Back from PRC

8 days flew by fast
my 5th trippe to prc

amoy, chuenchiu, zangziu, teochew, swatow, kityang

basically all south east china.
i learnt quite a lot, and was pleasantly surprised.

like how southeners dont share the nationalist fervor that transpires among the harbinese and the other northerners that infest rj. many people in these places i visited fear and despise mao tse tung and prc more than herpes and warts.

these people are envious of the success story that is taiwan or roc, whatever u wanna call it, and they suffered graetly during the cultural revolution. because in china during the revolution, if u have foreign relatives, u r to be supervised. many of them lost their land and valuables and family heirlooms and whatnot and were even sent into the villages to 'gai zao' them and make them friends of the revolution.

interestingly, people from teochew have great business acumen, such that over a quarter of chinese wealth is controlled by teochews. and teochew is only a very wee enclave in guangdong province. teochews dominate the rich lists in south east asia as well, with the richest pinoy n indon being teochew. li ka shing is also teochew. lol impressive. if teochews have so much business smarts, then how come im so poor?

many of the richest chinese are from the swatow part of the teochew speaking area. but swatow is mother poor. maybe its because the real pros have the brains and the balls to escape from china before mao took over china.

i visited my 'relatives' in a little village called seng kang. haha. 桑港 actually. they did bear some resemblance to us, but they looked primitive. we have larger rounder eyes. they have slitty little eyes and seem to have very long upper limbs or suffer from bone loss in their backs. they seemed stuck in the past, when we have all moved along and evolved.

but they were bloody rich. all of them have sets of gold teeth. but its cos of remittances from their overseas relations, ie, my grandfather and grand uncle, who together donated a whopping 200 000 RMB to the little village! that they named the main road of the village, which was basically a one lane road after them. riiight.

自扫门前雪

well the chinks epitomise this. they even bring it to an all new level. they literally sweep their rubbish out onto the main road, from amoy to swatow. the roads are filthy. i took a photo of a road, which was wet from a choked gutter, which smelt from the filth, the rotting cabbage from the vegetable stall, the foodwaste from the chuan shao stall and more. SUVs are practical in china, the roads are bathed in plastic bottles, broken wood furniture, glass shards, that it feels like a journey through the densest and harshest cross of a tundra and the malaysian rainforest.

to be continewed.