Badmitten
November 9, 2009 by Chinatex
Of course i know i spelled it incorrectly, but the first time i spelled it i didn’t even know that it was spelled badminton. Doesn’t make much sense as in Texas we always called it “badmitten”. In fact we only played this game once every few years at family reunions and picnics and usually beer was involved and it could get ugly as some inebriated and not so athletic relative fell on his big fat behind while trying to smash the birdie. That’s what we called em – birdies, we didn’t even know it’s called a shuttlecock and if we did we probably we would have laughed so hard at the name we wouldn’t have even got to playing.
That brings me to the point of this blawg post. Old Chinatex tried his hand at Badminton tonight and boy was it an awakening. I was going to write about one of my favorite subjects which is the hiring of chinese/taiwanese/hong kong managers by western companies and the company executive management trusting them to give legal advice just because they studied somewhere in the U.S. or the U.K. and speak good English. I realized that i didn’t need to waste my time when Old Dan Harris over at Harris & Moure took the words right out of Old Chinatex’s mind and posted it on his award winning China Law Blog. This gave me some time to try my hand at badmitten. Here is the link to the blog post.http://www.chinalawblog.com/2009/11/first_lets_kill_all_the_nonchi.html
Now back to badmitten! I now have an acute understanding why the Chinese are infatuated with this game. If you have ever watched them play it seems they get an inordinate amount of joy out of smashing that little birdie. I’m talking really smashing it and they get even more joy when their opponent or just the other person smashing it back to them, misses it. I can only imagine that they are thinking about their boss or husband or coworker or professor or who knows when they take aim at that little rubber head on the birdie and give it a resounding whack. So, tonight i played and thought about the rude taxi drivers, the clients who don’t listen to me and hire crooked managers anyway and say “but i trust him, he went to the University of Wisconsin”, and the bad service at restaurants and the noisy people in the elevators talking on their cell phones and a plethora of other unmentionables. Every time i took a swipe at that little birdie i imagined one of their faces – now i know why it is their national sport. With 1.6 billion of them, they have to take their frustrations out on something and those poor little birdies are the perfect foils for their anger.
So, if you hire a manager who went to the University of Wisconsin or some other school and professes to be an expert on China and international law and you trust him and then later you realize that Dan Harris and Old Chinatex were right, i suggest you take up Badmitten. As always, yeeha!! Chinatex
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