Chinese People Say the Darndest Things

Since I've come to China I've heard people say all sorts of things that just make me stop and scratch my head. Most of the truly amazing ones come in the area of food and exercise. The first whopper I heard was that walking backwards was the key to good health, and indeed you do see kids walking around the track backwards. There is also the fact that they are deathly afraid of the sun, they know about skin cancer but underrate vitamin D deficiency. With food it gets even worse. They believe that hot food increase your body temperature and metabolism, while cold food lowers both. While hot foods obviously add some small amount of heat to your body, your internal temperature is controlled fairly precisely. Ken found a Chinese traditional medicine website which included the fact the Westerners believe food has caloric value while traditional medicine knows it effect chi balance. Well, I guess they have me there; I do believe food has caloric value. They'll say completely contradictory things like insist that all American food is unhealthy while sighting American food as the reason Dave won the teachers race during the track and field day; maybe they think it's like steroids. The most amazing one I heard was from one of Carrie's friends who when Ken asked her if she wanted to get some ice cream said no since she was on her period and believed that cold food would be bad for her. The odd thing is that ice cream may actually be good since it has calcium, which in a country that avoids most dairy may be helpful.

Hearing all this stuff got me thinking though while I hear a ton of stuff in China that makes me cringe it's not exactly that people in the US don't believe some pretty stupid things. I read the Wall Street Journal online a bunch and ever since they started adding comments I've become addicted. Sometime I have trouble not just skipping over the articles so I can get to the bat shit crazy comments. Recently there was a fossil found that scientists thought might be the sold called missing link, a connection between humans and our ape like ancestors. The comments section of the Journal lit up with people saying every dumb thing about evolution they could think of. From people saying that this skeleton looks nothing like a person, to people arguing that since monkeys still exist evolution must be false. I actually have trouble believing that the person who wrote that second one was smart enough to figure out how to work a computer. Even as I laugh at some of the odd things Chinese people believe these people make me embarrassed to be an American. Also recently was the news that Bush had crazy biblical quotes put on the top of security memos. I honestly though for a long time that Bush was just dumb enough to think that Iraq was actually a security threat, now I see that he's not dumb he's crazy. I think Bush honestly believed that god wanted him to invade Iraq. I think I can almost here Dylan's "With God on Our Side."

While I as a general rule support anything the communist party opposes, religion gives me pause. I can't remember where this is from but someone said, "When god starts talking people stop thinking." It's not that I like how in China people don't really have the freedom to make that choice, it's just that I wish they'd make a smarter choice. One person in the comments noted that there was probably more evidence for evolution then there was the George Washington existed. Now that's a religion I want to join the one that denies George Washington.