Skanky Beijing

It seems that people would rather read about skanky Beijing than anything else, certainly more than they want to read about my philosophical musings (why aren't I getting any?) or culinary experiences (how can I duplicate this at home with local crap ingredients, no time, no oven, and very little hope of success?) Yeah, well, I write this primarily as a means of release for myself, and incidentally as a way of keeping in touch with a handful of people. Granted, my parents aren't waiting with baited breath to find out if my key card works now, but at least with a blog I no longer have an excuse for forgetting to  fill people in on the sort of details they might want to know about my life here. Hey, if they want an update on me, read the dang blog. It might not be strictly truthful but it is largely accurate and those are rare qualities these days.

As for Skanky Beijing...I am sitting on the oddest document I ever saw, a five-page treatise on staging an orgy that is breath-taking for its audacity, its air of  self-righteous thrift, and its bizarre, mechanical description of women that crosses the line into abnormal psych. I want to post it, if only for a laugh about how damn cheap the writer is (he sniffs at the quality of snacks at an orgy, as if there wasn't enough there to eat as it was) and how odd the word choice is--but on the other hand, I'm afraid people will start reading this in hopes of being clued into the odder activities of the expat set. If you want to know about the darker workings of the swingers, I'm sure you can find out without having to sift through my daily meanderings about what I ate, who pissed me off, or who I'm crushing on now. I'm too old, too educated, and too selfish to be a skank or a beer slut. So be it. I mention the outrageously bizarre only when it crosses my path, or winds up in my inbox. If you want the creepy stuff, look for it on your own. Start with the personal ads on The Beijinger and work your way down. Me? I've got a new crock-pot recipe for Chili which I'm dying to try out, and that's probably the topic for tomorrow.

Who's Laughing Now, Eh?

I can't use my electronic ID card to enter OR exit the compound and building where I live. Why, I'm not sure: it worked just fine this morning, but when I came home from work a few minutes ago, my card failed to release the locks so I could enter the compound gates, and didn't work on my building, either. This is NOT GOOD, as I often take the wee doggies out for early morning strolls before anyone else is awake. There's not a lot of foot traffic into my building, either, so I could in theory be stuck outside for hours with two stinking dogs waiting for someone to kindly let me in.

It's also ominous as I am having a bit of a spat with my school and they finally wrested my legal address from me. God only knows who is related to what around here: this is exactly the sort of low-level harassment that happens when you piss off a Chinese person who isn't quuiiiiite sure just how many connections you really have. After my card failed at the gate, a "security guard" (aged about 12) "fixed" it on the computer scanning system they have. Yet, four minutes later, it failed to let me into my own building.

Part of me wonders if this is my own damn fault. About two weeks ago the security guards accosted me as I was leaving the compound and demanded I sign a registration form giving my name, country of residence (Here: duh) and to write in the largest space--seriously, it was about 25 characters longer than the space for the name--- "Assignation of Genitalia." Well, I could guess that they meant GENDER (as in male or female) but I felt like a smart-ass and wrote in the space, "I haven't the slightest idea what the hell this means" before trotting along my merry way. After all, I was legally registered with the police, so this was just a formality, right? Perhaps not. As I flounced away from the security guard this afternoon, he said something odd which I now realize was, "Goodbye, Miss What the Hell This Mean."

By "Lays" I Meant Potato Chips, You Perv

I had a delightful morning spent first at brunch (eggs benedict, excellent fried potatoes, tea, only 50 RMB at The Den) and then with a friend doing girly stuff. By that I don't mean anything of a Sapphic nature (damn) but rather some quality time at the hands of beauticians. As we lay stretched out next to one another on a long divan I commented to my friend--who had three different staff members working on her at the same itme--that this was probably the closest to group sex that we'd ever get, a remark that so shook her that I think she would have walked out if not for the fact that her eyelids were taped shut and a weary-looking beautician was rasping her naked feet with a cheese grater. I don't know what's so awful about the comment, which was true, after all. But I hastily changed the subject to today's taste test, Hot and Sour Fish Soup Flavor Lay's, versus Blueberry Flavor.



The Challenger: Hot & Sour Fish Soup Flavor



Friend then starting showing signs of interest (rather than say, disgust.) While I rambled on about how shocked I was at the "weird" range of flavors (French Chicken, anyone?) she responded that most of those flavors are available in the UK. My turn to be shocked and horrified. In the US we have regular, barbecue, and maybe some salt-and-vinegar for the super fancy. Oh, you might find sour cream and onion, or cheddar ranch, but they're not that commonly found. OR ARE THEY? Is it possible that I have been away for so long that infidels such as Italian Red Meat Flavour have penetrated the local 7-11s and become the "new" standards? I was pretty shaken, actually, and started to describe my tasting process. First of all I don't bounce from one type of chip to another--I eat a fair share, then have a neutral chaser, such as a big slug of milk, before brushing my teeth, drinking a cup of tea, then starting on another batch. If something smells so foul that my dogs pass out when I rip open the bag, I don't bother to sample it. I was rather hoping that Hour and Sour Fish Soup Flavor would knock out one if not both of the dogs, but to my surprise they were unnaturally mellow when I opened the pack. and even less interested when I tipped the contents into a bowl.

These chips are thicker than the regular Lay's chip, and ridged to boot, possibly to hold more of that delicious fish soup goodness. I was intrigued by the fact that the package offered up the words "Intense & Stimulating" thinking that this was a description of the flavor, but these words probably just apply to the skank "singing star" who is pictured, chip aloft, chopsticks coyly posed, in front of a bowl of fish soup which has appeared like a burning bush in the lower right quadrant of the package. Taste? Hotter than hell, right? No. Kind of bland and mild. More like a barbecue taste, very light on the fish. In fact, I didn't really detect any fish flavor, and this batch of chips (crisps to you Brits, but by now you should have figured this out) was fairly fresh and had a good crunch to them. The dogs wouldn't touch them, which is an omen, perhaps,  but after stuffing two down my gullet, I was able to have a refreshing palate cleanser in the form of a Cadbury Creme Egg (it IS Easter after all) before trying Blueberry Flavor without any noticeable ill effects.



Yes, that's right: Blueberry



Blueberry is, according to the package, "Cool & Refreshing" and does not need the sexy presence of a skank to sell its strange and honest contents. What are blueberry chips like? Well, imagine you've just chewed some artificially flavored blueberry gum. You spit it out. You take a fistful of thin-cut potato chips and cram them into your mouth. You chew and swallow. That's what these taste like. Is it dessert? Not really. Is it a refreshing savory? Not really. Blueberry chips reside in that overlapping area on a culinary Venn Diagram called Not Really Anything. It's sweet. It's savory. It's not delicious and I don't know why anyone would bother. But then again, I say the same thing about certain sexual activities and that doesn't stop other people from enjoying them. (Or so I'm told.)

I have to go back to work tomorrow and I'm kind of hoping that something pleasant will happen, such as being invited out to dinner so that I don't sink into my Chili Cheese Dog rotation again. Whatever happens, you can be sure it won't be accompanied by the crunch-crunch-crunch of any tasty Lay's product.

A note: I found this photo and was staring at it for a while, thinking "That girl must have been wearing a SHITLOAD of eyeliner!" when two things hit me: first, note the presence of a home-made suit of armour in the right edge of the picture. Second, the girl was me, and the unsuitably sardonic smirk on my face clearly reveals that I would indeed spend the rest of my life around the sort of people for whom it is entirely natural to make a suit of armour from old Crisco tins to perk up a dull corner of the house. This was WAY before Martha Stewart. I shouldn't have smirked: at that time, as my mother was making our lives hell with a King-Kong outfit she was designing and the modeling of the head in clay took almost a year: we ate Thanksgiving dinner at a table which featured a lovely stuffed turkey and the head of a model wearing 26 pounds of sculpting clay and thought nothing of it. Ah, 17, the year people  (eg, Grandma) finally stopped calling me "Sandy" and stuck to the name I  have preferred, which is "Zanne." (If you are unlucky enough to be named Alexandra, be grateful no one calls you Alex or worse, LEXIE.)  And yes, Smart Asses, they had colored film back then, but the butt monkey who took this shot was an art student and preferred black and white.

Get Your Chips On, or, Getting Lays

I bought several bags of chips the other day, all of them the familiar Lays brand, and am preceding to work my way through them. Bag number one, on the left: Mexican Tomato Chicken Flavor. Oddly, there's a picture of the cover of both a tomato and a gravy boat full of hollandaise sauce, neither of which seem particularly Mexican or chickeny to me. The taste is not bad: it's not loaded with oregano or cumin as you might expect, but is a rather sweet version of a barbecue flavored chip. It's pleasant enough, but nothing to write home about, although I do seem to be spending time on an Easter Sunday blogging about it. Yeah, well, it's worth mentioning in passing, that's the best I can say of this. Saucy treat number two: This is, and again, I am not kidding, French Chicken Flavor. French Chicken--to me this is a hint of  some delicious tarragon-infused treat. What it is, basically, is your basic Lay potato chip with some fussy, almost undetectable  powder clinging to it which tastes faintly of salt, powdered sugar, and MSG. It actually tastes more like a regular Lays potato chip than the plain ol'  "American" flavor we buy over here. Pleasant, but not worth it.

Since I had both of these bags (yes, I shared a bit with the dogs) during the course of a single day, you can understand why I chose to have beer for dinner, in an effort to rid my body of that much sodium and MSG. I have a brunch to go to today at The Den, which is normally a sports bar (precisely the reason we six single ladies chose to breach its perimeters on today, The Lord's Day) but which used to have good brunches. I don't know if their own particular and peculiar brunch special is still up--you used to have your choice of a milkshake or a mimosa as a side order at breakfast--but I will report back to you. Today's Chip Du Jour is the most horrific one I have ever seen and I am probably going to have to get sloshed at brunch in order to open the bag, let alone dump out and sample the contents.

What gastronomic horror can be causing me this much agony in advance? Is it the Green Tea with Lemon Flavor? Cucumber Flavor, or the other version available in the "lite" (Read: dehydrated) chip, Green Cucumber Flavor? Oh hell no: it's not even Italian Red Meat Flavor. It is--brace yourself--HOT AND SOUR FISH SOUP FLAVOR. Hey, try topping your next casserole with THAT.

BTW--tomorrow is Anzac Day. If you don't know the story of the Anzac push in WW1, look it up. My grandmother lost her true love to World War One and it may or may not be true that on Anzac Day she wore black and walked around saying mysterious things like "Bloody Winston Churchill!" In any event, if you can attend an Anzac service, do so: very moving, very beautiful, and enough to turn you Quaker on the spot. The daughter of a long line of people who served in the military, I am convinced that making war is evil, but self-defense is mandatory. I'll do my bit to remember the boys by doing something other than making Anzac biscuits or picking up anyone from Down Under to share our breakfast. (Come to think of it two of my dining companions are Kiwi and Australian.) How about this: I promise to remember that I am a guest in this country and to act as a good ambassador by my cheerful and polite attitude. Yeah, I know, I do that perfectly every frickin' day. 

Passed Over

I've been in a fog all week due to slipped discs, plentiful drugs, and an incredibly stupid situation at work which exploded like a powder keg in hell. I also had a retraining/recertification process for MJN2 which added to the general stress. It's Easter this weekend and I missed Passover and sort of jerked awake in the middle of the night with the realization I had forgotten all religious observances and rose in a panic to smear a raw lamb chop (still frozen) across the door sill in the hopes this would placate the Powers That Be into letting the Peke (the only male in the house) live another year. Halfway to the door I realized the Peke is kind of a pain in the ass and probably not worth a belated sacrifice of a perfectly good lamb chop--what was I supposed to do, cook it and eat it afterwards?--and since  I'm not officially Jewish, I said the hell with it and had it for breakfast instead. He can take his chances, and I'll take mine. I seared  it over quick high heat, with a touch of olive oil, then added a knob of butter and a wisp of garlic to the top, put a lid on, and turned the heat way down. It was done to a lovely soft pink with a good brown charred crust within minutes and I ate it with a twist of sea salt and pepper. Mint would have been nice, or lemon, but it was good the way it was, and the dogs got the bones and fat to fight over, so all were happy.

It's Easter, and my baby girl isn't here, and for the first time in 47 years I am not dyeing a single Easter Egg. I'm kind of used to downer birthdays and Christmases but the thought of not putting together a basket for my girl sort of upsets me. I did send her something via See's, and sent my parents a nice Easter basket too, but it's just not the same.
I think I will break down and make cupcakes, with the traditional green coconut for grass and jelly beans for eggs and take them to brunch on Sunday. I just can't NOT do something. Once a Mom, always a Mom. Will take pictures if I do.

Food Ho! More Ice Cream Treats

I've had what is really a massively shitty day, through no fault of my own, and as soon as the legal smoke clears, I will write about it. In the meantime, continuing in the vein of "light-hearted ice cream snacks" I purchased the following:

He's so smiley! So friendly! Light-hearted ice cream man is FRIEND to foreigner! I unwrapped the bar, expecting something of a similar nature inside--I mean, HELL, if the Brits have managed to put the words "Holiday Rock" all the way through a stick of hard candy for the past hundred years, piping identical chocolate ice cream men into soft vanilla shouldn't be hard for modern manufacturers in China, right?After all, they invented noodles AND gunpowder and in 461 AD the concept of "pi", right? RIGHT???!??
Wrong. This is the horror that I got, all wrapped up in a little plastic coffin for verisimilitude:

Frankly, this scares the shit out of me--Demon Ice Cream!--and I am glad I didn't buy one for my godson. He's only six, and easily frightened. Note however that I did take a bite out of the creature--upper right quadrant--and I can report that not only is this a visual horror but it is a gastronomic one as well. It's not at all sweet, being sour, grainy, with a harsh chemical taste reminiscent of burning rubber. Also, in terms of the visual, he has no arms, and suffers from hydrocephalus, which is no laughing matter. Great--he's demon possessed, and Mom was on thalidomide. Is it asking too much that he's really a delightful companion, a good friend, a possessor of a great personality, or at least full of creamy goodness?
Well, I guess for a quarter, it is.

Food Ho, High on Life

Gentle Readers, I attach proof that I am indeed a Food Ho. That's me, aged five, dressed as a witch for Halloween. Why? Because witches are scary and frighten people into giving them more candy than say a princess would. (In truth, it's the other way around. But I digress.)

I am home sick today with a sprained back. This is Day Three of drugs and bed rest prior to a trip to the hospital to meet up with Dr. Q and his magic fingers. The drugs make me veer between nausea and a ravenous state in which I am willing to devour just about anything, including the item below.

These are--and NO, I am NOT KIDDING--"butter flavored" Chips Ahoy cookies. They were foul. I recall from my childhood that each Chip Ahoy is supposed to contain something like 17 chips minimum but these contained roughly five chips each and had a pissy chemical "butter" taste that was akin to the smell of microwave popcorn, extra greasy. Ugh. I paid 4.5 RMB for 9 tiny cookies that left a distinctly unpleasant aftertaste, not that they tasted that good going down. Thank God for the next item, a cheap Beijing standard known as the Bitter Coffee ice cream. I paid a whopping 2.5 kuai for this--about a quarter--for a standard popsicle size frozen dairy treat. There's a very, very thin layer of something on the outside that is almost chocolate, and the inside is a semi-sweet coffee ice cream. It's a bit grainy, and not as heavily coffee flavored as in the past, but it's pretty ok. It's actually less grainy than before, so there seems to be some trade-off involved: tastes great, less filling, perhaps.

Let's say you want a delicious quick and creamy treat--throw this with a splash of milk and a dash of Kahlua into your Magic Bullet (the blender, not the sex toy) and whirl it into an adult beverage.

At some point I nodded off due to a combination of Valium and Buffy Season 7, and when I awoke I was hungry enough to try this last one. It's corn-flavored ice cream which is actually shaped to resemble  an ear of corn. The texture is  creamy--almost as creamy as "real" ice cream and it has a thick sweet creamed corn taste which I found nauseating (down to the last bite, I might add.) The outer part is a thin sweet waffle cone which is imprinted cleverly to resemble an ear of corn. Since "corn" is a big flavor here--there's corn flavored milk, corn flavored yogurt, corn-flavored breath mints (yeech) it's not too surprising that in terms of texture, corn flavored ice cream is the creamiest, free of annoying chucks of ice crystal, well worth the quarter if corn--known to my nerdy friends as the "see you later food," a fact they proclaim loudly without stopping anytime I serve them anything with corn in it -- is your favorite taste sensation.Having overdosed on these "treats" as well as quite possibly the Valium, I am craving wholesome food in the form of potato chips. Whoops, that will have to be another post because it's damned hard to find plain ol' potato chips here--they're all flavored with Lime (not bad) or Green Tea or Italian Red Meat and what I want is this: someone to bring me food, no matter what it is, and to keep the dogs off me while I chow down. Staying after and walking those two little doggy bastards so I can stay in my pajamas for another twelve hours would be a bonus.

Man Hunt

I've been thinking about this Man Thing that's going on in my life. One of the reasons I have stayed single is the horrific marriage I had which kind of left me scarred and stupid--other reasons include the fact that I lived a very isolated existence as an expat raising a child on her own, coupled with the fact that I'm in a female-dominated profession. Plus, there aren't a whole lot of single guys my age out there, and getting freakishly fat a few years ago didn't help. Also--I have great taste in friends, and lousy taste in men I date. Lots of factors contribute to my general singleness, including the biggets one: I have never met a single (unattached)  man I thought should be with me the rest of my life.

I have met married men that became good friends, I have met female friends, married or not, whom I will know my entire life (if I'm lucky) but I have yet to meet someone single of whom I could say, "My life would be so much better if I stick with you. I'll be happier if I have you to come home to, I'll have someone who has my back. Be mine." For me it's not about the house and the ring and the car--it's more about the basic premise of  "I enjoy the HELL out of your company and I trust you do to right by both of us. Come on, let's get going." According to my psych professor, if you don't have a "successful" relationship in your teens you are never going to have one as an adult. Well, I didn't have a "successful" relationship in my teens and if that fact alone dooms me to being single forever, so be it.

But I did think about how nice it would be to have someone I can count on to play Scrabble with, or to mess around in the kitchen with. So I thought about drafting an ad. I'm not sure where I would run it, but it would go something like this:

Woman of words seeks man of numbers.
Wanted: someone who thinks I'm cute and funny and who wants to make me laugh. Me: I can cook like a dream and will actually wash your clothes, separating the whites from the darks, and using Downy,  but you have to put them away. I support myself and my child, you support yourself and your dependents. What's left over we can blow on books, food, music, travel, and maybe a brick oven. Looks not important, but do be healthy enough to tie up your own laces. Love of organic gardening and microbrewing a plus. Must love my dogs. I promise to not be catty about your exes, and will tolerate if not love your pets, friends, children, quirks and colleagues. Klingon a plus but not a necessity. Mean people need not apply.


What do you think? Does it cover everything? I think the microbrewing eliminates the closet fairies, as does the suggestion I will bleach your whites, which means handling them first. Looks? Is that too harsh? Honestly, I am sick of handsome and the problems that go along with being goodlooking. How about a nice, normal face? Good grooming but not manscaping? How about clean? What's more attractive than that? I had a HUGE crush on someone once who was probably one of the least attractive men on the planet in terms of facial features and to some extent body shape but OH what a mind! So kind, so funny, so thoughtful, so effing smart! And such a good husband--his wife lit up when he entered the room (hell, we all did) and everyone felt better for having come into contact with this gorgeous, gorgeous man who looked like a frog but treated every woman like a princess.

I'm not asking for someone to support me--I do that just fine, thank you. I don't want someone to shoulder the responsibility of putting my daughter through school: that's a private family matter and we're coping with it just fine. You know what I want? Just like the title of the movie says, I Just Want Someone to Eat Cheese With. Swing dancing a plus.

Sushi A-Go-Go

I eat a lot of street food, trusting in my instincts to buy good food and avoid the bad (although a potato salad at Brazilian Bar-B-Que damn near killed me once, and I have stared death in the face in the form of the salad bar at Pizza Hut on several occasions.) Street food has to be semi-clean because if you give commuters food poisoning they will come back and beat you to death.  I don't take big risks--for example, I don't order crepes made from batter that's been sitting out in blazing sunlight all day-- and so far I've been all right.

Outside my compound I can buy lovely ripe pineapple, peeled and ready to eat, honey sweet and dripping with juice, for about a dollar a pound. Strawberries too--in fact, I feasted on all-you-can-eat fruit for dinner for a cost of about two bucks. The yogurt I had for dessert cost more than the fruit. However, right next to the fruit truck there are two other places selling food: one is a cold noodle cart, a dish I don't care for, the other is sushi. Yes, you got it. Not sushi as in the Western public's perception of sushi as raw fish, but rather, sushi (vinagered rice rolled up in seaweed and sliced into cinnamon-roll shaped pieces.) You have your choice of fillings: cucumbers, daikon radish, or grilled hot dog. Yes, the ubiquitous pink weenie has found its way into the heart of sushi here in the heart of Beijing. I am currently on a hot dog kick, but I eschew the local pink hot dog (sold unrefrigerated in a hot pink casing) because it frankly scares me. My daughter used to love them when she was four but I was always afraid she'd get worms or worse from them. (For the record, Duchess Dog and The Little Emperor love them, but they have no taste and are known to lick their own hinnies, so there you go.)

I stared in fascination as a fashionable young lady (that is, dressed like a hooker but probably a bank clerk) gave pissy, chirpy little directions to the weary-looking man who was rolling up her sushi. Torn between getting a good bargain and not consuming too many calories, she sent the poor man into a near frenzy with her demands for a bigger chunk of pink weenie--a smaller amount of mustard (the plant, pickled, not the condiment) no, not THAT much weenie--oh, could she just have him re-roll it because she wanted the pink of the weenie to contrast with the pale green of the cucumber--oh, could he JUST roll it again in a different piece of seaweed and not cut it this time with that knife...the vendor's eyes caught mine and I could have sworn he was thinking that I would have made a far better customer, rendered almost mute by an inability to express my fussy princess preferences much past, "One piece, please. No want yucky pink meat."

Your Hostess with the Dairy Mostess

Well, my hair is not as blonde, but I still have the same shy smile, although I no longer wear tartan pilgrim dresses.

Here are some odd things to note before you pack your bags and move here, besides the odd baby picture:

One: The gum is lousy. I dislike gum-chewing immensely but after a lunch of raw garlic (and no access to a toothbrush) it's good to keep a stick around to pop into your mouth so that you don't accidentally knock yourself out with your own breathe. (I had an anorexic secretary once who referred to a stick of sugar-free gum as "lunch." Sadly, it was, and that stick of gum kept me from punching her in her dragon-breath mouth. Death Breath, the result of ketosis, you are the scourge of China.)

There are a number of interesting foreign import gums, notably Korean, but to my tongue, they're a bit flat and weak tasting. The best chewing gum is Canadian--just about any brand packs WAY more punch than other nations. Canadian friends pack their bags with DVDs of Corner Gas and good gum.

One of my friends is a gum-chewer and when I mean "chew" I mean "snap and chomp." It's constant. When we work in the same office I have to put headphones on so that I don't turn towards her and scream, "Quit chewing like a DAMN COW." She's Southern--over sixty--you'd think she'd know better but apparently gum-chewing is de rigeur among a certain set and sadly she's in it. My mother is the worst when it comes to chomping gum--truly the champ. She does an open-mouth chomp of wild childlike glee, usually of Black Jack gum, and it's enough to make you run screaming from the room. (Another reason to be on the other side of the planet.)

Two: Forget panty hose. You'll be lucky to find sox that fit! While a few ladies still wear sheer stockings, in general, it's the thick tight that's found most commonly pulled over a layer of thick woolen underwear. I have a year's supply of knee-high hose of the sheer variety and a few pairs of pantyhose. Most of the year I wear those thick tights, purchased in the US, or nothing at all. There's not a lot of in-between type weather. It's either hot, or it's cold, just like dating a manic depressive.

Third: Bimbo. Bimbo is a Mexican company that has a huge stack in the bread/tortilla/sweet roll market here in China. (I call it "The Wonder Bread of Beijing.") They have many odd little buns and things which are filled with creamy lard-like substances. In Wumart this morning an overly-eager shopper tried to tell me that "this is bread it explode-a in  mouf." I stared, open-mouthed in wonder, and shook off my comment, which was, "Honey, if I'm going to let something explode in my mouth it better buy me dinner first." Instead I smiled weakly and said thanks and still refused to buy it. I mean REALLY, I want to eat food, not date it. Good bread? Hard to find. Really, really hard to find. If you really love good food, make your own bread, or try to live near one of the few bakeries (like The German Bakery) that makes decent bread. Otherwise, learn to love the Bimbo. At least their mascot is cute.

Today's recipe: I have had a strange craving for Chili Dogs. I made my own chili (not the killer stew-for-two-days chili but a quickie one of ground beef, tomato sauce, cumin, chili powder, and a dash of mustard.) I used more mustard, cheese, Hormel hot dogs, my chili, and some bread (yes, it was Bimbo, damn it) and made myself a small slice of heaven. Some relish would have been nice, but I was content. There's more for dinner as well and I am counting the hours until I have done my daily one hour on the wii (Wiiiiiiii!) and then can enjoy my Chili Dog in peace. If you use a round hamburger bun and cut little notches into the hot dog so that it curls up around the chili, I believe you have a Coney Island dog. Could be wrong, though: in all the time I lived in NYC, I never once got to the fun places like Coney Island. Sigh. It's on my list now--to eat a Coney Island Dog in Coney Island. Not on my list--to have a date that would pay for one. I can manage just fine by myself, thank you.

Feelin' Groovy

The lowdown is this: it finally hit me on that gut-level where real change occurs that the guy who has been causing me all this heartache is a real shit head and as soon as I realized that, my body radiated relief and joy and I felt a million times better. Of course, the box of See's candy I was wolfing down at the time might have helped too. I have given up having chocolate excesses and cookie binges except for once a month or so (and have much better cholesterol as a result) but this was a special day. Each piece was a revelation and with each bite my courage rose and the hands on my moxie meter climbed back up to "mojo-licious" and has stayed there despite the resultant sugar crash half an hour later.

I have the day off. I might spend it visiting some elderly friends who don't get out much, and then go on to the Beauty Parlor for a new set of false eyelashes, and a foot massage, THAT's how good I feel.

He's a jerk, I can't do anything about that, just keep on moving. How nice to finally release the tension and worry--is he The One? What did I do wrong? How do I play it if he calls--should I pretend nothing happened?--and just get back to being myself, killer pedicure and all. Now that I don't have to be discreet, I might cough up one or two stories about this person, and then you'll see what all the fuss was about. I guarantee these skanky stories will blow your socks off and it's a shame I have to use fake names for fear of being sued (or worse.) Give me a day or two and I'll start posting the good, the bad, and the coyote ugly. I can hardly wait! 

Early Influences

Like many young children, I dreamed of being a cowgirl. First of all, in the early sixties, particularly in California where we lived at the time, the Western was King. Much of what we saw on TV was of the "Big Valley" type show and I'm pretty sure I modeled myself, however subconsciously, on Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke after a neighbor exclaimed, "Now there's a woman who knows how to TALK to a man." Looking back, I'm sure conversation wasn't high on the agenda there, but back then, even adult women were fairly innocent about that sort of thing.

When I was about to turn four, two things happened which changed the course of my life forever. First, a man  came by the house with a pony and a camera and little togs and my mother actually laid down the money to have my picture taken on the pony. I couldn't believe it: it seemed so glamorous and decadent and so thrilling to be immortalized on film as a real live cowgirl!  I  was even given a walk on the pony, to the end of the drive and back, and I remember leaning forward and urging the pony to run away, urges I didn't fulfill until many years later when I hopped on United Flight 888 and ran away to China. 

The second event; well, there was a little plastic pony advertised on TV: by "little" I mean not the size of a REAL pony, but one that was big enough for kids to ride on. You bounced up and down on the seat and the pony scooted forward. It was advertised for up to "age four" and I begged and begged my parents to buy me one. My father refused, telling me that I was "kind of big for my age" and "a little heavy" and that you weren't allowed to ride one after you turned four, so to give me one for my birthday was a waste of money. I was mortified: I wasn't fat, by any means, although I was your basic healthy little girl, and as a matter of fact, was in the lowest percentile of height (and still am.) Years later my mother told me Dad couldn't afford to buy one and this was his way of  (not) admitting it, but from then on I was convinced I was huge and therefore unworthy of having "normal" toys. (He said the same thing about putting a swing up in the yard--or buying a swing set-- or letting me ride the mechanical pony at the store that cost only a nickel... "You're kind of, well, HEAVY,  and just too big for that.") So, devastating as it was to my ego, at least you know I had enough to eat.

Our very own Auntie Mame and her brood.  Yeah, that's my dad holding the beer and singing right next to her .

Other influences: see the laughing happy people singing. This was my mother's best friend's family, and that was our player piano. Because it was a player, none of us learned to play it properly--as my mother put it, "Why bother to waste money on the kids' piano lessons when we can buy a roll for the song we like?" The piano had to have a roll of music put in it, not unlike a roll of toilet paper, and as we got older, the rolls were harder and harder to find, and the prices shot up. (I think the last one purchased was The Bee Gee's "No One Gets Too Much Heaven No More.") No wonder Dad couldn't afford that plastic pony, he was too busy buying classics such as "What Now My Love?"  "Feelin' Groovy" and "Theme to Dr. Zhivago." Note also that most of the adults are soused, there's an open can of beer, and why YES, that IS an ashtray perilously close to that small child!

Screw the alcohol and cigarettes, what I remember from our time with this family is the sheer amount of fun given off by their mother, our own Auntie Mame. She's gone now, and sadly, my parents lost touch with them after my father's first retirement, a move which jettisoned us away from the warmth of San Diego into the cold rain of Oregon. My parents never had any friends after that--well, my mother did, but we were never friends with any other families--hell, most of our relatives couldn't even stand us--and we never had get-togethers of music and fried chicken and blocks of ice cream cut with a knife to ensure equal portions again. I can still taste the drink of choice at these gatherings--Old Crow and Coke--and the sounds of Hank Williams and Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass make me joyful. Burt Bacharach is the soundtrack of my childhood, Dusty Springfield, my muse. I'm pretty sure this lovely laughing woman also baptized me as a Catholic--I have some dim memory of a secret trip to a church when quite young-- and I completely understand her reasons for doing so. Once in a while Mom reveals a little nugget about what was going on in those days, bits of secret information that was internalized as "sinful" and "shameful" but which was really just human. That family had their problems, we had ours, but when we got together--oh, what fun.

The final shot: I had two of these postcards, which I purchased about 15 years ago in Western China. I showed them to my students claiming they were both my boyfriends. Sadly, my students believed me and I'm pretty sure this is why the local government started leaving brochures at my house about how it's illegal for unmarried people to have "congress sexual or otherwise." (If only...) I am down to one postcard now, sadly battered and beaten and about as oily as the models themselves, but here goes: perhaps they will give you as much glee as they have afforded me for well over a decade...

Stacey's Mom isn't the only one who has got it going on!

Facebook Pictures Tagged

Here's something that some women do because they are competitive bitches: they post really, really horrible photos of you on their Facebook page and TAG THEM! For example, if you are an indistinct blur in the background, perhaps eating, or with a glass shoved up against your face, some CB (Competitive Bitch) is going to post that photo--in which they are front and center posing glamourously, and make sure that YOU are tagged, even if no one else in the photo, including the baby they're posing with, is.

I really dislike a friend's wife who runs a blog about how she has, basically, The Only Baby In The World. She even wakes the baby up from naps to "play" because "she misses him so much. " (No, she doesn't actually raise the child herself--went back to work five weeks to the day after he was born and refused to breast feed on the grounds that her breasts would get flabby.) What does the CB do? Oh, she snaps a picture of me ladling out plates of steaming hot spaghetti--my face is obscued by the steam and I have on a big chef's coat splattered with sauce. Not only is it a highly unflattering shot, but you can't even see me clearly in it. This is the front and center picture in her blog, accompanied with some highly charged phrases about how Western food (pasta? Isn't that just Chinese noodles?) makes you fat. Yes, my name--Chinese AND English--is on the caption.

I don't object to women who pose a lot and snap LOTS AND LOTS of pictures of themselves coyly posed in front of national landmarks such as Taj Mahal. I don't like this type of shot, since it screams to me, "LOOK AT ME! I'M STILL THIN AND I GO PLACES, YOU LOSERS!" But what the hell---it doesn't actually HURT me, does it? But when you put a bad photo of me up AND TAG IT, well, that's a call to arms around here. Do you think I would WANT that photo up for people to see? Do you think that I have no vanity, that I wouldn't want to control what's available on the Internet for people--including clients and employers--to see?

If you are one of those people that cannot live without posting but yet another shot of your hip and glam little self on Facebook, then post. I will think you're a tasteless idiot because you are, but so be it. But for fuck's sake, don't be so petty and small that you try to make yourself look better in comparison by tagging any helpless individual in the background. That's competitive, it's bitchy, and in a world where any employer can google a job applicant's name and access some truly ugly photos, it's a weapon that quite possibly is taking bread out of my baby's mouth. CB, baby, I'm lookin' at you.

Tomb Sweeping Day

There is a lovely little national holiday coming up known as Tomb-Sweeping Day. We all get the day off, but someone has decided that we should work Saturday and thus have off three days--Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. I don't know about you, but working six days straight in order to have a three-day weekend is not my idea of a Good Time. For one thing Ayi doesn't work on Saturdays, so I have to take care of the damn dogs AND put in a full day teaching, which means running home at noon in heels to walk Duchess and The Little Emperor. My disdain at walking the dogs has nothing to do with the fact that The Little Emperor is now so enthralled at Duchess that he laps up her pee--ugh--it's just that I hate having to run home, walk the dogs, and run back to school in a little under an hour. The only three-wheeled motorcycle pedicab available at that time is the one-eyed hunchback midget, and even though he's pimped his ride (it's now a very classy pedicab with Hello Kitty floor mats) it's still a wild ride with Mr. Toad, sans Disney sound track.

As for Tomb Sweeping Day: well, I'd happily dust off my ex's tomb, although he's not dead yet. I'm crazy about my mother-in-law and would, as the last member of the family still in China (no matter how ex-member my status is)  indeed go sweep the tombs if I knew where they were. Mother-in-law's parents were killed by the Japanese during the occupation, so I doubt if even she knows where those bodies are. As for snobby aristocratic ex-father-in-law, his parents' tomb are a fucking shrine--I'm not kidding, they are a national shrine--so there's no need for me to Go South and pay homage. About the ex: once after he pulled a particularly shitty deal on my kid, namely calling her up, telling her he was in Beijing and asking her to wait on a street corner for him so he'd take her to lunch--then letting her wait an hour and a half in the 108 degree summer heat before telling her he'd changed his mind--- I told her once he was dead we'd drink a bottle of champagne, dance on his grave wearing pretty red dresses, and quote poet Diane Wakowski the whole time ("I'll dance on the grave of a son-of-a-bitch.") It cheered her up a bit, but cheered me immensely, as I finally put my Fine Arts degree to good use, quoting poetry and lifting my own spirits in the process.

When my daughter was here and in a particularly shitty mood, she once screamed at me, "We never have fun on Chinese holidays! We don't go anywhere, we don't do anything! We're not even having a picnic because we don't even know any dead people!" (She doesn't know how close she came to being one for that little comment.) I can't say Tomb Sweeping Day is a favorite holiday, but you know what? If I don't have to speak slowly and say, "No, honey, how ARE you, not WHO are you?" for the thousandth time this week, having a holiday is fine by me, even if I can't wear a red dress and dance the tarantella on the old bastard's grave. A girl's gotta have something to look forward to, after all.