Before I get into Qing Fo, the Chinese Squid Woman, there are a couple of matters I want to deal with.
First thing, I'm sick of welfare bums, like my neighbor Martha, who has been on welfare for at least 15 years. There's nothing wrong with her physically or mentally. She just has no interest in working. How she gets away with it, I have no idea. She claims to do volunteer work. Even if she does, how does she manage to string the system along year after year? The only thing I can think of is that she's having sex with her case worker, although he'd have to be pretty hard up to want to have sex with such a dish rag. I figure she goes to his place, because I've never seen her receive any male visitors.
The second thing I am ticked off about is my local supermarket, which refuses to carry Diet Dr. Pepper or any diet root beer. Where's my freedom of choice? What kind of backward country is this? The manager claims he's not allowed to carry the brands of soda I want?! What a typical Canadian loser! Sometimes I just feel like strangling him! He carries all these Asian-type snacks that look like cat litter, but he won't carry normal soda for white people. I'm sure Coke and Pepsi are paying for shelf space to keep other brands out, which is some sort of restraint of trade, but does the government do anything about it? No way! I've made lots of complaints, too, but nobody will answer my letters any more.
Qing Fo, the Chinese Squid Woman, is the biggest mystery in the history of China, even more mysterious than how all those Chinese can live with all that polluted air. There is nothing whatever about her on the internet, so once again (as usual) it's up to me to fix something wrong with the world. The Chinese Consulate, I should add, has been of no help whatever. They claim they never heard of her!
Qing Fo was born in either 1928 or 1938, in either Chengchow or Wuhan. Her father was either a peasant or a street vendor of pots and pans, and the family was either on the side of the Communists or the Nationalists. As a young woman, Qing Fo either taught school or was a mistress of Mao Tse-tung, from whom she would have learned about the atomic bomb.
She came to be known as the Squid Woman either because of her skill in cooking squid in various ways or because she had squid-like arms with suckers. Another theory is that she was the girlfriend of an opium dealer known as the Squid.
Some sources say she wasn't Chinese at all but Korean. And some suggest she was a man disguised as a woman. However, a Chinese grocer in my neighborhood insists that no one in China would be called the Chinese Squid Woman unless she was really Chinese and a woman, because the Chinese are not so easily fooled. I don't think you can argue with that kind of logic.
Her death is just as mysterious as her life. Some believe she was killed in the Shantung soy riots of 1975. Others claim she killed herself with poison rather than be executed for treason in connection with stolen blueprints for a rocket engine. And others claim that she is still alive and living in Canton, Hong Kong, or Madison, Wisconsin, and has changed her name to Chi Kwok, Bao Wing, or Shirley Goldman.
The lack of reliable documentation convinces me that there has been an Orwellian conspiracy at the top levels of the Chinese government to obliterate any mention of Qing Fo or any evidence of her existence. This can only mean that she was deeply involved in some national security matter or some scandal with a high public official. That is my hypothesis until someone can prove otherwise.
Another thing that makes me mad is barking dogs that wake me up in the middle of the day when I like to sleep. There are stores across the street, and dog owners will tie their dogs outside while they go in to shop, and some of these dogs are totally untrained and bark continuously. There's supposed to be a city by-law about noise, but nobody enforces it. Sometimes I'm tempted to take a bat and go out there and smash the dog's head in. Some of these dog owners are so anti-social, they totally don't care if their dogs bother normal people like me. There's one guy in particular whose dog won't keep quiet for two seconds, and I can tell just by looking at him through my binoculars that he's either a drug dealer or a welfare bum like that miserable Martha, who doesn't have a dog, but she does have a cat that smells like death, and she doesn't even open a window to air the place out, which is why no visitor can stand to be in her apartment for more than a minute, or so I'm told.