travellers’ tales from FEER

no time to blog again, so here’s are some interesting and amusing stories from my favourite coloum “travellers’ tales” from the far easter economic review (FEER).

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From The Far Eastern Economics Review Issue cover-dated June 24 2004

TRAVELLERS’ TALES By Nury Vittachi

China Discovers People

The Middle Kingdom’s press has recently discovered human-interest stories and as a result is on the verge of becoming readable

THESE DAYS, foreigners who walk into tourist sites in Beijing don’t excite much comment–unless they are carrying goods purchased from other tourist sites. Then a message runs from stall to stall: Patsy alert! Patsy alert! Tourist stupid enough to buy tacky souvenirs in range!

One saleswoman at a Beijing temple decided I was so obviously a patsy of such stupendous gullibility that I should be used for market research. She pointed to my souvenir-of-Beijing baseball cap. “How much you pay for that?” she asked. She pointed at my Great Wall sports bag. “How much you pay for that?” Then she noticed that under my arm I was holding a child of Chinese race. She pointed at the adopted baby. “How much you pay for that?” she barked.

Yes, in China today, everything has a price tag–even infants.

The newly capitalist Middle Kingdom has always overflowed with bizarre tales of the strange things human beings do to each other, but only now are they being discussed openly. That’s because newspapers in China have relatively recently discovered the concept of “human-interest” stories. To celebrate this, we hereby present The Top Five Recent Human-Interest Tales From China:

1. SISTER ACT: The case of the surprised grandmother was told to me last week by reader Rajeshwari Singh. Grandmother Huang is 80 and lives in Chengdu. Her husband, to whom she had been married for 60 years, came home female one night. And I don’t mean he came home with a female. He came home as a female. Grandfather Huang had decided to have a sex change and had quietly organized surgery for himself. But he had not thought of telling his wife that he was having an operation, nor even that he intended to change his gender. He merely came home as an elderly lady and announced that henceforth he wished to be addressed as Sister. Grandmother Huang’s astonishment can only be imagined. She has applied for a divorce.

2. FALLEN HOPES: A man in Chongqing tried to escape from his apartment by jumping out of the window holding an umbrella, a system that always worked for that bourgeois waiguoren (foreigner) Mary Poppins. The reason he felt he had to jump (the report didn’t say from which floor) was that he had a feeling his microwave oven might explode. The umbrella trick didn’t work–he crashed to the ground and broke both legs, according to the West China City News. I anticipate his taking a lawsuit against Ms. Poppins, Walt Disney or Western civilization as a whole.

3. GREEN PARTY: A Guangzhou man has been exuding green sweat. He was moving furniture on a hot day when green liquid began running down his arms and forehead. He went to the Guangzhou Friendship Hospital, where puzzled doctors said that ancient Chinese medical texts spoke of people with red or blue sweat, but not green. The obvious answer is that he is turning into the Incredible Hulk, but perhaps that literary classic is not available there.

4. FROG IN HIS THROAT: A man named Chen in Hunan province had a pain in his neck. An alternative-medicine guru prescribed eating raw frogs six times a day. Chen obediently started gulping them down, and had munched his way through 130 before he collapsed. Doctors found his body riddled with frog parasites and Chen is now suing his guru. What I can’t understand is why anyone would think that having a pain in the neck could possibly be worse than having to eat 130 frogs.

5. GUARD DOG: A security guard in Shekou district thought a woman was summoning him. He raced to her aid, but then discovered that she was merely calling her dog, whose name was Security Guard. He told the Information Times he planned to sue the woman for insulting his profession. If he loses the lawsuit, he will change career. Of course, the woman might change the dog’s name to Frivolous Lawsuit.

One must applaud this new focus on human-interest tales. For far too long, China’s population has been presented as a single amorphous entity. It’s good to be reminded that it’s actually made up of more than a billion individual, quirky human beings, with rights of their own.

And if you want to buy one of your own, they’re apparently cheaper in Beijing.