a lunch full of tension and CCP bashing, thought i'd share. first, i was eating with the two chinese people that work in our 4-person department (boss is out sick). halfway through our meal, one of the head bosses, a japanese guy, sat down with us. somehow our talk about the upcoming spring festival led to a discussion of Little Tokyos, which are like Chinatowns, and whether there were any in china. from this, we started talking about areas that had been under japanese rule before the end of the war in 1945. this is an incredibly awkward conversation when had between an american, a japanese person, and a Chinese person raised in what was at that time known at Manchukuo, the Japanese territory. i think dan-dan and i were both thinking about how horrible the japanese were to the chinese in their conquered territories, and the japanese guy was trying to talk about that time like the territories were just another part of japan at that time. talking about the end of the war that forced japan to give up those territories, he may also have been thinking about ya know, the bombings. so there was a lot that none of us were saying in that conversation.
anyway, i tried to shift the conversation before dandan said something she'd regret (every time we talk about japanese people, she says some pretty intense things. i understand that growing up in manchuria there was a lot of anger, but i'm always like "you reeeaaally shouldn't say that"). so we started talking about my other chinese coworker's son, who we now refer to as The Chairman. turns out, because he failed to get a permit before he and his wife started trying to have a baby, he has to pay this huge fee. yikes, china. also, because he and his wife's work permits are for his hometown, and not beijing, his son can go to school here, but he will have to return to hebei for all of his official examinations. he started to get really angry talking about it, and he was like, i hate living in a country like this. which is not something chinese people will say to me often.