So some protesters go to another country, participate in an illegal protest, get arrested and ... the whole world freaks out? What did people expect? And why is it such an international incident? What happens to people who go to, say, the USA, participate in an illegal protest and get caught? Why does the world not react with shocked outrage when the USA, or Great Britain, or Canada, or Germany, or France or any other country in the world arrests and ejects lawbreakers?
Joan has a blog because I forced her to start one at gunpoint (or so she'll claim if asked). Pop on over and have a look. You'll have to have a font that displays Chinese to read the stuff that Joan didn't write herself, I'm afraid to report.
Out of morbid curiosity, I decided one day to write a little computer program that calculated the humidex according to this formula here. (The formula is a pain in the ass to do by hand, you see.) This results in me having waaaaaaaay too much information about just how unpleasant the weather in Wuhan is on any given day.
According to the weather report I have, the current temperature is 35°C and the dew point is 28°C. So, plugging this into my little utility:
$ humidex 35 28
50.90470549019746
"I hear hurricanes a-blowin'.So, last evening the sky suddenly—very suddenly—went black. My well-lit office suddenly plunged into darkness. I turned my head to look out the window and leaped into action, rushing to my bedroom, going out onto the balcony and pulling in the clothes that were hanging there....
I know the end is comin' soon.
I fear rivers overflowin'.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin."
I said I would announce the family's newest blogger and I'm a man of my word. Without further ado (or adon't, for that matter), here is...
My mother's blog.
Yeah, I know. Not the announcement that was expected after the last blog entry, but Joan still hasn't come around to the idea of blogging yet. Now that my mother has one, though, she's going to make one of her own.
It's been a long time since I've posted here. I have a good excuse, however: I'm a lazy bastard.
Now in my defence, since the last time I posted I did my exams (a brain-melting activity), calculated marks (an exercise in creative justifications) and then started working on my project with Jeff full time. These all interfered with my mental energy in writing blog entries. Too, I'm back to my old trouble: the things I write about are, to me, after six years in this country, everyday and commonplace. It's hard for me to believe that any of this could be even slightly interesting. Still, my mother has not-so-subtly hinted...
Joan, my little mother-to-be, is progressing well in pregnancy. Everything is going according to The List I was given (a list from an experienced father of what to expect as the mother goes through the assorted physical, mental and emotional changes of pregnancy). I'm not going into details, but just rest assured that it's all according to The List.
One problem Joan faces (and, therefore, so do I) is that she has nothing that takes up her time. She's never learnt how to handle free time. In her whole life she's never had any. She's been invariably studying or working (or, more often, both). This interacts very badly with so-called "morning sickness". (Why is it called this? Because calling it "twenty-four-by-seven nausea" is bad salesmanship....) A typical day after she stopped working basically consisted of Joan sitting around the home, sleeping, disturbing me at my work and complaining about an upset stomach.
We found a cure for this, however, on Sunday. An old friend from my previous school invited us out to where he lives over the summer. (Basically a palatial house rented by a foreign engineer in the middle of one of Wuhan's largest parks.) Joan likes Robert (the friend in question), likes Xin Xia (Robert's girlfriend) and was really looking forward to the visit. The visit was amiable, fun and wound up, as most visits here do, in a restaurant for supper, together with our hostess (the Australian wife of the Dutch engineer who rents the palace). Joan ate, drank, chatted and generally had a good time -- and to both our surprise she didn't get sick. She had an appetite, and then didn't chuck it back up afterwards.
This sealed it for me. Joan's going to have to find a hobby or something to do during the day so she's not dwelling on her morning sickness. When she's occupied she is happy, perky, cheerful and not at all sick. When she's left to her own devices her life is miserable. I don't like seeing her miserable.
One suggestion (thanks, Mom!) that I've received is for Joan to start a blog of her own. I'm trying now to gently coax her to that idea, so hopefully it happens. If it does, I'll announce my family's newest blogger with great fanfare right here.
But Mom? Turnabout is fair play. I have no idea what's going on in your life. Maybe it's time for you and Andy to start a small blog?...
Not much to say here. Just click on the photo to the right and look at my child through the glorious wonders of ... black and white ... something.
...not all you'd care to eat. This line comes from a Far Side comic from many years ago. I was reminded of it yesterday for some reason.
Robert, a colleague from my previous school (some of you may remember him from the wedding) finally joined the 21st century and bought a computer. He consulted with me to select the computer and then Joan acted to bargain for him. This gave him a pretty decent laptop for a good price.
To reward us for our efforts, Robert, together with his girlfriend Xin Xia, took Joan and I out for dinner at "Kaiwei Beer House" -- a sort of upscale hotpot/buffet restaurant of the all-you-can-eat variety. There everybody pigged out (even Joan: she's entering her "permanently hungry" phase of pregnancy it seems) and we sat for close to two and a half hours talking, eating and generally enjoying ourselves. Finally we asked for the bill.
Now there were some food items left on the table. The waitress apologetically told us that if there was food left over we'd have to pay a surcharge. This led to some initial consternation, but this was rapidly followed with shrugged shoulders and us chowing down further. Then Joan decided she wanted more of this item. Xin Xia wanted more of this other item. Then the desserts were spotted and grabbed. Then salads were proposed and consumed. (Yes. In that order. Don't ask me to explain. My brain hurts.) A half-hour later we finally finished. Again. This time with an empty table, so no surcharge.
So let me get this straight: if we leave some food behind (and it wasn't a lot!) we have to pay extra but if we eat that food, plus a whole lot more, and we occupy a table for an extra half-hour, the price isn't raised?
I love this place!
Free cookies (nice salty ones with chives in them -- I'm in China, remember!) to anybody who can figure out where the title comes from.
So summer is officially approaching. Technically I'm still in spring here, but I find it difficult to refer to 33°C@80%+ as "spring". Still, this is approaching the end of my sixth year in China, so I'm getting used to the heat. I'm not even using the air conditioner yet. I've partially adapted, it seems.
Maybe the massive weight loss has something to do with it?
Anyway, with summer comes all sorts of other fun things besides heat and humidity. As usual these things come in two forms: the good and the bad. Maybe that should be "the good, the bad and the ugly". Only I'm in China. Let's modify this to "the good, the bad and the positively weird".
Let's look first at the good:
First on the weird list is the sheets I sleep on. If you click on the image to the right you'll notice something odd on the side of the bed farthest from the camera. It looks like the bed is covered with little pieces of wood, right? Well, it's not wood. It's bamboo. And it's hundreds of little pieces (slightly smaller in area than a Mah-jong tile) threaded together with fishing line and edged with stretchy rubber stuff. It keeps you cool in the heat. It sounds ridiculous and uncomfortable, but it is neither. It really works and it is actually quite comfortable. (The more hirsute among us have to wear light underclothes to bed, however, to avoid some truly painful moments.)One of the wonderful things I've found here in China is a set of eye drops. They are made by the Rohto (Mentholatum) company in Japan and the particular version I've got seems to be unavailable outside of Asia. (Other Rohto/Mentholatum eye drops are available in the USA, but none, for some reason, are available in Canada. This is too bad.)
I encountered these eye drops first about two years ago. My eyes got something caught in them that was very painful while I was walking down the street with Joan one day. We happened to be near a pharmacy, so we went inside and asked for eye drops. Joan looked over the available set and latched onto these ones. Right there in the shop we opened the package, undid the top and Joan dropped them in my eyes. As the bottle was moving to the first eye, I was thinking to myself, "hang on, this smells familiar – what is it?" Just as the drops hit my eye it struck me what that familiar scent was.
It was menthol. (Had I known that it was a product of the Mentholatum division of Rohto, of course, this wouldn't have been a surprise. Here, however, there is no such division. It was just the Rohto brand.)
Ten seconds of intense burning later something miraculous happened. The burning vanished. So did the pain of whatever it was that got in my eye and made it feel like a (very small) knife was stuck in it. So did all visible blood vessels when I checked the eye in a mirror the shop had. Indeed the eye that didn't get the drops looked positively unhealthy by comparison. Too, the eye in question not only felt better, it felt... cool, like someone had built a tiny air conditioner in it.
I quickly put the drops in the other eye and endured the ten seconds of burning and had the same magic feeling (and lack of redness) occur there as well. I've been using these drops ever since.
I've always felt some affinity for Cassandra of Greek fame. (For those not up on the classics, she was given the gift of prescience by Apollo, who was smitten with her, spurned Apollo's advances and was then cursed to have her accurate predictions of the future never believed.) I have a variant of her curse, you see. I see something. I have a very good idea of where it's going to go. I tell people. I'm not believed. It comes true.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.
I had this problem in my places of work, for example: a case in point being the company Entrust. The code name for one version of the software that was being pushed was "Project Banff". It was late and by all estimates was going to be slipping even further behind. Management came up with a "brilliant scheme" to provide "incentive" for getting it out on time.
"On time" for them was, if memory serves, the end of August of that year. Realistic estimates for completion put the real delivery date around October. This was unacceptable, so one of the VPs—the development VP—came up with this brilliant incentive scam scheme: if the product is shipped by August, the company would take all the developers and all the testers out for an all-expenses-paid trip to Banff for a week (or maybe two? -- memory fails from so long ago).
Now I was in an unusual (or, as it turns out, not so unusual) position in Entrust. I was a lowly software developer. Further, I had absolutely zero ambitions for a management role. Yet I think I may have been the only person in the whole company who'd actually taken, you know, honest-to-goodness management courses. Further, I was one of five people I knew—none of us managers (sorry, Jeff – you had no budget, so you were a supervisor, not a manager)—who actually read... well, anything, really, but especially books and articles on management and motivation. And what I knew from my training and my reading (as did anybody else in the vanishingly small group of us who knew anything on the subject) was that performance bonuses tied to a timetable failed. Always. 100% of the time.
You see, the management thinking behind such bogus schemes is that workers are malingering and grossly overestimating the time required to do tasks. If they are given an incentive, they'll stop goldbricking, put their noses to the grindstone blah blah blah blah blah blah. But this is, not to put too fine a point on it, total bullshit. At least in high tech it tends to be total bullshit. (It may be in other fields too, but I'm not in a position to knowledgeably discuss such.) In reality, in high tech the workers tend to be strongly self-motivated and, if anything, are too optimistic in their estimates. A fairly popular agile development process (or unprocess) has, in fact, as one of its techniques a way of calculating just how overly optimistic developers tend to be in their estimates and using these calculations to get a better approximation of the real amount of time required. So when you have an estimate for delivery in October, one thing is 99% certain: the absolute earliest that it will be delivered is in October. Further, any attempt to squeeze it out earlier without reducing the features to be delivered will have the opposite of the intended goal. You will delay final delivery.
I pointed this out to the VP in question. (Stupid me: I believed him when he said he was interested in employee feedback!) I further made the prediction that the actual delivery date, if this incentive plan wasn't unhooked from delivery date, wouldn't be August nor even October. I said that the delivery date would be more like March of next year. I was, of course, not believed. Because the VP in question, based on his almost months of experience in upper management, believed firmly that he could mutate reality just by wishing it so.
Fast forward to August. The release is a disaster. Only a small number of groups had actually delivered their stuff by the due date (the toolkit group I was part of being one of them – Jeff's influence here, and true to the "no good deed goes unpunished" adage he was viewed with suspicion for this). The product is nowhere near ready. The delivery slips past August. Past September. Past October. Slips all the way to April of next year (proving my point that developers are overly optimistic, seeing as I had predicted March). Because exactly what I predicted happened: an initial push of hard work started. Then people noticed that, despite putting in 12-hour days (testers especially), no real extra progress was being made. In under two months the whole company realised that the Banff incentive wasn't going to happen. In that time the developers and, more so, the testers had burned themselves out completely. Despair set in, followed by ennui. Developers didn't care any more, so the product slipped further and further and further behind. When it was finally shipped in April, this was with features scaled down on top of everything else.
So how was my foresight rewarded? With a rueful "I guess you were right", right? Wrong. My foresight was rewarded with an accusation that I had personally seen to the project's utter, complete failure. I was specifically named by the VP as one of the reasons for the failure. I guess my negative vibes (which didn't actually impact the productivity of the team I actually worked with, oddly enough, seeing as that team was one of the very, very few who delivered everything on time for the Banff trip...) were transmitted to the company as a whole—even people I had never met—and caused the project to die. Or something.
So why am I regaling the world with this tale now seven (or is it eight?) years later? Because this is only an example of what hits me every damned day of my life, practically. Joan giving me another perfect example of this.
On Friday Joan's laptop (my old Sony) starts acting up. The "L" key doesn't work at all and the "Backspace" key is flaky. I tell her, very candidly, that the computer needs to be repaired; that we should take it in on the weekend. Joan, of course, doesn't believe the only person in the household who knows anything about computers. Besides, she wasn't going to need the computer for anything in the near future anyway.
Well, the distant future of three days later, she's got a big task to do that needs the computer. (This being China she's given the big task with under 24 hours of notice before it's due, of course.) And not only is the "L" key not working now, nor is the Backspace working at all. Nor the delete. Nor the right arrow. Nor the shift key. Nor ... You get the picture. Too bad nobody warned her at all about having to get it fixed, eh?
This is my life, almost every day. See why I feel for Cassandra so much?
It seems that the UK wants to follow the American path to Nazism. This war on an emotion is turning into a great tool for the authoritarian instinct. When will Canada follow suit? When will Canada join the USA in suspending civil rights and join the UK as one of the most surveilled countries in the world? I suspect it will be sooner than anybody thinks, cynic that I am, but this is one of those rare cases where I'd be really super-happy to be wrong.
I think it's instructive, for those in Canada who think "it can't happen here", to compare a couple of things. Specifically I want to compare police presence in Canada (and, quickly, the USA) to police presence in China. Of the two countries, China is the one referred to as a police state (and despite the tone of this message, I actually agree with that designation). Yet here's the funny thing: while living in Canada -- Ottawa, to be specific -- I had more official interaction with police officers (as opposed to social interaction or just happening to see them in passing) in an average month than I've had in China in nearly six years.
Yet China is a police state, but Canada is not. How sure are you of this? Think carefully before answering, because the price of a wrong answer is the freedom that is supposedly the cornerstone of our society.
Let me kick it up a notch. A long time ago I went to Houston for a job interview. (I was even offered a job, but idiot border regulations torpedoed my chances there. "Free Trade" has as much relation to freedom of trade as the "Democratic Korean People's Republic" has to democracy or the people.) The experience was an eye-opener in many ways. In one concentrated dose I got some of my stereotypes of Texas obliterated (Houston is an astonishingly diverse and cosmopolitan city!) and horrifyingly confirmed (the gun culture is at the level of insanity -- one of the people who interviewed me brought out a handgun to show off after I admired a "sculpture" that turned out to be a hard disk after being shot several times). I also had something nasty confirmed about the "Land of the Free". In my grand total of ... say 36 hours ... in Houston, I had more interaction with police officers or other gun-wielding officials of the state than I would get in a typical month in Ottawa or in six years of living in a police state!
And this was years before 9/11.
So if you really don't think a police state is possible in Canada (or Britain or the USA or wherever), keep this in mind: you're already half-way there. The USA has essentially suspended habeas corpus -- it's just going about it the smart "salami tactics" way. It also has a long history of taking laws intended for one purpose and applying them generally (War on Plant Products, anyone?) as time passes. The UK has more official surveillance cameras, both in terms of population and in terms of raw numbers (if memory serves), than any other nation. (The USA has fewer official cameras, of course, but for that can subpoena any camera logs they like should they feel they need it, so the effect is largely similar.)
And Canada? Well, I'm out of touch with Canada right now. I've been away for an absurd length of time and internal Canadian news doesn't often reach the international press. Given Canada's history, however, it's only a matter of time before we import Yet Another Bad Idea from the USA. The time span for that ranges from 5 to 20 years with the pattern being the dumber the idea the quicker we tend to take to it. So I really am afraid that Canada is following the USA's lead into Nazism.
Which leaves me in the awkward position of wondering if living in this police state isn't a better choice right now, especially given that I've got an expanding family to consider.
It sounds ridiculous, but I'm serious. I don't have the knack. People around me -- especially here in China -- can take naps. I can't.
If I plan for a one-hour nap and don't have something external (a person, an alarm clock, etc.) to wake me up, I'll wake up hours and hours later. There's no upper bound on this. I've taken a nap a 1PM and woken up at 3AM before. What's worse, though, is that when this happens, my sleep cycle is so thoroughly screwed I have insomnia for the next few days straight just as if I've been jet-lagged.
"So," you suggest, "why not use an alarm?" Well, I've tried that. If I use something (or someone) to wake me up after an hour, say, I wake up more tired and more muddle-headed than I was when I decided I needed the nap. The whole point of the nap is lost that way.
I'm really jealous of the people around me who can nap. It looks so ... restful.
So, yesterday was the Big Day, news-wise. By the time it all settled down, though, I was too drained to have the energy to write. So today is the day I try to settle down and organise my thoughts to transmit not only the news, but a taste of my life over the past year and a bit.
Of course all of this starts in March 18th, 2006. A lot of things -- basically the meaningful bits of my whole life -- started then. Of course Joan, being Chinese, and me, being a bit of a traditionalist at times, thought the whole point of marriage was to have children. For a variety of reasons, however, we didn't seriously start working on this until July of 2006. Well, OK. October.
Still, by the end of January we started to get a little suspicious. People around us who got married at about the time we did (or, in many cases, long after we did!) were in a family way, but our oven had no bun. February through March heightened all suspicion to the point that in April we decided enough was enough. It was time to bring in medical opinion. (And, of course, by "we" I mean "Joan". I would find it hard to consider anything less appealing to me than going to a doctor for this kind of thing. Even in Canada, where notions like "privacy" aren't just known but actively enforced I'd be antsy. Here in China? Where people discuss their most intimate personal details openly in public with a thousand others around? And where people are endlessly fascinated with even the most minute detail of foreigners' lives? "Antsy" isn't strong enough a word. Remind me to tell you of Joan's first experience with how foreigners are treated here in China sometime.)
A lot of dates are getting branded on my brain around this time of year. March 18th. April 30. May 14. May 19. April 25.
April 30 was our first trip to a hospital specialising in reproductive medicine. It was an abortive attempt (no pun intended) but it really heightened just how uncomfortable I was going to the hospital in China for problems like this. The doctor sat at a desk in an office and people just clustered around competing for her attention. When they got it, they blurted out their problems openly. And, of course, when Joan started talking, everybody was staring at me and listening intently. The result of it, however, was that the doctor suggested that another hospital would be better for this particular problem -- specifically the big one here: Tongji.
We decided to take that doctor's advice and arranged for a trip to Tongji hospital, finally getting there on May 14. There I had my panic attack as the number of people involved was truly incredible to behold. There was just no way in Hell I was going to have this potential problem discussed out in the open with literally hundreds of people in earshot. The visit was cancelled.
Well, almost cancelled.
Joan tried one last time to get actual information from the "Information Desk" and this time actually got it. There was a speciality clinic in a completely different part of the hospital than we had been sent to, you see. And when Joan went to check it out, she found it to be actually civilised. Private consultations, for example, with the top professor. Private. Closed door, even. I jumped at it like a shot.
(Well, actually I didn't. I still wasn't happy with the whole situation, but this I was willing to face at least.)
An hour later, after a strange man had fondled my genitalia and pronounced them structurally sound, I found myself in the lab building in a private room ... How can I put this delicately? Extracting seeds. Yeah. That's the way to word it. I found myself in a private room (or as private as the Chinese can imagine a private room to be -- the glass was frosted) extracting seeds. Into a small plastic cup. Surrounded by classic paintings featuring nudes (since actual pornography is technically illegal here). The cup was handed over to a technician and we waited for the results.
The results, after interpretation by the professor, were not good. Basically a low motile sperm count with a larger-than-average proportion of malformed cells. What we had suspected turned into a true nightmare. This was the low point of the week.
Slowly over the week we recovered from the shock and started investigating things which could be done. The news wasn't exactly encouraging, but neither was it hopeless. I wasn't sterile. I just had reduced fertility. I did a lot of research, as did Joan and we started to plan sort of a reverse of the Catholic "rhythm" method of birth control. Joan was a real trooper as we investigated and planned, proving once again that I had made a very good choice in marriage. (Her choice? We're still debating her taste in that....)
That Friday, however, I noticed a few things that had me curious. First, Joan was late with her period. Way late. As in, by that point, six days late. This is not the first time that's happened, though. In fact it was the third. The record was almost two weeks late, in fact. So missing the period wasn't a strong sign. There were, however, other things that weren't adding up for me. Small subtle changes in Joan that I hadn't seen before. Things that added up to me, on Friday, asking Joan what she thought and us agreeing that on that Sunday we'd go get a home pregnancy test to see what the scoop was.
I'll segue a bit here and describe a minor incident that happened Friday morning. I was shifting some clothing around from storage to use and stumbled across a small plastic bag with what looked like a small box of pills. That evening, before we started to talk about the possibility of Joan being pregnant, I asked Joan -- as a kind of afterthought while doing something else -- what they were, pulling them out and glancing over them quickly. Joan gave some vague thing about "women's stuff" and I dropped them back where they belonged. No alarm bells rang. Later, as we went to bed, I noticed that Joan had left that drawer slightly open, but again no alarms rang.
Fast forward to Saturday morning. That would be the 19th. A day before we agreed to go out and get a pregnancy kit. At 5:30AM I get woken up by a voice saying "Michael? Michael? Wake up." As I clawed my way toward consciousness, that same voice added "You're going to be a father." As I struggled to make sense of my suddenly upside-down world, I realised what had happened. That "box of pills"? Was a home pregnancy check. Joan was already suspicious a couple of days before I started to get suspicious and had picked up the kit. She wanted to test without me knowing in case it would raise false hopes. But the hopes weren't false. The kit showed "pregnant".
So consider the timing. On Monday I was told I was low fertility. That it would be a lot of work and effort (and possibly even require in vitro) to make a child. Quite possibly the lowest point in my life. Then on Saturday of the same week I'm told that I'm about to be a father. Quite possibly the highest point in my life, second only, maybe, to March 18, 2006. The timing of all of this is very disturbing.
Later calculation has us figuring that conception occurred on April 25th, incidentally. Which means that Joan was pregnant already before we visited even the first doctor, not to mention the one who fondled my genitals and pronounced me infertile.
Of course I'm still a cynical bastard, so, although I told a few people about this already, I didn't blog it until today because home pregnancy kits aren't 100% certain. But yesterday Joan and her mother went to that first hospital and had a proper lab check done and it's now official. Joan is pregnant and I'm going to be a father.
So the CBC has a story about the US government taking China to WTO arbitration over "piracy". (Please insert here the pro-forma rant about how piracy--the real thing, not copyright infringement--is a heinous crime in which people die whereas nobody has ever died from copied DVDs and CDs. I'm tired of typing it out again and again. Why don't you idiots at the RIAA and MPAA just call it "The Entertainment Holocaust" if you're so intent on grotesquely distorting words and concepts for rhetorical gain?)
Of particular interest in that article is this passage:
American companies contend they are losing billions of dollars in sales because of rampant copyright piracy.Which planet are these people living on? The Chinese, for the most part, can barely afford movies at the infringed copyright rates (ranging CDN$0.25-$1.50 depending on quality)! What on Earth makes these morons think that jacking up the price to $10+ is going to have any impact on their income?
Sunday was my family's day for 清明 (Qingming or "Grave-sweeping Festival"). It also happened to be Easter, something which completely escaped my attention this year until this Monday morning I had lots of people I know online wish me a Happy Easter. Knowing this, in retrospect it was probably good that I didn't mix the two in some way. There would be something disconcerting about mixing the Resurrection with visiting a graveyard that indicates, to me at any rate, that I've watched a few too many zombie movies.
I've ruminated about this in the past, but I think the Chinese attitude toward death is far healthier than what I see in the west. We're so afraid of death that we put it away in sterile, white rooms that smell of nasty chemicals. We fill bodies full of other chemicals so that we don't have to admit that the person isn't in the room with us any more. We like the illusion that the deceased are merely sleeping. It gets so extreme that even the slightest hint of death -- old age, we like to call it, although given our proclivity toward euphemism we change even those words around to "golden years" or "senior citizens" or the like -- and we lock up the poor people suffering from it in "retirement communities" and just have them shuffle around among strangers until they pass on. Those last two words, of course, being another euphemism for that subject we don't dare mention. They die.
Funerals in the west, as well as visits to the grave, are sombre affairs. Everybody wears thoughtful or sad faces and dresses as if they were themselves dead to commemorate the occasion. Tears are normal and expected. Laughter and gaiety are not. There are exceptions of course. The Irish throw a really good party to celebrate a life instead of a flood of tears to mourn a death. The most common, however, is to be super-serious and super-sombre.
The Chinese are not that way.
This is my third visit to the tomb of my father-in-law (plus assorted other family members). It's also my third chance to observe the Chinese treatment of death. By sheer good fortune I have, across those three visits, managed to see most stages of said treatment. The first time was just my then-fiancée, my future mother-in-law and some other assorted family members. That trip was like a family picnic. People brought food and drink and the family had a good time chatting and laughing and having conversations. (Some of those present didn't talk very much, but that's to be expected considering that they're basically just ashes.) This, from observing both my family and the families of those around us at the time, seems to be the normal case.
The second time I went there was, not too far from our last stop (for which c.f. below) a lady who had obviously just lost her husband. She was still in mourning and was shedding tears and crying loudly, chanting some kind of litany about how miserable her life had become since her husband was gone. She had two teen-aged children with her who were looking decidedly uncomfortable and embarrassed at her display, so I'm assuming this is not normal behaviour. Everybody else was carefully looking everywhere else except at her, so they too kind of tell me that's not normal. Too, the second time was a watershed event in the family. An old family feud was in the process of healing (partially triggered by my then-impending marriage, I think) and some family members who'd never visited the grave of my then-future father-in-law before were present. They too were sombre and spilled tears as they spoke to him. It was short, however, and life went on shortly after that.
This time the same people were there again, and there was no hint of tears. It was back to being a family picnic, only this time the family was whole -- the old rift seems to be healing fast. If my intuition of this resulting from Joan's marrying me is correct, I'm happy to have been a part of that.
Anyway, back to the visit. It was a nice, sunny day and all the sellers of paper goods were out in full force. For those who don't know, it is traditional to burn paper "money" and other paper goods as gifts for the dead. What you burn as paper, you see, turns into the real thing on the other side for the use of your loved one. Last year I bought my future father-in-law a car, an expensive watch and an electronic dictionary (so we could talk). This year I only got him a 麻将 (Majiang or Mah-jong) set. And, of course, he got lots of money. Interestingly, last year, when I suggested cutting out pictures of beautiful girls from magazines and burning those, I got an elbow in the ribs from Joan. She thought it was funny, but that if I did that her mother would kill me. This year you could buy paper dolls of beautiful women.... I really think I should have got a commission for the idea!
(Just how seriously do the Chinese take this paper thing? I honestly don't know. I suspect most of them know it's not real and treat it the way they do -- with some gonzo things like large paper houses, etc. -- for the same reason adults talk "seriously" about Santa Clause and the Easter Bunny. Yet sometimes the Chinese can be almost frighteningly superstitious. Don't give anybody a number that ends with 144, for example....)
The first stop on the tour is to Joan's grandparents. (Grandfather: 1904-1977. Grandmother: 1913-1989.) There we cleaned the grave, left an offering of sunflower seeds, peanuts and soda. We burned special funerary candles, "money" and tea leaves. Everybody present bowed three times to the grave. (There is an order to who bows when, but I haven't figured it out. The age of the participants is part of it, but there's other stuff involved too that I just can't fathom. It always resulted in me going last, however.) Once we finished with all that, the cute part happens. Any of the food that the grandparents didn't eat was assumed unwanted and we took it with us to visit the next grave.
The next grave, Joan's aunt (1945-1994), is a long way away up the hill. Unlike the first grave which is just a square box in a concrete wall, this is a proper gravestone. It's painted in red because she liked that colour a lot. Again food and sodas were offered. Money was burned, as was incense and those special candles. A ribbon was wrapped around the tombstone and flowers inserted. We bowed and, again, the food and drink were recycled.
A new "business" has started this year in the graveyard. Strangers will come up to people who are honouring their ancestors and will burn about 0.01RMB worth of paper "money", bow to the headstone and then claim that they did something for your ancestors so you should give them money. Funereal begging, in other words. It disgusts me a little. OK, a lot.
After that little unpleasant incident, we trundled off back down the hill and about half-way back to where the grandparents were to visit my father-in-law (1950-1992). Yes, we walked past his grave to get to the aunt's grave. I'll let you see if you can figure out the pattern. (I'll give you a hint: there's a reason why I'm putting those years in there.)
At that grave we did the same routine. Clean the grave, put out the food (he got a lot more than the others!), burn lots of money (plus the 麻将 set), left flowers, bowed and then recycled the food he didn't want to eat. It was while this was going on that I "lucked" into seeing the last piece of the Chinese funereal puzzle. I saw not one, but two funeral processions.
Funerals here aren't like Irish wakes. They are serious. There's none of this nonsense of wearing black and crying and carrying on, however. There is instead a processional march. The remains of the departed are in a box wrapped in lovely brocade. The first procession had people carrying big, ornate "bouquets" (for want of a better word) made out of what looked like coloured Mylar and ribbons. Each of these things had a single character in the middle which I am reliably informed (by Joan) means "mourning". The second procession didn't have this, however.
What both processions did have, however, was music. The music is slow, but not morbid. It's seemingly intended to make people think instead of dance or cry. The people had serious expressions one and all, but nobody in either procession was crying or making a scene. It was interesting to watch -- and watch it I did, although I had to be careful. I don't know what is and isn't permitted, so I can't just stare and take photos.
And while I'm writing this I'm struck with a thought: a lot of people live long periods of time in China. How many of them have even seen what I'm describing? There's so much that is unseen tucked away in the nooks and crannies of any culture, isn't there?
I never had any insight into what, precisely, was wrong with corporations and corporate management until I came to China. When you live in a country that gives the illusion of freedom and choice, it's all too easy to miss the more unpleasant cases within it.
One of the things that drives me most crazy in China is the so-called "leadership". These people aren't leaders. They're bureaucrats. Vicious, petty bureaucrats from the lowest levels on up to the Chairman of the Party. And, as such, they have all the leadership qualities of bureaucrats: none whatsoever.
A case in point is what's happening with my extracurricular activities. Smart people would see self-motivated employees doing extra work for the benefit of their employer and/or employer's customers and say "wow, that's great!" But that's not how corporate nor communist leadership thinks. They think instead, at a deep level, "if people are doing things without my oversight, that means they'll think I'm useless". So they meddle.
Way, way, way long ago, back when I worked at Pronexus, I saw this behaviour first-hand when Ian, the owner, walked into a skunkworks design session that Jeff Cooper and I were having with an eye toward updating the technology of Pronexus' product line so that it could thrive and expand in a rapidly-changing world. He demanded to see everything we were working on and then, basically, canned the project. (He later claimed he didn't tell us to stop, but I interpret "I'd rather see you working on things that will actually see the light of day" as a statement that he's never going to allow our project to see the light of day. I wasn't the only one who interpreted it that way either.)
This was my first taste of "leadership" screwing things up to their own detriment just so they could stay in control. I saw similar things happen at Entrust (Jeff and I, in fact, were just talking about one such incident two nights ago) all the time. New ideas are suppressed not because they're bad ideas, not because they won't make money or do good things but because any such new ideas are a threat to the position of the leader that allowed it to happen without oversight.
So imagine a country of 1.3 billion run exactly like that.
Today, after running my English Club and my Linux User's Group meetings for almost a month now, I was told that if I want to use a classroom over lunch hour I'd have to write a document explaining what I was using the classroom for and that I'd have to register my "lessons". Here I am, building something that will add value to the school's image and they decide that since it's not being done with proper oversight that I have to be told to do extra, unpaid work -- on top of the extra unpaid work I'm already doing voluntarily.
Guess who's not doing extra, unpaid work for the school anymore?
So, first things first -- a confession. I've modified the previous two blog entries out of embarrassment. The trees in question aren't plum. They're cherry. They don't look like any cherry tree I've ever seen and they do look like the millions of plum trees I've seen, but it turns out they're a special cherry from Japan given to the university as a gift some time ago. Mea culpa.
Now the surreal news.
One of my old students from 九江 (Jiujiang) asked me if I could help her with interpreting a phrase from a paper. The phrase was about ruling out the kitchen as the source of a fire and other speculation about where the fire could have started. This, to put it mildly, had me both curious and worried.
The phrase was out of context, so she sent me a PDF with the full context. It was a report from a fire department in New Zealand reporting on a fire that had gutted a home with two people upstairs studying. Two Chinese students. One of whom was reported hospitalised. The verdict of the investigation? Origin of fire: "suspicious". In short there was nothing where they identified the fire starting that could have started the fire.
The fire spread through the ground floor of the home rapidly, trapping the two girls, my student one of them, upstairs. They had to escape by jumping out a second-story window. All their belongings were destroyed and my student wound up in hospital for two months with a broken ankle, knee, spine and three ribs. The landlord of the place? Vanished. She was asking me, I think, to confirm that someone didn't try to kill her and her room-mate. This was not confirmation that I could give, having seen the part where it said "police investigation" on the document.
So now she's in China wondering how to proceed. I told her to get her government involved so that the police get cranky at the international interference. This way whoever set that fire will suffer greatly at the hands of police when he's caught and arrested. International incidents tend to make for a lot of paperwork, after all. I also suggested she immediately contact the insurance company listed in the fire department's paper and make a claim stat.
See? My students don't even have to be in China to get into weird, alarming difficulties.
In other news, my AIM address is also no longer in use. Not that anybody contacted me that way ever.
Other interesting contrasts.
Today the cherry trees in the pictures I put up last time got hit by wind. Flower petals flew around everywhere in a veritable blizzard. It looked truly spectacular -- another one of those moments of sublime beauty that keep me in this country. And along with it came another contrast.
The contrast this time was social, not visual. The students, upon seeing the petal storm, were electrified. My class was utterly and totally disrupted (and I didn't mind, believe me!). The students all ran to the windows, throwing them wide to see more clearly and to allow the petals to come into the classroom. Pandemonium reigned for a few moments as they took in the sight and, in many cases, broke out their mobile phones to snap pictures.
Not just the girls. The boys were just as ga-ga over flowers.
I think back to my school days and I can't find even a single memory of a boy who'd publicly go ga-ga over flowers. Here it's perfectly normal. Tough, seasoned warriors in ancient Chinese novels weep at the sight of gorgeous blooms. It's just the way life is here, and to me, the outsider, it's truly a wonder to behold.
Another busy week. I started a WUISS Linux User's Group (hopefully to expand into a Wuhan Linux User's Group) and the WUISS English Club.
At the former I pretty much organised it all myself and did the keynote speech ("What Is Linux and Why Would I Want to Use It?") since Linux is so rare in China. I had about 18 people attend with 14 staying through the whole meeting. One small problem developed when my laptop's CD drive refused to burn anything. (That's about the fourth laptop in a row, from three manufacturers, whose built-in CD-ROM screwed up. I hate laptops sometimes.) More people will probably show up at the next meeting in two weeks.
At the latter I was smarter. The goal here is to give the students their own English Corner -- one made for and by the students and run by the students. I'm acting in a strictly advisory capacity and as the teacher who gives them credibility when they're asking for funds, equipment, locations, etc. I'm doing as little work as possible there because I want the students to find out for themselves how hard it is to organise things. Yesterday was the first activity they ran and it went reasonably well. The only thing that really got screwed up was the advertising, something we'll be talking about next meeting.
Spring is finally springing here in Wuhan and I can finally answer a question that I'm frequently asked. "What is it that keeps you in China?" Nowadays the answer is more obvious in the form of Joan, but I was in China two years before I moved to the city Joan was in and four-and-a-half years before I married her. What kept me here all that time?
The answer is a single word: contrasts.
China can be a profoundly ugly country. Buildings look dilapidated less than two years after they're built. Everything is dirty and grimy. The air is so polluted I rarely see blue in the sky, and when I do it's a blue with an unhealthy brown tint. Yet intermixed with all this deep ugliness is equally profound beauty. I don't just mean my wife, either!
Consider for example the photo (taken by my lovely, talented wife) at the top left of this blog entry. This is an example of the profound beauty I'm talking about. It doesn't show, however, the contrasts I'm speaking of. For those you have to look to the photo to the right (taken by the significantly less lovely and less talented me). Here the cherry tree in full bloom (part of a long line of them along an alley you can see in the photo below) is stunningly beautiful. The photograph simply doesn't do it justice! Yet around it is a wall that's crumbling, a building that's falling apart and just general signs of decay and unpleasantness. It's the kind of contrast that makes me swoon (nearly) and keeps me interested in this place. Somehow the juxtaposition of ugliness next to beauty makes the beauty more mysterious and captures my imagination.
So I stay.
One year ago today the unfathomable occurred. A lovely, young, vivacious, otherwise-intelligent Chinese girl by the name of 王琼 (Joan Wang) consented to marry a cynical, cranky Canadian. Friends and relatives of said Canadian flew in from Canada unable to believe, without seeing it with their own eyes, that their Michael Richter was actually getting married.
One year ago today they saw it all. I really had no choice, in the end. Once I met Joan in 九江, it was pretty much inevitable that I would fall in love with her and seek to marry her. Joan, however, had a choice and, in an incredible event that warped both time and space in its significance, nonetheless chose me. Not a day has gone by without my wondering what I did to deserve such a perfect girl. My end conclusion was that I must have done something truly spectacular in a past life, because nothing in this life can explain what happened.
One year ago today this lovely girl and I both had to adjust. I had to adjust to a life spent, now, with someone else. I had to learn to give more and take less. I had to learn how to be a good husband and a decent person. I had to learn how to stop having money flow from my hands like water from a faucet. It was hard learning it all -- I still haven't accomplished it completely -- but worth every minute and every hard lesson. For her part Joan had less to learn. What she mostly had to learn -- or at least exercise -- was forgiveness as a cranky man set in his ways painfully adjusted to a newer, better life.
One year ago today 王琼 changed my life forever for the better.
One year ago today.
Well, it's been another busy week, but this time at least I'm used to getting up before 6AM to start my day.
On the home front I've been making very heavy use of my printer and the refill kits. I learned three things by using the refill kits:
The first week back is always fun (in the ironic sense of that last word). Lots of things have to come together all at once:
So, I'm getting a lot of good use out of my new HP printer (despite a few problems with the Linux driver that have yet to be fully worked out -- luckily I'm not printing photos!). Joan, when buying the printer, was already eyeing the price of ink nervously (the printer cost us 300RMB; one spare set of ink cartridges cost us 290) and got even more nervous when she noticed that I blew through the demo cartridge that came with the printer (3ml of black ink instead of 10ml, for example) with my first print job.
She was right to be nervous.
Printing at any kind of readable resolution sucks through ink at a prodigious rate. The printer manufacturers don't make their money from printers, you see. They make their money selling the ink cartridges. I have, since getting the printer, printed off five books on various things needed for my work (reference manuals in the main). Two books (of about a hundred pages each) is all I get per cartridge.
Luckily I live in China. In my neighbourhood you can hardly fling a brick without hitting at least three shops selling printer ink. And not just official cartridges, but, too, third-party cartridges (at half to a third of the price) and cartridge refill kits. These latter are the real life-savers.
Today I bought some ink refills. These are 30ml syringes (the black cartridges are 10ml, recall; colour cartridges are 8ml each colour) with the ink you need in the colours you need. Using them is simple: you peel back a sticker, insert the syringe, push the plunger and when the ink seeps a bit out of the hole you're using you're done. And they cost, literally, a tenth the price of the cartridge.
Going with the black cartridge (the ink I'll be using most often), that means that for one tenth the price of an official cartridge I get three times the ink. And refilling a cartridge is hardly difficult work! Fumbling with the packaging and tape of a proper cartridge means replacing a cartridge takes two to three minutes. Injecting the ink takes five. Hardly an onerous task when you consider that my print batches take hours.
Now sure, the ink quality isn't quite as good as the HP official inks. The black isn't quite so deep. The cyan/magenta/yellow isn't quite so vibrant. But it's still better than the official inks I used in my old Epson before it gave up its ghost and certainly more than good enough for the kind of printing I do (text).
So why would I want to be given the shaft by HP for its cartridges?
Well, I do blow my warranty away if they catch that I used an unofficial ink. On the other hand, if I refill my black ink cartridge three times, I've saved more than the price of a whole new printer....
Did I mention that today was Lantern Festival? That this means it's the last day of Spring Festival? And that this is the last day that fireworks are legally allowed to be sold or lit? That as a result I'm living in a damned close approximation of downtown Baghdad? You know why I haven't mentioned it?
Because there's no damned way you'd be able to hear me over the racket!
All in good fun, though.
So, last time I installed Windows on Joan's laptop (my old Sony), I made a mistake. I installed Windows.
OK. More seriously, I made the mistake of installing anti-virus software after connecting to the network. Long before protection was in place her system had viruses up and running which could not be cleaned out with any anti-virus application. Still, the system was usable and there's no other Windows systems on the network for her to infect, so we left things lying.
Lying, that is, until her system was slowed down so much under the assault of viruses and adware that just minimising a window would take longer than 30 seconds.
So today it was "back up all your data so I can reinstall all the software in the known universe" day. This time, however, I did the smart thing and installed Windows, installed an anti-virus package, then installed the network. If this doesn't work, I'm going to tell Joan that she's got no choice. It's time to switch to Linux.
So, on Monday I begin the daily grind again. It's about time. I really don't enjoy holidays like this very much, you see. Travel is basically impossible unless you want to travel out of country or by plane. (Every expat needs to experience travelling over Spring Festival once while they're here. But only once.) Most places that would be of interest to me are one of:
Received in the email today:
THE YAHOO LOTTERY INTERNATIONAL. INCWow! What a birthday present! One million dollars! I'm so there, man!
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All participant were selected through a sorting and filtering program designed by Dr Philip Emegwali from 50,000,000 (fifty million) e-mail addresses from the web because you have once visited one of Yahoo! sponsored sites. This is part of our international promotions program which is conducted monthly to promote the use of the internet with the world as a global village. This Lottery was promoted and sponsored by YAHOO! We hope with part of your prize, you will participate in our end of year high stakes for US$1.3 Billion international draw. YAHOO, collects all the E MAIL I D of the people that subscribes to yahoomail, msn, hotmail, aol, altavista, and others online, among the billions that subscribe to us only Fifty people will be merge for winnings. we only select fifty people every Month as our winners through electronic balloting System without the winner applying, we are congratulating you for having been one of the lucky people that won for this month..you are to contact your Claims Agent on or before your date of Claim, Winners shall be paid in accordance with his/her Settlement Centre.Yahoo Lottery Prize must be claimed no later than 15 days from date of Draw Notification after the Draw date in which Prize has won. Any prize not claimed within this period will be forfeited and retrieved .Please note that your lucky winning number falls within our booklet representative office in UK as indicated in your play coupon. In view of this, your won prize will be released to you by any of our payment Banks in Africa or it's correspndence Bank in UK .Our agent will immediately commence the process to facilitate the release of your funds as soon as you contact him through the email address or telephone numbers as directed below.Oversea Payment and Release Order Department,OSA CLAIMS PROCESSING LOTTERY AGENTContact Person: Prof. Desmond O'Connor.+447045707189
With the following are your Particulars. Security Code: AL/FEB/XX01 Ref: 4758961725
Batch: ALLINC 70564943902/188 Winning no: FGNGB2701/LPR SECURITY For security reasons, we advice all winners to keep this information confidential from the public until your claim is processed and your prize released to you. This is part of our security protocol to avoid double claiming and unwarranted taking advantage of this programme by non-participant or unofficial personnel.
Note, all winnings MUST be claimed otherwise the funds will be returned as unclaimed. Congratulations, once more from the entire Management and Staff of YAHOO! Thank you for being part of this promotional email lottery program.
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Please send me the million dollars quickly. This couldn't have come at a better time. My daughter needs a life-saving operation and the family wasn't sure we could afford it!I'll continue posting updates as I play these scamsters.
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