Notes From My Travel Diary: Kebab Allah

Suzhou, China: Every Friday I’d pay the equivalent of thirty cents and ride the bus to Shi Quan Jie. This was a street in the old district, where the walls where whitewashed, and the roofs had sweeping slopes, upturned eaves, and ceramic tiles. Few of the buildings reached over three stories high. Large birch trees lined the two lane road, flanked on either side by bubble tea stands, black market DVD shops, and boutiques showcasing China’s puzzling take on high fashion.


On my way to find a wok, I stopped at a Chinese Muslim restaurant where everyone, including the child waiters, wore tight knitted caps. The menu was in Chinese, with English translations beneath it.

Some dishes sounded peaceful: “The hashed meat meditates.”
Some sounded dangerous: “The palace explodes the diced chicken rice.”
And others were downright spooky: “Digs up the beef red.”

The sun was shining. I walked to the take-out shack attached to the restaurant. The griller was just standing around with a blue filter cigarette in his lips when I arrived. I told him how many curried lamb kebabs I wanted in Mandarin. “Sanga.” I then held up three fingers.


He screwed up his face at me. Then he held up his hand, outstretched his fingers and said “Wooga.” Five.

Was this his way of telling me that I was too skinny? Perhaps, but something told me this offer was non-negotiable. I waited for my five kebabs at an outside table. The legs might have been rat-gnawed. It stood on an open area of hardened clay between the sidewalk and a canal.


For the first two minutes, the kebab griller tapped the skewered sticks of meat above the coals. Then he stepped away from the embers to catcall a girl clicking down the sidewalk in high heels. It wasn’t subtle, whatever he said, but she turned up her nose and kept walking. Real cool. He leered at her and then turned to me, thumbing in her direction as if to say Women, go figure.


The griller brought over my kebabs and a flatbread in a plastic sleeve that read “crusty pancake.” He went back to the grill station, picked up an old copper kettle and came back to sit across from me. I’d watched his assistant – the boy baking crusty pancakes – use that same kettle to brew a cup of tea just moments earlier. Steam was still rising from the spout.

I tore off a piece of crusty pancake, and when I looked up, the griller was sucking on the spout. He was really gulping it down, and, just when I thought steam might billow out his ears, he set down the kettle and belched.

After lunch, I pulled out my notebook to make a few notes, referring to him not as “the kebab griller” but as “Kebab Allah.”


Kebab Allah burned his sleeve on a coal.


Kebab Allah threatened his assistant with a bamboo skewer again.


I’m not saying the man walked on water; however, in its own special way, watching him work did have a purifying effect on me. And he made a pretty mean kebab.

The Great China Hell-Freeze

We lost reception at noon. Our pirate satellite was hooked up to the neighbor’s, our landlord, a stringy, ratfaced man with a bad stomach. Perhaps he was a drunk. Those violent, gurgling echoes from the toilet penetrated our walls each morning. The TV was out, but, fortunately for us, so was the landlord. Aside from my wife and me, nearly everyone in our building was traveling home for Chinese New Year.

The storm became serious. Peasant workers throughout Suzhou (having never seen snow before) set down their brooms and hosed the roads off with warm water. Predictably, their efforts resulted in the largest patch of black ice motorists ever encountered. Across China, thousands were stranded in train stations and airports. A rice barge navigating the Yangtze reportedly sunk after hitting an iceberg. It was a tragedy, but the details, like most second-hand information in China, were open to interpretation.

I hit the store before they closed, gathering the makings of a Survival Kit. The essentials: A bottle of Malibu, a bottle of Bacardi, and orange juice to ward off scurvy… also a case of Tsing Tao beer, Kahlua, and two fingers of powdered milk for bone health.

In what seemed like a good idea at the time—what seemed like a terrible idea in hindsight—my wife’s employers insisted on carrying out the New Year’s feast. We were bused outside Suzhou with scores of other foreigners to a plush, remote compound surrounded by whitened mud bogs. The staff offered us a steady supply of booze and food, in that order. In the Great Room, the evening air was filled with pidgin English speeches from The Board, slender girls swaying the centuries-old dance of Rainbow Skirts, and waiters trying to make sense of our mangled Mandarin requests. 

There were drawings. I won a slow cooker. By the end of the night, the snow was falling harder than before. Or was it? Perhaps I hadn’t even won the slow cooker. For all I knew, I’d removed it from the kitchen. The only certainty, which was evident to everyone onboard, was the busses scattered along the road like tombstones. One bus had its ass in the ditch, the front tires clinging to the road like a beast pulling itself out a pit. Others had dug great moats while power-sliding into the bogs.

Our driver could have taken this as a warning, but that isn’t the Chinese way. I don’t claim to be an expert, but, from what I observed, in China it’s considered a weakness to adjust one’s driving to weather and road conditions. So instead of slowing down, our driver sped up, weaving between those frozen monuments with a disregard for safety that dazzled everyone onboard. It was fantastic.

To many this may sound reckless, but it’s important to understand that in China, this all-or-nothing mentality is engrained on every social level. Holding back is not in the playbook, so to speak. One commits to a particular character, and tries to steal the show for that brief moment when the spotlight is upon them. 

Notes on Going to See Mao Zedong

If you haven't checked out my latest story on Matador Network, Notes on Going to See Mao Zedong, you can read it HERE. 

"With a half-mile of folks standing side to side and butt to loin, a woman in a plaid shirtdress filed me back with her cane. It seemed unintentional, and at the time I thought nothing of it. But the folks behind us smelled blood in the water."


Big ups to the sultan of stoke, David Miller, for his fine editing work. 

Noah

A Preview from: My Moving Diary

2 January, 2008.  Raleigh, NC:  “I don’t think you can fly into China on a one-way ticket,” the woman at the Delta check-in counter says.  Her vest has these sad plastic wings pinned on. 

            “Are you saying that I can’t get into the country, or that I need to buy a return ticket?” 

            She thinks for a second.  “I don’t know,” she says.  “How long do you plan on staying in China?”

I'm actually moving to China, but two different people told me not to say that.   This is what I say instead:

“I’m just going to roam around the country for a while.”   

“Um, OK, you can figure this out when you get to JFK.  Have a good flight.” 

JFK Airport:  I check into Air China, get my boarding pass, and keep my mouth shut.   

Air China:  I’m the only White person boarding the plane.  Oops – there’s one more.  The plane is a double-decker.  I’m downstairs.  Everyone around me is speaking Mandarin or shouting Mandarin.  I have a window seat.  I sit down and watch people in the aisle shove each other from behind. 

There's an impulsive air onboard.  As we taxi down the runway, a man stands up to rummage through the overhead compartment.  The stewardess storms over and berates him.  I mean she lets him have it.  She points to his seat, and yells at him like a dog.  The man looks away like a dog, too.   

     “No!  Bad!”  I imagine her saying.  “You know what you’ve done.  Now sit!”   

I half expect her to bust out a choke collar.

The man behind me has his knees in the seat, talking to the man behind him.  They’re using ‘outside voices,’ even though they’re close enough to play patty cake.  The captain comes over the speakers and speaks Chinese.  I look out the window to make sure we’re still in America.   

I eat a Xanax.  We are prepared for takeoff. 

Somewhere over the Arctic Circle:  I wake up feeling naked.  The overhead lights are off.  My wedding ring is gone.  I use my iPod as a light and search the floor.  A knot tightens in the pit of my stomach. 

I search my immediate area before hitting the flight attendant CALL button.  I still have a pretty good buzz on; otherwise, I don’t know if I would have done that.

The girl comes over.  “I lost my wedding ring,” I say.   

She shakes her head.  She doesn’t speak English.   

At this point, I don’t know why this surprises me.  I point to my finger, tapping the spot where my ring used to be.  No luck.  I point to the ring of the man beside me.  He’s asleep.  Everyone’s asleep.  She’s trying real hard to understand what I’m saying. 

In a last ditch effort, I point to my ring finger again and say “Poof!” 

Poof is a magical word to this flight attendant.   It gives her clarity.  And not only that, it gives her the power to disturb sleeping passengers without remorse.   

The woman in the aisle seat gets it first.  The flight attendant prods her on the shoulder.  She comes to with a jolt.  I’m standing.  The flight attendant’s standing.  We’re both looking at her.  Before she can figure out what’s happening, the flight attendant launches an interrogation on missing jewelry.  The woman looks around like a chameleon, muttering the Chinese equivalent of “No, no, no.” 

I feel awkward about unleashing this flight attendant, but it’s out of my hands. 

She’s jostling the passengers in the row behind me now.  Their reading lights are turned on for them.  Their faces recoil.  They’re ordered to search the floor.  The man in the window seat is still asleep.  When he comes to, he is very confused.  The passengers beside him have their heads between their knees.  This, coincidentally, looks like the crash landing position.  The man looks to the flight attendant, but she offers no relief.  She is using her outside voice in a dark plane somewhere over the Arctic Circle. 

By this point I am freaking out.  What will I do, I think, wait until the plane lands? 

The nervous man doubles over now.  There is a commotion.  He comes up, pinching my ring between his fingers.

Recipe of the Day

I like going through my old diaries.  Much of it's just details about people and places, but every so often I find something useful.  Here, take this recipe for bum sundae:   

I drew this while living in China.  PC it is not, but then again, I've never been much of a drawer.  This seemingly obsessive fascination with bums was a strange period in my life.  I stood at bus stations around Suzhou, listening to street people play the erhu.  There was a certain mystique surrounding them, which drove the idea home:  I was a long way from home.  

The poor looked old timey, quilted.  It was, of course, a bit of illusion--a way of raking in more money, and I was happy to oblige.  They did not give the impression of being "between jobs" or "homeless."  They had simply chosen a roll, and lived it to the fullest.    

The idea for the bum sundae is a celebration of sorts.  There is the imagination, and then there are human boundaries.  By blurring the distinction between the two, the result is something deliciously mischievous.

The New Trend: Man as Trailing Spouse - Part 3

I can’t speak for all stay at home spouses, but it wasn’t a matter of not wanting to work; it kind of just turned out that way.  Four months after moving to Suzhou, I applied for a job teaching hotel employees business English.  It seemed like a great opportunity for both sides:  They wanted someone with a business degree, and my schedule was wide open. 

The hotel was still under construction when I arrived for the interview.  The staff was working in an underground bunker until the 700-room mega hotel was complete.  A girl named Nina, a Suzhou native, lead the interview.  She was professional, but hip, dropping some slang on me as I followed her down the hallway.  “So, you enjoy golf, huh?  That’s cool.” 

We came to a steel door.  When she opened it, there were twenty future housekeepers sitting quietly, all of them donning identical mint jumpsuits.  “You have twenty minutes to teach the class,” Nina said, and took a seat at the back of the class. 

“Nee how,” I said.  This was answered with blank stares.  “Can anyone say ‘hello?’”  Nothing.  Their shyness was astounding.  When a young man coughed, I turned to him abruptly.  “Can you count to three in English?”  That wild look in his eye said it all:  Had there been a window in the room, I’m sure he would have dove through it to escape.  His classmates stared at the floor.  It went on like this until I counted in Mandarin. 

“Yi, er, san.  One, two, three.” 

Slowly, they started to answer when I called on them. 

As it turned out, they could count to infinity in English.  “And what is this,” I asked, pointing to yet another number on the whiteboard. 

     “Five hundred eighty-seven thousand, six hundred twenty-nine,” they mumbled in unison. 

Convinced that they knew more than they were leading on, I spent the remainder of class preaching to them like an alien, divulging secrets of the future. 

     “When the people call, they will demand extra towels.” 

Nina called me the next day.  She fed me a line that I’d heard from disgruntled girlfriends, but not interviewers.  “Can we still be friends?”  Of course, this soft rejection was her way of ‘saving face.’  They say the Chinese strive for harmony similar to the way Americans idealize freedom.  It didn’t seem like a win-win situation at the time, but then again, it never does when you’re the one being dumped. 

Poker Night

The expat circle in Suzhou was tight.  Although many of my wife’s coworkers had my email address, they insisted on relaying messages through her. 

“Travis walked past my classroom today,” she’d say. 
“What did he have to say,” I’d ask. 

She’d throw back her shoulders and mimic their husky instructions.  “‘Tell your husband:  Poker, Thursday night.  Peace out.’”  After a long day alone, it was strangely refreshing to see a small Asian girl imitating a 200 pound rugby coach. 

Guys Night took place in the dining room of a pizzeria on Shin Do Street, a popular foreigner district.  The owners didn’t mind us gambling, so long as we kept buying half-liter bottles of Tiger beer.  The majority of us were from the US, with the others hailing from Canada, England, New Zealand, and Australia.  Conversations were centered on disputes in game rules, work complaints, and drunken hedonism. 

One guy, lets call him Richard, used to embark on epic, one-man benders, disappearing for days at a time.  He would invite us to join him, but we weren’t that stupid.  No one could keep up with him.  The police once found him passing out somewhere – a park, perhaps.  Not even Richard knew.  Apparently they searched his pockets and found only a business card.  When he finally came to, Richard was in the middle of the school courtyard, wondering, most likely, if he had a class to teach.  Of course, it was Sunday, so he probably just stumbled into the nearest bar.  

It was the juxtaposition that intrigued me.  Outside of work, their lifestyle wasn’t much different than, say, your average touring funk band.  Someone was always on the verge of a divorce, recovering from a motorcycle crash, or coaxing some fatally attracted ex off their balcony.  I knew the characters, followed their stories, and rooted for them when they were down.  Their stories never ceased to amaze me, but I couldn’t help but wonder if their lives were this hectic back home.

Travelers tend to be open minded when it comes to natives, but when we see “our kind” maneuvering outside the norm, lets face it – house rules are in effect.  I’m not saying that everyone was a train wreck.  Those just happened to be the stories I remember best.  Most of the people I met were decent and hard-working; but drama observers, nevertheless.  

My wife’s coworkers eventually started emailing me about Guys Night.  We became friends, and I enjoyed their company.  When it was time to cash in my chips, however, that unspoken fact still remained.  I wasn’t one of them. 

When I held up the mirror, that reflection – that reversal – was my everyday situation.  White people were the minority.  A woman worked while the man stayed at home cooking and cleaning.  It was Bizzaro World with chopsticks - and I liked it.  So what if somebody thought of me as a trailing spouse. 

     So, there’s that word again.  Trailing.  But I've decided not to attach feelings of resentment or inadequacy to it.  I don’t focus on the adjective.  I’m busy living the verb. 

The sunny side of trailing my wife is the memories we make together all over the world.  It means tropical breezes in Bali, sweating over a bowl of Tom Yum in Thailand, getting lost in the hutongs of Beijing, and having someone to confide in when no one answers the phone back home.  The roles are many, and I couldn’t be happier with what I do.  It takes courage to follow your compass, especially when it’s pointing in an ambiguous direction. 

Society accepts the stay at home wife/mother as an institution, but man as “housewife” seems to be a burden that many women aren’t ready to take on.  Male pride perpetuates, and often achieves, this illusion of “man as provider.”  Women deserve equality, but once they have it, where does it end? 

In their great, determined push toward equality, suppose the scale tips too far to the other side, beyond equality.  A society run completely by women would be a very different place.  Government would change.  They have that supporting, nurturing sense of control people always seek when they screw up.  Even war might become a thing of the past. 

I’m not saying that everything would be perfect.  Finding a decent plumber would be a nightmare.  But what the hell?  You can’t win them all. 

So, perhaps it’s time to slide over and let someone else take the wheel.  We’ve had a decent run, guys, and there’s nothing wrong with being domestic.  Just think of it as being a kid again.  As long as you finish your chores, you can go bowling, play golf, or start that novel you’ve been meaning to get around to. 

In fact, that’s what I’m going to do now…right after I clean the bathroom.

Shanghaied By the Tea Party

***

It was a sunny June morning, and I was walking the streets of Shanghai after picking up my new passport....

This story is pending publication.  Please check back later.

Back massage, hold the steam.

I was face down on the massage table when the masseuse tapped me on the shoulder.  “Look,” she whispered into my ear.  Five minutes into a massage, it seemed like a strange request but I did what she said.  When I lifted my head, the girl was pointing to my wife, whose neck, as I recall, was on fire.

"What a great story! And wonderfully written. I’d love to try a fire massage sometime. Also, I had always wanted to try cupping, but that icky photo makes me rethink… "  -- Reader comment


This post has been published at The Matador Network.  Read it HERE.

Birthday Wish to the Anonymous

It’s early, but I wanted to wish you a Happy Birthday, just in case the Big day sneaks past without me realizing it. You know, remembering wasn’t a problem last year because you had that party at Harry’s Bar. Did Takayo and I bring you a present? Funny how things like that can slip the mind. I recall the year before, however. We bought you a present at the Shanghai Art Museum, but we never gave it to you. It was a mug with naked baby dolls falling from the sky with umbrellas. Surprise! It lived in our cupboard for the longest time.  Still wrapped.  Then we left China, and it became our housewarming gift. The dishwasher in our new German apartment washed away all of the babies. So goes the youth in Asia.

OK, I’ll be honest. I didn’t really remember your birthday. I just happened to flip through my notebook and stumble upon an entry. This is what I wrote about your birthday dinner: “Two nights ago, we were at Harry’s Bar for ---‘s birthday.” Most of what I remember -- the round table upstairs with its huge Lazy Susan, the old wooden rafters overhead -- is mundane. Other memories, such as the tattoo on the inside of your wrist that you sometimes cover with a sweatband, flash! to mind, but provide you with no insight.

You showed up late, guest of honor, which was a nice touch. There was an open seat next to me and you sat down, but we didn‘t talk much. You were fairly enamored with your new boyfriend. He sat to your left, and I considered speaking to him, but didn‘t for one reason or another. Drinks were sipped moderately, and the steaming plates rode the Lazy Susan round and around. I had the sweet and sour pork.  After dinner, the smokers walked through an omega-shaped doorway in the adjoining room to enjoy cigarettes. My wife was in there.  I sat at the table, smiling and pretending to be interested in a conversation between you, your boyfriend, and some other forgotten soul. A woman across the table asked me, “You don‘t smoke?” “No,” I replied. Then she said,“How do you feel about you wife smoking?” I socked my fist into my hand and told her, “just wait till we get home.”

We all sang the Happy Birthday song, and you became flustered and blushed. Who cares if the Happy Birthday song is your kryptonite. Don’t worry, you’re still tough 364 days of the year. But tell me, was there any birthday cake? Candles? What did we all do after singing? Food fights are exciting, but I would have remembered that. Perhaps things fell apart, and everyone filed out of the room as if nothing ever happened. Something did happen downstairs, in the bar. I wrote this in my notebook:


March 22, 2009

“Some of the guests were at a table near the exit. A standard issue Filipino band was playing American songs on stage. Between songs, a Chinese guy storms the stage with a full pint in each hand. He’s middle-aged and hammer drunk. The band pretends the guy isn’t there, hoping he’ll find his way off stage. The drunk grunts, extends his right hand which is all beer, urging the singer to take it. The singer asks the guy his name and he growls into the microphone. The singer takes the beer and the drunk pressures him to gambae (Bottoms Up!). The singer obliges, reluctantly, and they finish at the same time. Instead of leaving the stage, the man staggers over to the drummer. There are no security guards, only waiters. The singer coaxes the drunk to the front of the stage where a few waiters lightly shove him off. The guy doesn’t like being pushed and his friends aren’t for it either. A strange pushing circle ensues as more waiters arrive, and more of the drunk’s entourage tangle in the mix. Out of nowhere, the drunk from the stage shoves a manager blind sided, knocking him to the floor. ‘Face’ has been lost, and the shoving circle explodes into a shoving match, ending with the drunk Chinese guy (who started it all) getting carried out under the arms of three scowling waiters. The band is chanting “NO MORE ASSHOLES” while the man is being carried out. There’s a return to normalcy after 2 minutes. At that time, the ejected drunk walks back in, composed it seems. A waiter accosts him (at the door) but the drunk opens his palms (and holds them up) to the waiter, as if to say, “Don’t worry, I’m OK now.” This disarmed the waiter, and the drunk walked back to his table, lit a cigarette, and sat down in front of his table-keg. He behaved himself for a few minutes. In the middle of “Sweet Child Of Mine,” the drunk got up, stood in front of the stage, and rocked back and forth. It didn’t take long. The shoving match reignited with new fury. Now there were white people caught up in the cyclone along with a female waitress who came up behind the drunk to hit him on the head with her cell phone. Once again, the drunk is hauled out in a writhing protest, with glasses crashing to the ground and incoming patrons wide-eyed and back-tracking to make way. Everyone was yelling, or requesting “FREEBIRD” and Chinese people laughed or frowned at the sloshing display. Tak and I leave (sober), walking past the drunk who was still milling about 15 minutes after getting kicked out (again). He hung onto other Chinese people, apparently no where else to go, and we took a cab into the night.”

And now, looking back, I can’t help but wonder: Were you even there, birthday girl? I remember a blue dress for some odd reason, but that wasn’t yours. Neither was that glass of white wine. It just sat there sweating on that table by the door. You must have gathered a few friends and made a quiet exit. That’s more your style, anyhow. Never too big on those sappy good-byes.  Or birthday songs, for that matter.

Everyday Miracles, China

After speaking with numerous expats over the years, I have come to the consensus that there are certain behaviors that relegate the overseas experience. At a certain point, say, three years or so, the expat reaches a certain saturation point. They stop noticing the surroundings - the buildings, bridges, rivers, lakes, pagodas, traffic - that make a certain place special. Lets talk Suzhou, China, because that's where I lived for two years. The decent open chaos of daily life -- the environment itself -- is taken for granted or consumed by some other event for whatever reason. I made it a point to notice and document as much as I could, in an attempt to “uncover” everyday miracles that may otherwise go unnoticed. Things such as public transportation. Here are two such accounts from my notebook.

Bus Log

March 3, 2009. Suzhou, China

Bus driver refuses to take on riders while sitting at red light, just ten meters past bus stop. He screams at pedestrians. They bang their hands on door. Driver becomes enraged, takes the microphone and screams wildly at them over the bus loudspeaker. Old man sitting across from me, we exchange glance. Old man starts up with the driver, (I guess) protesting in support of the people outside. The driver is seething, directs comment to the old man that, I could only imagine, amounted to “Shut the Hell up or you’re next.” The old timer pipes down. Everything is broadcast into the street for everyone to hear. We are still waiting at red light. The pedestrians bang harder and the driver opens the door to (I guess) berate them face to face. They bum rush the doorway, but he closes it before they have a chance get in. The mood became very tense after that. The light turned green. At some of the other stops, the driver came to a complete stop, opened the entrance and exit doors, and nobody was even there to get on, and nobody on the bus wanted to get off.

April 16, 2009

Coming back from shopping center (Auchan), black smoke starts pouring out of air vents. Bus continues down street, normal stops are made. I am sitting in the second to last seat in the back. Soon it was hard to see front of bus through smoke. The windows in this particular bus did not open. People begin to make concerned facial gestures and cover mouth. I looked over to a child. She was awake. The idea was this: I would use the toddler as my personal canary. If she passed out, I would get the Hell off the bus. The bus driver stops in the road, evacuates bus. I wait for the next bus, decide against it, then catch a cab home.

Heavy Cups in Macau

Takayo and I had been married almost a year when we flew into Macau, China from Shanghai. It seemed like the most appropriate place to spend our first anniversary: We got married in Vegas, and both of us have tendencies toward short, crippling bouts of gambling. After stuffing our fake Gucci bag with pressed shirts and dresses, we set out for five days of decadence in the world‘s biggest gambling center.

Mainland China is one of the most homogeneous places you can live. The first thing we noticed about Macau, however, was that it may be one of the most linguistically confused places in the world. It was a Portuguese colony until 1999, both the first and last European one in China. Jump into a speedboat and you can get to Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong within the hour. The municipal signs are printed in three languages, and casinos won’t accept Macau money. We found this out at our hotel, the Grand Waldo.

We rushed down to the casino after checking in, passing a pawn shop in the corridor between the casino and the lobby. Shinny, slightly used Rolex and Omega watches filled the storefront. How bad does it have to get before you look to your wrist and say, ‘well, I guess I could hock this and keep gambling.’ That’s what I thought as we skipped on by.

In terms of gaming, the casino was not unlike one of the Old Town ones in Vegas; just a bit more subdued. We both fork over an orange bill, 1000 Macanese Patacas, to the cashier for Hong Kong dollars. To warm up, I fed some money into a slot machine and began pecking away at the buttons. There’s no waitresses fetching drinks, and no other gamblers around me but Takayo. I hit the cash out button and, instead of receiving a printed voucher, five dollar coins began raining down into the drop box. There’s a fat plastic cup sitting next to the machine, so I scooped up the coins, heaving under its weight on my way to the bar.

It was about nine o’clock, too early for the freaks to come out (if there were any), but it also seemed too late to leave the hotel after traveling all day. I walked around the casino to study the dealers, double fisting - a four-pound cup of change in one hand and a Heineken in other. I play ‘Johnny Appleseed’ at the roulette table. 7, 19, 25, and 13 for good luck. The dealer spoke English, but seemed a little too uptight to hold a conversation. People had told us before we left, “Don’t go to Macau expecting Vegas.” When the ball fell on an even, the dealer scraped my chips off in a pile. Little by little, my cup became considerably lighter. $950 HK in change down the tube. I had enough to buy another Heineken at the bar.

There was a show on stage, most likely a Philippine band. They’re the only ones ballsy enough to follow “Highway to Hell” with an ABBA tune. Takayo was across the gambling hall somewhere, hopefully having better luck that me. But probably not. The machines were rigged, I figured, and everyone was in earshot of the band. Don’t expect Vegas. Ain’t that the truth. Ah, well, as the gamblers say, there’s always tomorrow.

61 Stories at Once

We took the elevator up to the 61st floor of the Macau Tower and I wasn’t coming back down in the elevator. At 233 meters, it’s the tallest bungy jump in the world. Your ears pop on the way up. It was my birthday, and while I wasn’t trying to overanalyze it, I thought it would be kind of ironic on a tombstone if anything went wrong. From the view up, there you can see the whole city and beyond. I was starting to feel a little sick. Not from the height, but from the day before…

This story has been published at... http://www.traveling-stories-magazine.com/61-stories-at-once/

A Possible Future for US Health Care

The health care debate is going to rage on for a while it seems. This raises an interesting question. Is it possible to puke blood from hearing too much bad news? Lucky for me, I’ve got universal health care. But I’m not saying this to put salt in a wound. Here in Germany, roughly 37 percent of your paycheck is taken out, most of it covering health care expenses. Ouch. As painful as 37 percent sounds, the only people I hear complaining are expatriates. But then again, I am one, and I can’t speak German.

Let’s switch gears from Germany and talk about China’s health care system. I had the pleasure of experiencing this first hand -- on multiple occasions. Food poisoning, like fireworks and smoking, is a way of life in China. Their health insurance companies are similar to ones in the States, but cost about the same as a moped. Make an appointment, show the doctor your card (if you have the strength) and you are on your way. There’s no co-pay, and basic medications are included. Sounds simple enough, but to become a resident of China, you must first pass the government mandated health exam. This is when, as the old timers say, you get what you pay for.

Make Sure They Use a New Needle

The school hired a man to drive us to the health facility, a 70 year old man named Zia and our Chinese translator, Rebecca (This was her English name. My friend Todd taught a girl who named herself Purple Micro Number Forty-Eight. She had a thing for Gobstoppers.). We drove through an area of Suzhou where sustenance gardens sprung up next to sidewalks. Dusty cinderblock buildings with brown-tiled roofs lined the crowded street. A river of bicyclists peddled alongside our van as we passed countless stalls of grilled innards and durian fruit.
I asked Zia where he was from.
“I spent some time in Italy,” he said. “But I had health problems.”
He looked like a lanky Fidel Castro and spoke with a mysterious accent one could expect from a Czech diplomat.

We arrived to an unremarkable white building blocked by a chrome gate. Rebecca handed over our passports at the front desk just before a group of Chinese migrant works stormed in. There were signs posted on the wall:

Be Silent. Wait Patiently. No Smoking. No Spitting. No Pets. No Photography.

Like most medical facilities, there was an underlying sense of sterility. This place, however, made Frankenstein’s lab look like a disco. We were led down a dark hallway. Smoked glass windows lined both sides, which projected the twisted shadows of neo-medical procedures.
The hall opened up to a ward surrounded by more smoked glass rooms. It was cold, and all of the medics wore face masks except for the woman drawing blood. I saw her working a needle into a man. A tube stuck out of his arm. There is no privacy. It is, after all, the People’s Republic. When the man came out I replaced him. A plastic pitcher of used needles sat on the desk between us. My wife had warned me, “make sure they use a clean needle. I mean actually watch her pull it out of the package.” I did just that, and then black blood loop-de-looped through the little hose. She pulled it out and dropped the needle in the jug. It was almost full.

A Picture For the Wallet

Then came the ultrasound of my stomach. I don’t know what they expect to find, but they squeezed that gooey gel onto me like a pregnant woman. The nurse dug the wand around my belly and pointed to the black and green TV screen. When it was over, I wiped off the gunk and she handed me a picture of my partially digested lunch.

An eye exam followed. The eye guy handed me a metal spoon, asked me to cover one eye with it, and call out the letters. They were all E. E’s to the right. E’s to the left. E up. E down. I figured he wanted directions.

“Um, E, E, E pointing left, E pointing down, E…”

He asked me to call out the next line and I just gave up. “E, E, E, E.” I passed, but couldn’t understand why a spoon worked better than my hand.

For the cardio gram, I took off my shirt and laid on a table while three Chinese girls stuck electrodes to my face, head, and chest. They asked me to lay still and then they disappeared. I closed my eyes and thought of someplace warm. Before long, a nurse snuck up and whispered into my ear from behind a mask. “Yor hart beat very slow.” “Thank you?“ I said. The girl handed me a post card sized readout of my leisurely vitals.

There’s not much waiting between the exams. It’s a free for all. Patients scurry in to get their forms stamped, and bolt out as if in a scavenger hunt. And then I walked into the X-ray room and all the radiologist were wearing boiler suits. I took off my shirt again, but had trouble removing the jade necklace my wife gave me.
“Put it in your mouth,” the boy said.
“You mean…” I said, and opened wide. He nodded. “You better not be screwing with me.”
“I’m sorry?”
I stuck it in, and the taste of Burberry cologne filled my mouth.

The last station was the dentist. A girl led me to a chair and reclined it until a light shone down into my eyes. When the dentist arrived, he quickly picked at my teeth and said that I had too much plaque and a broken front tooth.

I checked back with Rebecca and found her standing in the ultrasound room. Zia was laying down, surrounded by a group of about seven nurses. All of them were talking, looking to the ultrasound screen, and then back to each other. “What’s going on.” I shouldn’t have asked. It wasn’t any of my business, but I just got caught up in the excitement. Before Rebecca could respond, I heard one nurse say to another, “But he has no stomach.” They printed it out anyway. I waited on a cold steel chair until the fiasco was over.

It’s hard to say that a health care system in one country is better that another. Each country is just too different. If it came down to a solid universal health care plan, would Americans be willing to fork over 37 percent of their earnings for it? Or will cut-rate medical facilities have to serve the growing needs of the masses? Either way, you get what you pay for. The debate will surely rage on, but sooner or later, they’ve got to rip the Band-Aid off. Might as well do it quickly.