Final Thoughts On China

Well now that I'm safely back on American soil, i can reveal something that I was afraid to say while in China. Believe it or not, my blog was censored over there. If you go back and read the things I wrote about China, you'll see it was totally non-political, and, for the most part, rather complimentary. But, as soon as I got into Communist China (if you don't consider Hong Kong Communist), I was unable to access my blog.
Talk about being paranoid! And, I'm talking about myself, not those Chinese leaders who banned me. I got to thinking that maybe those Chinese cab drivers were only pretending to not understand English. Maybe they were taking note of what I was saying to my fellow passengers in the cab, and then immediately calling "headquarters" to report me.
I woke up one night about, about three in the morning, and tried to get on the internet. The whole thing shut down on me. I looked out the hotel window and a light in a window across the way immediately went out. I knew they were spying on me. I could feel their creepy breath against the back of my neck. My hair stood on end, as cold chills ran up and down my spine. Sorry, I was practicing my hand at writing a novel. Did that sound pretty scary?
Actually, I did get a little paranoid, too paranoid to actually mention in a blog (written while I was there) that I was being censored. But, now that I'm back, the whole truth can be told, and I'm telling it.
The interesting thing about Communist China is that, besides the censorship thing, it didn't feel very Communist at all. Of course, when it comes to understanding what Communism feels like, I'm probably about as ignorant as they come. But, the police officers I encountered, were pleasant young men. There were soldiers standing rigidly at attention on little platforms in front of some public buildings. Even when I tickled their armpits they refused to laugh, so maybe that's Communistic. But, really, except for the fact that everything is written in Chinese and everyone speaks Chinese, you really couldn't tell you were in China. Oh yeah, the dogs hanging in the marketplace along with the chickens and fish was a little revealing. But, really China is filled with people who smile easily, who are willing to provide a stranger with directions, who get up, go to work, care for their families, and do all the stuff we do.
The culture is quite different in some ways, but people are people. No one wears a big scarlet "C" around their neck, or pinned to their Chairman Mao t-shirts. On a couple of occasions I heard that European siren coming down the street. You know that wah-wah wah-wah sound that they use in all the old World War II movies. The siren sounds like it's saying "Na-zi Na-zi." But, each time, as I would dive for cover and peek out from behind a trash can or whatever, it was just an ambulance. Unless, of course, those devious Commies are pretending to be EMTs, just so they could track me down. You know I never considered that possibility. I wonder if any of them followed me back to America. Excuse me. I'm going to go hide. If you don't ever see this blog, please let me know.