It was probably my grandmother who coined the phrase its a woman's prerogative to change her mind, though I don't think that she was the mastermind behind the development of a section of the chinese population that has the brain to be very specific in such a way that matter doesn't exist on this planet. I guess because the lack of this ability was linked to color related genes for a period of time, that is why Europe is playing catch up on this, but even if they have to ride in steerage we are sending them out in the same convoy.
My grandfather was spoken of as a king in the time of the immortals, because the other immortals were kings that had moved their essential courts to his vicinity oddly away from the coasts and fields because some people in my family express the phenotype of being very good diagnosticians and have a sense of measuring and proportioning that can't be taught to others. He wasn't anything like a king as eventually people began to talk about in other places, in that he wasn't ever a warlord, he didn't progress beyond family and household structuring and a lot of other things that were said of kings, and eventually the concept of king became such that people presumed him to have traits that he didn't possess because he was allowed to use a territory that was somewhat coveted because if they pushed him back any further no one would have been able to find him or find some reason to be near enough to him of any use that he would look at them from time to time.
Anyway, sometimes in the miasma that is modern China its hard to know who is running things based on what actually happens, but when people out far away over the mountains sometimes don't calibrate their factories right they gas a lot of people on purpose. And a trend is developing in those who don't nicely die like they are supposed to. They have a tendency to be somewhat to extremely less productive than those who die, may have done extraordinarilly poorly in school and are to the point that they are retaining knowledge of wild foods out of sheer necessity, and while the life expectancy around them is not much over 60, they are more than 90 with no signs of slowing down.
My grandfather had a rather distinctive face, I look like him a little bit, and if anyone tried to put the pieces of this face together in the important cities people were stationed at regular intervals to make sure that didn't go on for long, so a certain kind of face became associated with people who lived on the fringes of the old structure, where they put the political favor appointees who weren't really capable of being specific enough to understand just enough to not be able to explain anything by accident or hold anyone hostage, and people would assume that such things would be reported by any sensible person, and no one could say such a person wasn't sensible. And pigs are really easy to raise and sell, they stink but aren't toxic, people who want to be toxic cant put up with it, and pigs sell well, people who raise pigs tend to not forage, unless they are trying to feed their pigs more cheaply, but sometimes the organs of pigs are worth more than their fat in China, kinda the opposite entirely of around here (I'm paying four dollars a pound for bacon and its really not the best I can get but I'd be surprised to pay more than a buck fifty for the livers if I could find them).
Anyway, all those people who adapted to my grandmother's every whim until such a time as they became kinda racist towards anyone who didn't look like them to the point that she couldn't hold any status among her own offspring, they are highly skilled at finding teenie tiny little niche markets, but not so sure about the amount of energy to put into them, and all kinds of odds and ends end up needing new homes, which generates another link on the food chain populated by people a little less flexible, a little less precise, who fill more varied niches in a more innovative way.
That middle space is under exploited really, that skill set is not just applicable to goods, and many people who accumulate in a pattern are doing nothing more than following a recipe.
Anyway, Dad never lived in China. His father wouldn't allow it, though he couldn't always tell everyone that so that people thought he would cooperate with sending Dad there when he actually told him to run for the west.
Anyway, around here we sometimes still say that it was the Chinese who invented the fire drill, sorta, yet China still hasn't burn down, for some reason.
