White male seeking sexy Asian women...

http://www.salon.com/books/review/2009/06/16/east_west_sex/


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Ready, willing and disabled

Ready, willing and disabled
September 27, 2008
Behind the glamour of the Beijing Paralympics lay a fierce controversy over which athletes should be allowed to compete, writes Jordan Baker.
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It was like any cafeteria, anywhere in the world. There were soggy scrambled eggs, stale bread rolls and long queues for bad coffee. Yet at the same time, it was like nowhere else on Earth. Next to the long tables and plastic seats, a Ukrainian in a wheelchair queued for sausages behind Tunisians shaking with cerebral palsy. A sombrero-wearing Mexican with one arm puzzled over the toaster with two Australian quadriplegics.
A tall beauty from Finland whose steel prosthetic leg extended from her thigh perused the salad bar with a young, tanned midget. He wore a blond mohawk; she wore a T-shirt reading, "Yes, he's my boyfriend".
For the thousands of people with disabilities who competed at the Paralympic Games in Beijing, the dining hall in the athletes village was a kind of paradise where there was no staring, no pity and everything was wheelchair-accessible.
There was a spirit of brotherhood and camaraderie - inside the village gate, at least.
Paralympians have a reputation for being the good guys of sport: the brave, inspiring ones who have overcome huge odds just to get there. Well, it is not always true. Competition is fierce, cheating can be rife, and the back-room politics are intense.
This year, passions ran as high at the officials' cocktail parties as they did on the track as international delegates debated a controversial question: just how badly off does an athlete need to be to be eligible to compete at the Paralympics?
The debate arose from a push to cut the least disabled events from the Games program. Under the proposal, track and field athletes with lower arm amputation and mild cerebral palsy would have to take their chances in able-bodied competition.
The move has sparked a furious response from countries such as Australia, who say it would leave those athletes with nowhere to compete.
Australia's response is partly driven by self-interest. The teams the country sends overseas have fewer severely disabled athletes than other countries' teams. If the new regime had been in place in Beijing, Australia would have missed out on two of its 10 track and field gold medals.
And as at the Olympics, medals mean money.
The controversy stems from the constant burden of disabled sport: classification. The classification system is there to make competition fair: to ensure amputees race against amputees, for example, and not against the blind or people in wheelchairs.
But it also makes the sport difficult to understand and leaves it vulnerable to protests and controversy.
In Athens, for example, there was a classification scandal surrounding two tall Tunisian midgets.
The Tunisians were included in throwing events for dwarfs, as there were not enough midgets to justify an event of their own. Classifiers decided that the requirement for competition would not be dwarfism, but height.
The midgets were slightly taller than the dwarfs. They could also fully extend their arms, as midgets' bodies are proportional and dwarfs' are not. The Tunisians broke world records, and the dwarfs were furious.
"These two are tall athletes," the Australian thrower Julie Isles told the Herald.
"Well, I'm saying they are tall because they are around four-foot-nine [145 centimetres]. I'm nearly four foot and some of us are around four-foot-three. They have arm lengths as long as yours. It's making it so hard for us."
Classification is also one of many ways Paralympians can cheat.
While paraplegics can block their bladders or sit on sharp objects to prompt a performance-enhancing physical reaction to pain they cannot feel, others, such as athletes with impaired vision, simply lie in medical tests so they can compete with athletes who are more severely disabled.
At the Sydney Games, a group of Spaniards pretended to be intellectually disabled to enter the basketball competition, hoping to claim a cash reward for gold medals that had been offered by the Spanish Government.
As a result, intellectually disabled events were dropped from Athens and Beijing. They will be revived in London, much to the disapproval of physically disabled athletes who believe the inclusion of the "IDs" will confuse the Games with the Special Olympics.
The latest plan put forward by international classifiers for London would cut the number of limb amputees and mild cerebral palsy athletes to make room for more wheelchair events.
National committees were invited to comment on the proposal in Beijing and many opposed it.
Advocates of reform argue that less-disabled runners' times are not far off those of able-bodied athletes and that the Paralympic Games should be reserved for people for whom competing alongside able-bodied athletes would be impossible.
Critics cite runners such as Australia's Katrina Webb, who won gold in Atlanta and Athens. She was diagnosed with mild cerebral palsy only six months before the 1996 Games, while she was 19 and on a netball scholarship at the Australian Institute of Sport.
Doctors noticed a slight weakness in her right leg and she was diverted from netball to the Paralympic program.
Australia does not field teams in the sports for more severely disabled people, such as goalball (a kind of soccer for the blind, which is played in silence) or boccia, which is played by those with the most severe disability.
Opponents say disabilities such as arm amputations and mild cerebral palsy are still severe and mean the athletes will never be able to compete fairly with able-bodied athletes. Without the Games, there would be no forum for them.
In Beijing, Australia's Heath Francis, who was seven when he caught his forearm in a meat mincer 20 years ago, won gold in the 100 metres, 200m and 400m. He is in the T46 class for athletes with a single above-elbow amputation and runs with an artificial arm to improve his balance. But under the new guidelines, that might not be enough of a disability.
"For sprinting, the upper body is as important as the lower body," Francis said. "When you look at Olympic runners, their arms are almost as big as their legs. The strength of your upper body determines the speed of your legs."
Able-bodied athletes do heavy weight training, but Francis cannot do most of it. "You try to modify them and make the best of it, and I'm lucky that [my coach] thinks laterally, but it's still not as good as the exercises I could do with two arms.
"That then translates onto the track, about how much power and force I can generate with my legs. I'm restricted with the strength in my arms."
Francis's times are not close to the best able-bodied runners, even on the national circuit. The Australian 100m record is 9.93 seconds. At the Beijing Olympics, Usain Bolt ran the 100m in 9.69 seconds. Francis won the arm amputee class 100m in 11.05 seconds.
Also in Beijing, Evan O'Hanlon, a 20-year-old sprinter from Hunters Hill, won gold in the 100m, 200m and 4x100m relay, all in world record time. Lisa McIntosh, of Victoria, won gold in the 100m and 200m.
Both are in the T38 category for those with the least severe cerebral palsy, another group that faces the axe under the new regime.
McIntosh's disability is noticeable but O'Hanlon's is not, partly because he has spent years teaching himself how to hide it. "If I don't want you to know, you won't know," O'Hanlon said of his disability at the Games.
Iryna Dvoskina, who studied coaching at university in Ukraine, looks after Francis and O'Hanlon at the Australian Institute of Sport. She said sprinters with cerebral palsy could never compete at a national level, as they have to manage increased build-up of lactic acid in their muscles, longer recovery and weakness in parts of their body.
"Cerebral palsy is a brain injury: you have an injury in the locomotive centre of your brain, which is responsible for movement," she said. "They have spasticity, and after big training sessions or fast and explosive exercise, spasticity can increase."
Dvoskina has written to the International Paralympics Committee's athletics division, arguing the events should be kept.
"Athletes like Evan and Heath cannot compete against able-bodied," she said.
"There are a lot of reasons. They can't do the same amount of exercise as able-bodied people can do. Technically, they can't do the same things. If they can't be equal with able-bodied but cut these classes, what can they do?"
Occasionally, athletes with disabilities may have an edge over their able-bodied counterparts. The South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius was initially banned from able-bodied competition because of the extra bounce from his carbon prosthetics. That decision was overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport, although Pistorius did not qualify for the Olympics.
The classification issue is murky, especially when technology also creates major advantages for athletes from wealthy countries. Some run on the world's best prostheses; poor athletes have been known to make their own from foam and leather.
Whether Francis and O'Hanlon are allowed to compete in London or not, the classification debate will keep raging in the world of disabled sport.
The athletes' village, however, will still be what it was in Beijing this year: a rare oasis where people with disabilities will be embraced, regardless of colour, creed or classification.
The Herald journalist Jordan Baker served as a volunteer with the Australian Paralympic team in Beijing.

Dirt returns as city airs its laundry

Dirt returns as city airs its laundry

Mary-Anne Toy
September 20, 2008

POSTCARD FROM BEIJING


The Olympic circus has finally left town and signs of regular Beijing life are slowly returning.

The cardboard recycling man with his rusty tricycle is back on the street near my home after being forced into temporary retirement along with the rest of the city's mum-and-dad scrap merchants. An old man in a dusty Mao-era suit was sitting on the footpath this week in a sign that homeless people and other undesirables are being allowed back in public. South of Tiananmen Square, in one of the old hutong neighbourhoods of small laneways, people are airing quilts and hanging washing outdoors again, taking advantage of the Olympic-improved air quality and the glorious autumn weather.

And after a blissful month without advertising text messages, my mobile phone is again buzzing with offers of everything from cheap tickets to flights, tutoring, fake receipts (for tax evasion) and illegal satellite television dishes. During the Olympics all of these were miraculously diverted to make way for Olympic-related news updates.

No one is looking forward to the return of Beijing's notorious traffic and pollution, even though the bans on construction and the driving restrictions have forced thousands of businesses to close or restrict operations, and driven hundreds of thousands to leave the city for lack of work.

I hope the vast improvements in disabled access due to the Paralympics will remain and be extended. Permanently lifting the ban on guide dogs would be a start. The ban, which stopped China's first Paralympian gold medallist, Ping Yali, using Beijing's first guide dog, Lucky, in public, will surely end now that both have starred in the Paralympics opening ceremony.

All the traffic and pollution measures imposed on July 20 are due to end today. Dozens of cranes that dot the skyline - which is still murky or invisible too often - will be back in action as construction starts up again. The number plate restrictions that halved traffic finish this weekend (although some restrictions on Government vehicles remain) despite public support for their retention.

State-controlled media have published several surveys showing most people wanted to make them permanent, despite the inconvenience, especially to businesses which have had to hire second vehicles or see their deliveries halved. But no one is betting the city will take such radical action.

The October 1 National Day holidays mean that many of the Olympic decorations and greenery will be maintained for the traditional influx of Chinese visitors to the capital. Millions are expected to flood to the Olympic Green to see the Bird's Nest, Water Cube and other venues. In fact, if the municipal government, free of the restrictive Olympic sponsorship rules, allows local food and drink vendors to set up shop in the vast Olympic Green, it will boast a more festive atmosphere than during the Games.

Those wondering if Beijing will slow down may find the opposite occurs. The flow of visitors should increase if the Government loosens visa controls imposed to keep potential troublemakers out. Beijing is likely to keep attracting international tourists, as well as hordes of domestic visitors, especially as the petty or bizarre restrictions on daily life are ended.

And the most common excuse in the past two months - "It's the Olympics", usually delivered with a shrug - for everything from bans on live music to the local Tex Mex restaurant taking macaroni cheese off the menu, is now officially past its use-by date.

Have you done a Ratner lately???

Recently, China Daily published remarks by an Israeli windsurfer regarding his Olympic hosts. He called the Chinese “shits” and complained about their lack of foreign language skills, obtuseness, etc. The Israeli Embassy went into overdrive trying to placate the Chinese who immediately cancelled a diplomatic dinner. The athlete himself had to retract his remarks and apologise to the Chinese.

Which just shows that you cannot speak your mind when it comes to international politics (as well as many other things). Or at least you have to be as convoluted about it as Lord Curzon was when he spoke of the Chinese over 100 years ago by highlighting the “…sullen resistance of national character, self-confident and stolid … wrapped in the mantle of a superb and paralyzing conceit.” At least he could hope that Chinese would have trouble understanding exactly what he meant by it.

Read some more blunders below:
The most famous of them all, so much so that such gaffes are now known as "doing a Ratner", was when Gerald Ratner joked about his family's jewellery business as selling "total crap".
He wiped £500 million from the value of Ratners jewellers with one speech in 1991 when he said: "We also do cut-glass sherry decanters complete with six glasses on a silver-plated tray that your butler can serve you drinks on, all for £4.95. People say, 'How can you sell this for such a low price?' I say, because it's total crap."
He added that his stores' earrings were "cheaper than an M&S prawn sandwich but probably wouldn't last as long".
But other gaffs have followed.
In 2003, Matt Barrett, the Barclays chief executive, shocked observers by suggesting that consumers should stay clear of his company's product, the Barclaycard, because it was so expensive.
Giving evidence to a panel of MPs, he admitted he would not use one himself.
He said: "I do not borrow on credit cards. I have four young children. I give them advice not to pile up debts on their credit cards."
Asked in an interview in 2001 to clarify the target market for the Topman clothing chain, the firm's brand director, David Shepherd, replied: "Hooligans or whatever."
He went on: "Very few of our customers have to wear suits for work. They'll be for his first interview or first court case."
The company later suggested that the word "hooligan" would not be seen as an insult among its customers.
Alain Levy, chief executive of the music company EMI, offended most of Finland when he said that he had cut the roster of artists on a subsidiary label the company owned because there were not that many people in the country "who could sing".
In 2006, John Pluthero, the UK chairman of Cable & Wireless, sent a memo to staff, which said: "Congratulations, we work for an underperforming business in a crappy industry and it's going to be hell for the next 12 months."
He warned of job losses and added: "If you are worried that it all sounds very hard, it's time for you to step off the bus."


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The “Game” after the Olympics Games

The “Game” after the Olympics Games

I met a Canadian expat in Beijing who spent about 5 years here. I will call him Andy. Andy speaks some 50 essential phrases of Chinese with fluency and panache of a real Beijinger.

He introduced me to some rules for Beijing that he found useful:

1. do not expect any Chinese to speak English.
2. when they speak, do not expect them to understand you or you to understand them.
3. when they understand you, do not expect them to think like you.
4. best, do not expect them to think at all for they have a set way of thinking that is unfathomable to foreigners but is bound to produce confusion.
5. best not to ask for any directions as you will invariably be misdirected.
6. when you think you are having free information or a bargain, they may actually cost you more.
7. unless you really know what you are doing, stay on the tourist circuit and pay the price. At least you know what you are getting (or not getting).

Andy should know. He has been teaching English to Chinese students for a few years. He’s actually been sacked from one college because, he says, he was trying to make students talk and think in English, instead of memorizing grammar rules and meaningless pages of texts. His other job is sitting in the front office of companies as the notional “foreign” partner. He has represented 43 different countries and companies so far. Sometimes he is picked up by a street agent who looks for voice over talent in bars frequented by foreigners. He is paid peanuts, most of the money being pocketed by the pyramid of agents who skim the field. All he has to do is to pretend to lip synch Chinese, with a native voice over. He is the “foreign face” of products and services marketed in China.

He is also a fan of Kiyosaki and Donald Tramp and an avid reader of “The Game” a dating manual for males who think that seduction of women is the only game in town. He is having a ball. He says that to a young Chinese woman the average Chinese male is boring, crude, cigarette smelling and beer drinking brute. A Western man with a smattering of Chinese and a sense of humor is simply irresistible. Most young Chinese women have only had 2 partners – a young boy from their school they “experimented” with and a current boyfriend (but, upon a close questioning, had another boyfriend with whom she had an affair before but forgot about it).

Andy is worried whether he will ever be able to date a Western woman. He is trapped in a honey pot. It is like me saying I will not be able to enjoy Western massage after a Chinese variety. Of course, the honey pot has its downside, like the habitual lying of every girlfriend he had regarding every topic he ever discussed with her. Or her preference for her evening TV series instead of sex with him every time he is randy (which he is a lot of the time, he says). He sometimes feels like an old Olympic ticket sold by touts on the black market for the Chinese to simply boast that they have attended an Olympic event (sleeping with a Westerner who speaks Chinese and has a sense of humor being the next best).

Andy is worried about his future and thinks China is just a trap for people like him. But he enjoys the present while dreaming of becoming rich and famous when he writes his bestseller or makes that elusive business connection.

I was telling him a story about a relative in Moscow who was a sex addict until a jealous husband started chasing after him with a fire axe, and an attractive secretary he hired for her looks who turned out to be a corporate spy who ruined his business. He listened to me while chatting up an eye-catching young waitress in a restaurant we were dining in, pinching her and making her giggle uncontrollably. I am not sure he had heard my story. He was enjoying the only game worth playing during, before, or after the Games in China.

By the way, he told me that many Chinese moved out of Beijing before the Olympics, afraid of terrorism, increased security and loose foreigners. He also said that many Chinese salary men and women working in offices spend many hours on the Internet and chatting on their phones instead of working, like they are supposed to. Andy said that this and their inability to think independently is actually good news for the West. If they were as efficient and hard working and creative as Americans are supposed to be, we’d be in real trouble. But he is afraid that the Chinese girls are going to learn The Game, and that Chinese men will learn to think. He promised he will move out of China then and maybe go to Belarus, which he heard has attractive girls and men who also cannot think. He is learning Belarusian.

The Preening of Beijing

There is no doubt that Beijing was vastly improved for the Olympics. There is the Bird Nest – truly unique structure that will rival world’s top architectural landmarks for notoriety. There are also plans to transform the Water Cube into a recreational swimming and leisure facility for the average Beijinger by moving out the seats and pouring in beach sand instead.

But what is also impressive is the number of small parks blooming with multicolored flowers and rose bushes (gardeners must be a popular profession here) that have been created for the residents. There is one close to my hotel and it is being used actively by people living nearby. Kids roller skate, adults play basketball on paved fields, crocket, and table tennis on all-weather tables (not present in Australia but also present throughout the old Soviet Union) and all manner of sporting gadgets like bicycles and outdoor treadmills, some uniquely Chinese but worthy of imitation everywhere else. Like a round steel structure that allows one to bend backwards and get kinks out of one’s spine. Such outdoor gyms are found in every corner of Beijing, even in the poorest neighborhoods called Hutongs. The Chinese are very clever and inventive about things like this. One can also see people sitting at the outdoor card game tables playing cards in the shade or playing Chinese checkers on the path; competing in picking marbles with chopsticks; singing, dancing and playing traditional musical instruments. They seem to enjoy each other’s company and spend free time effectively in a healthy environment. They are also keeping their minds and bodies active.

Keeping cool in a sticky summer environment is well provided for by the Chinese using hand held wooden fans and cotton umbrellas protecting them from hot sunrays. Ecologically sound and cheap too.

And what about the old standbys like Chinese massage, available to everyone for a modest price from USD 9/hr to maybe USD15 on the average – still a lot of many for rural and small town dwellers (but not unaffordable for the better healed denizens of Beijing). But it is also the quality and intensity of the massages. I would estimate that the average Chinese masseur uses 100-1000 times more energy when performing the massage compared to the average Australian masseur. There is also greater depth and sensitivity. I am not sure if I will be able ever to enjoy massage in Australia after 2 months of having a regular massage in China. And the relaxation to be completed by a cup of green tea available in immense variety. When I ordered a “green tea” the waiter was confused as to which brand to bring since each has a special name and is not just called “green tea” as it is in Australia.

Sure, one wonders if the greening and preening of Beijing and other cities will continue after the Olympics, with the economic “progress” and the growth of industrial and military might being definitely top priority for the Chinese government. But it was definitely impressive to see that the Chinese use energy efficiently, i.e. many street lights are run on a solar battery.

All the reports I am getting about the greening of China and its move to alternative technologies, combined with the traditional Chinese respect for nature is surely a basis for hope.

Visiting Beijing zoo with Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Visiting Beijing zoo with Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A couple of days ago I went to Beijing zoo. As zoos go, it is not a bad one. I recall zoos in some other Asian countries, like Korea and even Japan. They are such a contrast to, for example, the Sydney zoo, where animals are, well, pampered, living in big enclosures, often with people walking through fenced enclosures to observe animals which run free. Of course, the purists do not like even the Sydney zoo, but if they want to really rave about captive animals, they should come to China.

The Chinese seem to have nostalgia about wild animals which they identify with their own lost heritage. This is despite the fact that most Chinese nowadays like to see animals in the form of a cute cartoon or a toy, manageable and clean. Still, the Chinese novel “Wolf Totem” by Jiang Rong won the inaugural Man Asian prize last year and set a Chinese record for the amount paid for foreign publication rights. Basically, the novel tells the modern Chinese (and the young seem to be listening) that they have lost the freedom of the nomad and the spirit of the steppe wolf and became like a herd of sheep. (This maybe a bit of an exaggeration, watch Chinese on the trading floor of the Shanghai bourse, just like the romantic story about the nomad way of life is an exaggeration.)

Last night I watched a documentary on the Great Wall (which I am visiting today) and it showed that the Great Wall was really a great failure, insofar as it was supposed to keep the nomads out. It resulted in hundreds of thousands of lives lost and millions of people condemned to slave labour every bit as bad as Soviet Gulags. The “valorous” border guards who lived on the Wall, with thousands of enslaved peasants who worked around it and were supposed to feed the guards and the workers (but often run away to the enemy up North, simply to escape from life of drudgery and oppression), were very lonely and unhappy with their remote posting.

Of course, Jiang Rong describes eloquently (although some would say with over-the-board metaphors and clichés) how the “free” nomads lived in the past and tells of close their relationship with the land and its animals. Some Chinese seem to think that “Wolf Totem” can help them to become a little more like their brave ancestors rather then the pathetic human zoo dwellers and obedient servants of the government and the economy that they have become. It reminded me of our own, once successful but now largely forgotten, feminist tract “Running with the Wolves” (and a parody on it, called “Running with the Poodles”).

But it also reminded me of a much deeper novel, exploring zoo as a metaphor for humanity in one of its chapters. I am thinking of Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward”. In the novel, Oleg, an ex-convict, goes to the zoo where he cannot help but see animals in the context of his past experience. A mountain goat impresses him with its proud and resolute bearing which would help it weather any length of imprisonment. A nocturnal hedgehog may have just come back from a night’s interrogation. But it was a rhesus monkey that really stirred Oleg’s passion. The monkey was blinded by some evil person throwing tobacco dust into its eyes. And Oleg, his heart burning with indignation, calls out: “Make sure your children do not grow up to be cruel!”

I do not know whether it is cruel to feed bears ice-cream and other human junk food that I saw being fed to bears in Beijing zoo, despite signs not to do so. It is certainly cruel to keep animals in the pathetic conditions that I saw at Beijing zoo, in concrete boxes, with hardly a green twig in site. The nocturnal house looked like some pokey shed improvised overnight. But that was still not all. I have read reports of the zoo at Badaling, near the Great Wall, where visitors can, for a fee, throw live goats to lions and use bamboo sticks to lower live chickens to predators and then enjoy teasing them and see their ”bait” torn to shreds in front of their own eyes. I have read reports of truly appalling conditions of domestic livestock and its slaughter in China, and I have largely turned vegetarian here (with exception of some fish).

But that is also not the main point.

Someone said that our attitude to animals betrays our attitude to other human beings. I do not want to single out the Chinese here. Australians, comparatively good with their zoos, slaughter kangaroos and their young with extreme cruelty.

So the followers of the “Wolf Totem” glorify our predatory nature and, by extension, the cult of Genghis Khan, surely one of the most cruel and senseless mass murderers in human history. The myth of brave nomadic warriors is alive and well in Central Asia and beyond. However, some historians point out that Mongols have actually destroyed the economic and cultural basis of their own society and the societies they have so cruelly conquered and ultimately decimated. Look where Mongolia is now and compare it to the “effete” West.

The really big question that Solzhenitsyn, a wise man that has suffered and thought a lot, asks through his protagonist Oleg, is: “Even if one could let zoo animals out (read, human zoo dwellers) and make them free, how clever would that be? Because, together with the loss of their native skills they have also lost the idea of rational freedom. And if one was to free them suddenly, that would make things even more horrible.

As Confucius has said (in paraphrase): “The human primate is a tricky monkey. Give him too much power and he will abuse it. Give him too little power and he will dream of greatness and revenge. Cultivate his heart from early years and you may reap the benefits of gentleness tempered with reason.”

So, let us listen to Solzhenitsyn and Confucius. And beware of making your children inured to cruelty. Zoos included.