How do you make China’s 13th five-year plan, a far too dense document laying out the country’s future economic strategy from 2015-2020, appeal to the masses? Make a crazy ass video that’s the love child of Schoolhouse Rock and Joseph Goebbels.

“If you wanna know what China’s gonna do, best pay attention to the shí sān wǔ.”

Shí sān wǔ are the Chinese words for “13-five.” So you better pay attention to it, man.

China’s Five Year Plan video is a thing of beauty. It features the Great Wall, a Volkswagen camper van, a rubber duck, disembodied lips, a mixtape, a disco ball, Albert Einstein, and a guy with poo on his head.

Revival Road Workshop

The psychedelic video was created by the incredibly mysterious Revival Road Workshop, a media company that has put out a bunch of pro-China videos.

The company was behind a propaganda video earlier this year about how much the Chinese love Russian President Vladimir Putin.

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China has been rolling out  safe havens, little shelters, where parents can abandon their child without fear of facing charges or revealing their identity.  At Guangzhou’s first safe haven,  51 children were abandoned in the first 13 days of operation, according to China Daily.

Not all the children were babies. Some were 5 and 6 years old. But all of the children were critically ill or disabled.

There’s been a lot of controversy about the program, as some feel it will just become a dumping ground. And already the number of abandoned children has exceeded the estimate by government officials.

While it may seem cruel for parents to abandon their children, and we have no way of knowing why they’re abandoning their children, it beats the alternative. I adopted my daughter from China in 2005. She was abandoned in a park. Fortunately she didn’t join the 70-million girls who met a worser fate.

China has a huge social issue that needs to be addressed.

Photo Courtesy: Xinhua

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Oh my god! Ark Factory Music, who brought us Rebecca Black’s preadolescent crap song “Friday,” have outdone themselves with the release of Alison Gold’s single “Chinese Food.”

I don’t really know where to begin. The “Chinese Food” video is so cataclysmically terrible it’s hard to stop watching it. Every second that goes by you’re thinking “Oh my god, they didn’t just do that, did they?”

In the video, Gold, after a night of balling and clubbing (seriously), and evidently suffering from low blood sugar, knocks over a trash can in a park because she’s so damn hungry. She sees a Chinese restaurant and all is good with the world. She orders some Chinese food and sings the menu.

Read the menu
They got broccoli
Even chicken wings
Make it spicy
And you like it
Cause it’s beautiful
And it tastes so so so good

I like the egg rolls
And the wonton soup
This makes me feel so so good
Fortune cookies, tell my future
Chinese Chinese Food

Here’s the chorus:

“I love Chinese food. You know that it’s true. I love fried rice, I love noodles, I love chow mein, chow m-m-m-mein.”

Then she befriends a giant Panda, who turns out to be  Patrice Wilson, the man responsible for Black’s song “Friday” and Gold’s “Chinese Food” and they go off to a park to tickle each other. Seriously.

But then, just when you think a grown man tickling a girl while wearing a panda suit isn’t bad enough, Wilson raps about Chinese food. But he doesn’t just rap. Oh no. He actually squints his eyes and does a little Yellow Face for us.

Yo!
I like Chinese food
And some Wonton soup
Get me broccoli
While I play Monopoly (Landing on Oriental Ave, ‘natch)
Don’t be a busy bee
Cause it’s your fantasy
To eat Chinese food
Egg roll and Chop Suey
I use the chopsticks
To eat pot sticks
Put some hot sauce and sweet and sour make it sweet
Because Chinese food takes away my stress
Now I’m going to go eat Panda Express

And then – I don’t want to spoil it for you – and then a bunch of preteens show up dressed as Geishas. Geishas! Um, Geishas are Japanese, not Chinese.

It’s an epic train wreck.

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Marcus, Jon Jon, and I rehearsed the song today and they made me laugh pretty hard. Marcus is playing the arch-villain Ming the Merciless and Jon Jon is playing the insidious Fu Manchu.

Marcus was in the Broadway productions of Wicked and the Flower Drum Song revival. But I’m most excited he was in Sharknado. Yeah yeah, big Broadway musicals, whatever. Sharknado!

Jon Jon cornered the market on Miss Saigon. He was in the US Tour, the UK Tour, the Asian Tour, and productions in Germany, the Philippines, and London. He and Marcus were also in the musical Allegiance with George Takei. Oh my.

And the exhibit is wonderful.

“Curated by Asian Pop columnist, Jeff Yang, this exhibition is a unique and fascinating look at how the images and characters of Asians and Asian Americans featured in comic books during times of war and unrest coalesced into archetypes that still remain today.

The exhibition also contains elements designed to encourage direct engagement with the archetypes, such as life-size cutouts of the eight archetypes that allow visitors to put themselves “inside the image” and an installation called “Shades of Yellow” that matches the shades used for Asian skin tones in the comics with their garish yellow Pantone.”

The reception is Thursday, October 10, from 6:00-9:00. To RSVP, contact specialevents@janm.org or 213.625.0414, ext. 2222.

Come on down and see Marcus and Jon Jon tear it up. They’re going to be sensASIONal.

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Häagen-Dazs Signature Ice Cream Mooncakes. Who knew the little company from the Bronx made mooncakes? And word on the street is they are Yum – Me. I mean, who doesn’t like ice cream in the shape of a mooncake? Flavors include Chocolate, Strawberry, Cookies and Creme, and Macadamia Nut.

McDonald’s McMooncakes. McDonald’s sells mooncakes as well? They sure do. In certain cities in China you can go to the Golden Arches and buy mooncakes in great flavors like Mocha Orange, Assam Tea, Hazelnut Latte, and more.

Starbucks. Yep. The coffee giant sells mooncakes in green tea and vanilla flavors.

The Hong Kong based company Goods Of Desire (G.O.D.) has taken the cheeky meaning of moon and sells a bunch of naughty little mooncakes. They come in four different styles; “The T-back,” “D.I.Y.,” “Bunny,” and “The Split.” Hopefully they don’t taste like ass.

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Today there are two headlines that made me laugh out loud, The first:

Survey: China is the World’s Fourth ‘Horniest’ Country

The survey was done by AskMen, China is the fourth horniest country. Who’s first? Greece. I suppose they grew tired of the Occupy Greece movement and moved on to Occupy Vagistan. Here’s what AskMen has to say about China:

“Just in the past eight years, 5,000 sex shops have opened in Beijing alone. Plus, China even has a SEXPO, where Chinese residents come to check out sex paraphernalia.”

I don’t want to bust anyone’s condom but Australia also has a SEXPO and it didn’t make the Top Ten. (FYI: Australian SEXPO is next week!)

But all in all, China’s fourth place ranking makes me wish I was 30-years younger.

The second headline that made me laugh:

Chinese Museum Forced to Close after 40,000 Fakes Discovered

Now if you know anything about China it’s that it is famous for turning out fake products. But a museum with 40,000 fakes items is mind-boggling.

“Highlights include a wucai (five-colour) porcelain vase purported to be from the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) when in fact that the artistic technique was invented hundreds of years later in the Ming Dynasty (1368-1644 AD). Another giveaway was an item signed by an emperor who reigned between 2696 to 2598 BC – that’s more than 3,000 years before the writing system was even invented.”

If the museum got together with SEXPO, it could churn out 40,000 fake breasts. Now that should shoot China to number one of some survey.

(Not museum fakes)

Pictures courtesy NetEase

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