china’s been really amazingly fun during the last month (possibly because I’ve been with my family and vacationing) but every once in a while i snap back to my suspicious pre-summer self.

• I’m glaring hatefully at the two slick-looking police walking in the opposite direction on the boardwalk before I’ve even found a good reason to dislike them. I don’t know that they’re corrupt, I don’t know if they’re affiliated. Hell I don’t even know what it means anymore for a person to be either corrupt or affiliated or both…those ideas have gotten so muddled in my mind over the course of my stay.  But why in the world are they dressed in their unnaturally crisp suits and shiny badges, looking so entitled (AND MEAN!!!) marching down a freaking boardwalk among a sea of beachgoers in the middle of the day? Ehhh, at any rate I glared right at them and they glared back.  For a moment, I thought, am I in trouble now?  Did my freedom-nourished American mind break loose from the Chinese wariness I’ve since evolved? Did I forget that I look Chinese?  I didn’t even have my passport with me. Gotta be more careful.
• At a thoroughly drunken lunch party I was lectured by a woman I had just met about the biggest difference between China and most Western countries.  In the West, societies are built on the rule of law.  China on the other hand is built on human relationships. In China, it is of utmost importance to make people who matter to you happy.  At the dinner table, that means endless rounds of flattering toasts.  In the working world, that means promoting your son or your landlord’s son in order to secure future favors.  At the same time that the latter may seem plainly corrupt to the Western eye, many cases also deserve some empathy.  1) It seems that the average person in China would never get very far in life without caving in to this culture I have been speaking of.  So it’s hard to blame them.  2) In a giant step one might just say that Chinese culture is just really social.  Maybe it’s just because there are that many more people here—you need to be “social” beyond the western understanding of the word.
• Holy crap the bank guards have giant guns.  I would have taken a picture had I not been scared shitless.