Monday, October 24, 2005

The Great Cabbage Incident

Hello everyone. Pete has reluctantly allowed me to publish my thoughts under his URL. I assisted him with a couple of previous entries, but I felt that my creativity (read: compulsion to discuss minutiae) was stifled along with my atrocious American spelling: theater, color, honor, neighbor.

Pete has yet to share with you what we will now call The Wu Mart Cabbage Massacre (known as The Wu Mart Cabbage Incident within the PRC). Wu Mart is our not-so-friendly neighborhood supermarket. One morning Pete and I went there before class to get some breakfast, and we found swarms of elderly Chinese waiting for the store to open its doors. These Chinese pensioners had probably been awake since 4 am, and I imagine they were just so disillusioned that a supermarket would open as scandalously late as 8 in the morning. They were all so eager. It was as if Kenny G* himself were about to descend from heaven to grace the produce section at Wu Mart with dulcet tones of maddening longevity.

The store finally opened and we watched the pensioners push and shove their way down the escalator. Why? Cabbage was on sale. 7 mao (1p) a head. It was cutthroat competition to get a good head. Cabbage was flying everywhere. Cabbage was being torn out of the hands of old women and unsuspecting workers. Perhaps when Hobbes wrote of the life of man being nasty, brutish, and short he was witnessing a sale on Chinese produce.


*American, Soprano Saxophone soft jazz musician known for his ability to hold very high notes for a very long time. For some reason he is extremely popular in China.

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