playing with sticks

Whenever I get super-fixated on the excessive pollution or the food safety problems or the fact that cabs in Chengdu don't have seat belts in their back seats, there's a useful thought that helps me regain my sanity. It's goes something like this: It's safe enough here for 1.3 billion people to have been born and survived, so it's safe enough for you. Get over it.

It works for those days when you can't see clearly because of the "fog." It works when you're eating hot pot despite the scandals about "recycled" hot pot oil. It also works when you have to select your chopsticks from a slew that have been sitting in the reach of the public for who knows how long.

And it also comes in handy when you see kids navigating some fairly challenging street food delivery systems.

Kids here seem to have the ability to bite hunks of meat and fruit from very sharp sticks without incurring any self-inflicted wounds, even while on the move. These are kids so young that if they threw a basketball and hit the backboard people would be impressed, yet here they're already walking down the street using their teeth to pull grapes from a sharpened bamboo spear.

I remember when I was a kid, my parents would bend the ends of lollipop sticks to keep them from stabbing me in the throat. They'd also add water to my soda and refused to let me watch Three's Company, but that's got nothing to do with sharp sticks.

But now that I think about it, that might be just the kind of coddling that makes me crave seat belts and clean air... As I was saying, I'd better get over it.