Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Circa 2017
The werewolf reeks of booze. He speaks in rapid clips of American English. But with a Glasgow accent. This hairy beast has been with me since the start of the plane ride and claims he used to work as a roadie for the band Cradle of Filth.
“A bottle of Burmese whisky is only $3… Quality batches too… Washes out the parasites and perfectly pairs with tea leaf salads…” says the werewolf, and I crane my neck in bemusement.
The werewolf goes on to tell me he’s been teaching in Myanmar, at a temple, for two years, teaching English to young monks.
“Young monks?” I inquire, surprise coloring my voice. When I think of monks, I think of elderly Asian men with shaved heads… graybeards atop misty mountains… dudes doing Kung Fu in exotic jungle temples and lone silent sinewy figures meditating in the emerald glow of bamboo forests…
Apparently not, though, as the werewolf tells me that impoverished families in Myanmar will sometimes send a child to become a monk, to live in the monastery.
It’s hard for me to picture 5-year-old kids as monks, but I guess it’s a thing.
At the airport, the werewolf accompanies me through a chrome corridor, its walls blasting neon, like Christmas trees. We then proceed to the immigration controls.
Jutting his furry chin toward the sad-eyed agents seated behind the immigration counter, their faces twisted in a type of bored contempt, the werewolf whispers in my ear, his breath hot and wet and stinkin’ of whisky, “These immigration officers, border guards, customs agents… I wonder what they think of tourists, people who can fly around the world, take vacations… Just look at them having to serve us… Like, here they are, probably living in poverty… And here the tourists are, probably packing more in spare change and small bills than that customs agent earns in a month… Sort of explains a certain degree of surliness…”
I wonder what the customs agents will think of the werewolf, but then I size up the nearby knots of UK/Aussie backpackers, the unshaven, hairy lot, one covered
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer in so many tattoos that barely a speck of his skin shows… And I assume the werewolf will fit right in amongst the Western tourists.
The werewolf and I are launched by psychosomatic slingshot into the city. Then we walk all over Rangoon. We follow the flags. We follow the purple sky and its mango streaks of sunset. We pass progress and songs of the past and we pause our questions, our isms, and we posit nothing.
The werewolf really does fit right in, here in Rangoon. He chews betel nuts like a local, smiles wickedly with his mossy fangs, and skillfully spits big blotchy blood-red gobs of phlegm at the sidewalk.
The sidewalks are a hot mess, too, even without the spit. Dangerous to boot.
Thankfully, the werewolf is my guiding light, helps me avert the ordeal of slipping into an open sewer.
Tilting his hairy face and locking eyes with me, the werewolf explains, deadpan,
“The sidewalks are simply thin planks of concrete, lids, really, atop open sewers.
Parts of the planks have crumbled due to wear, tear, neglect, so it’s best to walk on the edge of the street.”
Looking ahead, I recognize how right he is, pedestrians walking single file, on the side of the road; bustling traffic, chaotic bursts of buses, cars, motorbikes, various three-wheeled vehicles whizzing by; however, the sidewalks sit empty, save for the holes.
The werewolf sighs, then cuts a ferociously loud fart, which he declines to acknowledge, and continues, “Careful at night. Myanmar sells its electricity to China, rations it domestically. Frequent power-cuts leave these streets pitch-black, prone to peril…”
I can imagine how horrible it’d be to fall into an open sewer in Rangoon, that sewer water probably so full of betel nut spit that it’d burn me alive like lava.
I’d never worried about trap doors opening into sewers as I walk down the sidewalk, but I guess it’s a thing.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer I stay in a cheap hotel near the temple. The werewolf bunks with me, sleeps on the balcony so he can throw shade at the moon.
Before he retires for the evening, the werewolf asks, rhetorically, “Why is it so many Europeans return to the lands they once colonized? The French in Laos, Vietnam? Brits in Burma? Dutch in Sri Lanka?”
Into the small hours of night, I lie atop the hard, thin mattress, spread out on the single bed, and read Toni Morrison, sip the werewolf’s whisky, and watch the werewolf do drunk yoga on the balcony, catching mosquitoes with his tongue.
I rise early, jolted awake, witnessing the werewolf with his head tossed back and arms outstretched, the werewolf on the balcony bellowing out Beyonce, I think, and I kindly invite him inside.
The werewolf waltzes in, burrows into my backpack, busts out and hands me an exquisite blue and white striped longyi and a Union Jack T-shirt and I ease into the clothes and slather beige sun paint on my face.
Then we drink raw eggs from shot glasses, take turns brushing our teeth with whisky, and clank on our shot glasses with our toothbrushes so as to ward off any evil spirits before we proceed to the temple. As we depart, the werewolf jumps and Kung Fu kicks the hotel’s front door shut, his form perfect as Jackie Chan.
The morning heat, humidity hangs heavy, like a shroud, over Rangoon, and the werewolf drags me, by my legs, down the road. We pass decrepit colonial buildings, glass and steel high-rises, and Chinese shopping malls interspersed among the urban decay of dilapidated structures, motorized street stalls, hovels, tarps, and tin shacks.
Bopping along the street, I people-watch the Burmese. They appear quiet, shy people; they appear curious yet reticent to speak with a foreigner, regardless of language barriers. There’s an abused, downtrodden look to them, a PTSD of sorts, and it’s hard to distinguish their ages…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The werewolf and I flashback to news coverage of Muslim massacres, the
“Buddhist Bin Laden” and sinking rafts of boatpeople. But, to my surprise, at least in Rangoon, I spot many Muslims, Muslims in Muslim headscarves and garb, and the Muslims move freely, mingle with Buddhists, and there’s a sense of coexistence.
The werewolf starts puffing on a hash pipe. “Fucking media,” grumbles the werewolf, smoke misting from his nostrils. “Fucking media only shows the bad stuff. Like Africa, all you hear of is wars, Darfur, Congo, and coup d’états. You’ll never hear about people going to a club, going to a birthday party…”
“It’s about more than fuel prices,” I assert, and I remember watching footage of protests from Rangoon, back in 2007. “The Saffron Revolution,” when monks walked miles and miles, barefoot, the monks’ feet bleeding as they lumbered through the city streets…
Then a bone-cold spasm shudders up my spine, and I almost want to throw my snakeskin boots into the sewer, in a sign of solidarity… Almost…
The werewolf’s arms are like long hairy snakes shooting from his shoulders as he flies a kite made of elephant bones. The bones have been painted crimson, and I’m not sure where or why or how he killed an elephant in the city, constructed an aerial contraption, last night, but I accept it.
We arrive at the Golden Dragon Pagoda and it is extraordinary. Its golden stupa is the size of a small building. It’s a triangle of solid gold with a spiraling tip that the werewolf says is an antenna, a beam to Buddha.
“But that much gold, what’s to stop someone from hacking off a chunk and running away?” I inquire. The werewolf gasps and scoffs. His stoic silence is practically a form of purgatory.
Slipping off my snakeskin cowboy boots at the entrance of the temple, the werewolf whispers that I need to take off my socks too. In Myanmar, the temples
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer require visitors to leave both their shoes and socks at the front gate. The werewolf avers that he once saw a Westerner refuse to take off his socks and get chased out of the temple by an angry mob of fist-pumping Buddhists.
Sort of like the “young monks,” an angry mob of Buddhists is hard for me to imagine. But I guess it’s a thing.
The paved grounds at the temple are baby skin smooth, gray as gravestones and white hot, truly sizzling in the tropical sun. The slick surfaces singe my feet, cooking my flesh, and I feel like I’m trotting on hot coals.
But the werewolf pays it no mind. His feet are hairy but appear tough, hardened.
He recounts the time in Mandalay when he climbed a sacred mountain, barefoot.
Tragically, however, he divulged that the mountain was littered with plastic bottles, candy bar wrappers, and empty bags of potato chips.
“So, you can’t wear shoes, but you can litter and muck up the holy mountain…” I shake my head and lament.
Hard for me to imagine anyone chucking a plastic water bottle into the bushes at a sacred site. But I guess it’s a thing.
After taking in the temple, we kick out to the crocodile farm. The werewolf’s kite lies in an open sewer, so we book a taxi via telekinesis, and the taxi falls gently from the sky. It’s a motorcycle with a sidecar, and its driver is a young ghost, a translucent figure, with bloody bullet-holes for eyes.
“A demonstrator from 1988,” claims the werewolf.
“It’s always sunny when you’re dead.”
We jump in the sidecar, and the motorcycle coughs to life, starts with a boom, like a gunshot, and we power forth, surging into a steel sea of traffic.
Initially I’m unnerved, but the ghost driver pilots the motorcycle with the skill of a Hollywood stuntman, and coolly slaloms and swings behind buses, shoots diagonally across lanes, blasts down narrow side streets and alleys, rips and does donuts around roundabouts, navigates the route with ease.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Soon we reach a residential area, by a lake, where there are scores of spacious estates, multi-bedroom houses with stucco roofs, swimming pools, manicured lawns, and classical Chinese style gardens.
The werewolf snorts, points a paw at the stately abodes. “The Tatmadaw. The meth-men. Those are their houses. That’s where the bastard generals live.”
“What would you rather be, a general, a rich man in an autocracy like Burma or Communist China, or a working stiff, clocking 70k a year, in a civilized country?”
the werewolf asks me, and I can’t grasp why this is a question.
My skin is slippery with sweat as arrive at the crocodile farm. The farm is a big green square, a gash in the tropical shrubbery. It’s fenced in by a towering protective wall constructed from broken glass, shards of smashed beer bottles.
The farm smells heavy over the humidity, like a soggy mix of shrimp and dirt.
I’d been suspecting the werewolf would want to free the crocodiles. “Crocodiles shouldn’t live in farms,” the werewolf scoffs. “It’s an affront,” he exclaims, biting his claws, leaning to the side of the motorcycle taxi’s sidecar. The werewolf had been sitting on my lap the whole drive over, his fluffy fur tickling at my face.
The young ghost driver slams on the brakes, rocking us forward and backward to a stop. Then he dismounts the bike, bends over, lifts his longyi, and digs out a submachine Uzi from his ass and then turns and aims the weapon at us, demands we flee, and refuses any act of monetary or moral compensation, shouting in broken English that he’s an anarchist and a philanthropist. We get the point and run away.
“See what happens when you don’t have access to social media mobs?” opines the werewolf as we leg it to the farm’s greenish glass gates.
I’d never thought an act of charity could end peacefully at the barrel of a gun. But I guess it’s a thing.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer At the crocodile farm, we visit cute little baby crocodiles, and the werewolf holds and hugs one. The baby crocodile has its mouth roped shut; but it’s so comfortable with the werewolf that I don’t believe it would ever bite him.
After visiting the baby crocodiles, we venture to visit the herd. There’s like 66
crocodiles here, in the farm, and they live in a manmade lake, a Florida-shaped peninsula of bleak brown water that has a raised wooden footpath, a long, thin, winding bridge, basically, running through the center of the lake, curving to a right angle and leading up to an observation deck, so that one can literally walk through the crocodiles, and then, literally, look down on them.
But, as soon as we step foot on the bridge and begin to cross through the crocodile lake, we recoil at how rickety the wooden bridge is. Not only is it rickety, but there are also scattered holes the size of suitcases in the bridge. Holes yawning and inviting one to stumble or plunge into the water maybe 15 feet below, ass into the crocodiles’ lair.
I’m amazed such a place this dangerous can even exist. I see a few Burmese, in the distance, on the elbow curve of the bridge; they’re thin and small and probably know their way about. Since they don’t weigh too much, they probably aren’t a threat to break through, but then I look at myself and the werewolf.
We’re both large, hairy mammals. I fear that any instant, we could both fall through this flimsy footbridge.
Then I see more Burmese have entered, are walking toward us, on the path. If we turn back, perhaps we’ll overweight the bridge, cause us all to crash through.
So, with no options, we trudge forward. Carefully. We slink around the holes. We avoid peeping down at the crocodiles, and, given his trembling and teeth chattering, it’s obvious the werewolf is terrified.
I never thought a werewolf could be scared. But I guess it’s a thing.
We arrive, by the grace of Buddha, at the stairs to the observation deck. Initially we’re relieved, but then we see that the stairs look perilous and are full of splinters and crooked nails.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The werewolf pauses. I hang my head over my shoulder, nod at him to come forward. But he’s frozen. I climb the creaky stairs, and yes, it’s unnerving, but I ascend quickly, reach the top and am relieved to discover that the upper observation deck appears more recent and in sturdy condition. There’s even an elevator exit.
Looking down to see the werewolf, he lifts his sad, hairy face, shakes his head. His nostrils twitch, his ears flick, and his eyes dart about. Then he turns, runs, and does a cannonball into the lake, landing with a splash, next to a clump of crocodiles. The crocodiles scurry away, appearing far more afraid of the werewolf than the werewolf was of them.
I never thought of crocodiles as fearful creatures. But I guess it’s a thing.
SHANGHAIED!!!!
一
I was flying into Shanghai for a business conference and still felt like shit from the giardia I contracted on the last leg of my hiking trip through Nepal.
Not to mention that I was shaken by the turbulent ride over the Himalayas, having watched the snowy peaks of the mountains, like a bed of nails below us, as the plane’s cabin violently shook, and passengers screamed.
The plane sliced in through the smog, and several people on board applauded as we touched down safely to Pudong Airport…
After immigration, collecting my bags, I caught a cab and we set off into the bustling Shanghai traffic, and I gazed out at the massive city state, its endless
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer series of structures that were so alive, all glowing and glimmering, flashing their night colors.
My driver’s bouffant hair bobbed in the bumpy ride. He leaned back and asked me directions and I told him I’d never been to Shanghai, didn’t know where my hotel was, aside from its name, location on GPS.
He cursed in a local Shanghai dialect that sounded more like Japanese. He looked pissed. It was the first time I’d been asked directions by a cab driver in a foreign country.
The cabbie suddenly pulled over, stopped in the breakdown lane of the highway.
Big beeping trucks whizzed by us. A scarlet Lamborghini careened inches away, at breakneck speed.
I handed the driver my phone. After a shouting match with my hotel’s front desk, he finally figured out the way...
We chugged into the city, into the Bund area, passed by the waterfront’s colonial architecture and nearby glittering glass towers, sprawling malls and department stores selling luxury brands.
Finally arriving at the hotel, a burgundy, art deco colossus, the bellboy met me and whisked away my bags.
When I greeted the front desk staff in Mandarin, a pony-tailed, rail-thin, post-college age girl in red/black hanfu replied to me in impeccable English. Her demeanor was gruff, her voice plangent, and her horn-rim glasses practically the size of grapefruits…
She averted eye contact, monotonously rattled off the breakfast buffet time, location, check out time, and handed me a key card, said the bags were already in the room.
After handing my passport back to me, with both hands, she pointed me in the direction of the elevator and returned to her phone.
“Service with a smile” wasn’t a thing at this hotel, like most of China, I surmised, but it was sort of pleasant, sometimes, how no one kissed your ass or gave a general fuck…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer On the 7th floor, I wandered through a cavernous hallway that was adorned with antique decor and Mondrian replicas and finally found my room, #721, and entered the fancy, compact, slightly dusty-smelling quarters.
The bed was queen-sized, with a comfy memory foam, super soft mattress- unlike the usual cement-style beds of Asia, and the furniture was a charming walnut color; the lamps, phones were vintage, 1930-esque.
The room’s only window, a single casement, next to the bed, led only to a direct view of the adjacent building’s red brick exterior.
I dumped my stuff. Got situated. The night was still young, and my stomach was growling for a better dinner than the microwave fare, beef noodle slop from the plane.
I went out, stopped by a tasty local restaurant, next door to the hotel, and had a sweet duck dish accompanied by steamed rice and stir-fried Cantonese cabbage.
As I clamped my chopsticks on the last few bits of crispy duck skin, I received a text from my coworker, Denny, who was also in town for the conference.
Ole’ Disco Denny, The Wildman, told me he’d just arrived and was headed to a bar and that I should meet him there.
Though my stomach was still queasy from the giardia, I didn’t want to waste my first night in Shanghai doing my quotidian routine of TV, book, sleep, so I decided to join him, hoping to maybe meet a local lady or that a shot or two of whisky down the gullet might kill off the rest of the virus in my guts...
二
It was November, so it had rained and gotten colder, damper, as time passed deeper into night, and walking out of the restaurant, my breath appeared like vaporous mist.
Appropriately, I selected “November Rain” from my playlist, blasted Slash’s glorious guitar into my earbuds and zipped up my leather jacket, stepped and
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer dodged through the masses of humanity in the streets, and I let Siri guide me to the subway.
There were 1.4 billion people in this country, and in places like Shanghai, it sure felt like that many…
Everywhere, there were people. People on every corner, in every building, every car, every bus, pretty much every inch of the city center had a person in or near it.
Most, like any metropolis, minded their business, hurried along, but I noticed an unusual number of obnoxious touts.
The touts mostly fell into two categories: either halfway decent looking young girls, speaking perfect English, on about trying local tea, or short, pushy, tacky dressed middle-aged guys, like gnomes, poking fake, gaudy watches in my face, grunting repeatedly, “Rolex, Rolex!”
These touts were practically the only people who paid attention to me, unlike other Chinese cities where simply being a foreigner rendered you a curiosity, a thing to be gawked at, taken pictures of, pointed at, yelled “hello” at, and basically considered a zoo animal.
I paid little attention to the touts, did my best to avoid eye contact, politely nodded “no” if we did lock eyes, and kept my earbuds firmly affixed...
Shanghai’s subway, despite being massively crowded, was impressive, state-of-the-art, almost futuristic, and it quickly carried me to the bar’s vicinity, which was only a few stops away.
Riding the escalator up to street level, I swiped through my GPS, located the bar, which turned out to be a restro-pub, in a gargantuan shopping center close by...
I rode up another escalator inside the shopping center, spotted my destination:
“Cowboys Bar and Grill.”
Walking in through the open, arched double doors, I noticed the place was packed. But I also picked up on something funny. There were no women there.
Only dudes. At first, I thought this was because of China’s gender disparity.
But scanning around, examining closer, I observed how all the guys were buff or at least in decent shape.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer They were mostly young, too, with well-trimmed hair, and dressed quite stylishly.
Gazing over at the walls, I saw posters of Madonna, Lady Gaga, Queen, Jason Momoa, and then, yes, a rainbow flag.
It was a gay bar.
Ah shit, I thought to myself. Probably wouldn’t meet a lady at this place.
I was surprised Denny had invited me here. He’d never struck me as gay, but I don’t have the best gaydar.
I’d known Denny to be a skirt-chasing maniac. Wait, was he maybe bi?
He was a prankster, though, always pulling gags in the office. Perhaps it was a joke?
I wasn’t sure, but I decided to take advantage of the “fabulous” drink special, slam a couple shots to finish off the virus, then have a stroll around the city, then head back to the hotel, creep online, probably jerk off to phone porn, the usual…
After draining a trio of Russian vodka shots, in rapid fire succession, and paying the African drag queen bartender, who’d winked at me several times, I texted Denny to see if he was at the bar. He replied with only a rainbow flag pic. Sneaky bastard!
Slightly crapulous, I decided to one up him, and I made a fake Grindr profile, with his pic, social media, and phone number, and I showed it to the drag queen bartender, asked her to post it on the bar’s Weibo page.
Figured Disco Denny Boy would have some interesting correspondences tonight…
三
The drag queen waved sentimentally, feigned heartbreak as I left, and on my way to the subway stop, I happened upon a massage place that looked legit and decided to get a leisurely rubdown.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The place was attached to a chain hotel and had the usual foyer, front counter that took your shoes, confirmed which package you’d like.
I chose oil.
A balding, shifty-eyed, runty 50ish man in gray “Guccci” sweatpants and sweatshirt led me up a flight of stairs, down a dingy hallway, into a KTV room.
“No, I wanted an oil massage, not karaoke,” I affirmed, but my words fell on deaf ears, and he scurried out.
I sat into the butterscotch brown leather couch in the center of the room, thinking perhaps another attendant would arrive to take me to the massage quarters.
But a second later, in slinked a very, very pretty young girl, maybe mid-20s, and slim, with catwalk legs…
The China Doll, the geisha white Asian beauty had sparkling sapphire lenses in her epicanthic eyes.
She was simply radiant in her black spandex miniskirt barely covering her pelvis.
And her white button-down blouse showcased a most yummy, spicy pair of round B-cup boobies!
This was some serious Kung Pao Pussy…
Her wavy, midnight mane was waist-length, parted to the left, and she swept it over her shoulder, sauntered towards me, like a kitten, her black pumps speaking with the cherry laminate flooring.
Wordlessly, she sat on my lap, crossed her black floral pattern pantyhose-sheathed legs, and wrapped her warm arms around me.
“What the fuck?” I thought to myself. Had I mistakenly come to a brothel?
I wasn’t sure what I’d gotten myself into. But I certainly knew where I wanted to get into...
“You have pretty eye,” the mysterious Geisha said to me, in a sultry voice. Her breath had a whiff of fruity candy to it.
“How about the other eye?” I quipped, wondering if my humor would land. But it didn’t. And she just quizzically stared at me for a second, like I was an asshole.
Sarcasm and plurals don’t usually translate well into the Chinese syntax.
Geisha licked her dark red, wide lips, leaned in and pecked me, and then backed away and timidly giggled.
I leaned towards her, pecking her softly. Her gem-like eyes widened with an expression of shock, and she shifted her gaze, for a split second, staring down at the floor, as if mired in trepidation, but then she swiveled her face back to mine and replied by kissing me again- this time slipping in her tongue.
And we were going at it, tongue-punching, sloppy, nasty, wet and wild smooching, tickling tonsils…
Hard to complain about snogging a yellow chick this smoking hot, but her kissing technique needed improvement; it was callow, far too aggressive.
I attempted to guide her with gentler, more romantic motions, lighter dips and dashes, but it was in vain, and I relented, matched her ferocity, reckless abandon, and then slipped my hand up into her blouse, over her microfiber, wireless bra, teasing and squeezing on her fantastic, pert little honey tits.
I broke our kiss, laid the Geisha Girl on the couch, hiked up her skirt, and marveled at her T-string thong panties, which were jet black, had strings like dental floss, and I gulped when I caught sight of one of her dark pink pussy lips poking out the V…
My cock was calescent, and it bulged, hardened stiff as cement. The Geisha reached up and lightly patted my tumescent little brother, over my jeans, and smiled approvingly, devilishly.
I reached down to yank her panties off, free her vagina, but my hands froze at the sight of another woman entering the room.
Sadly, it was not another super-hot chick. It was an older, frumpy cow with a bowl-cut hairdo. An obese Auntie in an aqua blue velvet jumpsuit.
The fat fucking bitch was angry, too, and ugly as a dragon...
Not sure if I was mistakenly molesting the bossbitch’s daughter, I relented my perving, sat back into the couch. I felt like a naughty schoolboy.
The Auntie appeared happier, seeing that I’d taken my hands away from the chick’s pussy.
The Geisha smiled at the Auntie, then looked and smiled at me, fixed her skirt and sat her hot tight ass onto my lap, its heat blanketing, grinding into my erection.
Giggling, Geisha hugged me and ran her fingers through my hair…
The Auntie plopped down next to us, the couch shaking, squeaking as she sat into it, and with a Cheshire grin, she said “hello” and told me that I looked like a white Drake. Given her age, nationality, I was surprised she even knew who that was.
Auntie spoke English quite well and asked me lots of questions, about my job, salary, where I was from, where I was staying. I lied in all my answers. I told her my name was Charles Bukowski and I was a police officer from Kansas City, visiting Shanghai before a cruise.
I thought that saying I was a cop might put her off, do away with whatever funny business might be about to go down. Maybe she’d go away and let me return to molesting the Mystery Geisha.
But it didn’t seem to make a difference, and while I spoke with the Auntie, with Mystery Geisha’s tight ass burning into my lap, an impish, 50ish bucktooth motherfucker, in a tacky suit, like a caricature of a British butler, brought in several trays of drinks, food, and then ducked out the room quickly.
Noticing the food, not wanting it, not having ordered it and not having a good feeling about where things were going, my dick shriveled like a frightened turtle, and I cut short the convo with Auntie.
“I didn’t order that food. Um, I think I’ll go now…” I said, as I politely loosened and lowered the Geisha from off me and got up from the leather sofa.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Right as my knees straightened, a trio of pissed off dudes burst in, the three assholes in a triangle formation. One up front, two behind.
The frontman was 30ish and effete, dressed in tight-fitting bright blue slacks and a hot pink polo shirt.
The other two wore the same Guccci sweatsuits as the front counter guy, but they were younger and far taller, bigger and rougher- between the two of them they probably didn’t have a full set of teeth.
The effeminate one, Pink Shirt, slipped me a handwritten bill for 2100 RMB.
About $300.
The Auntie and Geisha Girl promptly left the room smirking.
Watching Geisha’s pear-shaped ass as she girlishly stepped away, I knew heartbreak…
Pink Shirt had an angry scowl, but, given how thin he was, and seeing his tight, loud-colored clothes, and then noticing he had a man-bun, it was hard to take him seriously.
I wasn’t sure what pissed me off more. The man-bun or the bullshit bill.
“You pay for food!” Pink Shirt proclaimed, as menacingly as he could.
The other two goons, who didn’t look like they couldn’t fight, stood blocking the doorway, making their best war-faces too.
Ah shit, here it was. I was being Shanghaied!
五
I evaluated my options.
A: Do I pay them, which would encourage them to continue their nefarious deeds?
Fuck no!
B: Do I call the police?
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer In China?! Yeah right! There’s no rule of law in China! These assholes probably ARE police officers or are paying off, drinking buddies with, or cousins of the coppers.
C: Do I try to fight them?
Well, I’m in decent shape, was an amateur boxer many moons ago.
BUT, if I beat them down, I go to jail, wind up like Wendell Brown... Even though there were three of them, it’d probably be easy to fuck them up. Contrary to popular Western belief, very few Chinese, in China, nowadays, know Kung Fu, or have ever been in a real fight.
BUT, if they did know Kung Fu, went Jackie Chan on my ass, I’d get my face smashed, get robbed, go to the hospital, pay extortionate medical bills, and maybe ALSO go to jail, all of which would totally suck.
Lose-Lose, Option C.
So, I chose Option D.
Buy time…
“Hey,” I pleaded, “I’m really sorry, guys. But I don’t have that sorta money on me.
I’m a tourist. I don’t have that Ali- thingamajig.
“I really don’t want any trouble. Look, let’s go out by the subway station. There’s an ATM. I’ll pay you in cash,” I promised, speaking as conciliatorily as I could, holding my arms in the air as if the goons were cops pointing guns.
Then, without warning, without calculation, I ripped a thunderclap of a fart, a giardia, rotten egg stinker.
The three recoiled, covered and held their noses, retched and shook their heads in disgust. I thought the stink might paralyze them, allow me time to make a run for it, escape, but after the initial impact, they regrouped and hastily gathered their minds.
They spoke amongst each other in their local dialect. I couldn’t understand any of it. One of the ruffians seemed to have objections, was loudly motioning at me, yelling something, but Pink Shirt overruled him.
“Okay. We take you.” Pink Shirt said, nodding me towards the door.
The three assholes allowed me to pass, followed closely behind me. Walking down the hallway, I saw the Geisha Girl, two other pretties and Auntie sitting at a green felt table, smoking cigarettes, laughing and playing mahjong.
Shit, at least I kissed her, felt her up, saw her pussy lip, I thought, consoling myself...
I wanted my shoes, my Air Jordan 1 Low Laser Blues, but Pink Shirt wouldn’t let me have them. The man-bun fuck!
“You get shoe after you pay,” he growled, and pointed me to the door, and I stepped out into the cold wet misty night wearing flip-flop type slippers with no socks.
The three following behind me, I knew it was time to make my move.
I stopped, arched my ass directly at them and let out another violent, effluvial fart.
The noxious burst of gas temporarily stunned them, and I kicked off my slippers and tore off running, into the crowded street, dodging and shoving by masses of people, nearly knocking over a little pajama wearing dancing granny, who shrieked loudly after I bumped into her.
The three fucks gave chase, but I was faster, and I knew I had to ditch them quickly or else they might catch up or enlist the help of a cop who’d surely take their side in the matter.
I ran into the road, alongside traffic, and the road’s surface, the bitumen, felt gentler and warmer than that of the rough sidewalk.
WHHHHHHHHIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIRRRRRRRRRRRRRR was all I heard, and BAM, an e-bike slammed into me.
The driver, a deliveryman, and I, in tandem, collapsed, crashed to the ground, and the food in a plastic bag hanging from the handlebar of his bike- rice, veggies, mystery meat- went splashing into and over the asphalt like a modern art painting.
The trio chasing me, upon seeing the accident, stopped and stood panting and wheezing, frowned at me and briskly walked off in the other direction.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer It was then the adrenaline receded, and a massive surge of pain rushed over me.
I looked down and saw my right leg bent out of shape, grotesquely, a fucking Gordon Hayward.
Cars in the vicinity drove by, honking, as I lay there.
The deliveryman, not seriously hurt, at least not like me, nothing broken, I guess, got up, dusted off his mustard yellow jumpsuit, slid up his helmet’s visor and cursed at me, picked up his bike and zoomed off.
People nearby took pics with their phones. Many stood and stared.
Grimacing, I fished out my phone from my jean pocket and called the conference organizer, told her I’d been in a traffic accident, sent her my GPS coordinates.
She said she’d call an ambulance, and I dragged myself to the curb, sat and waited, pissed about getting Shanghaied, pissed about breaking my leg, losing my Jordans, and pissed I couldn’t bang the Geisha.
The only thing that gave me any solace was thinking of Denny’s Grindr profile and hoping he’d be getting sent dick pics and shit…
A JUMP TO HEAVEN’S GATE
一
Taylor was born and raised in Grayson, Kentucky, a rural, scenic little town with a population of about 4,000.
He’d had a fairly typical small-town American life, was handsome, outgoing and popular and played wide receiver on the football team in high school. He’d dreamed of playing in the NFL, being a superstar athlete, marrying a supermodel, or marrying his namesake, Taylor Swift, Taylor & Taylor… Oh, he could see them, hand in hand, walking on a glistering beach, under a crimson sun, their names written in the sand… Taylor & Taylor…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer He’d marry Taylor Swift, and he’d be making millions, playing in the NFL, breaking all of Jerry Rice’s receiving records. He’d be on TV commercials. He’d be somebody. Somebody GREAT. That was his dream…
But that dream didn’t pan out, and his varsity teams stumbled to losing records, didn’t even qualify for the playoffs, and he wasn’t recruited by any colleges, and his grades weren’t high enough to earn him any scholarships.
Aside from football, it was largely parties and girls that occupied his time in high school, not too much else. Books had never been a priority.
However, he had developed an interest in science, and became infatuated with the field of neuroscience, obsessed with the idea of him becoming a world-renown neuroscientist, having taken a shine to the topic after watching a few Sam Harris YouTube videos.
After enrolling at Eastern Kentucky University and failing to make the team as a walk-on, he completed his bachelor’s in pre-med (with a minor in frat parties, binge-drinking). Upon receiving his diploma, though, he again didn’t have the grades for a scholarship to med school and went further into debt as he struggled through a neuroscience PhD program at his alma mater and worked part-time stocking shelves at Walmart.
His drinking, which had been a weekend, party thing through high school and college, became an everyday thing for him. He’d begun drinking his coffee splashed with Jameson Irish whiskey, shotgunning 3 or 4 Busch beers with lunch, and pounding 6 or 7 shots of Jack Daniels or Old Crow or Jim Beam bourbon alongside dinner.
Despite his heavy alcohol intake, he was functional, never getting too buzzed where he couldn’t show up to school or work, get his tasks done, though the quality of his PhD research, papers was erratic, and he’d regularly be involved in shouting matches, sometimes shoving and in minor physical altercations with coworkers at Walmart, but nothing severe enough to warrant termination.
After eking out his thesis, completing his PhD, his dissertation, his defense, which he considered to be a work of unapparelled genius, an ingenious work severely misunderstood and maligned by his advisors, Taylor packed his belongings into garbage bags, crammed all his stuff into the trunk and backseat of his blue Ford
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Focus, and drove from Richmond to Louisville to seek work and fulfil his dream of being a famous academic or a wealthy researcher or highly regarded scientist at a multinational corporation. But, to his chagrin, he had trouble finding ANY work in academics or research. At all.
He lacked work experience in the neuroscience field, yet he had just graduated, and many employers wanted a candidate with prior work experience.
This infuriated him. How was he supposed to have 2 or 3 years of work experience when he’d spent the last few years completing his studies? It was indeed quite the conundrum…
The job search left him with a sour taste, and soon he’d developed a disdain for his country, America.
His whole life his parents, teachers, the TV told him of the virtues of a college education and that once he had a diploma in his hand, then he’d have a great job, a house, wife, kids, picket fence, et cetera.
And he’d done that.
Yet here he was, with a fucking PhD, and still no one was giving him an opportunity. No one was giving him shit, and door after door slammed in his face, application after application was rejected, and no one seemed to recognize the brilliance of the online research he’d done and published on his blog and spoken of on his YouTube channel, which had nearly THREE HUNDRED subscribers…
Further and further he sank into credit card debt, trying to simply pay his rent, car, buy food, and his debt compounded, started piling high as a Himalayan mountain-this on top of the six figure sum he already owed in student loans.
Shit…
It made him more and more bitter every day.
It wasn’t only the economics of America, it not being the meritocracy he thought.
He also hated the atmosphere, the political correctness, the bickering, the Twitter battles, the liberals and conservatives whining at each other while people like him barely made end’s meat. It was gross. It was stupid. What had this great country become?
Fed up, Taylor began to look elsewhere, look eastward, far east, to China.
China was the next great superpower, he posited. It was inevitable, with its large population, 600 million strong middle class, its manufacturing base and high-tech society and bullet trains he’d seen on YouTube videos.
He marveled at China’s ever-expanding economy and ingenuity and admired how the government of China got things done. How the people there were so united, so together, had such purpose. China reminded him of America back in the 1950s, when the country really was great.
Taylor had read online of the abundance of work, business and financial opportunities in China and began to study Mandarin.
He started applying to jobs at companies and think tanks, thinking he’d be highly prized, considering his PhD, but all he could find was work teaching English, mostly at training centers and public schools, and many of those jobs consisted of singing songs, dancing and playing games with children, which wasn’t for him, someone of his abilities and education.
Initially he was disappointed, but his spirits lifted when he came across a job for a position at a university near Beijing.
The job was for a “university lecturer”, and while it consisted mostly of teaching conversational English classes, it did offer possibilities of “research” and grant money for projects. Taylor figured it could be a gateway to bigger and better things and sort of liked the idea of being a “college lecturer.” It sounded very distinguished. Surely, he’d be highly respected.
After a brief Skype interview, in which he was asked only a couple basic questions about himself, he was hired, sent a contract.
The work visa process for a “Z Visa” was a pain in the ass, cost him nearly $700 in assorted fees, but he thought of the old adage, “It takes money to make…” and he sucked it up, went further into debt, deeper down the hole after shelling out an additional $1000 for his plane ticket.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Finally, though, after 2 months, he had secured his visa and boarded a plane, for the first time ever, and sat squished into the middle seat, in coach, and flew from Louisville to Beijing, on four connecting flights, for a total of 6,853 miles and 28
hours, crossing clouds, mountains, oceans and timelines, on a preternatural journey to begin his new life…
三
Despite seeing videos, pictures online, Beijing was nothing like he could have imagined. It was colossal and awe-inspiring in a way that was almost like prestidigitation. He was overwhelmed, speechless as he groggily walked through and out of the sprawling, shiny new Beijing airport.
He then boarded a lemon-yellow cab, handed the cagey flattop driver a slip of paper with the school’s address and buckled up as they roared off into the brownish dusk, en route to his school.
Taylor whiplashed and shook with the vehicle as the driver tore through the city streets and highways like a bat out of hell. Panning his jetlagged gaze around in the backseat of the cab, he couldn’t believe how many people there were in Beijing, people in such massive clusters, swarming and teeming everywhere and anywhere, streets, roads, buses, buildings, everything peopled, jam-packed, huddled masses, bunched in, packed like sardines, fucking swimming, brimming, spilling oceans of humanity. There were probably more humans on one city block, bus or subway train than in the entirety of his hometown.
(These Chinese people must really be horny and fuck a lot, he pondered. How else could there be such masses of them…)
Beijing city went on for infinity and was eclectic, varying the spectrum from battered weather-worn gray blocks of Soviet style apartments that sat directly adjacent to ritzy high-rises, and towering glass office buildings, KFCs, shopping malls and supertall skyscrapers situated next to squarish traditional Chinese homes, Hutongs and pagodas and slanted roof Asian temples, the city a truly extensive mix, a striking contrast of old and new.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Taylor’s eyes lit up when he thought he spotted a UFO. But it was in fact a circular black drone that whirred by his taxi’s window and soared off and sliced into the gray haze of the chunky sky, and Taylor sat enthralled, his head cocked back, staring out at the cityscape full of flickering neon glows from endless rows of immense structures, the city’s dusky radiance like something from a sci-fi movie…
It was truly mesmerizing for him, a small-town kid, to arrive in such a dizzying, bustling metropolis… I mean, he’d been to New York City once, but this was another thing altogether, a place this alien, busy, populated and massive…
For the first time in his life, he felt like he was on the verge of greatness. For the first time, he felt like somebody, and he thought of his classmates from high school, still in his hometown, still at the same DQ. Those nobodies still not doing shit. If only they could see him now! He was in fucking CHINA!
四
His university was on the city’s satellite outskirts, Beijing’s never-ending, expansive edge. The campus in what used to be a farming community that was becoming urbanized, developed. Along the roads were tiny lots growing vegetables and ramshackle tin houses and restaurants, small groceries, street side vendors and boxy crumbling concrete buildings.
On nearly every street were newly built mobile phone stores, at least one or two phone stores per block.
Red banners and Chinese flags hung from nearly all buildings, and there were giant billboards featuring Chairman Xi smiling and PLA soldiers saluting at nearly every intersection.
The most prevalent thing, though, in the area had to be the construction.
Construction on a scale Taylor couldn’t have exactly imagined.
There were half empty, half torn down, half constructed, newly constructed and about to be constructed structures situated on each street. There were newly built, mostly empty houses, office buildings, office parks, schools, stores, and some of the stores had fake “Starbucks” signs plastered on their fronts and mannequins standing inside the vacant buildings.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Constant cavalcades of mud-caked construction vehicles, semitrucks rumbled around every road, their tailpipes belching big black clouds of fumes that floated and dissolved upwards. The trucks drove furiously, honking their horns at one another, with purpose.
The trucks’ cargo rattled like storms and the trucks’ clangor bled into and mixed with the ubiquitous construction sites’ drilling, the clanking of heavy machinery, and the two harmonized, sounded a mechanical din.
The half torn up buildings and rubble all around first reminded Taylor of a tornado hit town, but the gray skies and ocher dust and local people in ratty clothes and facemasks sort of gave the place a Mad Max vibe…
五
The university was nice, though. Like a little oasis amid the bipolar fracas of construction and decay.
The campus was green, with many willow and poplar trees, lush foliage, violet and pink flowers dotted about its sprawling grounds.
The buildings appeared sleek and modern, Taylor thought, at first, while being given a tour of the campus by the middle-aged gruff admin lady who’d received him upon his arrival to campus, the lady’s lips not moving much as she spoke and her conservative, long gray pleated dress and her bowl-haircut, her bottle size eyeglasses reminding him of a Mormon, or a cult member…
Peering, looking closer into the buildings, though, as they walked briskly, Taylor discovered that many were empty or half-built inside... The school was only 10
years old and still developing, he figured, like the surrounding area, like anything, really; it was a work in progress…
At least his apartment, on the far edge of the campus, was, well, suitable. It was a basic but clean, spacious 2 bedroom on an upper floor of an 18 storey building.
But it had a few issues…
It as well looked a lot more posh on the outside than it was inside, its outside like a tall red-brick building, maybe a hotel or condo; but its inside had wires hanging
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer from the ceilings in the hallways, and the hallways weren’t lit at night, one needed to use a flashlight to navigate the corridors, and the elevator kinda freaked him out because it still had peeling plastic wrappings on its inside walls and was plastered with ad stickers and graffiti scrawled about and phone numbers written randomly about the elevator car’s silver metal walls.
The elevator also had a persistent odor of secondhand smoke as security guards from the building, as well as Chinese university teachers, would smoke cigarettes in the elevators, and hallways, too. There were often cigarette butts strewn, stubbed out on the elevator floor.
(Fire hazards had always freaked him out, and the fire hoses in the hallways didn’t appear functional, and where a fire extinguisher was supposed to be encased, in a glass box, next to the elevators, there sat only a 1-liter plastic bottle filled with water… It unnerved Taylor, but the building was built of concrete and likely less flammable, or so he hoped…)
The building’s construction was sorta scary too. Although the apartment building was newly built, there were several cracks, fissures running up the walls in Taylor’s apartment, which he hoped were only superficial, those cracks.
The furniture, especially the bed, was hard and uncomfortable. Buying several additional pillows, cushions, and a bed mat, helped.
The road next to the apartment complex was a two lane highway, and it was a bit annoying, with semitrucks and construction vehicles barreling down it, at all hours, and the trucks would constantly pop jake brakes and blare, honk, and beep high decibel horns at one another and at every other vehicle nearby.
Earphones, earplugs, and a white noise app helped with the beeping from the trucks, but the sounds were so high-pitched, they could still be heard slightly…
What’s more, Taylor had several bouts of diarrhea upon moving to China, nearly once or twice a week, having loose sloppy shits or other stomach issues, and he quickly developed breathing problems, too, chronic coughs likely attributable to air pollution in the area, the air leaving layers of brownish dust that coated everything in his apartment, especially out on his balcony, the dust stubbornly present and persistent, no matter how much or how often he cleaned.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Still, despite the flaws, his life in China was an improvement, a big step up from Walmart and the shithole apartments he’d lived in, with their paper-thin walls and bowing ceilings that squeaked and squealed like a pig being slaughtered. Even the slight rattle and squeal of the honking trucks was better than hearing that neighbor lady’s baby’s shrieking and crying or the young couple who were always screaming and cursing at each other, and for sure better than hearing and smelling his last roommate’s farts.
And it was WAY better, too, than the double-wide he’d grown up in.
For the first time in his life he was able to live alone, with no family or roommates.
He finally had a bathroom all to himself.
Best of all, the apartment, utilities were free, so he couldn’t complain, and he enjoyed that he was the only foreign teacher at his school, the attention it gave him, how tall it made him feel, and he loved his light, 10 hour per week schedule teaching classes of docile Chinese students, most of whom just slept or played on phones while he stood at his podium, reading from the class textbook or from a university provided PowerPoint.
Upon reaching China, Taylor was so elated, so high on the country, he barely drank, cutting back to a beer or two, maybe, at night, sometimes not drinking anything for the first time since high school. Of course, it did help, too, that the local beer tasted like piss and the national hard liquor, baijiu, tasted like foot fungus sieved through a stinky sock.
Taylor found himself enjoying his semi-sobriety, was sleeping far better at night and had gone down a couple pant sizes.
Life was good. He was in China! He was out in the world. He was a man of the world. An international traveler. A somebody. He was finally on his way to doing something, something great!
六
One of the best parts of his job was living on campus and not having to drive or own a car. Not needing a car was a blessing. He was saving tons of cash not having to pay for gas, insurance, maintenance, and all the other shit car owners
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer get raped for, and he finally was earning enough money to pay off a portion of his student debt.
Thanks to his light teaching hours, he had enough time to study Mandarin, and was at it, diligently, swiftly becoming much more conversant, discovering he had a flair for the language, its syntax, characters and tones coming naturally to him.
Perhaps he’d been Marco Polo in a previous life…
With his rapid rate of improvement, his linguistic skills were soon up to snuff, and he’d decided to venture out, see the local sights. But, after the lengthy trip via bullet train and several subway stops, Taylor’d been dismayed to discover that Sanlitun, and most of the expat bars, foreign restaurants in Beijing had either been shut down or had gone out of business.
“Where were all the expats, the parties?” he pondered. The few expats he did encounter on the streets looked paranoid, with eyes of shit, or they looked dead, more like zombies than humans, walking hollow with thousand-yard stares…
Beijing turned out to be far more boring as a city than he expected, no parties or much going on. There were police everywhere, many in riot gear, and he’d been stopped twice by the police, randomly at subway stations, to have his passport checked, questioned like a criminal on his comings and goings.
He left disappointed. He decided to stick more around his local area and be more adventurous, have a “real China” experience. Fuck those walking dead expats and fascist cops in Beijing. He’d learn more Chinese, anyway, talking to Chinese people.
Inspired after seeing a video on YouTube by a South African guy called Winston, who’d explored China via motorcycle, Taylor decided to do a bit of the same and bought a secondhand motorcycle from a Chinese coworker, a short guy with a weirdly sloped forehead, and Taylor excitedly strapped on a Nazi SS style helmet he’d gotten along with the bike and revved up the engine and set out to explore the local village near the school, riding off feeling like he was Indiana Jones.
七
To Taylor’s surprise, even in the village, there were security cameras everywhere, several, atop poles, on every block, cameras attached to buildings, cameras
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer hanging from bridges. He wondered what could be happening here in the outskirts to warrant such surveillance…
Also, to his surprise, he discovered the local townspeople weren’t very welcoming of foreigners. Whereas his students or the city dwellers were either friendly, polite, or at worst apathetic, those in the village, stared and pointed at him like he was a zoo animal, and many gave him dirty looks, were passively aggressive, and one toothless old man in raggedy blue slacks and blazer spit at him, shook his fist and yelled something about “Panmunjom!”
After hearing the old man curse at him, and understanding a few things the locals had said about his personal appearance (him being fat, having a big nose) he started to regret learning Chinese…
He tried not to let it upset him, thinking it must be similar to America, how in hicktowns, parts of hillbilly Kentucky, people were ugly and racist but in big cities like Louisville, or metropolises like New York City, LA people were more educated and way cooler, generally. It’s probably like that anywhere, China included, he thought.
And he wouldn’t let it faze him anymore, dammit!
Dammit, he was going to make this work, score a high-paying job in Shanghai or Beijing, and he became even more determined to study Chinese, and his learning only accelerated, being immersed in it like he was, and shortly he knew enough characters to partially read newspaper articles, and he began reading news sites on the Chinese internet.
What he saw, though, online, on the Chinese internet, shocked him. Nearly every other national news article was about America or Japan. About how those countries were conspiring to fuck over China somehow, preparing for war, or attempting to steal an island or other territory, not just Taiwan, which Mainland Chinese had long thought belonged to them and demanded to have returned from America, but the Mainland Chinese also claimed several tiny islands belonging to other countries, as well as a huge chunk of international seas.
He’d noticed the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua (which translated almost to
“Newspeak”) paid special attention to America’s failings, especially mass shootings, religiously reporting any shooting in America, which might have been
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer the reason why so many of his students asked him if in America “everyone has a gun.”
As a person who’d become disillusioned and bitter with America, he didn’t mind shitting on it, himself, but to be off in a faraway land, and to discover how openly hostile the Chinese State media was towards his country of origin, really gave him a sick feeling.
Having researched China’s economy, he’d seen how America and Japan were China’s largest trading partners and how much foreign investment in China had lifted so many out of poverty. It boggled his mind that a country so dependent and such a beneficiary of global trade would have such antipathy for the nations it conducted trillions of dollars of trade with…
But his mind was really thrown for a loop when he read the online comments that followed the articles.
Open hatred, venom towards America and open calls from Chinese netizens for America to be attacked, for war, for American cities to be nuked.
Outright racist language against foreigners, especially blacks, which was befuddling considering how much the Chinese were into the NBA. And it wasn’t only a few nutjobs spewing such bigotry, it was thousands upon thousands of comments, endless streams of racist posts, none of which were censored or deleted, the whole thing making even a guy from Kentucky cringe.
Again, Taylor thought that maybe this was just trolls or idiots like on YouTube videos’ comments or freakish right-wing extremists like Breitbart. He again figured he wouldn’t find a lot of those people in a big city like Beijing or Shanghai, and that’s where he’d go anyway and where he’d do amazing things after he’d learned enough Chinese.
He was going to land a job at a big Chinese company, make fistfuls of cash, live the “Chinese Dream.” Nothing would stop him.
Every morning, he’d eat breakfast listening to Chinese language learning videos; afternoons were spent upping his calligraphy skills, sitting perched over his desk, with his pen to paper, copying Chinese characters, attuned to their radicals and strokes. And every evening, he’d spend hours reading Chinese children’s books,
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer reading the pinyin, perfecting and practicing his tones, and then afterwards he’d have conversations with himself in the mirror, saying what he knew or learned that day or reading his learning exercises, dialogues aloud.
And his life got even better when he met a girl, one of his students, called “Apple”, a petite, dark-skinned Han Chinese lovely from Gansu province. The raven-haired beauty with a slender body, moon face, crooked smile and sexy librarian glasses.
Apple spoke excellent English, which helped their courtship bloom, and she soon enough became Taylor’s first serious girlfriend.
He’d been having her over to his apartment, and, after only a couple weeks, she was living with him there…
Taylor imagined marrying her, taking her to Beijing. Them in a ritzy high-rise.
Them with kids. Him making fistfuls of cash, speaking perfect Mandarin and working his way up to being a high ranking executive at a company that bought other companies and shit like that. Him on a private jet… Him featured on Chinese TV… Him living his Chinese Dream…
But that whole narrative took a different turn.
When a virus appeared in Wuhan…
八
It started off as an obscure story he saw posted in a China expat group online.
A mysterious pneumonia that’d broken out in Wuhan, near a “wet” market, a market selling live animals for slaughter.
He’d written it off, initially, thinking it was no big deal. There often were small-scale viral breakouts in China, especially related to food, food poisoning. But then, this one, of course, turned out differently, and it snowballed, became an epidemic, and nearly the whole of China, including his area of Beijing, was swiftly locked down; the country transformed into a 1-billion-person prison.
Forced to stay in his apartment, 23 and a half hours per day (allowed out only for a necessary trip to the campus grocery store or for takeout from the cafeteria),
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer and on some days not allowed out at all, made to stay inside for 24 hours a day, his apartment started to seem smaller and smaller, the walls closing in on him.
His girlfriend was forced to leave sooner than anticipated and was removed, in tears, by campus police because she wasn’t registered to live in the domicile.
After she returned home, she came clean to her parents about her relationship with Taylor, and her father mercilessly beat and slapped her, bloodying her nose and threatening to kill her if she made him lose any more face and commanding her to never see that “white trash” again...
Losing his girlfriend was a true punch in the dick, and Taylor plunged hard into despair. He missed her deeply, his Apple, her soft touch, her smell, the egg-fried rice she’d cooked him, and how she’d warmed his bed at night, the way her little feet tickled at his legs underneath the sheets…
Losing his Apple, along with the malaise of being locked down pretty much 24/7, led Taylor back to the bottle, in a severe way, after Taylor discovered that although it tasted like wet shit, baijiu was super high in alcohol content and got him sloppy ass drunk.
Not only was his personal life fucked, but things across China deteriorated diplomatically when a theory was put forth, espoused not just by a freak on the internet, but by foreign ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian, that the virus was brought to China, purposely, to destroy China, by the US military, and all over China, foreigners were targeted, fired from jobs, evicted from apartments (videos emerged of Africans in Guangzhou forcibly removed from their homes, turned homeless, made to sleep rough), and foreigners were stigmatized, refused entry into grocery stores, and there were scattered reports of violent attacks against foreigners in China.
The hatred, incitement towards foreigners in China that was typically only online, priorly, was now spilling into the public space.
So Taylor, sipping on baijiu, decided it was time to bounce, at least for the time being, and put his China Dream on hold.
Several neighboring Asian countries had already closed their borders to foreigners, and flights back to America were few and far between or outrageously pricey, but
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Taylor did see that Thailand was still open. Plenty of flights going there, even as China had been locked down.
Taylor booked a ticket and boarded a half-full plane to Bangkok, feeling like an escaped convict as he passed through the airport full of police in facemasks and medical personnel in spacesuits.
九
When Taylor arrived in Bangkok, he wondered why he hadn’t been there the whole time.
There was sun, palm trees, and smoking hot babes everywhere, with bigger tits and asses, and the place was sunny, relaxed, and unlike most of the Chinese, who only talked with their faces, the Thais smiled and were friendly, genuinely so, without being simpering, and even people working at 7-Eleven spoke English fluently or knew enough English to get by.
There were foreigners, bars, parties everywhere, and the foreigners there weren’t zombies like in Beijing. They were fucking chill and there to have fun, and on his first night he’d hooked up with a Heidi-looking German backpacker girl he met at the airport and they had a wild and kinky fuck, a perfect rebound fuck… The Euro-chick letting him do things no other girl would…
Seriously, why hadn’t he been here all along? he wondered over a breakfast slice of pizza from 7-Eleven.
But then he started looking around at teaching jobs in Thailand, disappointingly discovering that the overabundance of existing foreigners, the sagging Thai economy and hordes of cheaper Filipino teachers had resulted in pittance wages, many teaching jobs in Thailand offering only around $700 to $1000 per month and requiring far longer hours than he’d been working.
Looking at the job ads online sent him into a rage. Like, $1000 a month? For someone as smart as him? $1000 a month? For a doctor of neuroscience? For a PhD? Fuck that! That wasn’t him. He’d wait out the situation in China. He could still go to Shanghai, make tons of money. This pandemic will pass. Someone would find a cure. Things would simmer down…
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer But he found there would be no fast fix, and that the situation in China for foreigners just got worse and worse, with more reports of violence and discrimination and soon enough, foreigners were banned from entering China, indefinitely, even those with residence permits and work permits.
Then the coronavirus spread to Thailand, not as severely as other nations, though still enough to close most non-essential businesses.
With nowhere to go, nothing to do, not able to afford a flight back to America, Taylor began to sink deeper into desolation.
Confined to his $7 per night, windowless room in a rundown guesthouse near Khao San Road, he was drinking more than ever.
He’d become afraid of sleep, afraid of the recent nightmare cycle that’d plagued him, the nightmares of naked women in surgical masks brandishing kitchen knives, the naked women chasing him through Jewish graveyards, the graveyards with mutilated tiger carcasses hanging by nooses from fir trees…
To avoid the strong arms of sleep he’d take Yaba pills and spend much of his time at night alone up on the silvered roof of his guesthouse, his limbs feeling heavy, and there he’d smoke cigarettes, and gulp red bull mixed with rum, and he’d sit slouched on a plastic stool, watching cockroaches, lizards, rats in the alley below, how they scurried up and down the pastel ledges and angles and crevices of the neighboring buildings, the dilapidated buildings.
The buildings that were nothing but stacks of boxes and levels and open doors and windowsills. And he’d stare out at the flapping clothes hanging humid, hanging over the iron bars, cages over the windows.
And he’d sniff at the mélange of Bangkok’s scents, the fried noodles, the acrid diesel exhaust, and there, on that roof, he’d listen to his ghosts and to the screaming motorbikes passing the void…
十
The four walls of his tiny guesthouse room started to close in on him like his apartment had before.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The white of the paint was all he could see.
Though he wasn’t sure he’d ever return to China, he kept up his Chinese studies, if nothing else out of obstinance and spite, and he would try to have conversations again with the mirror. But it was useless. Staring at his reflection, his face was either distorted or stiff as a mask, and its lines, especially those on his forehead, told of age.
To study Chinese, he’d mostly been reading Chinese news, avoiding the politically charged stuff, virus stuff and comment sections and had looked into more local news articles and had been developing a fixation with traffic accidents, of which there were a daily deluge, a consistent supply…
Car accidents. Bus accidents. Buses plunging into rivers. Cars hitting pedestrians.
Trucks sideswiping motorcyclists. The accidents involving motorcyclists were the most spectacular, the combination of high speeds and velocity, the motorcycle riders being propelled, flying acrobatically, high into the air, crashing into somersaults on the pavement, their forms ending contorted and crushed and twisted like blood and bone pretzels.
There were thousands of such videos on the Chinese internet, many featuring musical accompaniment, usually racy classical music, and Taylor would spend his hours watching them on endless loops.
Drinking about a 70 cl bottle of Thai whiskey or rum per day, for the first time, Taylor thought of killing himself. Ending it all. And once he thought of suicide, he stopped fearing sleep, and he found he’d been enjoying his slumber, having pleasant dreams, again in the graveyards, but these dreams were of sunny days in graveyards, of himself naked, himself walking leisurely by deer that were eating, gnawing on the green grass matting the soil around the gravestones, the happy animals smiling up at him, while chewing on the hair of the dead.
Taylor loved the carefree state sleep brought him, and he’d considered how pleasing death, the “big sleep” would be. Never having to worry about anything again. And he wondered what would happen after he died, if there was something better than this.
He’d never been suicidal before. But now it was all he could think of. He thought of ways to kill himself, and jumping was the first that came to mind. Jumping.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Jumping from a building, a tall building, thinking the harder he plunged, smacked and clapped to the concrete, the more powerful it’d push his soul and could launch him into whatever dimension awaited him next.
Daily visions of jumping entered his drunken thoughts, his drunken daydreams.
And instead of car crash videos, he became fixated on jumpers, videos of jumpers, 9/11 videos, Faces of Death videos, and he wondered where the jumpers had ended up, which dimension.
The classic Van Halen song “Jump” showed up on his YouTube playlist, and he’d listen to it, over and over…
Might as well… Might as well…
十一
Watching the Van Halen “Jump” video, he believed there were secret messages in the video, a message, a code, a cipher, something in Eddie Van Halen’s wry smile or David Lee Roth’s dancing and Roth’s acrobatic dropkicks, Roth’s mouthing of
“Jump” at the video’s end, and Taylor believed that the song was leading him to another place, another world, that Bangkok was a portal to something else, a higher plane, and if he jumped, fell hard enough to the pavement, he really could force his soul to exit his body and nudge it to the next realm.
And he pondered the next realm, slamming spicy shot after shot of Thai whiskey, thinking of the gate, the beautiful gate, leading to the Candyland, the Willy Wonka paradise that must await him behind the gate…
On YouTube he searched for gates, hoping to unlock the code, and he found a video from the group Heaven’s Gate, its leader Do, and, enraptured, Taylor heeded the message.
He realized it was a sign, an omen and invitation. Do had contacted him, through time and space and was attempting to wave Taylor to the realm, that Taylor jumping would lead him to the comet Hale-Bopp, the comet Do and his flock had boarded to escape Earth and Earth’s crises. Taylor realized that the coronavirus was a catalyst, an invitation, a prodding, a sign to escape and let the Earth wash the species.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Once Taylor sucked dry the whiskey bottle, it all made sense. He knew it was time.
And he strapped on his Nikes and stumbled up to the guesthouse’s roof.
十二
Up on the roof, standing near the ledge, Taylor saw out through the swampy heat of the Bangkok night, swung his head, slowly, from side to side and gazed out at the neon-lit skyscrapers, the buildings’ lantern eyes, thinking how one or two of the buildings were in on it, how one or two of those metal spirals of lights were likely rockets ready to blast off and glide into the galaxy, cross the gate…
One or two of the buildings probably had jumpers like him, ready to, or having already jumped and joined Heaven’s Gate. Graduated to the next realm. Taylor could see the jumpers smiling and waving at him before jumping, diving gloriously, flying like swans…
Taylor understood. He knew he wouldn’t be a football star. He wouldn’t be a famous neuroscientist. He wouldn’t be a rich businessman in Shanghai. And it was for the better. Humans. The Earth. It was all fucked. Whether by disease, war, a supervolcano, an asteroid or the sun burning out, humans were fucked. The planet would die. Everyone on Earth would die.
But not him. He would escape. This was it, his passage, his route, his tunnel through the galaxy. He’d go. This was it. This was the great thing he was destined to do. He would escape. He would no longer suffer humanity.
He would no longer be a human or a prisoner of Planet Earth. He’d be on a new planet. He’d have a new body. Knowing this, knowing his destiny, knowing the TRUTH, saw him in the most euphoric state he’d ever been…
Taylor, his legs turning into snakes, cranked up “Jump” in his earbuds, and he sparked up a menthol cigarette, sucked in the minty cool smoke, let the icy smoke fill his lungs up like balloons, rounded his lips and exhaled deeply, shooting a funnel cloud of smoke that morphed into a misty form, a form of an eyeless, gaunt face that hovered in front of him and shrieked: “I will show you sleep in a handful,” and then dissolved into sparkly red dust.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Taylor peered below, where the red dust had fallen, and saw a large crowd of foreigners, all with their arms raised or outstretched, some in Jesus poses, some with arms swaying above their heads, some motioning at Taylor to come forward, and the opening keyboard riff of “Jump” looped and played over and over, and Taylor noticed Do down there with the foreigners, Do in long black robes, beaming with his big hazel eyes, smiling so happily, and he was also motioning Taylor forth, and everyone down there looked so peaceful, so post-human…
Stepping closer to the ledge, Taylor hummed “might as well…” and was about to…
When he stopped in his tracks at the voice calling to him from behind.
It was a female voice. The voice of an angel. A sexy southern belle, a Scarlett O’Hara type accent, a drawl that was sweeter than sugar, a voice more beautiful than any sound he’d ever heard before.
Taylor walked backwards a few steps, pulled his phone from his jean pocket, clicked pause on the VH.
Then he craned his neck around and saw a stunningly gorgeous girl, a ravishing 6’5 Nordic goddess, a taller, identical twin of a young, 2010 Taylor Swift, the leggy blond beauty in coal-black short shorts and matching black titty-tight Van Halen red/yellow logo T-shirt, and she was wearing fiery red flip flops and several multi-colored thread bracelets and anklets, and her long curly golden hair was like a halo, her immaculate hair flowing teasingly in the touch of the humid night’s breezes…
“Do you have a light?” the beauty asked loudly but patiently, a radiant smile twisting across her thin red lips, her smile so divine it restored a feeling deep inside his battered soul, a feeling he thought he’d lost inside himself...
He turned his head for a second, looked down again at the alley below. The crowd of foreigners had vanished, save for one tall lanky chap, a young buck with a shock of bushy black hair, the lanky chap in Burmese dress, a longyi, the fellow standing and clapping and hooting and hollering up at Taylor.
Taylor spun back around. Fixed his gaze back to the sizzling hot southern belle.
“A light? Do you have one?” the beauty asked again, her crystal blue eyes open wide, big as saucers as she was making a lighter flicking gesture with her right hand, touching it at the long thin cigarette dangling from her left hand.
“Yes. Yes, I do…” said Taylor, ebulliently, stepping away from the ledge.