“I really like Putin.”
“You think he’s sexy?”
“No. I think he’s a good example of strong
leadership.”
The cracks are beginning to show, and I’m
having to dance around them.
Called a Yotaphone, MJ got this special New
Year’s gift from her husband. It’s quite something: boasting two screens, one
on each side, it’s a sleek, sexy Russian PA that fits in a handbag. How else
could the Slavs outdo Apple, aside from building a gizmo so up its own arse it's
incompatible with any other protective casing, liable to break in the hands of
any ditsy yummy-mummy (I have seen her try and fail to piece together a
20-piece children's jigsaw). She fondles it and swoons. “Putin gave one of these to Xi
Jinping. And now I have one.”
I needn’t be surprised. Last month in Hunan
province, cradle of Chinese communism, we went to a restaurant nostalgically
serving Mao Zedong’s favourite slap-up dishes. My host family and their
zillionaire guests bowed to the statue of him which was placed at the entrance,
whilst I shifted around tectonically. Maybe I’m being naïve, but how can the
ideals of communism possibly align with this kind of exorbitance? Risking
my monthly bonus, good-girl status and perhaps my job, I can’t bow to the cold
hard representation of a man whose massacres multiply outnumbered Hitler and
Stalin’s combined.
The admiration for corrupt degenerates and
the skidmarks of a blackened past clearly have an arresting grip amongst the
highest echelons of Chinese society. They send their kids to Playdoh club at
the world’s largest building up the road, without sparing a thought for its
developer, disappeared under mysterious and implausible corruption charges.
Their daughter holds Hong Kong nationality in order to go to a prestigious
international school, and yet the callous suppression of the Umbrella Movement is
of no concern to her or them. They kneel at sunny Buddhist temples, while elsewhere Falun Gong practitioners are tortured in cells. I feel like asking,
where were you on May 25th 1989? But perhaps their memories are
clouded under a tizzy of capitalist winnings. Ironically. You live easy, eat
your shark and birds nest and never forget to say grace to Mao.
Never forget.
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