Sorry.  Yes, this is another of those true stories that cannot possibly be made funny.  Somehow I have to write it.

Just before Christmas a little pre-term baby was born in a smallish city in China.  He weighed 1.4 lbs, couldn’t breathe on his own, and had a weak heartbeat.  The local clinic told the family to take him immediately to a hospital, or he would die.

The Grandma took him.  But the hospital, true to standard procedure in China, would only admit the baby if the parents could pay the required advance payment of 10,000 yuan, which represents about 1-2 years salary for the average Chinese (it’s about $1500).

The family couldn’t begin to raise that, so Grandma took the tiny thing back home and tried to keep him warm.  They got no supplies, nothing at all, from the hospital to help them. The unheated house was below freezing at night so she held him against her for warmth, and  since he couldn’t breathe she blew air into his face to help him.  She used a dropper to feed him drops of milk and was happy when he seemed to be able to suck a little milk on his own.

“For a preterm baby this small to live this long without intensive care has to be a miracle,” said a Pediatrician from the Hong Kong Chinese University.

He lived 11 days under her care.   The publicity from the news article generated donations from people to cover the cost of the admittance, and perhaps also pressured the hospital, which on the 28th told the family they would admit him.  He died at 4 am the morning of the 29th from lack of oxygen, before his family could get him there.

What you should understand is that this story is not special or unique.  Cash payment in advance is standard:  China does not provide medical care to its people (neither does it provide retirement care, and only minimal schooling is covered). The state can’t afford to, so they don’t.  Outsiders just expect such care to come, as a sort of compensation, with living under communism.  But China is a totalitarian state that uses capitalism to keep it functional;  capitalism helps the state maintain conditions for its people that are just prosperous enough to keep the single party in power.  It features the joys of living in a police state simultaneous with the hazards of living under unregulated capitalism, where there is little consumer protection and no safety net for its people.

Before we came here we were under the illusion that everyone else is also under, that is, that we can buy lots of things here in China.  After all, seems like everything is made here.  Like computer parts.  Tom in fact bought a SanDisk 8 GB memory stick from a supposed SanDisk dealer down in the Suzhou computer market (BTW, prices for all such items are at or typically above what we would pay in the US).  But the memory stick never worked right.  It would never let you put more than a fraction of the 8GB worth of files on it, then it would report itself full.

So, Tom took it apart, and looked the chip code up on the manufacturer’s website.  The chip turned out to in fact be a 256MB chip (suffice it to say, many order of magnitude smaller than the 8GB emblazoned on the outside of the module).  A Chinese firm had gone to all the trouble to counterfeit the SanDisk chip using components that would let the chip appear to work when inserted into the computer, but would not in fact provide anything near the 8GB of storage.  And the so-called reputable shop was selling the counterfeits.

People who’ve never lived here would think we could take this back.  Not so.  Stores won’t take anything back, even things as blatent as this.  They simply refuse with No, No, and no explanation, or by accusing you of bringing back a different part from what they sold you (although, this might be a necessary self-defense against their exploitation by other Chinese that would surely occur to anyone who did replace or refund anything).

For those who wonder why we buy everything from US companies and lug it to China on the airplane with us, this is why.

You’ve probably noticed that Chinese people in the US tend to shop daily, picking up just enough food to make dinner with.  I thought it was because few people here have more than a very small refrigerator, or none at all, so they were simply repeating habits picked up from that life.  But since I cook using fresh vegetables I’ve run into what I think is the actual reason.  The veggies go bad.  And I mean right away.

At home you can put some carrots or cucumber in the fridge and they keep quite awhile.  You can buy an unripe apple or pear and sit it on the counter to ripen, then eat it when it does.  Here, the carrots and cucumber are, and I don’t exaggerate at all, going limp and dehydrated literally less than 24 hours after purchase, while unripe fruits never ripen at all, they simply mold and go bad within a day or two.  The Chinese people eat most of their fruit when it is hard and bitter and think that is what fruit is like.

I thought that this quick rot must be because of poor handling and transport from field to shop.  No cleaning onsite, no refrigerated trucks, no clean water to wash anything in.   In the mornings the delivery trucks bring in hot (in summer), and partly frozen and limp (in winter) veggies that are already showing stress from the trip, and you can smell the sewage water that is used to ‘clean’ things.  We buy only imported nuts, for example, after trying the packaged nuts here and finding that they stank of sewage right out of the bag, from being washed in the contaminated water that is used everywhere.

But even fruits that look fine when you get them spoil rapidly, without even beginning to ripen, in spite of my careful washing and decontamination when I get them home.  What’s up with that? Research from the US has recently reported that when contaminated water is used on crops, the plants draw the water AND the pathogens up into their tissues.  It’s inside the fruit or veggie, and therefore can’t be washed off.  It can, however, thrive and cause decay.

All this makes buying things daily a necessity.  Nothing will keep any length of time, and everything must be thoroughly and carefully washed and disinfected immediately when you get it home.  And then cooked or eaten raw right away.  Many foreigners in China simply don’t eat any fresh fruits or veggies, and live off imported frozen stuff.  But I just can’t get by without fresh and raw foods in my diet, no matter how much trouble they are to obtain.

Just another small difficulty that you wouldn’t anticipate until you lived it.  Now when I go home I truly appreciate the quality and reliability of our domestic food systems.

While we were back in the states last week, Tom picked up a tool and recognized the familiar, although getting to be less so, logo of the little American flag with the tiny words Made in America just below it.  Then he looked a bit closer.  The little words seemed a bit different.  They read “God Bless America.”

As he read the packaging closely he found the real country of origen:  Taiwan.  How nice that the Taiwanese wanted to acknowledge our religious foundation in the US by including a little blessing with our flag on their product.

Or maybe not so nice.  What do you think, was modeling it on the standard Made in America logo, so that it would appear to a casual glance that their product was Made in America, an example of lazy design, or a transparent counterfeit?  Better check out those little flags more closely.

As we’ve seen while living here, doing anything in China can be fraught with risks that would never occur to one’s mind previous to experiencing them in China.  For example, what would you do if, as a foreigner, you paid for a nice luxury tour of China by bus, only to find yourself locked inside the bus, in the heat, with the air conditioning turned off, and no water or bathroom?  And this as punishment for not buying anything in the shop the tour guide took you to?

Bizarre doesn’t quite cover it.  This happened to a group of Taiwanese tourists visiting the town of Suzhou where we live.  The old original part of the town inside the moat is a popular tourist destination in China because its canals and old buildings are thought to be Venice-like. Many travel agencies operate, and you can see bus-loads of tourists any given day by going down to the Silk Factory or one of the many old-town gardens. This bus stopped at a shop that, clearly, had some kickback thing going on with the tour guide.  He told all the tourists, retired schoolteachers from Taiwan, to buy things in that shop, and when some didn’t he told them they couldn’t leave until they did, making his threat credible with heat, thirst, and bladder pressure.

You notice that he did this to Taiwanese old folks, who are, like Chinese old folks, relatively timid and deferential to authority (even fake authority).  Would he have even tried that with a bunch of American tourists?  No possible way.  I probably could have freed them single handed myself if I’d have been there, simply by being loud, taller than him, and irate.  Tom and I have learned how to deal with the many people who try to cheat us here by being both alert to cheaters and cheating and by being bold and confrontational when need arises.  New experiences teach new skills.

Here’s the whole article, posted on a Taiwanese new site:

China’s travel agency apologizes to Taiwan tourists for forced shopping

While Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Strait Chairman Chen Yunlin promised that there would be a harmonious and pleasant trip for Taiwanese people to travel in China, a Chinese tour guide had bullied Taiwanese tourists for unwanted shopping. Sun Jianping, president of the Suzhou Travel Agency that organized the trip, publicly apologized to the tourists and vowed to discipline the abominable tour guide.

In his four-point statement, Sun offered apology to Taiwan tourists being rudely treated. The travel agency had disciplined the guide and suggested to governing authorities that his license be evoked. The agency would enhance education to all employees and be willing to compensate Taiwan tourists for their losses, said Sun.

Sun also said that the travel agency would go through a thorough review of the incident, striving to improve their service quality.

Recently, a group of retired teachers traveling in Suzhou had been forced by the tour guide to buy some products in a specific shop. When they refused to do so, the guide locked everyone in the tour bus, turned off the air conditioner and forbade them from going to the restroom. After the exposure of his bullying act, Suzhou City government began the investigation and the travel agency president apologized for the unfortunate incident.