Imagethief

Month: September 2006

  • Adventures in mucilage

    Every now and then, just when I think I’ve got this living in China thing totally handled, something spins out of control in a way that reminds me to maintain a little humility. On Friday that moment came when I went to bank to change a bunch of US dollars to Singapore dollars prior to wiring it back to my Singapore account. I took my service number and waited in a drone-like trance for it to come up at the one window that seemed to be actually turning over customers. Three windows were open, but two of them were stuck in all day perma-transactions. You know the ones. Your number is 8,902. The open window is now calling 8,887 and the granny at the counter to the left was served with number 14 –apparently earlier that month– and is still there hashing out the paperwork to wire 1000 RMB in plitchkas –or whatever the currency is– to Guineau Bissau where her grandson is studying muskrat husbandry. Someday, when her grandson is the muskrat king (麝鼠王 if you were wondering – I had to look it up) of all China, her investment will pay off handsomely.

    Muskrat husbandry in Guinea Bissau was sounding pretty good about the moment the teller gave me a quizzical look and said, “There are no US dollars in this account”. Yes, Imagethief had waited in line for half an hour with his wife’s passbook. At least she didn’t say, “You don’t look like Lee Yu Foong” (玉凤; it’s clearly a girl’s name) and put security on me with their sinister, candy-stripe electro-batons.

    But it got worse today when I went to the post office to mail my US tax return (late, I know, but I don’t owe so they don’t care) and some paperwork for my dive certification agency. At the counter where one buys postage, which is separate from the counter where one does everything else, I was told that I would have to insert my various envelopes into other envelopes that I would have to purchase. it seems that the Chinese postal service is intolerant of nonstandard envelopes, which is to say any non-Chinese envelope. No big deal; it was only 5 mao (six cents) for the envelopes, although it did leave me wondering as to the fate of two shockingly nonstandard envelopes I had mailed internationally the week before. We’ll find out, I guess.

    It turned out that neither Chinese envelope was big enough to accommodate the foreign envelope it was meant for. Both were close, but not quite there. I could have gone back to the counter and traded up to two larger envelopes, but at this point I was having second thoughts about sending my tax forms to Uncle Sam in a cryptically marked Chinese envelope. US tax envelopes use all manner of complex bar codes, stickers and machine-readable type to make sure they are routed to the clerk most likely to select you for auditing on the basis of some minor, personal quibble, like a wife with a Chinese name. Why interfere with that? So I decided to mail my tax forms from Singapore in two weeks. They’re already five months late, so two more weeks probably won’t make a big difference in the size of the stick that gets jammed up my ass. And Singapore’s postal service is both reliable and tolerant of registered mail using nonstandard envelopes.

    That left the larger envelope free for the dive paperwork. It just fit inside. I addressed the new envelope and took it up to the counter to send. As I was handing it to the clerk I noticed that I had forgot to seal it. And it was here that my entire errand unravelled.

    I should have just licked the envelope. Licked it and handed it to the clerk with a big, sweet grin. But, I thought, I don’t really want to lick this Chinese envelope, and I certainly don’t want to lick it and hand it back to this poor girl all damp with my drool and laowai tongue mites. Yes, I know this is a country where hocking a glistening, irridescent loogey is a crowd-pleasing national art form, but I’m American, dammit, and I keep my phlegm below the epiglottis except on the rarest of occasions.

    Seeing me looking for a moistened sponge or glue, the clerk directed me to a table by the wall. There was a grey washcloth in a dish, the sanitary status of which I daresay made my mouth look like the inside of a freshly used autoclave. Fortunately, the washcloth had dried out. There was also a little device for applying mucilage to envelopes. I swiped the flap of the envelope along one of the wheels of the mucilage machine and pressed it shut.

    Chinese mucilage does not stick. Not even a little. Whether this is because of deficient mucilage technology or in order to make it possible for the PSB to open envelopes without steaming them, I do not know. It’s tacky, but it doesn’t stick. I noticed a little slot in the machine that looked like it was for swiping the edge of a sealed envelope through. Perhaps, I thought, this heats the mucilage or applies even pressure, or magic postal pixie-dust, or whatever else is necessary to make the goddamn mucilage stick. So I swiped the envelope through it. Stupid, stupid, stupid. This applied another layer of mucilage to the outside of the envelope. I now had an unsealed envelope coated with tacky mucilage and fingers that looked like I had just crammed them up the nose of a three-year old.

    So I gave up. I figured I was only 5 mao down, and I simply wasn’t going to go through the whole process again. I’ll mail the works from Singapore.

    It is widely said that the Chinese think all Jews are smart. I may be the man who does more to undermine that remarkably durable impression than any other.

  • Dear lord, why not Paul Hogan?

    Or Yahoo Serious, for that matter?

    I was raised never to speak ill of the dead. Unfortunately that lesson, like so many others, didn’t really stick. So I thought I’d take a moment to reflect upon the early passing of Steve “The Crocodile Hunter” Irwin. I realize this is neither a China nor, strictly speaking, a PR story. But I do scuba dive a lot –and in some particularly risky circumstances– and I am always interested in situations where people meet a nasty end while in the ocean. I am also interested in how Irwin’s death is being described in the media.

    I was never a big Crocodile Hunter fan. I am a product of the Marlin Perkins era; an age of more restrained approaches to nature documentaries. (Ironically, Perkins’ show, The Wild Kingdom, was sponsored by Mutual of Omaha, an insurance company. Perhaps they were onto something.) Irwin’s shtick, on the other hand, seemed to consist of a lot of molesting of animals and insightful commentary along the lines of, “Wow, look at that [insert dangerous wild creature here]! He’s a whopper! Crikey! I’m just gonna grab his tail. If he gets those fangs into me, I’m a goner. Look at that! You’re alright, fella, you’re alright.”

    It’s like knowledge pouring into my head. If they’d known I’d someday be able to get that kind of information from the Discovery Channel, my parents probably wouldn’t have bothered spending all that money on my biology degree.

    My personal disregard for Irwin’s pedagogical style aside, any early death is a tragedy. Irwin leaves behind a young daughter and a toddler son who will only ever know his father through reruns (and who, you may recall, was once dangled perilously close to the snapping jaws of death in what, after his execrable “movie”, was Irwins’ biggest PR blunder). But my real interest in Irwin’s demise isn’t the circumstances per se, although they are somewhat unusual. Rather, it is that Irwin’s passing is being described as shocking, both by a random sample of Australians interviewed by CNN yesterday (indeed, the headline on the CNN web video story is “Australians Shocked“) and, most notably by Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, who said…

    …he was “shocked and distressed at Steve Irwin’s sudden, untimely and freakish death,” according to AP. “It’s a huge loss to Australia.”

    Untimely, yes. Shocking or freakish? No.

    Well, maybe it’s statistically freakish. From reports last night, I gather that there are approximately three confirmed stingray deaths in Australia since World War II. But it’s still not shocking. If Steve Irwin had died leading a hostage rescue mission on a plane full of tourists being held at gunpoint at Entebbe Airport in Uganda, or in a botched stage dive during a drag revue in Zagreb, that would have been shocking. Being killed by a wild animal was, well, predictable. Just like Roy Horn being mauled by a white tiger and Layne Staley dying of a drug overdose were predictable (my brother, gifted with a sense for such things, once described the then still performing Staley as, “clinging to life by his fingertips”). As Time noted of Irwin:

    He leapt fearlessly on to the backs of man-eating crocodiles, wrestled Komodo Dragons and deftly juggled snakes as they sought to plunge their venomous fangs into his arm or face, all the while keeping up a lively commentary for the cameras of his multimillion-dollar documentary operation. Scratched, bitten and bruised, he would display his wounds like trophies, casually using gaffer tape to bind up a severe bite from a large saltwater crocodile that he had been wrestling in a mangrove swamp.

    Yep, sounds like a man who stood a much higher chance of being killed by a wild animal than by, say, a Pushtun militia during a botched heroin deal on the Khyber Pass. Admittedly the animal involved was a bit of a surprise, but to be killed by a large stingray is not beyond the pale in the way that being killed by a hummingbird or a tree shrew might be. Big stingrays can be two meters across and have tail spines like those nasty, cheap serrated steak knives. The ocean is strange and wonderful, if slightly dangerous. Almost everything in it is pointy, venomous or both. In Southeast Asia people are periodically impaled by pointy, leaping trumpetfish or longtoms. That’s life. Or death, as the case might be.

    In fact, it’s not unusual for adventurers to be killed while adventuring. And, presumably, the rush of cheating death, or at least pushing the limits, is part of the motivation. Cave diver Sheck Exley died while trying to set a scuba depth record. Climber George Mallory died while trying to summit Everest (or Qomolongma if you’re not into colonial names). Test pilot Scott Crossfield died in an air crash. And the Crocodile Hunter died screwing with wild animals. He did, as they say, know the risks. And it’s a good bet his insurance company did too.

    So, RIP, Steve Irwin. I’m sure generations of children will see you in reruns. Unless, of course, the world simply shifts its attention to Austin Stevens, Jeff Corwin or the dangrously named “Shark Gordon”.