The Expat Web

It didn't take more than a couple of weeks in Shanghai for me to realize that the expat scene here is not only pervasive, but also incredibly overlapping.  Every expat "event" I go to -- be it a music event, or that chili cook-off, or the beer festival, or what have you -- in addition to seeing the people I expect to see, I invariably see other people I either know or recognize.  Put simply, expats, like the Mighty Ducks, fly together, and random connections abound.

Here's a good example:


A few weeks ago, I met Franco at a birthday party at a rooftop bar (great view of the French Concession).  Franco knew the birthday girl, Sasha, through a mutual friend.  Lo and behold, about five minutes after I got there, I ran into Pamela (Franco and my Chilean roommate).  She too was there for Sasha's birthday, and neither Franco nor I had any idea she was there.  You'll forgive me for not remembering exactly how Pamela and Sasha are connected.  Suffice it to say, both Franco and Pamela knew Sasha, through different means, and now I do too, meaning that Sasha is now connected to 75% of my random, Craigslist-formed apartment.

On Saturday, I went to dinner with Sasha and a few of her friends, some of whom I had met before.  We went to Chu Hua, a really yummy sushi place that keeps on serving you until you can't eat any more (or, in our case, they kick you out).  At one point, I ate a piece of fish that tasted acutely familiar, but it took several more pieces of fish for me to realize what it was: Herring.  I've loved herring for over a decade -- it's one of my favorite Jew-foods -- and I'm pretty sure I've never had it without either cream sauce or pickled in vinegar.  I've certainly never had herring with soy sauce and wasabi.  It's certainly not my favorite piece of sushi, but it was fun stumbling upon an old favorite in an entirely different context.

Anyway, a few hours later, I saw that I had received an e-mail from Zev, a guy I went to high school with, and with whom I 've keep in very loose contact since we graduated 6 years ago.  Zev and his girlfriend have just embarked on 14-month backpacking trip around the world, and their first stop is China.  I think I must've just stumbled upon their plan on Facebook (ahh the glories of technology), and e-mailed Zev to tell him I was in Shanghai and that I'd be happy to show them around if they were coming here while in China.  We've exchanged a few emails figuring out when they'll be here, and it turns out they'll likely overlap with Thanksgiving, a particularly nostalgic holiday for Americans abroad, or so I'm told.  Zev's email last night said that he and his girlfriend thought it could be fun to gather a few wistful Americans together for a Thanksgiving dinner, and that he was planning on asking his friend Sasha if they might use her apartment as a venue in exchange for a home-cooked Thanksgiving meal (Zev and his girlfriend are apparently avid amateur cooks).

Surely, I thought, it couldn't be the same Sasha.

It is.

They went to camp together 15 years ago.

I always hated that Disney World ride, but damn, it's a small freaking world.

***

It's been a while since I've posted some good pictures, so I'll take this opportunity to share the scene at Fuxing Park on Sunday afternoon, where we celebrated Pamela's birthday by having a picnic.  Just to bring things full circle...Sasha was in attendance.

Action shot of Pam's friend Natalia.

Any guesses as to who these two proud looking gentlemen are?  Answer below...

From left to right: Ignacio, Natalia, Daniella, and Pam

I saw this store on my way back from the park and had to take a picture, for reasons that will be clear to several of this blog's readers.


P.S.  That statue?  Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, of course!  Workers of the world, unite!

A Short Day's Journey Into Night

Assume, for the sake of argument, that we did away with daylight savings time in the US.  And then, for good measure, we just eradicated time zones in general.  It'd certainly make things simpler, right?  You wouldn't have to account for time change when planning phone calls, flight connections, television programming -- many scheduling difficulties we accept as part of living in a country of such longitudinal girth would be rectified.  So why don't we do it?  Well, obviously, because it makes no astronomical sense.  Without time zones, the day would look a hell of a lot different in California than it would in New York.  The sun would rise and set in California not just three hours later in an absolute sense, but in a time sense as well.

As counterintuitive as this may sound, this is how it is here in China.  With only one time zone, it is currently 5:06 PM at the offices of J.D. Power in Shanghai, and it is also 5:06 PM in Lhasa, Tibet, some 4,200 kilometers west of here.  The result: it got dark at about 3:45 this afternoon.  By Christmas, I imagine that I'll be saying goodnight to the sun at around 3.  Of course, the reverse is true as well -- the sun rises at around 5am or before here.  In order to make a single time zone of such expansive width functional at all, the concept of a "day" in which sunlight and waking hours are at least somewhat closely aligned doesn't really exist in Shanghai, at least not as we approach the winter equinox.  I imagine the same is true for Tibet and Xinjiang in June, where the sun probably doesn't set until close to midnight.  All of this is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things, particularly considering there are industrialized countries out there like Sweeden that function on close to 24 hours of sunlight during the summer and darkness in the winter.  But, man, is it disconcerting to look out the window before 4pm and have it be night time already.

I heard a funny explanation of this phenomenon the other night  After complaining about it, someone said to me, "Trust the Chinese government to mandate at least nominal, Communist equality in everything -- even time."  The notion that two Chinese people could be experiencing different times of day at the same time is, I suppose, anathema to the ultimate notion of "One China."  It reminds me of my trip to the Shanghai Aquarium 4 years ago, when, upon asking the ticket agent if there was a student discount for the preposterously expensive tickets, I was told in Chinese that, "In China, everyone is equal."

Whatever the reason is, Yogi Berra must've been thinking of China when he announced, "It gets late early out here."

Ode to Democracy

Diaspora has been a major theme of this blog -- it's perhaps my grown-up way of reframing good old-fashioned homesickness in an analytical way -- but November 6 was always going to be a day when my heart and mind where about as far away from Shanghai as they could be.  Thanks to daylight savings, and the now thirteen hour time difference between me and the east coast, only a few hours of my November 6th will overlap with the polls actually being open in the US (with the exception of Dixville Notch, of course).  But that doesn't mean that doesn't take away from the sense of long-distance patriotism felt today, November 6th, Election Day, 2012 in Shanghai.

I think everyone reading this blog knows who I want to win the election, and who I think will win the election.  So I don't really want to spend much time prognosticating -- in a few short hours, we'll all know what happens anyway.  About a year ago, I felt pretty good about the election, and I can't say I feel any less confident now.

That said, I've always thought that Election Day should be a celebration of something other than Democrat vs. Republican, or right vs. left.  We've got 1,459 other days every four years to argue about the relative merits of tax plans, defense budgets, moral imperatives and, of course, social security.  On this one day, can't we just be proud that all of this is left up to us to decide in the first place?

The refrain of the past few years has been "Washington is broken."  It's hard not to agree with that.  There's a lot that needs fixing, and it's not clear to me that either of the two candidates are individually capable of doing that fixing.  There is, to be sure, much to descry about the state of American politics.  But I, for one, like to take stock of the many and serious issues that plague our system, and thank my lucky stars to have those be the problems that populate our list of grievances.

For more than two centuries, every four years, on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November, the leader of the United States government is systematically and peacefully overthrown by the people.  Read that sentence out loud, and then go get a map of the world and try to find the other countries for which that is true now, and for which that has been true for so long.  I need not look farther than across my desk, at my Chinese colleagues, to find individuals who have never had a hand in the people who constitute government of their People's Republic.  To be an American is to have a voice -- regardless of who they support, Americans ought to be on top of soap boxes on Election Days, using those voices as early and as often as possible, screaming at the top of their lungs, just because they can.

Much has been said about how this election will come down to a very small sliver of the electorate -- primarily those who live in Ohio, Virginia, Florida, New Hampshire, and Colorado.  I worry that such a sentiment, nevertheless true, will discourage some in the other 45 states from voting.  Last I checked, the US had a voting rate of about 50%.  I find that somewhat disheartening, as I look outside my office window on Shanghai, a city of 23 million people who have never voted in their lives.  I certainly do not have a perfect record -- I didn't vote in either of the two elections I lived through in Washington D.C. (of all places), though this was primarily because I didn't want to register for a D.C. Driver's License (a very lame excuse indeed).  One shouldn't vote because they can single-handedly affect who becomes President.  It's for the down-ticket elections, on which they certainly can have an impact, and, more importantly, to vote is to celebrate one's ability to do so.

So vote, people.  Early and often.  And for whatever it's worth, this is what you'll be contributing to -- you heard it here:

Obama: 303
Romney: 235

The One Child Policy

On several occasions over the past two months, I have made the cultural blunder of asking a Chinese person whether they have any siblings, or otherwise assuming that to have multiple children in a household was not just possible, but perfectly normal.  The most recent instance of this occurred on Friday, when I was told by a colleague that another colleague wasn't at work because his wife had given birth to their son.  "That's terrific," I exclaimed.  "Is it their first child?"

My question was met with a look of confusion more than anything else, but it didn't take long for someone to say "Well, yes," and then continue, somewhat pedantically, "you see, you can only have one child in China."  I stammered some sort of apology ("Oops!  I forgot about that!"), as I have done previously when making this mistake, and the conversation moved on from there with no lingering awkwardness.

Part of me must have assumed that, along with China's growth and increasingly open economic market, so too came some form of loosening of the harsh human rights restrictions for which China has become notorious in the past 60 years.  Deep down, I suppose I knew this wasn't the case -- the government is frequently chided by its Western business partners, including the US, for its turning blind eyes to the human rights situation here.  Before coming here, I associated the one-child policy with sinister consequences, like the horrible stories of family planning, where Chinese couples would abandon baby girls because they had hoped for a son.  Given only one shot at the proverbial apple, people would elect for "do-overs," and leave unwanted daughters to fates at which I can only guess.  Such stories seem too awful to exist in such an industrialized, "first-world" country in 2012, so I suppose the naive part of me assumed they didn't.

Given that it does exist, and appears to be enforced rigorously, Chinese sentiment towards the policy (or at least my perception of such sentiment) strikes me as fairly fascinating.  First, nobody seems troubled by it.  It's just a given that families will only have one kid, the same way the notion of free speech is a given to Americans.  I suppose that is easily explained by either a status quo argument (they haven't experienced any other reality, so how could they question the policy) or a brainwashing argument (the government, as it is notorious of doing, has convinced them that this is "right").

But here's where it starts getting weird.  An expat friend of mine (who shall remain identity-less for the sake of privacy) recently went through a pregnancy scare with the Chinese girl whom he was dating.  The relationship wasn't serious at all yet, but these things happen.  Before the pregnancy had even been medically confirmed, however, they had the tricky conversation about what they would want to do about the potential child.  She declared that she wanted to keep the baby and raise it, no matter what, and that abortion was not an option for her.  Now, this clearly opens up issues of abortion which are very complicated and sensitive.  I certainly don't mean to thrust my pro-choice values onto this Chinese woman.  I don't have a sense for how the Chinese community feels about abortion, but if this particular case is any barometer, it may not be too popular.  But.  If people would go so far as to abandon daughters for the sake of having sons, I would assume that they would at least consider alternatives to having your only child as mandated by the policy with a foreigner who a) you don't know very well and b) likely won't be around for very long to raise the kid with you.  But from what I could tell, she viewed the potential pregnancy as a responsibility, if not a blessing, as if she had it with her Chinese husband, and was prepared to carry it to term.

As it turns out, she wasn't pregnant.  While I sympathize with any disappointment she might feel, I view this as a good thing, for everyone involved, including the non-existent child.  My friend, incidentally, agrees.  There are clearly wide gulfs between American and Chinese cultures -- it is precisely because of those gaps that I chose to come here.  When I experience them, however, like this one surrounding family and children, I can't help but feeling both insensitive and confused.  I guess that's just part of the ride.

What I've Learned: October

It's crazy that another month has gone by.  As long as those first few days felt, when I was running around from apartment to apartment, trying to get settled -- the subsequent eight weeks seem to have flown by.  The weather is finally starting to cool down here, after over a month of pleasant temperatures and sun.  I'm told I should be dreading the winter, but I think I can take it.

WIL in October:

• The same diaspora rule that applies to sports, applies to natural disasters.  Spent the past three days following the news, tweets, status updates, and really breathtaking images that Hurricane Sandy left behind.  I hope everyone is doing well back home.
• I think that Chinese fluency may be a pipe dream -- or something I'd need about a decade living somewhere other than Shanghai to achieve.
• Taiji (tai-chee) isn't restricted to big groups, a la the old folks on the Bund.  People do it on their own all over the place, including in my apartment courtyard.
• Some Chinese people are surreptitiously interested in the American election.  My colleague snuck peeks at the debate videos, even though his English probably isn't good enough to understand most of it.
• Chinese food at its best (my friend Huck's, for example), may be the best tasting homemade food in the world.
• Chinese food at its worst, or even approaching its worst, is inedible (though this may be true of everything).
• My Chinese handwriting is better than most Chinese peoples'.
• Chinese clementines are greenish, and much more sour than American ones.  But they're still good.

• Taiwan is a sensitive subject here.  I suppose I knew this already, but I didn't think it'd be a real problem for "regular" Chinese people.  Here's the story: a Chinese colleague asked me whether my Chinese teacher from college was Chinese.  I replied that he was Taiwanese.  Nonplussed, he told me that "Taiwan is part of China."  I just nodded, realizing my mistake, and took the next opportunity to drop the subject.  A few days later, on my way to lunch with the same colleague, he asked, cautiously, "you know that Taiwan is part of China, right?"  I said yes, and then added "it's complicated."  As soon as I said it, I realized I should've just stuck with yes.  "No it isn't," he responded.  "It's simple.  Taiwan is in China."
• Chinese elevators are the slowest elevators in the world.  It's not just speed.  There must be something wrong with their programming, because they take forever to come.
• People still use Polaroid cameras.  Exhibit A:

That's a Polaroid shot of me, volunteering at the Xinzhuang Elderly Care Center, where we built paper flowers with the patients.  By "we" I mean everyone other than me.  I was incapable of doing it.  My flower looked like a crumpled up paper airplane.

• I am very good at hitting "doubles" in darts.  I'm very bad at hitting everything else.  It should be pointed out that the doubles are the farthest away from the bull's eye without being off the board, so I don't think it's necessarily a good thing that I'm good at hitting them.
• Badminton is a funky sport.  It's ridiculous to watch.  And it requires surprisingly few of the skills associated with tennis.

Buzz

Should I end up losing my marbles (this assumes a fact not in evidence that I have not done so already), my biographers may ultimately point to this blog post as the first signs of my pending insanity.  So I'll just get right down to it:

I'm having trouble sleeping.  And it's a mosquito's fault.

Okay, so that doesn't sound all THAT crazy.  I've gotten mosquito bites before -- a lot of them -- so many, in fact, that my mother used to claim that my blood was just sweeter than anyone else's in the family (she did not make this gem of a line up, I can assure you).  So I'm pretty used to dealing with the itching.  I'm pretty good at sleeping through it at night, and grinning and bearing it during the day.

This is different.

This is, as far as I can tell, just one mosquito.  A super mosquito.  With stealth powers.  And camoflage.  And invincibility.

Let me try to explain.  Over the past two weeks, I've woken up in the middle of the night with mosquito bites.  This happened when I initially moved into my apartment -- it was still summer, it was humid out, and I frequently left my window open during the day while I was at work to let some air (and, it turns out, mosquitos) into my room.  As the weather started to cool down, I started keeping my window closed so as to keep the mosquitos out, convinced as I was that I had managed to kill all of the ones that had infested my room during weeks of open-window-policy.  It's been a few weeks since I've seen a mosquito in our apartment, so I think it's safe to say that mosquito season is finally coming to an end.

Except, it seems, in my room, and except, it seems, after I go to bed.  At first, evidence of SuperSkeeter's existence manifested itself in those middle-of-the-night bite discoveries.  I would wake up, feel the bites, get pissed off, eventually get back to sleep, and then -- wierdest thing -- wake up with no evidence that the bites ever existed.  They were, well....vanishing bites.

Now, bored of simply disturbing my slumber after the REM cycle has begun, SuperSkeeter has decided to up the ante.  He doesn't wait for me to fully enter the REM cycle.  In an apparent game of mosquito Chicken, SuperSkeeter has started to test the limits.  He waits until I'm lying in bed, lights off, eyes closed, and then BUZZ! right in my ear, and up I get, lights on, hands at the ready, eager to clap the fucker out of existence.  If I'm lucky, I see him for about a second and then, like Kaiser Soze, poof, he's gone.  In the past two nights, convinced that I've had him dead to rights, I've smacked the air vigorously, leaving nothing but ringing hands to show for my efforts.  Sometimes, I'm so close to sleep by the time he BUZZ!es that I just flail about, smacking myself in the face in the hopes that I'll get him out of literal blind luck.

And yet he endures, like the Energizer Bunny, his appetite for the destruction of my night's sleep (and my blood) as endless as my accuracy as a mosquito slapper is poor.  I used to have a rep with these guys.  My reputation as a mosquito killer rivaled that of the blue zappy thing.  SuperSkeeter has shattered that in a matter of weeks.

Last night, I tried setting a trap for him.  After several cycles of lights off, BUZZ!, slap, lights on, see him sort of, slap, miss, rinse and reapeat, I decided to lie down without turning the lights off so as to not have to waste precious time hitting the switch before leaping to attention when he made his fly-by.  Several hours, even more missed slaps, and many bites (none of which, of course, were still there) later, I woke up to the sound of my alarm.  I had finally fallen asleep, exhausted from my failed mission against SuperSkeeter.  The light had remained on the whole time.

I promise he's real.  I'm reminded of the episode of SportsNight when Casey is plagued by a metaphorical fly that nobody else can see, even on tape.  Let me remind all of you naysayers that in the end, the fly turns out to be real.  Many of you are probably grappling with the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and therefore have little sympathy for me.  That's understandable.  But let me tell you.  SuperSkeeter is no slouch.

Hurricane!

To the East-Coast-dwelling readers of this blog (who make up at least 80% of the readership): stay safe this week!  I've been reading about fierce Ms. Sandy (a NY Times reader posted that given the collective hysteria that the storm has induced, they should consider replacing its somewhat docile-sounding name with something more formidable, like Brunhilde).  Mostly, I'm just jealous that so many of you don't have work today (and possibly Tuesday as well).  Though I can't imagine either New York or DC is much fun without any public transportation.

The weather in Shanghai is as it has been for much of the last month -- partly sunny, partly hazy, high in the low 70s.  Can't complain.  Though as Yogi would say, it sure does get late early out here.  Thanks to China's single time zone (yes, that's right, the whole "one China" thing extends to things like time, even though China is about as wide as the US), the sun has already set here, and it's not even 5pm in October.  The sun also rises (apologies to Hemingway) at around 5am, which is bad news for me and my fairly transparent curtains.

In further proof that there are, in fact, Jews in Shanghai, I will be attending a free screening of the American movie Munich this evening as part of the Jewish Film Festival here.  It's free, very convenient to my office, and supposedly a very good movie to boot.

Anyway, stay dry and safe, everyone!  Please send me cool storm photos or stories, I'm kinda bummed to be missing the action.  Bonus points for windswept shots of Anderson Cooper in a yellow zonker.