China snapshots

A few random observations from the past few days... some of the quirky 'charms' of living in China:

Jarring juxtapositions

The Chinese can be endearingly uninhibited by any sense of the incongruous.  During the protracted drizzly spell we suffered a week or so ago, I happened to see two young soldiers - in full camouflage combat uniform - stopping to buy umbrellas from a street vendor.  There was quite a range of sizes and colours they could have chosen, but they both opted for dainty little PINK ones.

Unimpressive footwear

The PLA guards assigned to Embassy protection duty are usually rather better turned out than your average soldier, but their uniforms are still conspicuously cheap.  And the new shift I saw taking over at the US Embassy a little while back were wearing plimsolls.  Camo plimsolls, at least, but still plimsolls.  Again, it was during the rainy spell, so perhaps they didn't want to get their 'dress shoes' muddy.  But even their dress shoes are rather cruddy, plasticky-looking slip-ons.  In fact, I'm not sure that there's any standard issue or uniform regulation on footwear; these soldiers often look as if they're wearing their own shoes (and they'll invariably buy whatever is most inexpensive).  You hardly ever see a soldier wearing boots.  That does rather diminish the sense of threat that the Chinese armed forces seek to inspire in their potential foes.

Astoundingly BAD road design

Pedestrian crossings don't count for much in this country, since drivers pay them no attention.  But we do have them.  Quite a lot of them, in fact.  Far more, probably, than we actually need.  It's just that most of them are in utterly daft places.  On Jiadaokou Nandajie (a street that I cross quite a lot), there's one right next to a bus stop - so, when a bus pulls in to the stop, it completely blocks the crossing (even worse, the approaching buses pull right over to the edge of the road, forcing you to scoot out of their way [there is no sidewalk to stand on, so you have to wait on the edge of the road while looking out for an opportunity to cross]).  And just the other day I noticed (I can't think how this has escaped my attention for so long; I suppose I just don't spend very much time on the city's Ringroads) that there are bus stops on the city's East Third Ringroad.  Yep, actually on the Ringroad.  And right next to the off-ramp.  I kid you not.

Routine cleaning

As I was walking home late one night, I encountered a couple of skivvies from a local restaurant cleaning their meat-grinder on the sidewalk outside.  Well, 'cleaning' is probably not the appropriate word.  The larger, fresher lumps of meat they were picking off with their fingers and depositing in a bowl for future use; the older, more dried-on fragments they were just ignoring.  I begin to doubt if I will ever have the nerve to order shizi tou ('lion's heads' - large, faggot-like meatballs) again.

Foot binding

While taking a break in the country for a couple of days last week, I came across a toothless old granny who appeared to have had bound feet.  I can't be quite sure, but there was definitely some disability in the way she walked, and her feet did seem very small and oddly shaped.  I would have been embarrassed to ask her about it, though - even if my Chinese were up to it.  And I doubt if I would have understood any of her responses: she spoke in some thick rural dialect, further garbled by her toothlessness, that neither I nor my capably Sinologue friends could fathom at all.  Foot binding, I gather, wasn't finally eradicated until the beginning of the Communist era, and was still relatively common in certain areas through the 1920s and 1930s - so you do still occasionally see a very old lady with these tiny, broken feet.  It's a disturbing reminder that the feudal past is not all that distant in China; in fact, much of its legacy of brutality and superstition is still very much with us.