This is based on a series of posts of mine at the SA forums, I am far too lazy to rewrite it all, and it has been an important moment in my life. The usage of the word “Jap” in the original post got me put on probation. Read it all before you come to any conclusions, this whole series of events has taught me a lot about myself. The original thread is here if you wish to read through some 200 posts.
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Dec 15, 2005: 07:26
I have an interesting tale to tell, and it is just developing.
As you may know, I am in China, and if you didn’t before, you do now. That plays a small role in this situation.
I have a Japanese roommate who is possibly the most annoying and horrible roommate in existance. For about a month, I have heard him on the phone talking about how he is running out of money and so on. Sometime, in the last week, my passport got “misplaced” to use a neutral term. I keep it in a safe place, and he is the only one who has seen me put it there. It was not there yesterday, and it wasn’t there today, nor was it anywhere in the room, well, my side of the room is all I have searched so far.
This brings us to the critical point of the story. While searching desperately, the roommate comes back and asks what I am looking for, I say “something important”. He sits, lights up a smoke, and then says that US passports are worth a lot of money in Japan, and worth twice the amount in China and then lists prices. He offered this without me hinting at what I was looking for. He smoked some more, and then left. He is either VERY stupid or VERY innocent.
This is the only thing missing from my room at this time, but it is the most important thing. It also contains all my visas and stamps from all my travels and means a lot to me. I can get it replaced with a lot of hassle and money, but that is not the biggest concern.
To get this all taken care of, I must file a police report. According to the Embassy, they will be asking who had access to it or knew where it was, and they usually investigate these cases for American passports once they are reported. Any report I file will finger him directly, and as a Japanese, he stands no chance at all in the legal system here if he did it. If he is lucky he will be deported. We are talking about a Jap in Chinese prison, he won’t survive a week.
So, with this in mind, I need serious advice about what to do.
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Dec 17, 2005: 00:56
Here’s what happened at 2pm today:
I had gone to the student office to get a piece of paper saying that I am a student here, that’s all that I needed, I had found my receipt from my residency application and deposit for my room to prove that I live here. At 1pm or so, I went to the net cafe on campus to print up 4 things:
Front page of my passport
The visa page that I entered on
My residency permit
A picture of the roommate
The printer running out of toner and me having to butt in to fix things is a story by itself.
Moving back to the story, at the office, I had to explain why I needed this, and I told them as little as possible to avoid troubles on campus for the guy. Hell, if he is innocent, I don’t want the school to fuck with him. I also needed to know where exactly the local PSB was. The guy in the office walked me there, and right outside the gate, my girlfriend called. She was suppossed to be going to class, but her mom and her roommates convinced her that she had to come along to help me be clear if I had communication problems and also to protect herself simply by being there.
I waited for her to arrive, and then we went in. We filed the report, and they didn’t care really… just sent us to the Haidian head office. At Haidian, they were bilingual, and I was able to fill out the entire story in full detail as to what happened. I was careful to never say who did it, or that I thought that it was him. Only what happened and what everyone involved said. I asked if they wanted my roommate’s name, they said no, because that would bias the investigation because there is no evidence yet.
To be honest, I was shocked. So professionally handled. I got my police report receipt to take to the embassy, didn’t need to go to Andingmen. I called the embassy to make sure everything was ok. Here is a future note to all who lose their passport in Beijing: You just have to go to a bilingual station, Andingmen is bilingual, but there are others.
We got in a cab and headed back to go get good Indian food in Sanlitun. About halfway back to the dorm, I got a call from Haidian. They wanted me to go directly back to the local station. Here is where it got rocky.
The first person we saw, yelled at us that they didn’t want to see us and that no one sent us. I made her call the number that called me before they cared. Professionalism.score()–. They decided that the roommate is suspect #1 and the fact that he is leaving the country on Jan 4 means it must be investigated immediately. Shit, well, that makes sense. It was at this point that one of the officers said 日本人有怀, or “Bad Japanese” sort of… shit, they jumped to a conclusion like I was afraid they would. Professionalism.score()–. They took my statement, and handed it to me to sign.
Big fucking problem… I had been saying “roommate” the whole time, they WROTE “Japanese” instead. This is where it got rocky. I forced him to change it to “roommate”, in every line. He said it was just a simplification because I might have more than one roommate. I saw it different. I lost all trust at this point, and my poor girlfriend got stuck translating this (I will get to this later). Then, he wanted the name and photo, I made him promise he would be fair, I made them all promise they would be fair and that coincidences and suspicion alone is not evidence and guilt. I handed it all over, and that is it… it is no longer in my hands.
And onto the girlfriend. She was about to break down, she wanted to break up with me after the stuff at the police station. Cultural conflict. I did the right thing, but I did it wrong. I treated these cops like they didn’t know what the hell they were doing. I didn’t trust them at all, and I don’t know what I was thinking really. I got caught up in the heat of the moment and went too far. I acted like I was better than them. This is a trust thing that I need to work on. I walked away from Haidian and felt good and trusting, and the second I walked into the local station again, I got a bad feeling, like the one I got at the campus hospital where they didn’t give a damn and just wanted me to leave. But, in this matter, I couldn’t leave. I fell back to all my anti-China biases for guidance, all the shit you read in the US is extra-ordinary stuff, not the way it normally works. I put my girlfriend in the middle of this and hurt her a lot. We worked out the fight ok, and are better for having it now though. She was one wrong word from walking out on me at dinner. But, yea.. here’s the thing about China. You can live here for years and understand it all, but still keep your biases, still be ethnocentric. You have not learned anything till you have accepted it, and can trust it a little (not completely, god damnit, you have to CYA). This, is fucking hard to do, and maybe impossible to do alone. I can do it because I have someone I love and trust more than anything else anywhere who can help me do it. Cultural conflicts… international relationships… gah, so hard, yet so worth it. Dinner was 狗肉炖豆腐 by the way… evil thing got me to eat the skin… the skin is the best part, and I would have just thrown it away and thought nothing of it without her
It is 12:40am now, the dorm closed at midnight, and he is still not back.
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Dec 17, 2005: 14:13
The roommate came back at 1pm and said nothing for half an hour, finally passport stuff came up. He brought it up. He wanted to know why I suspected him and I told him everything piece by piece. The ONLY reason he brought up the passport information in the first place was because to him, that is the most important thing he owns. Makes sense.
The money talks: Joking around with friends back home
The money in the suitcase: Company sent him his living stipend and tuition for next semester in a lump sum.
Accusing my girlfriend: Was only trying to help and he is willing to apologize to her if she wants him to.
I then told him everything I did yesterday, and he is ok with it, and in my opinion, nothing will happen to him if he says it the way he just told me and it all checks out.
Gah, I knew there was a reason why this whole thing felt wrong to me, and this was it. The fallout from this of course, is that my girlfriend doesn’t want an apology or to ever see him again. Her hatred towards Japanese has not been justified and I’m pretty sure she feels silly now. I feel ok letting the police handle this now.
Who stole the passport? It’s a mystery.
But honestly, I really don’t give a damn at this point.
Sorry guys, no arrest photos for ya unless this takes a drastic 180.
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Onto the conclusion:
The reason he has a ton of cash right now, is that he is moving out into an apartment next semster and moving everything before he leaves. 4000RMB a month and he wont be here for over a month and has to pay things in advance. Most of the money was gone because he just got someone to help him setup a bank account for the rest. Before, I was 99.9% positive he did it, now I am 99.9% sure that he didn’t. Either way, I am ok in trusting the police in this matter now.
That brings up a cultural conflict issue. Trust.
I fucked up big and deserved every last bit of hate I got from my girlfriend for what I did. Truth be told, I deserved worse than the 4+ hours of pure hate that I got for what I did.
Here’s what I did wrong:
This is NOT my native culture, the only things you hear about the legal system here is when it royally fucks up. When I saw how they were treating the issue at the station, I was afraid I was contributing to another case where things were going to be fucked up. I got flashbacks from when I was sick and we went to the school hospital where they simply didn’t care and wanted to get rid of us. I quickly reverted to a state of “this is all wrong, they are doing it WRONG and I know best because it is done differently in America”. I lost all trust right there, freaked out, and started handling things in English with my girlfriend being forced into a translation spot. I insulted the police, and I insulted the entire system they represent. Which means that I was insulting China. It was a direct attack on face. If that wasn’t bad enough, I put my girlfriend in a position where it was HER attacking China. I could have handled things much better and still gotten what I wanted to across. She trusted it, she has dealt with them before, why didn’t I trust her judgement? I was incredibly ethnocentric and it was at a bad time because she had just had a class where some American teacher pissed off the entire class with his own ethnocentrism.
I walked out of the station feeling that I did something good, and talking with other Americans, they agreed with me completely. Therein lies the problem. And it is a hard problem to overcome. It is easy to understand this stuff, hard as hell to accept it yourself if you were not raised with it and have your own experiences from which to make judgements. Relying on bias and pessimism is the easy way out, and that’s the way I took. Without her basically wanting to give up on me and never see me again, I never would have figured this out about myself.
On to racism issues:
It really rubs off on you here, and if I wasn’t planning on staying here that would probably be a far worse thing. I am not going to fight 1 billion people to make them think differently. I have to understand it and play into it a little at times for survival’s sake. That being said, this roommate puts me through on a daily basis all the things I hated about Japan that I only had to deal with from time to time there. So, sure, I’m a bit “racist” from time to time. However, this does NOT guide or influence my actions in any serious way. When someone needs someone else to stand up for them, I can do that if I like them or not. If he did it, in my view it has to be handled fairly through the entire process even if I hate him. I can live with that, if you can’t that’s your own damn problem. If a white guy is harassed by some homeless black person on the street all summer and calls him a “nigger”, refers to him as a “nigger”, and then in the winter takes him in and extends a hand so this “nigger” doesn’t freeze to death because no one else is willing… is that person a racist simply because of his words?
With Japan, I have a lot of Japanese friends, I speak rather good Japanese, I have lived there for a year. I have my own damned experiences from which to judge, and I have a LOT of them. That being said, I would never want to live there, and the only redeeming factors I have about Japan are foods that contain the word 焼, the trains, and my Japanese friends who didn’t just want to use me for my English or foreigner status. That doesn’t mean that I want them to be lynched for shit they didn’t do, or get worse punishments because they are Japanese. I am not alone in this feeling, and one of my best friends talks shit about Japan and Japanese far worse than I do, and his girlfriend is, in fact, Japanese.
Back to the passport shit
I don’t know what happened to it, it’s gone, it’s never coming back. If my roommate is innocent he can tell the cops everything he told me and if it all checks out that’s the end of the matter as far as I am concerned. If they catch the person who stole it, good for them, at least I know they cared more than I expected they would and I trust them to act rationally and fairly.
Thoughts on it all
The one thing that sucks more than anything else is that it is getting harder and harder to relate to the things that I once “knew” for a “fact” to be “true”. I talked with Americans about all this, they don’t get it at all. I talked to Americans about this who have lived here for 10+ years and they don’t get it either. None of them have had the same experiences that I have had though, so they just don’t get it, and it is doubtful they ever will because they just shut it all out and are not willing to even try. And I can understand that, it is scary as fuck to go through alone and far easier to rely on what you “know”.
Call me a shill or an apologist or whatever you want, but you really don’t know me, and there is no way I can really force you to understand it or how I think. I have changed FAR too much to go back to what I was before or accept the things I used to accept as gospel truth. Hell, I spent 3 weeks back in the US, 2 weeks at home and a week of traveling, and it was all so horribly awkward. The only way I could cope and not have a nervous breakdown was to just sleep and act like a tourist in my own hometown. Reverse culture shock I guess, but it felt like something far deeper than that. Maybe the police station thing had more to do with trust issues, maybe it was just a last gasp for air. Trying to prove to myself that there was at least ONE thing here that I was dead right about before coming. The notion that persuing that line of reasoning could have cost me everything has made me think a lot more about everything. I’m just lucky that I have someone who loves me enough here to hold my hand through this stuff and let me know what is safe to trust and what is not. With her, I have to pick my battles, using the right context, but it is not as simple as 50/50 compromises. She grew up here, she has dealt with stuff, she knows what to do here to be happy, confident, safe and successful. I could do the same on my own probably, but I wouldn’t be as happy and I would be shutting out far too much. In the end, I would just end up as someone detached from his native culture who pisses off everyone here too much and life would be lonely and suck if I ever thought about it too much. Everyday that she puts up with my shit, I love her more. The prevailing thought in America seems to be that China is a repressive shithole, well this “repressive shithole” has done far more for me than America ever has on a personal level.
Despite all the hassle, this has been the best $97 I have ever spent.
船到桥头自然直 I need this tattood on my damned forehead sometimes.
edit: For those who care, 狗肉 is dog meat by the way
