As Far East Asia Continues to Burn

My home desktop computer just happens to be right next to this sliding glass door/window type thing in this tiny shoebox of an "apartment" my wife and I currently live in here in South Korea. Yeah, it's a place to live, but then again, if most people from most Western countries were to see the place, they'd more than likely just think that it's yet another filthy, humiliating, pent-up little concrete cell in the heart of yet another neon-scarred Asian slum hole.

Autumn has finally fallen and the weather has mercifully just begun to start to finally cool off a bit. Thank God that we can now save a little money on air conditioning. At last, we can crack open that big, glass window/door which leads to the tiny, horrifically narrow excuse for a patio/balcony and finally get some fresh air in this stifling, claustrophobic little crap-hole for a change, right?

Until, that is, yet another addicted Korean dude and his college age cronies all start puffing smoke into the apartment. And then, pretty darn quick, as a non-smoker yourself, unused to the harsh effects of tobacco consumption, you can hardly breathe, the noxious stench is so unbearable. Thank goodness my wife doesn't smoke either. Funny thing though; I honestly thought that it was actually our choice, a matter of our very own free will as a human beings, as to whether or not to become addicted to an overpriced, hyper-addictive weed that most people start sucking on when they've barely even entered puberty.

So we keep going to the window. We lean out and look up, down, and all around, but where on earth is the incredibly invasive stench of tobacco smoke even coming from? Yet try as we might, we can't quite locate those pathetically self-centered, orally fixated tobacco addicts anywhere. Well, we're pretty sure that they tend to stand out on the balcony of the apartment directly above us, puffing away and shout-talking at close range with one another in the usual, terribly obnoxious East Asian fashion, but they never actually have the guts to show their rude, inconsiderate, thuggish faces.

Huh. How terribly typical.

But we sure do have to step over all the lighters and cigarette butts that these idiots tend to drop in the stairwells leading up to our fourth floor apartment. And unfortunately, that's hardly all we are forced to step around on our way up or down the back stairs. There are also discarded bits of half-eaten food (banana peels with part of the banana rotting in the late summer/early fall heat, fast food containers, etc.) and all sorts of other things that people in this part of the still very much developing world just tend to carelessly drop at their feet on a daily basis.

You see, there aren't any public trash cans in South Korea. But then again, when I taught English in Taiwan and Mainland China, it was pretty much the same in those awful places too. Or actually, back then, it was a whole lot worse. I mean, what is it with Asians and their sorry excuse for public hygiene anyway?

Worst of all, it's often no use at all to try to hunt down the very worst of the filthy littering bastards anyway. Because littering is a huge problem in most countries in East Asia. In fact, it often seems like Asians are actually encouraged to litter indiscriminately. I mean, there may be laws on the books against illegal dumping and littering in general, but there's very little in the way of law enforcement and the fining of lawbreakers, so the poor hygiene and pathetic pollution in East Asia just continues to go on and on and on, day after day for years and years with no end in sight.

My God! Are Asians really that immune to omnipresent public litter? Are they really not bothered by all the filth and poor hygiene in their various countries. I often wonder.

And then there's the fact that the global tobacco companies suddenly couldn't sell near as much product after several prominent "Marlboro men" started dying of cancer in the US and other western countries. Apparently, even those often devastatingly handsome male models that used to appear in all the major western magazines, newspapers, and even on television ads and gigantic billboards, weren't immune to the ravages of lung cancer. Go figure.

And then it finally became illegal to openly advertise tobacco products. And then all those warning labels started to finally go on all the cigarette packages. What was left for the big drug pushing companies in the west to do then? Well, we'll just get the Asians addicted, they apparently said. Sure. Great idea. I mean, think about it. Asia; that's one huge market for tobacco products right there. Yeah.... Well guess what? It worked. It worked really, really well. Too well. Much, much too well.

That's also pretty much how opium smoking, which had already been a more or less tolerated habit in China for centuries, eventually became so totally out of control. But only after the British fought not one, but two major wars with the Chinese in the 19th century, just for the right to continue to be able to traffic a highly addictive narcotic. Okay, sure, it was a matter of "national pride" for the British, right? I mean, that's why Queen Victoria eventually approved of the British going to war in China, isn't it? And that right there, kids, is just one of the many reasons for the almost total stagnation of Chinese (and greater pan-Asian) "CULTure" (or lack there of) as we know it today.

I mean, just imagine what kind of successive generations you get from a country where, in some places, 75% of the population once spent days on end lying prostrate in opium dens, not taking care of their own kids. Or worse yet, some even resorted to the selling of their children, or some other family member such as a wife, to get more drug money to support the filthy, disreputable habit. But then I'm pretty sure that Chinese CULTure was already in a pretty sorry state even before the Opium Wars broke out between Great Britain and China, which is a story for another time.