The following essay and the tweet at the bottom of the page, have stricken a chord in Chinese people and circulated on the Internet, not only for its unmistakable sarcasm, but for its unexaggerated wrap-up of newsy issues that have been heard from news over the past few years. The essay has been updated or revised to include the latest scandals or happenings, including food scares, inflation and prohibitive housing prices, that are closely associated with Chinese daily life. Therefore, there are several versions sharing the same title. This is the newest one we can find.
A Happy Day of A Chinese
(From Renren)
After I wake up in the morning, I brush my teech with toothpaste containing diethylene glycol,Wash my face with stinky algae bloom water,Make my child a bottle of milk, which contains melamine and hormones,Whereas I drink soy milk produced by underground workshops.I have a twisted dough fried in swill oil from gutters and two salted duck egg with Sudan Red (illegal and carcinogenic food dye),Or sometimes steamed buns whose meat filling was made from waste paper cartons,And some pickles preserved in paint buckets.After I am done eating and drinking, I go to a fake cigarette factory where I work and arrive on time.I sneak a peek at stock market information on my copycat cellphone: it has plummeted from 6,124 to 1,240.46.At noon, I go to the dining hall for lunch with my co-workers.I order spicy eel, which feeds on oral contraceptives that make it grow bigger,A dish of crawfish caught from sordid gutters,And Chinese little cabbage sprayed with DDVP (insecticide),Get a bowl of mildewed poisonous rice.The owner pours a cup of tea with tea leaves containing heavy metal 100 times in excess of the limit.When I pay the bill, they say 168 yuan ($25) is an auspicious amount and do not give me any discount,And the owner gives us back some counterfeit bills as change.In the evening, I get home. I steam pork, which contains clenbuterol hydrochloride (an illegal additive),Make a cold dish out of jellyfish, which is soaked in formalin,Grab a bun, which has fluorescent whitening agent,Sip at a cup of liquor adulterated with methanol.When I am about to go to sleep, the formaldehyde released from new building materials smarts my eyes so much that tears keep coming out.So I can only bury my head into my quilt padded with “black heart cotton (used and hazardous cotton and industrial fiber waste).”At the thought that there is still 400,000 yuan plus interest to go before I pay off my home mortgage,I toss and turn in bed and can’t fall asleep.I rummage for sleeping pills and swallowed half a bottle; it doesn’t work.I taste it a little bit. Good. Luckily, it is only glutinous rice powder…
Chinese tweet about food safety and Japanese nuclear crisis:
Madam Curie lived 67 years despite exposure to radiation from dusk to dawn. Chernobyl has even become a tourism site. China is so far away from Japan, what are you worried about? I firmly believe that a nation which has gone through the baptism of Sudan Red, melamine, illegal additive in meat and poisonous dumplings will not be defeated by this little radiation.
(Blog posted by Ministry of Tofu on March 20, 2011 by Jing Gao. You can see the original article by following this link to Ministry of Tofu)
