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An Unusual, but Badly Needed, Instance of Public Pushback Against Trans Tyranny in Canada
I’ve been trying to limit my news intake to about once a week lately. The headlines are repetitive and clickbaity, catering to today’s keyboard social justice warrior who tends to spend more time in the comments sections of articles than actually reading the published content. Myself, I want information, not sensation/entertainment, so news offers little. But this is no new disappointment as I lost any faith I had left that the news was about anything other than ratings/money a long time ago. An apolitical news agency is about as hard to find as an objective scientist these days. Just as people used to argue for a separation of church and state in the past, we need to start arguing for a separation of capitalism from media and science today. Some things just don’t mix well.
Anyhoo, today was my news perusing day – which I consider to be more of a snorkelling expedition than a deep dive, cuz who wants to risk the bends, right? – and I noticed a strange and interesting article concerning the collision of a number of my shitlist topics: trannies, Canada, and to a lesser extent, International Women’s Day. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you know my stance on trannyism. And you may also know that I am a long-term Canadian expat, mostly for financial reasons – I just can’t afford to live there as a single, child-free woman who doesn’t fuck men. But if I had money, I don’t think I would live there anyway, simply for ideological reasons. Canada is an anti-woman, pro-tranny stronghold, for one, but leadership has made a number of questionable ethical decisions of late in the foreign policy department. International Women’s Day? Well, for me, it is kind of like Earth Day – an opportunity to publicly and smugly pretend you are a good person by virtue signalling about how much you care about the issue without having to change any of your behavioural or lifestyle habits. These days require no sacrifices, self-analysis or true change, and everybody can go back to what they were doing the very next day. And feel the self-righteousness of contributing to ‘progress’.
The article spoke about a recent ad issued by Hershey’s Canada ‘honouring’ International Women’s Day by featuring a trans ‘woman’. The gist of the article was that the shit (perhaps Hershey’s garbage chocolate itself?) was hitting the fan for the company due to public outcry for the slap in the face to womankind. This man was supposed to represent progress for women, in other words, and people weren’t having it. After reading the first bit, I had to stop for a moment. We’re talking about Canada, right? I can’t think of a more pro-trans country. I can’t think of a country that has done more to destroy women in the name of men in dresses. Canada censors women, destroys women’s businesses, careers and non-profits, puts rape victims at risk, allows hate speech against women, supports blatant threats of violence and rape against women by trans in publicly funded exhibits, and a whole lot more. Are Canadians finally ready to fight back against this very dangerous and violent, tiny minority of extremely powerful men? It is hard for me to believe/imagine. I’m including a link to a pdf of one of the less biased articles, as it will likely be censored in the future – we are nowhere near ‘peak trans’, alas. Many publications have painted the ‘backlash’ against Hershey’s as hate. And there are lots of sad feelz quotes by trans who think feminism and trans rightsism are compatible and are deeply disturbed that women are not supporting trans. Yes, men get disturbed when women don’t support them. Funnily enough, PinkNews claims that ‘far right’ groups are pushing back, which of course, is how TRA’s tend to brand anyone who points out reality, even in a completely apolitical way.
So I am suspicious of what is happening, knowing how Canada operates. I’ve had the displeasure of living in California, which is as close to Canadian craziness as you’re ever going to find in the US. I wrote about how Women’s History Month was met with silence on my college campus in central California a few years ago. I just can’t imagine a serious response to the trans takeover, especially in areas of life that matter. Hershey’s chocolate just isn’t that good, so it would be no real loss if they left Canada. If you risk losing your job or home because of opposition to the trans, you’ll likely say nothing and let your daughter lose opportunities and scholarships to boys as has always happened throughout history.
But there is a glimmer, I suppose, and a badly needed one. One day, trans will make a wrong move, and the camel’s back will finally break. It just won’t be chocolate that does it, I suspect.
~~~
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It’s Always about Poverty: COVID Has Finally Hit My Flophouse
This is a rant. I have a few of them in the queue, and I had planned on another topic for publication today, but things move quickly here in Canada. So if you’re in rant-reading mode, buckle up…
It was only a matter of time. I’ve been waiting for it, and frankly, given the living situation and how things are managed here, I’m surprised it hasn’t happened sooner. I came back to my windowless micro-room in the shithole in which I’ve been forced to live due to poverty in my shithole country (Canada) that punishes women for being ‘old’ (among many other things) only to find a note on my door informing me that we’ve been infiltrated by one of The Infected, but that the management will not be taking it seriously.
What?
A little backtracking since you may not have read further back on this blog. I’ve been unemployed for more than a year-and-a-half now. Part of that was planned as I transitioned from a paying job in China back in July 2019 to a full-time studentship in the US, the idea being that I would use the time in the US to make connections and work my way into some employment. Everyone knows that getting jobs isn’t about your education, qualifications or competence, but about who you know and being in the right place at the right time. I’m 48 and this is how it has worked my entire fucking life. This is how men still dominate the job market despite their inferiority. Men help men, and sometimes the women they are fucking or want to fuck. If you are a woman on the outside (smart, gay, old, etc), things are very difficult, so you have to be good at networking.
Anyhoo, the pandemic hit, and suddenly I was stuck in the US with a shut-down educational program, an insanely expensive place to live and nowhere to go. Literally nowhere to go. I have no family, few Western friends who actually do more than say hello electronically and who certainly won’t help me in a time of need, and no home base in my home country of Canada. I hadn’t lived there in a decade. But finding a job in my former field (teaching ESL) in a foreign country was out of the question, so with more than half my small savings depleted, I repatriated to Canada with dread in my bones. And I was right to expect the worst. After being lied to by the Canadian government (they officially told me after a formal inquiry that they would pay for me to quarantine due to having no home to return to) and being forced to stay in an expensive and very specifically designated ‘COVID’ hotel with no affordable food access for 2 weeks, I moved out to a city I had lived in about 20 years previously. I found a ‘cheap’ place to stay in an overpopulated house full of very strange people in the sticks via AirBnB for a few months, but had to flee due to an abusive male who threatened my life because I looked at him in what he decided was a disrespectful way. And given that without a job, you can’t get an apartment, there was nowhere to go but a downtown hostel that did extended days (meaning month-by-month rentals), but functions more like a flophouse, centred as it is in the dangerous homeless- and drug-addict-ridden area of town, and strangely still accepting random travellers from all over the place despite COVID restrictions. I had stayed at this place in a 4-month extended stay 20 years previously when I first moved to the city for a job. It had gone downhill a bit, attracting a lot of really weird, listless and creepy men in addition to people who are flying in from hard-hit Virus areas of Canada as well as other countries. The worst thing about hostels, even in non-COVID times is that you always have to share kitchen and bathroom facilities – hotbeds of germs and disease even under normal circumstances. I know for a fact that the males who share the bathroom closest to my room don’t wash their hands and leave disgusting messes all the fucking time. This is well known because of social research on post-bathroom hand-washing, but the more fucked up the population of men, the dirtier they are. And the cleanliness standards of this place are dubious to me. They don’t clean door knobs. The toilets aren’t cleaned properly, and the showers might get sort of cleaned once a week. Maybe. I had applied for a part-time cleaning job here, but wasn’t even given the time of day. Over the past few months, I’ve noticed the only ones getting the cleaning jobs are people under 30, and there is a whole parade of them, constantly changing staff. I know for a fact that I clean better than any of those fuckers. I’m a Gen-X’er who grew up in a time where children, especially girls, still had household chores starting at a young age. And as the eldest child with a completely useless mother and a mostly absentee father, I had girl jobs and boy jobs. I am a cleaning master. And I know I’m physically stronger than all of the females they employ in this joint. Further, I have more hostel experience than all of these young people put together spending most of my adult life working and moving around abroad as I have. But this is a sexist-ageist world. I can’t get hired for anything to save my life. If I were male, my age wouldn’t matter so much. But I suspect there is a connection thing going on – millennials and Z’s make sure their friends get jobs.
So I get the notice of infection today, they detailed a few things about when the Infected arrived and what their activities were after arriving and when they left. The person was staying in the same area where my room is, which also means we shared a bathroom. The hostel has indicated that it is no big deal. The only thing they are going to change is that they are going to stop taking randos off the street for short stays – but it won’t be implemented until March 1st???!!! How is this helpful? We’re going to continue putting you at risk for another 3.5 weeks. Whatevs.
Now, this particular region where I am living is one of the least affected COVID areas of Canada in a province which has done much better than many of the other provinces (which I attribute to there being a female physican in charge of regulations here), and this is good considering it has a large population. We are on an island, which has helped to limit much of the traffic that would normally pass through a large city. So to have a case show up here speaks to what happens when you have poorly managed (aka ‘money grubbing takes primacy over public safety) congested housing with low-income people, especially males, who generally don’t give a shit how their actions affect other people. Our national media has only focused on the effects on poor immigrants, but there are tons of poor locals who are as affected by disease and poverty as idiots who come here illegally or who come expecting to find streets paved with gold and government hand-outs for people who haven’t contributed to the tax base (trust me, this is a common perception of Canada and why many, many foreigners come here). Poverty is rampant in Canada and it affects all races and citizenship status. But liberalism has its agenda…
I’m pretty sure I had COVID early on while in the US before anyone was taking things seriously, and I really don’t want to come down with the dangerous new strain that has made its way to Canada from the UK. I will say for certain that I think China did things correctly – not the withholding of information from the world part and failing to help the world in a significant way after infecting us – but their local policy implementation of locking everyone down and enforcing strict policies on comings and goings at the community level. They nipped it in the bud before COVID could destroy their economy. Chinese nationalists (according to my former students) are laughing at us Westerners with our fucking ‘freedom’ talk and our limp dick approach to letting people do whatever the fuck they want and thus spreading the disease everywhere and destroying many people’s economic lives (including my own!).
I’ll never be a communist (or a capitalist for that matter), but when I can finally get out of here, I won’t have any problem moving back to a country living under dictatorship. It’s not ideal, and the racist sexism is always there, like it is here, but at least I can be employed and any crises will be dealt with swiftly without entitled shitheads ruining it for everyone. I hate all male political systems, but after going through this pandemic business and coming face-to-face with the rabid anti-woman liberalism that is a worse infection than COVID ever could be, I’ll take the dictatorship, than you very much. In an ideal world, however, things would be male-free and the system would look very, very different in every possible way and this blog would not be needed at all.
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An Evening Muse on Western Misogyny, Poverty, and Such
I have to admit I’m a little down lately. Despite being a person who expects little from people, situations, and life in general, I’ve managed to become disappointed and once again worn down by life in North America. If you’ve never read further on this site, the context for this comment is this: I frequently live and work abroad; I left a nearly decade-long stint in China at the end of July 2019; I spent a year in the US studying and trying to navigate a possible career change; and then the Virus hit, all my plans went to hell, and I was forced to return to my homeland – Canada – a country I thought I might never return to again other than to visit.
China is a really racist, sexist, and chaotic, but uber-controlled country. It was hard. But I adapted. I was employed, I cultivated a small, but excellent group of local friends, and equally important, I had an apartment that was all mine despite being black moldy and not very cosy. I’ve spent most of my adult life living alone, and I’ve come to see it as a luxury, even when my space is not optimal. I just don’t like living with people. And I especially don’t like living in places where I have no control over who else is living there.
The year in the US was pretty brutal in a lot of ways. First the culture shock – not sure if that is the right word – was kind of surprising. I think in the year and a half since leaving Asia, I’ve realized that if I am going to be an outcast, I need to be a full-on outcast that has no hope or expectation (by self or others) of ever fitting in. Even more than in early adulthood, I just don’t think I can fit into regular society here – and that seems like a simple and precious thing to say, but it is really complicated in a way that you will never understand unless you’ve lived outside your country for years and years at a time.
The US also showed me that women don’t have it better in the West. We are constantly battered with the idea that “women are equal now” and “Western (especially white) women are better off than all other women, so stfu.” But I have to tell you, no, the misogyny is just as bad here as anywhere else. It just looks different. And the less money you have, the worse it is. Because of the lifelong brainwashing, selective women’s history (if any) taught in public schools, and a general unwillingness to self-examine because it’s “too negative” or victimy, the majority of women just don’t see it. And I’d bet that in countries that Western women typically tsk tsk over, those women also don’t really see what they experience as anything other than “that’s life, the way it’s supposed to be”.
I had some good experiences during my year in the US. I was studying plants, for one. And then the Virus hit, which was actually a good thing in some ways – I was able to get some tuition money back after my male teachers decided they didn’t want to work anymore, and continued my plant education by myself outside the classroom by going on 5-10 mile hikes every day. But I spent way too much of my small, scrupulously accumulated savings on keeping wealthy people wealthy through overpriced accommodation. I also contracted a staph infection that has recurred 5 times, manifesting in massive, painful and disgusting abcesses. Antibiotics are NOT something one should be taking regularly, and I’ve had 4 hardcore rounds in less than a year. I swear, if you want to contract a brutal disease, go to the US, not a Third World country. But possibly tied for worst – I haven’t lived alone since I left China – the bad part being that I have lived with some of the most horrible and abusive men and women I have ever met, and paid my hard-earned money for the privilege. Ouch. Once the Virus was in play, housing became even more insecure. I was terrified of being kicked out with literally nowhere to go if I contracted even a small cough. The crazy landlady I lived with during the first few months of the outbreak forced one of the other tenants out when she got a cold. It was stressful.
But you know, despite some pretty seriously shitty stuff going on while in the US, my spirits were good. It was not until I returned to Canada that I started to get depressed. This country is about poverty for me. I spent most of my Canada-side adult years living in poverty, and being back is no different. I have no contacts or references here. I’m an overeducated, middle-aged female and white – all of those working against me in a city with 11% unemployment and a government focused on making sure immigrants have jobs.
And I’m still living with people. And it has been all about male violence. I just moved from a shared house where an older male verbally attacked me and threatened to physically attack me because I wasn’t looking at or speaking to him correctly (we all know what that means – he wasn’t getting the deference and respect he thought he deserved). I just moved out of that house in the burbs to a downtown hostel that accepts month-to-month renters. I had stayed here when I first moved to this city for a job 20 years ago. But things seem to have gone downhill with increased poverty/income gaps and with the stress of the Virus. In a week’s time, there have been two major violent male episodes – luckily not with me. But they were terrifying. One – a verbal screaming match between staff and a male who (as usual) didn’t think he needed to follow the Virus rules mandated by the hostel. The second – a male did something the staff didn’t like and they refused to let him back into the building to go to his room. It was a long ordeal, poorly handled by the staff, that escalated until the male smashed the entire plexiglass wall going from lobby counter to ceiling, and smashed computers and various things on the check-in desk. No cops ever seem to be called here. I took the least expensive room. It is in a hallway beside the lobby. It is a tiny, tiny room with no window. There is an immense amount of noise 24/7 due to people traipsing by or accessing a bank of METAL lockers right beside my door at 2 or 4 in the morning. They are raising the rent significantly next month despite being down season for travellers. It does have a bit of a half-way house feel to it. Or even a homeless shelter (given the male violence and the creepy, listless air of some of the male guests), except that I am paying for the privilege.
As much as I wanted to move on from teaching English to unmotivated, cell-phone addicted students, I’m almost wishing the Virus were over so I could escape Canada, take another teaching job, and have a job and a small private living space away from men again.
Bottom line: the West is just as dangerous and stressful for women as it is in other parts of the world. The income gap and access to affordable and secure housing issues are as serious here as they are in many places. The less money you have as a woman, the more exposed you are to dangerous situations caused by males. And yet Western countries are more and more obsessed with racial diversity and less and less focused on the fact that women are the most at-risk group STILL and face more challenges economically than men of any race.
Let’s hope 2021 brings a better year for us and that we all make it there unhurt by the men around us.
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Small Children, the Mentally Deficient, and… Men
Likely, everyone is sick of hearing about The Virus and everything Virus-related. Just as I write this, it occurs to me that it has been on my personal radar since it hit China. I have so many contacts – friends, former students and former colleagues – back in China, that I was in frequent contact with during Chinese New Year – before it was a serious thought in the minds of most people in the rest of the world. Myself, I got hit with a brutal illness at the very end of December that lasted until the end of January, the cough even longer. At that time, everyone was talking about an unusually nasty flu season, but this was like no flu I had ever had. I’ve never had a cough accompany a flu before, and I’ve never had a fever and chills and debilitating weakness with a throat infection. But there was no testing in January, so who knows what the hell it was. But I caught it shortly after riding a Greyhound bus inbound from Seattle on its way to L.A. And there was one super sick dude on that bus who was coughing all over the rest of us on the bus…
Fast-forward 10 months. I’m safely harboured away in Canada on an island region of about a million people – we’ve had a total of about 200 cases since it all began. Pretty good. A significant number of those cases came from a single house party of drunken idiots, luckily in a small up-island community and not adjacent to the larger southern metropolis and thus pretty isolated. And this has been common around North America – drunken house parties and congregating in bars seems to be the number one way to get The Virus (also the number one way to get raped, if you’re female! And alcohol isn’t a dangerous drug…!) People are generally pretty hard-core about following protocols in my region. There is a large proportion of elderly people here, for one. Also, and this is significant, my province is taking direction from a smart, rational, and surprisingly well-liked female doctor. Leadership is key in managing crises, and it is always better to put a woman in charge. We are just better at strategy, planning, taking threats seriously, and reacting rationally and without brutality. And this is in evidence around the world and throughout time. Now if you want death, destruction and general mayhem, by all means, put a man in charge.
And speaking of men, just an anecdote. When I got out of quarantine following my arrival from the US, I immediately headed to the ferry terminal for my crossing to the islands. You are supposed to wear face masks on board and they are keeping car people in their cars and walk-on people have a limited run of the passenger area of the ferry. Sensible. Now, as I was watching people disembark from an arriving ferry, I heard the din of shrill male voices. Two men were having the following conversation:
Dudebro 1: Well, it was great to have met you, brah. I can’t tell you how great it is to meet a rare fellow free-thinker these days.
Dudebro 2: Yeah, man. You can tell the free-thinkers – we’re the ones not wearing masks, guffaw, guffaw.
Dudebro 1: Right on. Like the rest of the sheep... Goober goober, scrotal babble drifting away on the wind and out of earshot.
Men truly tickle themselves at how smart they think they are. Constantly self-labelling as ‘rational’, ‘logical’, ‘free-thinking’, and you name it. I mean, there is a shit ton of research out there showing how men, without fail, overestimate their abilities, competence, intelligence (and conversely, how women without fail, unless afflicted with a personality disorder such as narcissistic or antisocial PDs, underestimate their intelligence and abilities). So it follows that they are also deluded about their thinking style. Mistaking selfishness and stubbornness for free-thinking is just one of many examples.
Anyhow, it was just a reminder that while Canada is more level-headed as a country than many, including the US, there are still men there and they are just as stupid and arrogant as they are anywhere else in the world.
***[I guess I’ll put this little side note here. We are still in a place where no one is entirely certain of the entire host of behaviours that can lead to you becoming infected with The Virus. I am a supporter of scientific methodology, and I stand by science as a tool, even when men misuse it. Some women see male abuse of science as a sign of a bad tool, but that is not true. Men abuse ALL tools. Don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater, or something like that. I think generally, wearing a mask in enclosed spaces around other people is a probably a good thing, as is washing your hands PROPERLY and regularly, and not putting your tongue down other people’s throats… So not following these basic protocols, is just kind of stupid and selfish – not free-thinking. We don’t have all pieces of the puzzle yet, but we’ll get there. Part of the problem is that some behaviours are required, but so many other behaviours that may be problematic are unregulated, so many people start to question authority and refuse to do anything.]***
But let’s get a little more local, and more to the topic of this post.
In my particular city, it has become mandatory to wear face masks on public buses, and there is limited seating. But there are people who are exempt from the mask thing. The transit authority has a blurb on their website outlining who doesn’t have to comply. It is very bizarre. Some of the people on the list include:
- Children under 5. Why don’t parents have to mask their toddlers? Kids tend to be disease super-spreaders as they touch everything and don’t tend to self-regulate coughing or where their drool or snot goes. I suppose this a breeder privilege thing…
- The mentally challenged. I don’t understand this one either. If a mentally retarded person can manage something so complex as riding a bus, then they can certainly figure out how to put a mask on.
- People with limited mobility. I’ve seen evidence of the first two on the bus, but I think most people who can’t really move either take a parabus option or just don’t travel by bus. If you can’t manage a mask, then taking a bus would be extraordinarily difficult.
- Emergency personnel responding to emergencies. Self-explanatory and hard to imagine – the bus isn’t typical transport for say, a paramedic on the job.
Now there is one other group of people who seem to be covered by the exemption, but they are not included in the list of the super-challenged. And in fact, I’ve seen more of these offenders than any others on the legit list. Wait for it… you know what I’m going to say!
MEN
Yeah, I’ve noticed an inordinate number of men – of any and all races – getting on the bus without a mask. Every time I ride the bus, there is at least one adult male without a mask. And these guys are mobile, not under 5, not emergency personnel, and not overtly retarded. And yet they saunter on and sit their in their scrotal privilege unmasked, while the rest of the Canadians use the only uncovered part of their faces to full effect, shooting them dirty looks (Canadians are super good at passive aggression!) And remember, like children, men tend to be super-spreaders of disease (which has been true throughout time).
Now, also in the transit regulations is a note that while mandatory, the mask rule is not enforceable. In other words, the bus drivers have not been tasked with getting into altercations with angry males who refuse to comply – because we all know that’s what would happen if you tried to encroach upon a free-thinking male’s sense of FREEDOM. I agree that bus drivers should not be put in more danger than they might already be in, having to deal with the large number of behaviourally unpredictable drug addicts we have here on the West Coast, but what is the point of a mandatory rule if it only applies to a minority of the population…?
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How I Lost My Smile
I hope I won’t meander too much here. This isn’t a straightforward little Aesop’s Fable with a sweet little bottom line. It’s involved, layered, and there is no clear conclusion. Just something I’ve been thinking about for years and that I continue to think about as I experience more and more and find myself further down that downward spiral that is life as a woman.
Let’s just start with this: Canadians are miserable fuckers. I’m saying this as a Canadian and one who tries to spend as little time there as is humanly possible. As evidence, despite my great boredom on ‘holiday’ here in the US from China, and despite the fact that I have a piece of business I need to take care of up North, I’ve decided not to cross the border. I just hate the place. A small part of it is that Canadians are miserable fuckers. Various data/polls even show it. I remember a comparison poll I once read about done by the airline industry on the differences between Canadians and Americans, and they found that the number one thing American airline passengers hated was fellow passengers who brought too much carry-on luggage. Canadians? The number one hated thing was strangers sitting next to them trying to talk to them. Yeah, miserable fuckers.
But it’s all relative. Canadians are, for example, much, much friendlier and more helpful than the Chinese who are some of the rudest, most selfish, emotionless and humourless assholes on earth. But we’ll get to that.
And I will say this, having disparaged my fellow countryfolk, friendliness varies depending on where you are in the country. I’ve travelled a fair amount in Canada, and I’ve lived in four of the 13 provinces/territories. Having grown up in one of the nastier parts of the country, it was a breath of fresh air to move to the West Coast. I’d say that about American geography, too. I’ve lived on both American coasts and also travelled through 25-30 of the 50 states. While Americans are much friendlier than Canadians, in general, the West is waaaay friendlier than the East. And I’m talking basic friendliness, not politics or ability to think, etc.
Living on the West Coast, and in particular, on the various islands is a different world. People look each other in the eye. Strangers say hello to one another on the streets. You strike up conversations with people at bus stops. You help your neighbours. And people smile. Could be the weather. I really do think better weather makes for more easygoinginess, in general. It’s not that simple, of course, but I think it plays in. So when I moved out there in my later 20’s, I felt myself relax, connect more easily. And I smiled a hell of a lot more.
If you don’t think about smiling in particular contexts and the meanings it can have, you can make the blanket statement that smiling is good for your health. I have felt that, and still do to this day. Exchanging an ‘unloaded’ smile (I’ll get to that in a moment) with a stranger can change your frame of mind and put a different spin on whatever is going on in your mind.
But then there are the ‘loaded’ situations. This is where men come in and ruin things for women like they ruin every fucking, innocent, positive thing on the planet with their filthy minds and need to humiliate and dominate.
It is dangerous to smile at or around men. It is also dangerous not to smile at or around men. Nothing is safe, but a blank look – the kind you see on rape victims or women destroyed by working in porn – is best. Smiling at or around a man can, TO HIM, mean, that you want him, want sex, want to be approached, are submissive and friendly and compliant, and are the perfect victim/prey. Not smiling, and even scowling, may invite sexual harassment, belittling requests for a smile (“Smile for me, honey. It’s not that bad.” Um, yes it is. Now that you’re talking to me.), or the seeing of you as a threatening bitch in need of punishment. Women are required to smile in order to make men feel like men and to help them get what they want from you. Fucking fuckers.
But having said all that, it is not Western men who made me lose my smile, although I will say that now that I have been permanently affected and my eyes are fully open, I don’t waste smile energy on them anymore.
No, I lost my smile due to long-term immersion in Chinese culture. And it took only a month for the first changes in my behaviour to occur.
I still remember my very first month in Taiwan. I’d gone directly from the West Coast of Canada – happy, smiley territory. I was bright-eyed and pleased to be working in a foreign land once again. Until I got there. Despite having a machine gun held up to my face by an aggressive young man on the second day I was there, I still remained my smiling self. But I realized something. Not only did the Taiwanese not return my smiles, ever, the only thing I ever saw were blank, robot-like faces, or just plain old disgust. It was bizarre, and very disheartening. Chinese culture discourages emotion. Emotion = bad, weak, out of control. Even fucking smiling.
Even the children don’t smile. Even most babies!!! Back in those days, in between my regular teaching, publishing, editing and writing jobs, I took on some private language-teaching sessions with the children of rich families. I had one weirdo kid – an 11-year-old boy from a very rich family – who had a freakish interest in out-moded English vocabulary and whose mother would enrol him in adult-level film classes (um…). And oh yeah, the kid refused to smile or even laugh because he thought it made him ‘look ugly’. I got him to engage in some tailored, fantasy/comedy-based murder-mystery story-writing centered on the strange-looking photos of the authors of one of his English books. His stories were hilarious and I laughed my ass off. The kid would start to laugh and then deliberately choked on it to prevent himself from getting all ugly. But I pushed and pushed and finally one day he started laughing and couldn’t stop. Every time I came by his home after that, to his mother’s confusion, the kid would spend the first five minutes laughing hysterically before exictedly whipping out the next instalment of his who-dunnit.
Jezus fucking christ. My biggest accomplishment in Taiwan. Forget the textbook I published, I got a fucking little kid to learn to smile and laugh. Pathetic.
I spent a couple of years in Taiwan, found myself changed fundamentally in a negative way, but not entirely smile-less. I returned to Canada for about 6 years. And then I went back to a culture I said I’d never return to, and I’ve been in Mainland China almost solidly for the past 6 years. The Mainland is even worse than Taiwan, which might be expected given the history and the sheer terror that communism wreaked on the country for so long. And having been there so long, I’ve had a lot of time to study and reflect on the culture and how I have adjusted to it and been mostly destoyed by it.
China killed my smile. It’s not that I am incapable of smiling. I do it a fair amount when warranted. It is much less automatic or natural though in these situations. But in public, outdoors, it never happens. Never in China. And while it has a significant effect on how I feel inside and my outlook, in general, it helps me dissociate, which is necessary when you are a white woman in China. It also saves me a lot of energy. I was quite surprised actually, when I began to analyze the effects of the implemented changes to my public demeanour in China. I used to try to be ‘present’ when I went out, and it was exhausting and demoralizing, especially because there was never any reciprocation from the Chinese. Once I started behaving like them, things became, I don’t know… streamlined? Energy-efficient? Self-centred? I’m not sure what the right word is. I mean, I absolutely hate the way it has changed me, but at the same time, I don’t feel exhausted every time I finish an outdoor ordeal. Going outdoors is always an ordeal. The funny thing is this: I know from feedback from some of my students, that they think I look angry or they are a bit afraid to approach me. But the thing is that I look exactly like them, expression-wise. Blank face. ‘Chinese face’ is what some of them call it. But as a Westerner, and especially as a woman, I am expected to be the kind and entertaining dancing monkey. Double standards. But it saves me energy and I don’t have to be concerned with how I appear when I don’t waste time on distorting my face into something I’m just not feeling. I want to feel nothing, so I put nothing on my face. It becomes easier and easier.
The double standards happen in the West, too – only for women though. We must be the happy slaves at all times. Men can wear whatever the fuck they want on their faces including murderous rampage or disgusting, rapey perv. They’re fine no matter what. Not so for women. Now that I’m visiting the US, I have relaxed a little, but I am much more economic and mindful of my smiling. Tons of women have smiled at me, and I smile back. No problem, and it feels good. I like women. I like the solidarity and energy I feel when exchanging a smile with one. But I don’t smile at men anymore. I try not to even look at them. I’m mindful of where they are in relation to my person, but I don’t look at them. And I don’t scowl. I adopt blank, trauma-face. It is the safest. And so far, so good. I am hyper-aware without perhaps appearing to be so. I come across perhaps as on a mission, hopefully ‘not prey’.
I hate that men and male culture have destroyed something so simple as smiling and relating positively to people. I don’t feel natural, comfortable, easygoing, or healthy. Thanks, China. Thanks, men. Thanks, international Patriarchy.
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