Chapter 36

Up early (well, “vacation-early”) for a little day of sightseeing with the visiting friends from out of town. We packed a little picnic bag and walked with the dog to the old part of town to have breakfast. The place had old communist kitsch posters, one of them was the face and upper torso of a benevolent-looking Mao Zedong above a field of sunflowers, with the caption “To the service of the people”. The girlfriend laughed at that one.

I often wonder what would have happened in the first two or three decades of the PRC, if they went straight to the state capitalist approach rather than those absolutely disastrous communist programs that held them back. Hell, maybe we’d all be speaking Mando right now.

The girlfriend’s friends arrived, and we ate hundun (which the Cantonese call wonton) and xiaolongbao (small conical dumplings stuffed with a meatball and soup), it tasted great.

We drove to an area south of the city with a lake, a hill and some cute green spaces. The hill is about 80 m tall but still stands out in this part of China, which is a flat pancake as far as the eye can see. It’s also got a towering temple on one of its slopes, and two interlacing white statues that represent something Buddhist.

“Is this the highest point in the city?”, one of our visitors asked once we got to the summit after a five-minute climb.

“I’m not sure, the hotel attached to Wanda Plaza might be taller”

We all laughed. For many years now I’ve been speaking more than enough Chinese to deliver snarky comment upon snarky comment. Despite its diminutive size, the hill is pretty cool, with a nice view of the surrounding countryside, and it was almost deserted.

Then we went to the lakeside and had a little picnic, eating oranges and cherries and small cookies, and drinking beer. Well I was drinking beer. The other dude was driving and doesn’t really like alcohol anyway, and the two girls aren’t into day drinking as much as I am.

We drove back, and I kept reading Homo Deus on my Kindle. The post-biological dystopian world that is described in there is truly scary, the author makes hypotheses about the upcoming death of humanism and liberalism as the de facto dominating ideologies, as human beings become less important in a military and economic sense, as algorithms and machines are taking over, and also as trans-humanism and genetic or cybernetic enhancements becomes a thing. I was born in the 80s but still feel like an old fart at times, and if I think it’s creepy that the things I write about here influence my Facebook ads, well that’s just the beginning.

I made a gratin casserole with cod, mashed potatoes, a cream sauce with dill and lemon zest, and two types of cheese while they were playing a board game. And to balance the richness, I also made a salad. We ate at 3 PM, which is a bit odd but we had breakfast at 9 and they needed to go on a three-hour drive to go home. I put on a cumbia playlist, something that somehow became a tradition when we have friends over for dinner. I really like all sorts of Latin music and so does the girlfriend, and I feel like it’s good stuff for a dinner party. I got some compliments on my cooking and it was indeed pretty delicious, thank you YouTube’s Chef John for the recipe.

I was a bit sleepy in the late afternoon, after eating that calorie bomb and drinking wine. I did a bit of writing while listening to a mixtape by Tandem, a French hip-hop duet from the northern suburbs of Paris. They’re among the first French rappers I’ve ever gotten into back in the day, and they have some serious bangers. They got under a bit of controversy back in the day for the line “Je baiserai la France jusqu’à ce qu’elle m’aime [I’ll fuck France until she likes me]”, a lot of their tracks deal with the realities of immigrant communities, and just like with the case of Scred Connexion, I agree with some of their points and virulently disagree with others. One part I found interesting was a sample before a track, no idea if it was from a real interview or from a piece of fiction, but it was something like “Yeah, I’m racist, and I admit it. I live among all the foreigners, I see how they are. It’s much easier to be anti-racist in Neuilly [a rich neighborhood] than St-Denis [a working-class neighborhood that is heavily black and maghrebi nowadays]” And... that’s kind of a valid point. Ivory towers and all that. I’m not defending racism, but for sure it’s easy to be virulently anti-racist when the only black guy you’ve ever seen was wearing a tuxedo and handing out flutes of champagne at a fellow CEO’s daughter’s wedding.

I poured myself a Belgian strong ale by La Chouffe and watched a short documentary about Kazushi Sakuraba, one of MMA’s most legendary figures. The focus was on his feud with the Gracie family, the bunch of Brazilian brothers and cousins who brought BJJ to the USA and changed the whole world of martial arts. He beat four of them, including Royce Gracie, who had won three of the first four UFC tournaments (and the reason he didn’t win UFC 3 was due to injury), and that one was under a special ruleset with no time limit. The two men fought for six 15-minute rounds, with the Japanese cacthwrestler dominating most of it, until Gracie gave up. And then, as it was part of a tournament, Sakuraba came out the same night and fought Igor Motherfucking Vovchanchyn, the number 1 rated heavyweight at the time, a heavy-handed Soviet smashing machine who outweighed him by quite a bit. Truly one of the most fearless men to ever walk the face of the Earth.

For the next several months, I want to go through the Rolling Stones magazine’s list of Top 500 Albums Of All Time, the 2020 updated one. Of course, there’s a bit of criticism about the whole thing because there’s got to be some underrated albums that didn’t make it, but it should be good enough. The first one, at number 500, is Funeral by Arcade Fire. I kind of expected to find it really gay, but it’s actually pretty damn good, a great piece of indie rock with many layers of instruments. Number 499 was an album from 1977 by artists I’ve never heard of, Rufus and Chaka Khan, in a soul and funk repertoire, and I also enjoyed it.

Our late dinner was reheated Sichuan food leftovers over rice with an egg on top, while we watched another episode of The Office. Then I kept reading and called it a night.