Remember Blood Diamond, the movie about the dirty diamond business in Sierra Leone? The hardcore mercenaries would grunt at each other as they killed old colleagues and say, “T.I.A,” short for “This Is Africa,” i.e., that’s just how business is done here, so don’t expect any mercy, civility, or human decency. We have the “T.I.C.” version of that here in China, and you hear the expression often enough around Shanghai.
It usually references a slightly less brutal reality than the African version: rip-offs in shops, kafkaesque bureaucratic absurdities, and the like. Occasionally T.I.C. can mean truly harrowing and even deadly business, though. A recent rash of horrible scandals in the food industry makes Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle look like an expose of dirty tablecloths down at Appleby’s: for instance, people have been caught putting melamine, a plastic, yes a plastic, into milk as a filler, sickening and killing thousands of children; farmers were coerced into feeding poisonous additives to pigs to drive up their weight and their profits; and watermelons have been exploding all around the country because of the noxious chemicals used to enlarge them. Government officials have been embarrassed by the scandals, and many of the perpetrators have been executed (no wrist-slapping here), and yet the scams and the scandals continue, so desperate are some people to make a few extra kuai on each item they sell. We don’t buy milk or yogurt unless it’s imported, and we buy meat and chicken from a local French butcher we can trust, but we still can’t be sure about all the food, all the time.
Sometimes T.I.C. can be so ridiculous it’s comical, even wonderful. A friend of mine, Lara, told me about trying to rent a rowboat at a lake west of the city. Behind a long row of twenty or more ticket counters, she saw only one clerk, and approached her at counter number 15. After she managed with some difficulty to get across what she wanted, the clerk told her that the rental was only handled at counter number 4, so she walked down the row to counter number 4, while the clerk got up, walked along on the opposite side of the glass, and sat down at number 4, facing her. She, the clerk that is, then stared blank-faced at Lara as if she had no idea why she was there. So Lara again struggled to express her desire to rent a boat, to which the woman then said that such requests weren’t handled until 11 o’clock -- and since it was before 10 a.m., she’d have to wait. When Lara told me this story, laughing so hard she nearly cried, she naturally ended it with, “But T.I.C., you know?” There are loads of stories like this: at the zoo one day, I tried to buy a ticket to a kiddie ride, some plastic dolphins that go around in a pool of very iffy, probably brackish water. The ticket booth lady shrugged and gestured to the empty seat next to her, telling me it wasn’t her job to sell the dolphin tickets. She then went back, quite literally, to doing her nails and reading a magazine. She sold only the caterpillar spiny ride tickets. The dolphin ticket lady was across the way, chatting with the guy who runs the car ride, maybe 20 feet from us. Did I mention that there are only three rides in this little nook? Or that we were the only customers? Or that we waited 10 minutes for the dolphin lady to come back? Or that my children, aged 1 and 2 years, do not have an excess of patience? Or that in the entire history of the Shanghai Zoo, there has never been a single moment when it was necessary to have an employee dedicated only to selling tickets to the dolphin ride, and another employee sitting right next to her specializing exclusively in caterpillar spiny ride tickets? But of course, T.I.C., you know?
Which leads me to the story of Hua Hua. We were having brunch one Sunday at a place I always call “waiguoren lu”, which means “foreigner street,” and people, i.e. taxi drivers, actually know what I mean and take me there, although the place has a real name, something like “Hongmei Cultural Pedestrian Model Street,” but I don’t know how to say that in Chinese. Anyway, as the name implies, this street has a bunch of foreign restaurants, and a bunch of foreign customers. A local animal rescue group sets up shop there once a month to find homes for strays, and this was their day. So Allison decided to take the boys over just to have a look, you know, a perfectly innocent look. Well, someone in our little group came back to the brunch table with shining eyes and said,”oh pleeease, can we take her home? She is soooo cute, and we neeeeed her, and she will be sooooo much fun, and we can all help take care of her, canwecanwecanwe??!!” That, of course, was Allison, just after meeting Hua Hua, a sweet, lovely mix of Chau? Collie? and other? The boys, especially Kai, also seemed excited about the prospect, swept up in their mommy’s enthusiasm. I guess I must have been swept up too, since I skipped my traditional pros-and-cons list and two-week meditation retreat to think it over. Thankfully I at least told the dog whisperers that we would take Hua Hua home on a trial basis only, for a week or two, to see if she was a good fit for our family. I really do love dogs, and I wanted it to work. And if you could just have seen Allison’s face! So the next thing we knew, Hua Hua was in our living room, and then, six hours later, Allison was on the way to India for a week of business travel; I had a new baby on my hands, to go along with the other two.
Hua Hua means “flower,” and it’s a very common name for dogs here, sort of the Chinese version of Spot or Fido. Allison wanted to call her Daisy, and Kai was all for calling her Sodor (that’s the island where Thomas the Train lives, for the uninitiated). Somehow, though, Hua Hua stuck. She really did turn out to be a sweetie, despite the fact that she chewed up a few dinosaurs and got up every morning at 5:30, even before Keegan. She was housetrained, frisky, and fun, and like most dogs and Harvey Fierstein, she just wanted to be loved and be part of a family. The biggest problem, aside form the increased workload and poopload, was that Keegan was afraid of her, and didn’t understand that her licks and nibbles were just invitations to play. Kai too was soon on edge around her, and despite the fact that both boys were also fascinated by her, it was soon clear that it was getting worse, not better, and that Kai and Keegan just weren’t ready. When Allison got back from India, she could immediately see and understand the situation -- we just couldn’t have the boys feeling frightened in their own home that way, even though we understood Hua Hua meant no harm. If it was going to work with any dog, it would have been her. We were just on the verge of calling the adoption people and pulling the plug on the project when our neighbor Patti, who lives just around the corner here in Green Valley, stepped in and told us she wanted to adopt Hua Hua! After a trial period of their own, Patti and her two daughters, age 10 and 11, have decided to make Hua Hua a member of their family, and a companion to the mutt they already have, Dumpling. This is the best off all worlds for us; we were able to help Hua Hua find a family, we didn’t have to foist her back on the dog-rescue people, and we can still see her and learn that dogs can be our friends. In a few years, when we’re sure the boys are ready, we’ll try again, and hopefully Hua Hua can help us to get there.
So what does this have to do with T.I.C.? Well Shanghai has a new law that people can only have one dog, and all dogs have to be registered, and get a chip implanted, etc. Violators are subject to having their dogs immediately impounded and euthanized, as in killed, as in, in front of their very eyes. We heard a couple of grim stories about this, and Patti was loath to take the risk. We were prepared to register Hua Hua and have her “hang out” with Patti and her family until the last trumpet, but at the last minute we discovered this was unnecessary. Why? Because for some mysterious reason, that law just doesn’t apply to foreigners -- go figure. Hua Hua now has some kind of diplomatic immunity, and we can see her whenever we want. This is a somewhat rare but wonderful positive example of T.I.C.
I wanted to give you more examples of T.I.C., like the universally ignored traffic laws (you know how you have to yield to oncoming traffic before you make a left turn on green? Well, congratulations, you know something that NO ONE in all of China is aware of!). But as often happens on blogworld, I’m way past deadline, and I need to wrap this baby up. For that reason, we’re now going into Full Lurch Mode, as I transition to . . .
The Obligatory Paragraph With All the Links to the Cute People! Here it is! Woot, as we used to say back in America in the old days. Be forewarned that internal transitions will NOT be a feature of this paragraph. In fact, this is the last one. I swear, I’m not hooked. I can quit any time. I just don’t WANT to quit. Here are the boys eating traditional Dragon Boat Festival foods! For actual pictures of Dragon Boat Festival (a party for a suicidal poet who is not eaten by fish), you’ll have to wait till next year, on account of monsoon rains. Here are the boys hanging around at home. (Hint: if you only have time to click on one link for the rest of your life, it should be this one. These pics are so cute, it's not fair to all the other babies.) Here are the boys celebrating our driver Wong’s birthday with a panda cake! (No actual pandas were harmed in the making of this blog. A warning, however -- camera phone in use. Only Wang and Grammy need to click.) Here’s Kai at his school, in photos taken by his teachers over the past semester, with a special guest appearance by Keegan at the zoo field trip (I said I couldn’t chaperone unless I could bring Keegan, and they fell for it). And here are the boys looking quizzically at fish heads, turtles and wounded geese at a freaky street market we mistakenly believed would be a charming farmer’s market! The best part was the cupcakes from a Western bakery -- yum! See, I promised, no transitions! Wait, is THIS a transition? Drat!!
Kai’s birthday is just around the corner on July 2, so I’ll definitely do at least one blog in July before we visit this mysterious West we’ve heard tell of. Hope you are all well . . . let us know how the summer is going!
