Happy April Fools! I’m not getting breast enhancements, although, I could use some larger breasts…

Just kidding! I want you to know that I am perfectly happy with the size and shape of my breasts. I’m not only perfectly happy, but rather fond of them too. But that can be saved for another discussion…

There is one other lie though, and that is the time stamp on all of these posts. I’m actually sitting here, freezing, at 5am April 1st in the dorm hallway because (can you believe it?) I can’t fall asleep even though I am super tired and have work at 8:30 in the morning. I’m leaving for China and my internet connection will be iffy; I don’t want to keep my eager readers hanging, so I scheduled a post for each day I will be gone. Please leave comments and I promise to respond to them when I get back and also write about my China adventures. In the meantime, sit back, relax, and enjoy the lineup that I have so stuporly crafted for you in my insomniac clarity.

I’ve made a rather eventful and shocking decision. I’ve decided to get breast enhancement surgery. I’ve sort of been hiding this from everyone because I didn’t want anyone to know until I was certain about it, but I’ve been thinking about it for a long time.

My flat chest has always sunk my self-esteem. From the very moment in fourth grade when my first girl friend started to develop boobs, to sixth grade when all my friends were wearing bras, I still looked like an androgynous doll. I did start to notice something forming in my chest that hurt when I pressed against it, but I imagined that they were two mochi sized kidney beans (read all about this here).  In seventh grade, I abashedly asked my mom if I could start wearing a bra, because we had to change in the locker rooms for gym. She only bought me a training bra, and I had to wear the same one every day for three years. When I was in ninth grade, I finally sucked up the courage to buy a real adult bra. I asked my girl friend to take me shopping and teach me how to figure out the bra sizes; I made up some excuse about how I had bought all my bras in China and the sizing was different (it is different).

My first serious boyfriend always told me that he liked the size of my breasts exactly the way they were, everyone else’s was too gaudy and unmanageable. I took that as his way of saying, “it’s ok that you have small breasts, honey”. I think it must be due to the fact that I sleep on my stomach so much.

So I’ve decided to end my sex drought by taking my body into my own hands (or rather, into the surgeon’s hands). Over spring break, the reason I stayed on campus while everyone else was off in Mexico was because I had an appointment at Stanford Hospital Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery to discuss my surgery options. I even have a date scheduled! June 24, right when I come back from school and so I can really enjoy my birthday! For those of you who I won’t see until school starts, you’ll come back to Hot Mama Crystal.

Here is a before picture (I’ll post an after one too, obviously): I apologize that it is so exotic, but it is the only one I have of me from the side. For the curious minded, I’m wearing a Chinese Yunnan ethnic minority traditional dress.

Flat chest prior to surgery

BTW – things you should do today:

• check out youtube and watch your favorite video! It’s not what you remembered
• Try google’s new CADIE program

10/6/6 Feel like I’m about to turn my life around and start anew! Never felt better!

Fmylife.com is a must in any procrastination toolkit. Usually I just laugh at how stupid most people are and click on You Deserved It (because they usually do). Unless it really does fuck up their life for real, in which case… its kinda funny that the first thing they think to do is to post it on fmylife.

But today when I was browsing (and trying to make productive use of my insomnia), I stumbled across this post:

Today, while at the Golden Gate Bridge, I spotted a large group of asians trying to take a picture. Trying to be a diplomat, I slowly say “You… want me… take picture?” while using hand motions. The man looks at me and says “No thanks asshole. I got it.” in plain english. FML

Of course, everyone knows the obvious initial response. The fact that it is 69k to 3k YDI to Yeah that sucks! is evidence enough of the outrage this has caused, not to mention reading the biting comments.

I’m here today to write a defense of Daftly Racist. Yes, we all know that what Daftly did was pure prejudice, rudeness, and idiocy. It’s the kind of thing that we don’t tolerate among our self-respecting, morally superior, unprejudiced folk. Thank god we never have to be judged by millions of internet procrastinators. We can guilt-free click the “You Deserved It” button and smirk at our purer moral composition. Because amongst our class, prejudice doesn’t exist and we operate in a judgment free world.

Isn’t it funny how we are taught to not judge, but those same teachers repeat the maxim that “first impressions are everything”? We can never free ourselves from our judgments (see this post for a fuller explanation). Isn’t it better to acknowledge those prejudices and do our best to mitigate them, rather than brush them aside and claim to have conquered them? How can we combat the enemy within ourselves and others if we don’t force it to the border of our inner psyches?

Daftly’s courage in posting is aptly refreshing. In a society where to exhibit the slightest bit of prejudice is cause to raise noses (and ironically, form judgments), to have the balls to admit fallacy in prejudice should be applauded, not condemned.

4/2/3 Insomnia mostly, but still proud that I can voice a semi-cogent argument at 6 in the morning.

I broke my vegetarianism last night. I was out with my friend getting shabuway hot-pot at Shabu Shabu, and I ordered the beef plate. These were my thoughts when I was considering whether to get the beef + veggie or the double veggie plate:

1) I’m going to China soon anyway, and when I go to China I am not going to keep this diet up because meat in China is sooo good and not as unhealthily cooked as in the states

2) Shabuway hot pot is just meat + boiled water, no oil or any of that yucky stuff

3) Just vegetables won’t fill me up

However, not only did the beef fall below par of my expectations, the vegetables tasted much better and I would have preferred to just get two plates of veggie instead of one beef one veggie. Also, now I have a huge blister on my lip, I’m not sure if its a result of the meat. [Sigh] Karmic Retribution.

Alright, so I slipped up. I’m not going to give myself crap over it, I’ll just continue even harder on my vegetarianism. I went to the grocery store afterwards and bought entirely vegetarian meals for the week. The one thing that I can’t decide on is whether I should still be vegetarian when I’m in China. I would really love to get your feedback on this one. It would only be a 10 day hiatus from the diet, which I will resume when I go to England. What do you all think?

4/4/3 blister + lonely because everyone has left for break and I’m still here; at least I have my roommate’s fish for company

This is the 3rd chapter of the Migrant Worker thread. Read the 2nd Chapter.

I scored a front row ticket to the Closing Ceremony of the Beijing Olympics this summer. Going by myself, yet eager to take lots of pictures inside the Bird’s Nest, I borrowed a camera tripod to set up auto-picture-taking.  A security line surrounded the Nest a few miles out, so no one without a ticket could enter, and those with tickets had to talk a good 45 minutes (I made it in 30 because I was power-walking) until they reached the stadium. I arrived at the security check-in point next to the stadium forty minutes before start time, only to find out that camera tripods were not allowed in. I tried every trick in the book: sweet-talking the male student volunteer, pretending to be a dumb foreigner, being an angry bitch. Despite my protests, the volunteers told me my only options were to either chuck it or walk back outside the security line to find a hotel that could check it for me.

Seeing as how the tripod was borrowed, I could not throw it away, so I turned around and started on my trek outwards. Twenty minutes out I approached a fancy-hotel-ish-looking building and asked the policemen on guard if I could check things there. They told me no, the closest place would be outside the security line. When I asked how much checking it at a hotel would be, they relied, “100 [RMB]”. Running out of time and breath, I called my friend to ask how much the tripod was; her response: “65RMB”. Some quick math told me that paying 100RMB to store a 65RMB object was not right, and exasperated, I told her my situation and asked if I could buy her a new one instead. At that moment, a policeman, I suppose out of pity for a single frantic girl, offered to hold on to it for me until the end of the ceremony. I just had to meet him back at the exact same spot immediately after it ended. I grabbed his number and headed back.

Great, I run back towards the stadium and arrive with time to spare. I snap some photos sporting my Olympic and Chinese patriotic gear, and ask some foreigners to sign my Olympic guestbook (using my fake Chinese accent to speak English so I sound like a cute Chinese obsessed with foreigners).  I head on over to my great seat and watch the show progress, seeing up close Yao Ming’s towering ogre of a figure. The show ends and I start to head back to where I met the policeman, only (I should’ve seen this one coming) my horrible sense of direction and memory lead me 15 minutes down the wrong street. By the time I arrive at the spot, the policemen have all moved to their next shift location, and I have no choice but to take a taxi to their new shift.

Arriving at the Museum of Science and Technology past midnight, I look around but don’t see anyone. The entire area is deserted and the only sounds were the humming of cars on the highway. I call him to tell him my exact location: in front of the main gate on a rock, wearing a white skirt. At first, in the silence, I hear footsteps approaching, and then I can make out a tall plain-clothes man walking towards me. Our eyes meet but we do not know for sure if we are right people that we are looking for; in the darkness and rush of our first meeting, we didn’t really get a deep impression of each other’s appearance.

“Hi, are you the girl here for the tripod?”
“Yes, that’s me”
“Here you go”
“Thanks so much, I really appreciate it”
“How are you getting home?”
“Metro”
“So late at night? That’s not safe for a girl like you traveling alone. We can send you home in our police car”

And so he sent me home, all the while chatting about our lives. I usually never tell Chinese that I am actually American, but I felt like I could trust him (he is, after all, a policeman). He was also quite cute, and when I chat with cute guys, I naturally can’t stop smiling during the entire conversation. After I arrived home though, I never thought that I would see him again.

The next day, I receive a phone call from his number.

“Hi, do you remember me?”
“Of course I remember you!”
“I just realized that I never even asked for your name”
“Oh, I am Crystal”
“My name is LYK”
“How long are you going to be in China? I hope to have more opportunities to chat with you”
“I am actually leaving for Wuhan today, but I will be back in two weeks”

Two weeks later, I call him to let him know I was back. Every few days I would receive a call from him just to chat for hours.  We talked about our childhood, jobs, the U.S., China, our past, our present, our future, just everything about our lives. I was really giddy – I mean, a policeman was interested in ME! Flirting is a universal language afterall. I had an extra ticket to paralympics wheelchair basketball, and I had been looking for an excuse to see him again, so I invited him to come with me. The conversation gradually shifted to the Olympics, and I asked him if aside from security work, had he ever been inside the Bird’s Nest.

“Yes, I went last week, but we didn’t get to spend much time there because we had to hurry home”
“Oh, how come?
“My mother-in-law wanted us back”

I felt like an anvil had dropped and crushed my pride. I had spent the past few weeks flirting with a married man?

“Oh.” [silence]

He must’ve sensed my shock and understood why, because the next thing he asked me was, “How old did you think I was?”

Asian men look younger than they are, a lesson I learned the hard way. He was a married, 35 year old man, who for some reason or other, wanted to make friends with a 20 year old college student.

What does this have to do with the migrant worker, you may ask? Recall that for the entire week I had been avoiding the migrant worker because I was more interested in the policeman. After this phone call, I was so upset that I called up the migrant worker and invited him to dinner.

Mood: 7 just ate dinner and helped one of my students with his lab report, had my weekly tea party with friends

Physical tiredness: 5 slept at 4 am last night, but woke up at 1:30, so haven’t been awake very long

Spiritual tiredness: 4 finally made some long term progress today, turned in my major grant proposal

This is the 2nd chapter of the Migrant Worker thread.

“I will think about you,” he shouted to me with a huge smile on his face as I turned away and walked up the stairs to my apartment, leaving him with his yellow cap in the darkness. The Annie’s delivery boy had just taken half an hour out of his work shift to accompany me to the bank, all because of my absent-mindedness. That night I received a text message from him with a message of friendship:

*** Friends ***
*** New Friends Are ***
***Gifts sent from Heaven ***

The next day, riding my hour-long bus commute home from work at 11PM, I receive a call from him inviting me to go out drinking with his work buddies. Against my better judgment, I accepted; but quickly realizing my mistake after hanging up (I barely know this guy, it’s late at night, we’re going with his friends, and I have no family in Beijing to follow up on me), I send him some excuse by text about being too tired. The next day he invites me again, but I decline, citing late work hours; and the next, and the next. Eventually I start ignoring him altogether and I think he got the picture.

I didn’t trust him because he was a poor migrant worker. I don’t know what I was scared of, whether it was rape, or kidnap and demanding ransom from my parents; I just knew I was scared. I felt ashamed of myself; I had been desiring more interaction with migrant workers, yet I could not trust the very people I was trying to help.

The Annie's Delivery Boy

I spent this summer doing econometric research about migrant workers in China. After traveling through rural Southwestern China surveying thousands of migrant workers, I was frustrated that I had not had the chance to get to know a single one of them on a more in depth, personal level.  The night I arrived back at my apartment in Beijing, frustrated and disillusioned with my research – but also tired and lazy to go out – I decided on delivery for dinner. I carelessly reached for the Annie’s take-out menu, the cute little Italian restaurant whose menu my family (as Westerners in China, once they found a place with good pizza, stuck to it like a thumb in a bottle) kept next to the telephone.  A voice over the phone spoke to me in heavily accented English: “OK, a numbah nine frutti mari delivery to building six Lishui Garden. Someone will be right ova.”
When that someone knocked on the door, I answered it and saw a small boy – who looked about 17 or 18 – dressed in a yellow Annie’s shirt, black dress pants and shoes, and a cute little red cap on his head. He cheerfully addressed me, “Hello, Annie’s delivery!” “That’s ok,” I told him, “I can speak Chinese. How much do I owe you?” However, when I reached into my wallet, my face flushed bright pink with embarrassment; I did not have a single currency of cash on me. Certain that my family must have some cash hidden in the apartment, I asked him to come in and wait for me to find the money. He politely refused to enter, preferring instead to stand outside the doorway. This made me feel quite uncomfortable, as I had my suitcase sprawled right in front of the doorway and had been unpacking, my clothes splayed everywhere in the entrance. The delivery boy was obviously unaccustomed to such a living arrangement, and must’ve contented himself with the explanation that I was moving soon. My anxiety heightened as I flipped through drawers and turned out pockets but could not find a single bill. At last, the only choice I had was to ask him to accompany me to the nearest bank (since I had no idea where it was), and to wait for me to withdraw some money. So we set out, me in my pajamas, him walking his Annie’s delivery bike. “Busy day at work today?” I asked him. “No, not really, just like every other day,” he replied. “Does this happen to you often?” I joked. “No, you’re pretty particular in that respect”.

As we chatted, I began to learn more about his life. And the more he told me, the more I was hungry to learn more. He had migrated from his rural hometown to find work in the city, just like the other thousands of migrant workers I had surveyed. I asked him about his background, education, family, motivation to migrate, difficulties encountered. He had so many experiences that when he finished walking me back to my apartment, I knew I had to keep talking to him. I gave him my business card and told him he could feel free to call me. Before he left, he told me he would think about me, but I never really thought I would see him again.