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.

Train, Shenzhen to Beijing

I'm on a train to Beijing. Their long national day holiday has just begun. Almost all Chinese are on vacation. Like I mentioned in a much earlier post, it's a twenty four hour journey. I enjoy that aspect because it lets me unplug for a little while. And by 'unplug' I mean 'write mobile photo-enabled blog posts'. So as you can see, these trains are reasonably comfortable. The mattresses are soft. There's a restaurant car, but it's considered relatively expensive, so a minority of passengers go there to eat, bringing their own food instead. One photo from the restaurant car shows the ubiquitous green tea containers. I've found these are popular everywhere, and essentially indispensable among folks in the factories.
By the way, I decided I like this form of communication, so if you currently get email notifications of updates, I'll end them soon so email boxes don't get cluttered. If you don't mind a cluttered inbox, let me know and I'll keep you on.

Dong Guan

This is a bird's eye view of a landscape in Dong Guan just north of Shenzhen. Dong Guan is developing quickly, rapidly resembling it's SEZ neighbor to the south. I'm also experimenting with this kind of on the fly post as a different medium for communicating than the standard blog post.
To recap the last post on milk, I've talked to some more locals, and it seems Chinese around here are reasonably hip to the propensity for corporate greed, but place less blame on government culpability in the problem than Western newspapers. One person understood my tack in questioning, and in turn was convincing me that people have a lot of freedom of speech in general even on political topics, certainly much more than in the past. Looking from their eyes, if the large American milk company Lucerne started giving people food poisoning, I would much sooner blame the company than draw the conclusion that the multi party system had to be overhauled, essentially the analog of some Western newspapers' arguments on the recent scandal. It's easy for me to realize, however, that such a scandal in the US would become easy fodder for political mud slinging in an election based on multiple parties, and would probably result in some positive action to improve food regulation. Personally, I think it would be nice if we had more than two parties to choose between every election cycle. Maybe some problems result from a strictly two party system that, just as with the Chinese, aren't so obvious to us either. Like them, I don't think we'll soon see commentary in our popular press on the topic. I don't know why.

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