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So I'm hangin' out in my apartment today, and I see a strange sight from my window.  Luckily I managed to slip on a pair of pants just in time...

I’ve been sitting on this little story for a while, but as it’s been more than a year now since the “unfortunate event” I feel ready to let it out. Well, I’ve been the perpetrator of some truly clownish mishaps in my life so far, but this one is perhaps the worst. Just to set the scene, I should tell you that the wedding ring on my finger is not the first. One day about a year ago when I was living with my sister in law’s family, well, how can I put it…

Instructions Concerning How to Flush your Wedding Ring down the Loo

1 Take a big dump in a small asian bog and then use too much loo paper, so you need to flush twice.

2 Flush once, then wash your hands with a good old fashioned bar of soap.

3 Get soap stuck under rim of wedding ring.

4 Take off wedding ring and run under tap, then get some loo paper and start wiping off remaining soap. Leave ring inside the paper for no good reason.

5 Finish off washing your hands. Space out.

6 Realise that loo is ready for second flush and flush it.

7 Turn back to the sink and see some toilet paper lying around which you then just have time to throw in the pan so the second flush takes it down.

8 Finish washing hands…dry hands and look for wedding ring. Look some more. Get puzzled. Get worried. Stop, calm down. Replay previous actions in mind. Reach step 7 then get sick feeling in pit of stomach.

9 Groan loudly in panic. Check pan to see if everything has gone down. It has.

10 Leave bathroom and explain to spouse and family that you have just flushed expensive and treasured symbol of love and conjugal attachment down the pan. Explain again slowly and put up with verbal remonstrations and shakings of head in disbelief.

And the moral of the story is? Well, as any Chinese will tell you, it is quite obviously…”never flush paper down the toilet!” Use the little bin nearby. I should say that all this happened when I was relatively new to China. I always use the bin these days.

And my wife is still my wife. She was wise enough not to take my blunder as a symbolic act..

The other week I had to give a talk about argument in academic writing. Argument is an interesting enough topic but academic writing can be a bit dry and dusty, so I thought I’d “spice up” the talk a bit with some references to argument outside academia.

One of the texts I chose as a condiment was Deborah Tannen’s “The Argument Culture”. Tannen is a discourse analyst/professor of linguistics and also a bestselling author: Respect. The Argument Culture is subtitled “Stopping America’s War of Words” and its main point (argument) is that western-style discourse is all-too-often aggressive, polarizing and counter-productive. She also argues that too many modern Americans (and by implication westerners) believe that the best way to demonstrate intellectual prowess is to criticize, find fault, and attack. Does that ring any bells for you China Expats?

This thesis is used to examine gender differences (her specialty), the education system, the legal system, and the media. In the light of what’s been going down recently with the “CNN versus all right-thinking Chinese” ballyhoo I thought the media section was particularly appropriate. In this part, Tannen chronicles the emergence of an “attack dog” media from the days of Watergate, and shows the damage this can do to the political process and the people who serve in public office.

Point taken. But, it must be said, if America has an “attack dog” media then China’s is a “lap dog”. The media in China is the party’s pet poodle and this is a worse state of affairs, I would argue.

I also found a review of “The Argument Culture” that contains the following:

what this terrific American scholar suggests, to a large degree, is going Asian. Asian cultures…place great value on avoiding open expression of disagreement and conflict because they emphasize harmony.

Yeah…right! That is just such total crap it’s difficult to know where to start ripping it to shreds! Just joking. But actually this sounds quite a lot like one of Tannen’s other books, You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation which argues that: “Men grow up in a world in which a conversation is often a contest, either to achieve the upper hand or to prevent other people from pushing them around. For women, however, talking is often a way to exchange confirmation and support.”

So can we say then that the east is feminine and harmonious and the west is masculine and divisive? Well, we can if we want to piffle away with unhelpful and massive generalisations. Actually, China seems a fairly argumentative place to me, with a fair amount of shouting and finger wagging on the streets and at a national/nationalist level there is a readiness to take umbrage at perceived slights that often leads to noisy demonstrations and internet vituperations.

Ask my students what they think of CNN and they won’t wax harmonious. Walk around a Chinese town wearing a Free T1b3t T-shirt and I’m fairly sure you’d get a harmonious pummeling.

In fact, it could be argued that it is the very lack of argument in China’s media that leads to such inflexible opinions (aka pig-headedness) and those notorious “hurt feelings” when the western media presents an argument “the Chinese people” haven’t heard before.

But then again, undeniably, there is CNN’s recent bungling reports of the riots in Tibet and, in general, too many knee-jerk criticisms of China the big bad bully.

There’s no easy answer to all these misunderstandings and confusions of course. Broadly speaking, China still doesn’t “get” western points of view because so much is censored, and the west indulges in sloppy criticism of China because of arrogance or because we cant be bothered to read up about a complicated state of affairs.

Just “Imagine” this though…cue Lennon’s familiar riffs…Less censorship, less aggression, more research, more consideration, more reflection, more patience. World Harmony! Peace and Understanding between Black and White and Yellow and Brown and Emo and Punk and Goth! Wouldn’t that be nice?

What…you don’t agree? Go fuck yourself.

camerabug2 發表相片：

Former Dalian Administrative Building

Edit by Alex:

An message was received (comment below) claiming that this is a somewhat exaggerated account (commenter was emailed but no reply received), Global Voices account (translation on Shanghaiist) that some people (possibly, this is the Internet) from the school claim the teacher's classes were cancelled).  Further Shanghaiist have received word from the individual involved, read here, asking to calm the coverage down.  read more »

shahemenkou 發表相片：

In the centre of Dalian's rapidly expanding Development Zone a new estate is going up. Around 10000 renminbi per square meter, just a little cheaper than downtown these apartment complexes are triple the height and twice the price of somewhere 15 minutes walk away.

They they posses a quality I've only ever seen in movies about US Ghettos, just not built to the same standards.

shahemenkou 發表相片：

Dalian, Development Zone

Christine Lu asks a worthwhile question:

“Do you feel western media is misinformed about China? If so, what source of information do you rely on when it comes to staying informed on China?”  read more »

Graemetric 發表相片：

Dalian, China, March 2008.

Graemetric 發表相片：

The view from my new flat. Free puncture repair kit for the first person to spot a bicycle.

Dalian, China, March 2008.