Reporting From New York.com

A grizzled old woman carrying a kettle of hot water wafts from car to car selling Ramen noodles on the Wei River Highway.

Hemmed in between pagoda shaped mountains and the mouthe of a tunnel, she weaves her way through the hundreds of cars, buses and delivery trucks, including those carrying toilet paper, which are pinned down, and forced to wait out a five hour traffic jam. There are no traffic cops in China.

For the western mind, it is nearly impossible to penetrate the mysteries of China. It is always hyper-focused on what is missing, and subsequently fills in all of the gaps of its understanding with blackness, and even more mystery.

There is no ice in China. When ordering soda or beer, make sure to ask for it “Bing;” which means cold. It  isn’t an absolute that you will get it…bing, but you might get one that’s cool. Chinese prefer a plate full of donkey to be washed down with hot tea, so good luck.

There is no toilet paper in China. There is…but it’s stuck in traffic on the Wei River Highway. There is rolled gauze that is camouflaged to look like toilet paper-but nothing heavy duty is readily available to handle the occasional fish eyed brick you are trying to evacuate. 

There are three public toilets per every 10,000 people in China. (I know this because I used all three) If you are counting trenches that have buildings warehoused over them as toilets, then there are more than three.

At one roadside trough in particular, it was so clogged, that visitors had resorted to depositing their waste ”around” the building, instead of in it. Next to that, a huge sign anchored to a mountainside read: “Support the government. Support the PLA. Treat their families well. Serve the people.”  It should read, Hold your nose, Watch your step, Learn to squat, and Bring your own paper.

There is no milk, no coffee, no bacon and eggs. The showers dribble, the water smells, the beds are hard, and yes, they’re small. Public spitting and indoor smoking are equally acceptable; during a 21 hour train ride from Lanzhou to Beijing, I witnessed a father prompting his four year old son to take a drag off of his cigarette. There is no political correctness in China.

In Beijing, they have Hooters, McDonalds and smog.

In Xi’an, they speak English, and cough from the dust.

In Gao Tai, if you’re hungry, see the guy on the corner without teeth. He’s peddling rotted lychee nuts and bruised fruit curbside, and he’ll take your garbage for free. Try getting a vendor’s license in Manhattan with that get-up.

If it’s your laundry that needs doing, hit the Donfang Hotel in Dunhuang. In less than 48 hours, you’re guaranteed to get at least half of it back. It’s not such a bad deal, considering you also get half of someone else’s; but at least it’s damp. And if you want to make a Chinese person laugh, go through the trouble of having a translator spend 15 minutes explaining to the hotel’s laundry service that your $40 Calvin Klein V-neck T-shirts will shrink in the dryer, so they need to be hung wet. There are no dryers in China.  

There are plenty of pigs’ ears to eat. And fish eyes, and donkey and black boiled eggs. There is squid on a stick, and of course….chickens’ feet!!!!

At the first signs of political unrest in China,  there will suddenly be no Twitter. First hand reports from Tsinghua University journalism students through E-mail exchanges presently confirm that,

“The Internet situation in China now is no Twitter or Facebook.”

                                                -AND-

“FACEBOOK has been blocked in China for a certain period (sic)and I will accept the invitations I have received as soon as it reopens someday”

There is no YouTube either, and on those rare days when a sly piece of pornography manages to slink its way onto Chinese servers in the form of a link, there is no Google.

Former Beijing Bureau Chief for CNN, Rebecca Mackinnon explains what it means to be “Harmonized,” (USA Today)

Whenever (a Chinese Internet users’ ) edgy comments were purged from a website, they’d joke online that they’d “been harmonized” — a sarcastic reference to Chinese President Hu Jintao’s calls for a “harmonious society.” Soon, the censors caught on and added “harmonized” to the blacklist.

In keeping with President Hu Jintao’s desire to loosen social restraints through economic democritization policies, ReportingfromNewYork.com is donating the following design ideas:

 

                                                                          -OR-

   

 

 

Filed under: Uncategorized by reportingfromnewyork