#i think i primarily remember the parts of chinese history that resulted in food arguments in class

[snarp]

Have been accused of "mad" and "a historian" on the cheese dress post. Traumatized.

[natzeeab1962]

APOCALYPSE NIHAW

My contempt for Chinese is not encompassing, meaning it doesn’t extend to every Chinese out there. There is still a pious side of me, strange as that may sound, that intervenes occasionally in removing those blinders that make me myopic and hardcore with hate. That part that refuses to relinquish me to full-scale bigotry would remind me that inasmuch as not all Krauts during WW2 were Nazi sympathizers, not all Chinese are uncouth, curt, impudent, manipulative, exploitative and morally reprehensible, particularly in the area of doing business (sometimes I wonder if these were the same traits the Fuhrer saw in the Jews that drove him to expunge them wholesale). What makes that argument tenable is that I have Chinese friends (or at least that’s how I regard them and how they regard me.) who exhibit none of the scabrous demeanor that has made some of their kind the object of my derision and denunciation. In my conversations with them, some have even gone on to slam their fellow kind for the same reasons that I am disdainful of them.

 Growing up, I was often mistaken for Chinese due to my slanting eyes (it still happens to this day) that got me heckled by peers and any street punk I brushed with. My father, from whom I took after those eyes, saw nothing ignominious to be misconstrued for one for he had high praises for them. He venerated them as the paragon of diligence and industry from whom one could learn immensely if he hoped to be successful in life (never mind if they sometimes played dirty to get what they wanted). He was so warm and accommodating to them, and they in turn reciprocated his congeniality, perhaps because they saw him as one of them. His affection for the Chinese was such that at one point he even encouraged me to learn Chinese so I could be in the good graces of these people. Had he been alive today, there’s a good chance he might even share the current President’s sentiment about these people. Not only had this Dude-in-Chief publicly pledged his allegiance to these people but even went on to say that if it were up to him, he would be happy to see this country be an annexed province of the Mainland. It was as if the Chinese had spun him around their tricky fingers that has made him oblivious to what everyone else could clearly see – that China is not to be trusted at all. One can only speculate what those masquerading hoodlums are cooking beneath their dimsum steamers.

 A lot of controversial things have slipped out of the cracks from the East’s growing dominant force in the early part of this century alone. With their authorities censoring much of the information, such allegations or stories could neither be verified nor denied even if they had found their way on YouTube. Remember the Baby soup thing back in the late 00s? How ‘about those various diseases, e.g. SARS, MERS, that were rumored to have been manufactured by their labs, turning them into bona fide viral sensations, both as contagion exports and social media content?

 Now, we have the NCOVID-19 pandemic. President Biden’s predecessor, with all vitriol and mockery, tagged it the China Virus or Kung Flu. Not everyone was inclined to denounce this accusation. Speculations abound among Netizens that this was deliberately manufactured from their labs and strategically disseminated by its unwitting citizens throughout the world with unspeakable damage this time.  Unfair and unfounded, sure. But think about it. Is it really such a preposterous presumption that these Chinese disease-shes (as an erstwhile colleague of mine once joked about their food), are a precursor to a grand biological warfare being hatched all this time?  Could its own citizens share the same view, only they’re too repressed or frightened to speak out? Is it really hard to imagine that this country, with an embarrassing history of subjugation by smaller countries such as Mongolia and Japan, despite being the advanced civilization that it was back then, has mastered the art of weaponizing diseases for world domination? And that hokey public relations thing, with their emissaries acting like Ambassadors of Pandemic Cure by offering to poor, hapless countries like the Philippines their own vaccines, could that be their own Trojan Horse set-up? I don’t know about you but here’s another thing I think about these Chinese - they don’t give you anything for nothing. Somewhere down the line, if we buy the bait (that is, if we’re not doing that yet), there will be hell to pay.

 These maladies from China, coupled with its aggressive encroachment on the South China sea by laying claim to territories that a world-judicial body had already declared not theirs, have become sources of inspiration for some of my recent stories. You can say that the Chinese have become my favorite Rogue du Jour, as Islamic Terrorists are to western flicks. I have silenced reason and put those blinders back on, giving me free reign to spread my venomous palaver all over the pages. This is more so with my latest tome, LXR.

 When the idea for this book first came to me years ago, the growing South China sea dispute, the global pandemic, and yes, even those Chinese, were farthest from my thoughts. These elements came into play as I developed and progressed with the story. It was designed primarily as an urban fantasy tale of sorts and not at all intended as a social commentary. Little did I imagine that a disease that originated from those parts would bring to its knees, not just my neck of the woods but the entire world. As a result, what was once unthinkable has become a grim reality when Manila’s streets and highways were suddenly devoid of people and vehicles. It was the stuff only seen in apocalyptic movies.

 And now, with China’s intransigent and unrelenting campaign in the South China Sea, side-by-side with their egregiously paradoxical gesture of pandemic charity, the dystopian scenario I conceived, where the main character in the story, Free (short for Alfredo) arrived home from a vacation to his home country only to discover that it had relinquished its sovereignty to an imperial ruling power (both countries thinly disguised by another name) due to a manufactured pandemic, could be a grim and frightening reality as well. Far be it from me to line myself with such visionaries as Orwell, Huxley and to some extent William Gibson for that matter, that I should hazard to call my work a portentous picture of an immediate future. Believe you me, nothing gives me much pleasure to even think of it as such.

 Because of the fantastical elements in my tale, it’s easy to dismiss it as nothing more than the conjuring and rambling of a mind on speed. No argument there. But think about those other fantastical tales such as man flying to space; Earthlings landing on other planets; machines slowly taking over our jobs and eventually everything else; and of course a contagion that could wipe out much of humanity if not all of them; those too began as a product of a hyper-kinetic imagination over a century ago. And now…well…

 If you ask me, it is my sincere hope that LXR would be just that -  nothing more than the stuff of fiction and a fun read at that.

 My other wish is now that you would give it a look and judge for yourselves.