Chapter 83

To make up for skipping yesterday’s session, I did 40 minutes of tai chi in front of my TV this morning, after downing a big cup of green tea. Tai chi is supposed to be low impact and a good way to activate the muscles and joints after slumber, but I twisted something in my neck, even though I had stretched before. I’m becoming an old man, my mobility ain’t what it once was.

The music of the day was Madvillainy by MF Doom, a rapper with cult status due to his eccentric style and intricate wordplay. He kept his identity secret for a long time, performing with a mask, and he passed away not long ago.

Our dog can understand some words now, mostly things related to his impulsive needs and wants. If we say chifan (eat), he runs to his bowl, ready to be fed. Chuquwar (go outside and play) makes him all excited and grabbing his leash himself from the hook where it’s resting. We used to have another dog, who passed away last year at age 11, who would just put her paws in the harness hoops and wait to be strapped up, but our current little spaz isn’t there yet.

I was excited to go to work, because I just bought two containers of tea at the corner store and I was eager to try them. Yes, this is where I am in my life now. I brewed some white jinyinhua tea and headed to an eleventh-grade class to invigilate their physics exam. It lasted an hour and a half, and towards the end my bladder was about to rupture due to all the tea I’d been imbibing.

A friend sent me a link to a Twitter page from a random Asian-American activist. Last week there’s been a killing spree in Atlanta, with a scumbag taking the lives of eight women, six of Asian descent. Of course some race grifters jumped on the occasion to claim their little slice of the victimhood pie, virtue-signalers rose up to the occasion to get a few more brownie points, and some media pundits blamed the integrality of white America for that heinous crime (meanwhile, terrorist attacks committed by card-carrying ISIS members with six-inch beards who yell “In the name of the Caliphate and Allah, I condemn you to die” before ploughing a crowd with their Truck of Peace are said to have nothing to do with Islam, really gets you thinking). That particular online slacktivist was mostly irate at how the names of the victims were reported incorrectly, and... I agree with her grievance. It’s lazy journalism, and quite disrespectful. I also get annoyed when Chinese names are butchered, like in the UFC for instance, of course it’s a bit much to ask to pronounce those complicated foreign names flawlessly, but at least do a damn Google search on basic phonetics and recognize that the family name comes first, and the given name after. But then she went off the rails completely, talking about how the white man has always disdained the Asian race, how not knowing how to pronounce foreign names is an act of white supremacy, and how tragic it is that her name is Michelle since her parents wanted her to integrate more easily. There's about 5 million things I could say, regarding how integration is in fact a good thing (unless you just want to create ghettos), my experience as a Caucasian-Chinese, general resilience in the face of minor adversity, the welcoming nature of western nations (and western nations only) to immigration, and also my high school students over the years who like their English names and go by them even if I know their real names.

Don’t get me wrong: there’s definitely a weird kind of creepy racism towards Asian-Americans that manifests itself in a few different ways, and the most insidious thing is how open it can be. Women are oversexualized, men are unfairly seen as less masculine, and whole communities are mocked in ways that would cause enormous offense if it targeted another race (except white people, who are of course fair game). From what I’ve read thus far the scumfuck who gunned down these women did it because of a hatred for sex workers, but if he was indeed a racist like they claim, well, may he rot in hell even more. Fuck racism in all its forms, in this instance fuck anti-Asian racism, and I say this as a Caucasian-Chinese with a Han Chinese girlfriend whom I love dearly, and a strong attachment towards Chinese people and Chinese culture, but the same goes for all races and creeds. I’m just saying that some shit needs to be kept in perspective, some grievances are trivial at best and makes you sound like a whining crybaby for bringing them up, and also that some of these “militant antiracist activists” are themselves among the most racist people on the face of the planet, who are just interested in furthering the interests of their self-ghettoized communities by pitting them against their host nations.

I had another invigilating session to do, only for 45 minutes this time. It was pretty boring, but I passed the time by singing songs in my head, reminiscing stories and also doing press-ups against the door frame using only the tips of my fingers. I got this habit of constantly doing calisthenics when I have a bit of down time, like pike push-ups or calf raises when I’m waiting for taxis in the middle of nowhere, banging a set of pull-ups when I’m bored at home, and stretching a lot. I looked at the exam, it consisted of pretty complicated physics shit, stuff I was doing in college and have long forgotten since. Our students do a multitude of advanced courses in a language they only have a thin grasp of, it’s quite admirable but also a bit sad, their brains must constantly be on the verge of imploding.

I rode home for lunch, listening to a podcast by my old army friend who has a yoga YouTube channel I use twice a week for my morning sessions. He was having a nice wholesome conversation with a couple who are also running their own yoga channel. I stopped at the small grocery store to buy tomatoes for my homemade salsa and saw that they now stock some kind of thin flatbreads, I bought a pack and they turned out great to make tacos. I used the beef chunks that had been sitting in the slow cooker all day yesterday, a very satisfying lunch, or can I call it breakfast, as lunch is always my first meal and it breaks my intermittent fast.

I watched a YouTube video about world champion bodybuilder Dorian Yates, with a narration by himself superimposed over gritty black-and-white footage taken in a gym. I don’t care much about that level of bodybuilding and the absurdly deformed steroid junkies that populate it, but for sure they are driven and focused men who can teach a thing or two about motivation and discipline.

In the afternoon I had a self-study babysitting period, and drowned the chattering noise with Bleach’s second album, eponymously titled. I can’t really say which one of their LPs I prefer, they’re all great, with an alternance of furious noise rock and quirky Japaneseness. This one has got a track called Revenge Of The Canary, which is ridiculously catchy, the first song I ever heard from them many years ago.

In the last two periods, I invigilated a grade 12 pure mathematics exam, the questions could have been written in ancient Carthaginian runes and I wouldn’t have understood less what the fuck they were about. The students were quickly filling the boxes with equations and diagrams, seemingly unaffected by the level of difficulty. I walked around and looked at the pinboard in the back of the class, it used to be filled with goofy photographs and drawings from the students, but now they were replaced with austere patriotic artwork with the theme 我爱我祖国 (I love my motherland). As I stated many times I have zero problems with and in fact see great virtues in patriotism, and am personally moved just as much by the sight of the blue fleurdelysé as I am by the five-star red banner of my adopted homeland. On the board there was also a poster with each student’s name and their “dream university”, and it’s more than a little ironic that all of them are outside China. Their at-times ardent patriotism still comes with the implicit admission that their own universities are crap, or even that expatriation is preferable to staying in China.

A tab from a travel aggregator website was open on my phone’s browser, from when I looked at plane tickets. I browsed options a bit, compared schedules and prices, and then completed the purchase. The first weekend of May is a holiday, and the Nash Hash (the yearly national hash run) will take place in the southwestern city of Kunming. That should be fun, hundreds of hashers descending upon the region to hike and drink colossal amounts of beer.

I got home and relaxed a bit. The math exam lasted two hours, and doing nothing can be surprisingly exhausting, mentally. I watched a few ADCC grappling matches, I find it hard to get into, mostly because it’s hard to see what’s going on. Two guys roll around, attacking and defending submissions, then boom one of them taps out from some complicated leg lock. Even with my rudimentary knowledge of BJJ, oftentimes I sit there wondering “what the hell just happened?”

Speaking of which, we were supposed to go train tonight, but now we’re in a bit of a limbo situation, as the expensive gym with its tiny mat wants to charge us a hefty inflexible fee if we want to continue going there, and the other guys seem lukewarm at the idea of using the kickboxing gym. Well shit. For tonight at least, maybe resting would be a good idea, with my neck still a bit jacked up.

The girlfriend came in and we went to walk the doggo and buy vegetables. She cooked a great meal like the great wife she is, with steamed eggplant, some kind of sweet buns, rice, and the beef I braised yesterday in the slow cooker. I felt like drinking wine, so I opened a cheap bottle of Changyu red and poured a big glass. We ate while watching the Season 4 finale of The Office, it had a few storylines, one of them being about marriage proposal. I asked the girlfriend if she wants to get married, she shrugged. She told me before that she’d like to get married in a small village in Argentina, as it’s the country the furthest away from China and she’s even more misanthropic than I am.

I washed the dishes while listening to the next Top 500 entry, an eclectic and hard to qualify thing called Talking Heads. I liked it, though the high-pitched vocals got on my nerves at times. Then I watched a video called Hell World, by YouTube social commentator Shoe0nHead, summarizing the events of 2021 thus far. She espouses left-wing progressive views, and because of this, she despises Biden and Harris. Yes, I said “because of”, not “despite”. I wonder how long will it take for the general opinion to get past that “Well at least he’s not Orange Man” cop-out and see the current political regime as cancerous and destructive.

I wanted to watch a video about late medieval infanrty tactics like the enormous nerd I am but the internet started getting spotty, most likely due to every teenager in the building coming back from their cram schools and clogging the network. I went to bed and played a bit of GTA IV on the PlayStation before crashing early.