The Last Communist

Otherwise known as Lelaki Komunis Terakhir.

So beware of sending your boys back to the mainland!

After just a year of living in the Beijing, Charming Calvin has been brainwashed by peking duck, red communist flags and now with the daily repetition of the national anthem during the recent Olympics - into an alarming communist.

You can imagine what a shock that is to a liberal democrat like me!

In just the space of one year, he has morphed into the perfect Mao soldier not seen since Lei Feng walked the dusty hills of Hunan. Our recently dubbed Comrade Calvin in his Soviet floppy-eared winter hat waving that little red book while chanting revolutionary dogma exhorting the rise of the proletariat slaves to shed the chains of class struggle and overthrow the dictatorship of the imperialist bourgeouis. 起來！不願做奴隸的人們! Wouldn't surprise me if he'd volunteered to slave away in the internment gulags in the western counties to help the common people - as the proverbial revolutionary screw that never rusts.


The perfect soldier
Quite obvious that he'd changed into a junior Lei Feng when we had this conversation snippet.

Paul : I wonder whether I should buy that pair of boots. Costs a bomb but the leather's soft as butter.
Calvin : Shed the chains of bourgeois materialism! Donate to the common proletariat! Support the rise of the great nation!
Paul : The boots are probably made in China.
Calvin : Learn from Lei Feng! Live a frugal life!
Paul : Sew my own shoes from fallen reeds?

Maybe I shouldn't tell him how much I spent on my glasses.

In case you're wondering, Lei Feng was a young PLA revolutionary whose selfless devotion to his people and the motherland made him a role model for the Chinese. To learn from Lei Feng was at that time an important moral assignment for schoolchildren who would do selfless voluntary work in their neighborhood, helping the elderly with their chores, bringing a lost child home or carrying luggage for passengers. A posthumous lesson though since he got struck down by a falling telephone pole. Taking his lessons to heart is reason enough for the rise of cellphone usage in the country.

No doubt if they'd repackaged Comrade Lei Feng as an aspiration for the modern China, he'd be a slick fast-talking entrepreneur in Armani trotting out his new shiny Mercedes and an even shinier supermodel girlfriend.