My career as a counterfeiter begins - intro to Baijiu

APRIL 20,2007: I'm about to write my first forged Australian Department of Foreign Affairs document. At the request of my boss.

It might prove to be the start of a brilliant realist art career, like it was for Dan Gregory, ol' Rabo Karabekian's artistic mentor in Bluebeard. The boss told me the authorities in Changchun were refusing to issue my one-year visa because they couldn't get their heads around my dual citizenship.

I had to prove to them somehow that the australian andrew peter timothy chubb, date of birth 5/2/84, is not the twin brother of the british andrew peter timothy chubb, born 5/2/84 in the same place.

Perhaps the One-child Policy is to blame...maybe they they've been indoctrinated with the message that the problem with multi-child families, especially those involving twins, is that only one child name is available per family, so identical twins must share identical names. It's one explanation.

Anyhow, no-one official could give me any such proof. The Australian government can only verify i'm Australian. The British government can only say i'm British. No-one can say i'm a dual citizen, only me with my two passports. Which aren't good enough proof for the Changchun authorities.

What is good enough, however, is a fake letter from DFAT. "They don't even know English anyway," the boss told me, "they just want to see something flashed under their nose.

"If you can't do it," he continued, "i will have to bribe them lit' bit. That will cost me some money. So please do it."

He also didn't care that i don't officially have a degree (i never paid the fee for the graduation ceremony and piece of paper), even though the same authorities needed to see that too.
"If it's too much trouble, don't worry about it," he said when i suggested i could possibly rustle something up. "I will just bribe them."
First massive night of drinking last night, mainly with 2 Canadian girls who arrived a week or two ago. We finally had a go at that horrendous 'baijiu' spirit.

Our drinking games involved a King's cup - actually a King's rice bowl - of that nasty 'Baijiu' liquor. They went down well (not the baijiu).

It was punctuated, however, by annoying "hurry up" phone calls from the Swiss teacher, who was already at the venue, sober, with the Chinese teachers from the school. The guy reminds me of me. He's probably how i'd have turned out if i grew up in Europe. Apparently he was a crazy goth until a year ago. Then he came to China and started liking pop music and being uptight. ("You're smoking? Ewwwww!"/"Didn't you use to smoke until recently, Harry?"; "You're getting drunk? But you have class!"/"I do have class, Harry, but i can handle a beer with my lunch.") We must have told him we were leaving 4 or 5 times, only to play another round. To get more pissed. Which we did. Which didn't go down well when we rocked up, a full 100 minutes late. He was blowing steam from his ears and his face was redder than a local after too many baijius. (Remember that shit about some asians not being able to handle alcohol at all? That's true, there's a lot of them around here - but it doesn't stop 'em drinking.)

The piss-head takeover was complete soon after when the Swiss dude and the Chinese girls left. The latter were scared.