Drinking in China

 For The Real Deal, You Gotta Pay

It’s an all too common scenario after a night out in Shanghai. You awake the next morning with a thudding headache and a fire in your throat. At this point you wonder: Did I really only drink beer last night or was it something else? Fake beverages - alcohol mixed with non-essential and unsafe chemicals - is a rampant problem in China. Often the only indicator that you have consumed a fake beer, vodka, whiskey or wine is the morning-after affects. It can be extreme. Some friends of mine got together over dinner and had about three beers each. After returning home and going to bed, each one had problems sleeping. Instead they were fighting headaches, burning throats, and nausea. All this pain from just three beers each. 

"You can’t rely on bars or even some supermarkets to guarantee the booze they sell is legitimate."

It can be hard to know the quality and safety of your drink by taste. A good look at the labeling of your drink is always required. You can’t rely on bars or even supermarkets to guarantee that the booze they sell is legitimate. The corner store right next to my building, a legal franchise, sells fake Australian wine. How do I know? The wine description on the label is so fuzzy that I can’t even read it. The cans of western beer often taste like acid and it gets you thinking: I never remembered Bud or Heineken tasting like this! 

At a drinks function one time, a German expat who has lived here in Shanghai for over a decade said the only way to guarantee that you drink safe alcohol is to pay the right price. That means not buying cheap drinks and being wary of discounts. The more you pay, the more likely your beverage will be real. 

The same rule also applies when buying other food goods, particularly meat. Being a conscientious consumer in China boils down to a simple rule: price determines quality.

Australia: Immigration Haven

Foot Steps To A New World

DIASPORA in Australia is diverse and widespread. The following narrative depicts the  strong light of the human soul in unfamiliar realms. Despite not knowing one another, these progressive individuals work toward the same coda: be more. 

Success, but first audacity

One step and a new momentum, in a migrant haven, will see you never return to the life you have always known. That previous life is passing behind the back of your head. You cannot focus on that. Security guards eye you, guns ready. So lazy and bored are their eyes though, and you hope that they don’t ignite with any sudden thought; sudden thoughts like doing the job correctly and checking passports.

That was Bernard Matosevic’s lasseiz-fair experience as he crossed the checkpoint from Mexico to the USA, as an illegal immigrant with sweat dripping onto the sidewalk below him - evidence of the nerve-racking ordeal that could result in life at a deportation centre, before returning to that all too common incomplete puzzle back in Serbia - who knows what’s next.

Walk (through) the line

Bernard has resided in Australia since early 2006, obtaining a masters degree in entrepreneurship. He has worked at major logistics companies since then. Although this man hails from Boston, Massachusetts, that is only one leg of his logistically-complicated mission to live in the western world with his parents.

While the asphalt boiled underneath Bernard’s feet from the delirious desert sun in Mexico, way back in 1994, he was preparing for the most important race of his life. He, along with his parents.... wanted to go silent under the radar, and create a more peaceful life in the USA. There was one rule this family was following as they crossed the border: whoever gets through stays. 

Fortunately for the Matosevics’, they walked through undetected, but had no time to celebrate. Being an illegal immigrant in the United States may not be a new concept, but maintaining some type of security hidden within society is vital. Especially for the Matosevics’ who had escaped war-torn Yugoslavia. A life of misery shrouded the family in Nis, Serbia, where uncertainty was as common as warmed plum brandy. The insecure forces and threats facing their lives was enough for the family to obtain tourist visas to visit Mexico.

Arriving in Mexico City airport the family, due to their south Slavic routes, were immediately scrutinised and given permission to tour Mexico City only. In Mexico though, heading north is more a matter of survival and no red tape will suffice to keep a migrant from the environs of a country with money and jobs. So the Matosevics’ caught a bus to Tijuana and somehow, as silent and hidden as ghosts, walked through a checkpoint without having to show a passport or any other form of documentation. With the help of a Serb-American they found a small apartment in San Diego. Instead of driving to Ikea for the latest cheap furniture to decorate their new home, they somehow found garbage dumps and trawled through people’s waste for chairs, beds, tables or anything they could use. Bernard’s mother got a job working as a housekeeper for an elderly Slovak woman who was more interested in having the company of an Eastern European than a maid.

With the help of the Slovak woman, Bernard was able to show proof of an address to be accepted into one of the US’ best secondary schools - La Jolla High School. There, with no English and able only to read the Cyrillic alphabet, Bernard showed his academic strengths in science and was soon pushing the high school to academic euphoria by winning national sciences competitions - as an illegal immigrant. He graduated two years later, in 1996, still in hiding with his family. Around that time the Matosevics’ decided to turn themselves in and go through the court process for residency.

In the court, once the Matosevics’ had finished telling their tale, the judge said he could not believe three people could walk through a checkpoint without having documentation checked. While the battle for residency waged on and Yugoslavia was divided into six new countries based on religion, the Matosevics’ won residency through the green card lottery and were free to live in the United States.

Before gaining the legal right to live in the migrant haven, Bernard had to apply for university. A result of Bernard and his parents’ stubborn resolution was an acceptance into Boston College, even if that included offering fake identification numbers. While he was in the process of deciphering a future with qualifications, his family was guaranteed the right to live in the United States.

His story does not stop in sophomore year at Boston College. It ends up half way around the world and below the Equator, in Brisbane, South-East Queensland. One of Bernard’s reasons for emigrating to Australia was to escape the 50-plus hour work week in the United States and low wages.

A Russian encounter below a bridge

“You want to have coffee, tea, vodka?” questioned Russian IT technician Sergiy Makarov at a Kwiki-mart like-store underneath the Story Bridge near his Kangaroo Point apartment in Brisbane. Towering a complete head against most 6-foot men, Sergiy’s manner was bold but exuded a reserved conviction about the nature of events that surrounded him. He was drawn to Australia through curiosity. “It was my first opportunity to have a look at people and the atmosphere of a former enemy and that was the reason for my curiosity,” Sergiy explained. 

Part of his inquisitiveness has been fuelled further by a love for beach volleyball and a never-ending coast line that can be accessed for the sport. “I love breathing the fresh air and sun.” His attraction, from cold and cloudy Saint Petersburg, has also manifested toward scientific discovery which may better-harness the natural environment. During the 2000’s at the University of Queensland, Sergiy created an ocean wave energy converter. A 30m long platform, the converter was thrown into Moreton Bay to test whether or not electricity can be conducted. “It is the best way of converting ocean wave energy into electricity. Ocean wave converters are passing through the same period of time as cars 100 years ago.”

As the infant converter passes through its history, Sergiy laments on that of the super-nation he was born in - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). He worked in the Navy as an IT technician. He lived in Kazakhstan and the remote Kamchatka Peninsula stemming south on the eastern seaboard of Russia, north of Japan. He also worked on military space programs focused on launching computers in rockets. 

“To get self-development and promotion once you start military life you had to be a member of the communist party. I have never been a member of the communist party.” During communist party class a senior ranking official visited and picked up Ivan’s class book to find it filled with notes on western literature. Realising he did not want to be a member of the communist party, Sergiy was waved past class and continued work in the military space sector- something unheard of in the USSR. “I think it is some sort of genetic legacy to have an independent style of thinking. I could feel something wrong. The idea of communism is that it is some type of heaven on earth. I couldn’t find any clear explanations getting from pointy A to B seeing how leaders of the communist party live and how the rest led regular lives.” 

 Perhaps it was Sergiy’s computer intelligence that divided him from his peers and allowed his passage to space military genius to continue. While we discuss his activities in Australia as a freelance IT technician and ocean wave energy expert, Sergiy explains how instrumental the technology he developed could be to produce power. “If you put the device into open water, you only have half the energy. The kinetic energy of the wave is put into the air and flows into a duct. After that it is a matter of gaining more efficiency.” After explaining the significance of wave energy to Australia’s 24,000km coastline, like how vital water is for survival, Ivan centres his interests on Queensland’s rim with the Pacific, where from one linear metre of coast, 12-15,000 killowats can be harnessed from a wave converter compared to Tasmania’s 65 kilowatts. 

Crammed between white walls wallows cultural identity

Walking through Brisbane’s Queen Street offers a blurred experience filled with a flavour not so much rousing as congenial to the mall - sameness. Behind the fluorescent white walls and windows of plasticity, depending on how hard you look, an added realm can be found. In one store looms a tall, blonde, Macedonian. In a revised cycle of the customer-retailer relationship she arouses an aura of prominence. This is by no fault of her own; rather it is the raw fact that her alertness, strikingly strong feminine nature and sharp direction force the eye to follow her. The accent is strong, filled with all the clipped words one could easily mistake for as Russian.

Baptised Ana Polanksi, she has resided in Australia for five years, advising Brisbane’s elite fashion squad what to wear. Previously, in Macedonia, life had been a lot more social and as Ana puts it - fulfilling. While sharing a mango laska, Ana explained moving country, let alone city, is a lonely experience. 

Perhaps her reasons are reflective of her current position in society. Married to a man Ana describes as submissive, she yearns for her homeland. The 35-year-old woman said she had put her heart into making the family business, a corner store selling everything, blossom. Despite yearning for the land she left, Ana is continuing to grow and express herself - through a modelling course in Brisbane city and the creation of a Macedonian folk dancing group who perform on special occasions. In five years she has visited Macedonia twice and often the conversation circles around her family in the landlocked Slavic nation. Even though Ana moved to Australia because of her husband, she has struggled with the stress of knowing no one and recently being the bread keeper while her husband recouped from a severe neck injury. She says that experience was incredibly trying, partly because of the difficulty obtaining employment as a foreigner without a degree and the recession. “I am not picky about what I do but it is important to be happy,” Ana explains.

Another store in a nearby mall - small, musky-smelling, assumedly old - is the business of a Mongolian woman. Her Australian story is a little longer than the Macedonian counterpart but boils to the same jazz. Hailing from Central Asia Amra sells cashmere and camel wool clothes, made in her nomadic and flat homeland of Mongolia, to an array of Australians looking to add another facet to their wardrobe. She explains that the small boutique store, filled predominately with bright red and orange winter wear, was designed herself; that she painted the colourful and oriental box and laid out the design only three weeks prior to the interview.

That was Amra’s first expression of independence and iron-awed assertion to succeed, like that of a bower bird preparing a nest with emerald green glass and yellow milk bottle lids.  Further inquiry into Amra’s placement defines how strong her and her husband value discipline, like a marathon runner at the 32km mark. The discussion also sheds light on how Amra admires and respects to no end, her husband - a computer scientist.

In 1997, when the married couple first visited Australia, they would walk a distance of 10 km to finish menial tasks and attend university rather than catch public transport, to save every cent possible. An immediate thought of walking with a back pack from university to some dungy, 50s style apartment sits high on my mind, sweat trickling uncontrollably over the body, demanding some type of quench and knowing that upon arrival in the stale-smelling carpeted apartment, it will be even hotter and the sweat will pour cyclonically. Forget about a beer can, or for that matter bottle of Coca Cola. For this pair of Mongols, that was $2 better saved in the pocket or bank.