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.

Portulacas

Here's pictures of some portulacas planted on the edges of the beds in our front and back yards.

I first planted portulacas in a small patch of land next to a little studio apartment I lived in in LA about 10 years ago. The apartment was above a garage and next to it there was this little weedy patch about 10 x 20. I asked my landlady if I could dig up the weeds and plant a little garden and since it was sort of out of the way and people rarely object to anyone voluntarily pulling weeds, she consented. I ended up planning tomatoes, some red and yellow peppers and then a bunch of flowers -- mostly seasonal stuff with lots of zinnias, petunias and impatiens. In the dead of the summer I planted portulacas, which I'd never known before, but are really nicely flowering things once they get going. They're annuals, which are both fun and sad, since you get the satisfaction of seeing them bloom quickly, but then you have to seem them die off quickly as well. They are heliotropic (the flowers turn to face the sun as it moves during the day) as well as diurnal (the flowers open in the morning and close at night). I felt obliged to shoehorn those words in somewhere just because I spent a lot of time learning what they meant and you can't really throw them into a normal conversation. Anyway, I showed my kids some morning glories in our neighborhood recently told them that the flowers open and closed. They were a bit skeptical but we did a check before and after sunset and I was justified in the eyes of my 4 and 6 year olds. Abby came up to me the other day and said that portulacas were related to morning glories since they closed up at night. I thought it was pretty observant and I was pleased to see that my botanical indoctrination was beginning to bear fruit. It's always nice to close on a bad pun

Rock formations

A couple of weekends ago I went with a neighbor on what was going to be a long day trip to a Chinese national park that was about an hour flight from Shanghai. Amusingly, I got the idea to go to this place from an online article in the New York Times travel section. I read the Times on the web each day. As far as I can tell it appears to be almost entirely uncensored by the Chinese government. Most days there is at least one article on China or something Chinese in the paper and very rarely do they get blocked. Web censorship occurs not by doing any selective deletion from articles, but by simply blocking entire web pages so that when you hit a link to a story on China the page just won't appear.

In any case, given that the trip to this place was a lot easier for us to pull off than it was for the average citizen of the Tri-State area, and since our families were both out of town, we decided to give it a try. One of the interesting differences between US and Chinese air fare structures worked in our favor. In the US, if you book early you can get the best fares, but in China it's the opposite. Many airlines don't release their discounted fares until a week to 10 days before a flight is scheduled to take off and the fares seem to drop even further during the day or two before the flight actually takes off. The place, called Zhangjiajie, was filled with lots of large natural stone pillars, sort of like a less colorful, but much lusher version of Bryce Canyon in Utah. It's the kind of geography that shows up in a lot of Chinese paintings. In the morning the temperature was great -- about 75°. By the afternoon it heated up a bit but it wasn't nearly as hot as Shanghai. We ended up doing a long hike down a narrow canyon next to river in the morning, then took a cable car up to a higher elevation part of the park and then later another cable car down to another area. Towards the end of the afternoon we did a hike that was on a trail that was essentially a staircase carved into the side of the mountain. We went straight up for probably an hour and a half. It was literally just climbing stairs for an hour and a half. Almost no flat stretches. I turn 40 in about a month and while I am in relatively good shape, I can’t scamper up the side of a mountain like I might've when I was 25. The hike was very pretty, but by the end I was totally hammered and my legs were little bit wobbly. Our flight didn't leave until 10 p.m. so we took a bus into town and wandered around for a little while you're at it this is a relatively small city by Chinese standards -- probably 1.5 million people. It's also a long way off the western manufacturing path so the city itself is very Chinese. In Shanghai you see quite a few signs that are in Chinese characters but also have English or Pinyin, which is a transliteration of the Chinese characters using the Roman alphabet. Zhangjiajie had almost no signs with any English or Pinyin.

But the real action started after we got to the airport. It turned out that there had been a big thunderstorm in Shanghai and so the plane that was supposed to pick us up never left Shanghai and they just canceled the flight. It was not great news to get when you're exhausted after a long day of hiking. The funniest part came when we realized that not only was the airline not providing any sort of hotel or transportation, but the airport staff had locked the doors to the airport so no one could leave. When I was a bit younger I spent many a night in strange countries sleeping in very sketchy and unhygienic circumstances, but the exoticism of spending a hot and humid night with 500 fellow travelers sleeping on a dirty linoleum floor in an airport with no central air conditioning doesn't have the appeal that it once did.

Fortunately, I traced my way back through security checks and metal detectors, which were all turned off, and found that the doors to the security were only closed by small sliding bolts. On a somewhat frightening side note, the airlines would check in whole groups of tourists by letting their tour guide just bring up a stack of ID cards and issuing the tickets for the stack. – no visual check of the passengers. Anyway, I undid one of the security gates, figuring that if I got in trouble I could always pull the confused foreigner card, and walked out into the main lobby where we found an open door to the outside. As we were headed out the door a bunch of people saw that we had escaped and began to follow our lead, pouring out of the airport. We managed to grab the last cab and found a hotel back in the town about midnight that had a couple of rooms with air conditioners. Our flight back to Shanghai didn’t leave until 10:30am the next morning since the plane had to come from Shanghai.

A girl after my own heart

This summer while in Los Angeles Abby heard that there was a water shortage in Southern California. She even told me that the mayor of LA announced the need to reduce water use, but then he got in trouble for increasing his water consumption after the announcement. In any case, she took it seriously and started to take cold showers. When Jenny asked her why she was taking cold showers, she said that it made her not want to stay in for so long so she was saving water. While my jobs or projects aren’t as directly involved in environmental issues as they once were, I still retain the sensibilities (which sometimes drive Jenny a bit crazy when I go around turning off the AC in the summer). Anyway, I was impressed by my 6 year old’s earnestness.