Zaijian UK....

A cold but beautifully clear morning in the town of Loughton. Sitting in the Last Post, formerly a post office – hence the wonderfully witty name – and about to enjoy the benefits of a little Wetherspoons cuisine. The fayre tends to be cheap and cheerful, but fits my needs of the moment. I have but a few hours to go before setting off once more for the joys of Heathrow Airport and the eleven and a half hour flight to Guangzhou. As ever, there are a few odds and sods to sort out at the last moment but, as ever, I am surprised with just how simple such undertakings are in this day and age. Visa, insurance and tickets in place, all that remains is the collection of a little cash, the purchase of a couple of presents and suchlike, and….that's it!
Once more I set out with the intent of learning Mandarin, once more I would guess the resolution will last for just a few weeks, once more though I will find that I am improving, even if progress feels disconcertingly slow at times. In some areas in life, I can be quite an academic learner, but with languages all that really seems to work for me is constant exposure and a receptive mood. Chinese, in particular, seems a very difficult language to learn if one approaches it via books or other more conventional means. Day to day interaction, on the other hand, seems to gradually coalesce into an almost unconsciously learned ability. The language itself is something of a challenge as it is so fundamentally different to any other language that Westerners would be routinely exposed to. On the other hand, in many ways it has an almost disarming simplicity as well. If one looks at a direct translation of Chinese words, one is struck by the sheer sparsity of the language; it seems to be cut down to the point that it reminds one of the type of wording ubiquitously employed in the sending of telegraph messages, or perhaps the modern equivalent, texting.
My relationship with China and the Chinese remains ambiguous, so much so in fact that I scarcely know whether I am looking forward to the journey or dreading certain aspects. Certainly the levels of air pollution one routinely experiences are no great attraction but, on the other hand, the rather pleasant thought of enjoying the oh so much richer, and oh so much healthier, food of China is very alluring. Having spent a month in the UK, the thought of eating Chinese cuisine again rather than what passes for food in this gastronomic wasteland is enough to start the salivary glands happily doing what they do best at the prospect.
One wonders whatever happened to the British in this regard. Other nations developed a wonderful range of mouth-watering delights whilst the British remained obsessed with such mundane fayre as fish and chips or pie and mash or, pushing the envelope of culinary creativity to the outer limits, sausage and mash. The only light in the darkness of the the British food firmament seems to be provided by the importation of foreign food, the almost ubiquitous Chinese, Indian, Greek or Turkish restaurants that are found on almost every self-respecting High Street in the UK. Even these oases of comestible indulgence are often outnumbered by Americanised fast-food joints, the horrors of McDonalds, Wimpys and, perish the thought, KFC (There was an almost credible rumour doing the rounds that the latter had to change their name from Kentucky Fried Chicken because there was not actually sufficient chicken content in their 'chicken' to merit the name…).
As pointed out in a previous blog, the damage done to the average Brit by succumbing to the offerings of the purveyors of multinational fast-food are all too self-evident. Indeed, another pleasant part of returning to China is simply being amongst a people who seem both able to enjoy their food (something of an obsession in China) and yet manage, for the most part, to do it in far healthier ways that are currently the case in the UK.
Time to finish up for another week. At the conclusion of this week's offering I find myself sitting on a rather hard wooden bench in the arrivals area (slightly less crowded) of Heathrow terminal 4. As the flight desk is about to open, and as my time is limited on this system, I fear I must bid a hasty farewell for now and submit this particular offering sans the usual editing and proof-reading. Apologies for any errors incurred by submitting to this unseemly haste (not at all my usual habit!), but, as the saying has it, needs must when the devil drives! 

 

Leaving on a Jet Plane...

 “No one realizes how beautiful it is to travel until he comes home and rests his head on his old, familiar pillow. ” 

Lin Yutang

It seems that, after a mere four week break, that my more far-flung flaneurial duties will be once more resumed in the coming weeks with trips to South China and Thailand. It is a tough job, but someone's gotta do it. In the meantime, I spent the weekend preparing the few odds and sods needed for such a trip. This task was not particularly onerous, chiefly consisting of the obtaining of sufficient funds to get by in my first few weeks in China. This is something one needs to arrange before visiting that particular country, unless one enjoys the hour and a half proceedings that tend to occur every time one endeavours to change money in a Chinese bank in any place other than the most obvious of tourist destinations.
If one already has visas and insurance in place, then it is a simple matter to prepare for such a trip, even when that trip is planned over a period of months rather than weeks. I am sometimes asked by friends and relatives how I set about these things. The answer is surprisingly straightforward; once one has completed such technicalities as visas, insurance and funds, it is simply a matter of getting on a train, then a plane, then….well, that's it...really, that is all there is to it. In the interconnected world in which we live today, such travel is no longer that much of a challenge. Indeed, I would go so far as to say that the biggest part of the challenge is the ennui of long journeys on aircraft. Personally, I usually find the 'entertainment' on offer through various films and TV shows very dull, the films being almost invariably of the more commercial type, popular but vacuous. Every now and then a little gem somehow sneaks in, but often as not I scarcely bother these days. Thank heavens for the invention of the e-reader! With this in hand I find I can happily wile away many an hour tucking into the delights of Henry Miller or Anais Nin, or any one of about fifty authors that I am currently indulging in, whilst suspended 40,000 feet above the planet's surface.
In retrospect, I think that the return to the UK at this time of year was perhaps not the best notion that every crossed my mind. The pleasurable part has been catching up with various friends. Oddly, it seems to matter little how far one has travelled or what adventures one has indulged in, on return such relationships, after an obligatory handshake or hug, return to much the same as they were before. This is something that I appreciate very much. Time and distance seem to make little difference, the core of such friendships remains essentially unaffected.
The country itself...hmm, let us just say that absence makes the heart grow fonder, whilst confrontation with the reality of its fundamentally parochial nature, its class struggles, its asinine politics and, on a more banal note, just how cold it is this time of year, soon dissipate one's delusions about the place. The UK can be a very beautiful country, from the end of April to the end of September. If one is fortunate, even October can be reasonably pleasant, the rest of the year it is a struggle simply to survive the cold, the wet, the wind, the mud, the ice and the snow. The days themselves are incredibly short at this time of year, seemingly consisting of a sunrise and a sunset, with scarcely anything in between.
The inward-looking nature of the country can also be a tad wearisome, the somewhat dated beliefs as to its significance bearing little relation to today's reality. There was a time, many, many moons ago now, when Britain was indeed very influential on a global scale. Whether this influence was at all beneficial is another matter. Much of what was done in the name of Empire now looks very dubious with the benefit of hindsight. Numerous examples spring to mind: running India as a company, rather than as a country, the Opium War in which we forced the Chinese to import the drug in return for access to their markets (tea, interestingly, in particular), our efforts in Africa (such dubious efforts as the setting up of the first concentration camps by the British in the course of the Boer War – not as fundamentally awful, admittedly, as later iterations, but still very unpleasant), and...well, I could go on, but suffice it to say that much of the British contribution was not exactly positive in nature, mainly consisting of a ruthless exploitation of raw materials and local populations. Much of the 'civilising' influence claimed was something of an afterthought, the very notion betrays a level of smugness that looks remarkably ill-founded given the pecuniary motivation for almost all of the British interventions.
To be fair, almost every country one visits suffers from similar delusions as to its own influence. America seems to be forever wagging a finger at the rest of the World and lecturing about human rights, whilst conveniently ignoring them on their own escapades around the globe. The Japanese to this day remain in denial of the nature of their occupations during World War Two, a subject that causes much friction with its Asian neighbours. The Chinese and the Russians adopt a slightly different approach wherein they portray themselves as forever victims of foreign aggression, conveniently ignoring the fact that their own leaders were responsible for far more suffering than any invading armies ever inflicted.
And so it goes…
Personally, I rather liked the words of the venerable Thomas Paine on nationalism. This old Thetfordian (interestingly, as I write these words, I am a mere few hundred feet from his birthplace) simply stated:
“My country is the world, and my religion is to do good.”
I could not argue with such noble sentiments.

The Fat of the Land...

Today I find myself in a wet and windy Exeter, enjoying the hospitality of the library in the city centre which has been thoughtfully provided with a pleasant little coffee shop in the vestibule. The castle backs on to the grounds of a centuries old Norman castle which, in recent years, has been thoughtfully landscaped to provide a very pleasing setting on a warm summer's day. Unfortunately, at the time of writing, warm summer's days are but a distant hope; the ground beneath one's feet squelches to the tread and all is soggy and waterlogged, adding an extra incentive to stay within the confines of the building and enjoy the fayre on offer here.
Apart from a wide variety of cakes and similar comestibles, the fayre seems reasonably fair in this place, in contrast to most establishments I have visited since returning to the UK. What passes for food in this benighted land is normally high in fat, swimming in grease or comes pre-wrapped from a factory, bearing little or no resemblance to anything natural or organic. Quite often these packets come with pretty little labels indexing all the various ingredients and percentages thereof and just how much fat, carbohydrate and protein is contained therein. Little or no food seems to come in its natural form, unprocessed or sans addictive that add little to the nutritional value. 

 
These days, such 'food' is the standard fayre on offer in the UK; if one requires anything beyond the range of these mundane offerings one is required to both search far and wide and to pay out a proverbial arm and a leg. Most don't bother, or simply cannot afford to bother, hence insuring an unremittingly poor diet for themselves and their families.
For all my criticisms of China, and there were many, the diet there is infinitely better (and infinitely cheaper) than it is here. One comes across the odd rotund person in China, but the norm, even into great age, is slim and fit-looking people. The contrast with the UK could not be more stark, and seems to become more and more obvious each time I return from one of my sojourns.
The streets of Exeter seem to be filled to bursting with the rotund, the generously-proportioned, the wide-of-berth, the ample-figured, the big-boned, the plus-sized, the hefty, the chubby, the plump, the obese and even, what we used to call in previous, less politically correct times, the fat. They wibble and wobble down the street, huffing and puffing, panting and grunting; so much so in fact that one is concerned as to their very survival whenever they are met with such severe challenges as an incline, a few steps or a slightly more than normally substantial door..

A close friend of mine insists that these people are their own worst enemies, that the choices they make dictate the state of their bodies, that they really should have the self-discipline to make appropriate food choices and to take a little exercise occasionally. Personally, I feel that is a tad unfair given the type of fayre that is normally on offer in the supermarkets and hostelries of this land. There really isn't that much choice, particularly if you live in straitened circumstances, as so many do in what the Daily Mail insists is economically successful Britain. 

 
Another good friend espouses a type of conspiracy theory wherein the great mass (no pun intended…) of people are fed rubbish in order to render them suitable customers for the pharmaceutical industry as their health inevitably deteriorates. Again, I would not fully subscribe to such ideas, but one has to admit that the average UK citizen is usually imbibing a copious cornucopia of tablets and other forms of medication by the time they reach the ripe old age of fifty. Huge sums do indeed seem to be made at both ends of this equation, firstly in feeding people such poor food as to lead inevitably to obesity, and secondly from the doomed attempts to deal with the concomitant health problems such as cardiovascular disease, high blood pressure and diabetes. 
 
Many moons ago, back in the nineties, I enjoyed an interesting, if somewhat challenging, trip to India. As happens to so many who take on extended visits to that land, I managed to contract a form of 'Dehli-belly' (appropriately enough in Dehli) and came back from my travels some 10 kgs lighter than when I left. The people of the sub-continent were, in those far off days, more or less inevitably slim. A couple of months later, I followed that trip with another to Florida, my first to the United States. The contrast could not have been greater. On my first morning, I came across my first mall and my first food section, stuffed full of fast-food outlets. A few metres in front of me, bound for the same outlets, was a woman of indeterminate age wearing, perhaps unwisely, shorts and a singlet. She must have been at least 150 kgs, probably more. As I observed her ponderous advance towards her fervently desired destination I found myself trying to work out within which folds, of a very high number of folds in her ample legs, her knees were contained. The image reminded me oddly of the Michelin Man in those wonderfully antediluvian French posters.

At the time it was known that the US was in the midst of an obesity crisis. Little did I realise that just a few years later many of those same fast-food outlets would be littering the streets of the UK (and indeed, Europe and the World) bringing with them the subsequent problems and deleterious effects on the nations health, perhaps particularly on a younger generation who have scarcely ever known anything better.
Back in the library café, the rain is lashing hard against the windows as I finish this week's offering. Currently in the West country, it tends to vary between drizzle and violent downpour, so I await my chance to get merely slowly soaked rather than drowned beneath a veritable inundation. In the meantime I have treated my self to a second Americano but, in view of the above, resisted the temptation to indulge in the various cakes, muffins and sticky buns on offer ...

Keeping Abreast of a Breast...

Back in the bracing but very clean air of Thetford in Norfolk, I find myself enjoying the local fayre at the Red Lion in the centre of town. Tis a tad 'down to earth' but they do a rather pleasant vegetarian English breakfast for the negligible sum of £2.49, topped up with endless cups of refillable coffee for another 80p, which seems quite reasonable even after months of relatively cheap Chinese offerings The internet is somewhat slow here, as befits such an establishment, but still many, many times faster than anything I experienced during my time in Dongguan.
Interestingly, and somewhat bizarrely, the Chinese hosted an internet conference in the final weeks of December in the ancient town of Wuzhen, a pleasant if atypical spot criss-crossed with canals in Zhejiang Province, in which the main subject under discussion was censorship and freedom on the web. It seemed somewhat incongruous to yours truly, even a little Orwellian (as in double-speak) for the Chinese government to be expounding on such a subject. 

 
The minister in question, one Mr. Lu Wei, succumbed to the need to wax lyrical on the question of web censorship with the rather oxymoronic statement that China does not censor the internet but merely blocks access to sites. This rather mind-numbing notion passed with barely a comment on the Chinese state's media outlet, the Global Times, the correspondent penning the article apparently unaware of the rather startling contradiction in the minister's statement.
If one's internet search in China is limited to the commercial or the completely non-controversial, then the experience is merely frustratingly slow. If one dares to start to investigate issues that may be in any way even slightly controversial or, perish the thought, critical of the CPC (Communist Party of China), then it can take an age. I am sure that in this day and age the search goes through all sorts of algorithmic checking, but one feels almost as if there is some spotty clerk sitting at a desk in a gargantuan ministry in Beijing, peering through a pair of thick-lensed spectacles, going over the query word by word, searching out any potential problems. Tis the stuff of paranoid fantasy, of course, but it does indeed often feel that slow.
As ever with these issues, there are levels and levels. I recall that a certain W.S. Churchill said of the Soviet Union that it was 'a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma'. One could think of China in much the same way, but one would need to add a few extra layers. They routinely reject the entreaties of the likes of Twitter, Facecbook and Instagram, usually hinting at security concerns, but the reality probably has more to do with protecting monied interests inside China. The likes of Baidu, Weibo and Youku are now enormous, helped to a significant degree by the simple fact that they do not have to compete with their Western counterparts. One sometimes wonders about the mutual connections between those who run such enterprises and the higher echelons of government inside China. Although I would imagine there are no direct connections, I would not be at all surprised if mutually advantageous links existed nevertheless…
Censorship is such a difficult issue, and much of the reaction to various situations is very culturally dependent. I remember a few years back the huge outcry in the US when one of Janet Jackson's pendulous bosoms happened to escape her apparently insufficient bodice during a Superbowl interval (I say 'apparently' as it is quite likely, being the US, that the whole episode was something of a publicity stunt). Given the reaction, one would have thought that the sight of a woman's near (only 'near') naked bosom was a harbinger of the apocalypse. 

 
On the other hand, American films quite happily will show scenes of people being blown up, shot, stabbed, beheaded, garotted, strangled, minced, sliced and diced with barely a raise of the eyebrows from the censors. This is particularly the case if the victims of such violence are some kind of foreigners. I remember attempting to watch an early 'Rambo' film. The basic premise was that one American had been captured by the 'gooks', those inhuman Vietnamese who, apparently, never had a mother or a father, never went to school, never had an ambition, a first love, girlfriend, wife or lover, never suffered all the trials and tribulations that are the very stuff of being human. Essentially, their only role in life was as cannon fodder to the ever diligent Rambo, conscientiously engaged in his attempt to rescue said American from their evil clutches.

Of course, the Americans are not alone in doing this. The Thais do it, the Chinese do it, even educated Brits do it (...let's do it, let's exterminate a foreigner...). In fact, it is a phenomenon one finds in many countries across the globe. The dehumanizing effect of labeling people as Nips, Yids, Towel-Heads or Gooks; Goys, Farangs, Dagos and Cooks; Spics, Chinks, Gweilos and Spooks seemingly renders it 'OK' to impart great violence unto them, with ne'er a thought as to their humanity.
It seems so strange to yours truly how barely anyone raises any sort of objection to such violence and racism yet… show a breast on daytime TV, a mammary gland that has, to the best of my knowledge, never actually hurt anyone, then there is hell to pay.
Strange World…
Back in the Red Lion, the lunchtime clientele are now chatting happily enjoying some post Christmas merriment. It is good to see that for one week of the year at least, people are released from the onerous chores of the 9 to 5 to enjoy a little rest, a little socializing, a little time to simply be. It seems something of a shame that this privilege is granted to them only in the very depths of winter, but it is still to be enjoyed. For my part, I am finishing my third coffee and thinking that it is probably enough, even for one so inured as myself. Time to take a stroll back to where I am staying, perhaps taking the river and the bridge in en route. The walk along the river bank is all very beautiful at this time of year, even if the water levels are rather alarmingly high at the time of writing. Hopefully, the centre of town remains unflooded. The current plan is to write next weeks episode from the hopefully pleasant environs of Exeter in Devon, but the weather being what it is, there may be a few challenges to overcome before achieving that. We shall see...