June 4, 2016

In Beijing I stayed in a cheap old courtyard residence (四合院) that advertised laundry service, which turned out to be a large wash basin with a clothes line on the roof. During the afternoon, a big windstorm blew into the city and carried some of my underwear onto the roof of a neighboring building. I located the neighbor, a 70 year-old butcher (see attached photo), and asked if I could retrieve my underwear. He demanded to see a government issued i.d. establishing that my name was either Duluth Trading or Armachillo. He eventually relented after we shared a cup of tea and a ten-minute discussion about the US presidential election. I was surprised to learn he was a big Donald Trump fan. His reasoning: In the past, the greatest advances in US-China relations have occurred when the leaders of both China and the US were insane.