Chengdu often wish they’d married Chengdu women instead! Chinese people say:

More often, Chinese people use advanced grammar to purposely create Daoist mysterious confusion, like this:

Recently, other Chinese cities have become even richer than Guangzhou.

“Not One Less”

To experience China without leaving the comfort of your American home, rent a movie about China. I recommend Not One Less, which I found at our local video-rental store in New Hampshire.

It’s about a girl who, though just 13 years old, is forced to take a job as an elementary-school teacher in rural impoverished China, then must run to the city to retrieve a student who ran away, then winds up on TV.

The biggest surprise comes at the end, when you discover who the actors are. The characters are all played by themselves: they used their real names and real titles. Even the bureaucrat was played by… a bureaucrat!

You’ll see the schoolkids get lessons in Chinese & math and see how hard it is to discipline an elementary-school class.

The director is famous in China for trying weird experiments. The movie ends with a political message saying millions of schoolkids run away from school to earn money for their families.

The film is subtitled and won an international award in 1999, but I can’t figure out when the story’s supposed to take place, since the schoolkids give a pledge-of-allegiance to Mao, who died in the 1970’s, and my wife doesn’t believe life in rural China is so bad today. Is it?

Joe Wong

“Joe Wong” was born in China but went to college in the United States, where he became a citizen, a Ph.D. microbiologist at Harvard, and a funny Chinese critic of U.S. life. He said this at a dinner with Vice President Joe Biden & journalists:

88 ways to know you’re Chinese

People who are born in the United States but are ethnically Chinese are called American-born Chinese (ABC). People who are born in Canada but are ethnically Chinese are called Canadian-born Chinese (CBC).

Canadian-born Chinese love to pass around an e-mail that reveals “88 ways to know whether you’re Chinese.” Chinese in Canada and the U.S. have gradually improved the list, to make it truer. I’ve organized it into topics.…