Trouble-prone friend in a foreign land
My friend Steve is in China. I get e-mails from him occasionally, keeping me up to date on life, work and the fact that the Chinese measure temperature in Celsius so he never knows exactly how cold it is.
Oh, and that the C in Celsius stands for "crap."
He's scheduled to be in the People's Republic for about two months, building something I wouldn't understand even if he explained it to me again.
Steve works with big, heavy, metal things that only run when they soak up enough electricity to power Las Vegas. The machine may be a tool for world domination, or it may make cookies. I don't want to know.
But the fact that Steve is in Communist China should worry all of us.
I met Steve in college and quickly found he could get in trouble anywhere, at any time, for any reason. And if he's the kind of guy who'll short sheet his grandma's bed, who knows what might happen if he did something funny to the wrong person in a repressive government.
"Is it true you reached into the trousers of the governor of the Guizhou Province, pulled his underwear over his head and said 'I see London, I see France?'" A local authority would ask.
"Hey," Steve would say, pointing at the officer's shirt. "You spilled something."
The officer would look down at a nonexistent stain, Steve would flick the man's nose and laugh, and we would never see Steve again except on Fox News as the reason for the war.
But he'd been in China for more than a month without causing an international incident, so I wondered how well he was fitting in ...
Excerpts from an e-mail
Monday, 9:03 p.m. CST
"Hey Jason, you had some questions:
"Is language a problem? It's no problem that they do not understand me and I do not understand them."
He then listed a few Chinese words he'd picked up, which all conformed to a basic formula: innocent-looking Chinese term I can't pronounce = vulgar English translation I can't repeat.
"The food? I eat white things, brown things, some kinds of meats. Some good, some bad. I only wished I new what it was.
"How about people's attitudes toward Americans? Some spit, some are nice, some try to say hello.
"I am having a pretty good time, it could be worse.
"How's the accessibility to beer? The beer is only served warmed. Yuck.
"Steve."
I can deal with a repressive government. I can deal with mystery food. I can even deal with not understanding anything anyone says. But I refuse to deal with yucky beer.
I guess I won't travel to the People's Republic of China any time soon.
