Punching buses in Suzhou

Did you see the story about the American fugitive who was caught in Suzhou a little over a week ago? The guy is accused of raping his daughter and posting video of it on the internet.

Turns out the guy, John Freeman, lived openly, mingling with a sizable ex-pat community in Suzhou. Here’s an intriguing post from the blog of an American resident there who had dealings with Freeman.

“Outside of being muscular (he was a body builder after all) and a bit vain (dyed hair, to get that gray out; and presumably, to enhance his “disguise”), there was nothing to indicate he was a felon wanted by the FBI. He was, as they used to say in the old movies, ‘a regular Joe.’”

The author is Bill Dodson, manager of a consultancy in Suzhou, and his This is China! Blog is quite interesting.

Freeman apparently could be loud and aggressive.

“He was proud of the fact that he punched the cars of Chinese drivers that were pushy or just plain lousy at the steering wheel. He bragged he once punched the front of a bus that was pushing through a traffic crossing at which pedestrians clearly had the right of way. ‘The bus driver gave a really surprised look when this big foreigner made such a big noise punching his bus,’ he chortled once over Tiger Beer.”

How did he get away with that kind of behavior? Well, it says a lot about how Chinese still offer deference to foreigners, and how some foreigners abuse that deference.

“That Freeman could be so comfortable in Suzhou says as much about being an expat in China as it does about Suzhou. For one, expats do enjoy a kind of latitude in their adopted countries that the locals do not, to the resentment of some locals.”

Comments

[Shamao]

While there is still deference to foreigners, an acquaintance was recently attacked with a brick by a couple Chinese hawking "lady bars" after he swore at them in Chinese. Should not rely too much on that bulletproof vest anymore.

[Arthur Borges]

General public opinion of Westerners has been going down steadily since around 1990, when most foreigners you met were fluent Chinese speakers who knew how to keep both feet out of their mouths.

From the statistically unrepresentative sample of Westerners I've seen, the Americans seem to be the least flexible as well as the most likely to develop symptoms of mental imbalance -- in five years, I've met half a dozen American males who profile just like Mr. Freeman.