A Blogger is Me « Wo Shi Laowai

A Blogger is Me

Note: I have acquired the domain www.MyLaowai.com and will map to it when I have time. The content and host will remain the same.

This blog is written for the benefit of my family, my friends, and humans everywhere. If you don’t like it, don’t read it. Frankly, if you’re an uber-nationalistic Chiney with a chip on your shoulder, you can piss off now. This blog isn’t for you.

Please address all your hate mail to me here:

MyLaowai AT gmail DOT com

Standing here, in the greatest cultural desert on Earth, it might well seem as though life as we know it couldn’t exist. Yet that is not the case, for this is the natural habitat of a most unusual animal: homo hobbitus, or, the Chinease. Join me now for a journey of discovery into the life of this amazing creature…

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

So this is Home. Bugger.

Q. What’s this ‘Shanghai’ place you live in?

A. Shanghai used to be a muddy little fishing village on the banks of the Huangpu River. Then the British came and set up civilization, which immediately led to huge numbers of illegal immigrants arriving to take advantage of the business climate. Some very decent Americans, Japanese and Russians also showed up. Oh yes, and some French. By the 1920’s Shanghai was a booming centre of trade and had become known worldwide as ‘The Whore of the Orient’. Never had the world seen such a wretched hive of scum and villainy. Nowadays, of course, everything is very different: more people have televisions and some of the buildings are a little taller. There’s an ambitious social program (due to be completed by 2008), in which people are being trained to walk across the street only when the little green light is on. An even more ambitious and longer-term program aims to have all citizens able to both walk and chew gum simultaneously without any foreign assistance whatsoever by 2057. It’s all happening in this fast-changing mega-fishing village.

Q. What’s a ‘Laowai’?

A. Laowai is Mandarin for a no-good, uncultured and stupid barbarian who basically just comes to glorious China to steal jobs and women. Laowai’s come from uncivilized and awful places that have no culture, no history, and nothing whatsoever to like. A laowai, in fact, is the lowest conceivable grade of pond-scum. A less accurate, but more literal, translation is ‘foreigner’.

Q. I don’t live in Shanghai, am I a laowai?

A. If you can read, write and know who your parents actually are, rest assured that you are, indeed, a laowai.

This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.