Commie Girl Scouts

My daughter Lulu was a member of the Commie Girl Scouts. You may know them by their correct title, Young Pioneers. She wore a red scarf and sang songs with a group of other red-scarved children. When she transferred to a hipper school in third grade, someone remembered that she was actually a US citizen and she got kicked out. This made her mad, but it also awakened her to the first faint realization that injustices exist. She came to two conclusions: you can be a patriot, or you can be a good person who loves the whole world and you’ll probably get excoriated if anyone recognizes this about you, but what the hell. In that moment, she shifted from being Mao’s Little Sunbeam to being an ardent proponent of recycling and Living Green.

This is not a super popular choice. I don’t get involved in politics, except for the politics of living: ie, I don’t throw anything of a private nature into the collective garbage can unless I WANT my neighbors to know about it (“Hey, Lao Wang! That lady in 202 isn’t pregnant, she’s just fat! I have the proof!”) But the green movement, while afoot, is hardly awash with a ton of new recruits. 10,000 new cars hit the road EVERY DAMN MONTH in my city alone, making it a city full of the world’s most expensive cars driven by the world’s worst drivers. People who once practiced economy ostensibly in favor of ecology throw their garbage out the windows of their brand new BMWs as soon as they can afford it. They weren’t being green before, they were being cheap. Now that the dollar is worth squat and the RMB is king, they can afford to be as destructive as they want to be. Green is for suckers, don’t you know.

Now my daughter is choosing a college major, and she’s thinking of becoming an environmental engineer. As soon as she says, “Engineer” people here gasp in happiness and joy: when she mentions the “environmental” part, tongues are clicked in disapproval. No money in it, you see. And if there’s no money in it, what’s the point? (My Chinese friends are horrified that I have not one—but TWO Master’s degrees in Education. "What’s the point?" they wail, "You just play with kids all day!") My old friend Tina Whitman (where are you, lassie?) used to say, “Die young, stay pretty.” Apparently the Chuppy creed (oh come on now, you saw that one coming, Chinese Urban Professional) has changed from “We are Mao’s Little Sunflowers” to something more like this: “Whole world dying, I don’t care, Me got Beamer!”