The man next to me flips patiently and attentively through a classic multi-tentacle penetration manga magazine, while sitting right next to me. I am waiting for him to show me a particular good alien-schoolgirl combination, but unfortunately he lets me make up my own mind as I look over his shoulder.

Across from me a women mumbles what must be a song, because it picks up melody at irregular intervals… she then shouts a line and goes back to mumbling as if tired by the sudden effort. Or she is trying to re-interpret the song for us, making it easier for us by highlighting the significance of the shouted parts.

There is also a man with bizarrely structured limbs, that belies the power of prose as I have no idea how to describe their composition.

I get off at Jordan, while a bunch of students stays on - together with the rest of the circus. It seems my residence is not as edgy as I thought it was; there are students who are keeping it much more real than me.

No need to point out that he Chinese are still destroying the environment relentlessly, and most Chinese cities make Los Angeles seem like Switzerland in terms of air pollution (Capital cities have twice its rate of air pollution). The world may be surprised that that Beijing is keeping its anti-pollution regulation in place (license plate restrictions and such) because the inhabitants actually like their air a little cleaner… who would have thought.

What is really interesting though is that some of the world’s boldest architectural experiments in terms of green building are currently taking place in China.

Steven Holl is building linked hybrid , one of the largest green residential projects in the world. Here rich Beijing locals can ignore the outside air quality for a bit by focusing on their nicely sculptured green gardens, while proudly tapping their geothermal walls. It even has a Montessori school… does it get any greener than that?

One step up is Arup’s (of Sidney Opera Hall fame) geo city, at the mouth of the heavily polluted Yangtze river: zero vehicle emissions, organic farming methods, advanced waste recycling. And no less than 10.000 inhabitants will be able to enjoy this lush green lifestyle. Only one billion to go… but nonetheless, it is hard to find any such project anywhere in the world.

The nerds own the future… we all knew that, I suppose. It was during the IT boom that this became fully apparent. All magazines wrote a bit about it and then this just became readily acknowledged. Quarterbacks become truck drivers - nerds millionaires… something like that.

But I had not yet contemplated the nerd’s latest scheme: China! All the successful white guys I meet her (I can’t distinguish Chinese nerds) are nerds. The guys that went and studied Chinese at university 10 years ago… yes, that’s right. Not the trendiest folk on the planet. But they are doing pretty well for themselves now. The ones that came to China, when it was just opening up… same story.

Not sure where all of this leaves me, I was certainly no quarterback, but perhaps not quite nerdy enough to make it in this part of the world. I did have braces for a long time - perhaps there is hope.

Forget about facing the Dragon… nothing is quite as hard as mastering blogwriting.

Today I bite the bullet…

And how else could I start but with the Olympics. Coming from the Netherlands I am not without experience when it comes to mass hysteria related to sports events. In China the words “mass hysteria” relate to each other in a different way though. It is not by mere association with an individual - or a bunch of them - that the Chinese live the Olympics. A victory is not just an occasion to cheer, or simple pride in what a fellow countryman can do. Rather, every victory is a victory of the Chinese people as a whole. The Chinese government has gone so far as to forbid (yes) the cheering for a particular individual. Cheering is encouraged, but only insofar as it pertains to a country: one is to say “go China” … “go Yao Ming” is not appropriate for what is he but one of a billion. The Adidas commercial shows this spirit to its full extent. It seems Western companies are learning what it is to market China in China. The one where a one billion strong Chinese volleyball team rises from the other side of the net to defeat a faceless opponent is my favorite. It could just as well be a video in an anti-Chinese scare-campaign by some midwestern American politician.

As another point in case: David Brooks mentions the fishbowl experiment. Chinese people, when asked to describe the activities in an aquarium will talk about the context: the aquarium as a whole and how the different fish interact, for it is all one entity. An American, needless to say, will tell you what the biggest/fastest/most spectacular fish in the tank is doing.

Conversations with the Chinese about the Chinese are much complicated by this phenomenon. Remarks about or questions regarding particular Chinese people or phenomena will always be taken to pertain to the society as a whole. Needless to say this should make one very careful with not-quite-positive remarks; let alone downright negative statements. Insofar as these statements are tolerated, it is only in the context of the Chinese catching up - flaws are by default temporary.

It goes both ways: Chinese people have a tendency to extrapolate their own opinions onto the masses. My Chinese instructor in Beijing insisted there was no such thing as anti-Japanese sentiments in China, countering every example with a story about herself.

In the West we only know this phenomenon as a psycho-analytic phase in the evolution of our psyche, the earliest one to be precise. “Chora” defines the wonderful first six months of your life, where you do not distinguish between yourself, your mother, or even the world around you. Whereas westerners quickly learn that (alas) things are not quite that simple and go on to devote themselves to the ego, the Chinese preserve a notion of being one with their context.