A Modest Proposal

I only had one class today, midmorning, with my freshmen renji-3 group, of writing. That in mind, I could have easily gone home after lunch. Lunch, by the way, was good today. I picked what turned out to be smoked, salted pork which was very well-prepared... I'm just glad it was only toward the end of the meal that I noticed that the skin and hair were still attached to many of the pieces... somehow that really curbed my enthusiasm for eating it...

Instead of going home, though, I stayed in the office and played online. Since my office has a wireless connection, my laptop is actually useful there, and so I can do real work... or (as in this case) hop on my WoW beta account for a few hours of uninterrupted playtime. But I digress...

Around 3:30, a few students began wandering in waiting for Warren. Apparently they were the "heavy hitters" for the school's speech team, which apparently is about as close to a sports program as the have here. The "theme" for the meet they were preparing for, I was told, was "1+1=2?" Taking that cryptic, nigh-sphinx-esque clue and figuring out what the hell they were supposed to do with it was, obviously, the students' job. They were supposed to prepare a speech in English that ran as near to 3 minutes as they could. Should it be expository? Argumentative? No one really knew, save that one added to one might possibly reach the sum of two.

Let me just say, I don't care if you're speaking in fucking Swahili, clicking your consonants with your tongue on the roof of your mouth, 3 minutes is far too short a time to present anything in any sort of convincing or logical manner. It is simply out of the realm of possibility, as far as I'm concerned. You get to get up, make a quick introduction, quickly run though any points you might've come up with, and then conclude. It's over before it really ought to have even begun.

Two of the speeches were boring as hell... and complete with all manner of ridiculous, overplayed cliches and catchphrases that I guess still play well among the Chinese. After all, these are the people whose educational system consists of making the children sit for hours and just memorize shit. (I'll be damned if I'm ever wrangled into playing memory with anyone here...) One began with a parable about a man breaking a chopstick, but then finding he could not break several...the girls "argument" was that people work better as a group than singularly, if that gives you any indication of what is considered a convincing argument.

The third speech, however, was certainly a break from the ordinary - to put it mildly. The girl tried - valiantly - to convince me in 3 minutes that the way to deal with the global population crisis was...

...
can you guess?
...

To have all world governments implement China's infamous One-Child Policy!! That's right, folks, take the system that brought you infanticide and 100 million terminally unwed males, and apply it to the globe... super.

It's not simply that it's an idea utterly at odds with my value system, it's that she took a topic that people could sit and debate for hours, days... hell, decades, and turned it into the 3-minute Hello Kitty edition. Nothing was wrong with the system, it had worked perfectly, and moreover could and should work equally well the world over.

Suffice it to say, I had to literally stop myself from laughing, and remind myself that hey, I'm in China. We, the three foreigners listening (as 1/2 the judges at this competition will be foreigners), politely told her that perhaps she should scale her argument back a bit and only propose that the system be implemented in countries similar to the Great Red Dragon. What countries have a similar social (patriarchial), governmental (totalitarian), and life-style (enormous population relative to landmass)? Really, we could only think of North Korea, and I actually quite OK with the 1-Child policy being implemented there. It's not like it could do much more damage.

But at least it was entertaining.

(CS)WC Out.

On rocks i dreamt of where we'd stepped