I already did not like pandas. They sit on their asses all day and they don’t do shit. The black-eyed cunts are vegans when they are supposed to be bears… in fact they are bears! But only literally. I know most of a bear’s diet is actually plant based, but it’s that ten percent of thrashing a young deer or elk into shreds that makes bears what they are. A polar bear – now that’s a real bear. Polar bears are obligate carnivores, meaning in order to survive, they have to fuck up some unlucky ringed seals. It’s so raw and intimate. I can’t relate to why the whole world is so eager to suck pandas’ dicks. Pandas are like influencers and that’s insulting influencers. Pandas would be the worst kind, the thirst-trap kind, the kind that charges a Sudanese farmer’s full year’s income on their OnlyFans every month and only shows half a nip and a shadow of a puss once in a blue moon. They prey on people’s lust for them. Friggin scammers. I actually respect the OnlyFans girls that are on the production line, that churn out work. They put their holes and bodies under stress and they work hard and they get creative – the manual labor of the digital age, brick by brick, clip by clip, birthing the flesh to a virtual hedonistic utopia one penetration at a time. There is a real blue-collar sensibility there. That’s something I can drink to. I sleep good on that. But asshole pandas don’t do none of that and somehow we see them as so precious that the CCP uses them as diplomatic gestures of goodwill so they can sit on their asses in some zoo way the far away and do nothing in another time zone. Just what kind of message the CCP is really sending is fun to chew on sometimes.
So my pen skated furiously on my notepad as the keeper walked our group through the panda research base. I wanted to confirm pandas were indeed assholes. Here are the details. Apparently, the main reason pandas are so endangered is because they don’t fuck. They did it to themselves. The females only ovulate once a year and are fertile for two to three days. And these pansy things are picky pricks too. If they don’t get wined and dined, they are definitely not putting out for the sixty-nine. What I’m saying is, pandas desire a personality match from their companion, but they mostly hate each other and don’t think anyone’s worth a swipe-right. What I’m saying is, these keepers have to play panda porn to get them in the mood and arrange threesomes to sex-ed the youth, and even then, they are still barely breeding. And their diet is a joke. Bamboos is ninety-nine percent of the diet but they can’t actually digest that shit. Because of that they can drop up to a sixth-grader’s weight in poop a day. Because of that, they don’t get any fat reserve to sleep through the winter so they can’t hibernate. The giant pandas have zero natural predators. They are literally screwing, or unscrewing themselves to be more precise, to extinction and the world loves these losers. This is how you know God’s not fair.
The only chance at redemption for the pandas is if this extinction stunt is for-real a suicide attempt on a species level, a collective philosophical resolution to meaninglessness, a satirical protest on death and power and comfort and the absurdity of being. To say “Fuck it and fuck off! I want to leave. I’m here and I am not impressed. Fuck love when I can’t even go to war. There is nothing to die for.” If that were the case, pandas would be pretty cool but they just look like a bunch of soft, entitled assholes to me. On some level, I think both OG and Aunt Flo would agree. I say spend the money on saving the polar bears. The real bears.
Junior and Amei couldn’t grasp why I was only taking down these “bad” notes, why my hatred for these cute animals. To them, I should have been singing songs about how fluffy and adorable they are.
“Because they are a shit animal.” I said. But it’s also simply kind of awesome to just hate something purely and passionately. I believe just as humans have a desire to love and be loved, we also have a need to hate. It’s the other side of the coin. It’s our backbone. A Zen mentality only cheapens everything.
“Because I hate motherfuckers born with a silver spoon in their mouths.” I said.
OG and Aunt Flo had mostly been silent on the group tour, just taking in the sights and the wet smell, but on the silver spoon comment, OG turned his head and shot me a side eye and nose crunch combination.
“I know, unc. Alright? I am the same motherfucker. I am well aware of the irony.”
Junior and Amei got distracted by a panda cub yawning and I was glad of that. They really didn’t need my negativity, especially Amei, she deserved a proper vacation.
Amei just finished Gaokao. It’s like China’s SAT but think four different tests on six different subjects. Chinese, Math, and English are obligatory, and then you can choose to take a humanities test, which includes politics, history, and geography, or a science test, physics, chemistry, and biology. Think two tests a day for two days in early June, once every year. Think all three years of high school in China are basically three years’ worth of mock tests for Gaokao. Think if you choke under pressure in Gaokao, you’d have to re-take last year of high school in order to try again the next year to get into a good university, and in China, going to a good university really really matters. So yea, Amei deserved a proper vacation. She didn’t talk too much about how she did after it was all over. She knew talking about it made no difference. Amei is a firm believer in causality, a rejector of superstitions, especially the begging, self-pity kind – the test was done, it was what it was, there laid no need for stroking the ego or licking the wound. Amei just made a big pile of all the mock tests on a bare piece of the field behind the house and lit them on fire, and I mean a big pile, like you couldn’t believe how big the pile was, like how could anyone do so many tests in three years? She didn’t say nothing and we all just watched it burn together. Amei was mature and cool like that in a cosmic sort of way, like physics and the universe is her god, which I deeply respected in a kid. OG and Aunt Flo obviously cared but they knew they had no power to get a single word out of their daughter about Gaokao so they just took the big straw brooms and returned the cremated tests to earth. Such was the life of a test-paper tree in China, a brief conveyor of knowledge after death, then forever after in the realm of the forgotten. Circle of life.
Aunt Flo decided to do a family trip to Aba to take our minds off things. First day see the pandas, second day some pretty waters. Aba is basically an oversized Indian reservation in China but less desperate. Its full name is Aba Tibetan and Qiang Autonomous Prefecture but the Autonomous is in quotations, wink wink, can you smell what the CCP is a-cooking? Qiang is a people, like the Tibetans. They are an ethnic minority even smaller than the Tibetans and they don’t got beef with the CCP, or they can’t afford to, not money, not lives. Aba is a land that houses both these minorities and so, like Uncle Sam to the Native Americans, the CCP drew a circle around it and told the Qiang and the Tibetans they can handle it themselves, except handle is also in quotations. Instead of casinos, and besides the stupid pandas, Aba has some unbelievable natural sights and that’s no kidding. The color of the waters in JiuZhaiGou is that Islamic turquoise blue. It’s the blue of One Thousand and One Nights, of the Turkish lights in a bazaar, of the sapphires inside the forty thieves’ hidden treasure chest behind “close sesame.” This mystic blue apparently has got to do with the calcification of the scapes under the water. It would have been a fantastic view if not for the tens of thousands of heads of other tourists crowding on the edge of the waters. It was incredible how nature can be so dense with people. I mean even if locusts and migrating starlings came here, they must think what the fuck?
It was hot and the mosquitos were having a party. It was so hot I had diarrhea for no reason. Smoking is basically mandatory in a public restroom in a Chinese tourist attraction site. You’d pass out otherwise from the smell. Junior was getting pale from the heat, so we opted to head out of the over-populated nature paradise. We still had one more night in Aba, so OG drove us to a camping site to get away from the people for some peace. The heat blasted us all into near delirium and we shut our mouths and closed our eyes so as not to disturb the AC. Junior passed out in the back-back seat and Cui Jian’s husky voice in a cool autumn Beijing night on OG’s CD hurled our minds into memories of a distant China full of hot blood, curse words, and the American Dream that no longer exists. OG has the soul of 80s Chinese rock and roll and it’s awesome.
OG is OG because he is the original Guo while Junior is the second gen Guo. My momma’s surname is Chen and her mother Meng, so OG must be some real distant family, or, my personal theory, a former lover of mom’s. OG was born and raised in the uterus of the motherland, the prostate of the big red rooster – SiChuan. He’s native to the mountains, native to the pandas. In the late eighties, he went east and became a personal chef for the governor of an east coast province. The Governor was from Sichuan originally also. This is how the CCP does it, by the way. They deploy good prospects from local governments of wherever to the provincial governments of wherever else where there is a higher-ranking spot vacant and that’s the ladder people dream of climbing – all over the place. Leadership should be leadership anywhere is the philosophy. Anyways, the east coast food is good but mild, soft spoken. Even the loud dishes are non-violent. They are sweet. They are subtle. They are about the freshness of the ingredients and preserving the spirits of the dead animals and plants in the soup, in the jus, in the many layers. But Governor was from SiChuan where anything is thrown in a wok hotter than the sun and fried in chili oil explosions. He liked his food red. He liked burning the roof of the mouths of people sitting down with him, so he knows what they are made of, so they know to be honest. Really it was kind of brilliant, a BDSM equivalent in business etiquette and people tend to be honest about things they normally aren’t when hogtied. It’s not torture but more so people can’t think about lying when their other senses are overwhelmed. OG was Governor’s Shibari artist. For twenty years, he brought out to the Governor’s dinner table simple, easy-going dishes like blanched Bok-choy with garlic that still stinged on the tongue and tonsil even though there’s not even black pepper or ginger in the recipe. Guests from provinces where people don’t regularly get stomach ulcers would smile bitterly and bitch and moan in a joke,
“唉呀，不愧是四川来的省长。家里青菜都是辣的。”
“Even a plain dish in a SiChuan kitchen is spicy.”
My OG would respond,
“不好意思噻，辣子都渗进锅里头咯。”
“Forgive me, the chili is in the skin of the wok now.”
For twenty years, they had many successes together with the spicy dinners and made many good deals and secured a prosperous future for the province. I like to assign OG more credit than he probably deserves. Governor was supposed to be a real intelligent man but I’d like to think my uncle’s dishes had that ineffable magic that made things happen. And it’s my story so fuck you. But Gov was too smart for his own good. In the early twenty-tens, his ass got thrown in jail for corruption and marital indecency. Quite the headline it was at the time, OG told me. Some record for total bribes received which had since been broken many times by Gov’s peers. When I asked OG if he was surprised, he had to think about the answer. He said he knew Gov was dirty because everyone was dirty because you cannot not be dirty when everyone else is dirty because then you are a problem for everyone else and that’s dangerous because that’s when things happen to you. But did he expect Gov to fall the way he did, I followed up? And unc said,
“这个谁能晓得？看命咯。” meaning who is to say? We all just have to read what she wrote. But unc also said he suspects, actually more than suspects, it was stronger forces in the dark that took Gov down.
“水可深着咧。” It means the water is way deep. If those in real power in the CCP don’t want you to succeed, then God can’t even help you here. The CCP is only eighty something years old, so there is no playbook, not for more than the immediate utilities right in front of you. “人在江湖，身不由己,” OG said, which means when you put yourself out there, your life is no longer just in your own hands.
Fascinating, I thought. These stories got me drunk faster than the Baijiu. So all these politicians, they sign their lives away at the door? In their collective unconscious, there is a sense of pending doom, a fatalistic abandon? I got excited. I took out my pen and notepad, but OG said to shut my mouth and eat my dinner.