Friday, December 21, 2012

The pick of the crop: a sampler of my very best posts

For any new readers who happen across this blog (closed down at the end of 2012), this is the best place to start exploring - a selection of my favourite pieces from six-and-a-bit years of blogging. I hope you'll enjoy browsing through some of these. [There's a similar roundup of highlights from my other blog here.]



A lifelong fan of Douglas Adams' The Hitch-Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy series, I believe I have discovered the solution to the books' central conundrum.

One of the reasons why queues at bank counters and supermarket checkouts move SO SLOWLY in China.

An hilarious - and bizarrely detailed - dream that came to me during a time of stress and fever.

A dozen nuggets of essential wisdom.

I disown 'humility' - at least when expressing my opinions.

I feel that Beijing has rather too many of the bloody things already.

If you hunger for some biographical background to your blogger, sink your teeth into this.

The approach of the Beijing Olympics provokes some reflections from me on the essence of security.

I translate a favourite piece by the Roman poet Catullus.

I wonder if newborn infants really do have the power to enslave us.

This one's already got its own spot in the sidebar, but I should include it here as well - it is the longest and most impassioned of my many posts on the Tiananmen protests of 1989.

I am not a fan of e-readers; give me a book any day!

But it makes a good start. One of my key posts on the institutional shortcomings that, in my view, will prevent China from ever becoming a truly great power.

I look back on a lifetime of film buffery, recalling the ten most intense emotional experiences I've had in a movie theatre.

One of my more bizarre (and discomfiting!) flights of fancy.

Although some of my best friends are artists, I get irritated when they describe themselves as such.

Some observations on being a schoolteacher (my first job after university).

I itemise the many shortcomings of China's least appealing traditional snack.

A couple of the funniest anecdotes from my teaching experience in Beijing.

I am Wile E. Coyote, obviously.

The thanklessness of trying to teach English in China...

My drinking buddies create a concept for a charitable NGO.

The end of the 'mosquito season' brings its distinctive torment.

Some of the great tough guy moments from the movies.

I catalogue the varieties of unsafe handling of fireworks one witnesses every Chinese New Year.

I consider getting a pet dog, since a dog appears to have considerable advantages over a girlfriend.

And other excuses...

I re-fashion a 'positive thinking' aphorism to better fit my own mindset, and to make fun of a bumptious entrepreneur.

China's rather limited grasp of Western popular music can be a source of dismay and exasperation.

Another of my more serious posts, about the 15th anniversary of the Karamay theatre fire.

A poignant - and somewhat poetic - snapshot of a thwarted love affair.

Some of the things about life in England that I eventually found I was starting to miss.

Probably my favourite post ever: I imagine how the historians of the future will go about their work.


5 comments:

JES said...

Winners all. Thanks for the handy reading list!

FOARP said...

Wondering whether Froogville ever reads these comments and how they are doing....

Froog said...

Hi there, FOARP,

Yes, I'm still 'here' - checking in on comments whenever they appear (usually only spam these days, of course). Sorry, I had thought I'd replied immediately: that classic mistake of checking e-mail late at night, and then forgetting about it in the press of work the next day.

I have found myself back in China - twice! I am currently working in an international school, but yearning to escape. I find the school environment unfulfilling these days (so much record-keeping to do in this 'digital era', across so many different platforms - none of which work quite as they are supposed to), particularly in the International Baccalaureate. I am also pretty sad - and ashamed - to be back in China. Things have gone to shit so dramatically under Xi, I don't feel comfortable being here any more: it feels like some kind of 'acceptance', a tacit condoning of the appalling way this government treats its people.

I have become very fond of Cambodia, and think of that as 'home' now. But I may try Laos or Vietnam for a while next, as employment prospects seem to be rather better there. (The whole region, alas, is being brutalized by Chinese investment....)

FOARP said...

Many thanks for the response Froog. I felt the same when I was in China for a long business trip in early 2014: that it was a place I no longer could ever see myself living in. That whatever “Q” factor made me want to live there was no longer present - probably it was me and not China. Of course this was before the kids came along which makes any move very unlikely. It was also before the full nature of the Xi regime became so obvious through events in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. There is a feeling of complicitness even in visiting nowadays.

I think of all the people I know living in China, some of whom moved there in recent years, COVID has driven them all out except for one who is talking about going. Compare this to the folk I knew in Taiwan in 2001-2, three or so of whom are still there twenty years later: a gentle, livable place. I am less familiar with Vietnam/Laos/Cambodia but there is something to be said for “small-country Asia” (yes, Vietnam is not small except compared to China) without the pretensions of being a global super-power. I now wonder if I will ever go back to China even to visit on business - I was last there in 2019 and COVID seems to make it impossible.

All the same I can’t wholly say that the UK feels totally like “home” either. I spent a month in Germany this year with the family which seems about my speed nowadays.

Froog said...

Good to hear fromm you again, FOARP. I only know one expat Sinophile who's still trying to go back to China (from the UK); and that probably only because he's now in his sixties, and unemployable anywhere else. Most of my friends in Beijing, Chinese and foreign, had already left before I did in 2013, and nearly all the rest followed within a few more years.

After briefly get sucked into another job in Hangzhou for a few years, I was very much enjoying a semi-retirement in Cambodia from 2015 to 2018 - and that immediately felt like 'home' to me, and indeed made me regret that I'd tarried so long in China when there were so much nicer countries waiting to be discovered. However, travels in the rest of SE Asia made me think that I might possibly like Lao even more, and I had been considering a temporary move there, when I finished working again. And, as Fate would have it, that is where I've ended up - although it's been a happy accident rather than a calculated decision.

I'd got lured back to China in 2018 to work in a start-up international school; but I noticed the ominous news out of Wuhan very early, just before I left on my brief Christmas holiday. I was monitoring further developments regularly from then on, and forseeing how bad things might get, I connived to leave early for my Chunjie holiday... just a few days before the shit really hit the fan. I'd planned to go back to Cambodia, but unfortunately I'd only got myself an online tourist visa which couldn't be extended beyond 30 days. So, in early February I moved over to Saigon, which was blissfully untouched by the crisis at that point, and where I initially enjoyed the luxury of a free apartment-sit for a friend. But things began unravelling there soon enough, and once again I was stuck with a non-extendable 30-day visa. So, in March I hopped up to Luang Prabang, hoping to be able to use that as a stepping stone into southern China, if things quietened down there over the next month or two. But of course, despite apparently getting the outrbeak under control, China suddenly closed its borders, and international air travel had rapidly withered to nothing in just a few weeks, so I found myself stuck here - permanently. At least it's been easy to get long-term visas. And I've found a gorgeous little apartment for only a few hundred dollars a month.

But, after 18 months of being miraculously spared from any significant Covid outbreaks, we've finally got a big one brewing over the past six weeks or so. And because we have such an uneven vaccination rate - near 100% of adults in the capital where I am, but much less than that across most of the rest of the country - I am probably not just trapped in Lao, but trapped in Vientiane, banned from leaving the city at all, perhaps for several months. A nomad like me finds that rather oppressive.

But we have been blessed to get off so lightly in this pandemic - the least badly affected country in SE Asia, and one of the least affected in the world (so far). And it is a very nice place to be stuck. In many ways I prefer living here to Cambodia: slightly milder climate, even better food, more varied scenery; and Vientiane is an extraordinarily pleasant city, much greener, and far less crowded and hectic than anywhere else in the region. But somehow I'd built up quite a strong sentimental attachment to Cambodia while I was there, and I am starting to miss the place. (I actually still keep a small apartment there, in which I've lived for only about 6 or 7 weeks out of the last 3.5 years!)

I hope you and your family have all managed to stay healthy during this crisis. And I hope you'll be able to enjoy a sense of being 'at home' a bit more often - even if it's only on vacations.