CHINA RAGE moments

From time to time, just about every expat here reaches the point of complete meltdown suffered by Michael Douglas's memorable character in Falling Down.

There are just so many things about this country - and its people, and their 'culture' - that are weird, gross, inept, selfish, rude, dangerous, or just completely irrational and pointless. Hell, 'weird' doesn't begin to cover this place; it's bewilderingly, mind-buggeringly..... INSANE at times.

No matter how sensitive we are to 'cultural difference', and no matter how curious we are about it, and how tolerant of its more challenging manifestations.... there comes a point for all of us when we've had enough.

Luckily, automatic weapons are very hard to come by out here. When we reach an emotional flashpoint like poor old 'D-Fens', the very worst that's likely to happen is that we shout at an incompetent cab driver or piss on the hubcap of an improperly parked Audi. Most of the time, the extent of our catharsis is a bit of random muttering of obscenities under the breath or a theatrical beating of the palms against the forehead.

I've been muttering rather a lot myself these past few weeks. I need a break. Ten days in Malaysia at the end of February didn't do much to revivify the spirits, because it's not so far away geographically, and quite similar to China also in climate and development status; it was hardly like being away at all. Other than that, I haven't had a holiday of any kind in nearly two years. And I'm not sure that I'm going to manage to fit one in this summer, apart from a brief trip to Yunnan for a mate's wedding (nice, but still in China). I have found before that after an unbroken spell in this country of much more than a year, I start to get just a little bit crazy. After 18 months or so, I have no patience left for anything: absolutely everything pisses me off, all the time.

But there is some consolation in knowing that I am not alone. Two of my oldest friends have gone through rather more spectacular and thoroughgoing examples of the China meltdown recently, and have determined to quit the country for good (after having survived here significantly longer than I have).

And a friend recounted a story to me the other day, an overheard venting of steam that rather tickled me because it seems such an apposite summing up of the way we laowai feel on those occasions when this bizarre country completely gets on top of us. A well-dressed, middle-aged foreign male - it would seem perhaps a business traveller rather than a long-term resident here - got out of a taxi, slapped his hands against his head, and yelled (to no-one in particular), "God! It's like being in the world's biggest kindergarten!"

Ah yes, one of those days.