ranierean
D-9999
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My mom used to regularly take me back to China as a kid before the ‘08 crash; at some point we just stopped going there and I’m still not sure why.
What’s also weird to me is that I don’t have a lot of memories about the country apart from insanely personal and weird flashbacks and… this:
I remember us passing through one of those asphalted but relatively car-free avenues, stereotypically lit by neon and filled with dirty sidewalk eateries, and right in the dead center of it there was this disheveled elderly woman smoking and casually taking a shit over an open manhole. She was this visual island of sorts, a protagonist of the moment, because no one cared about what she was doing and even I at that point was old enough to know not to stare at the random freaks doing their own thing in public.
Once me and my mom put some distance between us and that scene she just started cracking up, asking if I saw something strange. I said “No” and she went on to describe it in great detail, still laughing, and to my surprise she also said that almost every single street we walked through was like this, they’re just places of retirement plans based on open defecation – I have never seen my mother be animated by anything in life to such an extreme degree ever since, she was fucking cackling, but somehow I just tuned all those insane Chinese people out of my periphery.
So, whenever I encounter mainlander nationalists or third worldists telling me about how the People’s Republic is great, I go back to this.
The supposed burgeoning of China, its political apex, have less to do with images of civilizational triumph and more with forces of global capital beating retarded chinks with canes to make them assemble plastic trash cheaply; I just don't think that RGB-lit skyscrapers can channel Frauenkirche…
What’s also weird to me is that I don’t have a lot of memories about the country apart from insanely personal and weird flashbacks and… this:
I remember us passing through one of those asphalted but relatively car-free avenues, stereotypically lit by neon and filled with dirty sidewalk eateries, and right in the dead center of it there was this disheveled elderly woman smoking and casually taking a shit over an open manhole. She was this visual island of sorts, a protagonist of the moment, because no one cared about what she was doing and even I at that point was old enough to know not to stare at the random freaks doing their own thing in public.
Once me and my mom put some distance between us and that scene she just started cracking up, asking if I saw something strange. I said “No” and she went on to describe it in great detail, still laughing, and to my surprise she also said that almost every single street we walked through was like this, they’re just places of retirement plans based on open defecation – I have never seen my mother be animated by anything in life to such an extreme degree ever since, she was fucking cackling, but somehow I just tuned all those insane Chinese people out of my periphery.
So, whenever I encounter mainlander nationalists or third worldists telling me about how the People’s Republic is great, I go back to this.
The supposed burgeoning of China, its political apex, have less to do with images of civilizational triumph and more with forces of global capital beating retarded chinks with canes to make them assemble plastic trash cheaply; I just don't think that RGB-lit skyscrapers can channel Frauenkirche…
