What I've Learned: September

I, ever-seeking metrics for time and progress, have decided to try to mark the passing of each month with a brief recapitulation of that which I have learned over the previous four weeks.  I think I may sometimes put too much pressure on myself to "get the most out of" this time I'm spending in China.  Perhaps counter-intuitively, I have found recently that I learn more, and have a better time, when I turn that psychological evaluation mechanism off and just live here.  So instead of constantly trying to get the most out of China, I'm going to try to live here as I lived in Washington D.C. for two years, or Philadelphia for the four years before that.  But, so as not to lose sight of the reason I wanted to come here in the first place, I'll plan on reviewing each month with a list of things I think worth remembering.

So here goes....What I've learned in September:

• Out of frustration that I am not as amazing at Chinese as I'd like to be, I frequently underestimate my Chinese ability, thereby self-consciously and counter-productively limiting my exposure to it.
• Chinese people can be pretty lazy.  Exhibit A: they insist on waiting for the escalator in the Metro rather than taking the stairs.  (The people in single file in the center of this picture are the few taking the stairs.  There is an open lane, free for other stair-climbers, but everyone else chooses to wait in the clusterfuck for the escalator)...

• There is an inherent conflict between the Chinese concept of "face", and the apparent lack of the Chinese concepts of "personal space" and "manners".
• There is an inherent conflict, in any business, between sales and compliance (i.e. following the rules and protecting the best interests of the company as a whole).
• Americans make pretty bad world citizens.  My roommate Serge, an Armenian Canadian, speaks better Hebrew than I do, and he's not Jewish.  He also speaks French, Armenian, Chinese, Arabic, and English.
• Chinese people are fascinated by Americans, or maybe just laowai (somewhat derogatory term for foreigners) in general.  Sometimes I play a game on the Metro where I see how many Chinese I can get to smile at me just by looking at them.  Kids are like shooting fish in a barrel. 
• Chinese people smoke a lot of cigarettes.  So much so that they find the need to do it while on the toilet.  How do I know this?  I found a cigarette butt in the bathroom stall at work.
• Chileans speak very quickly.  I can barely understand my roommate when she speaks English.  When she's Spanish-ing, there's no chance.
• Travel, in general, is expensive, exciting, and endless.  There are too many places to go and things to see and do.
• Shanghai is huge.  I've always thought of it as the small, manageable, yet more-crowded counterpart to the massive Beijing.  And while that may be comparatively true, that doesn't detract from how big Shanghai is in its own right.  I went to an orientation meeting for an organization I may start volunteering for.  The meeting was in Minhang, a district in southwestern Shanghai, but still legitimately ensconced within the downtown area.  Travel time, by Metro and walking: 90 minutes.  Puts Upper West Side-Coney Island to shame.
• In addition to being huge, Shanghai can be very nice looking.  I feel like urban China in general gets an often-warranted reputation for being crowded, hot, smoggy, and generally not beautiful.  Some evidence to suggest otherwise:

• I am a pretty good chess player.
• I am a pretty good teacher.
• I generally like people, until proven otherwise, and I think people generally like me too (until proven otherwise).
• No matter what happens, no matter how much I learn (and I do think it will be a LOT), I will always feel lucky to have friends and family whom I love, and with whom I can keep in contact so easily despite being so far away.  I didn't realize how much it would mean to me, the relative ease of communication, until I got here.

READER'S NOTE: It's Mid-Autumn Festival and National Week this week, which means the entire country gets to go on vacation!  I'm heading to Nanjing tomorrow, and then on to Beijing for a few days.  So the blog will probably be dark for a week or so until I get back...but I'll promise pictures and sage wisdom learned (fodder for the October edition of W.I.L.) when I return.

The Bund

Pearls of sweat begin to speckle the faces, and weave between the wrinkles of the men on the stone walkway overlooking the river.  The sun, barely peeking over the horizon and through the magnificent metallic monstrosities on the eastern bank of the river, is already having an impact on the early morning.  The men, quite practiced at their ritual, aren’t bothered by the heat; they expunge the weighty, cumbersome granules of their souls through perspiration.  Their arms move, rhythmically, through the thick, humid air, as if on strings manipulated by the master of a marionette theater.  They harness their energy, their qi, and shepherd it through their nimble, grizzled bodies.  From their fingertips they feel their blood pulsating.  Embracing longevity, health in old age, the men face the rising sun respectfully, and practice their taiji.

The stone walkway wraps around the riverbank, a famous remnant of the international, eclectic history of the area.  Accompanying the old men, who make their pilgrimage to the embankment daily for taiji, are those who cannot afford the luxury of taiji.  Some sleep against the stone walls, enjoying the last few hours of the spot before the tourists come, and the police chase them away.  Others, who still have the energy to fight the currents of their tidal poverty, wearily set up their merchandise carts, hoping that today will bring them more luck than the day before.  They are all long-faced and bleary-eyed; the little good humor and energy that they have left must be corralled for the long day of nagging and haggling with prospective customers.  Some of them keep an eye on their children, who often participate in the business, by trying to appeal to a sense of pity from the passersby.  One toddler is being roused by his mother.  He has a hole in the seat of his tiny pants, so that he need not remove them when he goes to the bathroom.

Despite the old men, the homeless, and the bedraggled merchants, the winding walkway is quite deserted.  The stately buildings across the street, which, along with the embankment, will be teeming with traffic in a matter of hours, are dark.  Even the street cleaners are few and far between; their work was finished the night before.  For a few hours, after the night crowd stumbles into cabs, the city sleeps.  Invariably, the masses will return again this morning.  But, first, time for the day to begin, a time, the only time, for time itself, to palpably unfold, in this city of consistent effervescence.  The sun continues its journey up along the eastern sky, now glittering down on the Huangpu River that separates this, the old part of the city, from the new.  This is the Bund; Shanghai, at dawn.

*******

A few days after I returned home from Shanghai from my summer abroad in 2008, I sat down determined to write something.  I had been keeping a journal of my day to day life in China, but I really wanted to produce something a little more ambitious than just a travel journal.  So I started to write about the first memory I thought about.  I didn't think much; just focused on the image and wrote.  What I produced in that initial post-China free-write was the above vignette, describing the scene on the Bund one morning when my friends and I decided to participate in a favorite tradition of Shanghai's youth, both native and tourist: staying out until the sun rises over the Bund.

Looking back on it now, I regret not taking pictures of that early morning on the Bund.  Watching the sun rise, combined with the many other days and nights I spent walking that stretch of riverbank during the summer of 2008 left me with the Bund as my most lasting visual memory of China (or, at least of Shanghai.... I suppose the Great Wall would probably give the Bund a run for its money).

Which is why I thought it was strange that I hadn't yet made it there yet this time around, a month into living here.  It was a beautiful early fall day here in Shanghai today, so I decided to break that trend and get back to the Bund.  It wasn't dawn -- I do hope to revisit that tradition at some point while I'm here, at least to get those pictures I didn't get last time -- but it was nice to be back to that place that, for whatever reason, has become the first set of images I see when I've thought of Shanghai these past four years.

For those that don't know, the Bund comprises a stretch of Zhongshan Road on the western bank of the Huangpu River.  Its name comes from a Hindi-Urdu word that means 'embankment' (thanks, Wikipedia!).  In Chinese, it's called 外滩 (waitan), which literally can be translated to mean 'foreign bank'.  I particularly like that translation -- even though I can't say with certainty that this is actually the derivation of the area's name, it does reflect the international flavor of the area's history.  The Bund has become one of Shanghai's hottest tourist spots, primarily for its views of Pudong, the eastern section of the city which, in the last two decades, has become the center of Shanghai's business world.  The Bund also sports famous architecture, as old banks and trading houses from the late 19th and early 20th centuries still stand proud up and down Zhongshan Road.

Anyway, I wasn't about to make the same mistake I made that early morning on the Bund: I took plenty of pictures today.  Here are a few of them: 

This is Chen Yi, the first mayor of Shanghai after the Communist Revolution in 1949.  When it comes to honoring political officials, Communist China really doesn't do small....

These are a few shots looking down the Bund's stone pedestrian walkway.  The river is to the left, Zhongshan Road is to the right.

Two examples of the architecture that contributed to the Bund's famous place in Shanghai geography.  Both of these buildings are banks, or at least used to be.  Some of Shanghai's swankiest night clubs and restaurants now occupy some of the old buildings on the Bund, though I don't think there are any in these two.  I could be wrong though.

This is, in my mind, one of the coolest part about Shanghai: the skyline of Pudong's Lujiazui business district.  The funny looking building to the left is the Oriental Pearl TV Tower, Shanghai's tallest structure and one of the tallest in China.  You can go up to the top, but I think you have to take out a mortgage it's so expensive.  It's way smarter to sneak up one of the other tall buildings, in order to see Shanghai from above.

The jagged, shorter building in the middle here is the Jinmao Tower, one of the first skyscrapers to be built in Pudong.  It's overshadowed by the Park Hyatt hotel, which, when it opened, was the world's tallest hotel.  I'm pretty sure the Burj Dubai now has that distinction.

And then there's lil ol me.  The second picture was taken after I walked through part of Shanghai's old city.  You can see the Pearl Tower in the background to get a sense of where I was.  An eager Chinese girl first asked me to take a picture of her, which I did, and then basically demanded that she take several pictures of me in order to make it fair.

It's official: I'm Official

Remember the jungle of Chinese bureaucracy?  Remember how long ago I was complaining about it?  It appears as if, at long last, I am finally and thankfully done.  I am officially a legal resident of Shanghai.  This week proved fruitful on that front, as I received the following key documents:

First, I have a bank account!  I initially had posted a picture of it, which some of you saw, but then realized that probably wasn't a good idea from a security standpoint.  Thanks to Mike for pointing that out.  Anyway, I'm hoping that having a Union Pay (Chinese card company) card will let me swipe at more local establishments, many of which don't accept international cards.

Following in Mao's footsteps, I have my very own little red book now: an Alien Employment Permit, allowing me to legally work for pay in China.

And last but not least, the culmination of several month's effort, dating back to while I was still living in Washington: my residence permit.  Doesn't look too different from a visa, but the devil is in the details -- the 02 SEP 2013 means I can go in and out of China as I please for a whole year.

These pictures don't really tell the full story, though.  Below is a long and boring list of the paperwork I had to apply for and receive leading up to the residence permit:

• Invitation Letter of Duly Authorized Unit (procured and sent by my employer while I was still in the US)
• Employment Authorization (procured and sent by my employer while I was still in the US...this required me to send to China a) an English translation of my diploma, which is in Latin, and b) an original copy of my official transcript)
• Chinese Z (work) Visa (applied for by me in NY.  Takes about a week to turn around)
• Medical Report (involves a 45 minute medical checkup in Shanghai, which has to be scheduled weeks in advance, a week after which they send you a cute little book with all of your medical history and details)
• Employment Contract
• Residential Contract
• Proof of residence and landlord identification (you would think that the residence contract with my freaking name on it would be enough proof of residence.  But TIC (this is China).  So no.)
• Temporary Residence Authorization (for this, I had to make several trips to the local police station before I had the proper materials.  You hand in your paperwork, they give you a sheet of paper.)
• Employment Permit (the little red book you saw above.  For that you must surrender your passport for a week, while the government processes your application.  It's a bit disconcerting to have the Chinese government be in possession of the proof that you're an American citizen).
• Residence Permit (an additional week-long surrendering of the passport, and FINALLY, you're done).

So.  Anyone want to move to China?

Shanghai Calling

I suppose I need to see this movie:

A few notes:

• The film is shot on location in Shanghai.  All those places (except for the Wall Street 2/3 station) are really here.  I've been to most of them.
• Bill Paxton doesn't live here.
• It wouldn't shock me at all, however, if it turned out that Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Of does live here.
• I've yet to meet a person of Chinese descent in Shanghai that doesn't speak at least as much Chinese as I do.  That isn't to say they don't exist -- there are probably tons of Chinese American tourists that come through every day -- they just aren't all over the place.  So I'm not sure this guy is representative of a huge class of people.
• That's a real Shanghai taxi cab, and whoever is driving it either is a real Shanghai taxi driver or has been in many of them.  That whole scene is pretty darn realistic.  Except for the fact that the base price of a Shanghai cab is 14 RMB instead of 12.  The difference isn't much, but I've heard that prices of little things like snack food and taxi cabs have been skyrocketing here, as evidenced by the fact that this movie is already economically out of date.
• Expats sent specifically from the US to China to work really do get a sweet deal.  For example, my roommate Franco is on an Expat package: his housing is entirely paid for and he gets a free trip home to the US once per year.
• I wish I had an Awesome Wang.  Okay that came out weird.... 
• I'd like to think of myself as slightly less clueless than the protagonist, and far less taken care of.  He appears, it seems, to have been given the Expat package.  I most certainly do not have a relocation expert whom I get to kiss on the Bund.  I also understand all of the Chinese in this trailer, which he does not.  But it's certainly pretty good timing for this movie.  Sign me up. 

Slow News Day

The journalists would call today a slow news day: there's very little to work on.  So I'm just going to write.

One of the senior people in the office who hasn't been around much just stopped by to ask how I was settling in.  He said, "I hear you're fluent in Chinese."  I responded quickly, because it sounded like he was about to test me.  "Um.  Not fluent, exactly," I said.  "Working on it.  Let's just call it proficient for now."  He smiled and walked away.  Crisis avoided.

The Seattle Seahawks beat the Green Bay Packers 14-12 in Monday Night Football a few hours ago.  I know because I was following it online (remember, not a whole lot to do).  The game ended on a controversial touchdown call -- the Green Bay defender appeared to come down with the ball for an interception, before the Seattle recevier tried wrestling the ball from him.  The play was ruled a touchdown and chaos ensued.  The call would have been disputed regardless of the situation, but the reaction to it has been further fueled by the fact that the league as a whole has been under a firestorm of criticism for locking out its referees and allowing regular season games to be called by replacement officials from lower division college football, arena football, and, yes, the Lingerie League...

...OK, timeout for a quick side note.  For those of you who frequent this blog for fascinating pictures of China, today's just not your day.  I'm bored at work, and my little free-write here just stumbled upon the Lingerie Football League, so the picture you all get is of the famous San Diego Seduction:

Those of you intrigued by the Seduction can find further information about the league here: Lingerie League! Woo hoo!.  I'm shocked and appalled that this website wasn't blocked by my office internet firewalls.  I guess it's a "legitimate sports league".


ANYWAY, so this is where some of the officials that are currently charged with maintaining order in NFL games comes from.  I don't have to tell you that the rules of the NFL differ substantially from the Lingerie League.  That much should be obvious.  But wait, it gets worse.  The hoopla surrounding the botched ending to the Packers-Seahawks game has been so ubiquitous, that even the LFL felt it necessary to join the fray.  Not only have LFL referees been hired to officiate NFL games, but some of them were FIRED from the LFL:  Hilarious.

I can't say whether that press release is genuine or not, but the fact that Deadspin is reporting on it suggests to me that it is.  In any event, this replacement referee thing has gotten out of hand.  Fans, journalists, players, and coaches were all waiting, simultaneously hoping for and dreading what ultimately happened tonight: a single call affected the outcome of the game.  Russell Wilson became the first player in the history of the NFL to throw a game winning interception for his team.  An NFL Fan Boycott page has cropped up on Facebook, calling for fans to stay home from games next weekend in protest.  I don't think it'll work  -- the NFL has always banked on the elasticity of its fan base, and I think this officiating debacle has been a test of that gamble (a test that, so far, the NFL has won).  But I've been a pretty avid sports fan for my entire life, and I've never quite seen something like this.  The NFL and its owners will have to answer a very simple question in the coming days: is it willing to sacrifice the integrity of the game for the sake of their negotiating position with the NFLRA?  For the first three weeks of the season, the answer has been a resounding yes, and that's stunning from a fan's perspective.

I'm feeling the diaspora effect from all of this, too.  My inability to watch any of the games has increased my fascination with what has been going on.  My mouse cursor was fixated on the refresh button at the end of the game, eagerly following the reactions on Twitter and waiting for ESPN to finally load the video of the final play onto its website.  I feel how far away I am the most when things are going on with the things I'm interested in, to the point where I seem to care about them more than I would otherwise.  It's not just the NFL - I've been following the election campaigns way more closely than I have in the past.  There's something real about how being absent from something can inversely correlate with the extreme to which one cares about it.  I was always interested in news and current events -- now that my access to it is so limited, I've become a junkie, lapping up whatever I can get.

I've been asked to write a short piece on my experience moving to Shanghai for a corporate newsletter.  Cool, I thought.  What a fun thing to do.  Ironically, I can't figure out what to say.  Here I am furiously keeping up with a blog that I thought I'd fail miserably at, and I can't fill a page with coherent thoughts about my experiences for work.  It'll come eventually, but I think the writer's block relates to what that friend of a friend told me before I came to China the first time: "when you're here for a day, you want to write a book about it, but when you're in China for a month or two, you don't know what to write about anymore."  Little things, blog-sized kernels for me to remember, those are easy and fun.  But "my experiences"?  How do I fit those into a page and have them make sense?  I just spent three two paragraphs on the Lingerie Football League for goodness sake...and you want me to write a page on moving to the other side of the world?

Guess I better get cracking...

Fahuazhen Road (法华镇路)

Things are starting to settle into a routine here on the other side of the world.  I go to the gym several times per week (it's in my building complex, which is great, despite the fact that the facilities themselves leave plenty to be desired).  I go shopping for food, which I then use to prepare lunches or cook for dinner.  My roommates don't wash their dishes, but Serge does clean the kitchen once per week.  I go to work every day.  I get pissed at Chinese people on the Metro - some get pissed back, and some just gawk at me.  Waking up on Monday mornings is still no fun.  I hung up one of Franco's (my roommate) tapestries on my bedroom wall so it feels slightly less barren in here.  I'm taking my first vacation next week - to Nanjing and Beijing.  My toilet doesn't flush properly.  I speak Chinese as regularly as I can, with varying levels of success.  And despite spending a good deal of time on my own, and despite still being primarily reliant on my roommates for company, I'm starting to enjoy the beginnings of a real social life.  I even found a friend who wants to play Settlers of Catan with me later this week.  What more could I ask for?

In other words, the things, both good and bad (but for the most part good), that make up the humdrum of everyday life are starting to fall into place here.  One of these daily reminders that I actually live here is my daily commute.  After a week of experimenting with different streets and Metro lines, I've settled on the best way to get to and from work.  It happens to be the most efficient route, but I also like it for one particular street.  Fahuazhen Road is quickly becoming my favorite street in Shanghai, and it makes up the majority of my walk from my home on Dingxi Road to the Metro on West Yan'an Road.  I posted this picture of it in an earlier post, but it's worth replicating it here just to give a basic feel of the street:

It's a windy, tree-lined street.  What I like most about it is its varied window into the 'real' Shanghai - the city of my tale of two that I'm perhaps slightly more interested in.  There is only one shop (out of dozens) on the stretch of Fahuazhen that I traverse daily that has English lettering on it.  Everything is in Chinese, without any recognition of the Western influences that pervade the surrounding city.  The other day, I nearly had a heart attack when a Chinese wedding party pulled up along the side of the street in several black cars, got out of the cars, and started setting off firecrackers in celebration.  I thought I was being shot at.

The coolest thing about it is its randomness.  There are restaurants, florists, grocery stores, residential buildings, run down remnants of stores with people sorting through the rubble, and so on and so forth.  I spend maybe 10 minutes on Fahuazhen Road every day, and I feel like I catch glimpses into the lives of the people who live here, many of whom have likely never left.

Here are a few images of Fahuazhen Road:

A few of the various street food peddlers.  The stuff they cook here isn't particularly appetizing, at least to me, though I did try some dumplings from the guy on the right.  They were okay.

This guy's just chopping some vegetables into a bowl on the street.

This picture doesn't quite capture it, because I only managed to get him after he passed, but this is one of my lasting images from China from the last time I was here in 2008.  People load up their bikes and trucks with crap, and hurtle down the street at speeds that would be dangerous without all of the cargo. I'm not entirely sure where he's going or why.

I think that's sheet wood, but I'm not really sure what he's doing there.

One stretch of the road has a bunch of these little friezes.  Kinda random.

No, that's not a pigeon.  That's a chicken I saw on Fahuazhen a few days ago.  I would bet it is no longer alive :(

It took me a while to remember why I took this picture, but it's because of the guy sitting down.  Fahuazhen is full of people just sitting in front of their homes outside, doing anything from playing music or cards, to cooking, to washing clothes, to just reading a good book like this dude.

Anyway, it's a random, small part of my routine, but I have found myself looking forward to those few minutes every morning and evening on Fahuazhen Road.  It's home, in a strange way, about as far away from home as you can get.

In Which Saying Hello Can Earn You a Salary

A few days before I left for Shanghai, the New York Times published an interesting report on China’s slowing economy, and its unforeseen impact on retailers and manufacturers.  As the economy stopped growing at the untenable rate at which it had been for the past decade, people stopped buying goods like cars.  This has left dealers and suppliers with the newfound problem of surplus inventory, and the question of what to do with all of these goods on which people can no longer afford to splurge.  You can read the article here (shameless plug: Geoff Broderick, quoted toward the end of the article, is my boss).

I’m reminded of this idea of surplus inventory as I think about the subject of this post.  In addition to having an apparent excess of cars and other goods, China may also now have an excess of, well, jobs.  One of the nice things about living in a still-Communist society is that basically everyone is put to work.  I can’t speak intelligently about the unemployment rate here, and there certainly is inequality (I pass homeless people on the street every day, though not nearly as many as in New York).  The system isn’t perfectly Communist, but it’s certainly Communist, and it manifests itself in somewhat amusing ways.

Put simply, the citizens of Shanghai are tasked with some pretty useless things to do, presumably in the name of universal employment.  Take this guy, for example:

I pass him every day on the way to and from work.  He stands at the top of a staircase that leads down to both a mall and the Metro station near my office.  His job: to say hello.  Period.  End of job description.  Every time I pass him going up or down those steps, regardless of whether I make eye contact or not, he says, “Ni hao.”  Other than that, he stands there.  As far as I can tell, he doesn’t carry a walkie talkie, and he certainly isn’t packing heat, so I can’t classify him as a security guard.  He’s a greeter.  I would assume if I asked him where the bathroom was, he would tell me, though I can’t be sure, because in three weeks of passing him multiple times daily, I haven’t heard him say a single thing other than “Ni hao,” which he says constantly.  With all due respect to the poor bastard, is that really an indispensable job?

Descending down into my particular area of expertise – the Metro – we find two more examples of jobs found here the need for which escapes me.  First, our friends the bag checkers:

At each and every Shanghai Metro station, all of the entrance gates are preceded by security guards, who are tasked with running everyone’s bag through a scanner before they enter the Metro.  1-2 people wave their hands at you to put your bag on the belt, while another one sits and watches the screen.  Now, I don’t mean to scoff at legitimate security measures.  We live in a post-9/11 world, one in which mass transit systems have already been the targets of terrorism several times.  So if the Chinese government has deemed it worthwhile to set up security checks in the subways like we do in airports, who am I to say that’s unnecessary.  I’d rather be inconvenienced a little bit than have bombs in the Metro.  That’s obvious.

The problem is, the entire operation is conducted in the most farcical way imaginable.  Here’s how it works: Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum wave their arms at everyone carrying a bag, and almost everyone carrying bag does absolutely nothing.  They just walk right past Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum as towards the turnstiles, as if they were selling comedy show tickets.  For the few people that follow their gesticulations (I’m usually one of them, both because I’m a good citizen and because I just feel bad for the clowns), bags are put on the belt, presumably to be scanned, except the idiot watching the screen is never ever EVER paying attention.  I wish I had a good picture of what the screen-watchers do, but it’s always some combination of talking to Tweedle Dee/Dum, reading a book or a magazine, or just staring off into space.  One place they are not staring is at the screen showing the x-ray of my bag.

So if the whole security checkpoint thing is just a big joke, then why even bother?  I can’t imagine it’s cheap to install and maintain all of those scanners, let alone pay the thousands of Tweedle Dees that pretend to man them.  If you’re going to have security in the Metro, fine.  Personally, I think the notion of checking bags for the millions of people that ride the Shanghai Metro every day is somewhat unrealistic.  But if you’re going to do it, do it.  This is just plain silly.

Moving on down to the Metro’s platform, we meet my favorite practitioner of a useless job.  Meet Flag and Whistle Guy:

His job is to blow his whistle incessantly whenever a train is coming.  That’s helpful, considering a) everyone can see the train, b) everyone can hear the train, c) everyone can feel the wind created by the train’s motion, and d) there is an automated announcement a minute before every train comes that’s literally impossible not to hear.  So I’m grateful for this guy’s added warning.  When the train has arrived, he waves his flag (you can't see it because I'm a bad photographer, but it's in his raised hand).  I assume the flag waving means something, like “okay! Everyone get on the train!” or “okay! Everyone is on the train now, it can leave!”  But boy does it look dopey.  And even if he is serving to somehow increase passenger safety, a worthwhile endeavor most surely, there’s no way he does it effectively.  He’s one dude, on a really long platform full of people, and he doesn’t move or give any indication that he’s there to help.  And you guessed it: every single Metro platform has at least one of these eager beavers, on each track.

Further manifestation of China’s nearly universal employment guarantee include things like this monstrosity:

                           

This is a mall.  We have them in the US too.  It’s actually where Mr. Ni Hao works.  These things are literally everywhere in downtown Shanghai: at virtually every Metro station, and all over the major pedestrian thoroughfares.  They build these things with alarming speed and frequency (there’s another one across the street from this one), and fill them with all of the world’s fancy brands.  You can see the Gucci store in this picture.  The problem here is twofold.  First, most Chinese people can’t afford Gucci, especially considering most of the stuff is priced higher than it would be in the US because of all the taxes that the Chinese government levies on sales by foreign companies.  Second, if I or anyone else wanted a bag that said Gucci, I could go buy a fake one from a merchant for literally 4 US dollars.  The result: lots of malls, with lots of empty stores.  I’ve walked through places like this before, in search of food (to be fair, the food establishments set up in these malls are often quite good, and quite crowded).  When I pass by, all of the salespeople in the various fancy shops eye me desperately, as if to say “please come in and pretend to buy some of my overpriced crap…no one has been in here all day!”

So what to make of all this?  I’m not really sure I have a “so what” here.  But seeing all of these seemingly useless jobs has gotten me thinking about the inherent differences between free market and communist societies.  American politicians probably say more about job creation than anything else.  Unemployment is a huge concern for millions of people in the US and elsewhere.  You would think that China’s response to the kind of unemployment that we have in the US would be to hire more Greeters and Flag Wavers, and build more malls.  And maybe that’s not such a bad thing, putting good people to work so they can provide for their families.  But I can’t help but think that there are better uses for people than saying hi to me twice a day.  Is it possible that a society ultimately is more efficient and benefits from a finite job supply?  I think it may be.

Posthumous Equine Abuse

This'll just be a quickie, before I forget.  I just used the phrase "beating a dead horse" in a work email, without really thinking about it.  Then, after sending, I realized that I was sending it to a group of Chinese colleagues.  This is the type of stuff you don't really have to think twice about when dealing with native English speakers, but I think I may have to be more careful going forward.  Because if they don't grasp the idiom, they may be worried that their new goofy-looking American colleague is far far more deviant than his big red head suggests....

Travel

As I've mentioned here once or twice before, one of the really cool things about being in Shanghai is the myriad places within reach to which I assumed I would easily get to go.  Places like Tokyo, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Thailand, Inner Mongolia, [Real] Mongolia, Chengdu and Sichuan Province, the Chinese beach island of Hainan, South Korea, Russia, Istanbul -- are just a few of the many places in this half of the world that I've never been that I would like to go.  It seems unlikely that I'll make it to all of them, let alone in just a year, but it would be nice to get to as many of them as I can.

Which is why I was so pleasantly surprised when, on my first day of work, I was told that the Chinese celebrate their National Holiday by taking a week off of work surrounding October 1st (which is the anniversary of Mao Zedong's Communist victory in 1949).  After I got over the initial surprise of the absurd notion that the entire country would be taking off a whole week (and they do it again for the Chinese New Year!), I started eagerly planning how I would use my newly discovered week off.  I could go to Hong Kong, an easy two hour flight, and while there hop across the bay on a boat to visit glitzy Macao.  Maybe even check out the hustle and bustle of Shenzhen, the city just on the Chinese side of the Hong Kong border, known for its ample shopping malls full of knock off goods.  From Hong Kong, I could pop over to Vietnam, where I could visit my friend Sam in Hanoi, and maybe take a two hour train to the supposedly gorgeous Halong Bay, or up to Sapa, or down to Ho Chih Minh City in the south.  The options were endless!

Okay, so, yeah, that wasn't realistic at all.  To do all of that in a week would mean very little time in the actual places themselves, a lot of time in taxis, trains, and planes, and virtually no time to do what you're actually supposed to do on vacation: relax and enjoy yourself.  But even if time weren't an issue, China has graciously provided me with a whole host of issues to make this amazing free week off potentially more stressful than the past three weeks of work combined.  (Okay, that isn't saying very much considering I haven't really done a whole lot at work yet because they haven't figured out what to do with me.  But I digress).

First, I never really stopped to dwell on the fact that the whole country had the week off, and would therefore likely be traveling.  Had I done so, I probably wouldn't have been so floored to see the prices of air and rail fare for that week.  I'm on a fairly tight budget to begin with, so any delusion I had that I was going to make several international trips during the most popular travel week of the year pretty much evaporated after a few minutes (okay, a few hours) on travel websites.

Add to that another wrench thrown in by the Chinese Exit and Entry Bureau: they took away my passport AGAIN.  For those who don't know, I've already had to surrender my passport once as part of the ridiculous process of becoming a legal resident in China.  Well, on Wednesday, just as I was preparing to finally be done, they snatched it away again.  Fuckers.  I'm supposed to get it back next week, but you can imagine it being somewhat disconcerting to purchase expensive tickets, particularly international ones, without having your physical passport in front of you.

So after all that, I decided on a much simpler travel solution.  I'll go to Beijing for a few days, where my roommate Franco will be playing a few bluegrass gigs with his band.  So that'll be fun.  And I'll probably stop in Nanjing, conveniently located on the Beijing-Shanghai High Speed Railroad, on the way.

Tentatively confident in my travel compromise, I trudged over to the Chinese train ticket office near my apartment after work today.  (Of course, the only online methods of purchasing tickets either don't accept foreign credit cards or are international travel agents that charge exorbitant surcharges).  Except I didn't really get close to the office, because the line to buy tickets stretched about the length of a New York city block.  To make matters worse, I forgot to take a freaking picture. 

Win some lose some, right?  I have at least a modicum of faith that I'll get my train tickets eventually, and my passport, and have a good trip to Nanjing and Beijing.  Until then...fuckers.

我们有一个很重要的业务会议！

On Monday, one of the office assistants, Kathy**(see below for a footnote on Kathy), invited me to a meeting that would take place this morning.  The meeting was an introduction to a new piece of software that the research team here will be using to assess and present data to clients.  I figured there was very little chance I needed to know how to use this program, but agreed to attend the meeting anyway because a) I probably wasn't going to have many more productive uses for my time, b) it would be a good way to interact with my colleagues, and c) lunch was to be served (needless to say, that's in the reverse order of importance to me).

So, with the meeting about to start, and my stomach enjoying anticipatory growls associated with the prospect of free food, a fact dawns on me that ought to have been perfectly clear from the second Kathy told me about the training session on Monday.  The meeting was to be conducted entirely in Chinese.  There were about 10 of my colleagues in Shanghai, and another handful listening in from Beijing.  And in contrast to everyone else in the room and on the phone, I was whiter than the rice that was later served for lunch.  More to the point, I was the only one for whom Mandarin wasn't a native language.

After assuring Kathy and the rest of my colleagues that I'd stick around anyway, and try to understand as much as I could (I just didn't want to miss out on the lunch), the meeting started.  A colleague launched into an in depth crash course on this obscure, yet actually pretty cool data program.  It's called mTAB (not sure if any of your business types are familiar with it) and it's sort of a Microsoft Excel on steroids.  More impressive than the program itself was that I was actually able to follow most of the meeting!  Some of the specifics were naturally lost on me, and I was greatly aided by the fact that everything my colleague was explaining was also being projected onto a screen as she did it.  But for the first time since I've been here, I was genuinely proud of my Chinese ability.  It was a step in the right direction for a heretofore dampened confidence.  And it suggests to me that, given my qualms with the expat community's impact on my linguistic and cultural progressions (or lack thereof), that I may need to actively make my office and colleagues a real means of getting some consistent Chinese in my daily life.

There were a few moments during the meeting, however, when I had trouble stifling laughter.  First of all, a colleague showed up to the meeting wearing a surgical mask.  You know, like the ones you saw Chinese people wearing during the SARS scare.  Now, I sometimes see people on the Metro here wearing masks, and I suppose I can muster some justification for that.  The Chinese are very concerned with good health, and the Metro involves many hundreds of people standing at very close quarters.  So, if masks helps you get through the trauma of sharing a train with potential pathogens, then so be it.  But, seriously...a business meeting?  In a big room with maybe 12 people in it, all of them sitting at least five feet from you?  That I just don't get.  So I spent part of the meeting dodging images of Beth Wilkinson wearing a mask in front of the jury.

I don't know if this is true about other languages, but a weird thing about Mandarin is that certain terms either don't have translations, or people are just too lazy to use them.  So they just revert to the English terms.  Here are a few examples from the meeting: "Mandarin mandarin mandarin mandarin standard deviation mandarain mandarin mandarin median."  "Mandarin mandarin mandarin mandarin business team mandarin mandarin mandarin mandarin consulting team mandarin mandarin mandarin."  It just sounds funny to have native Chinese speakers flow seamlessly into English when there's a word that doesn't have an easy translation in Chinese.  Perhaps there's a reason for this, but it's lost on me.  The standard deviation example was particularly tickling, because they frequently abbreviated it "STD."  I think you can guess where this is going.  I had to bury face in my hands when I saw the Powerpoint slide with just "Mean + STDs" in big block letters.

Oh, and in case anyone was wondering, the title of this post says "We have an important business meeting!"


**On my first day, Kathy introduced herself to me as Cassie.  Or, at least, that's how she and everyone else in the office pronounces her name.  Cassie.  Not Kathy.  So imagine my surprise and embarassment when, after a day or so of calling her Cassie, I notice that her name card says Kathy Li, not Cassie Li.  Many Chinese people, it seems, have difficulty with the "th" phoneme.  Ever since, I've avoided calling her by name.  I don't know what to do!  Do I say it like everyone else in the office says it?  Or do I say it like, you know, it's supposed to be said given that's how she freaking spells it?!

A Tale of Two Cities

I took this picture from the window of one of the apartments that I looked at when I first around here.  You're looking North, towards the center of downtown.  In the foreground is a traditional Shanghai street market, teeming with fruit peddlers and electronics merchants, many of them the very definition of mom-and-pop shops.  Almost all of them operate out of the front of their residences, and many of them rarely leave the confines of the market area, which you can see clearly defined by the red roofs.  The market is overshadowed - quite literally - by the modern city of sky-scraping hotels, apartment complexes, and offices for which the city is now famous.  This is one of what I imagine are several possible examples of the "two" Shanghais.  The buildings in the background here don't even scrape the surface of the gargantuan architectural wonder that can be found here. And this market is one of many just like it, remnants of an old city that just recently became new.

Anyone who argues, therefore, that Shanghai isn't a good example of "real" China need only get lost in the maze of Old City (another market area not pictured here), or haggle with a merchant selling antique chess sets, to know that there is plenty of ancient China within the bustling confines of this metropolis.  That said, the international influence here is more palpable than anywhere in China with the possible exception of Hong Kong.  Colonists from France, Holland, Great Britain, and elsewhere historically had outposts here, and for the last 150 years Shanghai has been considered the cosmopolitan capital of China.  It is here that you can see grand old Dutch architecture on the Bund before having Indian food for dinner and gelato for dessert.  And it is here where most international companies send their sentries to build colonies of their own to exploit the until-recently burgeoning economy.

For a 24 year old American living in Shanghai, the distinction between Chinese and international is a far more relevant tale of two cities than that of old and new.  The expat culture here is everywhere -- just this weekend I was invited to two dinners of over twenty people, not one of whom was Chinese.  People from all over the world live here, like to have fun, and like to share that fun with newcomers like me.  They party - hard - to the extent where going home before the sun rises is considered an early night.

And as fun as this paint the town red (and always) lifestyle is, I am hesitant to commit fully to it.  There are the obvious drawbacks: despite the fact that many of the expats here speak an impressive amount of Chinese, Chinese is not the language of choice amongst the foreigners.  They speak English, or French, or Spanish, but Chinese only as a novelty that they show off in front of waiters and taxi drivers.  An expat life is not the path to Chinese fluency.

But there's something subtler at stake here as well.  I came here in many ways to grow up -- not to toss my youth aside as finished, necessarily, but to actively take a step forward in my exploration of, if nothing else, myself.  In many ways, the expat life seems a step backward to me.  An unendingly fun step, but one in reverse nonetheless.  On Friday night, I went to a rowdy Chinese dinner with many friends of a friend, most of whom were American.  My friend explained to me that all of them, almost without exception, lived in a very small area which Chinese might call the northern edge of the Xuhui ('shoo-hway') District, and foreigners would call the French Concession.  These guys, on the other hand, call it, simply, "Campus."  The restaurant we were eating at was about a kilometer away from their little enclave, so everyone kept talking about how it was "Off Campus."  The whole night was reminding me of college -- in a really fun way, don't get me wrong -- but when you add On Campus/Off Campus to the beer-soaked dinner and the cacophony of "Call Me Maybe" and  "Livin' On a Prayer" blasting at the bar afterwards, I really could have been in Philadelphia with my TEP brothers, let alone Shanghai.  Rack those cups, pass the ping pong balls, let's play some beer pong and sing country songs all night.

But before you write me off as some hoity-toity culture snob who is swearing off the more-fun expat scene for good, here are a few reasons why I won't be doing anything of the sort:

Saturday was the 7th Annual Shanghai Chili Cook-Off, and these three pictures were my feeble attempts at capturing it.  Thousands of people, the vast majority of which were expats, flocked to the difficult-to-reach Pudong region (my new expat friends affectionally call it Pu Jersey, and I can see why) for some chili and beer.

A couple of weeks ago, on my first Friday night out in Shanghai, I was invited to this brand name-release party.  Two Danish guys are opening a sandwich and salad chain in Shanghai (anyone familiar with my dream of opening a Chop't here will know how excited this makes me), and I found myself at the official releasing of the brand name.  All Cape Cod enthusiasts who read this blog will be encouraged by its choice of name, I'm sure.

And then there's this.  It's blurry, but yes, that's me.  The more pertinent fact is that I'm riding in the side car of a motorcycle, a la Groucho Marx in Duck Soup, darting through the streets of Shanghai at night.  After the Lunch Box party, my Chilean roommate and a few of her friends dragged me to a Latin club.  How convenient that we were also with an American dude with a motorcycle.  I wasn't about to hop on with him, but the side car looked exceedingly comfortable.

So while there's certainly room for the fraternity-esque debauchery that seems like it comes naturally with the expat scene here, I'm hopeful that I can strike a balance.  Just walking around the city, speaking to Chinese people in Chinese would be a step in that direction, and I think I've done a good job of that so far.  There are two cities here, and I think I have time to revel in both of them before my tale here is complete.

A Shanghai New Year

I had another post in mind for today.  One of the things I'm discovering about blogging, though, is that it's silly to try and plan blog posts, because then you forget or, as in the case of this evening, something else comes along and demands attention.  So the other post will just have to wait.

I was invited by my Canadian roommate Serge to a Rosh Hashanah dinner this evening.  Were it not for his invitation (and my parents reminder earlier this week), I likely would have forgotten entirely that it was Rosh Hashanah this weekend (the Jewish guilt is fairly low on this point.  I feel that I would've been granted a Get Out of Jail Free had I forgotten considering I just, you know, moved across the world to a country that one would assume had maybe thirteen Jews total).

In fact, there are more than thirteen Jews in China.  At least 7 or so more, and at least those 20 live in Shanghai, and all gathered this evening at the Greek Taverna Milos for a lovely dinner to ring in the new year.  There was no shofar, but there was good ouzo and wine and, more importantly, good cheer spread around the long table to go with the plentiful and hearty Greek chow.

As far as Rosh Hashanah dinners go, it was far from perfect.  It began with the significantly overwhelmed wait staff fumbling around for enough menus, silverware, and organization to handle our group.  It got to the point where everyone involved wondered whether we would get our food before 5774.  Add that to the fact that I was the only non-smoker out of 20 (which, by definition, makes you a smoker whether you like it or not), the notable absence of my mother's pot roast, and the financial expenditure that came with the evening, and you've got a Rosh Hashanah dinner that leaves something to be desired.

And then one remembers that he's in Shanghai, surrounded by excitement and language and new experiences but lacking in one thing - the feeling of being home - and the Rosh Hashanah experience takes on its own special kind of perfect.  Who knows if this group will become a central part of my eventual social scene here.  But they were my Jewish family tonight, and for that I was grateful.

L'shanah tovah to all back home.  I miss you all.

Some pictures from the evening, including apples and honey:

News

Two items of China-related news got understandably overshadowed this week by the international media's coverage of the 9/11 anniversary, the anti-Islam movie, and the subsequent violence at the U.S. embassies in Libya and Egypt.  Those stories are certainly of more significance to both the world and especially the US.  But if it weren't clear to me before that I now live in a country with a completely different set of political norms, these two stories make that quite blatant.

The first: Oh Xi....where are you??

This month was supposed to mark the once-in-a-decade pre-planned transfer of power at the top of the Chinese Communist Party.  After 10 years in power as General Secretary of the CCP and President of the People's Republic, Hu Jintao was set to step down in favor of Xi Jinping.  Party Premier Wen Jiabao was to be succeeded by Li Keqiang.  Much had been made of this peaceful transition of power, and all signs pointed to a heavily planned 18th Party Congress, with all of the pomp and circumstance one could expect from the Chinese Government.

Instead, Xi is missing -- he has literally evaporated from public view, last seen on September 1st.  There is now speculation that his disappearence is health related, and that he had suffered from a heart attack.  Naturally, those rumors have been confirmed by no one at all.  The Party Congress is now likely not to happen until at least mid-October (dates have still yet to be confirmed).

Even had the transition of power gone through without a hitch, the distinctions between the political climate here and back in the US would have been obvious: on the one hand, a politically charged, often bordering on the ridiculous, campaign leading to the very definition of democracy (a free*** national election) and on the other hand, a stoic and meticulously planned transition of power from one set of unelected heads of state to the next.  Instead, Xi's absence can now be added to the Bo Xilai and Chen Guangcheng sagas as part of a year of Chinese political theater that is steadily approaching farce.

Story number two: The new definition of "work study"

The most disturbing part of this story, for me, is that it elicited, at most, a "ho hum, look what they're doing now" reaction.  It strikes me as so very Chinese to put children to work, without recourse, and label them as "interns" and, perhaps, equally Apple to view the practice as an evil necessary to churn out enough iPhone 5s out in time for the big release.  It provides little comfort that Foxconn assured us that the student laborers make up only 2.7% of the workforce there, since that still amounts to 32,000 kids putting together cell phones in what has already been widely reported as substantially less-than-optimal working conditions.

The two stories are similar in that a) I read about them in international, not Chinese, news sources, and b) nobody seems to care very much around here.  I admittedly don't understand everything my colleagues say when they're chattering away in Mandarin, but I've been paying a fair amount of attention this week, and I'm almost positive they are not talking about Xi Jinping and Foxconn.  There is, naturally, far less of a hunger for news here, both domestic and international.  That's what happens when the definition of "news" deviates so very far from what we recognize as news in the US.

In other "news", I walked past an old Chinese man today on the street wearing nothing but boxer shorts and orange Crocs.  I considered taking a subtle picture but chickened out.  I seriously regret that decision now.

***I can't help myself but drop this footnote to clarify that our free elections of course don't extend anymore to some people with historical tendencies to vote for Democrats.  Who knew that being physically capable of driving a car was a prerequisite for one's Constitutional right to vote.  And all in the name of rectifying a voter fraud problem that doesn't exist.  Hooray for the American spirit!

Kinda Fun

At the risk of propelling this blog outside the realm of objectively observant and into the depths of culturally insensitive, here are some more funny things that Chinese people say and do!

• There's something going on with the phrase "wait a moment."  It is said all the time.  I think it's just because the literal, word for word translation of the Mandarin phrase "deng yi xia" (pronounced dung ee shya) is "wait one moment," but "deng yi xia" is really just a colloquial way of saying "hang on."  In any event, whenever a Chinese person wants you to cool your heels, they invariably say "wait a moment."  This is all well and good, except it sounds a bit out of place in, say, a restaurant, when you place your order and your waiter says "wait a moment."  I'd kinda hope that my steak takes more than a moment to cook, thank you very much.
• What a great segue...to the word "kinda."  In that last sentence, I used it pretty much the way any colloquial speaker of English would.  The same can't be said for a colleague of mine, who copied me on an email this morning looking for a previous year's contract.  The email said: "Do you have this?  I'm kinda not the one who took care of this who last year."  I laughed out loud at my desk.
• Back to waiters, for a second.  Whenever you order something here, they respond "Just one?"  That doesn't really make sense when you're sitting by yourself at a restaurant.  I ordered a sandwich the other day and was asked "Just one?" to which I considered replying, "Now that you mention it, I'd like seven."
• My colleagues run through the office.  Like literally sprint.  Frequently I look up, and someone is darting from one desk to another, desperate to speak to someone without wasting any time.  I think this probably has to do with the whole "face" concept, that if they know someone wants something, it doesn't occur to them to walk from point A to point B.
• Phone calls are interesting.  You know that someone is circling for a landing when they say some combination of the words/sounds "mmm....hao de...byebye" in quick succession.  "Hao de" just means "good" in Chinese.  "Byebye" means, well, "byebye" in Chinese...I guess.  The weird thing is that the call doesn't end until they go through 4-9 cycles, rapidly, of "mmm...byebye...mmm...byebye...hao de."  And I can only hear one end of the conversations, so I can only assume that they're just volleying this exchange back and forth, like two cutesy lovers saying "no YOU hang up first."

Anyway, I should say that I know for a fact that my Chinese sounds hilarious to them when I try to speak, so all of this is in good fun.  And given that I struggle with my Chinese so much, it's incredibly impressive to me that these people can actually conduct real business in English.  I'm not sure I'll ever get to that point in Chinese.

In other news, this was posted in the window of the restaurant where I ended up eating lunch today:

You can understand why I decided to dine there, right?  Who doesn't want Loose Women with their midday meal?  To be honest, I felt I had to go there before seeing the sign, since it's called Judy's and I felt I needed to try it out of deference to my loving mother.  But the sign put me over the edge.  I stormed in, seeking out the loose women (rather than following the sign's warning), but, alas, received only a hot plate of Sichuan Mapo Tofu.  It was quite good.