Jet lag

Most people who work in China for foreign companies become more familiar with jet lag then they ever thought they would. If you travel back and forth between coastal China and the East Coast of the US it's particularly bad since the time difference is 12 hours -- your schedule is basically turned upside down. He usually takes me about a week to get over the jet lag. The pattern is roughly as follows, on your first day in either the US or China, depending on which way you're going, you fall asleep pretty early, maybe eight or nine o’clock, but then you wake up about two or three in the morning still tired though basically awake. There's not a heck of a lot to do so early in the morning so you usually call home, check e-mail or call back to the office in the country are not in to talk to people who are in the middle of their workday. Then you can go workout if your hotel has a gym. At that point, it's still pretty early, but you're hungry so you go to the restaurant for breakfast. You're almost always the first one there in the US. Sometimes you actually stand around the door waiting for the restaurant to open. If you come on a China business trip, you find that you've never seen a restaurant so crowded at six in the morning. It's full of fellow jet lag sufferers. You generally feel okay in the first half of the workday, though a little tired. But by the afternoon it's a real struggle just to keep your head off the desk. On each passing day you wake up about an hour later, so after five or six days you are waking up at a fairly normal time. Unfortunately, with many business trips this is exactly the time when you're ready to get back on the plane go back in the other direction and face the same process for the following week.

This past year I had two periods where I had meetings in the US every other week for a six week stretch. One was in March/April and the other in August/September. I didn't want to leave my family nor work behind for a three week period so I ended up going to the US for a week, back to China for a week, back to the US, back to China, backed to the US, and finally back to China again. This is a pretty awful pattern and in during the latter stretches of one of these I'd get almost a little delirious. Its not a good time to make any meaningful decisions. I read an article In the Harvard Business Review a year so ago about jet lag. It was by a doctor and he was suggesting that business people who travel you have three or four days before they're in a situation where they have to make any decisions. It's actually not a bad sentiment, but it's unbelievably impractical.

Jet lag can sometimes have advantages though. My very best weeks for exercise are always the weeks after I get back from a trip, because it's not much else to do at four in the morning. I was in LA on vacation with my family this summer visiting my parents and as usual I found myself awake at about three in the morning. I ended up in the car and going for a drive. My parents live pretty close to Universal Studios so I drove over the hill past the Hollywood Bowl in and down Hollywood Boulevard then over to the Sunset Strip. This was midweek, so there wasn't much of anything going on except for people cleaning the streets and a few homeless guys wandering around. Even places like the Roxy were dormant. I decided to keep driving along Sunset Boulevard. I don’t think I’d ever seen Sunset as quiet. On Sunset you wind your way through Westwood and Brentwood and eventually through Pacific Palisades before hitting the coast. Pacific Palisades is a very nice neighborhood bordering Malibu. I never knew anyone personally who lived there until I was in LA working as a lawyer and it seemed that a disproportionate number lawyers seemed to live there. As I drove through the Palisades I was reminded of Bud Kling, the fiery coach of the Pacific Palisades tennis team. When I was in high school, I played on the North Holland High School tennis team. Tennis is a sport that is in many ways very geographically predictable. Almost universally the high schools with the best tennis teams are in the wealthiest enclaves. When I was attending North Hollywood High, there was a huge mix of people both racially and economically. Our boundaries went up to Mulholland Drive, taking in Universal City, Studio City and Laurel Canyon and spread all the way out into the flatlands of the Valley, which with their significant gang concentrations, couldn’t be more different. Still, there was enough diversity in a school that could still manage to marshal a very good tennis team. The last two years that I was there we played in the city finals against Palisades, winning once and losing once. I just remember the coach of Pali vividly because he was such a character. He was incredibly competitive and incredibly intense. The contrast between him and our coach could not have been greater. Our esteemed leader, Pete Bristol, didn't know how to play tennis far as we could tell and really just provided us with tennis balls and came down to the courts after school in his flip-flops to watch us play. I suppose we had the discipline to practice enough to be fairly good. And some ways Bristol was a perfect coach if you're a high school kid that just wanted to have a good time. He was happy when you won, but he really didn't put any pressure on you.

Just below Palisades is a small beach near Gladstones, a fish restaurant on the beach, located at the intersection of Sunset and PCH, which is where I ended my nighttime sojourns. This is the same beach where I cut my head open surfing as a 19-year-old. Ironically, this was also a fond memory. It was one of the bigger swells of the summer and my friends happily paddled out. While there was sand on the beach, once you got past the sand by a few feet it became all rocks underneath. I fell and hit my head on a rock. Luckily, I wasn’t knocked out but my head was throbbing and I walked up onto the beach dragging my board by the leash on my foot. The horrified looks on everybody's faces on the beach let me know something was wrong and then the blood started to run down from my head onto my arm. My friends came out and slapped a towel on my head and lifeguard came and told me to keep pressure on it. I remained conscious the whole time and my friends drove me to the nearest hospital. I called my mom who insisted that I wait for a plastic surgeon to stitch it up. The best part of all, once my friends saw that it might take a while, they started getting visibly antsy knowing it was one of the better surf days of summer. I just told them to head back to the beach and let me know how that it was. Later my mom came in and then the doctor. It was 40 or 50 stitches in the end.

So there’s the silver lining of jet lag. You get to drive around LA in the middle of the night reminiscing about goofy things that happened to you when you were young.

Disaster relief

We saw these the bumper car things not long ago and liked the FEMA/Power Ranger combo. Look at the logo on the back. Maybe FEMA should bring these guys in during the next hurricane disaster.

The Feast

I recently spent most of a weekend in Wuhan, a 2^nd tier city in central China along the Yangtze river. It has about 7.5 million people and is thus big, but not huge by Chinese standards. I was there speaking at a trade show which was actually pretty weak – not too well attended. They had me fly in early, about 10am, so I had to get up very early and miss all the Saturday activities, soccer, park, lunch out, etc. Frustratingly, I arrived to find out that my speaking slot had been delayed so they had me go to the hotel for a rest. I had just arrived! Anyway, I didn’t want to go and just hang out at the conference, so I said ok and then ended up going for a walk for a couple of hours. I like to walk around and see what places are like. I always have. Wuhan looked about the same as most other Chinese cities, maybe even more non-descript since there was no topography to speak of and the part I was in was not near the river. A bit dingier than Shanghai for sure, but I like walking into the side alleys and small streets to see what is really going on. All the open air restaurants with their giant steaming woks and markets full of odd vegetables, fish and portions of meat that Westerners don’t often eat.

The convention center was a typical new, swooping chrome and steel structure, but the inside wasn’t that nice. Many of the very modern buildings look great for a year or two, but then the cheap construction begins to show through. My speech was fine, but they didn’t have the normal simultaneous translation so I don’t think very many people could understand me well. Afterwards, we went to the dinner banquet, which was in a big restaurant, lots of gilding and chandeliers. It was the typical banquet dinner with a couple of bottles of maotai on the table, the clear high-proof grain alcohol often consumed at these things, and a tall stack of Double Happiness cigarette packs. At one point I counted 8 people smoking at my table of ten. I’ve never been as appreciative of a religious excuse not to drink or smoke as I have been here.

The program started with the awards ceremony. We got three. One for best foreign company in our industry, or something like that, another for my personal contribution to the development of our industry in China and another one in a sort of made up sounding category. The competition for these awards was clearly pretty thin.

Then came the entertainment. It was a fairly typical cavalcade lasting about 90 minutes. First there was a guy singing Chinese pop songs – sort of a karaoke superstar. Then came another guy singing Chinese folk songs. He was wearing traditional garb of some sort. Then there was a woman doing traditional dancing in a fairly elaborate costume with very puffy sleeves and pant legs. After that a woman who was wearing a totally normal sweater and pants and looked like she just got off work at an office job sang some Chinese opera favorites. Her voice was very high and it pushed the audio system to its limits and beyond, squealing out a couple of times so bad that everyone covered their ears. After that two pairs of ballroom dancers came on and did some salsa and tango routines. The women had incredibly elaborate eye make-up, lots of color and sparkle, and the guys wore very rico-suave looking satin outfits – super slimy looking.

All the while there is constant toasting to anyone and everyone. By the end, most everyone at my table was totally hammered. This is no surprise when you consider the rounds of traditional “gan bei” (bottoms up) toasting that occur. Its like doing shots with half tumblers of the grain alcohol. Half of the people at my table had a blank glazed over look by the time the salsa crew came on and slurred some goodbyes to me as I moved out when it was all over. You have to imagine all this overlaid on a meal in which about 15 dishes are brought out, one every minute or so, and placed on the giant lazy suzan that is in the middle of the table. The dishes will be nothing that you recognize from a Chinese restaurant in the U.S. (In fact, one of the biggest complaints that my employees have when they visit the U.S. is the terrible food. Panda Express and its ilk are almost an affront to any self-respecting Chinese). Many of these dishes will be, from a westerner’s eyes, pretty disgusting. Pickled sun-dried jellyfish, chicken soup with the whole chicken in it, head and all, a sort of garlic jello, duck tongues still in the detached beaks, these spotted brown caterpillars with a long proboscis (long proboscii? - you don’t get to use that word everyday) and if you are a real VIP, sea cucumber. There are a few dishes that are semi-normal, but not many. These banquets are interesting the first couple of times you do them, but quickly become one of the low points of an expat’s responsibilities.

The Emperor's Children

I recently read a book called The Emperor's Children by Claire Messaud. I read about it in one of the mini-reviews in The Atlantic or The New Yorker, which I still subscribe to, but which are delivered to me a few weeks lake via the intercompany pouch that makes its way from our US headquarters building to China every week or two. There are a few English bookstores in Shanghai but they're pretty small. These magazine reviews and whatever happens to catch my eye in one of the airport bookshops on a layover on a US work trip are my sources for book tips now. Not much coming from my Chinese work colleagues. It was a pretty quick read and a sort of entertaining story, but it didn't do that much for me. Had I been raised among intellectuals in The Dakota perhaps I would have liked it more.

Chinese Christmas Tree

One of our neighbors heads up the Maersk Shipping operation in China. He is Danish and his wife complained that they couldn’t get decent Scandinavian Christmas trees in China, so when he was home in the summer, he cut a deal with a guy with an organic Christmas tree farm near his summer house and arranged to have a 20 foot container full of Christmas trees shipped to our subdivision in Shanghai. A perk of working for a shipping company I suppose. He and his kids opened up the container and sold them out of the back. They sold out in a weekend. His two oldest kids did the delivery via one of the three wheel bikes things that are common here. A bit different than driving your car to Home Depot or the local Christmas tree lot.

The Avalon

I bought a box set of Hitchcock movies a while ago and we’ve been making our way through them. We watched The 39 Steps recently and it reminded me that the first time I saw this movie was with my grandmother, who I called Mammy, that having been the way I pronounced grandma as a 2 year old. I was the oldest grandchild and as such I got grandparent-naming privilege that is often bestowed on the first grandchild. I’ve known quite a few people whose grandparents nick names are the result of the same poor pronunciation process. Anyway, she was a real character. Born around 1919 in a tiny town called Grantsville, about 60 miles west of Salt Lake City on the edge of the desert that stretches between Salt Lake and Reno. At that time Grantsville couldn’t have had many more than 1000 people and she said that growing up she knew everyone and their dog.

She was enamored with Hollywood and movie stars, going once or twice a week to Grantsville’s little movie theater as a girl. It was an incredible escape for a poor girl in a Depression-era hardscrabble little town whose economy was at that time largely based on the Western Pacific railroad, salt extraction from the lake, and cattle and sheep ranching on land perhaps best left to sagebrush. She was a fantastic and very funny person who loved to laugh and was as positive and supportive as anyone I’ve known. Her mother probably spoke more Swedish than English though Mammy claimed she only knew “tack sa mikket” (phonetic), which was all I ever learned and apparently means thank you. Anyway, once I was a little older, maybe 8 or so, my sister and I would go and spend 3 weeks or so with them each summer. It was fantastic and we always looked forward to it.

One of the great memories I have was going with Mammy and grandpa to the Avalon Theater on State Street in Salt Lake City. The theater wasn’t anything particularly special, but it was an old style theater with one big screen. It showed only old movies, most often in double features and it cost 25 cents. We, not having lots of money, would buy snacks and drinks at a normal grocery store and sneak them in Mammy’s purse. It was Mammy that taught me that a woman’s purse was a sort of sanctum sanctorum, never to be violated with out specific permission and even then very cautiously. This rule and the attitude that lay beneath it served us well in our snack smuggling trade. The drinks we took in were usually in glass bottles, which were pretty common back then.

One night during a movie, Mammy finished her bottle of Pepsi (Pepsi and absolutely not Coke was the undisputed drink of choice for Mammy) and set it on the ground under her seat. A few minutes later, perhaps in a swoon at the entrance of Clark Gable, Gene Kelly or Errol Flynn, she accidentally kicked the bottle over and it proceeded to noisily bump and roll its way all the way down the floor of the theater. We all played dumb as people huffed at the racket. We still laugh about this, years after her death.

Anyway, I remember seeing The 39 Steps with her as a kid at The Avalon, being totally spooked and loving Hitchcock movies ever since.

No Psychopaths

I saw this sign last week at the bumpercars in Century Park, Shanghai’s version of Central Park. The first line is the best.


You get a pyschopath on the bumper cars and there's no telling what will happen, but I think that their instincts are right -- better not leave it to chance.

IT clean out

Last night I cleaned out a box of old 1.44M floppy disks, now technological relics. I’m trying to move files onto my hard drive so I don’t lose them to new technologies, as I have tried to do with my college writings that weren’t printed out. In doing so I threw out a whole bunch of old software disks. Programs used to come on so many disks before the advent of CD ROMs. Here are some samples.

Wordperfect for Windows (10+ disks)

Wordperfect 6.0 for DOS

Westmate

Lexus 2000

Windows 3.1

LotusWorks

Virex for the PC

Font packs for WordPerfect

Quicken 7 for DOS

Clean Boot disk

The demise of WordPerfect is still sort of amazing to me when I think about how dominant it once was.

The Monkeyshed

This is another example of some funny translation. You may have to click on the picture to try to zoom in. This is from a hiking place a few hours from Shanghai were I was this summer. This is the kind of place that, while not that uncommon in China, would put any PETA person over the edge. If you double click the picture you can read it better.


The first sentence is the best - they were caught "by accident" with "something bow-shaped". Hmm. I also thought that I couldn't blame the other monkeys for moving on given the uneviable combination of severe deforestation and "the great bomb sound". You might be able to handle one, but both - no way!

I've heard that the government in Beijing is making a huge effort to improve the translations on signs in all the tourist areas there prior to the Olympics. A small gain for linguistic precision; a huge loss for comic relief.

The Chris Quiz

My only responsibility in the 40th party was to make up some sort of game. I’ve never been a good Pictionarian or much for charades so I made up my own test. Here it is. See how many you can get right. Many of the answers are highly negotiable.

Super Easy Multiple Choice

1. What is Chris’ usual breakfast?
a. Cheerios
b. Bangers and mash
c. Congee
d. Whatever is left on the kids’ plates (nasty!)

2. What is Chris's favorite book?
a. Chicken Soup for the Middle-Aged Soul
b. Charly
c. Anna Karenina
d. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

3. Which movie would Chris prefer?
a. Fried Green Tomatoes
b. Ghost
c. Beaches
d. Anything with Godzilla in it

4. Why did Chris major in Botany?
a. Easy – he’s sort of crazy
b. He liked plants
c. He always wanted to open a lawn mowing company
d. Everybody knows all the hottest girls major in Botany

5. Why did Chris go to law school?
a. Easy – he’s sort of crazy
b. He liked John Grisham books
c. He always had a passion for justice
d. What else are you supposed to do after graduating in Botany?

6. How would you describe Chris's current state of hair loss?
a. Pretty thin on top
b. An awkward stage of male pattern baldness
c. Starting to look to comb over-ish
d. All of the above

7. How many times has Chris told you the story about army ants coming through his house in the jungle?
a. five or more
b. two or more
c. zero (if you pick zero, you're asking for it)

8. What best suits Chris’ musical tastes?
a. Seriously boring classical
b. Ella Fitzgerald and friends
c. Zydeco/klezmer fusion stuff
d. A mix of today's hits and yesterday's favorites

9. Where did the scar on Chris’ forehead come from?
a. Attack by a knife-wielding madman
b. Surfing accident
c. Bad paper cut
d. I’d rather not go into it

10. What is Vitello’s, the restaurant where Chris worked in high school, famous for?
a. Veal parmesano
b. It was once owned by Dean Martin
c. It was the place Robert Blake (supposedly) shot his wife
d. It was often frequented by Erik Estrada

11. What is Chris most proud of?
a. His cute kids
b. His highly efficient dishwasher loading skills
c. The fact that he’s never done the Macarena
d. Having eaten one pot of lentil soup for twelve days straight as a missionary

Word Problems

12. Chris, a monkey and a lion are stuck on an island with a coconut and a little rowboat. The island is one km from the safety of shore and only two people can go in the boat at once (the animals and the coconut all count as people, don’t ask me why). The lion will eat the monkey, the monkey will really bother Chris with his non-stop yapping and the monkey and the coconut sometimes play chess together, but always end up arguing. What is the fewest number of trips they can make to all get to shore safely?
a. One
b. Two
c. Three
d. I think this question got on here by accident

13. Chris has an important appointment 5 kilometers from his house. His driver has a “flat tire”, i.e., he’s eating lunch with his girlfriend. A taxi costs $5 and takes 5 minutes. The metro costs $1 and takes 10 minutes. When do you think Chris will leave the house?
a. Five minutes early
b. Ten minutes early
c. How long does it take to walk?

14. When they turn 40, many people are filled with a profound existential angst due to the fact that there’s not much to look forward to except a long slow descent towards decrepitude and the grave. Plus you gradually start to get that old man smell. What will Chris most likely do to combat this?
a. Become obsessed with golf equipment
b. Run a marathon to demonstrate his youthful vigor to himself (and to anyone he could casually mention it to)
c. Buy a cheesy sportscar
d. Make a stupid Photoshopped T-shirt of Jenny

15. Chris, the monkey, the lion and the coconut are still stuck on the island with a little rowboat. Apparently, you didn’t do a very good job of answering the earlier question. Suddenly, a rat appears and gives them a flare gun. Man, where’d he come from? The monkey high-fives the rat and the coconut looks disturbed. What should Chris do next?
a. Yes, definitely
b. Wait until they see a bigger boat and shoot off the flare
c. Shoot the lion
d. I’m totally confused by this whole thing

One More Super Easy Multiple Choice

16. What do you wish Chris on this momentous occasion?
a. I wish him a long and healthy life
b. I wish him a year supply of fresh and juicy eels
c. I wish he’d mind his own beeswax
d. I just don’t want to hear anything else about that stupid coconut

Matching

This section is really only here to make those of you who have done terribly so far can feel better. If you don’t get 100% on this you should probably just go home.

17. Where was I born?
18. What’s my birthday?
19. What’s my sign?
20. What was my favorite TV show as a kid

a. Virgo
b. Inglewood, California (ex-home of the Lakers)
c. Gumby
d. September 1st

Tally up your answers. If you got more than 10 right, send your score to Chris for your free gift. Please include US$5.00 cash for shipping and handling.

40th Birthday

Jenny threw me a great 40th birthday party a couple of weeks ago. I’m officially middle aged now. It was really beautifully done, in true Jenny style, and a lot of fun. I’ll post a couple of pictures in a few days when I’m back in Shanghai (I’m in Hong Kong for the next couple of days). It was a mix of expat friends (who are all foreigners) and work friends (who are all Chinese). Everyone had a good time. We had it at a friend’s house who is a partner at Deloitte. Their house is huge and I think some of my Chinese colleagues were a bit wide eyed. I figured it must have been a bit like getting an invite to a big bash in a Beverly Hills mansion. Despite my attempts to dissuade them, some brought some gifts. One was a set of Peking Opera masks hand painted by one of my employees on egg shells. I found it quite touching.

Amusement Park Darwinism

We went on this crazy ride at the Ho Chi Minh City amusement park that was like a version of It’s a Small World with these really cheesy looking dinosaurs in it. Some rubber toothed dinosaurs were set up to pop out at you when you went around a turn. They definitely succeeded in scaring you, but they were so goofy looking it was just funny. How about the ape-man and the snake? Is it is pet python or is it trying to kill him?

The kids were really into this poster outside the dinosaur ride. I was forced to give an explanation of evolution that conformed to the visual, which the kids found very authoritative. It went roughly as follows - first monkeys walked around on all fours, which was probably pretty boring since you couldn’t see very well, plus your hands were always dirty and just plain muddy on rainy days. Eventually, one got really mad about this situation, picked up a stick, stood up and started yelling. Fortunately, the artist captured this very event.

After that a fairly straightforward evolutionary process kicked in in which the monkeys gradually got taller, less hairy, happier about their clean palms plus the sticks they carried got better. The picture was clearly painted before vintage t-shirts, cargo pants and hand sanitizer were invented. That would have been the next picture. Why did I spend a whole semester studying evolution in college when I could have just gone on the dinosaur ride in Saigon?

The Sphinx of Saigon

We went to this crazy amusement park in Ho Chi Minh City the day before Jenny came to meet us. This followed the basic pattern of finding activities that at times included levels of danger that would have been impermissible with a full parental complement. Anyway, it was like a giant State Fair full of sketchy rides. One of my favorites was the Sphinx, a faux Egyptian haunted house place. Abby insisted on visiting it as she felt she had developed a certain expertise in Egyptology by watching “Scooby Doo and the Pyramid of Giza” on the flight down to Vietnam. It had some scary fake mummies inside that sat up when you walked close by. Abby’s verdict – scary, but somewhat lacking in authenticity when compared to the Scooby treatment of similar content.

Almost Lonely Planet

I thought this was kind of funny. This is in Ho Chi Minh City. The Chinese are good at DVD pirating, but I'd never seen pirated books until I got to Vietnam. These are fake Lonely Planet books. The paper seems to be thicker and the pictures were mostly black and white. The asking price was about US$4 per book. You’ve got to hand it to these guys for knowing their market – if you’re looking for a place to sleep for US$10 a night, there’s a decent chance you’ll be interested in a cheaper way to help you find it.

Phu Quoc

Our next stop was a little island called Phu Quoc in Southwestern Vietnam. There is a big very developed tourist island in Thailand called Phuket. This place is sort of like Phuket with almost no development. Get there while the gettin's good because you can see the build up beginning. Now the economy is pepper farms (the black spice kind), squid fishing and one little fish sauce factory. Almost all the roads are dirt and at night you can lie on the beach and see the Milky Way. I hadn’t seen it in many years, since camping way up in the mountains in the Western U.S. The kids weren’t even sure what it was when they first saw it. Anyway, here are a few pictures. Double click the small ones if you want to see them better. My good friend and tennis doubles partner in high school died a few years ago of skin cancer so since then I’ve been a big enforcer of these high sun protection swimsuits for the kids. They don’t seem to mind yet. (Jenny is pregnant so I’m required to keep posted pictures of her at a minimum at this point, which I believe most women other than Demi Moore or Britney Spears will completely understand). You could buy seafood at these little shack-ish restaurants on the beach and they’d cook some right on your table. Super fresh and super cheap. The beaches were beautiful. No waves, a la Apocalypse Now, but that is better for the kids anyway.

Tuk-tuk

Here are a few more Cambodia pics. One night when I let the kids pick the restaurant, they picked Indian food to my surprise. We eat it once in a while on Saturdays in Shanghai. When I was little I would have assumed that Indian food was what Navajos or Hopis ate and I had no idea what that was. Anyway, we got to and from the hotel to the town via tuk-tuk or a sort of trailer thing hooked on the back of motorped. The kids loved it. They used to have versions of these in Bangkok where the motorcycle and the seat were sort of one unit – think Sophie Ellis-Bextor riding around Bangkok in the Spiller video of “If this ain’t love (groovejet)”. I heard those have been banned there now.

After Cambodia it was back to Vietnam via prop plane on Vietnam Airlines.

Temple of Doom

The coolest part of Cambodia are the Khmer temples. Real Indiana Jones stuff. Here are some pics. Double click if you want to see more detail.

This is where the absence of a maternal influence really came into play. We climbed up some really steep and slippery pyramids. The kids were clearly instructed that if they didn’t follow my strict instructions they would not only fall and get seriously hurt, but I’d also get in huge trouble with their mom. Luckily, compliance was reasonably high and no one fell.

The Circle of Life

We ate lunch at a restaurant next to one of the more remote temples in Angkor Wat in Cambodia.This is a good example of the plunging levels of hygiene that I found acceptable under the circumstances. The kids loved this place. It had dirt floors, no walls and there were some workers sleeping in hammocks about 10 feet from the tables. A dog wandered around the place as did a chicken.

We ordered chicken with rice and the kids asked me whether the chicken that was walking around and eating the spilled bits of chicken with rice was actually a cannibal chicken and if it would end up getting eaten next by other people who wanted chicken to eat. Then Abby started reflecting on The Lion King and the circle of life.

Best of all somebody spotted a walking stick on the ground in front of the restaurant. Its one of those weird bugs that actually does look like a stick with legs.

Rice, Sprite, cannibal chickens, dogs and walking sticks. What more could you want?

Beat that Rain Forest Café!

Stuffed Animals

One of our stops in Saigon was the building where the former South Vietnamese government was officed. The décor was basically left as it was when the tanks rolled in in the late 70s so there was a certain grooviness to the place. The high point from my kids’ point of view was the ex-President’s office which had a variety of mangy looking stuffed animals in it. Not teddy bears but small dead carnivores. If you’ve got a taste for taxidermy this bad, I’m not sure that you should be running a country anyway.

The Garden of Earthly Delights

On our trip to Vietnam we spent a couple of days in Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon. We hired a tour guide who took us to one temple that was full of these graphically illustrated pictures of all the absolutely awful things that happen to you in the afterlife if you don’t mind your p’s and q’s while in this mortal coil. It reminded me of a Hieronymus Bosch painting I saw once in Spain called “The Garden of Earthly Delights”. Anyway, the tour guide was happily chatting away to the kids about grisly punishments such as having your legs chopped off by a blue guy with a cow's head or getting eaten by long-fanged snakes while you’re tied to a stake. The kids were mesmerized (and scared). It was a bit freaky for me too. Fortunately, all thoughts of eternal doom quickly vanished when a little cat walked by and the kids ran after it.

Heart of Darkness

We recently got back from a vacation to Vietnam and Cambodia, a perennial family-friendly destination. I told people at work that we rented a motor boat with a machine gun mounted on the back and headed up river. I think they sort of believed me.

We booked the trip before we realized that Jenny, being pregnant, couldn't take the needed malaria medicine for the Cambodia leg, so we decided that I'd go on first Cambodian leg (3 days) with Abby and Ben and then we'd meet up in Vietnam after that.

Needless to say, with me alone at the helm the acceptable hygiene level dropped way down, the danger level went up and I think the general fun level went up quite a bit also. Once we got back together in Vietnam things normalized, but we still had a good time.

Anyway, I'll try to post some pictures etc. of the trip soon.

Remote problems

Does this happen to anyone else with little kids? This drives me crazy and it seems like it happens every other day. First, the back cover of the remote gets lost, found, lost, found, etc. The batteries drift in and out during the cycle. Eventually the cover gets irretrievably lost. Then the batteries are just gone most of the time or at least one of them is. Then I try to tape the batteries in, but that's apparently just as much temptation because the tape gets torn off and batteries just disappear again. Asking where the cover or the batteries are is absolutely useless. I'll ask if anyone knows where the batteries are and get an answer like, "No, but can we get a dog?"

Notorious

We watched this movie again recently. Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman in 1950s Rio de Janeiro. This is the disturbed and twitchy Cary Grant of the Hitchcock films he did and not the goofy romantic comedy Cary Grant. And Ingrid Bergman… Rio looked so clean and elegantly exotic – every one dressed up for day to day life. Great stuff.

I remember when I was in high school there was a theatrical re-release of a series of Hitchcock movies – Rear Window, The Man who Knew Too Much, Vertigo, etc. A new one would come out every 3 or 4 months. I would rally my friends to go see them and they were great on a big screen. They weren’t at too many theaters, but I remember going to an older theater on Hollywood Boulevard, which hadn’t been cleaned up at that time. My friends were pretty reluctant at first, but after seeing one of these on a big screen people started wanting to go. Plus it was a little offbeat, which had an appeal to a certain sort of LA high school kid. LA was a fun place to grow up.

Bienvenidos a Guangzhou

I saw this ad in the back of a cab in Guangzhou (near Hong Kong) recently. I just thought it was sort of weird. Its hard to read, but its an ad entirely in Spanish for a sourcing coordinating company. How many people that understand Spanish ride in the back of cabs in Guangzhou?

17th National Congress

Recently the 17th National Congress of the Communist Party began. On the first day I was in Qingdao, a city by the sea between Shanghai and Beijing for some meetings. I unfortunately had a long negotiation and ended up stuck with a 10pm flight back to Shanghai. We watched part of President Hu Jintao's opening remarks in an airport restaurant.

There weren't many people there and most didn't pay much attention to the speech. One guy was playing solitaire on this computer. About the same level of interest as would be generated by the State of the Union address in a US airport restaurant I imagine. It looked like there were 1000's of delegates in the meeting which is being held in the Great Hall of the People on Tiananmen Square in Beijing. I went to a anniversary party for a big Chinese shipping company there last year and it was very impressive.

Mooncakes

The Mid-Autumn Festival recently passed in China. This is the second biggest traditional holiday in China, after Spring Festival (which in known in Western countries as Chinese New Year – if you talk to someone Chinese about Spring Festival they’ll think you’re pretty savvy). It’s a lunar holiday, like Easter, so it doesn’t fall on the same day each year. Families get together and celebrate under a full moon, traditionally eating a celebratory meal outside and presenting their food to the moon before eating. One of the big traditions of this time of year is the giving (and eating) of mooncakes. Mooncakes are circular in shape, usually about the diameter of a racquetball and have a pastry shell on the outside. The inside was traditionally a sort of sticky sweet red bean paste filling, but it sometimes has a lotus root filling and maybe a hardboiled egg yolk in the center. When I first tried these about six or seven years ago on a trip to Singapore, I didn’t like them too much, but now they’ve grown on me. In the last few years, mooncakes, like everything else in China, has both modernized and bowed to commercial pressure. Now there are lots of new and different flavors, including caramel, tapioca, apple, peach, even grapefruit. There are even ice cream mooncakes. Haagen dazs even makes them now.If you have a business, you usually get a bunch from suppliers etc. Sometimes they are given via gift certificates from certain shops or bakeries. Fancy hotels make their own also. I got a box given to me that was from the Shangri-la Hotel in Shanghai – where Yao Ming recently had his wedding banquet. What could be cooler? The fancier the origin, the better perceived in a very status conscious society.

As a side note, there are number of common dessert components in China which are basically unknown in the West. Red bean and lotus root are two that come to mind. These are both sweetened and used in various ways in desserts, much like chocolate in other places (you almost never see anything chocolate in a real Chinese restaurant – too sweet). The only place in the U.S. I’ve run into anything similar is at shaved ice stands in Hawaii where you can usually order red bean as an extra with your shaved ice.

Anyway, someone told me that they had read a Wall Street Journal article that said that mooncakes were analogous to fruitcakes in the U.S. at Christmas. I disagree. First of all, there is almost no one over 85 years old who likes fruitcakes, as far as I can tell. When we set out the mooncakes at our office party before Mid-Autumn Festival, they get downed in no time. While some people don’t like them, most people do. Second, I think fruit cakes are basically a thing of the past in the U.S. I haven’t seen one in quite a few years at Christmas. As was a child it seemed like there were always a few that my grandparents would pick at. They do get re-gifted a bit. The mooncake giving season starts 3-4 weeks before the holiday and the coupons in particular can see several different temporary owners. Whoever ends up with the coupon a few days before the holiday rushes out to redeem it for the mooncakes, since the coupons expire on the day before or the day of the holiday. The difference between mooncakes and fruitcakes is that the person who ends up with them is rarely disappointed.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

I was playing rock, paper, scissors with Ben and Abby the other day. The game started pretty normal, with the usual elements (rock, paper, scissors) and hierarchy. Then other things started to creep in. First it was ground, fire, rain and wind (which made me wonder if they were studying medieval medicine or alchemy in school), then gun and bomb got added. These things were added slowly at first and then in a flurry of one-upmanship. Nobody really seemed to mind if you added something. The relationship between rock, paper and scissors was always straight forward. The relationship between some of the others was pretty fluid and situational. As far as I could tell most of the time rain beats fire, as does wind, and ground beats rock. Gun beats rock, paper and scissors. Gun doesn’t seem to hold much sway over ground or wind, which seemed vaguely logical, but it doesn’t necessarily win either – it really depends on what the third person has. Bomb beats most anything, but it seems like if you use it too much everyone just gets mad, so it drops out after one or two uses. The winner was sometimes defined by who hadn’t won in a while or who was crying because of the injustice of it all.

Looking for work in all the wrong places

We were interviewing for a senior operational manager recently and a bunch of my staff settled on one candidate. I usually have them filter down a pool of candidates to a few before I talk to them, just to be more efficient. Anyway, I interviewed the top pick recently and wasn’t too impressed. I asked him about how to handle situations where the customer might not be too happy, for example. He just said that those situations shouldn’t happen since you should always make the customer happy. While that sounds good, it’s not very realistic and worried me.

In any case, I asked my HR manager about it and she shut the door to my office and began to tell me in a characteristically matter of fact way that we shouldn’t hire him because he was over 35 and unmarried. I was then informed that if a woman in China is 35 and unmarried that’s her business, but if a man is 35 and unmarried, he’s got to be a total loser. Either he’s a dismal failure in his professional life or a complete social incompetent. What if he’s very shy, star-crossed or maybe had bad luck?, I asked. No, in China even the bashful and unlucky will have plenty of options if they’ve got their act together, particularly in a big city like Shanghai, which she believes has many more available women than men. Why should a global company like ours hire someone so patently inadequate?, she asked.

The HR conversations here are really crazy some times. There are plenty of times when people say things that are so insanely un-PC or clearly biased that simply having said the thing about a person in the US during an interviewing process would almost force you to make them a job offer.

A family first

Today was a milestone in family maturity for us. We started soccer. Not for the year, but actually just started for the first time. Neither Abby nor Ben had ever played in any organized way and I wanted them to play and not get behind their peers.

I never played growing up, but in my global wanderings I’ve often been pulled into matches only to demonstrate my football lameness.^† I’d either get totally outmaneuvered or just kick with wild abandon, batter other people’s shins and then play it off to American inexperience. I think that too many people in America play now so that technique won’t work for much longer so I figure our kids need to at least learn the basics. Ben, who has not shown much of a predisposition for balls or sports, caught us totally off guard. He jumped right into the practice and then when they started these little games he just went for it, dribbling the ball and scoring a bunch of goals. At 4 years old most of the kids were just wandering around and looking at their parents for some sign as to which way they should be running. The only exception was a little Italian kid who could do these amazing slide kicks and turns. Ben can be sort of aggressive and once someone told him where the goal was, there was no stopping him. Abby absolutely did not want to play and she just started really whining and resisting when we tried to get her to go to the practice. I really insisted that she at least try it, but Jenny didn’t seem to care. This lack of parental unity didn’t help. Jenny and I were essentially arguing about whether a 6 year old was best left to decide whether or not she wanted to play soccer. We eventually gave up and went to eat at a place called Johnny Wu’s. Johnny Wu’s looks suspriciously like Johnny Rockets in basically every respect – menu, décor, uniforms. The food is actually pretty good and the chicken strips, always a kid favorite, were really good – it tasted like they had a bit of cumin in the batter. I’ve found that the combination of my growing experience as a parent and my inherent cheapness has turned me into a relatively indiscriminate consumer of the leftovers on my kids’ plates.

† Note: That said, one of my athletic moments of glory did come as a 7^th grader at Walter Reed Junior High School in P.E. In 7^th grade they had a semester of rotating instruction on a variety of different sports. One day, they pulled out a soccer ball, set up some goals and gave a half-baked demonstration. After that they divided us up into a couple of teams and turned us loose. Basically nobody had done this before and it was like throwing a cat into a pack of feral dogs. Just wild kicking and running around, people falling down and getting kicked and stepped on until the pack stumbled past them. My moment came when the ball suddenly appeared close to me in my section of the pack. I kicked it as hard as I could having no idea what would happen and it sailed above everyone falling into the top corner of the goal. It was the only goal scored before the coaches realized that there were kids lying on the ground with bloody noses and they stepped in to stop the mayhem. Resigned to defeat, they just had us run laps for the last 15 minutes of P.E. This was the last time I remember playing soccer in any sort of formal setting. I was known as a good soccer player for a couple of weeks.

Welcome to Hong Kong – want a donut?

This is one of the first things you see when you emerge from the luggage area in the Hong Kong airport. I’ve always found it a bit ironic.

If this is what the wonder of globalization gets you, I feel short-changed. That said, I have to admit that I once bought one of these once in a moment of trans-fat nostalgia.

Yellow fish mobile

Here’s an end of summer picture taken in front of our house on the way to the community swimming pool. The three wheeled bike acts as a minivan of sorts for us in our neighborhood. The kids pile in the back and love it. You see these all over China, but they are usually hauling a 5 foot high pile of old cardboard, some watermelons or maybe a pile of used tires. When Chinese people see me pedaling around with three kids in the back they think it’s hilarious. In Shanghai the Chinese nickname for these is “yellow fish mobile” because in the past they were often used by local fishmongers who bought piles of yellow fish from the Yangtze River or its tributaries and pedaled around the neighborhoods selling them. I paid about US$35 for it and I think the shopkeeper that I bought it from thought I was totally crazy because he couldn’t imagine what I would possibly be using it for.

Baby raccoon

Abby is still hankering for a pet. She’s refining her strategy now. Last week she came to me and said that she no longer wanted a rabbit, because they go to the bathroom too much. Instead she gave me three potential pets to choose from: 1) a chipmunk, 2) a baby raccoon or 3) a teacup dog. I was then given a fairly systematic description of the relative merits of each. A chipmunk was very small, probably didn’t go to the bathroom that much and was very friendly. A baby raccoon had all the benefits of large raccoon, though she did not elaborate on what these were, but it was much smaller. Being smaller it was less likely to ransack our trashcans. A teacup dog was probably the best because she and her brothers all wanted a dog and a teacup dog was very small – aptly named since you could fit it in a teacup even when full grown. I was then asked to wait while she proceeded to the kitchen, where she got a mug to show me how small the dog would be.

I asked her where you could buy, say, a chipmunk in Shanghai.
Well, at the cricket market, of course.
Why not just buy a cricket?
Way too boring, maybe even more boring than a fish.
The saga continues.

Clocks

I saw this in a travel agent's office recently. I liked the lack of precision in the minute hands.

Collect the Distillate of the Whole World

This slogan was on an airport advertisement for a fancy golf course subdivision. It must sound better in Chinese. The English translation has got toxic tort written all over it.

Duck herding

Just a picture I took out the window of a car when in the Chinese countryside not too long ago.

Git' along lil' duckies.

Six Records of a Floating Life

I read a short book called “Six Records of a Floating Life” recently. It’s an autobiography by a Chinese man, Shen Fu, who lived in a Chinese city called Suzhou a couple of hundred years ago when China was still relatively untouched by the West. It was a fairly accesible window into another world. He wandered fairly precariously between jobs and cities around China during his life. The six records are supposed to be six chapters, but I got to the end and had only counted four. I went back to the introduction, which I skipped, like most introductions, and found out that the last two chapters were lost but the title and the first four chapters remained. (If I ever write a book and there is an introduction I’ll make sure I don’t call it an introduction to catch all the intro-skippers like myself). The first section is the best, which is largely a description of his marriage to a wife who died relatively young. A very touching and almost wistful description of the affection between them. Lovely stuff and a good short read – maybe 150 pages.