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Monday, June 17, 2013

HOW TO MAKE YOUR CHILD POOP PRECIOUS METAL


(Here's my latest column from That's Beijing/Shanghai/Guangzhou magazines! Plus some photos for the razzle dazzle factor.)



In the early years of parenthood you worry about things your offspring might mistake for food, put in their mouth and swallow. Especially when you’re married to a doctor, everything morphs from “benign little knick-knack” to one despised, chill-sending item known as “the choking hazard”.

That makes sense in the baby years. For the love of God you shouldn’t have to worry about it when they’re six!

But here we are in Things They Never Warned Me About #136.

First, a graphic content warning. This story involves the digestive system and things that come out of it. So if you’re reading this while eating, drinking or making love, perhaps put it down til later.

Evie swallowed a coin. And our seemingly happy life changed utterly. I’ve no idea how or why. All I know is that it happened on my watch. Worse still, it happened on my lap.

We were Skyping my nephew in Australia. Perhaps I should blame him. Since Evie and I were facing the computer, he should have seen the whole thing, officer, and raised an alarm. But being 17, he was no doubt texting while speaking to us, and thus distracted. (The same callow youth was actually bitten by a deadly brown snake once whilst walking and texting at the same time. True story. He made the papers.)

In any event, our chat was interrupted when Evie spun around and said: “I’ve swallowed something I shouldn’t!”

I thought of a piece of paper, some cardboard at worst. Parenthood is never that simple.

“A coin,” she said. The worry showed on her face, perhaps in correlation to the gobsmacked look on mine.

There was a moment to absorb. I made sure she wasn’t choking. At least it had gone down the right hole - or slot I suppose – if there is a right place for a coin to go down a child.

My next stage was incredulity. That this had happened was unfathomable, something you just can’t accept, like watching a footballer miss an open goal, the ending of Thelma and Louise, or any Beijing intersection.

But it had happened. Despite our scratched-record parenty warnings, she’d had the coin in her mouth, had moved suddenly and lost control of it, and down the hatch it went. This I had to relate to my wife Stef, who of course came home from a bad day at work that very instant.

I was heartened that at least it was a one jiao coin. “It’s tiny!” I said, invoking a hitherto unknown spirituality by adding “this too shall pass”.

Nu-uh. You don’t get off that lightly. Not if your wife’s a doctor.

“What is it made of?” she began. “If it’s made of zinc it can corrode the stomach. How big is it? Anything over 20 millimetres is likely to get stuck.”

My reply was swift.

“D’uuuh”, I said.

This didn’t cut it. I confessed my parenthood training hadn’t broadened my knowledge of Chinese coins beyond the fact some of them had a funny hole in the middle.

I found a helpful coin collecting website. It said the yi jiao coin was precisely 19 millimetres across! Better still, it was aluminium. (The zinc issue has been a known problem in America since 1982, when the US mint began making pennies with a 97.5 per cent zinc content, just to corrode the stomachs of stupid children.

I double checked by emailing the website. They elaborated that one jiao coins had been made of nickel-plated steel since 2003. I was marvelling at the amazing things you learn through your children when Dr Wife jolted me out of it.

“We’ll have to go through her poos until we’re sure the coin is out,” she said.

The horror.



A one jiao coin, yesterday, when it was
believed to be worth a little more than
it is today.


What Evie would have looked like
seconds after swallowing the coin.
(Simulation, using the X-ray of some
other mad child).


To be fair, she probably wasn't as mad as this
one. This is an X-ray from a pioneering
American doctor in the late 19th century.
Sadly, the child is no longer with us.


This X-ray captured the image of
another child, believed to be the
young Michael Jackson.


This poo-checking directive from the household medical director was really not what I wanted to hear. By contrast Evie thought it sounded hilarious. So has every other parent who thought they’d left the poo years behind years long ago.

Stef went first, the next afternoon. I thought this was far too soon A) for it to have passed and B) for Stef to escape suspicion she quite liked this sort of thing.

Her method was to have Evie poop into glad wrap laid over the toilet bowl, and then lovingly, tenderly, fondle it through the plastic. From my safe place in the backyard I soon saw there was only black smoke in the chimney.

When my turn came I used a plastic stick. I gritted my teeth, thought of England, and poked and prodded as if making soup. For her part, Evie sat there chuckling maniacally. Still nothing.

Many days and poos went by unrewarded. One day, whilst literally “knocking them back with a shitty stick”, the thought occurred that Evie may have passed the coin at school, and that I was now just doing this for fun.

“No,” she insisted. “It didn’t feel like anything shiny came out.” This seemed like a definite no, for another old saying holds that you can’t polish a turd.

The stories came out. One parent told Dr Wife their kid incubated a coin for TWELVE DAYS. Another's daughter had swallowed a British pound and, finding that went quite well, promptly threw down four more. (Parenting tip: The pound: Not a bad coin to swallow. Small and heavy, they pass quickly. Within only a couple of days this couple had that mythical 'perfect child' who poops out pounds).

I was heartened slightly by an American friend’s tale of a bachelor party involving the drinking game in which a quarter is flipped into a beer. The loser, sculling his beer, also swallowed the quarter.
At least he was a drunken adult male. A six-year-old should know better.

Finally, on Day 16, Evie had her first ever X-ray. It was good news, though a little bittersweet. The coin had been passed. I'm not even going to ponder when.


(ED's note: If you think I'm going to use this piece as a vehicle to publish more gratuitous, freaky X-rays garnered from the web, then you've got no other thing coming!)


This man was said to have got cold feet and panicked
when he saw his intended fiancee approaching him
with a shocking new haircut.


According to my favourite website,
www.x-raytechniciantraining.org, this
construction worker got around for several
days without knowing he had shot a
four-inch nail into his head! It was
eventually spotted by a razor-sharp dentist
after the man presented complaining of
a tooth-ache. To further complicate matters, doctors
then also discovered that for the duration of his
ordeal, the man's arse had been on fire.
Amazingly, he was fine.  So was everyone else
in this collection, I'm pretty sure, although I
wouldn't bet money on the Victorian-era
child with the safety pins.


Even this kid! He's a 17-month-old from
Kentucky, who had a fall.


This person, a 60-year-old man, also had a fall.
No, he did! Of all the freakish luck - to land on a
bottle that had been left carelessly in his shower
stall. That's what he told his doctor, and I see no
reason to doubt him.


Still in the nether regions, this is a mobile phone found
in a prison inmate in El Salvador, who was believed
to have invented butt-dialing. This one went up,
not down, I believe.


This fellow was said to have enjoyed his
meal, but found himself still hungry
at the end. He ate two forks and a pen,
and then just before bed, his toothbrush.



Monday, May 27, 2013

SCALING BACK

Hi Readers!


The Tiger Father and a full plate,
yesterday.


After a year and half of leading the world in cutting-edge commentary on China, parenting, and parenting in China, the Tiger Father has come to something of a fork in the road.

I've tremendously enjoyed writing this website - oh OK let's just call it a blog - the feedback I've received from readers in various countries, the hordes of groupies camped outside my doorstep, etc.

But it's time to spend more time trying to finish some other writing projects that need finishing, and which will hopefully nourish my soul in other ways, ie, with money.

It's not a complete capitulation, however. I will continue to post on this blog from time to time, such as with my monthly columns for That's Beijing/Shanghai/Guangzhou magazines. And I'll also intermittently slap up some funny photos from around Beijing. Blog members will be advised of such updates by email, while I'll also post them on twitter, facebook and Beijing's email groups.

After that it will be on to the book, T-shirt, major motion picture, action figure and Andrew Lloyd-Webber West End musical. So watch this space!

Mind you, the blog won't just blow up or anything. It will still sit here forever, or until it's eventually swamped by the encroaching sands of the Gobi desert in about a hundred years time. So if you're that keen, or you can't sleep one night, or you're thinking about harming yourself because you just can't go on, you'll always be able to look back through the blog via the "Blog Archive" and "Popular Posts" sections down the right.

Thanks to everyone who has helped build the Tiger Father through various means, such as supplying subject matter, photos, translations. There are too many to mention them all, but gold stars go to my long-perplexed Chinese teacher Han Xiwen, to photographer extraordinaire Paul Sutton, and to creative input people Stephanie "My Wife" Teoh, and Tara Wilkinson. Big thanks to Stef and our daughters Lani and Evie for often being the subject matter. I wasn't being mean. Honest.

Thanks for reading!

Trevor Marshallsea
Beijing

Thursday, May 23, 2013

BEAUTY IS IN THE EYE OF THE PROTRACTOR

It's occurred to me that most of one's life as an expat in a radically different culture to your own is spent floating. Unless you're totally assimilated, and fluent in the language, you float around - in my case a bit like a happy toddler - not really knowing what's going on: constantly understanding about 50 per cent of the conversations you're having or hearing, mostly now knowing what that place does or what that sign means.

Sometimes the signs are in English, and you still don't have much of a clue ...


A new one in my residential compound.
They've spent some time on this, but what
the hell is it supposed to mean?
Previously, if a worker was going to throw
his pliers and hammer at you, at least you
could count on it coming at you in a
graceful arc. But, sadly, not any more.


Our compound can be a lively place.


Come to think of it, I did hear a bit of a bang the other night.


Speaking of angles and arcs in our compound, I came across this advertisement in the lift. It's for plastic surgery, which in newly moneyed urban China is a growth industry like loony ranting is a growth industry in North Korea.




They used to say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Thank heavens some Chinese plastic surgeons have taken that nonsense out of the equation, to tell us finally what beautiful is. Now, it's all a matter of degrees.


Sisters gotta learn to play the angles.
I like the one under the eye the most.
This is to give the client those hotly
desired little eye-bags, touched on
here previously. Warning: Anything
outside of this seven millimetre
range and it could all end in tears.


My feminist sensibilities duly offended, I hastened back home where my latest copy of Women Of China, had arrived, featuring on its cover the powerful and inspirational Peng Liyuan, wife of President Xi Jinping.




But then on opening up on page two, I was hit with another advertisement targeted at modern, powerful women, again from our friends at the carpentry shop ...


For all those women out there whose jawlines do not
achieve the optimum beauty angle of 116 degrees,
kindly hide your hideously shaped faces indoors
until you sort that shit out. It's just not fair on we men
that we should have to look at you.


This place has also worked out what the divine ratio
for a woman's face should be. It's a complicated thing,
beauty, but in China at least there's a good understanding
of maths, so it should all be clear now. We're left to
assume it's something to do with how the wider bits
of the face relate to the narrower bits, the eyes to the
nose and so forth. It's, oooh, fairly precise, if you're
getting down to numbers like 0.819. This is good, for
many women don't have enough to worry about
concerning their looks.  The writing refers to
the "golden proportion", which should be a very
effective marketing tool in China as it combines precious
metal with maths, two things highly valued in the
Middle Kingdom. That is if you believe we really need
canny marketing tools for women who would buy into
this sort of thing anyway.



Where does it all get to if we are able to blueprint beauty and graph gorgeousness to such an extent? Do we actually still need skin?


Phwoar!
Look at this bunch of good sorts.
If I were gay I'd take little Ralf Hutter.
Check the hypotenuse on that guy!


Meanwhile ...


What the hell is this?! It's at Shanghai
International Airport. Can't we men have
a wee while waiting for a flight without
getting a creeping feeling we're about to be
accosted by some casual slipper-wearing lurker?


Are they taking the piss?


They call it public (toilet) art. I just thought it was this guy again ...


A sort of "Flat Stanley the Pervert"?

For toilet installations, you just can't beat these, which I found at Beijing's new Great Leap beer house in San Li Tun ...





They're something redolent of Beijing - bicycle seats.

Need more explanation? Remember it's a pub, where men can get a little tired over the course of a night ...


Eat your heart out, Sliced Bread.


Speaking of perverts, who's this guy getting around with a bra cup over his mouth and nose?


He would have us believe it's a home-made
pollution mask. But maybe, this being
China, it's main function is as padding
to protect him from facial injury in
subway collisions.


There was another art installation on the streets of Chongqing, lifesize statues of people going about their business. Then of course someone had to go and do this and get on the internet.




Better still were these real-life women on the streets outside the Forbidden City.


Usually, photos of young women outside
the Forbidden City look like this.
And even then the guards look on
suspiciously.


But they didn't know quite what to do with these two ...



The guard's been thrown for a loop. He'd thought lesbianism
had been banned with all other forms of fun in 1949.


"Shall we stop them, Sarge?"

"Aaaah ... no Li. Let's just ... let's just wait a bit."


Also seen, literally, on the streets of Beijing ...



He just wants to be alone.


Amid some warmer weather, the swimmers have come back to our neighborhood canal.





As has the green slime.





And the T-shirts keep coming ...



I think the problem here is simple.
One thing you notice about the
Chinese people is that by gee they
can get tired. Whether it's low-energy
diets or an insistence on buying beds
composed of solid granite, you do
see them dropping off a bit. Look
at most crowded buses going by and
you'd swear they're headed to the
morgue. My theory is translators
get halfway through a trick T-shirt
like this, start to get a little sleepy
and lose the thread.

Then there's been more of this - domestic helpers, or ayis, posting notices in expat shops looking for work. Here's one I showed earlier ...





It's in line with the theory that you should start with something positive, some praise or honorific for your potential employer, for example.


This one's aiming high.
Has this Michelle Obama adulation even reached China?


And this ayi (which means 'aunt' in Chinese) appears to be dangling the carrot of bringing her boss happiness as often as every 30 minutes, though she admits later she can be frustrating at times.





Back on the street ...



This is the way to transport a huge bus windscreen ...

... provided you don't want to pay money to
do it properly.


Then again, there's little you can't achieve with
a small car, willpower and sticky-tape.



Thanks for clicking, clickers. We'll be all aboard for another instalment on Monday!





Monday, May 20, 2013

ALL EYES ON CHANGSHA

THE Tiger Father would never assume anything about the intelligence of his readers. But I know for a fact there is something you don't know very much about.

That thing is Changsha, a regional city down south in Hunan, a province known as the world's largest producer of Mao Zedong.

In fact, the author here only knows about Changsha from a British friend who had to live there for two years for her husband's job, who wrote that there "wasn't very much to do" there and that she "might kill herself" as an alternative to living there much longer.

But now all that's about to change because Changsha, of all places, is about to hold that most fleeting of honours - the site of the world's tallest building!

One of those rare places to be described as "a large industrial Chinese city", Changsha is home to 7.04 million people. This is an official figure according to the 2010 census. However, applying the usual Chinese caveats - factoring in outlying suburbs and unregistered migrant workers - it is safe to assume  Changsha's population is somewhere between 8 and 50 million people.

Despite all this, there's not much there.




That's why critics of the new "world's tallest building" plan allege it might "stick out a bit".


An artist's view of the planned
building Skycity.


Still, just because you're small doesn't mean you can't dream big. Media outlets reported today that approval has been granted for the building, to be made by the Broad Sustainable Construction group.

Skycity will be 838 metres high - or half a mile plus 38 metres, just to confuse people more. This will make it 10 metres higher than the current tall building gold medallist, Dubai's Burj Khalifa.

These sort of things can of course be gimmicky big PR stunts. The Burj Khalifa has had many well documented problems, such as initial low occupancy which forced huge cuts in rents.

However, Skycity supporters say there are many reasons why Changsha needs to have the world's tallest building.

The most obvious on is that the builders are based there. But another is that the city government insists the building is a great idea for its ecological benefits - living vertically, instead of laterally. It is planned, for example, that the building with house 4,500 families. Normally, if you spread those families out in traditional single-storey accommodation in China, it would take up a space the size of six tennis courts.


An artist's impression Skycity
tower, with some statistics.


An artist's impression of Skycity if it was built alongside
four other big towers in some sort of "Ostentatious
Architects Wonderland Theme Park", which would
also be built in China.



An artist's impression of a map of China,
which looks like a chicken.

See? You have to assume the feet are either beneath
Myanmar and Vietnam, or have been removed for
culinary reasons.



No, that's a joke. It would be more than six tennis courts.

To be fair, there is a touch of showboaty gimmickry about the new world's tallest building. Originally the planners boldly declared they would "knock it up in about three months".

It's true. Broad has a reputation for erecting pre-fab buildings quickly, and set a 90-day target for this monster.

Usually, hurried construction times are a cause of great concern in loosely-regulated, earthquake-prone, building-collapse-bemoaning China.

But Broad seems to have a trick, not even related to China's occupational health and safety laws, or lack thereof. They once built a 30-storey skyscraper in just 15 days! You can watch that by copying and pasting this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hdpf-MQM9vY

Still, news of approval for Skycity's construction revealed they had backed away from their three-month target. Now they have set a far more pedestrian goal of nine months. The Burj Khalifa took five years.

Skycity will have 202 floors and 92 elevators. If you want, you can walk instead by taking a curling ramp which is six-miles long (380,160 inches). It will also have schools, a hotel, sporting and shopping facilities, and all else you associated with a vertical city built in a field.

But what of Changsha itself? What is it? Who needs it? Can we live without it?

Let's take a closer look at some other important bits of this mysterious city.


Changsha has previously only made the news once in
human history. It was for this.


And this.


The so-called "cows grazing in a rubbish dump" scandal made the news in 2010 after cows began grazing in a rubbish dump. Farmers explained they had allowed their cattle to roam hills near Changsha to look for food, and that some had wandered into a landfill site, and that it didn't happen all the time really. Local authorities were quick to rule out the chance of any food-tainting issue caused by cattle eating filth and grime.


The city will also soon have this -
the Changsha International Culture and Art Centre,
the so-called "Melted-Down Sydney Opera House of
the East".

Changsha also has this man as major - Zhang Jianfei, a man
whose name I was convinced meant Zhang Lose Weight
until told I had the wrong tones. It actually means
Zhang Sword Fly, which is much better. The mayor stands
apart from other Chinese mayors for three main reasons:
1. He is a thoroughly modern man with great drive and vision.
2. He won back-to-back world comb-over champion titles
in 2009-10.
3. He has not been tainted and humiliated in a major
scandal involving bribery, sex, murder, etc etc.


There are six other cities in the world with whom Changsha shares the title of "sister cities" - a weird sort of arrangement believed to mean that one will help the other city out if she splits up with her boyfriend city or is caught smoking.

Changsha's aren't much good: Gumi, South Korea; Kagoshima, Japan; Kimberley, South Africa; Mons, Belgium; Latenapula, Sri Lanka and Saint Paul, United States. No Parisses or Londons or New Yorks there, but they were probably already spoken for.

Not everyone is a fan of the fanciful Skycity project, however. The China Daily newspaper recently ran a story quoting an assembled group of nay-sayers who, seemingly without a lot of facts at their disposal, seemed to say such a building was not God's plan.

"With so many people living and working in the building, there will be risks everywhere," said Li Xun, vice-president of the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design. "What if there is a fire, or an elderly man has a heart attack?"

The paper pointed out that fire rescue ladders generally only reach a height of 100 metres, some 738 metres short of Skycity's peak. It is to be hoped that in designing the world's biggest thing, architects probably made some plans to cover address this.

Wang Youwei, vice-president of the China Academy of Building Research, was even more excitable.

"Such a huge building may cause serious problems, even a disaster," Wang said. Then again, you could equally say it may not cause serious problems, or even a disaster.

Wang went on to concede: "I'm not familiar with the geological features of Changsha".

Still, let's hope everything's alright, and that the eight-mile-high and nine-month-long tower doesn't fall over or, as Wang says, there could be trouble.

But as bizarre as it sounds, here's to plucky little Changsha for having a go.



* Thanks, readers, for doing what you do best - reading. More on Thursday!