China taught me to laugh, SA taught me to weep

My maid, a sweet young lass called Tang Ying, brings me a punnet of strawberries under a thick layer of purplish mould. It had been softly rotting away, hidden under a packet at the bottom of our vegetable rack. She wants to know if she should throw it away.

In the Family Convenience store of Wrigley’s Top Secret Chewing Gum fame (my first blog on Thought Leader) next to our apartment block, the young lass scans my dozen bottles of diet coke one by one. She could easily just tap in twelve on the till and it will automatically bill me for twelve cokes but she is more comfortable with the robot-like routine of doing them one by one while the queue behind me grows, hypnotised by the bleep bleep bleep. The last bottle will not scan. She tells me this, indicating I should perhaps go get another bottle, further delaying the queue. I indicate she need just bleep through one of the other bottles already in her possession. Drone-like, without even a sheepish blush coming to her face, she does the excruciatingly obvious and uses another bottle.

My current landlady has informed me she only wants our next tenancy contract until May next year. This is because she wants to rent out our shoebox apartment to business people coming for the World Expo 2010, which will be held in Shanghai. First: by letting me know in advance we will be outta this apartment before the end of the year. We are not going to leave it till the last minute to find a place. And once we have moved I will inform her and then she will have an empty flat for about four or five months, no income. Few people will want to rent a place for a few months. Second: The landlady also fails to realise that there is a staggering excess of properties in Shanghai. For example, the huge new skyscraper in Pudong, one of the tallest in the world, fondly known as the Can Opener, is sitting with only 20%-25% of the floor space leased*.

The typical business person coming here wants what only good hotels and some hostels can offer: a translation service (he would be completely lost without one) hotel staff with some proficiency in English and a valuable commodity here, room service, taxis waiting outside and so forth. He or she is not going to be interested in finding a local grocery store, worry about cooking, where to find a taxi to get to his supplier’s factory and how the hell to give directions.

A common sight in downtown Shanghai is a suited businessman accompanied by a translator as he whisks in and out of his posh hotel where every service is at his fingertips (including massages where the ladies come to his apartment and cater for, well, everything a red-blooded man could wish for). Further, not a month goes by when we don’t have electrical or plumbing problems in our shoebox apartment, which is the norm. It took us a good while for us to learn to survive or “crack” China. The business entrepreneur has no time for cracking anything other than business. He will step outside our apartment building without the faintest clue as to what to do. He is in raw China, unbuffered by the superb and necessary services offered by hotels.

Our landlady, the poor woman, has completely misread the market. I come across this inability to think here all the time; this is a reason why communism flourished at one point; it is a system that works best when people do not think for themselves, just obey like drones. And yes, that has its deep sadness. But yes again: China makes me laugh every day and has taught me to write light-hearted stuff. I never did before. The heading of this blog has a profound truth for me which hit me between the eyes when I saw this picture of poor SA people and the protest poster saying “AWB was better than ANC” which appeared in The Star:

Now they said it, not me. A strong suggestion in the statement about the AWB being better — appalling thought — is that these people felt it was better to live under apartheid rule. And that is not a laughing matter. It is a profound statement and reflects, at grassroots, a complete loss of faith in the ruling party. Yes, South Africa taught me to weep, not to laugh. What the current ruling party is doing to the poor is far, far beyond a joke.

*More and more buildings get thrown up and others pulled down in Shanghai every day. It comes across as a false market, lavishly created employment. Just ensure the drones are employed with their stomach full; then they are happy and will not revolt.