Shanghai Surprised
Robin Usher, Hungary
Dr Robin Leslie Usher Ph.D wrote a doctoral thesis `Jungian Archetypes in the work of science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein`, 1992. He has been a teacher of English language and literature since 1994. He has taught in Hungary, Poland, Russia, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Oman and Libya. He is a science fiction writer, 'All For Naught Orphan Ufonaut' in Shelter of Daylight, Sam's Dot Publishing (2010). He published in the British SF academic journal Foundation, `Male And Female He Created Them Both: Beyond The Archetypes` (112), and the Hungarian Institute for Educational Research`s Educatio, `Learning To Study`. E-mail: robika2001@yahoo.co.uk
Imagine my surprise when the normally parsimonious Chinese agreed to pay my airfare to Shanghai and guarantee to return me to pasture when the juice had been squeezed from the orange of my teaching capacities. A rurally idyllic perspective quite in keeping with traditional imagery associated with China, thought I, emboldened by remembered scenes of Madonna and erstwhile beau, actor Sean Penn, careering through the streets there inside a rickshaw, while he tried to make sure that the locals didn`t get any mud on her in the film, Shanghai Surprise (1986), and crowds of onlookers held chopsticks and rice bowls romantically against a vast backdrop of grey skies and endless paddy fields receding off into a distance immeasurably quaint.
Arriving at Shanghai airport meant the usual routine in which Mr Johnny English Teacher was assured he`d be picked up at the airport by someone holding a piece of paper with his name written on it, and somewhat overburdened, Johnny English, arrived to discover no one there. As usual, Mr Johnny Teacher`s phone was choc-a-bloc with messages from the local `phone company, China Mobile, advertising the huge benefits of purchasing a new sim card so that the Chinese network would be available to those `foreign devils` desirous of communicating verbally with the communist sponsors` generous tones, anticipating being collected by the person nominated by the contact, who`d located me at my operations` center in Budapest, that is, the converted cupboard with WC installation, which I proudly call `Bide A Wee`.
Finding that Johnny needed a `phone to make overtures to his Chinese captors, I picked his pocket and purloined the `phone ensconced therein. Battery flat, I despaired, how will my flat mate heat water for her shower without electricity? I floundered, drowning in fear at being stuck in Shanghai at a major Chinese airport, without any possibility of speaking with the flat Chinese girls, whether battery powered or not, who`d been the `phones that had invited me to be there. Paralyzed by the `uncertainty principle`, much beloved of physicists like the quantum mechanic Schröedinger, who wanted to establish that a cat could be simultaneously both dead and alive in a box exposed to lethal radiation, the English Johnny went over to the door with the universal sign for `trousered` in order to do some technical research on the existence of electrical sockets from which flat battery `phones could be replenished so that they would give life-giving succor to the auditory system of data processing commonly known as human beings.
Standing inside the convenience, English John observed that the plugs weren`t compatible with the `phone recharging equipment brought from Europe to Asia, and opted for a walk around the Shanghai airport environs outside the plane arrivals` area to locate a charger facility acceptable to the Europhone. Approaching a conveniently positioned `China Mobile` retail area, with the `phone battery recharger, it quickly became established that the `foreign devil`, that is, the John from England, would have to pay for a sim card, and a new `phone with a battery charger compatible with the Europhone communications` technology. Or, could John `Knee` Eng use the plug adaptor inside the unwieldy luggage he was perforce shouldering around the airport like a plumber with a few toilets in his native speaker`s ELT portfolio?
Having discovered that the ATM machines were all in Chinese and so it was impossible to obtain cash to buy a sim card at an airport in China, John Neen `Glish opted to `go native` and, burrowing deeply into his conspicuously black holdall with the Hungarian flag neatly emblazoned strategically at unattractive angles, found a plug adaptor that might conceivably fit the holes in the WC and afford the Europhone an electric boost so that Chaw Ning Lish could `phone his employment opportunity. Soon fully adopted inside the WC with his newly Orientalized face looking back at himself from the mirror above the washbasins while the `phone recharged from the adapted socket and the business of the lavatory went on behind his back undisturbed, Shaw Nee Ing Lish `phoned his contact and was assured that he`d be met almost instantly by those who presumably were giggling behind their hands somewhere in the great Shanghai airport concourse.
Standing and moving from place to place by turn, and with no cash for purchasing coffee and donuts, after an hour or so I received a call on the recharged Hungarian `phone ostensibly from Zou, who`d invited me to be there to be picked up by a representative of her company, and who hadn`t materialized when I arrived. Accepting, against my better judgement, that this was in fact Zou, I agreed to go with her to the accommodation supposedly expecting me after a two hour or so journey by Shanghai metro. I was assured that the room was close to a medical center, where I would be established as a non-Aids carrier. When I looked from the window, I could see another airport. In the morning I passed muster, instead of mustard, and was on my way to a teaching assignment.
Wondering who`d gotten the genuine accommodation that, presumably, had been arranged for the English Ph.D., and Certificated ELT professional, I travelled from Shanghai by train with a certain degree of trepidation and uneasiness; calmed only by the soothing tones of the MP3 player l always utilized during my excursions in foreign parts. The music invariably carried me along effortlessly ignoring a landscape teeming with muggers, and any murderers who`d seek to waylay the unwary traveler for a pair of headphones and some tunes, and so it was that I was able to journey on unintimidated by those who`d seek to take an Englishman `on the hoof`, as it were, by distracting him with fictional concerns.
Observing from my seat, the huge skyscrapers characterizing the housing estates and, in Chinese terms, small conurbations, before the truly humungous Chinese cities appeared along the route of the train, I understood that the Great Wall of China was the product of a people used to success on a scale more than great. However, when I reached the school I was to teach at, the water was undrinkable, and the basement apartment was covered in damp, green mold, which began to appear on my clothes, and would remain there until I was able to find a laundry in Turkey that could remove the fungus from my shirts.
The school was, of course, the usual internment camp for suspected political dissidents, and espionage agents sent from the United States of America, and the United Kingdom and elsewhere, to speak to Chinese infants, and perhaps uncover secrets relating to the aims and ambitions of `red` China; insofar as those capitalist nations had concerns over these communists` apparent desire for much bigger and more powerful aircraft carriers than the West. Labeling itself communism, `red` China remained true to the concept that `workers control the means of production`, which is what the German classical economist, Karl Marx, argued in his seminal work, Das Kapital, (1867), although China`s initial communist leader, Mao Tzedong, was a proponent of agrarianism, that is, the work of socialism began with rural peasantry, while urban conurbations represented the wage slavery of capitalist economics, rather than `ownership of the means of production by the workers`, which was Marxist communism.
Maoism was the perception that capitalism was slavery, so the Soviet communism of Russia, which began with the October 1917 Revolution against Russia`s involvement in the First World War (1914-18) against Imperial Germany`s attempt to enslave Europe and the world, was industrially centered, which resulted in revisionism and the reestablishment of slave economics by dictator, Josef Stalin, for example, before the Second World War to liberate Europe and the world from German Imperialism. However, the desire of the Chinese to build bigger aircraft carriers than the United States of America suggests a revisionist industrial centered communism based on host womb slavery in parasitism for war and death. Because the `workers` who `control the means of production` should be women, as civilization, culture and art emerges from their wombs, despite men`s parasitical depredations, which means that the production of huge aircraft carriers from the human species` futanarian womb is subversion by a capitalist revisionism that seeks the extinction of the human race in a form of alien racism imposed upon her by men of the `serpent`s seed` in Satanism.
Naturally, it was difficult to obtain dialectical teaching materials in China, or even adequate directions to the classrooms, where the children were; lest some esoteric Oriental knowledge pertaining to international global security might be placed at risk. Consequently, smart chalk and a blackboard was the advanced technological mode available to the ELT pro, and a wet cloth, which though it wasn`t wet to begin with, could be made damper by recourse to a rusty tap. Pootering along to the WC, which was rapidly becoming the favored port of call for Johnny In Glish, who was by now used to being kept in a state of terror as the technology afforded to the teacher by the locals dwindled to non-existence in their desire to strangle the teacher`s voice, Mr Glish moistened the chalk mark removal equipment.
The teachers` enclave was on the third floor of a three storey building with an `OUT OF ORDER` lift, in Chinese of course, 失灵, to ensure that the educators maintained regime fitness. Although China couldn`t be considered hot, it could be murderously humid, and the providers of liberal Western values, through the medium of New Interchange, perspired enough to fill Liza`s bucket with the hole in it. In Saudi Arabia boxes of tissues are thoughtfully provided by the administrators of the hothouse flowers, but in China the sweaty oik with the TESOL Cert. has to buy their own or drown. Later I`d marvel at the Turks, who`d have me live in Asia and take a ship to Europe where I had to cross a footbridge and climb a mountain in order to locate the language school or company I was to ply my trade at each morning around 9.00 am. `Thank God for the old ladies on the footbridge,` I`d chuff, as they proffered cellophane wrapped packs of five or six tissues for less than a Turkish lira (TL) in admiration at the passing of this, their Odysseus:
`To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the Western stars, until I die.` 1
`Least said, soonest mended,` I chuffed on, hoping not to expire before my IELTS one to one, and `A stitch in time saves nine billion,` I quoted American science fiction writer, Robert A. Heinlein (1907-88), from his short story `- All You Zombies -` (1959), in the hope that some of the zombies might sew a button on for me. After leaving Budapest with a TV 21 Supercar pin holding my suit jacket together, because the plazzy button had shattered into a squizillion pieces at the last instant for no explicable reason, as I switched off the light to put the key in the door to leave my wretched abode, I`d walked the length and breadth of a Qatar airport mall asking for a needle and thread to no avail, and finally after arriving in Dammam I`d taken the buttons off the inside pocket of the suit to sew on as jacket buttons, before the Saudi passport authorities and the Turkish airline contrived to steal suit and buttons by misappropriating the bag in which they`d been ensconced for my return journey Westward:
`Some work of noble note, may yet be done,
Not unbecoming men that strove with gods.` 2
I taught TOEFL to a group of Turkish residents, straight from Midnight Express (1978), although there were several toe fulls to avoid the morning I endeavored to make it to the ferry at Kadikoy in Asian Turkey for the crossing to Bakirkoy in Turkey, Europe. Despite the labyrinthine expeditiousness of the devil`s toenails, as their eyes snaked along in the paths God had ordained for them since the outbreak of the First World War, and the invention of Fry`s Turkish Delight (1914), which Michael Jackson and the Jehovah`s Witnesses believe signaled the end of the world, and God`s judgement upon it, the toe fulls weren`t sanguine enough about the safety of their souls at sea with John Knee Inglish, to offer Yours Truly a tow aboard ship:
`A life on the ocean wave,
A-home on the rolling deep!` 3
In China it was metros and trains after Shanghai airport. Being told I`d be picked up followed by the usual rigmarole attending the arrival of the pick up after flying from Budapest and making it to the coast of Asia opposite California, Los Angeles, I was taken on a three hour metro excursion with the promise of a medical the next day for work visa processing purposes and a train journey of similar duration to Wenjou city in Zheijang province where I`d be picked up. At Harley Street a doctor had raised a quibble over a supposed hiatus hernia that cost me a return flight ticket to Budapest and my employers in Saudi Arabia close on 1000 GBP, so I was grateful to discover in Beijing, after another nightmare train journey across Asia, and a visit to the local medical center there for more work visa processing, that I was in fact healthy.
I`d had my own medical supplies for nervous exhaustion and blood oxygenation stolen from me at Dammam airport along with the suit, that is, Ferrous Phosphate # 4 and Kali Phosphate # 6 homoeopathic remedies, which cost me upwards of 200 GBP to take with me. They`d been manufactured by New Era laboratories at Marfleet in Kingston Upon Hull, Yorkshire, but the factory had been shut down by David Cameron`s UK government, presumably on the grounds that St Peter thought they were `too good` for humans, who were waking up to what was being done. Having sacked half a million civil servants whose families like as not were looking to be able to function in some way or other to the probable detriment of the Conservative government that had made them destitute (at least to their eyes), Tory policy seemed to have reverted to maintaining a population in extremis. A sick public is unlikely to give a ruling Party any opposition, which is what God told Eve in the Bible, after the serpent gave her the `fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, which is death. Ephemeral humans die as slaves in `enmity` with the enslaver who`s poisoned them, because it doesn`t want healthy development and immortality for humanity born from host wombs without parasites:
`When Britain first, at Heaven's command
Arose from out the azure main;
This was the charter of the land,
And guardian angels sang this strain:
`Rule, Britannia! rule the waves:
Britons never will be slaves.` 4
Satan, the angel, was turned into the serpent in Eden because God`s plan was for the human host to be greater than the angelic, and Satan disagreed. Similarly, the human host at his `Last Supper`, Jesus, offered `bread and wine` as symbols of his `body and blood`, that is, acceptance of the human host, but his disciple Judas betrayed Jesus to the Romans who took him to the hill of Calvary outside Jerusalem and nailed him to a cross of wood where he died. Jesus` Resurrection and Ascension to heaven was a sign that the human host will not be damned by a parasite it perforce shares a womb with.
In Dammam my sunglasses and a spare pair of spectacles, made in Józsefváros, Budapest`s VIII district, Lőrinc Pap tér, (look, if you can, for the statue of 19th century staunch Catholic, Count Zichy Nándor), were stolen after Turkish airlines found it impossible to put a luggage ticket on my bag, so imagine my surprise when one of my Turkish TOEFL students in Istanbul working for Onurair said that he could give me a pair of reactolite spectacles; because his relatives were opticians! As a science fiction writer, my suspicions were that the readers were trying to write my life as a script for a commedia not unlike that of Alighieri Dante (d. 1321), who described circles in hell for Catholicism at the beginning of the 14th century. If the criminals stole enough of my life, I guessed the theory went, I`d never escape their circle:
`Thou shalt not kill!` (Ex: 20. 13)
Because theft is murder, as God probably intended his prohibition should be interpreted, which is why the prohibition against theft is equal with the law against murder, `Thou shalt not steal.` (Ex: 20. 15) If the criminals steal enough of your life, it`s murder by degrees, and I have enough degrees as a Ph.D English `major` to understand that, although the murderers don`t seem to be able to, even if they`re Masons and know they`ve 360 degrees to their circle. An individual`s life isn`t a comedy for the illiterate, or `fair game` for the killer, which is why God`s Bible contains the story of the first murderer, who killed his human `brother`, because he`d invented cooking, and was Abel.
Unconsciousness of being murdered as a disabled individual is still murder by degrees in order to maintain human slavery. The automobile hasn`t improved in a hundred years, since the first mass produced Ford model T came off the Detroit, Michigan, production line in the United States of America in 1908, because motorists are still using their feet on a Mason`s treadmill for the enslaved host wombs of the human race to be fooled around with.
Pedestrians are what slavers like to see amongst their circles, which is why Oedipus` name means `swollen foot`. The ancient Greek dramatist, Sophocles, wrote Oedipus Rex (c. 429 B.C.) about a man who inadvertently kills his father, Laius, and then unknowingly marries his mother, Jocasta. Oedipus blinds himself after feeling horrified because he`s broken the incest taboo. The drama ends with Antigone, Oedipus` daughter, guiding his footsteps away from the city of Thebes. Oedipus` fate represents unconsciousness, according to `the father of psychoanalysis`, Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), because Oedipus isn`t within the family circle, that is, he doesn`t accept that host womb slavery in parasitism is what men are for, which is why he`s pedestrian:
`What goes on all fours in the morning, two in the afternoon and three in the evening.` 5
In answer to the riddle in Sophocles` play, Oedipus` answer is, `Man.` Having answered correctly he is afforded the opportunity to go on into Thebes and marry the widowed queen, Jocasta, and as a blind man with a cane, he`s a prototype of murdered humanity, that is, he`s a disabled pedestrian enslaved in unconsciousness by a writer`s tradition, which is that the characters aren`t conscious of the author`s intentions. Faced with a writers` collective seeking to prevent Yours Truly from progressing unhindered, the ELT Face 2 Face Pre-Intermediate book loomed larger at the Istanbul Language Centre in Kadikoy than otherwise it might have done. Were these people the faceless writers` collective seeking to write themselves over the writer`s meanderings and so make a palimpsest of the traveler`s travelogue? In the movie, Face/Off (1997), the Asian killer had transformed himself to look like Nick Cage`s character, Caster Troy, who`d then taken John Travolta`s face and given Travolta`s character, Sean Archer, Nick`s, which meant that, because the good guy looked like the bad guy, it was only possible to get a good look from the killer. When Mr Wriggly Ugly Boobs invited me to go to Europe from Asia every day by boarding a ship in Istanbul, Turkey, I knew I`d been Shanghaied in China. I was being accused of being Cage, GB, which meant that I was John Travolta dancing with the uneducated:
`Feel the city breakin' and everybody shakin'
And we're stayin' alive, stayin' alive.`6
Language schools are notoriously tight fisted and penny pinching institutions that don`t want their equipment to be used, because it costs money that they don`t want to spend, as it`s a business for them, and not an educational establishment run by a government administration that wants an education for its citizens. Consequently, teachers who seek to employ the paucity of technology, and the scarce materials they find for what they need, are accused of being spies, because the authorities don`t actually want the schools to educate, but rather provide a cheap unofficial program for spying on other nations` activities. English language teachers aren`t really expected to teach, they`re pressed to perform wonders illustrative of their nation`s cultural excellence, while the fiction is that the management are appreciative of the efforts made; despite the financial constraints under which everyone is camply concentrating. The instantaneous transmission of CVs by e-mail across the globe means that an individual`s entire cultural heritage is placed under scrutiny by Ministry`s of the Interior as diverse as those of Beijing and Tripoli. While I was in Istanbul, the Turks were bombing the Kurds into submission, which is the nation Saddam Hussein was executed on December 30, 2003, for allegedly using poison gas against, and Kurdistan extends into Iraq, Iran, and Turkey, which has the largest population and land mass of that international people:
`Whether you`re a brother or whether you`re a mother
You`re stayin` alive, stayin` alive.`
As petitioners to join the European Union, Turkey is perceived as an ally of the West, but Saddam Hussein was executed for warring on the Kurds, whereas ELT professionals are encouraged to perceive the wagers for war on the Kurds, that is, the Turks, as friendly towards Western Europeans, which doesn`t seem obvious. Nor does it appear likely that an ELT professional`s CV in the hands of a Turkish language school manager is a security asset from the point of view of the human family. Bombing the Kurds into unconscious submission is a figure of what happens to populations with national governments. ELT professionals and their families are thus a type of Kurd, who represent intelligence rather than unconsciousness, which national and international governments seek to suppress. Hence the camply concentrated international language school pogrom manager`s role as a local bomber of liberal insurgents.
The teacher is of course pimped by the language school. In preparation for China, I had to work out for a month or so in order to fill a T-shirt respectfully, and flex my abs and biceps in a laptop Skype interview for a `position`. Naturally there was more to it, and I had to be able to juggle, while playing the saxophone, while using my toes to conjugate verbs with chalk on a blackboard. Qualifications are of less use than chopsticks in Ireland when it`s China. Although I was intimidated but gently when I attempted a bowl of meat and potatoes without chopsticks when I arrived in Wenjou city. For the Chinese, Skype interrogations are pornography, much like the ancient practice of `foot binding` has been replaced by ELT selection procedures as a form of Chopherknees torture in post Bridge Over The River Kwai (1957) settings in Chopann. For the Chinese, Skype suggests Steve McQueen fruitlessly trying to get his motorcycle to jump over over the Nazi guards on the hillside in the movie, The Great Escape (1963), so it`s their role to make sure that you can`t. Airfare is reimbursed after six months or a year, which means a period of hard labor in order to remain long enough to earn enough to leave by cheap plane ticket when you`ve been caught attempting to escape international pogroming through Skype.
Turning my ELT credentials towards Asia seemed logical, and although Vietnam and parts Far Eastern seem explorable in financial terms, who`d want to work for Cambodia`s Pol Pot language ghouls. Pol was the Indo-Chinese leader that decided to kill all of the people with brainpower in his nation, a feat comparable to those of Mao in China, Stalin in Russia, and numerous other minor dictators, whose penchant was to potter about muttering about the dangers of international language skulls. President Richard Milhous Nixon kept on carpet bombing during the Indo-China war (1946-89) as well as with the `agent orange` defoliation pogrom delivered by US adapted crop spraying aircraft, which removed all of the vegetation from that region so that the people would starve, because there`d be no food either for them or livestock, and which was quite usual for the US as they`d killed almost all of the 60, 000, 000 buffalo by the 1880s to starve the North American Plains` Indians to death a century earlier. Consequently, it`s difficult to decide who was the bigger criminal, Pol or Dick, or whether Saddam Hussein, strangled Iraqi bomber of the Kurds, or Ahmet Davutoğlu, Turkey`s President during the September 2015 bombing of the Kurds, was more deserving of our lack of respect:
`Kurdish independence in Iraq could lead to Kurdish independence in Syria, which could lead to Kurdish independence in Iran, which could lead to Kurdish independence in Turkey. Every time a new independent Kurdish entity pops up in the Middle East, the likelihood that Turkey will lose an enormous swath of its territory increases.`7
If there aren`t any Kurds, a large swath of territory necessarily devolves upon Iraq, Syria, Iran and Turkey, because Kurdistan is a very large nation with a population that wasn`t territorial until the nearby national heads began stealing the Kurds` territory. Kurdistan was a truly international nation, which is the supposed ideological reasoning for the existence of the European Union superstate, where people belong without reference to borders. Where borders aren`t perceived there aren`t any borders, which mightn`t be perceived as true if you come from Manhattan, and you`re on your way to the Bronx. Although the borders are invisible, they`re real enough to street gangs. As Rita Moreno`s character, Anita, in the film of the 1957 Broadway musical, West Side Story (1961), with music by Leonard Bernstein, and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, sings in `A Boy Like That`, for a mixed audience of `Jets` and `Sharks`, who`re Puerto Rican and Polish immigrants to the United States of America descended from families processed after arriving at Ellis Island at the mouth of the Hudson river between the states of New Jersey and New York:
`A boy like that who'd kill your brother;
Forget that boy and find another.
One of your own kind, stick to your own kind.
A boy like that will give you sorrow;
You'll meet another boy tomorrow.`8
Between 1965 and 1999, the British Broadcasting Corporation`s BBC 1 televised Jeux Sans Frontières, that is, Games Without Borders, as a jokily competitive Europe-wide television show, because the ideological perspective of Europe was of a superstate that didn`t have enemies within. As an ELT professional engaged in working in Europe, and in nations seeking entry as member states of the European Union, hoodlums make it difficult for an individual to leave the district they live in and travel to the next; irrespective of destinations arrived at from international airports more resembling abattoirs, with damned animals collecting meat stamps to avoid being condemned, than humans in transit before visiting relatives and friends.
1 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, `Ulysees`, 1833, l. 52-3.
2 Tennyson, `Ulysees`, l. 60-1.
3 Sargent, Epes, and Henry Russell `A Life On The Ocean Wave`, 1838.
4 Thomson, James The Works of James Thomson, 1763, Vol II, p. 191.
5 Apollodorus, Library of Apollod, 3. 5. 8.
6 Gibb, Barry, Maurice Gibb, Robin Gibb, `Stayin` Alive`, Bee Gees, Saturday Night Fever: Motion Picture Soundtrack, RSO, 1977.
7 Totten, Michael J. `Turkey Bombs The Kurds`, October 16, 2014, World Affairs, http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/blog/michael-j-totten/turkey-bombs-kurds .
8 Moreno Rita as Anita `A Boy Like That` from West Side Story, Seven Arts, 1961.
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