Ricky the Psychopath

In my line of work, Saturdays and Sundays are the hard days.  I work at a cram school, which is basically school for when you're not at regular school.  Playing?  Enjoying your childhood?  God forbid! (Wait a minute, there is no god.  God is the opiate of the masses.  How foolish of me.)  On Saturdays, I have five classes, or ten hours.  On Sundays, I have four classes, or eight hours.  Some people say it must be easy ("all you do is play games with kids") but it's exhausting to spend your 10 of your 14 waking hours being kicked/sneezed on/clambered around on by screaming kids.  By the end of the weekend, I feel like Bloaty the Pizza Hog from Invader Zim:

"What more you askin' for?"

My very last class on Sunday is a kindergarten class.  These are kids who have never been in a classroom before, and spend most of the class either crying, or performing various bodily functions.  It's one last hurdle to get past before my weekend (that is, Monday and Tuesday).

It is in this class that I have a kid that I call Ricky the Psychopath.  I call him that because his name is Ricky and he's a psychopath.

This kid, a five year old, embodies why I will never have children: because children are jerks.  Lots of people tell me "you know, your kid could be the one to cure cancer".  True, but more likely they'll end up being like Ricky the Psychopath.

Among his various offenses are using his considerable size to bully other kids in the class, yelling swear words in Chinese when I'm trying to talk, and grinding my chalk into a cocaine-like powder.  What I really don't get is that his parents and I are working together to help him improve his behavior, and they seem like actually good, conscientious parents who take an interest in his education and want him to do better.  And yet they ended up with this kid.

There's a good side to everyone, of course.  It would be unfair if I didn't say that Ricky has one too.  He has a baby sister in the same class.  He is very protective of, and a perfect gentleman to, her.  A Catholic theologian, Bishop Robert Barron, once said that with the right training, a bully can become a knight.  This is what I'm trying to do with Ricky.  I think it's possible, but it will take time.

So anyway, last week I was trying to teach some new letters of the alphabet.  Ricky and I had the following exchange:

Me: M is for Milk!
Ricky: (whacks the kid next to him.  Kid cries.)
Me: Ricky!  Say sorry, or time out!
Ricky: (punches me this time, while screaming)
Me: Five! (This is a system that I worked out with his parents.  If he gets five warnings in a class, he loses five minutes of playtime at home.)
Ricky: WO CAO NI MA!

This is a Chinese insult that means "I'll fuck your mom".

I tried to keep a straight face, and failed.  It was the most unintentionally hilarious thing I'd heard in weeks.  I don't think I've ever laughed that hard at a five year old before.  I have no idea how he learned that expression, but hearing him squeak it at me in genuine, if impotent, rage was the kind of thing you couldn't write down.  Hey everybody, new rule: you're not allowed to say that if you are anatomically unable to do it.

And yes, Ricky got a time out for that.  No sticker after class either.

Backdiapers and Breast Cancer

Chinese parents are weird.

China is a weird place in general, but there's something that happens when a kid pops out that sends Mom and Dad on a one-way trip to Loonyville.  This is a list of bizarre things that Chinese parents do or think:

--First, backdiapers.  My friends and I invented this term one night over (a lot of) beer.  Backdiapers are a kind of towel that Chinese parents stuff into the nape of their kids' shirts.  The purpose is to soak up the sweat that pours off the kids' backs in a constant, unutterably foul torrent of Old Testament proportions.  Chinese kids sweat a lot, you see.  This is because...

--Being cold will give you breast cancer.  Chinese people have a weird thing about being cold.  They drink their water hot, for example.  Even if the thermometer's at 100 degrees (that's 40 celsius), moms will interrupt class by coming in and turning off my air conditioner, because their kids will "get cold".  I speak from experience, as when I was in Hangzhou there was about a month-long period where it didn't go under 100, day or night.  Meanwhile, the kids were wrapped up in sweaters with sweat pouring down their faces and backdiapers so thoroughly saturated that you could wring them out.   There are a few justifications they use for this, among them that being cold, or even drinking cold (i.e. room temperature) water causes breast cancer.   Given the level of competence among most Chinese medical professionals, I would not be surprised if they're the ones disseminating this information.  For the same reason, many parents don't let their kids shower in winter.  This aversion to cold is deeply ingrained in Chinese culture, as is...

--Letting your kids crap on the street.  Diapers aren't super big here, so most kids who are old enough to walk but not old enough to control their, ahem, functions, wear pants with an open crotch.  When it's time to go, they squat down wherever they happen to be--on a street, in the market, in an underpass--and let it rip.  Of course to a sensitive and effete laowai like myself this is shocking, but it's a centuries-old practice that, if you think about it, is much more environmentally friendly than using diapers.  It also makes the parent's job easier.  For instance, the other day I was on a train.  I was sitting near the corridor reading my book when a Mom hustled by, holding a toddler.  At the end of the car was a communal trash bin.  She took the kid, dangled him over the bin, and started up...

--The piss whistle.  This is a high-pitched whistling noise that parents make.  It triggers a Pavlovian response in their kid that opens the floodgates.  As I sat in the train that day, desperately trying to focus on my book, the mom held the kid out, started whistling, and sure enough he unleashed a stream of pee into the trash can.  By the way, this whole time, they were right across the corridor from the bathroom.  Which tells you something about the quality of Chinese train toilets.

Pretty nasty, if you ask me.  But some other Chinese parenting habits are heartwarmingly affectionate.  Or at least, they toe the line between heartwarmingly affectionate and disturbingly helicopterish:

--Feeding their kids.  The other day I was walking down the hallway at school when I saw one of my kids.  He was reclined on a chair, with his parents standing over him.  Dad was holding chopsticks and a bowl to the kid's mouth, shoveling in food.  Meanwhile, Mom was holding a glass of (presumably boiling-hot) water to his mouth and pouring it in at intervals.  The kid was doing nothing on his own, just laying back with his mouth open like he was at the dentist.  This kid was five years old, and his parents were watering him like a plant.  One Chinese friend of mine does this with his nine-year-old daughter, and the lunch lady at our school cafeteria has actually done this to me.  Incredible.

This one, though, I can understand.  Think about it: the parents (or at least the grandparents) grew up during Chairman Mao's time--that is, the single worst famine in all of human history, coupled with not being able to eat what you did have (thanks, communism!)  This is the first time in living memory where a kid in China can reasonably be expected to have enough to eat--and even then, that's only in the cities.  Parents can't get that food into their kids fast enough.

Shovel away, I say.

I'm Korean

So, right now I’m living in a city called Guiyang.  It’s the capital of Southwest China’s Guizhou province:

By Chinese standards it’s kind of a backwater, and there aren’t a lot of expats living here.  Guiyang is a place where it’s quite unusual to see a foreigner, and people aren’t used to it.  In fact, even the most basic knowledge about foreigners escapes many people—they just don’t know what the crap they’re seeing when we walk by.  For example, Guiyangers (?) seem to be unaware of the fact that if you’re white, you’re (probably) not from Africa.  Outside my apartment the other day, I walked past a pair of guys sitting on their electric scooters.  One turned to the other and said, “That African sure is tall.”

Another time, I was at the mall.  I was washing my hands in the bathroom, and a guy walked in. “Whoa, Xinjiangren!” he said.  He meant that I was a Uyghur.  The Uyghurs are Turks* from western China.  While not exactly "Chinese" looking, they usually have darker complexions and black hair.  I, on the other hand, look like I just walked off the set of “Triumph of the Will”.

But that’s all small potatoes compared to what one guy said yesterday.  I was downtown, walking to work, and as I walked by, he waved and gave me a cheerful “Anyeonghaseyo!”

That’s “hello” in Korean.  Apparently, in this guy’s mind, Koreans are six-foot-tall white people.  Astonishing.

*Speakers of a Turkic language, not people from Turkey.

The Wacky World of Chinese Psychiatry

"Do you suffer from a mental illness?  If so, explain."

That was one of the questions on the visa form the first time I came to China.  Of course I checked no, because otherwise I wouldn't have gotten in, but as a matter of fact I do: I have OCD, and I take meds for it.

Meds which, at the moment, are running fairly low.  This means that one of these weekends, I'll have to shell out a few thousand kuai for a weekend in Beijing to visit an expat-run hospital.  Why not a local hospital, you ask?  Chinese hospitals are bad enough when you have a cold: now imagine telling them you need Head Meds.

Here's what happened the last time I stuck a toe in the Wacky World of Chinese Psychiatry.  It was about two years ago, in Hangzhou.  I needed to get a mental health check for a job I was applying to--a routine procedure in decent places, but as Gollum said, silly hobbitses, this isn't decent places.  This is a Chinese public hospital.

Apparently in China, "Mental health check" is a euphemism for "interrogation of political dissidents and/or the criminally insane".  But I head to at least try.  More or less knowing from the start that my endeavor was doomed, I headed down to the local public hospital.  I was talking with a nice doctor who spoke some English, and she was baffled by the idea of giving mental exams to the non-straitjacketed.  "Why would you need that?" she asked.

"Well, in some countries we have to pass a mental exam to work as a teacher." I said. "Basically all I need is a paper that says 'Bro is not crazy' with a doctor's signature."

She called around to find a doctor with the qualifications to make such a statement, apparently a rarity over here.  Eventually she ended up calling the infamous #7 Hospital, which is essentially an insane asylum circa 1940 and figures prominently in discussions with Chinese 6th graders (e.g. teaching Alice goes to school by bike quickly devolves into "Haha, teacher goes to #7 hospital by pig".  An actual quote.)

With a look of resignation, my doctor friend hung up the phone. "They won't do it." she said.

Figures. "Why not?"

"Well, how to say in English..." she thought for a moment. "he said that Chinese people, white people and black people have different brains.  So he can't give you a test for Chinese people."

...huh.

Let me remind you that the person who said this is a medical professional.  Let that sink in.  In fact, go ahead and reread that, I'll wait.  An MD just said to me that white brains, Chinese brains, and black brains needed separate (but equal?) evaluations. 

Of course, we shouldn't shoot the messenger.  My doctor friend was very sympathetic and did help me schedule my physical for the next morning, which was nice.  I guess she realized it wasn't my fault I was born with a tiny white brain and enormous pointy nose.

Rise and Fall of the Jie, Part 4!

Part IV!

 

Shi Hong was helpless.  In fear, he offered the throne to Shi Hu.  Shi Hu, acting after the example of Cao Cao, sarcastically declined and said something along the lines of “No, you’re the crown prince after all, go ahead and take it, but I ‘strongly suggest’ that you make me the prime minister and the King of Wei—and give me the nine bestowments while you’re at it.”  Note that these are the same titles that Cao Cao took!   Poor Shi Hong must have seen what was happening.

Now, again, if I had been Shi Hong, I would have said something awesome like “Golly gosh Shi Hu, who was my dad again?  Oh yeah!  He was the emperor!  And he’s dead!  So…wait a minute!  That…that makes me…the emperor!  And…and you’re not the emperor!  Off with your head!”  As you can tell, I spend a lot of time fantasizing about this.  Perhaps, you would say, he knew he would’ve been killed if he said that, but surely there must’ve been some faction loyal to him.  He could’ve even drawn his sword and made a heroic last stand with his bros.  But he didn’t, and allowed the situation to get worse.

Anyway, Shi Hong for whatever reason didn’t do this, nor did he take a lesson from the story of Cao Cao.  Instead he asked his mom, the empress dowager, for help.  This was the same lady who had saved Shi Hu when he was in danger!  She tried to enlist another prince to attack Shi Hu, but the plan failed.  Shi Hu, emulating his old hero Cao Cao, had her killed.  Imagine the nerve of this guy!  Shi Hu was by rights the empress dowager’s subject, and he had her executed as if she was a common criminal!  I can only imagine the language he must have used to have her executed—for he could not have done so without the emperor’s ostensible permission.  It must’ve been something along the lines of “Your majesty, this woman has threatened the security of your royal person and must be punished, I ask you to order her death.”  Something like that.  Imagine doing that with a straight face!  What a bastard.  And he did this to his very aunt, who had previously saved his life!  What a savage twist of irony.

So let’s look at Shi Hong—that was the emperor, remember.  These names all sound alike, at least to me, because I don’t speak Chinese.  Understandably dismayed at being forced to approve his mom’s death, he couldn’t stand it anymore.  Talk about a golden cage!  This guy was—supposedly—the Son of Heaven, and the ruler of all beneath it, but he was basically the captive of Shi Hu, and had to go along with it.  So what did he do?  He decided to make one last plea for humane treatment.  He must have known it wouldn’t work, since his cousin was a psychopath that made the Joker look like Gandhi.  At any rate, however, Shi Hong made his way one night to Shi Hu’s palace, carrying the emperor’s jade seal, and said something along the lines of “the mandate of heaven has passed to you.  For the preservation of the dynasty, please take the throne and rule all under heaven!”

That’s right, Shi Hong offered the throne to Shi Hu again!  Imagine having to do that to the man who had your mom killed!  What agony poor Shi Hong must have gone through.  But Shi Hu, in true psychopath fashion, said something dripping with sarcasm, like “Oh, I am only your lowly servant, I would not dare take the throne from Your Highness.”  Poor Shi Hong had to return to the palace to await his fate.  Of course everyone, Shi Hong included, knew that Shi Hu wanted to be emperor, and this was as good a time as any, but of course he had nothing better to do than insult and torment Shi Hong first.

By now Shi Hong had been “ruling” for about a year.  Not long afterward, Shi Hu made an announcement.  He said that Shi Hong had violated the mourning customs regarding his father—which he hadn’t.  As a result Shi Hong was “strongly advised” to abdicate the throne.  Poor Shi Hong by now seems to have been completely despairing of his fate.  He made no attempt to resist.  In fact, he probably thought that by not resisting he would escape with his life—which he didn’t.  Not long after being deposed, Shi Hong was executed—which by rights should’ve happened to Shi Hu, if only Shi Hong had had the courage to try.  Poor Shi Hong never got the justice he deserved in this life, but we can hope that he found rest in the hereafter.

But, as the ever-quotable Gandalf the Grey said, many that die deserve life, and some that live deserve death.  Shi Hu’s first act as emperor was to change the era name, following an ancient Chinese custom where not only emperors have names, but their reigns too.  He named his reign period “jian-wu”, which appropriately enough means “establish militarism”.  He even lived in a palace called Tai-Wu, or “excessively militaristic”.  The two decades that followed were an orgy of bloodshed and chaos to the people of Northern China.  His atrocities I have already described, and the common people of China were forced into slave labor to build an extravagant series of palaces, where Shi Hu ate, drank, and made merry with his concubines until he died in 349. 

As a side note, as if killing his cousin weren’t bad enough already, he also murdered his own son, daughter-in-law, and grandchildren.   While doing this, he even claimed to be a Buddhist—I suppose much the same way that the Spanish Inquisition was Catholic.  Maybe he thought he was helping his victims by speeding them on to their next incarnations.   More likely he saw Buddhist missionaries from an Inner Asian perspective: as shamans with weird powers, and therefore to be respected and feared.

Of course, the inevitable fate of tyranny is downfall, and though Shi Hu seems to have died a natural death, his empire was not to last.  Three emperors were enthroned and deposed in two years, and the realm descended into even worse chaos than before—I am sorry to say that this tragic story ends with nothing short of an ancient genocide.

As we’ve discussed, Shi Hu and company were not actually Chinese, ethnolinguistically speaking.  They ruled and terrorized a Chinese population, and took on the trappings of Chinese emperors, but were themselves Jie.  Apparently, the Jie language was completely different from Chinese, and even from other Xiongnu languages.  The Jie people even had a different appearance from their neighbors.

It is a sad reality that very often, an entire ethnic group suffers for the terrible actions of a few of its members.  The Jie were one of these groups.  Following the overthrow of the Later Zhao dynasty, the Jie people were completely hunted down and killed.  This included everyone of the ethnic group, even those who had nothing to do with the dynasty’s reign of terror—women, children, whatever.  Escape or blending into the Chinese population was impossible, since the Jie seem to have had such distinct features.   It was horrible.  Even though Shi Le and Shi Hu were bad guys, I’m sure there were lots of nice Jie people too, and like Shi Hong, they had to suffer despite having done nothing wrong.  Racism is bad.

As a matter of fact, along with the Jie, other Xiongnu were killed and the survivors driven from China.  Could this have been the beginning of the migration of nomads that would end a hundred years later at the gates of Rome?  Maybe!   The “Xiong” in “Xiongnu” sounds kind of like “Hun” after all, don’t you think?

This genocide was so thorough and complete that as a result, we don’t even know who the Jie were!  All that remains of their language is a single sentence transcribed by a passing monk.   What was this sentence?  Does it contain the key to unlocking the mystery of the Jie people—who they were, where they came from?  Probably, because otherwise there would be no material for a video!  At any rate, we’ll talk about it next time.

Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jie_people

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Hu

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Hong

Rise and Fall of the Jie, Part 3!

Part III:

 

Given the barrage of names, let’s review: Shi Le is the aging emperor who established the dynasty, Shi Hong is the heir apparent, and Shi Hu is a jealous cousin.  Their dynasty is known as the Later Zhao.  They belong to the Jie ethnic group, which was one of many tribes known to Chinese historians by the umbrella term “Xiongnu”.

Before long, Shi Le’s health began to fail, and he died, leaving the empire in the somewhat unsteady hands of Shi Hong.  The tragedy that followed can be described as comparable to something you’d see in Ancient Greek Theater, but to understand it we have to go back a hundred years to the early third century, to the time of the Three Kingdoms.  So again, from the fourth century, we’re going back to the early third century, to a completely different cast of characters.

One hundred years before the Later Zhao, China had been split up into three warring factions.  In Northern China, the Emperor reigned in name, but was in truth nothing more than the plaything of Cao Cao, a brutal warlord who filled court with his henchmen and tormented the poor emperor day and night.  While Cao Cao paid lip service to the emperor, he actually kept the emperor as a virtual prisoner, going so far as to have the emperor’s two wives executed when they crossed him.  One happened to be pregnant at the time, which means that, in effect, Cao Cao murdered the child of the emperor of China.  But even this was not far enough for Cao Cao.  To add insult to injury, Cao Cao then forced the emperor to marry his daughter, as a vacancy had been created.

Cao Cao then “strongly suggested” that the emperor make him the Prime Minister, as well as the King of Wei, a region in north China.  On top of that, Cao Cao got what were called the “Nine Bestowments”, which were in theory a reward given by emperors for good service.  Remember, this is after killing the emperor’s wives and unborn child.  Can you imagine the agony this poor emperor must have gone through?

The whole affair was an absolute farce.  When I read “Romance of the Three Kingdoms,” reading about the way Cao Cao treated the emperor made me so angry that I used to throw the book across the room, and then go for a walk to cool off!

That said, the emperor was partially at fault:

Here, we see the emperor’s wife being arrested, with the poor emperor looking helplessly on—that’s him in the chair.  The guy with the sword is Cao Cao.  Remember, he’s daring to draw his sword before the emperor of China!  At any time, the emperor could have stood up and said, “You know, Cao Cao, I don’t recall this being a constitutional monarchy.  Off with your head.”  But he never did, because he was too afraid.  Even when his wife was executed, and she asked him to save her life, all he could do was mumble something about not even being able to protect himself.  Of course, hindsight is 20/20, but I always like to daydream that if I were the emperor, I wouldn’t have any of Cao Cao’s nonsense.  But this guy, it seems, was just too much of a spineless coward. 

The one thing that Cao Cao never dared to do was claim the throne for himself, but that kind of actually makes sense, because he knew that if he did, his descendants would one day fall into the position of the poor emperor that he so tormented.  His son, however, was less intelligent, and soon after he died, “strongly suggested” that the emperor abdicate in his favor.

With this in mind, let’s return to the Later Zhao a hundred years later.  Shi Hu—remember, that’s the envious cousin—looked at Cao Cao as a personal hero.  He even lived in a palace that Cao Cao had built.  But Shi Hu, while being even more evil than Cao Cao, could not match him for brains.  All he could do was look to the past and try to imitate his predecessor.  So, when Shi Le died and the gentle, studious Shi Hong ascended the throne, Shi Hu muscled his way into the palace and staged a coup—in this case at least, the sword proved mightier than the inkbrush.

Rise and Fall of the Jie, Part 2!

Part II!

 

In our last video we talked about the rise of Shi Le and his establishment of the Later Zhao dynasty in 4^th century China.  I want to begin by reviewing names, since this can be confusing, especially to people like me who don’t speak Chinese.

I’d like to start by reviewing that, in the year 220, the mighty Han Dynasty split into three kingdoms.  The strongest of these was called Wei, led by the wily and devious Cao Cao.  However, Wei’s hegemony was not to last.  It was replaced by the Jin Dynasty, which reunited China for several decades at the end of the 3^rd Century.  Soon, however, trouble began with a loose confederation of tribes in the north, called the Xiongnu.  They invaded northern China, pushed the Jin into South China, and established their own Sinicized dynasties.

The Xiongnu were not ethnically homogenous!  “Xiongnu” is a catch-all term for a group of tribes.  One of these tribes was called the Jie, led by the warlord Shi Le.  Shi Le conquered most of northern China, and declared himself emperor.  His dynasty was called the Later Zhao, having supplanted a dynasty called Han Zhao—not to be confused with the Han dynasty of 100 years earlier.  Shi Le established his capital in what is now northern Shandong province, in the very shadow of the Tai Shan, China’s holiest mountain:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mount_Tai#/media/File:Mount_tai_azure_clouds_temple.jpg

He may very well have even climbed this mountain, as many emperors have done, to symbolize the legitimacy of his dynasty.  Even Chairman Mao did this, an interesting move for someone who claimed to be the elected leader of a “People’s Republic”.  History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes very well.

Shi Le was a barbarian who had no sense of honor or mercy.  All that mattered to him was plunder and power.  However, having established his dynasty, he seems to have cooled off in his old age.  In fact he even became a Buddhist.  As one of the first emperors to convert to Buddhism, he played a key role, though largely unrecognized, in the early spread of Buddhism in China.

Having established his claim to the Imperial throne, Shi Le attempted to arrange for the continuance of his dynasty after his death.  There were two primary candidates for the succession: first, the bookish, mild-mannered and popular Shi Hong, his son.  Even though Shi Le was a ruthless and often cruel warlord, his son seems to have been a pretty decent guy.  He was by all accounts a compassionate and all-around good-natured person who spent his time studying the Confucian and Buddhist classics.  The second candidate was the psychopathic Shi Hu, a nephew of the royal house who had accompanied Shi Le on his conquests. 

Shi Hu was a real bastard.  It’s really impossible to overstate how bad of a person he was.  He was famous for having his own men—even his own sons—beaten to within an inch of their lives.  Even worse—by the way, if you’re eating right now I recommend you pause the video until you’re finished—it’s said that he had his armies cannibalize local people, as a form of both psychological warfare and saving on provisions.  Even Shi Le’s hardened crew of badasses trembled in fear at the mention of his name.

Shi Le, who was himself no Mother Teresa, found his nephew’s shenanigans disturbing to say the least.  He wanted to have him killed, but was dissuaded by his wife.  According to her, “before a bull grows up, it breaks the cart”, preemptively quoting the Bard in Much Ado. 

But alas, this savage bull did not bear the yoke, and taking this advice was arguably the worst decision of Shi Le’s career, and could be said to have doomed his dynasty—and, in an ironic twist worthy of Sophocles, doomed Shi Le’s wife.  But more on that later.  Instead of having this psychopath killed, Shi Le simply disenfranchised Shi Hu in favor of his son, Shi Hong.  This only served to irritate Shi Hu, who felt that he should be the heir, as he did most of the work of conquering the empire. 

Bro Goes to a Chinese Hospital: or, Fun with Needles

(To Preface: I finished my year in Mongolia.  I am now back in China, and plan to be for the next year.  I am currently located in Guiyang, Guizhou province.)               

 If at some point in your life you find yourself living in China, you will almost certainly end up at least once in a Chinese hospital.  This is because in order to get a residence permit you need to have a health check done before and after you enter the country.  This is a perfectly reasonable thing for a government to ask, and I wouldn’t mind it at all if it didn’t involve, you know, actually going to a Chinese hospital.

                Since opening up in the 80s, China has gotten many useful things from the West, but modern medicine is not one of them.  The concept of the hospital as a place where you can receive compassionate treatment in a comfortable environment is lost on the Chinese.  Traditional Chinese medicine is great for preventing illness, less so for treating it.  And since Western medicine is still a new thing here, the point is often missed entirely.  Patients are frequently misdiagnosed or given bizarre “remedies” that do nothing to help their ailment.  In one case, a coworker of mine went in with flu symptoms and was diagnosed with AIDS.  As might be imagined, the consequence of this diagnosis on his personal life was not negligible.  He had to tell his girlfriend and her family (!) and made preparations to spend his last days at home in America.  Two weeks later, he consulted an American doctor, and, whoops, it turns out he had the flu after all.  He was back at work in a week.  Another coworker took a bad fall and wound up with damage to his spinal cord that would leave him paralyzed for life if he didn’t go home and get surgery.  The doctors at the Chinese hospital put him on a saline drip and told him to hold a hot water bottle of green tea on his neck.  Because, you see, green tea is good for your health and it will seep through the skin, mending your nerves as it goes.

                That’s another thing.  Saline drips.  If you step into a Chinese hospital, no matter what the complaint, you will be put on a saline drip.  Broken arm?  Saline drip.  Toothache?  Saline drip.  Hangnail?  Hook ‘em up!

                You will also have blood drawn.  I have gone in with the stomach flu and been told to get in line for the lab.

                The above two points do not bode well for me, because I am not good around needles (get it?  Points?).  Of course, it’s not like anyone is actually “good around needles”.  I think even junkies would prefer a way to get their high that didn’t involve sticking themselves.  But mine is a special case because for most people, they can deal with it by laying down, looking away, and thinking about something else.  I can’t.  I need to be restrained, and even then I tend to yell.

                Knowing this, I was not looking forward to my health check after my arrival in China.  I communicated my apprehension, and the reasons for it, to my boss.  He said it was no problem, someone would go with me, etc.  I was not entirely convinced that he got the gravity of my needle problem, but there it was.  At any rate there was no getting around it.

                So, I went to the hospital.  Going to the hospital in China is much like the hospital scene in the movie Idiocracy.  You get shuffled around to different rooms, stand in various lines, and take your clothes off in a dirty room full of patients waiting their turn behind you, only for a doctor to prod you a few times and tell you that you talk like a fag and your shit’s all retarded: 

Ok, maybe he doesn’t say that, but he does say you are too fat (I’m 6 foot 2 and 150 pounds) and that you should drink some green tea and get a saline drip. 

Actually the hardest part (after the needles) is standing in a line full of sick Chinese people.  The Chinese are notorious, of course, for two things: first, line jumping, and second, not covering their mouths when they cough. 

                The room-shuffling and line-standing commenced, and all went about as smoothly as it could have until the last part, when it was time for the blood draw.  I stood in line, almost fainted when I saw it happening to the guy in front of me, and told the nurse I needed to lie down.  This did not compute.  What, you need to lie down?  Why do laowai lie down when they have blood taken?  See, these other laowai don’t need to lie down.  There’s no need to lie down.  Bu yong.  Sit on the stool. 

                Yong, I replied.  Need.  The nurse went and got her manager.  There was much hemming and hawing and soothing words on the part of our translator.  This laowai's conduct was most unorthodox.  Unharmonious.  At last they took me to a back room, and I laid down on a gurney with a coworker there for moral support.  To take my mind off things, she listened to me talk about front-vowel rounding in Chahar Mongolian.

                Things went to shit when a nurse walked in carrying a needle and tourniquet.  From the depths of my stomach, I screamed an unholy scream that brought to mind Westley being tortured in the pit of despair:

                The nurse jumped back, terrified.  What was this laowai doing?  She had not been trained for this.  Blood drawing is routine and normal.  This laowai is not behaving normally.  Laowai are dangerous enough already, and now this one’s screaming?  He’s from a country full of guns, for Confucius’ sake.  Surely guns are more dangerous than needles.  Does he scream whenever he sees the nine handguns that all Americans always carry?

                More soothing words from our translator.  The nurse cautiously approached me, and put the tourniquet on my arm.  Another scream, more unholy if possible than before, this time accompanied with thrashing around.  She jumped back again.  More soothing words.  She put an alcohol swab on my arm.  This unleashed the queen mother of all shrieks, one that made people a mile away look up and think “what the fuck was that?”

                The hospital director showed up and told my translator to get this deranged laowai out of his hospital.  The room where they had me opened to a courtyard, and apparently they could hear me on every floor, every wing of the hospital.  I was clearly a menace to society and they weren’t going to be responsible for me.  Our translator pulled out all the stops.  I don’t know what she said, but somehow she got him to agree to one more try, provided I was quiet this time.

                A council of war was called.  Coworker1 had tried distracting me, and failed.  Translator asked if I had considered, you know, not making a scene this time.  I assured her that I was unable to not make a scene, and indeed that I was doing quite well for myself, given that I hadn’t fainted yet.  It happened every time, and would continue to happen.  I needed to be restrained, as I had said before.  No good, apparently.  None of the nurses here were willing to restrain a thrashing laowai.  Maybe they could sedate me?  No, anesthetic was too expensive. Coworkers 2 and 3 stepped up to the plate.  They had a plan.

                C2 and C3 are a couple from America.  C2 is a bodybuilder, and C3 used to work as an EMT.  They decided to combine their talents.  I laid back down on the gurney.  C2 grabbed my arm, which at its thickest is about the diameter of his wrist, and held it steady.  C3 sat on my chest and held my other arm.  Of course, there was still the issue of screaming.

                “Give me your passport.” Said C3 as her weight came down on my solar plexus.  I rummaged in my pocket, and handed it to her.  Without hesitation she took the passport and stuffed it into my mouth.  “Bite down.”

                This was more like it.  I bit down, and in fact to this day my passport has vampire-like bite marks on it.  The nurse came back into the room and did her job.  I felt the tourniquet and swab, and hollered into my passport.  The needle followed.  I thrashed as much as I could, given the circumstances, which basically amounted to tossing my head around.  “Ok Bro, it’s over,” said C3.

                I don’t know why people always say that, because every time they do it’s not over.  They mean to say that the needle is in and they’re collecting the blood.  “Geh ih aagh!”  I yelled, which is passport-in-mouth for “get it out”.

                “Breathe, bro” said C3, which was easy for her to say but hard for me to do, considering she was, at the time, sitting on my lungs.  My vision tunneled.

                And then, the job was done.  The nurse took the needle out, got away from me as quick as she could, and I was released.  I sat up slowly so as not to faint, and the tunnel vision came back when I saw the drop of blood on my arm.  I asked for a bandage, and was given one—and a complimentary eye roll—by a nurse.  By the way, in China, nurses still wear those ridiculous hats that you see in Three Stooges skits and college Halloween parties.  The more you know!

                I’m not sure how to end this, but that's the story of Bro going to a Chinese hospital.  If you ever consider yourself insane enough to go to China, make sure you’re insane enough to handle their healthcare system.

                On a related note, C2 is now my workout buddy.

The Strange Story of Mangas

I'm not sure why I haven't posted this before, but this is a video that my friends and I did for a project in Mongolian class a few years back!  It's our cinematic version of a classic Mongolian folktale.  I was on narration, but you can see me with some pretty wicked hair from 6:50 to 7:10.  You can also see between 5:20 and 6:15 our excitement over the then-forthcoming legalization of certain a herbal medicinal product in our state. Here's the story in English.

TOLD BY BAT, BAATAR and SUKHBAATAR (our Mongolian names)

On one hot summer day, an old man was taking his red cattle down to the lake for a drink.  This old man's name was Dalantai.  As he was coming down to the lake, a huge, terrifying monster came out of the lake!  This terrible monster had a hideous face and walked on quick legs.  This was Mangas, the Monster!  For a long time, this monster had been taking away and eating Dalantai and his brothers' best cattle.  Mangas said:

"Hey, old man!  I'm hungry.  Give me your best cattle, that I may eat them."

"Strong Mangas!" Said Dalantai. "My red cattle sure are delicious.  I can even make them into some great khuushuur for you."

"Hmm...khuushuur.  Give them to me!" said Mangas.

"I will give them to you, Mangas, but there's one problem.  You need my brother Tontii's knife to eat them, as the khuushuur are very thick."

"You wait here," replied Mangas. "I'll go get Tontii's knife."

Mangas went from the lake to Tontii's ger (i.e. Mongolian yurt).

"Tontii!" Mangas cried. "Give me your knife!  I need it to eat Dalantai's khuushuur."

"Ok, Mangas," said Tontii. "But my knife's dull.  You need my brother's whetstone.  His name is Bintii.  Go get his stone and come back."

Mangas, dejected, went from that place to see Bintii.  Bintii was terrified, on hearing what Mangas said, pointed down the way--for the whetstone was very heavy, and could only be moved with his brother Tantii's carriage.

"My whetstone's over there." he said.  At this point in the video, you can hear Mangas singing "Ayani shuvuu"--that is, "Migrating Birds"--a very popular Mongolian song.

Mangas travelled to a distant ger, where he found Tantii, smoking his silver joint pipe.

"Awesome..." mumbled Tantii as Mangas approached, taking a long draft from his dooby pipe.

"Where's your wagon?  Give it to me now!" demanded Mangas.

"Sure, Mangas." he replied. "But...my wagon is made of heavy iron.  You'll need my brother's big white horse."

"I'll go get the horse." said Mangas. "You wait here."

Mangas therefore headed to Tantii's camp.  Tantii was gazing upon his horse, which Mangas promptly demanded.  Tantii said:

"Mangas, my horse is out grazing.  Head over to my brother Untii's camp by the lake.  He has an uurga, which you'll need."

--CUT--

VOCABULARY

A younger version of me with majestic long hair is standing in the library of Western Washington University holding an important looking book.  Below, the caption is supposed to say "Teacher--WWU".  Unfortunately, the word in Mongolian for teacher is "Bagsh", not "Baksh".  Whoops.

"'Uurga'--this is a long lasso made from a birch tree.  Mongolian herders, by means of the uurga, are able to capture their horses."

--CUT--

Mangas headed off and found Untii by a nearby lake.  He asked for the uurga, and Untii pointed to an island in the middle of the lake.

"My uurga is on an island in the middle of the lake."

"How am I going to get through the water to the uurga?" Asked Mangas.

"Tie the heaviest rock you can find around your neck." said Untii. "It has magical properties which will allow you to quickly reach the island." He indicated a nearby rock with a rope around it.  He and his brothers had come up with this plan to do Mangas in.

"Thanks!" said Mangas.  He jumped into the water and promptly drowned.

From that day on, Dalantai, Tantii, Bintii, Xantii, Tantii, Untii, would always laugh when they thought of how they tricked Mangas.  They lived happily ever after.

THE END.

Courtesy of Strangely Doesburg, the Accordianist Laureate of Washington state.

Rise and Fall of the Jie, Part 1!

A few months ago I made a video about the Jie, a possibly Yeniseic tribe who founded a short-lived dynasty in Northern China.  I’d like to tell their story today, one which I hope you’ll agree is as dramatic as anything you’d see on TV or in a movie.  So sit back and relax, and get ready for the epic story of the Jie!

China, third century CE--it was a time of chaos and savagery.  The great Han Dynasty, which for centuries had ruled all under heaven, had fallen to internal strife and outside invasions.  In its place emerged three kingdoms struggling for power.  In the south, stretching from the Yangtze river to modern Vietnam, was the kingdom of Wu, led by the patient, diplomatically gifted Sun Quan.  In the north, bordering the steppe tribes of the Xiongnu, was the kingdom of Wei.  Although nominally led by the Han Emperor, the reins of power were tightly gripped by the cruel and devilishly clever Prime Minister Cao Cao.  In the West—that is, modern-day Sichuan province—was the kingdom of Shu, led by the imperial scion Liu Bei, which struggled to rescue the emperor from his  captivity and restore the Han to its former glory.  After decades of civil war, a new dynasty—the Jin—rose from the ashes of Wei and conquered the other kingdoms.  This complex and incredibly intriguing period of history can be read about in Romance of the Three Kingdoms.  I mention it because it forms the backdrop to our story today.

                

The Jin dynasty’s hegemony was not to last.  By the 4^th century, northern China had fallen to a succession of nomadic tribes—then known as the Xiongnu—who set up their own pseudo-Chinese dynasties.  These were not unlike the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, or the Manchu Qing dynasty of the second millennium.  Meanwhile the Jin had retreated south of the Yangtze, where they would remain another century.

                

One of these Xiongnu tribes referred to themselves as the “Han Zhao”—a name referring to the lineage of their leader, who claimed descent from the Han dynasty.  Going so far to change his family name to that of the Han emperors, he claimed the imperial throne, despite the reality of being a minor steppe warlord.  In order to expand his empire throughout China, the self-proclaimed emperor enlisted the help of his general, the ruthless Shi Le, who will become one of the main actors of our drama:

http://www.czxnews.com/czxnews/d/file/wenhua/lishimingren/2013-09-04/94db6b94416a71313c7eba5110c47f69.gif

Watch out for this guy, he’s a badass.  Even his name meant “Stone Strangler”.  You might even say he was a…stone cold killer.

                

Shi Le was very much a product of these warlike and chaotic times.  He was a man much in the vein of Conan the Barbarian—his greatest joy was to roam the earth, crushing his enemies, seeing them driven before him, and hearing the lamentations of their women.  He belonged to a unique tribe within the larger Xiongnu group, known in modern Chinese as the Jie—however, in the Chinese of this ancient period this word would have been pronounced as *kiaet, or something approximating it.  The Jie were a mysterious group that had emerged from the north, speaking a totally unique language and even having a different physical appearance from the other tribes around them.  Shi Le—just like Conan, come to think of it—had been sold into slavery as a boy, but had risen through society by the might of his sword and ruthless pillaging tactics.   By the year 310 or so, he was the most feared general in all of the Han Zhao army.  Underneath the Han Zhao emperors, his army of ragtag badasses had conquered most of Northern China, even extending to the Yellow river itself, the ancient heartland of Chinese civilization:

Image Source: http://history.sina.com.cn/bk/gds/2015-01-29/1002116024.shtml

But even this would not satisfy a man of Shi Le’s ambition.  He didn’t want to be a simple general—he wanted to be the emperor of China itself.  And so, in 319, he took up arms against the Han Zhao emperor and created his own state, the Later Zhao.  Han Zhao, having lost its best general, could not hold for long, and by 329 had conquered the last pockets of Han Zhao resistance, and murdered the emperor.

Thus was Shi Le made the uncontested ruler of North China, despite he himself being *kiaet.  The ethnically Chinese Jin dynasty continued in the south, but was really not much of a threat.   And so, in 330, he declared himself Emperor of the Later Zhao dynasty—the Son of Heaven and ruler of all under it…that is, the emperor of China.  But would his dynasty, won by the might of his sword, survive?  Stay tuned, and find out!

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi_Le

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jie_people

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Han_Zhao  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Later_Zhao

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E7%9F%B3

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%8B%92

Ene Noxojd Ta Xeregtej!

Here's a video of me speaking Mongolian, looking for a family for Bodon.  She has since found a nice home with an old couple in the countryside.

Don't Mess with the Hat!

The story of my encounter with the Hat Thief of Ulaanbaatar!

Yeniseic Speakers in China? An introduction to the "*Kiat" People

Did the Huns Speak a Yeniseic Language?

Let's get down to business...