somewhere in between

Well…I never thought that a spell living in Beijing would cause something so major to happen to me. For a good long year now, I’ve been dogged by some pretty strong feelings of depression. I think I started last year when I was suffering from a great, overwhelming feeling of directionlessness and general low self esteem.

Lately, after sabotaging what could have been a great relationship with a Chinese girl I met, I’ve been forced to finally confront what has been a recurring theme for me. I like a girl, get on with her really well, and then, sometime or other, I wreck the whole thing.

One of my friends here in BJ had told me that the best thing to do would be to leave the girl alone, and that she would come to me…but I couldn’t do it…something that I’ve now identified as a fear of abandonment made me too clingy, too needy. Needless to say, I scared her away, and now I’ve no chance with her.

Looking through the list of things symptoms that an abandonment fear displays, some of it rings so true. A need to be a control freak, a need to be liked by everyone, I’m worried about what people will think of me, and there’s a massive sense of paranoia. At first I thought that there was a guilt complex, but now I think that it’s an abandonment fear…things seem to match up so well.

I’ve no idea where to go from here…but I hope I can be fixed.

“Censors tend to do what only psychotics do: they confuse reality with illusion.”
– David Cronenberg.

I’m lucky in China, all of my friends and most of my students are good people. Unfortunately, I always think that bad things are happening to them. Take the recent internet porn crackdown for example. The Chinese government wants to purify the internet, to get rid of all the pornography that’s on the web…they’ve got a bit of a challenge ahead of them.

There’s been a spate of stories in the state-controlled China Daily newspaper on how this is a Good Thing to protect the people, serve the public interest, etc, etc, etc, ad nasuem, we hate the Japanese, bleh, bleh, blah.

Now, usually, I’m not one to say that we should be watching more porn anywhere, but some of the stories that you read in the paper are just ridiculous. Take the tragic story of Xiao Yi, a seventeen-year-old is serving 10 years in prison for rape. And he lays the blame fairly and squarely at the feet of the Evil Internet Pornographers.

“I could hardly stop It was so exciting,” the boy mumbled. “I went to the Internet cafe almost every day, and was dreaming of making girlfriends.”

Half drunk one night, Xiao Yi sneaked into the student dormitory and raped a 15-year-old girl. “If I had not seen the porn websites, I would not have done such a thing,” the teenager says wistfully.

Sadly, Xiao Yi is not an exception. Jin Hua, deputy director of the Beijing juvenile facility, said about 20 percent of the offenders last year committed rape, and almost all of them said porn websites were to blame.

Course, the implication is that Chinese parents are no good, and need a government to do their job for them. Chinese families are called “one mouth and eight pockets”, the phenomena of Little Emperor Syndrome is well known, and now the years of molly-coddling youngsters, letting them do whatever they want to is coming around to bite them on the ass.

No question has been asked as why the 17 year old was able to go into a netbar and access sexually explicit images. No one has asked where the boy got the money from, quite honestly, I don’t think that anyone is asking any questions at all, and there might be some doubt, if you’re at all cynical, if the boy said what he said in the first place. There’s no greater endorsement of a government plan than having a former drug addict/rapist/murderer tell everyone the whys and wherefores of what he did, and then saying the the government is right to do what it’s doing.