Editor’s Note: Continuing with the tradition of posting some of my old weblog content, I’m offering up this gem from May 29, 2001, about two weeks after I arrived in China. Regular programming will resume as soon as I’m done with my little project, which will be soon.

Everyone talks about the globalization and, even more nowadays, the Americanization of the world. They complain that western culture is invading and wiping out the local cultures of the third world.

Now, in China, the people have McDonald’s and KFC and (in bigger cities) Starbucks and Subway and Pizza Hut and all that other American goodness. They can buy (illegal copies of) American music, American clothes, etc. If they really have the money they can even buy the authentic stuff in high-end department stores.

But you know, they can keep all that. I don’t care, I don’t want it. Jordan and I went to Pizza Hut my last full day in Shanghai just because I knew I wouldn’t have it for a while… but other than that I could care less. I’d rather eat at good, cheap Chinese places than spend an arm and a leg for food I ate at home.

What I don’t understand is why two simple Western innovations haven’t made it here… simple things that could just change this country for the better: cold beer and real toilets.

First the toilets. Taking a shit should not be a gymnastic event. You should be able to go into a bathroom, sit your ass down and take a shit. Maybe even read something if you have the time. Nope, not in China. You squat down, hoping to align yourself with the little slit in the floor they call a toilet and try to at once balance yourself and not piss on your pants.

And for me (and I don’t know about the rest of you folks, but I don’t see why y’all would be any different), I don’t have a directional nozzle down there. It just kinda comes out and goes down, maybe taking a jaunt sideways or something first. It never really mattered because the toilet bowl was there to catch it. But now it does, and I just don’t like that.

Second, cold beer. I know the Chinese don’t drink much of anything cold. I don’t know why, but they don’t. But damn, whoever showed them how to make beer in the first place should have made them promise they would never serve beer warm. I’ve had more piss-warm beer in the last two weeks than I care to remember. In Shanghai you could find places with cold beer, but here in Changchun you have to buy it then stick in the fridge, it seems. Nothing is cold.

Pierre, Radim, Marissa and I are planning to, at some point, buy some good beer (most of the beer here is pretty shitty lite stuff) and put it in the fridge for a couple days then really enjoy it. I’m looking forward to that a lot. Maybe when Nell gets here at the end of the week we can do that…

My hot water heater finally works (some switches that are behind screw plates weren’t flipped), but my bathroom floor leaks. It seems that my bathroom was never intended to have a shower, so they never waterproofed the floor. Consequently, yesterday, in my underwear after taking a shower, the guy from below my comes up yelling a mile-a-minute in Chinese about something… I called David and had him talk to the guy.

It seems that when I shower the water floods his bathroom. The landlord is supposed to fix it soon, but has told me, for the time being “to maybe only take one shower a week instead of two.” I about cracked up, because so far I’ve been taking seven showers a week… but maybe I won’t mention that.

Crazy, crazy Chinese.

Posted by John on Sunday, May 25th, 2003 at 11:53 pm.