Welcome to communist China

The last few days it has been raining non stop and the weather says it will continue for the next week. This blows, but whatever I think tomorrow I will go get one of these 5 dollar massages I hear about, hopefully with a happy ending. :P But damn with a happy ending it might cost me like a whole 6 bucks, so I dont know yet, Ill sleep on it. :) Tons of people have scooters here which they have to drive in the rain too, so they have these rain coat things that cover the scooter and their whole body at the same time, pretty funny looking. Not so funny when your soaking wet and they arent though.

Tonight six of us went out for a Chinese dinner at a nice restaurant close by. They only bring one menu to the table because its customary for one person to order for the table, we voted Michelle. So she ordered mostly vegetarian food, but we added some meat dishes to spice it up a bit. All in all, we got 8 dishes, a few pots of tea, and some starter foods for 124 RMB, split six ways(less than 4 bucks a pop), and we only could finish like 75 percent of the meal. It was soo good too, a lot different than American Chinese food. One of the dishes, I enjoyed, was tofu with 1000 year old egg, they call it. I dont really understand the 1000 yr old egg part but its an egg thats old as shit, which is hard boiled and the white part is transparent purple and the yolk is black, really weird I know but I liked it. Still dont know if its really 1000 yrs old, but it looked like it to me for sure.

In China its all about 'saving face', which means people want to look good and not be embarrassed or looked down upon for any reason by others. They dont want to help someone or befriend someone who isnt in their class or higher, or cant help them move up the social ladder in any way. For example, if someone crashes and falls off their motorbike, no one will go up and help them up or see if they are ok unless they are good friends or this person is of higher status then they are. Or, if you ask someone to do you a favor or ask for help they will lie to you or say they will help you, when they have no intention to do so what so ever. They will tell you yes when you ask them but when it comes down to it they wont because in the moment they are 'saving face' instead of being looked down upon. Even though us westerners think worse of people who lie and dont fulfill their promises. Seems really backwards to me, and when it happens I plan to call them out and make sure they understand how stupid it really sounds to other cultures and how it really hurts their culture in the long run. This is also why they always want to be seen with foreigners. This is why they always cook way more food at gatherings than anyone could eat, because they want to 'seem' wealthy and better off. Im sure this topic will come up in future posts, because it really bothers me so Ill leave it alone for now.

Want to know something else thats f-ed up about China...?

I have to protect people I will talk about next, because I dont know who else is reading this. The government controls the Internet and the news in China, so I wont mention names, places, or times. I will keep it quite vague as well.

I was listening to a story from a friend here who works in construction, about a man in his early 20's who died recently while working on the site. Like I said earlier, it has been raining here for a couple days, and Chinese business's force men to work in the rain or any weather, for the most part, to keep things moving and progressing as fast as possible. Because of this rain, something went wrong with the building and an accident happened where people were hurt real bad and one man died. Instead of stopping work and getting the law and insurance officials there ASAP, the site managers and the company just covered up the body and acted like nothing happened. When the work day was over they called in all the managers and foremen who know or will have to know to keep things quite. The government gets involved too, but for all the wrong reasons. Turns out, the meetings were over nothing but money and keeping this whole thing quite. The government and the business dont want people to know that someone died working on this project or even that there was an accident, even though it wouldnt even be considered an accident in the states because they shouldn't have been working in these conditions in the first place. So in this meetings they negotiated how much money it would take to keep the family quite about this death and how much money this business would have to pay the government to 'make sure' this story didnt get out at all. The phone call made to the family of the man who died was about 5 minutes in length and 4 of those minutes were about the money the family would receive and that they 'would' keep their mouths shut and forget about their loss. There is only a handful of people that even know about this 'accident' and they are all managers or foreman for this outfit. They all will show up to work pretending that nothing happened and make up some bullshit story about where this man moved to or why he isnt there anymore. The Chinese government, along with the mans family, and a few other people actually made a significant amount of money off this mans death, in access of 50,000 RMB each to keep it hush hush. Its f-ed up when you think about it but in America people would make money too just differently. Lawyers of course would make out like bandits and the family would be paid through lawsuits or life insurance also. I could probably lay here and think of a couple more parties that would make money but I dont want to expel the brain power. The difference in America is most likely the truth would be told and work would stop for a few months while a proper investigation took place and all the legal shit went down. Here in China they lie and cover it up to 'save face' and keep business and progress moving right along as usual. Now one family is torn apart because they lost a son, brother, nephew, uncle, cousin, or father even, and they have to accept this 'pay off' to forget about their loved one forever! I lay here thinking about all the fun and sweet ass things you can get into or do here that you wouldnt even thing about in any other country, but remind myself that, this is definitely communist China!!