Disaster zone

Recently Shanghai had its heaviest snowfall in 50 years. The kids loved it and we made snowmen, an igloo and snow angels. The most dramatic thing for me personally occurred when the roof of a very large warehouse my company operates collapsed under the weight of the snow. The warehouse was full of flat screen TVs, computers, cell phones, refrigerators, stoves and microwaves. It was right before Chinese New Year, the busy season for our customer, which exacerbated the disaster. I ended up spending about a week of very long days and late nights out at the warehouse organizing a recovery effort which involved hiring demolition and recovery crews, renting giant cranes to pull the scraps of roof off and finding trucks and new warehouse space to move the salvageable stuff into. It was high drama with millions of dollars of damage and plenty of screaming Chinese people. In law school or forestry school I never imagined I’d find myself in an industrial zone outside of Shanghai in the middle of a snowstorm wearing a hard hat while climbing around on rubble and remnants of plasma TVs.

Flower markets

Today after stopping in at a design company to look over some plans for a new office we’re moving into I stopped in at the Hongqiao flower market to get some flowers for Jenny, today being Valentines Day. The flower markets here are fantastic, particularly if you’ve got botanical leanings. There are quasi-wholesale markets in different parts of town with a huge variety of plants and flowers. I love just wandering around in them. The orchids are the best part for me. They have long been my favorite flowers – the colors, the shapes, the symmetries. In college when working on a paper for an evolutionary biology class I remember checking out this book by Charles Darwin on orchid pollination and evolution. It had been there for probably 20 years and it had been checked out maybe twice before! Anyway, orchids, cut flowers and plants are cheap in China so I load up.

New Addition

Our new addition arrived on Friday morning. He weighed in at 10 pounds 2 ounces, 20 inches, a bit of hair, healthy, happy. From Jenny's point of view, it was the best birthing experience she's had compared to the other births in the Netherlands, the U.K. and the U.S. Great doctors, nurses, hospital, etc. Everyone's a bit tired, but doing very well.

Speak of the Devil

The kids have been sort of into the devil lately. What does he look like? Where does he live? Why is he so mean? I turns out that Ben has a friend named Sadan or something like that. The kids in their classes are from such a wide variety of countries that a kid with a typical American sounding name is the exception rather than the rule. For a while he kept talking about his friend Satan, which was a bit worrisome. No parent, no matter how religiously disinclined, is happy to hear that their kid has befriended the Prince of Darkness. When I figured out that Satan was actually in Ben’s preschool class, it became clear that we had a pronunciation issue rather than a need for an exorcism. It got me thinking that from an employment perspective being named Satan may not be that bad, since it would definitely get you noticed in a pile of resumes. Plus people would think of the tiniest nice thing you happened to do as a huge upside.

La Vie en Rose

I went into my 2 dollar haircut place the other day and they were playing an Edith Piaf album. This is in boondocks Shanghai, not central urban sophisticate Shanghai. Where did they find this stuff? Given my linguistic limitations, I was only able to ask them if they liked French music. I was happy to have even been able to communicate this. They said they did and that they liked Edith Piaf. I asked them if they also liked Charles Trenet, but they didn’t know what I was talking about. They all had spiked up or dyed hair, one dyed bright red. None of them was older than 25.

King of Citrus

In the fall and winter in China it's common to see big piles of what appear to be steroid enhanced grapefruits being sold by vendors on the street and in supermarkets. They are gigantic. They are actually pomelos, which I had never seen in the U.S. The taste is in between an orange and a grapefruit in terms of sweetness, probably siding more towards a grapefruit. The white-ish semi-see through skin in between the sections is pretty tough, so you have to peel the whole thing and then peel off the white section-y stuff. Pretty labor intensive, but very good.

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.