You could say that my body lives in China, but I don’t. I live in my head, my ideas, my paper and e-books and particularly the internet. To stay sane, and relatively calm and unstressed, I interact verbally with the Chinese as little as possible. When I do have to interact closely with them, all too often, their cultural and organizational inferiorities get on my nerves. After my first year in China, I developed a psychological expectation that was helpful, namely, expect the Chinese to screw up. When they almost inevitably do, then you are not surprised. When they don’t screw up, you are pleasantly surprised. However, if you are a visiting westerner it is a mistake to assume that the Chinese, very much a third world country will function with first world attitudes. The Chinese, most definitively are not first worlders.
So, by paying an American company to provide me with a VPN service (virtual private network) to get round the CCP’s censorship of the internet, I can quite easily forget, especially at night, that I’m living in China, a third world, backward, dirty, disorganized, corrupt, dictatorial, mean spirited shithole.
- Professor Huge de GARIS
