Pictures from the Weekend

Coming late, but coming nonetheless.

Playing badminton with Zoe, of course:


Singing "It Was a Very Good Year," with President Victor's cowboy hat, which he gave me for the performance (I think he confused it with a Sinatra Fedora, but it worked anyway):


Taking a slight bow:


The girls really, really liked the hat:


I'm sure there are more pictures floating out there. I'll try to post them soon.

A Weekend Away

This weekend, Horizon took off to their annual company retreat, 4 hours away on the beach. It was a highly scheduled event, of course, with lots of competitions and glamour.

When we arrived, I noticed dimly that the place did not smell of ocean. I did not know why. But the trip over was very exciting and interesting--in the 4-hour trip, I looked out into the countryside and saw bridges, derricks, factories, tractors, backhoes--most of it having arrived after 1978. When we got to the shore, we saw dozens of fishing ships before the horizon: the government had not forbid such things so wealthy Senators would not have to look at them from their vacation homes. Our resort was called the "BTV Training Center--" mostly because it was built by the government before 1978, and to build such things, one had to pretend that they served the government in some way, even though the motive was clearly as a resort for those who intended to pay. To this day, that resort (and many) still hide behind a lie that everyone knows is false. As long as it is not uttered, it is fine.

Anyway, we had a sports competition the first early afternoon, in which I played badminton with one of my many bosses, Zoe. We lost 2 games to 1 in the first of three rounds to the team that ended up taking the whole thing--sad. But the second game we won was a hard-fought 26-24 victory that included a few diving swats on my part that gave me scrapes and cuts but gave us crucial points. Zoe came to hug me at that point (which broke her usual tough-boss demeanor), and I carried her one-armed to the other side of the net, where we then were trounced.

The evening was held in a small theatre-room, and included lots of speeches (of which I understood little), photo contests, and singing, the last of which I participated in at the behest of Zoe. I will say that last night revealed more strangeness about Chinese culture--not bad, perse, but strange:

1) Enthusiasm is appreciated greatly, and rewarded with enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is a great way to cover-up nervousness or fear, where I think in the West, one is more expected to be calm and composed to cover such emotions.

2) Talking during speeches/performances is allowed. I've seen it a lot, even at the movies. I hear it happens a great deal at Peking Opera, from my guidebooks.

3) Western-educated Chinese think and act very different than domestically educated ones. Dr. Feng, another one of my bosses, is a great example of a man with fundamentally different humor capacity (though not unique, just pseudo-Western) and way of speaking, though he is not in love with either Chinese or Western culture/traditions.

Anyway, I sang Sinatra's "It Was a Very Good Year" and then helped Michelle sing "Hey Jude,"--we won second place, and I came home with a portable speaker set that's not even that bad. I think I even sang alright. A mere 20 minutes later, I was a part of a contest that Nicole devised in which I put on headphones and listened to Chinese music (most of which I had never heard before), and then had to reproduce the melody for two groups, which had to jump to try to guess the song. I did not like it much, but their sheer enthusiasm detracted from me enough that I felt like I was alone in the room, and so I survived it.

This morning, I played volleyball and this silly game where we had to run back and forth to the shore and take seawater to fill up a bucket with our hands. My large hands helped us get second in the latter--we were pretty thorougly crushed in the former.

On the busride home, a friendly employee from the Guangzhou office talked to me (in Chinese!) for a few hours, and then fell asleep. We didn't talk about anything gripping, but the practice was good. I am actually getting better at speaking, which I was still pretty lousy at when I arrived.

Three weeks of work left. I am tired--I haven't run around that much in far too long.

Today's Observations

A few interesting observations today:

1) Chinese post-offices are very confusing. But a nice lady came up to me and said "HelloIspeakEnglishdoyouneedsomehelp?" After a moment blinking, I said (in Chinese) "Oh! I speak some bad Chinese, but I'd still love the help." She helped me find stamps. It was difficult.

2) I went to the food market today, and it had no prices anyhwere, so I was expecting to haggle like crazy. But I walked past the people yelling at me ("Hello! Oranges!"), and got to the people that looked at me with an earnest curiosity as to whether I was going to competently purchase their wares. I approached them, and politely asked them the prices of different meats/vegetables/etc, and they _didn't rip me off_. I thought about it, and said "no, no, this is a fair price." I didn't even have to haggle. It was strange. But I got some good stuff for cheap.

3) I got spit on again, turning a corner. The guy didn't even apologise. I don't know if he noticed.

4) Jamacian people speaking Chinese is _awesome_.

5) Being helpful is also awesome.

6) There's no domestic peanut butter. It's all imported, and really darn expensive. Drat.

The Fall of Research

Well, until a few days ago, I had 3 research projects at Horizon. One of them fell through because our Indian client ignored us past the deadline. One fell through because of a strict denial. One is not "gone," perse, but is waiting for a conference call that was supposed to be two Mondays go, failed because we were late, was rescheduled for today, and then cancelled at the last moment by our American client for "next week," which will give me approximately two weeks to do anything of use.

Those projects were supposed to take up my time, and now they're half-heartedly filling it with proofreading projects for bad translations. So I am mostly wasting time here. What a drag.

South Sanlitun; My Current Haunts

It's not home, but it's the closest I'm going to get in Beijing. South Sanlitun now knwos me, from the friendly doorman who waves at me to the convenience store owner that says "Nihao, laowai!" (hey, foreigner!) when I walk in (such friendliness sometimes surprises other customers). I know the area well enough that I have given people directions, and I've led a few of my Chinese friends the right way on the subway when they were confused. I've got the place down.

But I have a few complaints that will make me very happy to get back to the US. Some of the stuff that has really bothered me these last 6 weeks:

1) Cutting in line; Beijingers try it a lot. They are usually unsuccessful, because I will tap them on the shoulder and say "Ni gan shenme?" (What do you think you're doing?), and they'll usually waddle behind me. Sometimes they don't, and I figure it's not worth a fight in a foreign country.

2) Spitting. It's loud (you know that sound when you push up all the junk in your nose and throat right before you spit it out), and then it's all over the sidewalks. People do it all the damn time.

3) Car horns. The Chinese have an adolescent relationship with their horns that is like a Freudian nightmare. Bus drivers are the worst, careening into the wrong side of the road and blaring their horn at anyone that dares oppose them, or honking at cars at intersections that have not yet even begun to think about entering the road. But besides them (I know I have complained about them already), there is incredible honking at all hours of the day. On my way to work, one man leaned into his horn for well over 30 seconds, not letting up, behind a line of cars at a red light. He smiled and let off it as they moved, as if he had had some effect. He's not the only one that holds that delusion.

4) Loud ringtones. My cheap cellphone has vibrate, and I know theirs does, too. They just haven't figured it out, or are so enamored with their ringtone that they want to share it with everybody in the office when someone tries to call them while they're away from their desk. One ringtone is literally a child crying. Literally. Seriously, people, why do you do this to me?

5) Pushing. Chinese folks, you'll have to tell me if this happens to you, too. But when people want to get by me, they don't ask me to move, and they don't even silently tap me on the shoulder to get me to move, they just shove me. Old ladies, big young men, doesn't matter. If there is some sort of language problem, it is that the Chinese have not figured out how to get someone's attention without using words. But I think there is some small pleasure felt in pushing whitey around.

6) Tour groups here suck, too. If you go to a famous college or live in a large city, you've seen them. Chinese tour groups are their own detour sign, and have absolutely no care that they might be in everyone's way at once. It is no different here.

7) People are always in my way, even if they're not tour groups. I have not noticed this in other large cities I've been in (Philadelphia, New York, Boston), but for some reason, Beijingers are just in the way. Maybe they walk a bit slower. Part of the problem might be that there are more people per square kilometer, but part of it is certainly that they don't naturally create "right-side" and "left-side" opposite flows--groups tend to just crash into each other in some terrible disaster.

8) Pushy salesmen. This can get epic, especially in tourist locations. Do most of you white people cave in and buy something when someone shoves it in your face and screams at you? Am I the only one that evades this? If not, it seems like terrible business practice, but it keeps happening. It's the one thing that will get me to ignore anything a vendor has to offer, and the single greatest obstacle to me souvenir-shopping.

9) Pushy flyer-pushers. You know the LaRouche guys that try to give you pamphlets telling you that space-alien clone Cheney is planning to use Halliburton's private nuclear stock to attack Azerbaijan for its vast stocks of toenail clippings? You know nothing! Saturday, after seeing Chairman Mao, Michelle actually got assaulted by three ladies trying to stuff travel agency cards in her purse, and she and I both had to push them off. We considered calling the police. She said "this just happens sometimes."

10) Rude smoking. Now you all should know that I don't complain about smoking. I live all around it, and tolerate it in just about any private establishment--if you want to smoke, I can leave. But in China, people frequently ash on the ground (despite ash trays on their tables...), and cigarette butts litter the bathroom stalls at work, along with ash. The smell, combined with regular bathroom smells, is pretty terrible.

11) Personal space problems. I have found it is harder to get someone to leave you alone or give you physical space using body language. Some of my travelers will note this happens in bars--women have to be pretty obvious for a very long time before men will stop hanging on them. I also don't know how to politely say no in China (traditional Western methods of evasion seem to have no effect here), so I have been roped into some pretty lousy stuff that I thought I had made it clear that I was not thrilled about, especially at work.

12) The subtleties of flirtation are lost upon young Chinese girls. I am told that traditionally, Chinese women silently pine for the men that they like, and also that the new generation of girls has rejected this for more personal initiative. But as I've told before, from the girls stealing my telephone number to the 15-year-old telling me boys her age were too young for love, such forwardness would turn me off even if I were single.

13) American college students are even more obnoxious here than at home. I now know where the "ugly American" comes from, and it's college students. Men and women my age, alike, are entirely clueless about other cultures, and make absolutely zero cultural preparation before their mommies and daddies drop $20k for them to spend an "educational" summer abroad. And they seem to neither notice nor care how their hosts feel about their behavior. I have had a special revulsion that I have reserved for other "laowai" in China, and I yearn for American obnoxiousness in an American context, where it belongs.

I guess this is not "a few" irritations, but many. China can be an irritating place.

Seeing the Chairman

Got up at 6 this morning (ugh) to go see Chairman Mao Zedong's final resting place, just south of Tiananmen Square.

There was a mandatory bag-check, which de-railed our adventure, but the line moves quickly through the Mao-soleum, urged on by workers whose job it is to stand there all day and tell you to hurry up.

There were two halls: The first had a great statue of the Chairman, and a few people broke from the lines (that went around it) to stand in front of it with flowers and thrice-bow, as if they had incense at a Buddhist temple. I don't know the minute details of Chinese culture well enough to know how both practices are linked, but I thought it strange.

We were told to be very quiet, not to talk. Nobody did, among hundreds of people (including very small children) at 8AM. Apparently almost everyone wants to see this at some point.

The second hall: He lay within a crystal coffin, covered in a red sheet with a yellow hammer and sickle. The crystal coffin sat further within a glass case, and his face was lit. The closer I got, the less sure I was that he was real at all, and not wax--even Michelle commented that he looked like was probably made of wax. Neither of us know the embalming process well enough to know whether he was real or not, but Wikipedia and other internet sources don't mention that there is any question as to whether or not it's his real body, so I'm willing to buy it.

Either way, I was rather in awe. I understand why people were there to push me along--I wanted to stay and stare at the Chairman for a rather long time. But I think I more share the Chinese people's mixed respect for the man than most Americans, who (largely correctly) see him as a madman dictator.

The experience was a bit surreal, especially given that the Chariman may have been the first dead person I have ever seen in-real-life. Certainly as far as I can remember.

June is Vanquished: More Learning for July

July is next.

I saw a guy with a shirt today, it said: "I can do whatever I want to." Certainly not as true as if he were in other places, but it helps that people are thinking about it.

I went to a lecture last night by David Lampton, who talked about his book, The Three Faces of Chinese Power. Sadly, the books were sold out, so I could not buy one and ask him to sign it. Oh well.

He lectures at Johns Hopkins, and is a heck of a lecturer. Very engaging, like a conversation. I got to sit closest to him, and he had the guts to look everyone in the eyes. Anyway, he started off by talking about a few meetings he's had with the Chinese and American leadership, dinners with Henry Kissinger, and being part of the very first post-Mao diplomatic mission to China. Very cool stuff.

He defines power in three ways: might (using pain to threaten people into doing what you want), money (using economic incentives to pay people to do what you want), and mind (using ideas to inspire people to do what you want). He then talked about how China is hoping to balance all three forms of power in the world--like the US has since the 2nd World War. He also says that this is a China we can live with.

He made some very interesting observations that are of note:
1) The Chinese, of course, sponsor much of our debt, and many Americans worry about this. But they shouldn't. First, the Chinese cannot call back our debt, as many Americans think--the Chinese buy bonds, the US government doesn't go begging for loans. The Chinese can't call in our debt any more than you can demand your CD be paid to you in full three years early. They could sell the bonds off, causing the US dollar to drop even more. But this would hurt the Chinese economically more than the United States; it would completely devalue their own holdings of US currency, it would destabilize their own currency (which is backed by the equity of US greenbacks!), and it would annihilate their particularly precarious export-economy, which depends on a strong dollar and weak Renminbi. So the Chinese could sell these bonds if they were feeling suicidal, but wouldn't get much more than pain out of it. In general, he cites economic interdependence between the US and China, which forces each to listen to the economic and political concerns of the other. He and I agree: this is great.

2) One might think, wait, China's not spreading Communism, what is this mind-power that it's using? Remember that Deng Xiaoping brought a new motto into the Chinese arsenal of slogans, and this one has beat out all the others: "To get rich is glorious." He realized the Chinese were rich everywhere but China, and began urbanizing, globalizing, and marketizing China. And lo! China has started to get rich (so much so that he cites a Feb. 2008 Gallup poll showing more Americans believing that China is the world's leading economic power than the US. A hard claim to back up when the GDP of the US is still more than four times that of China.). Asia is quite excited about jumping on China's "get rich" bandwagon, as is Africa. The European and American notion of paternalistic liberalism just isn't cutting it for countries that aren't already swimming in wealth.

3) The Chinese and American navies should talk more. One of Rumsfeld's key mistakes in an otherwise very good China policy by the Bush Administration has been a refusal to talk to the Chinese military. Gates has changed this policy, and with great effect. The Chinese sphere of influence is growing--we can't stop it, and nor should we. It is expensive to try to patrol the entire world, and why should we do it when China can take care of its region effectively? The Chinese export-led economy depends deeply on a peaceful region full of neighbors that trust it and like it. Their policy of reassurance has gone far to make sure that happens. China wants to secure sea routes (especially the Strait of Malacca, where it gets 90% of its oil) and make sure no force can approach its coast without permission--the large bulk of China's population lives right by the water. It will need aircraft carriers for this, and really, we should take comfort that someone with the means is going to watch over Asia so we don't have to.

I disagree with the Professor that we have to start changing our ways to compete with the Chinese for influence or markets, particularly as a government. We've got a ton of smart kids in business nad international relations, all chomping at the bit to get working with China and the rest of the world. We just need to stop being so terrified and unchain them, let them fly. They'll make the US competitive again.

Anyway, great lecture, lots of fun. I got to have a good conversation with him about Chinese naval expansion, but sadly, the man agrees with just about everything I think. I'm sure there's a lot of data he has that I don't, but I didn't quite feel that my point of view was too challenged. Maybe that means I'm getting it closer to being right.