I Breathe A Sigh of Relief

Finally, after much intellectual pain, I am finished with yet another semester. Rather than talk aimlessly about how fast time is flying and how it feels like I'm going to be "old as the hills" in a matter of moments (no insults intended to those of you who feel that you are already as old as these geographical features), I have a nice little story about censorship which everyone can appreciate.
Earlier in the semester, our teachers asked (read required) us to write a brief essay in Chinese about some topic. They told us this had to be longer than the weekly reports we wrote, some three or four pages and that it had to be good. Being the innocent, naive little students we are, none of us suspected what evil designs our teachers had in mind. Well, almost none of us. There were these rumors that they (our program) were going to attempt to publish these horrible little things we wrote. Apparently, the status of foreigners in China is so elevated that even the mindless, badly composed drivel of a bunch of students is worth publishing. Now, you my wonderful readers, know me, but you do not necessarily know how bad my Chinese is. It has gotten better, but at the time they wanted us to write these things, it was genuinely atrocious.
Any Chinese person who saw my writing would ether laugh themselves to death or cry themselves to death because it so mangled their language. I speak (and write) Chinese with a lack of skill which invokes deep mental pain in the minds of those who are native speakers. I have even seen some Chinese cower on the ground in the fetal position upon hearing me speak.
So you may imagine, knowing me to be the compassionate person I am, that I never would have desired to cause such wide and deep pain as the publication of anything I wrote in Chinese would have caused. So I set my mind to work. After sleeping on it, I devised a fool proof plan that would ensure no one would even contemplate publishing what I wrote.
Even though China is nowhere near so foolishly obsessed with political correctness as America is, they have their own love of bureaucracy and so cannot avoid at least a little. My plan involved appealing to their sense of decorum and political correctness, in effect hiding behind it. I figured if I wrote something offensive enough they would never, in all their desire to make us foreigners into sideshows, publish my piece.
So one night I sat down to open up the floodgates of political in-correctness. Having read this far, you can make a guess at what I ended up with. The topic I was give was tourism in China. So, I decided to list off the favorite past-times of all the various races and nations on earth in the most indecent manner possible. This involved quite a bit of the imagination. I started with the Taiwanese, I decided to say that not only did the Chinese mainlanders not like them, but the rest of the world didn't like the Taiwanese either. But the real brilliant touch here was why people did not like them: I said that Taiwanese people eat little children (台湾人很喜欢吃小孩子) . But i wasn't convinced that this would be shocking enough to ensure that they couldn't publish it, so I forged bravely on. I said that there weren't many French tourists in China because they don't like to use bathrooms and instead will nonchalantly relieve themselves wherever they feel the need (法国人随地上厕所) but I quickly realized there were two problems with this. First of all, nobody really likes the French anyways so they wouldn't have a problem with publishing such a scandalous review of them. And secondly, the Chinese seem to be quite content with this very informal means of answering nature's call, so I couldn't exactly expect them to raise any guff over such a statement.
The only choice was to keep on striving for the ultimate in offensive statements. I said that China did have a lot of American tourists, but nobody really liked them because they were all fatties (美国人都是胖字). I said that China only allowed Japanese tourists in so that they could catch them all in a great vengeance trap and kill them (中国人要杀死日本人). The Germans became people who liked to drive cars the wrong way on streets and Canadians just came to China to use drugs. I added a few other touches but finally relaxed with the comfort that it would cause a small international incident if my teachers tried to publish this little piece of mine.
I underestimated their cunning.
Low and behold at our farewell dinner, with all the dignitaries of our school present, the program head pulled out some colorful little magazine and said that it was a collection of articles written solely by us students. He began to read some of the articles, and my feet grew cold. I did not want to imagine what it would be like if he got to mine and went foolishly on reading. From what I have seen the Chinese do not appreciate a dry sense of humor and sarcasm in the same way Americans do--I guess they haven't had enough contact with the English. Anyhow, he named off two of my classmates and then came my name. I cringed. He started in talking boastfully about the wide understanding of tourism I demonstrated and the fairness and insight with which I judged the various nations' reasons for coming to China. I did not understand it. How could this be?
After a few minutes however, it all became clear. My teachers had decided that a little poetic license needed to be used in my case. They had rewritten my entire article and the only thing which remotely resembled the one I had written was the name. For a while I was angry about this, but then I realized that I had achieved my aim anyway. I had wanted to stop them from publishing what I wrote because my Chinese would have caused horrible pain to the many native speakers who read it, and this was achieved--just not how I imagined. It is no doubt that my teacher's Chinese was far more eloquent than I ever could have written, but since she attributed it to me, everyone would imagine it was my Chinese--and what is more, no one would have to go to the hospital. There are times when things do actually work out.
And so that is how I ended my semester, in plagiarism imposed upon me by my teachers.