More on milk . . .

I just stumbled across the source of China's milk quality problems . . .

Good locals, bad locals

The other night the gas for my stove stopped working. Strange, because my hot water had gas. Also unfortunate, because I arrived home late from a long day of work, and I was eager to prepare myself a carb and protein fortified meal consisting of that classic, pasta and tomato sauce. I asked the security guard downstairs to call a repairperson, who arrived in 5 minutes with an assistant. In the meantime I arranged to dine with a similarly famished neighbor, who would bring an electric stove while I supplied the food and cooking.
The repairpeople disassembled the stove, and pointed out the area of the problem, saying that an important component would need to be replaced, at a cost of 160RMB. Lucky for me, they were prepared to complete the repair on the spot. But I was busy with dinner plans with my neighbor, so I told them I'd call the in the morning. Against my suggestion they closed up the nonfunctional stove.
Repairpeople having departed, I showed my neighbor the problem. There was electricity for the ignition spark, but no gas to light. She suggested changing the batteries in the stove.
"Stoves have batteries?". Sure enough, my stove is powered by two D batteries. I felt for sure it should have been connected into the apartment's electric network. (American readers: Do your gas stoves use batteries? I grew up with an electric stove, so unsure). My neighbor went on to suggest that the repairpeople might cheat me.
The next night, (last night) I purchased two batteries, 7RMB, replacing the old ones that turned out to power both the sparking function and a solenoid valve for the main gas line. The solenoid valve (or its controller) cuts out when the battery voltage falls below a certain level, although the batteries are still sufficient to generate the ignition sparks. Certainly intentionally, this is a safety measure to keep gas from flowing when batteries become so dead that the spark itself stops working and the manual gas valves (the knobs) are left on.
I replaced the batteries, and voila! . . . the stove still wasn't working. I remembered how eager the repairpeople were to put the stove together again the night before. I re-disassembled the stove, to find those crafty repairpeople had sabotaged the connector to the solenoid valve. ("Ah, Shenzhen . . . ") I reset it, and my stove was working fine again. (For you root-cause analysis people out there, to confirm my comprehension of the situation, I put in the old batteries again, and the stove was again non-functional). I wrote my neighbor to thank her profusely for her advice.
Moral: Choose good locals to make friends with, they counter the naughty ones who undoubtedly will find you.

My recollection of life in the north of China is that I would much less likely have this experience. Any northern readers care to comment?

Also, in writing this post, I'm concerned that Chinese grammatical structure is working its way into my written English use. Dissecting contract grammar in my last language session could be to blame. I'm a bit too close to the issue to be able to judge it from a distance, but I invite any appropriately bilingual reader to assess.

Malls and Migrants

The first image is Guangzhou East Railway station. I visited through here on a day trip from Shenzhen. During Chinese new year GZ's train stations are synonymous with the largest annual human migration on the planet. Migrant workers and students alike collectively do their part to test the limits of ticket servicepersons' patience. I had the dubious honor of joining the masses in the middle of the fray as I had to purchase my return ticket to Shenzhen.

On the other side of the economic spectrum, in the second image we have a dragon dance, familiar to SF Bay Area folks, taking place in a ritzy mall, which felt like much less familiar a setting for such an authentic cultural display. I had been looking in vain for these kinds of New Years' festivities streetside as seen in Chinatown back home. I decided that the mall must be the new 'authentic' for affluent shenzheners. As opposed to the migrants and students, this Shenzhen middle class - businesspeople and office workers - stick around the city during the holiday and frequent these ubiquitous, unavoidable malls.

Blog update initiation

Welcome once again,
This blog is for keeping in touch with people I'm familiar with, and giving you a view into my activities and experiences mostly in Asia, especially China. Blogger/Google Groups combination make it very tricky to update many users to the blog. Suffice to say I published the below three posts only to find that it didn't update (!) I had to use three email accounts of mine to test out the capabilities under different settings. So here's the skinny: When I post, within about a day you'll get the message that it posted. This is to allow for the (rare) case when I post multiple times in a day, I don't want people getting bothered with multiple emails. Also gives me time to do damage control in case I post inadvertently ;) So, this post is intended to completely exercise the update capability, and below are the "real" posts. With that, do please give them a look!

Welcome to newcomers

Welcome to the blog if you haven’t seen it before – to avoid people having to check periodically to look for new posts, I’ve set up an update list. That way, if I go off the radar for a month, you know you’re not missing anything until the next update. If you have a friend who wants to subscribe, they can leave a comment with their email address which I won’t publish, and I’ll add them. Unsubscribing is also easy. It's an anonymous blog, and I moderate comments. Lastly, if you've been receiving daily summary emails from Google Groups, that won't happen anymore, and I apologize for any trouble.

To avoid cluttering people’s inboxes with update notices right now, the following three posts are uploaded together:

Post 1: Four Months Ago

Last entry I was on my way to Beijing. I got to see my first Beijing Opera, a real cacophony of tones taken to extreme. Like in western opera, much of the audience won’t understand what’s being sung, and so they have subtitles, which not only are in Chinese characters but their grammar reflects an ancient style of expression, and so I’m triply lost. Luckily I had a local there to explain what was going on. Turns out that a plot that takes three sentences to describe takes two hours to act and sing out.

Beijing continues to be a beautiful place, replete with preserved as well as re-created traditional architecture. I’m going to try and cover the goings on of the past three months in short form in this entry to allow me to quickly segue into current events. Here goes:

Got my phone stolen in October (horror). I felt like I was missing an arm for about a week and a half while I was doing pickpocket negotiations (don’t bother) and phone-fraud damage control, and while finding a quality exact replacement. Scoured Shenzhen on Thanksgiving for a true Turkey. Went to Shanghai in December to check out an up and coming business school there, (which unfortunately for its recent tuition hikes, is more than aware of its up and coming status). Saw my good and newly arrived friend in the French Concession there. Tied up work on the inspiring lighting product, toward putting pieces in place to allow many customers to develop and manufacture different kinds of electronics products using affordable IT development and manufacturing resources in India and China. (boilerplate: This effort isn't taking away American jobs, it’s enabling higher value-add and creativity in existing jobs, as well as creating new jobs higher up the value chain, and generally fostering an environment for opportunities that otherwise would be unable to find an outlet.). Yes, I had not been exclusively backpacking and snapping photos during my travels, extended business and technically-oriented networking began rather spontaneously shortly after I originally set out for across the Pacific one year ago. In fact, yesterday was the one year anniversary that I departed the States for Kuala Lumpur on the way to Bombay. I returned to the States over the Christmas holiday, got my China business visa in hand while there (neither a trivial errand nor cheap), did some other mundane activities related to the business (changing to a more remotely manageable American bank account, for example) and returned to Shenzhen via Hong Kong in early January.

Post 2: The Nokia E51

I want to describe a tool I rely on heavily. After one day when this tool was stolen from my pocket, I was at a great disadvantage and generally in a very sour mood, and so I became keenly aware of its value before locating an identical one. The tool is my mobile phone, specifically the Nokia E51 business phone. I purchased it in Malaysia, my first outbound port of call. It’s most important feature is its quad-band GSM capability, which means the device is useful in Asia, Europe, and the States. It also has 802.11b access, GPRS (slow speed) data, versatile 3G (high speed) data, a (poor) camera , audio recording, music playing, and video recording capability. For being purchased in Malaysia, and thanks to its proximity to Singapore, it came loaded with simplified Chinese character support as well as a Chinese dictionary. How’s that for serendipity? Singaporeans, thankfully for my subsequent instruction, had adopted China’s simplified character system as opposed to Hong Kong and Taiwan.

Compared to most phones acquired via subscription plans in the states, I spent more up front and purchased this one outright. Most phones purchased in the states are “locked”, which means they can’t be used with a different telecom carrier than you subscribe with, even if you’re outside the country. I think this practice is sick myself. Freedom to move and operate between countries has been an integral theme to my past year, so the technology to enable the communications side of that was critical, and I paid for it.

The phone’s operating system is Symbian v9.0 S3 . The phone allows me to download and install applications written for this popular OS. Critical applications enabling my mobility are Gmail for mobile, Google Maps with antenna position localization, and the Fring VOIP tool.

Google Maps has enabled me to keep Indian rickshaws from cheating me, and to learn and recommend faster routes to Dong Guan taxi drivers. Fring has allowed me to stay in touch via instant message with my friends on Gmail and Skype from guest houses in Mysore, a hundred miles out of Bangalore, as well as to give the odd friend or family member out of the blue near-free voice calls from trains en route to Guangzhou. YouTube mobile has allowed me to view videos while on Ko Pha-Ngan (because this is what one should be doing on a Thai island). I use the phone to record Chinese speech and photograph Chinese sentences that I’m not familiar with to later review with my teacher. I also refer to the dictionary described earlier frequently.

For all this functionality, I most frequently use the phone for texting. Chinese sent 700 billion texts last year. Can you imagine if an American dime was paid for each one such as in off-plan American mobile phone contracts? Chinese generally pay one jiao, (a Chinese dime), for a message, equivalent to about one and a half American pennies. And their SMS servers have at least the functionality that ours do, and may very well be the same brands . . . it's a lucrative game, that one.

One encouraging Hong Kong expat challenged me to switch from pinyin texting to character texting to increase my character learning rate. That effort, while initially difficult for a few weeks, paid off handsomely in how much I can communicate by text now. Texted Chinese reflects spoken Chinese, and therefore often exercises a different set of characters than used in typical written Chinese. Shortly my instruction will have to switch to those Chinese characters used more frequently in writing.

Post 3: “You who come, are of Shenzhen.”

来了,就是深圳人 – this phrase is translated by this entry’s title, In fact it’s hard to translate this phrase any way other than poetically. I’m told there are deeper as well as more mundane meanings to this sentence, but I most appreciate its surface meaning – it might as well say, “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses. . . ”. Quoting Liam Casey, a local entrepreneur I admire, from a Shenzhen Daily article – “When people go to the United States, they’re probably chasing the American Dream. But when seeking their fortunes in Shenzhen, they call it a global dream . . . ”.

Shenzhen is a rough and tumble place, presenting the full spectrum of character that diverse individuals have to offer - humanity’s good, bad, and ugly. It's not a very pleasant or fun place, and it's culturally indistinct next to Shanghai or Beijing. People come here to work, to enable their dreams, and (especially those on excursion from Hong Kong) to indulge their vices. If I ever wondered what an old American western town was like, I would look at this city, and simply rewind its technological clock by a hundred and fifty years. Instead of being the Wild West, it’s the Wild South. Here livelihoods are earned, families supported, and industries made, even if periodically at the moral expense of co-opted western intellectual property.

For better or for worse, this place is where I’ve chosen to start my consulting business. Alas, this blog is too anonymous for me to go into much detail on the business (unless I decide to use this medium for marketing . . . hmmm . . . ), suffice to say I now have an office in the fiercely staid central business district, and an apartment on the edge of shady LuoHu.

Shenzhen Food

Cuisine in Shenzhen is difficult for a foreigner used to large portions with little time in which to consume. Burritos, that most efficient form of consumption, don’t exist here. Instead, a lot of rice with some vegetables with little meat is too often the norm. A lot of food is served such that it requires many plates to get enough substance into you.

Not a place for a healthy diet. And so we foreigners here share tips on where to find large portions of protein-filled dishes, and we cook for ourselves. I frequent the likely places, keep a stash of western supplies at home, and take vitamin supplements. My current favorite restaurant is a Pakistani joint that serves as familiarly Indian style food as I could hope for. It’s strong point is that by default it has the features I otherwise have to ask servers in recommending dishes, containing “a lot of meat, no bones, no fat, and no soup.”

When I got home to the Bay Area, I couldn’t wait to consume what I remembered calling “chinese food” again. As far as I’m concerned, “American style” Chinese food is at least as deserving of recognition as any revered member of the eight regional Chinese cuisines.

Consuming Products

Buying anything in Shenzhen is challenging. I’m not talking about linguistic obstacles – that isn’t a problem anymore. It’s all about deficient product quality now. Just about anything I buy will have some defect that becomes apparent only after some use of the product. I’ve been amazed at how well this has held true again and again. The DVD player’s syncing is imperfect, the apartment’s microwave is busted, the pillows (from IKEA!) don’t match the demo models . . . Products just need to be tested, and they need to be tested locally. I saw a promotional video once for the company National Instruments, makers of testing products and software. They depicted a world where testing didn’t exist – all kinds of everyday objects kept breaking and acting funny. This is only a mild exaggeration of what Shenzhen is like for me. There is a very strong filter between the products that get made here for export, and the products that are received in the States. In the states, we no longer necessarily associate Chinese products with low quality like we did ten to twenty years ago. But in China, low quality Chinese products is absolutely still the norm. Just the fact that they exercise the term “export quality” is very telling. There was a local news story recently that with the poor economy in the States, and American importers telling Chinese exporters to withhold shipments, initially resulting in a stockpile of goods in warehouses here, that Chinese consumers were finally getting to buy quality products as exporters decided to sell domestically instead.

Banking

A long time ago, I set it as my goal to open a local HSBC bank account. As of last week, I finally got one. Those folks don’t make it easy. Beyond the usual identifying documents, it required a personal introduction plus my office and apartment lease and no small change of a starting balance. However, it’s worth the trouble. The account represents my ability to exercise funds from any part of the world, to any part of the world, at a few clicks and a small transaction cost. Quite a powerful tool even if it seems outwardly mundane. Try doing that with Washington Mutual. I’m thankfully enabled in setting even that much up by a very helpful person in the States. On one’s own with no logistical assistance from the home country, I’m not sure how one could begin in exploiting global opportunities. It’s a failing of the financial system we operate in, I think. For all that our trade representatives work hard to make world commerce in the image of American free market values, the occasional need to remain enabled administratively by trusted folks at home (valued as they are) feels contrary to the American sense of independent rugged individualism. To illustrate, if the American financial system could collectively speak, it would be saying to me, “Of course you need to be in an American bank branch to manage your account”, or “Of course you need to maintain a local address for tax and financial correspondence”, and even, “You really ought to just business from within your own borders. How could you possible require being based anywhere else?” I suppose that under any kind of financial system, one can still trace one’s success in large part to those who are trusted and close to them, it’s just that operating abroad in the early stages periodically requires pressing such an abstract concept into all-to-tangible practice.