Milk

Commenting on the latest media frenzy on China isn't my style because it feels like grandstanding. I'm not a Sinophile, so I'm not always paying attention to all the political dimensions at play, usually leaving me at a disadvantage to contribute to the conversation. But this business with the milk powder deserves some thoughts.
You don't have to be an expert in Chinese characters to be able to glean that the internal news coverage is being glossed over. Go to www.xinhua.net, the government's online news site. I've been visiting the past few days. This character, 奶, means "milk". Copy and paste the character into your browser's text search utility, and you'll find that coverage is far removed from the main headlines. Instead, headlines of China's space mission currently in progress reign supreme. In general I've picked up that China's internal news coverage is about instilling pride in the country and its place in the world. It's fun to follow this kind of coverage (usually through imagery for me for obvious reasons, but many Chinese article translations are also accessible), because I feel like I'm observing an important transition for a developing country. But if it happens at the expense of themes like the following excerpt, from an article by a Beijinger Cui Weiping, then it's not fair. This was accessed via the Washington Post, dated Sunday, September 28.

"What could I do after I heard something like this? Where could I go to report the problem? I can't think of any official in this vast country who would patiently listen to me and try to address the problem. Most officials would probably regard me as insane if I went to talk to them. They would glance at me arrogantly from behind their desks. I don't think I could stand the humiliation for even a few minutes. Why should I seek this disgrace?

"There are all kinds of things like this happening in the country. There's nothing I can do about it," I said to myself, trying to appease my conscience.

How pitiful I am. I already know that my effort will be useless even before I take any action. Is there a devil who lives in our hearts and sneers at our actions all the time? His mission is to deprive us of the ability to respond, to smother our enthusiasm, and to paralyze our will to take action. I am caught in the same situation as my imaginary, impassive official. Both of us are controlled by a curse and have lost the ability to take appropriate action . . .

However, my humanity has been hurt. The damage is immeasurable. Trapped in this kind of silence and not able to do anything about it, I feel bad about myself. I almost feel that I've become a pile of [dung], or a slave who only knows work but not how to speak. I chat and joke with people around me, but I am not able to talk about the biggest bewilderment on my mind.

To speak, or not to speak, this is the question. This is a question that is hard for our judgment. But what we've lost is the ability to make basic moral judgment.

-- Cui Weiping

(End quote)

At least one of the following links should allow you to easily access the full article in question.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/26/AR2008092603451.html
http://wordpress.com/tag/baby-milk-powder-scandal/

This excerpt reflects themes I've come across before, but mostly in reading about China in Western media. To the extent that Chinese news organizations still cover the tainted milk issue, I've been able to glean from poor automated translations that coverage focuses on blaming one company. There's little discussion of reexamining the regulation process at a higher level. And contrary to the excerpt, local Chinese folks I talk to as part of the everyday don't seem to be itching to get these kinds of thoughts off their chest. They know which milk to avoid, and that's all I hear from them about it. If they wanted to they would have no problem voicing such concerns since face-to-face conversations naturally aren't monitored.

Onward

With my last post, I signaled the close of this blog. But a lot's happened since then, and so it's time to start writing it up. I'll also reframe the scope of the blog. It's no longer a travel blog, but its focus is on expatriate (expat) life, particularly with regards to China.

About that: Yes, I'm back in China, in Shenzhen. In July, in and around France, I visited Brittany, Belgium, Luxembourg, Strasbourg, and finally, Marseille with my dear mother. After her return home, I used the time in Marseille to determine the next step in my career, intending to do extended volunteer oriented work, where I could preferably apply engineering skills. That last condition narrows down the list *a lot*. However, towards the beginning of travels, I had made some inroads with a particularly appropriate socially oriented technology company. And so I remain in the profit-seeking world.

In looking over the blog history for references to Shenzhen, I realized I didn't write it up much. (By the way, kudos to the post-Olympics government for letting me proof my own blog, unlike before!) This was because I spent less than two days here. It's for the better anyways, as now I have the opportunity to talk a lot more about it. Shenzhen is not a travelling destination, it's a bit of a business hub, but with a very very low concentration of expats compared to, say, it's big brother Hong Kong to the south. Shenzhen is a wealthy place. To look out over the city is to walk through an excessively caffeinated architectural firm's display room. convention centers, government centers, major hotels, together look like a futuristic city from a space opera. The funny thing is, getting in at ground level, if you look hard enough, you can still find typical Chinese style hutongs sprinkled about. I should know, I live in one, and it's quite interesting (not to mention convenient - almost anything I want from rice cookers to barber shops at rock bottom prices). By contrast, the designer highrise apartment complexes that make up much of the residential space of downtown Shenzhen have a much lower local density of retail businesses, and even then only in the marble palaces that comprise your average Chinese shopping mall. It occurred to me one day as I was chowing away on semi-identifiable food in the hutong, that you can't eat marble. Anyways, before you think I'm slumming it Eastern-style all the time, I'm only there when I want a cultural dip. As I write, I'm in a starbucks.

Alas, life is not all bai cai and chicken feet, nor is it ventis and raspberry scones. Guangdong, the province Shenzhen is located in, particularly specialized in electronics manufacturing. With the help of local partners, I source and coordinate manufacturing for a consumer lighting product. The work scratches my itch for development oriented work, as the target customer is a low income consumer without reliable electrical access : e.g. much of India, rural China.

The earlier Chinese language study is starting to pay off - I can get through most of a day's work in the engineering areas without calling our bilingual OEM, who's often busy. You can teach each other technical words on the spot. Maybe one day I'll tell local engineers that the English word for 'resistor' is actually "lollipop". Can't wait to have them source 10,000 lollipops. Well, I like the sound of their term "dian zou" better. I keep up the studies, but only at 4 hours a week instead of 20+ like in Beijing. Character assimilation is slow, especially with such crutches as the fact that all non-elderly Chinese read my pinyin with no problem. Good computer input method editors make it far too easy to look like I know all kinds of characters. Here goes one: 中秋节快乐 means, "happy mid-autumn festival", an important holiday taking place this Sunday, which also gives everyone a day off on Monday. (People work they're behinds off around here, they deserve this holiday and more).

Another aspect of the work, which I probably more adopted than was assigned, is interfacing with venture capitalists. Socially oriented entrepreneurship is all the rage these days. And Asia has no shortage of heaping sums of money flowing around, as evidenced by the aforementioned monuments to modernisation of Gehry pedigree. Especially with close proximity to Hong Kong, networking with potential investors is exciting. And, to folks from the Sili Valley, don't worry, Sand Hill Road is well in our sights too.

To whet your appetites for the next post (god only knows when that will be), I'll write a heavily redacted description of the social aspects of expat life. (hey, an audience of wide scope reads this, you don't think everyone wants the sordid details, do you?)

One last note: When it comes to talking about business, I try to maintain some discretion - this is a startup, and like many startups with viable business plans, we have competitors. To the extent that you may glean details about our operations from my writings, do please be discrete as well. I've come to learn, mostly for the better, it's a very connected world after all. Sounds like the theme song for an up-revved Disneyland boat ride.

Reminder: comments are anonymous

End in sight

Since my last post, I finished up my time in Thailand in the island of Phuket. I got better at surfing, (finally managing to catch the open face of waves!), and learned a new sport called paddle upright surfing.
The wind during my time there wasn’t sufficient for picking up kite-surfing, instead I was very happy to have progressed to the extent that I did with conventional surfing. Thailand was fun, but I don’t know if it deserves the nostalgic sense of ecstasy people seem to go into when they talk about their experiences there. Maybe I’m not young enough to enjoy it as a complete party animal, and not old enough to enjoy it for the idyllic sense of relaxation available in so many parts of the country. The Indonesian island Bali has both of these in a smaller area, so if you ever consider an exotic getaway, give this one due consideration as well.

Now I’m in France, the last stop on my itinerary. The first week I stayed in an apartment in Montmartre. I was gratified to be able to “cook” and store my own food in the apartment since, with the dollar-euro conversion being what it is these days, eating out daily was becoming an expensive prospect. I’m glad to be joined now by one close family member, and we’re visiting Paris, northeastern France, Belgium, Luxembourg, and northwestern France around Strasbourg together.

After getting to practice yapping on so many itinerant French in recent travels, communicating in the language has become easy here. Today I found myself missing the adventure in China of communicating over the course of daily activities, trying to form sentences in poorly-toned Chinese, like in the grocery store: Wo yao na ge dong xi, yong chi chi fan. (lit. I need that thing, used for eating food) spoken while I make a pinching motion. And so I get led to chopsticks, and I learn, kuai zi. And then to make it easier to eat rice, Yao ying guo de kuai zi (I need ‘English chopsticks’) and now I have a fork! As far as languages go, Chinese is definitely my next focus, especially for business. Although I think I’ll be learning characters for the rest of my life . . .

With the end of travels in sight, I find myself spending most of my time moving forward with the next steps of my life and career. Soon, this blog (being a travel blog after all) will by all rights come to an end. Going forward though, I will treat it as a medium to update folks, wherever I am, (even home!), in order to describe new experiences and my reflections. If you don’t already get “push” notifications by email or otherwise of updates to the blog, email me and I’ll add you to the update list. Should you choose to tune out completely (and who could blame, given the frequency of updates!), it’s been very fulfilling to post my experiences and thoughts. Perhaps you’ve been enticed to wonder about the world some more, or just to hit the beach. Either would justify my purpose in posting. The travels have been meaningful to me on approximately twenty thousand different levels, and I hope some of that has rubbed off. If via this medium you’ve been accompanying me, I thank you.

Thailand

One goal I had with coming to Thailand was to see what all the fuss was about with
people who've come here reporting that it shouldn't be missed. So I'm here, finally
not-missing it, and . . . well it's a very pretty place. White sandy beaches are mildly
developed, providing a happy balance between seclusion and access to services and
activities. Addressing the fuss, I'm afraid I can provide no nutshell response on whether Thailand should or shouldn't be visited except through the anecdotes that follow. I will preface that Thailand's
seemingly magical effect on most visitors seems to have only mildly affected me. Like I told at least one person before I left, I'm a very bad tourist, so I can only enjoy
pure uninterrupted recreation and relaxation for so long, an inconvenient character flaw
in a place like this.

First, I completed my 18-meter depth dive certification in the waters off Ko Tao, which was so much fun! The water was as clear as any postcard picture you've seen of diving in a tropical resort region. The instructor, comfortable with my classmate's and my level of relaxation, took us into some narrow caves, making for a real lesson in buoyancy control

I've spent the past week and a half on Ko Pha-Ngan island off Thailand's east coast. My bungalow is very inexpensive, so I've spent a lot of time using it as a base to explore different parts of the island, finding beaches each with their own traveler culture. And that's the funny thing about much of Thailand that I've seen. The culture of common tourist locations is more driven by travelers than by locals. To hazard a guess, I imagine that in busy times the island's transient foreign population swells to at least match the local population in size. So touring here is like touring the populations of the developed countries, if vastly overrepresented by the British.

Ko Pha-Ngan's culture and economy is centered on the Full Moon event. Some would call this event a festival, others would call it a party, and still others would call it a 10,000 person beach rave complete with trance techno, florescent paint, drinks with dangerously unidentifiable ingredients, and more unabashed hedonists than you can shake
a glowstick at (and who could say if I wasn't one of them?). I could describe it as a one-night Burning Man minus the sense of responsibility to selves and environment. And the average age is about ten years younger than Burning Man's (the British pre-university gap year hordes strike again). If you don't know what Burning Man is, you'll have to do a few minutes of web searching to understand this as a reference point for the Full Moon Party. And if you're not familiar with what Gap Year is, well I think I'll touch on
it next post, or you can search on your own.

What follows is a moderately stream of conscious listing of things I've been up to around here. If you're looking for a post that is well tied together, I'm afraid you'll have to wait until I've exited the Thailand mindset. At least I didn't write in pidgin.

-I recently finished reading The Beach by Alex Garland, a book about backpackers finding a secret lagoon community in a nearby island to Ko Pha-Ngan. It follows the popular trouble-in-paradise plot line, except like Lord of the Flies, it's a real downer of a novel, so it's put me in a sour mood.

-I took a Thai cooking class, making coconut soup with chicken, Pad Thai,
green curry chicken, and for dessert, coconut-milk fried bananas. I served the
food to some Thai I live near, and they didn't retch, so I felt good.

-Unfortunately for a still growing tourism industry, the islands are floating liabilities
when it comes to the likelihood of many kinds of injuries. Roads are in deplorable condition, compounded by unfenced ditches by the roadsides, frequent rains, and drunken tourists on two wheels. On the flip side, wound dressing is big business so it’s justifiably pervasively advertised. Sometimes more frequently than I can believe, I see travelers with glass cuts from walking on the beach (even wearing sandals), motorcycle accidents, and rock cuts from vaulting between cliffs (under the influence of some narcotic). Also, in the local hot, moist climate, the threat of infection is always looming. For all this, unlike in India, I'm avoiding motorcycles like the plague here, which by no means absolves me from the odd cut or scrape. I've gone into my med kit at least twice as frequently as in India, though thankfully through much more mundane causes than described above.

-I'm trying to manually remove a virus from my laptop again. I first got rid of it while
I was in China, but it looks like it's been hibernating on my memory cards in the meantime. Here's hoping it's not on my phone's memory itself. Not a very good use of time in the islands, but I'm getting some work done as well on the computer so I need it clean. Otherwise my computer gets too hot, and risks getting damaged.

Now I'm itching to see a different part of Thailand. I'm planning my escape by air to the island of Phuket for more surf lessons, and then back to Bangkok with plenty of margin of time to fly for France.

China recap - and don't forget the subsequent recent post!

As I was arriving in Hong Kong they were only just running news
stories of protests by parents of students killed in the Sichuan
earthquake. Apparently many of the schools that fell were the only
structures in their respective areas to suffer such catastrophic
damage. Since schools are the kinds of things that get built en masse
via government contract, it immediately pointed to the potential for
corruption in the construction planning process.
It bothered me in the wake of the earthquake that the news coverage
focused only on the heroic efforts of rescuers, and not on critical
questions such as why the building codes weren't up to the task of
withstanding a high magnitude earthquake such as many important
structures in San Francisco are designed to handle. A semi-analogous
US disaster in recent memory was Hurricane Katrina. There was much
more anger as to why the levees didn't hold water through the storm
than similar coverage for the China quake. To get an idea of how the
Chinese media responded to the disaster, consider this: Imagine if for
one night s

hortly after Hurricane Katrina, a PBS-on-steroids goverment
television network wiped away all other broadcasted programming in
favor of airing the same telethon benefit event identically on all
channels, where the theme of the event was an emphatically displayed
and repeatedly exclaimed, 'I am American!', presented amid
sensational images of the disaster and rescue attempts. This the
evening of the day that every car driver in every US city was required
to simultaneously stop completely while maintaining a constant honk on
their horn for three minutes straight in memory of the disaster. To me
this sounds fanciful, or just plain strange, but it's what took place
in China after the earthquake.
Turns out, as Western papers reported, local Chinese media
establishments were being instructed by the government's media arm not
to air coverage critical of why buildings weren't constructed to
withstand earthquakes. Instead, only themes promoting unity got
through.

In Thailand

Hong Kong from the Peak tram
At two am this morning I arrived in Thailand after about a week in
Hong Kong and Shenzhen. A friend from school put me up and helped me
sample expat life in the Asian business hub. Most expats I met must
have been spending every other week in a different East or Southeast
Asian city on work.
One of HK's first tourist stops is a mountain sitting on top of the
city's downtown called the Peak: take San Francisco's Telegraph Hill,
make it three times as tall and wide, and relocate it to the middle of
downtown at Powell and Market streets, and you get the idea of how
closely HK's developed areas have had to squeeze against and around
it's sharp geographic features. Walking around the Peak I could get
the lay of the land. I think Hong Kong's most recognizable features
are its ubiquitous residential towers which for their narrow girth
look unnaturally tall.
I arrived in Thailand early this morning. I'm on a bus now making my
way to one of Thailand's islands. I'm gratified to have made good on
a recent friend's advice to 'get out of Bangkok as soon as possible'.
For a while it seemed like I was going to be stuck in an urban
backpacker district that looks like the first stop in Southeast Asia
for every British gap year student looking for quick and dirty
partying on arrival. For the next week I'm taking a diving course in
Ko Tao, finishing it in plenty of time to reach the storied full moon
festival in Ko Pha Ngan. Everyone I've ever met while traveling has
always had only glowing things to say about Thailand, so I decided to
invest all of my three weeks before France in this country,
particularly around its islands. In the interest of moving around
like a true backpacker, I've left all of my business and metropolitan
clothing behind in a hotel's left luggage area. Everything except . .
. my laptop. One must have principles after all.

Bliss in Beijing

Note: Just got lucky with this shot! At the cafe at the bottom of the Yuan Guang 100 apartments in ChaoYang district.
I am on a train in the Beijing railway station, at the beginning of a
twenty three hour journey from the capital to Shenzhen, Hong Kong's
manufacturing hub. It's my last stop before reaching HK. The train,
by the way, is very plush, considering I booked the lowest class.
Compared to Indian trains' jail-cell sleeper class, I feel like I'm at
the Hilton for how clean and comfortable it is . . . Maybe I'm getting
soft these days.
I'm sad to be leaving Beijing. Like anyone I get addicted to routine
all too easily: get up, eat cereal, hit the starbucks on the way to
the four hour morning class, one hour lunch of gai-fan (deliciously
cheap meat- and vegetable-covered steamed rice) , then one hour of
private tutoring before either returning home to take a much-needed
nap or else linguistically force-feed myself by bargaining the
afternoon away in a knock-off goods market. (jia-de meaning 'fake' is
important vocabulary to know in these situations, although at the end
of the day neither vendor nor customer have any illusion about the
authenticity of the goods. Authenticity matters little here - if
knock-off goods do the job, then they're goods, regardless of what
brand has been slapped on them). Speaking of routine, seeing the same
students and teachers every day for a month definitely caused me to
form attachments, so leaving some of those behind made me feel kind of
down.
Beijing is a great city. It has so much energy running up to the
Olympics. There's a sense of anxiousness about the event and wanting
to present Beijing's image on the right foot that permeates
everywhere. I feel fortunate to have been here during precisely this
time.
On the other hand, I can anticipate sensing the opposite feeling in
people when the Games are through, something like, 'the party's over,
now what do we do?'. Also, between the Games and the sensationally
televised government's response to the quake, locals will be so hiked
up on national pride by August 8th that I'm afraid they'll have
withdrawal symptoms come September!