I Hate The Chinese

I hate the Chinese. I hate them. Right from their flat faces to their straight black hair to their cacophonic language to its horrible script, not to mention their food (the one we get in India is nowhere near what they themselves eat). Worst of all, I hate the fact that some of them can’t speak proper English even when living in the heart of New York.

Sample this. We are in a very posh downtown area of Manhattan, and suddenly two blocks down, we find ourselves lost. As we walk down into Chinatown, New York, for all practical purposes, disappears. For all you know, it’s as good as finding yourself in the heart of mainland China, and not just a small part of Manhattan.

We had gone to Chinatown to book the tickets for trip to the Niagara Falls and back. On the streets in Chinatown, each and every single sign on every shop was in that damned script of theirs. Even McDonalds was not spared, and only their iconic yellow M was there in English (possibly they mistook it for just an arch and not an actual letter, else even that would have been replaced by an ugly squiggle). The only things to reassure us that the US visa was sufficient to roam around here were the names of the streets and the occasional blacks and whites who were doing their cheap shopping around.

However, when we actually entered the office of the tour company, save for the large maps of the US plastered on the walls, there was no indication that we were in the US. All the office staff was composed of Chinese girls, who chattered away to each other in the most irritating voices in that dratted language that made me feel like flattening their already smooth faces. Even when they attended calls they spoke only Chinese (Mandarin, to be precise), with the only incidence of English being the pleasantries hello and thank you. Possibly, there might be a bit more English in use in China itself. All the files that lined the cabinets had bold lettering in Chinese and let’s not talk about the décor at all.

We did manage to book the tour tickets, but their limited vocabulary was a major hindrance. The tour guide who accompanied us on the tour was also a Chinese girl (cute in a short-haired Chinese sort of way), but mercifully spoke better English since she was a law school undergraduate working part-time. Imagine a foreigner showing us our own country back India; its unimaginable. Such a travesty would be downright shameful In India, but the Yankees don’t seem to mind it one bit. It’s a downside of cold capitalism that they have to live with.

My hatred for these flatfaces started on our trip to Australia when our hotel in Sydney was right in the middle of the Chinatown there (they have them in every city that they live in; they just don’t know how to blend in like us desis). Here as well, their populations are swelling like crazy and what once used to be Little Italy and Chinatown alongside each other is now two blocks of Little Italy surrounded by vast expanses of Chinatown. Let me tell you Australia with their tiny population is soon going to be overrun by them and here as well they have made themselves indispensable to the American economy. They are pretty much on the verge of taking over the tourism travel industry around New York by offering unbeatable prices so that it’s impossible to get rid of them now. Quite possibly they might spread their ugly talons all over the US right under the noses of the unsuspecting local pink pigs.

The actual trip to Niagara was decent, though the falls themselves underwhelmed me. I expected them to be in the heart of the wilderness but the area around is very much urbanized. They are really massive and are more deafening than the Ensiferum concert of Moodi ’08, but I expected something of gargantuan proportions. The wind and the mist, though, are something to behold. The biggest positive to come out of the trip was getting the tour guide (I refer to her as such because I really did not get her name despite her repeated attempts to spell it out) to admit she found me quite handsome, which probably means I could have got further had I not been under the constant unwavering surveillance of my parents.

Currently I am already on the west coast which puts me way behind schedule as I have already done D.C., Chicago and Vegas. So you could expect a few quick posts sooner rather than later with all the latest scoops of my trip.