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In the 1970s, my grandfather was tortured by the Chinese communists for being a “Capitalist swine”. Not that they needed any hard proof to arrest anyone at the time, but the incriminating evidence was a picture of him at the age of 4 sweated on wooden toy horse wearing clothes that were evidently too western and too colorful for the tastes of the CCCP.

As I trodded down the crowded isle the central Wuhan train station yesterday, I couldn’t help but feel extremely… bourgeois, for the lack of a better word. The stark difference in dress attire certainly contributed to that effect. As did travelling to one of my dad’s clients factories in a rather large Audi. It certainly gives off evil-capitalist-oppressing-the-lowly-proletariat vibes. For those of you not in the know, I’m currently travelling in China with my family visiting relatives, friends, ancestral graves and all that good stuff. Its been about 5 years since I last visited China but I’m amazed at how much the country has changed - The Chinese can literally rebuild an entire city faster than it takes Singapore to build a basketball court.

People who haven’t visited China in recent years would find it hard to picture the scale and scope of the transformation that is taking place - Massive highways spanning the lengths of an entire continent (or lets just say hundreds of Singapores in length), state-of-the-art airports, hospitals, skyscrapers, and shopping malls so massive you’d consider them engineering marvels by their own right have all popped up like mushrooms after a bout of rain.

Its messy at times, and the dichotomy between the have and have-nots is mind-boggling to say the least. At Wuhan train station, for instance, you see migrant workers from the poorest provinces of China, beggars, charlatans peddling snake oil, vagrants all crammed together in destitute conditions. Just a gated doorway a few meters away lies another world, the first class lounge where students from previleged families play with their unlocked iPhones, businessmen in snazzy suits and their IBMs, chic chicks with all the latest fashion apparel who wouldn’t at all be out of place in Tokyo or Paris.

In spite of these problems, you get the unmistakable impression that progress is both real and unstoppable. The number of cars on the streets are increasing exponentially, not just the cheapo plebian-mobiles, we’re talking about BMWs, Audis, Jaguars, and even Cadillacs. The Chinese have just discovered their purchasing power. Business is booming, and will continue to do so in the forseeable future. And it hasn’t escaped anyone’s notice that the world’s grandest display of a market economy in action is, ironically, taking place in what is technically still a communist country.

P.S. The good news is that China has free internet (Yes, for everyone). The bad news is that its dial-up. And the worse news is that Blogspot is on its banned list, which means I can’t access most of my friends’ blogs. Good thing I have my own domain, else I wouldn’t be able to blog on the fly either.

I don’t watch a lot of TV. What little time I spend in front of mine is usually divided evenly between National Geographic and the History Channel. Exciting, I know. In this day and age where shows like CSI, Lost, Sex and the City, and Desperate Housewives rule the airwaves people find it incredible that I don’t have the faintest clue what Carrie Bradshaw does for a living.

Its not that I don’t enjoy a bit of drama every now and then; I just can’t justify spending hundreds of cumulative hours sitting in front a box and accomplishing nothing productive. But there are a few rare exceptions. A few years ago, one of the shows that I did invest a lot of time in was a sci-fi series called Andromeda. The funny thing is Andromeda was hardly the creme de la creme of TV productions: the theme music was cheesy, the special effects (or rather lack thereof) was dire and the script was laughable. The only reason why I followed it for as long as I did was because it was easy for me to draw some parallels between the script and my somewhat tumultuous life at the time, having just been transplanted from Singapore to Kansas.

The story itself is set thousands of years in the future in an alternate universe, where a prosperous democratic alliance of planets known as the “systems commonwealth” rules the known universe. En route to a battle engagement, the Andromeda, a starship captained by the protagonist of the series, Dylan Hunt, is ambushed gets caught in the event horizon of a black hole and frozen in time. Dylan and the Andromeda emerge 300 years later, only to discover that the commonwealth has collapsed and a universe in chaos.

With the only world that he’s ever known gone and displaced in time and space, Dylan Hunt sets about the impossible task of rebuilding his beloved commonwealth single-handedly. Its tough. After all, he’s an living anachronism longing to recreate dead ideals and dreams that few people understand and even fewer care about. He clearly knows he doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell but he forges on anyway. The rag-tag crew of the Andromeda are wonderful companions, but they’ll never see things his way. In his heart of hearts Dylan knows he’s isn’t - and won’t ever be - where he belongs.

Somehow, I could relate to all of that.