If Wishes Were Horses, I'd Get to Ride

I grew up lower middle class, and this meant we despised the people immediately above us as well as those below us, namely people with horses.   Horses were, I was told, nervous animals and people who loved them were crazy. In fact, all animal lovers were nuts, and people with exotic pets were not only crazy but probably neglectful of their children as well. I can attest to some extent on the last one--I have yet to meet someone with a pet monkey who was a good parent or even a decent pet owner, and I recently dated someone with a snake. (Not a code word here, he really had a snake. And I wouldn't have gone out with him but I had recently met a kind of interesting co-worker who had a tattoo and snakes but was versed in Anglo Saxon poetry, so I thought, what the hell, give the guy with a snake a shot.) For those of you who care, it was a python and he raised it from a tiny snake from an exotic pet market he found here in Beijing. He made the mistake of bringing it to my house and threatening to feed the guinea pigs to it. I am not that fond of my guinea pigs but I am their owner and treat them very well and was not going to see them being terrified and teased and turned into dinner, even if it would relieve me of spending over a hundred bucks a month on guinea pig feed. So out he went. Both guinea pigs are now about half the size of a football and getting bigger by the second, so perhaps it was my loss after all--but I couldn't bear the thought of Squeaky and Snowy feeling panic or distress or pain. BTW, the dogs were out getting groomed so they missed the excitement, although they freaked out when they got home and smelled his patchouli that lingered in the air like the image of a  bloated corpse burned into your retinas. (It's still there.)

As to horses, well--in truth, I loved horses and when I had enough money together would try to organize a trip with other friends to rent a horse for an hour. I didn't have enough money for a lesson, mind you, so most of my time on horseback was spent trying to giddy-up, but I felt the most tremendous guilt for liking horses, a liking that began well before I read National Velvet or Misty of Chincoteague.  I still like them, I still wish I could ride properly, and I still hope that some day I will learn how. I boosted myself into middle class with the dint of my college education, and I lifted myself out of middle class morality by dint of having absolutely no money, no social security, and no social status in the form of a husband or even at this point family. I get to like what I like, and if that means taking in rescue dogs and a rescue guinea pig (and getting that one a guinea pig of its own so it wouldn't be alone) then so be it.  I'm not neglecting my child--hell, she's in a good university and doing well--and my dogs don't have more clothes than I do, although I do kind of envy one of her this little pink coat that has the sweetest pink bones embroidered on the collar. Here's the benefit of being the crazy single lady on the block: I can do whatever the hell I want, and like whatever I want, and there's no one here to look down their nose for my doing it. Yay me.

My Life As a Singer

I've been blessed with the ability to perform and to carry a tune, which means at some point I've been on stage singing, either with a band or as part of that divine thing, musical theatre. Musical theatre is a lot of fun to do, but excruciatingly awful for most to watch. I'd rather NOT see Starlight Express, thank you, nor do I ever want to hear One Rock And Roll Too Many ever sung again, particularly by that chick from a past season on American Idol who also did that creepy baby wail.

At one point in my life I sang professionally, not as a diva on some operatic stage, but as a regular feature on a sleazy nightclub circuit in Tokyo. I started out as a bar girl, meaning I sat at tables, wiped the fingerprints off the clients' glasses, and stirred their heavily watered down whiskey and water for them. Since it had a KTV component--hey, it WAS Japan in the 80's--I was also paid to get up and sing for the customers, their choice. This evolved eventually into a regular gig with a regular set list and my very own eight-track cassette tape which traveled with me from club to club. It didn't occur to me until years later that I looked a lot like a prostitute, as I jumped from one waiting car to another, with different clubs sending different drivers out to pick me up and get to me the next gig. I have sung "My Way" more than any other white girl living, but I have never sung it cold sober and I hope I never have to. (Must write sometime about the Soapland gig which gave me such a severe case of self-worthlessness that I didn't sing again for twenty years.)


My newfound life, post-Baby Girl leaving for college, has sent me the opportunity to get back up on stage again. So, I've formed a few groups to do a few numbers, and we've had the usual discussions on what to call ourselves. I'm usually good at names and I proposed the ones we're using straight off the bat. No, I'm not telling you what they are. But I then came up with some of my favorites, which I will share with you:

An all-girl, over fifty years of age band called Iron Maidenhead. We never smile, and we play hard rock.

Another all-girl rock band, Nine Inch Nail Salon. We play a fusion of New Romantics and Death Metal.

And, the last one in honor of my friend's truly horrifying wife, Skank. Perhaps Skank can open for Iron Maidenhead sometime. (About the truly horrifying wife: I stopped by their house one day to drop off a yogurt maker and she answered the door in a bondage outfit and said, "You here for threesome?" and I said no, just dropping off the yogurt maker for your husband and she replied, "He not here. You have five hundred kuai, I let you watch." So yeah, Skank. Could be so much worse.)

Another note: in a country where no one can use English correctly to identify even and odd numbers (even big-ass theatres refer to seats as "single and doubles" when they mean odd and even numbers--and your tickets have all the evens clustered together in rows on the right, and odds in rows on the left--everyone seems to know how to use the term "threesome." Why, God, why? 

Perfect Hostess Brownies

I believe Perfect Hostess is the name of a song by the Korgis, and it's one of my aims in life. I have thrown some very dismal parties, but I have a knack for throwing together good jam sessions. It's easy: get together some musicians, throw in food. Alcohol not needed.

I strive to serve something nice to each guest, whether it's their favorite diet root beer, or a choice of iced green or black tea. At a jam session at my house the other night, which followed close on the heels of an 11-hour work day, I had soup, grilled pastrami and cheese sandwiches (because I was starving) and brownies for anyone who didn't want soup and sandwiches. I also had hot green tea with honey and I periodically floated out of the session whenever my vocals weren't needed and heated up more hot water, filled tea cups, passed out napkins, and all that. You know, hostessy stuff. One musician left around nine, the other around ten.

The next day the guy who left first asked me with a smirk if my brownies had "done the trick." I was sort of puzzled--done WHAT trick? He then asked if the other guy had "thanked me for the brownies by staying over," i.e., dick for brownies. This is incredibly offensive to me---I bake to release stress, I set a nice table because I have that sort of background, and I feed people out of good manners. I had grandmothers and a mother who would have died of shame if someone left the house without having had at least a cup of tea and a nosh. Poor people always feed you anyway. I  packaged up all the brownies and sent them home with the second guy as he's super busy, not feeling well, and also, I don't like to have brownies around the house where I will eat them. I've had a bit of a relapse, not quite out of remission but not feeling well, and I've been on huge amounts of medication which makes me retain a lot of water and cough like a chain-smoking house madame. My joints hurt, my elbows are so swollen I can't wear my button down shirts,  and I can't keep to my usual exercise regime although I do move a lot. The last thing I need is to sit and eat my feelings with a pan of brownies. (Although reading through this tempts me to do exactly that.)

Anyone who thinks brownies are all I have to offer as bait doesn't know squat about me. However, the brownie recipe I've come up with is divine, and is the icing on the cake of anyone who really DOES get my overall vibe.

You can  microwave these--six minutes, full power (I have a 700 watt oven) in a square 8 by 8 cake pan does the trick nicely.

First, melt a half cup of butter and let it cool for at least five minutes.
While that's going on,
beat the crap out of three small eggs (two large ones)
Add one cup of sugar, and a big teaspoon of homemade vanilla (brandy works just fine)
Beat until quite thick and fluffy and smooth.
Dump in 3/4 cup flour, 6 tablespoons of cocoa powder, and the half cup of butter. Yes, it can be self-raising flour, but plain baking flour is best.
Stir just long enough to combine the ingredients.
Pour into a square cake pan, and bake as directed above.
You can stir in other things, such as toasted nuts, crushed peppermint sticks, etc. A light sprinkle of mini-chocolate chips does it for me.

These are simple, but simply delicious. Just like me. (Especially the simple part.)

Chocolate

A lot of people claim they like chocolate, but what they really like is candy. "Ooooo, MUST have some chocolate," they say, reaching for a slab of brown Laffy Taffy. That is not chocolate. Chocolate is chocolate, great crisp-breaking hunks of pure chocolate madness, unsullied by whipped fillings made of hog's feet and marshmallow, enhanced perhaps by a goodly handful of nuts. There is one day every month where I must have chocolate or I will kill someone. The rest of the time, chocolate is consumed simply to feed my soul, and not as a form of gun control.

I was told as a small child by my mother that chocolate is the only flavor, and that vanilla is merely the absence of chocolate. As a consequence, I never tried any of the other flavors and missed out on ice cream such as butter pecan or raspberry. She has since told me that she was joking when she made that statement but I wonder sometimes, as I have yet to see her dig into any dessert that wasn't laced without at least a generous dollop of home made chocolate sauce (her grandmother's lemon bars the only exception to that rule.)

My mother loathed many things, including M and Ms, and I never had that classic cookie, the M and M cookie, until I was 47.  She was passionately fond of the chocolate and nut combination found on the outside of Rollo candy bars, and much of my childhood consisted of coming downstairs to a smoke-filled living room, and seeing the gutted remains of a Rollo resting uneasily in an ashtray covered with cigarette butts, the imprint of my mother's teeth where she had nibbled off the chocolate covering still clear in the light brown fondant filling. The Rollo candy bar is no longer available, so my mother, when she indulges, has to go straight for the chocolate covered peanuts.

I get my mother on many levels, and I understand her more as I get older: she has a wicked sense of humor which I did not relate to as a child and I was often confused by whatever was making her laugh, a statement echoed by my own daughter when discussing my shortcomings as a parent. I still don't understand why M and Ms are, in her opinion, vulgar, as she is the one who taught me to suck on the casing long enough to for the dye to come off, thus staining my lips red, or green, or whatever color I fancied. (She preferred red.) I indulged in many many M and Ms when in the US, where I found coconut, raspberry dark chocolate, and pretzel M and Ms. All were divine, and none are available here, where we're lucky to find peanut M and Ms that aren't actually stale.  It's just as well: the raspberry dark chocolate would be terrific in brownies, and as for the pretzel ones...well, let's just say, they are too close to the perfect snack to be something I'd want to have readily available. I ate my first pretzel M and M on a flight and alarmed fellow passengers with my first grunt of pleased astonishment: subsequent noises included a groan or two. You can blame the noises on turbulence but you know, and I know, it was due to the demonically good combination of crispy, smooth, salty, chocolatey kibble. Ah, pretzel M and Ms: bachelorette chow at its finest! The perfect PMS snack.  

Update: How Fat White Guys Get Laid in China

Update! Special alert! I have written far too much about white men being treated like gods in China by the local women and I swore to leave that topic forever. However, I did have an update I think is worthy of posting: according to a friend, if you go to Maggie's early in the evening, there are no women there.

My new friend Thor reports that he went to Maggie's on my recommendation and there was not one single chick there. Not one. It was full of mostly white men in various stages of attractiveness: some young and thin, some old and fat, some well dressed, all with different expressions of hopefulness and disappointment playing on their features. It was only nine in the evening, but it was a Saturday night. So go figure. He finally left. However, my friend Little Nicky (yes, that's really his name) went in around three a.m. and claims he scooped up two for the price of one. (He said, rather gallantly, that they're all fairly attractive after you take out your contact lenses, beer goggles be damned.)

So I don't know. I'm kind of old and I don't spend much time in night clubs unless I'm watching a friend perform or having a gig myself, the latter happening very rarely these days. I think I should actually go to Maggie's myself and I've asked my friend The Rose to arrange for us to broadcast one of his shows out of there so we can report on the action blow-by-blow, so to speak. If nothing else, I can write about the food as I understand they serve a hell of a hotdog. That's not code for anything, I hear they do have good food and that's about my only interest, aside from checking out the ladies and the skanky men who frequent the bar. So afraid I'll bump into a former boss there...well, as long as it isn't a student's parent, everything should be fine.

I Miss Television

I do have a satellite dish, but the channels originate out of the Philippines, which means for every "good" station like HBO (which I loathe, incidentally) there are four channels broadcasting evangelical Catholic programs, such as Family Mass and Mother Maria TV. Most feature a motley collection of priests and nuns in tropical-weight habits (think shorter sleeves) and occasionally, if you flick through the channels fast enough, you will see the same priest giving a talk or singing mass on two different channels to two different audiences. The timing is set for the Philippines as well: the screen may show that it's really showing The Glee Project 2, but what's on is a tagalogized version of Red Dawn. ("Ka barkada mo, motherfucker!") Just today the screen announced it was showing Family Mass but it was actually broadcasting Party Philippinas, a sort of Girls Gone Wild with everyone keeping their modest bikinis firmly in place.

I do miss television. I don't enjoy Chinese tv, largely for the reason that I'm not a moron. I have one channel that shows some American television (I love New Girl) but for the most part, it's reruns of the most loathesome TV show ever, next to Alf and Small Wonder, namely, According to Jim. Ugh.

The time has come for me to go back to teaching, which means 14 hour days, coming home to walk the dogs, eat dinner, and crawl into bed exhausted. I won't be sitting around following Idol and eating potato chips while drinking diet Coke: it's far more likely I'll be coming home with a suitcase full of laminated letter shapes that need cutting out for tomorrow's opening activity. However, it IS nice, particularly as an expat, to have a weekly show to anchor yourself to the rest of the world with: how nice to watch Big Bang Theory, for example, and to be able to chat with your friends back home about it without a year-long delay. We seek as expats to adjust ourselves to a new world daily: how can we do that when we don't have some ties to home? If we cut ourselves off from our own cultural literacy, one which expands and changes daily, we risk becoming stuck in our old experiences, knowledge, and expectations. Our language becomes stale and outdated.  We become That Expat, the crazy lady with a goose in her purse, saying "groovy" and "beautiful" and "marvelous" and blinking uncomprehendingly when someone says, "Jealous much?"

Is it too much to ask that China gets one channel going for expats (and Chinese) which actually shows real American shows? For god's sake, it could be Donna Reed, The Brady Bunch, and Dark Shadows 24/7 for very little money.  I wouldn't complain. Classic comedies from the fifties, sixties, seventies and eighties would do more to enhance the English language acquisition of the local population than any thousand broadcasts of CCTV English Outlook (which is now a show on food anyway.) I don't want to have a satellite dish anymore. I would watch Chinese tv if there was even one single channel that showed anything good, however outmoded.

Indulgence

I've just spent a few weeks on the East Coast, not of China, but of the US. I love New England and I'm always glad when I have a chance to spend some time there. Once I get over the shock of the ocean being on the wrong side (I'm from California) I get along just fine. The fashion! The food! The ethnic diversity! But mostly, the food.

I had not planned on getting out of China this summer but I was starting to hate everybody and everything, which was a sure sign that it was time to get out. They say when the footprints on the toilet seat are yours, it's time to leave. I was staying at a five-star hotel, dashed into the lobby toilet to wee, and found the tell-tale footprints. (Not mine, but still...it was a five star hotel! Who could afford to stay there who was still so City Mouse that they were STILL jumping up on the Western toilet seat and treating it like a squatter?)

The flight over was a nightmare. It was a packed flight, mostly Chinese on their way to shop for bargains. (Yeah, I know. The irony.)  The passengers were the sort who had brought their own food and who refused to sit in their assigned seats. Much food was passed back and forth among family members, cucumbers and jianbing being passed over my head, tossed to Grandma up in Business class down to Young Male Shit of the Family up in first, from Mom in Steerage. Ugh. 

Two incidents: rather than speak to me in either English or Chinese, the girl on the inside seat of our row simply climbed over me---I was awakened by the rudest sort of lap dance from an unattractive bitch and while screaming out my objections in fluent Mandarin (I believe I said, "What, are you mute? I speak Chinese, damn it! You could have said something!") She blinked and from then on would jab me viciously in the shoulder every time she wanted to get up, which was every hour on the hour precisely. 

Second incident: waiting to use the toilet. Nice Older White Guy in front of me in the line. Young Male Shit of the Family exits toilet: Nice Older White Guy enters then walks out in fear and anger. "He pissed all over everything! The ceiling, the  floor, the walls, the sink, everything! Even on the toilet paper!" Then, to my intense surprise, Nice Older White Guy (NOWG) went back in, rolled up his sleeves, and CLEANED IT UP. All of it. After scrubbing the hell out of his hands, he locked the door, did his business, and then exited. I walked into a clean toilet. NOWG had even wiped the sink as a courtesy for me, the next passenger. The man deserves a medal and I said as much. He commented as he left, "These goddamn people get a little bit of money and stop being human."

I definitely needed an Attitude Adjustment, as I spent the first week glaring at anyone speaking Mandarin, wanting to shout, "Get back to China, dammit, and quit spoiling MY vacation!" I didn't mind hearing Cantonese, or Japanese, or Laotian, or French--just Mandarin set me off.

However, my anger began to subside with the first bite of lobster and by the time I had slammed down my last glass of Moxie, it was gone. I gained about eight pounds, but I lost the pissy attitude, which in the long run does my heart and soul rather more good.

This is a partial list of what I ate and drank:

Lobster rolls, lobster bisque, cheddar cheese nachos, sweet and sour chicken, ribs, brisket, real kosher dills the size of my fist, Manhattan Special Espresso Soda (both regular and sugar free), black and white cookies, Sabrett hot dogs, pastrami on rye, New York Cheesecake, pizza on the street, raspberry pie, blackberry pie, blueberry pie, chocolate chip cookies with Heath toffee bits, Moxie, deli sandwiches, pumpkin granola, vegetarian corn dogs, Dunkin Donuts, Honeydo Donuts, Hostess Lemon Pies, Snoballs, Ben and Jerry's Red Velvet Cake Ice Cream, Ben and Jerry's Chocolate Brownie Ice Cream, Popsicles, Fro Yo, Cheesecake Factory cheesecake (not as good as Moonstruck Deli's) and many, many Icees.

Look at the list and marvel that it was only eight pounds in two weeks.