Police Action, Part Deux

So, I was sitting in listening class, and we were waiting for students to get settled when the 老师laoshi says, "We have a famous person in our class." We're all looking around, wondering who it is. Then he says, "It's an American." Well, there's only two of us in our class, so I look at the other guy. He's looking at me. I'm like, "肯定不是我!" (It's certainly not me!). He says the same.

It's me.

All through class I chuckled to myself. Picked up a few papers on my way home, keep one for myself and send a few home to folks.

I have a front page photo, and a second, only slightly smaller, on A4.

I read through the article. It was fun. It was pretty general, about China's MEGA-census, counting everyone in the country, including 外国人 (foreigners). I've been census-ized. I'm accounted for.

I'm happy to be in the paper, and I try to tone down my criticism of things that bother me since I'm a guest here and all and it can be really easy to find things you don't like about another country and culture, but I'm pretty ticked about the article. They put our whole address in the article, down to the door number (which, humorously, doesn't actually exist; when we moved in we asked the owner for the door number to receive packages and he said, "left").

So tomorrow I'm going to go down to our little police office and have a talk, to see what we might do about it. Obviously there's really not much that can be done, and it wasn't even their fault, it was the newspaper's. Maybe we'll see about getting some kind of alarm system put in or something, as long as it's cheap. Or maybe a BIG dog (I'd like that). Or I could hire someone to guard our house, or get my own gang of thugs organized...wait, I can't do that here.

We'll see how it pans out. I know the Lord is in control, and there's nothing I can do to change the fact that our address is all over Wuhan. We have decent locks on the doors. And we really don't have that much stuff worth stealing (unless they like dirty Western laundry that won't fit a Chinese person, or American cooking utensils which are also usually dirty...). We don't keep any money in the house.

Well, there's my rant. Here's a few pictures for your enjoyment.

This is the front page

Close up; don't I look happy! And our friend Officer Liu is also enjoying himself a good deal.

A4, with article

Close up