Day 1 of my captivity. Impending doom looms over my head. My oppressors,
henceforth referred to as Mother and Father, have kept me in a cell, in
a foreign land known to the locals as Beijing, with a bed so thin you
can feel each individual metal rail beneath. Such utter cruelty, but my
thin hide will have to weather the harsh conditions for now. My sentence
was to infiltrate a Beijing law firm while keeping up the pretense that
I could make heads or tails of their Chinese documents. I prayed for
salvation at night, prayed for free WiFi, prayed for the children
without fresh water or tamagochis, for the transvestites without the
proper parts and the gays without Grindr.
Day 2. Like a common criminal, I was transported by car to the legal facilities under close supervision of two female guards. I was brought before the reigning supreme ruler of Lawyer Kingdom, and he decreed that I was to shadow their best lawyer and absorb her essential life-forces. She looked suspiciously like my previous boss from the hospital at UW, and for a brief moment I wondered if they were long-lost siblings, then wondered if asphyxiating from choking on bubble-tea pearls would be a tasty tapioca-filled experience. I was assigned a work-space, where all of my slavely duties were to be performed. I sneakily befriended the receptionist and received the WiFi-password to their facilities. Tumblr is making my life here slightly more bearable. God bless memes, and god bless kittens that haven't mastered typing.
I am to make my own way back to my cell, which is simply cruelty at its very finest. Navigating the public transport in Beijing is like rape - if you don't use some force, you'll never enter. The city of tens of millions are all mobilized during peak hours, and buses are a cesspool of inadvertent groping and awkward butt-to-butt/crotch-to-butt touching. After a few transfers, I am dropped off at the wrong gate by the zoo (which I live next to), and I had to flag an illegal taxi to bring me back to my quarters. I wave goodbye to the unscrupulous woman who charged me 25 yuan for a 5 min trip but she was already gone, leaving me amidst the ripe smells of monkey feces.
Day 4 finds me making my way towards the law firm once again by bus. Nobody looks good on a bus. The most dressed up, dignified looking gentleman can get on a bus and within a few stops, get reduced to a seating, frazzled and irritable chump. Something about the combined effect of closed quarters at high heat and engine vibrations, mixed with the foul temperaments of every other passenger nudging and shoving each other just breaks you. In my heat-induced semi-coma, I wondered if bus drivers regularly have love affairs with their dumpy conductors in the dark corners of bus-parking-lots, and if they use sexual bus-terminology like 'beep beep the bus is pulling into the station'. Before I could finish a compilation list of all the bus-puns they could use, however, my attention was unfortunately diverted across the aisle to the man persistently digging his nose with only his pinkie, because he's classy like that. He then used said pinkie to swipe across the screen of his white iPhone, and I wept for the hard work of all the Chinese children in Apple sweatshops.
I was summoned to King Lawyer's office, where I was told that they were slightly disappointed in my proficiency in Chinese. Their original plan for me to read cases and discuss them with my mentor is falling apart because I was pretty much only able to read Chinese take-out menus. As usual, Father had lied to me. When I expressed my concern about not being able to handle documents in Chinese, he assured me that my disabilities in deciphering ancient hieroglyphic-codes would be conveyed to the firm, but apparently they were expecting a student that grew up in China. The game-plan was changed, and I was now to study Chinese procedural law (if they can find the English versions) and go observe cases at court (if they'd allow non Chinese citizens in).
Day 2. Like a common criminal, I was transported by car to the legal facilities under close supervision of two female guards. I was brought before the reigning supreme ruler of Lawyer Kingdom, and he decreed that I was to shadow their best lawyer and absorb her essential life-forces. She looked suspiciously like my previous boss from the hospital at UW, and for a brief moment I wondered if they were long-lost siblings, then wondered if asphyxiating from choking on bubble-tea pearls would be a tasty tapioca-filled experience. I was assigned a work-space, where all of my slavely duties were to be performed. I sneakily befriended the receptionist and received the WiFi-password to their facilities. Tumblr is making my life here slightly more bearable. God bless memes, and god bless kittens that haven't mastered typing.
I am to make my own way back to my cell, which is simply cruelty at its very finest. Navigating the public transport in Beijing is like rape - if you don't use some force, you'll never enter. The city of tens of millions are all mobilized during peak hours, and buses are a cesspool of inadvertent groping and awkward butt-to-butt/crotch-to-butt touching. After a few transfers, I am dropped off at the wrong gate by the zoo (which I live next to), and I had to flag an illegal taxi to bring me back to my quarters. I wave goodbye to the unscrupulous woman who charged me 25 yuan for a 5 min trip but she was already gone, leaving me amidst the ripe smells of monkey feces.
Day 4 finds me making my way towards the law firm once again by bus. Nobody looks good on a bus. The most dressed up, dignified looking gentleman can get on a bus and within a few stops, get reduced to a seating, frazzled and irritable chump. Something about the combined effect of closed quarters at high heat and engine vibrations, mixed with the foul temperaments of every other passenger nudging and shoving each other just breaks you. In my heat-induced semi-coma, I wondered if bus drivers regularly have love affairs with their dumpy conductors in the dark corners of bus-parking-lots, and if they use sexual bus-terminology like 'beep beep the bus is pulling into the station'. Before I could finish a compilation list of all the bus-puns they could use, however, my attention was unfortunately diverted across the aisle to the man persistently digging his nose with only his pinkie, because he's classy like that. He then used said pinkie to swipe across the screen of his white iPhone, and I wept for the hard work of all the Chinese children in Apple sweatshops.
I was summoned to King Lawyer's office, where I was told that they were slightly disappointed in my proficiency in Chinese. Their original plan for me to read cases and discuss them with my mentor is falling apart because I was pretty much only able to read Chinese take-out menus. As usual, Father had lied to me. When I expressed my concern about not being able to handle documents in Chinese, he assured me that my disabilities in deciphering ancient hieroglyphic-codes would be conveyed to the firm, but apparently they were expecting a student that grew up in China. The game-plan was changed, and I was now to study Chinese procedural law (if they can find the English versions) and go observe cases at court (if they'd allow non Chinese citizens in).
No comments:
Post a Comment