Commie Camo Couture

So camouflage is totally popular here. Not terribly surprising, I guess, for a fairly heavily militarized country, but still. I cringe every time I see a dude dressed head to toe in his camo duds. But then again I’m a stuck-up fashionisto. Not that I dress all that well, but as long as I believe I have the ability to do so, I totally exculpate myself from being a wrinkly little hypocrite.

But on to bigger and better thangs. Again, I feel awfully contrite that I haven’t posted on this deal-i-o in for-evs, so awful in fact that I’m hyphening everything I can to speed up this typey-typey.

Hmmm. But how have I been doing lately? Pretty solidly, I would say. To stay with the fashion bent, I saw a funny t-shirt a girl was wearing on the subway last night. I hazily remember it saying something like, “Clownpracticing Not Make Jackass”. It had a picture of hands shaking. Completely incomprehensible awesomeness. I really need some shirts like that. As of right now, I have no clue where to find these gems, but I’m gonna start reconnoitring that shit heavily. That is a Christmas-present must fo’ sho.

In one of my discussion groups last week I was discussing traveling abroad. One of the women in the group had had the opportunity to go to Bangalore on a business trip. She was telling me how much she enjoyed feeling so special and different there. This feeling was no doubt helped by the fact that EMC was paying for a driver to handle her every whim and fancy, but she also mentioned how neat it was to look so different from everyone else. I think she also mentioned how much she enjoyed being far lighter-skinned than everyone else (she’s a pretty tan Chinese person), so perhaps there was a bit of some subconscious melanin-ism there, but mainly she explained how she really dug checking out this completely different culture. It was cool being able to talk to a Chinese person who had been out of the country, for though the Chinese love to travel and be tourist-y, travel generally consists of heading by train a few hours to some “famous” hill, mountain, or National Park here in the Middle Kingdom. Not too many of the employees here, including the middle-aged ones, have been outside the country.

I also got to talk to another employee who went to North Vietnam a few years back. He said he loved it. Apparently, though, the Chinese government won’t allow, or wouldn’t allow (point is, he couldn’t), Chinese citizens to see the wealthier and more developed southern part of Vietnam. Maybe the CCP was worried about people seeing the stark economic differences between communist and capitalist rule.

Speaking of the CCP, in a somewhat expected but still amazingly far-ranging move, the government here is blocking almost every possible international-ish, free-speach-ish web site they can get their non-democratic hands on. Check out this New York Times article right hurr:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/03/world/asia/03china.html?_r=1&hp

Interesting stuff. I had noticed in the past week that some sites that I had normally been able to gain access to were being blocked for some reason. If you hadn’t heard, the anniversary of the Tiannamen Square Crackdown or “massacre”, depending on your mood, is tomorrow, Thursday the 4th of June. Yes, it’s been 19 years and 364 days or so since Deng XiaoPing, the revered leader of China who opened the doors to capitalism and the West, gave the go-ahead to the military to break up the democratic protests using a boatload of force.

I actually talked with some discussion groups about the 20th anniversary recently (and got into some trouble for doing so). Zhao Ziyang, the Party Secretary at the time of the crackdown (basically the highest official in the Party other than Deng, but not the government), was one of the more liberal members of the Communist Party at the time, and his soft-line stance towards the Tiannamen Square Protests touched off his fall from Party leadership. Zhao lived out the rest of his life after 1989 under house arrest in Beijing, but he secretly recorded audio cassettes of his account of the events leading up to June 4th and somehow snuck those babies out to trusted friends and family. Zhao died four years ago, but his memoirs were published last week to coincide with the 20th anniversary. You can check out the Economist book review here:
http://www.economist.com/displayStory.cfm?story_id=13688045

Interesting stuff. Okay. I’m off. But I hope you like the post, and I hope you’re enjoying your own slice of democracy wherever you are. You can’t get very fat on the servings over here.