Michael T. Richter

English as my students see it.

2010-07-09T15:17:00.002+08:00

It's exam-marking time again and, as usual, I have some real winners. This is how my students see English. Some of these students have studied English intensely for a decade or so....

First, the "find the wrong word and correct" type of exercise. For example the incorrect sentence "He open the door and stepped into the light" would be corrected as "He OPENED the door and stepped into the light."

She was found guilt BY murder.
If you are luckily, you MAY get away with a fine of $800.
He might impose a five-year prison sentenced on the CRIMINOLOGY.
Many CRIMES are let off with a fine these days.

Next, some true and false:

Salmon is a kind of shellfish. TRUE
Good study habits require planning; you can't just study when you think you have free time. FALSE
(No wonder these kids aren't learning anything!)
The best way to learn vocabulary is by studying vocabulary for two hours once per week instead of studying ten minutes every day. TRUE
A quick way to expand on vocabulary is to learn the different forms of a word (like "construct" and "construction") at the same time. FALSE
It is not possible to learn English vocabulary on your own. TRUE
(GAH!)

How about some opposites?

The opposite of "fatty meat" is "thinny meat".
The opposite of "cooked onions" is "fresh onions".
The opposite of "tough meat" is "sturdiness meat".
The opposite of "fatty meat" is "gaunt meat".
The opposite of "tasteless food" is "dulcet food".
(Someone snuck an electronic dictionary into the exam for the above two I see. Ironically he still only scored 54%...)

And some free-style fill-in-the-blank work. The filled-in answers are in CAPITALs.

...English idioms are typically formed of similes and DIFFICULT.
...English idioms are typically formed of similes and SENTENCES.
More modern idioms, however, especially in business, are based upon the TRUTH metaphor...
(So that's why all the cheating here! Truth is metaphorical!)

Meanwhile, in the listening section, we've got gems like:

Name of his FIST: Siti
(The missing word was actually "wife"....)

When know-it-all ignorance blends with xenophobia

2010-05-19T21:52:00.004+08:00

There's a story on CNN today about the recent knife attack on children—students—in China. The story itself is pretty typical of modern reportage: mostly factual, but obviously slanted for maximum sensationalism. (Why only "mostly factual"? Well, at one point they say this attack was "slightly different" because the victims were college students. They kind of also forgot to point out that this attack was a gang attack, not an individual one. This, to me, represents a rather large departure from the previously-reported attacks but it doesn't further the sensationalist "OH MY GOD LOOK AT THE PEOPLE ATTACKING CHILDREN IN CHINA!" slant of the story to note that so they move on and hope you don't notice.)

That's not what I want to talk about today, though. What I want to talk about is one of the comments underneath the story by one ignorant know-it-all working under the name "oldthis". Just to make sure I avoid any claims of taking him out of context, here's what he says in its entirety:

Hope this helps for people not familiar with the region: 1 - Guns are illegal in China. If you are Chinese, unless you served in the military, you've probably never even touched a gun. 2 - there is a reasonable degree of unrest in certain regions of China. Afterall it is a massive area and has very distinct differences from region to region. There are very broad civic problems such as those that all countries must deal with, but there are also regions or pockets where some problems are more prevelant than others. Some of the most significant problems China faces right now, that don't have "easy button" solutions.
A - there are 30 Million more men in China than women between the ages of 18 & 35. This is a direct reflection of China's one baby policy that was in place for many years and rual farmers needing a son to carry the family forward as the parents aged. Female babies were often killed. This means that if you are a Chinese male in that group, your odds of finding a mate aren't spectacular, particularly if you live in the country side.
B - China has some significant growing pains: Inflation, shifting populations, large pockets of unemployment resulting from the global economic slowdown, govermental corruption (predominately at the state level), polution, a largely uneducated population, a largely rual population contrasted with "extreme megacities".

OK - gotta get back to work. The point is, by attacking children these guys are attacking the establishment itself. China doesn't really care about an individual, it cares about the group (its the communist way). The only way for these guys to make a statement is to be bold and utterly horrible in their "statement" to the government. Enter kids at govt paid for schools. That said, this attack seems different. It could be that these are some local guys POed that the college boys are "taking all the women" (refer to "A" above). I am going out on a limb here, but given that it was a dormatory that was attacked and the article says (one student had HIS hand cut off) and knowing that China isn't going to have co-ed dorms...it sounds like an attack on a male dorm. The more I think about it...this is definately not the same thing that has been happening where people are trying to make their frustration known to the govt. This is retribution for something. Has to be. 5-6 men could've created a heck of alot more carniage than this. They did a hit and run on these guys either because one of them had wronged a member of the "5-6 man hit squad" or b/c the "5-6 man hit squad" was growing frustrated with the overall presence of that group of people (college boys) in general. The other school incidents only gave this group of ding-a-lings the idea.

So ... where do I start in dismantling this pile of bullshit? I'll stay above an obsessive critique of spelling and grammar or of composition skills other than to note that it sadly fails to surprise me that native speakers of English are, again, proving less able to use their own language than many EFL speakers of my acquaintance. Perhaps I'll just go after the major points in order.

1 - Guns are illegal in China. If you are Chinese, unless you served in the military, you've probably never even touched a gun.

This information would come as a shock to those in the Chinese countryside who hunt to supplement their food intake, who have firearms to protect themselves from some of the more dangerous wild animals and who in general, you know, use guns. Firearms are not illegal in China. They are heavily controlled. There is a difference.

A - there are 30 Million more men in China than women between the ages of 18 & 35. This is a direct reflection of China's one baby policy that was in place for many years and rual farmers needing a son to carry the family forward as the parents aged. Female babies were often killed. This means that if you are a Chinese male in that group, your odds of finding a mate aren't spectacular, particularly if you live in the country side.

Would these be the rural farmers for whom the one child policy doesn't apply? These same farmers?

The one child policy is a policy for urban Chinese, not rural. Indeed, for urban Han Chinese, not minorities. Rural Chinese are permitted to have a second child if the first is a female for precisely the reason cited above as the grounds for the purported infanticide. The rules for minorities, urban or rural, vary by minority and region, but again are laxer than the one child policy inflicted on the Han.

B - China has some significant growing pains: Inflation, shifting populations, large pockets of unemployment resulting from the global economic slowdown, govermental corruption (predominately at the state level), polution, a largely uneducated population, a largely rual population contrasted with "extreme megacities".

Anybody who says the corruption in China's government is largely at the state level is ignorant, a liar or a fool. One of the things that has always astonished me in China is the utter omnipresence of corruption. Everybody who can be, in China, is on the take. Those who are not wish they could be.

OK - gotta get back to work. The point is, by attacking children these guys are attacking the establishment itself. China doesn't really care about an individual, it cares about the group (its the communist way).

So the Chinese have been communist for 5000 years? Because, short of that little hissy fit of Mao's (called, for some quaint reason, the Cultural Revolution) there has been basically no change in China's cultural fundamentals. Right down to the purported groupthink. (The reality is far more complex than the stereotype, as is to be expected, but that discussion is far out of scope for today.)

The only way for these guys to make a statement is to be bold and utterly horrible in their "statement" to the government. Enter kids at govt paid for schools.

Government paid-for schools? Which China is he talking about? The China I've lived in for almost a decade has no government-funded schools worth mentioning. Families work themselves to nubs to pay for their children's entry into schools. Schools are government controlled, yes, but certainly not paid for!

That said, this attack seems different. It could be that these are some local guys POed that the college boys are "taking all the women" (refer to "A" above). I am going out on a limb here, but given that it was a dormatory that was attacked and the article says (one student had HIS hand cut off) and knowing that China isn't going to have co-ed dorms...it sounds like an attack on a male dorm. The more I think about it...this is definately not the same thing that has been happening where people are trying to make their frustration known to the govt. This is retribution for something. Has to be. 5-6 men could've created a heck of alot more carniage than this. They did a hit and run on these guys either because one of them had wronged a member of the "5-6 man hit squad" or b/c the "5-6 man hit squad" was growing frustrated with the overall presence of that group of people (college boys) in general. The other school incidents only gave this group of ding-a-lings the idea.

This is the first (and only) piece of insightful commentary this man has made. The first (and only) that is based on a solid observation of fact. The first (and only) that involves speculation that is not, in fact, entirely ungrounded in reality. I'll give him a C- with a little annotation saying "facts are available in published sources; there's no reason to make them up".

Student contrasts

2010-03-17T19:22:00.004+08:00

I think I had the perfect contrast between good students and bad students in microcosm today.

My students entered my class late this afternoon with ham-acted "I want to die" statements. When I asked for why they were so universally wishing for death, they said they had too much work in their previous class.

Them: "We had to write 70 words in 45 minutes."

Me: boggles

Me: "That's less than two words per minute. Come crying to me when you're told to write 500."

Them: "But English is your native language."

Me: "OK, I'll do it in German, then, if you like. Or even French."

Them: boggle

They were really not happy when I gave them an exercise (pre-planned! I swear!) in which they had to ad-lib a speech that worked out to roughly 300-450 words....

Now in this class I have a "guest". He's a student in another program (computer technician) who has decided he needs to improve his English skills so he sits in on my classes when he's got free periods. He also talks with me as I go home after class to help practice. Today, on the way home, he mentioned that he had been finding his classes very difficult this term to the point of wanting to give up. As I was about to encourage him he blithely continued, explaining that this had changed after he went to the library and studied some supplemental material that was easier to understand than what the teacher was giving in class.

And that, in a microcosm, is the difference.

Poor students only go to class and bitch and moan about doing even miniscule amounts of work. They don't do any work outside of the classroom unless forced to (and then usually cheat anyway, thus invalidating the whole point of self-study).

Good students, when faced with adversity, work harder to learn by taking extra classes, spending extra time studying, finding other sources of information, etc.

The dangers of cross-cultural plagiarism

2010-03-13T16:10:00.002+08:00

I'm doing a bit of textbook editing on the side. As is usual here, the material is mostly cribbed from elsewhere with the questions sometimes done by the "writer" and sometimes themselves cribbed from elsewhere.

This can lead to disaster as it would have been in this case had they not asked me to do some editing for them.

In one section of the book there's an activity to make a restaurant menu. They have a sample menu at the top of the page as a model. Here's what the model menu says:

WONG WONG's

CHINESE FOOD MENU

LUNCHEON SPECIALS

SUM YUNG CHICK $6.99

Different And Delicious

WON HUNG LO $6.99

Chinese Meatballs

CHU SUM TWAT $16.99

Dinner Parties Of Three Or More

SUC MI PORK $9.69

Chef's Special

FUC YU MAN $6.69

Speciality Of The House

DINNER COMBINATIONS

1. GOO IN HAND...$9.69

For Those Dining Alone

2. GOO WEE CHICK $6.99

Sloppy Seconds No Charge

3. CUM TOO SOON $6.99

Order Early These Go Fast

4. SUC MI WANG $6.99

Traditional Chinese Meatloaf

5. SUM DUM CHICK $4.99

You Get What You Pay For

6. LIK MI CLIT $6.99

Delicious Lip Smacking Oriental Delicacy

7. CHO KON IT $9.99

Not For The Light Throated

8. FUC SUM NOW $6.99

For Those In A Hurry

9. TUNG SUM CHICK $8.99

A Taste Bud Tingler

10. SUM GULP CUM $9.69

Low Cal Diet Special

As funny as it would be to leave that all there, professionalism and ethics kick in. I'm going to have to warn them. :(

Amazing service.

2010-02-14T19:46:00.003+08:00

Try and get this kind of service out of Canada Post!

On the 13th of February I got a phone call saying that I had a parcel and the truck with it was waiting outside the gate for me to get it (instead of dropping it off inside the campus post office). Let me list the ways in which this was amazing:

They phoned me to tell me the package was there. Now to be fair my mobile phone number is on the address label, but I'd bet that if you mailed something in Canada with a mobile phone number you wouldn't get called. Canada Post doesn't offer that service.
The mail truck waited for me to go get it instead of dropping it off inside the campus.
February the 13th was a Saturday.
February the 13th is also Spring Festival Eve, a holiday that involves, basically, 99.44% of the country shutting down.

If you want to know what this feels like in terms of pleasant surprises, consider getting a parcel on Thanksgiving, Christmas Eve, New Year's Eve and Good Friday all rolled into one. On a weekend.

Lost continuity

2010-02-01T18:11:00.002+08:00

This is a maudlin story today so if you're not up to reading emotional trash skip this blog and wait for the story about Lucas' haircut which is going to be much more fun to read. Assuming I ever get it into words.

The story begins with me carrying Lucas in a toy store today and with Lucas pointing to a prominently displayed toy, crying "House!" (actually he said "Haush" but I'm going to translate his expressions into human speech for purposes of this story) and reaching to play with a familiar old friend. Immediately after this a pang of pain and, to a degree, guilt stabbed through me and tossed me into unfamiliar emotional territory for the rest of the afternoon and even partially into the evening. In short I was a wreck. To understand this reaction you'll have to understand some of the back story. (This, by the way, is called "in media res" and is a classy way of telling stories unless you make the mistake of pointing it out to the audience.)

So...

The back story starts with Lucas' house. You can see the house in question in the picture to the left. It's one of those child activity centres you can find all over the place, given to him when he was around 9 months old. (The picture is from his first birthday, but this wasn't his birthday gift.)

When we bought him the house it was far too advanced for him. Still I reasoned that as long as it caught his attention (bright colours, interesting shapes and a keyboard that played single tones or whole tunes) it would be something he could grow into.

Grow into it he did. It rapidly became his favourite toy and, when a new toy of the moment temporarily displaced it, it remained the centre of his playtime existence. (More often than not we'd find his other toys stuffed inside it for storage. Whether they fit or not. Don't ask.) As he grew older he would find more and more things to do; become more and more capable of coping with the various puzzles the house offered. Other toys came and went, but none had the staying power of his house.

All good things must come to an end and the house was no exception. We lost the house to Joan's cousin. The cousin's family had come for a visit when Lucas was 18 months old complete with their son (almost a year older than Lucas). The son loved Lucas' house as much as Lucas did and was playing with it for the whole afternoon. When time came to leave the boy refused to let go of the house and kicked up an enormous fuss. (They're called the "terrible twos" for a reason, after all.) It was decided that we would let the boy take the house with him, complete with the play pieces, and we'd just get it back next time we visited them.

(Not decided by me mind, but decided nonetheless.)

I had an inkling of trouble when I saw Lucas' worried face as the door closed to the van and the family drove off. He knew the house was in there and he was very unsure what was going on. For a few days after that he'd ask after the house and cry when we told him he couldn't have it. (We didn't word it that way of course, but come on. He was eighteen months old. "It's not here" just means "you can't have it" at that age.) We always intended to go get the house from the cousin's place when we visited in a few weeks, but you know what they say about the Good Intentions Paving Company.

Weeks turned into months and we still hadn't gone visiting. Lucas had forgotten about his house, or so we thought. (This, in the trade, is called "foreshadowing" and is also a sign of class as a writer as long as you don't draw attention to it....) When we did finally visit my inkling was proven correct: the house had been viciously played with by the boy and was effectively gone: broken with most independent pieces lost.

I'd like to state, just to make it clear, that I don't blame anybody for this. It falls firmly into the camp of "life happens" and at no point was anybody being unreasonable, unfair, selfish or anything of the sort. Joan's cousin's family are some of the nicest people I know and they have done a lot for us in the way of clothing, toys and general companionship. They even bought a nice toy for Lucas to replace the house (a toy he still occasionally plays with). Nobody could have guessed what happened next. (Well, had I been thinking I could have, but I was too busy lying to myself like everybody does. We call it "rationalization" but it's really just lying to ourselves.)

We didn't worry overly much about things. We assumed that Lucas had forgotten all about his house and that other toys had taken over as The Toy. He had toy cars aplenty (and as you can see if you peruse the album linked to by that photo above he's somewhat automobile obsessed!). He had as many toys as we could find that we thought appropriate for him and that we thought he'd enjoy. Obviously he'd forget about that silly house, right? (This is called a rhetorical question, BTW. Another sign of class in writing. This is really turning into a great work of prose, isn't it?)

Here's a clue. I'm almost 44 years old as of this writing and I still have vague memories of some of my favourite toys from when I was a very young child, even some from before I went to school.

Our illusions were utterly shattered when, almost half a year after the house went missing, Lucas stumbled across a small piece of green plastic. It was one of the animal shapes from his house designed to be pushed in through an appropriately-shaped hole in the top (and which would have the house making the sound of the appropriate animal as it was pushed through). Lucas, upon seeing it, immediately recognized it and started asking us for his house again and would not take "no" for an answer. He cried loudly with a wrenching, heartbroken sound that echoes in my head to this day when I'm reminded of it. He was inconsolable and cried for hours, refusing every attempt to distract him with his other toys, newer and older alike. For days afterward he asked for his house (despite our quickly throwing out the piece that identified it for him) and would cry for a while when told he couldn't have it. Still, eventually that simmered down and he was back to being his usual happy self.

This brings us to today's little moment. The house in question that Lucas pointed to with such fondness was, of course, the same as the one he'd lost. The pang of guilt can be understood now, I think. The pain, however, is harder to explain.

What I felt there was sorrow. Sorrow at lost opportunities. Sorrow at broken continuity. The house that Lucas had was tied in deeply with all of his other toys. It was a prime playing piece of its own as well as storage for the other things he loved. Had it never gone missing it would still likely have occupied a central role in his playtime as he figured out more of its puzzles and as he found more uses for it. When Lucas saw the house today I saw the echoes of these opportunities, but only the echoes. He was happy to see his old friend, but it wasn't anything special anymore. It was one of a few hundred (thousand) things in the store he wanted to play with. Even if I had decided then and there to buy it as a replacement for his lost toy it would not have had the central role it used to have. That, more than anything, left me feeling depressed the rest of the day.

Just to keep the ending on an up note, I'd like to end by showing you what might well turn out to be the new central toy of his life (purchased just today!). It's amazing how colourful wooden blocks can interest a child, isn't it?

Shooting for zero and accomplishing it!

2010-01-11T18:34:00.011+08:00

My family owns a large KEEP in the south of England. When I was 18, I studied WATER at college so that I would understand farming better. My brother is in charge of one part of the business and he PICK cows and sheep. Some of these are HARVEST and sold for their meat. he also sells AGRICULTURE such as maize and wheat. We DAIRY vegetables for a few years, but we didn't make enough money at it, so five years ago we GROW a lot of apple and pear trees instead. In the late summer we have extra workers to help FARM the fruit and AGRICULTURE the wheat. Some years are very difficult in farming. Last year, there was no rain for two months, which caused a PLANT. The CROP was very hard and we had to GROUND the maize every week.

This is a student's long-winded, fill-in-the-blanks way of saying "I didn't bother with homework at all this term".

Since I hurt my leg in the accident, it's been difficult to BITE my knees.

I should bloody well think so!

Do you think I can OVERDO my homework if it's not very good?

I rather suspect that in your case you will not be overdoing homework at any point in the foreseeable future.

The alarm didn't EXPLODED this morning – there must be something wrong with it.

Talk about a strict morning routine!

The police believe the young boy was responsible for HIS PARENTS.

The RCMP is teaching cops abroad now?

I had to COMB my nose in the middle of the lecture – it was a bit embarrassing

I can only imagine.

I always sit ON the table for dinner.

"...but I can't figure out why people have stopped inviting me."

Put this coat on – it'll MAKE you dry if it rains.

Does it only dry me when raining or will stepping under a shower do?

How many MISTAKE do you MAKE at school?
About twelve including two languages and all the sciences.

...Words fail me....

What's the matter?
I don't know but I MIGHT BE getting headaches. I think I should make an appointment to see the doctor.

My arm might be broken as well and it is quite possible I've been decapitated.

If you don't go to bed when you have a flu IT OFTEN GETS DARK.

...and if you get out of bed when you have muscle cramps it often snows?

remove writing from the board = PUT it off

Yeah, I procrastinate on cleaning up myself.

The children were here a minute ago, but now they've RECHARGED.

Never ever recharge your children. It takes forever for them to run out of energy.

A fall in sales could lead to A PAY RISE FOR ALL THE WORKERS.

I wish my employers were so enlightened in these harsh economic times.

If you start to recover from an illness YOU PROBABLY DON'T GET BETTER AT IT.

And I was trying so hard to perfect my flu too!

Lest you think I'm being unusually cruel even for me, keep in mind these two points:

These are university students planning to study abroad.
This is all lifted directly from the homework they were supposed to have been doing all term.

Oh, and every entry up there is from a different student.

Exam time cruelty

2010-01-11T16:22:00.002+08:00

So, my first exam of the term is behind me: English Vocabulary. The students were concerned about this one for the past month or so, constantly asking me if it was going to be difficult. I was always on-message when I told them "if you've been doing your assigned homework this will be an easy exam".

This is literally the case.

The course texts for this class are a pair of books called English Vocabulary in Use and Test Your English Vocabulary in Use. I assigned homework in the form of the mini-tests in the latter every week to be done for the next class. Each class I would spot-check the homework by taking one of the mini-tests and grading it. Each mini-test is worth 30 points (in question sets that varied from 1 point to 15 points each). I was getting an astonishing number of people passing in mini-tests with scores of 29 and 30. Well, astonishing unless you noted that the back of the book had answers to all the questions.

The silly students thought I wouldn't notice. (Hint: if you're copying the errors from the textbook's answer page, I'm going to notice!)

So, back to the exam. For the exam I made up eight pages worth 20 points each. Each page had exercises taken directly from the book they had been assigned as homework. I did eight pages but each student only had 3. This was done as an anti-cheating mechanism: no student was going to be sitting next to someone with the same mix of exam questions and at first glance it's going to look like I actually did what I had threatened: made 31 different exams. (Cheating is an epidemic in Chinese academic environments, you see.) But the key is something I have to stress again: each question was taken directly from the book they had been assigned as homework. So quite literally this exam would have been a cakewalk for the students who did their homework.

I haven't graded the exams formally yet, but I have glanced over them rapidly as a sampler. There's going to be a lot of wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of garments over this one.

Maybe writing the following on the board in bright, cheery red letters before the exam was going overboard:

EXAMS ARE FUN!
(for the teachers...)

Amusing small minds.

2010-01-11T11:23:00.003+08:00

So, being the only person in the adult portion of the family with a sense of fun, it is always left up to me to find ways to ~~warp the mind of~~ amuse the kid. Here's one of the simpler things I do.

This game is played in the bathroom (or anywhere where there is a sizable mirror). When the kid is looking in the mirror, make a face. (I personally suck in my cheeks until my lips protrude like fish lips.) Wait for the kid to spot you in the mirror. Almost invariably the kid will look to the real you to see what's going on. The trick is to make sure that you erase that face before his eyes focus on you. Now he's faced with a mystery: the you in the mirror has a distorted image. The real you looks perfectly normal.

I can keep Lucas entertained for quite a while when I do this. He hasn't managed to catch me in the act yet.

How to spoil a birthday in one easy step...

2010-01-10T10:40:00.002+08:00

Get struck down by fever.

So yesterday was Lucas' second birthday, but I got some nasty virus or other and spent most of the day and well into the night wandering in and out of semi-consciousness. I basically missed his second birthday. This means everything here is second-hand information.

First, I have to apologize to my mother. There are no pictures because Joan forgot to take the camera when she went out with Lucas and her mother. You'll have to do the same as me and just imagine.

The first thing the intrepid trio did was go shopping for some foodstuffs. In the process they got a small cake and ate it with Lucas. After shopping they went to a small park in the middle of Wuchang called Hong Shan park (literally "flood mountain park"), meeting up with Joan's cousin with whom we have a very close relationship. There he ran around and looked at everything and generally had a good time. There was some kind of "drumming for kids" display there that Lucas partook of, apparently striking his drum with great zeal (but no sense of rhythm if I know my boy). Indeed he thought it was so much fun he stole the drumstick. (Nobody noticed this last point until they were a looooooooong distance away from the park, so now he has a drumstick.)

After the park it was time for the restaurant and eating. This went as usual but for one small thing: Joan's retainers accidentally got left on the table, wrapped in tissues. She didn't know this until everybody made it home, however. She called the restaurant and asked if they'd seen them but nobody had. She had to make the long trip back to the restaurant and then root around in the (dry) garbage until, just shortly before she was about to give up, she found them. Some extreme cleaning measures later she has a pair of retainers again.

I'd like to post more, but I'm still a bit dizzy so this is it for today.

Shopping with the master of disaster.

2010-01-02T09:36:00.005+08:00

So, we were shut in most of the day yesterday between the annoying drizzle of rain and the low (for here) temperatures. Lucas, my sweet little idiot, was all ramped up on energy because the apartment really isn't big enough for him to safely release any. (When he starts things break. Or get annoyed. Or both. It all really depends on the sentience levels in question.)

Finally, after dinner, and after a few hours without rain, I'd had enough. After having browbeaten Joan for long enough we finally left the apartment as a family to take a longish walk.

Lucas has a new game, incidentally, that causes heart stoppage in the adults in his life. It follows these steps:

Run full-tilt down the sidewalk.
Suddenly collapse to his knees.
Follow that up with collapsing to the ground in a sprawl.

He loves it and plays it endlessly while we look on in shock (the first few times) and annoyance (Joan and her mother) or laughter (me).

This is where shopping enters the picture. While we were out, we walked past a small supermarket. I'd been there lots before but Joan and her mother had never stopped in. Since we needed some vegetables, Joan's mother decided to go check it out. (It turns out that some things are available there cheaper than the usual haunt.) I took Lucas inside partially for warmth and partially for the sheer fun of it.

Lucas, in his inimitable fashion, and after the initial wariness of someplace new, took to the place like carassius auratus auratus takes to oxidane^[1]. He ran up and down the (very narrow) aisles happily looking at all the strange stuff while his father desperately tried to keep up without knocking anything off the shelves.

Now, I've seen badly behaved children in departement stores before, especially in Canada where parents seem to think that it's perfectly OK for their children to pull things off of shelves, open packages, etc. In China this is more rare. Even by local standards, however, Lucas was a marvel. For example quite by accident we stumbled over the toy aisle. This was like kiddie crack for Lucas: dozens of interesting things that he wanted and wanted now. Here's the difference, though, between Lucas and tens of thousands of other children I've personally witnessed. He'd follow these steps:

Point excitedly at an item and say "要！" (want!).
Look expectantly at me with a grave face.
Listen to me gently say "no".
Move to the next item.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

Note the absence of any of the following:

Tantrums.
Whining.
Clinging.
Grabbing. (Well, he did grab one thing, but this was after looking at me and me nodding because I was considering actually buying one; I decided against on quality grounds.)

Other dumb things he did included playing shy with the store clerks (who subtly flocked in his general vicinity like flies to sugar) in just the right way to charm them and, get this, quietly going past the bulk candy (which he recognized excitedly) after being told, once again, "no".

I actually enjoyed going shopping with a toddler. Man, I must have done something really nice in my past life to warrant this kind of son!

^[1]Goldfish takes to water.

A glimpse of the future.

2010-01-01T17:09:00.002+08:00

Living in China has its disadvantages. It is, after all, a brutal communist dictatorship so it's like living in Exxon or Microsoft or the like: a corporate state. (Anybody who disagrees with this parallel has either never worked in a medium- to large-sized company or has never lived in a communist state.) It is heavily polluted. It is alien beyond all belief at times.

One advantage that I have, however, living here in China, is that I know the future before you do. While I'm writing this, for example, most of the people who read my blog are still living in the year 2009. I've been living in the year 2010 for almost a whole day now. Magnanimous guy that I am, however, I will give you a glimpse of what the future will bring you.

The future is pretty much the same as the past.

There you go.

And 新年快乐 (Happy New Year) to you all!

The old grey mare...

2009-12-27T19:44:00.007+08:00

So, for no particular reason I've decided to take up my keyboard and post on my dusty blog. Because of this complete lack of any kind of reason I'm also focusing this blog entry on things my mother would be most interested in.

Chief among these right now is, of course, her grandson, Lucas (or, as I like to call him, the Grand Overlord of All He Surveys at Least in His Own Mind – GOAHSLHOM for short). We're closing in on his second birthday and he is in full-tilt "Terrible Twos" mode. Now to be fair he's better-behaved than other two year olds I've encountered. He is, however, incredibly active and hard to manage for a variety of reasons:

he is hypercurious about everything (the more dangerous or annoying the better);
he is much larger than other children his age;
he is commensurately strong.

When he wants something it takes the concerted effort of Joan and her mother together to rein him in (or just me since I'm still the giant in the family).

He is, in a word, annoying.

The annoyance is mitigated, however by the sheer joy of watching him develop (and, in my case, the sheer joy of warping his mind for my own amusement). The initial health scare is gone. Lucas is a big, healthy, active, normal child in every sense. He's developing manual skills (some of them annoying – my desk drawers are no longer sacrosanct). He's developing very good listening comprehension skills in both English and Chinese. (We often underestimate how much he understands now!) His spoken skills are pretty good; he can communicate most things quite clearly now (and boy does he like to communicate them constantly!). He can recognize about 75% of the alphabet without error and about half of the remainder with about 50% accuracy. (He still confuses "N", "M" and "W" mind.) He's memorized a couple of Tang Dynasty poems (remember those from your childhood, Mom?) and is even at the point of beginning to recognize some Chinese characters in context (but not independently yet).

Some of the interesting character traits he's developing:

he's absolutely obsessed with cars and has been from an amazingly young age;
he loves Dora the Explorer (the TV show and the books);
he's recently developed a love of the ridiculous rhymes of Dr. Seuss (There's a Wocket in my Pocket! being his current favourite book edging out by a hair the illustrated version of The Itsy Bitsy Spider);
he likes to play hide and seek and is both remorseless and tireless while playing it;
when he's tired he doesn't get whiny and cry, he gets crazy and runs around like a manic idiot;
he's an extremely picky eater (obviously acquired from Joan, not me!);
he likes music and will dance to it all the time, sometimes even managing to look cute instead of spastic;
his first favourite song was, of all things, "Iron Man" which has given me one of my favourite images of all times: an elderly Chinese lady humming "Iron Man" to a young baby to soothe him;
a current favourite song is the theme song to the old television show Night Court although I recently introduced him (by accident) to "Squeeze Box" which he also enjoys.

I do have a lot of new pictures of him and will post them as soon as possible, but some technical problems are interfering with this at the moment. When those are cleared, I'll make a new blog entry that consists almost entirely of Lucas photos.

The next person that Mom's going to be interested about is, of course, Joan. Joan is doing well, but this term bit off (quite a) bit more than she could chew work-wise and is worn to a frazzle. I, of course, told her this was a mistake long before she started into teaching 30 periods per week—over and above the whole parenting thing, mind—but nobody ever listens to me until it's too late. Still, this term is ending soon and next term she won't be making this same mistake. He won't come out and admit that I was right, but we both know that I was.

Joan is still the chief driving force behind us wanting to buy an apartment in Wuhan. This is proving more difficult than we had anticipated because the Chinese mortgage industry, like most large-scale operations in China, is run by untrained chimpanzees with bladder control problems. (They don't know what they're doing, are unsuited to their positions and like to piss on everything around them.) The size of the down payment we need to make is just too large to be realistic so I'm going to have to go hunting for a better-paid job or start a successful business or something. (Alternatively I could win the lottery or something. It's hard to do when you don't buy tickets, however.) We're still working at it though, even through the added expense of a personified force of destruction (a.k.a. 王森锐 or Lucas) in the household. Indeed it is for Lucas (giving him a stable home in his childhood) that we're going through this. It'd just be nice to get it done earlier.

Other things Joan-related: she's on her way to getting her Master's degree in teaching, get this, Chinese as a Foreign Language. This is our entry plan for Canada. Given the giant China has become on the world stage there's a lot of places itching to have their staff trained in Chinese. Further a lot of overseas Chinese are interested in having their children learn their "mother" tongue. This is beside the obvious possibility of government interest in native Chinese speakers. There's lots of opportunity for the future in this and Joan's working hard at it.

(Anybody want to learn Chinese from Joan so she can get some praxis?)

This leads to me, the last person my mother is interested in hearing about in our little family over here in China. My family life is going fine, although two sudden adjustments (bachelor-to-husband, husband-to-father) in rapid succession after 40 years of solitude was a bit of a shock (to put it mildly). As you may have gathered from the above, I'm insanely fond (and proud!) of my son despite the annoyances and worse of parenthood. (Oh, Mom? I apologize unreservedly.) Pretty much anything I do these days is for him, short- or long-term.

My work life is far improved at my new school, the Hubei Communication Technical College. This is not what one would call a high-rung college (more third-string) and as such they lack the arrogance of my previous school which (fraudulently) banks in on the good name of one of the more respected universities in China (Wuhan University). They, as a result, pay me (slightly) better, give me a much nicer (albeit about 10% smaller) apartment and pay all my bills except long distance telephone. That's not the best part, however. The best part is that I'm not just a 白猴子 ("white monkey") to them. I'm a teacher. I'm treated as a teacher and an asset. My opinion is sought out on matters that affect me (and sometimes even on matters that don't affect me). I'm invited to planning meetings. I'm actually encouraged to interact with the Chinese staff! (Three dinners so far and still counting, and this after I had to demure from two because of scheduling conflicts.)

The down side, of course, is my students. Just like the East Lake Campus students of my last school, these students are the dregs of China's educational system. They're entirely unsuited to being in university-level (or even college-level!) education. Unlike my former East Lake students, however, I actually feel for these kids. They're not arrogant, spoiled rich brats on the whole. (There's one exception out of about 100 students.) They're decent human beings who are being forced into something they have no interest in nor aptitude for. (The same is true of my former East Lake students, but I loathed them as human beings so didn't care about their suffering.)

On the other hand, my main campus students at my old school were decent people and, in many cases, people I actively thought had a real future (with several of them proving my predictions correct now!). I have no such students here. Still I'm overall much happier with my work here than I was at the old place so the move was a net plus.

My mother was kind enough to send me a big batch of books for my technical use (she's already sent Lucas about 20...). Because of her I'm now learning how to use ANTLR, Groovy, Scala, Erlang and Haskell (with Clojure on the way in another package) so that I can get my technical skills back up to snuff and ready for a move to high tech. Further, I have prospects, high tech-wise, here in China. One of my former students has talked to his manager about me and that manager is interested. Should things go well, I may be out of teaching next year this time and back into software, this time working for a Chinese company with ... well, I won't give away what it is that they were interested in me for so that I don't jinx the process of being hired. If this happens, though, it will be big. Very big.

That's it for this blog for now. Hopefully I can get back into the swing of things again (I have a strategy I like to call "mini-blogging" that may help) and not have a three-month gap again. And Mom, for no particular reason I promise that the pictures of Lucas will be up in a blog posting just for you before the week is out.

Was that ever a long week...!

2009-09-21T10:47:00.007+08:00

OK, so I said a week and it's almost a month. Sue me. I dare you.

That being said, I do apologize to my blog's biggest (only?) fan for the delay. Life just gets very, very busy and crazy at the beginning of term in a new school and I'd forgotten that aspect of things. Distractions piled on distractions piled on Lucas ... I mean distractions ... and before I knew it, a month had passed. Then I promised to have this thing up by Sunday and a network problem prevented it. (I couldn't access Blogger nor Picasaweb.) So here I am, late Monday morning, filling the blog with my usual drivel.

This is going to be a picture-intensive blog entry, and there's more pictures than are showing up here to be found at Lucas' very own Picasaweb album. Pop on over for more details.

Lucas is growing up very quickly now, and I mean this in all respects. He's smarter. (Too damned smart, sometimes, if in a stupid sort of way!) He's taller. He's more active. He's everything that drives Joan mad.

Joan, you see, has one flaw among her many virtues: she really does not adapt well to change. Lucas is in that stage of his life ("Terrible Twos" are coming!) when change is the only constant. Just as Joan gets used to one set of behaviour patterns from him (nap times, for example, or meal times) he goes and changes things and this drives her (and her mother) nuts. Me, I've had nothing but change for all my life except for an 8.5 year period of illusionary stability (Edmonton). I've learned to adapt to change a thousand times over since then. Joan ... not so much.

I guess some statistics are in order. We have a height chart on the wall and officially measured him on August 17. 87cm. At a little over one year and seven months old, Lucas was as tall as many 3-year olds in China. And he's still sprouting. A few days ago—around the 17th, oddly enough—I did a quick eyeball check (didn't have a book handy so no official measurement) and he'd jumped to 88.5 already, maybe even 89. Oddly enough his weight is not increasing as quickly. He's shooting up, but he's losing fat in the process. This kid is going to be slim and wiry when he grows up. (At the rate he's wearing out his mother's and grandmother's last nerve, if he grows up!)

His personality is also developing at a rapid pace. I don't know what Joan and I did in our past lives to deserve this, but Joan (an introvert) and I (an even stronger introvert) have been saddled with a boy who's the precise opposite: an extrovert of the highest order. He loves having people around. He loves interacting with people. He can't stand periods of quiet and rest. This, too, causes him to wear out nerves quickly. Of course he's so damned cute when being aggravating that he likely will survive to adulthood.

There are a couple of interesting personality traits developing. He's got my stubbornness for sure. Once he sets his mind on something he doesn't let it go until ... well, as with any near-two-year old he's got the attention span of a gnat combined with, say, another gnat. But while we're in that attention span phase, he's dogged. Whatever he wants he wants and he simple will not be distracted from it. Until the attention span thing, I mean.

He's developed an obsession with cars already. He loves them. He points to toy cars, photos of cars, cars in movies, cars on the street and starts reciting what kind they are. He's even right most of the time. His favourite toys are cars (or Lego-like bricks which I make into cars or car accessories). He'll always drag out his picture book and flip it to the cars page to recite the names. Out in the street he'll constantly look out for cars and let out a joyful "che che!" ("car-car!") when he sees one, then announce what kind it is. (He even distinguishes between "car" and "taxi".) It's getting to the stage that we want to rename him to "Lucas Cars" or something like that because he just won't shut up about them!

The other thing that's developed is his penchant for motion. This kid is never not moving. Look at the pictures I put up of him. Even on the best there's tell-tale motion blur. Keep in mind that I put up one photo for about every ten I take. The rest? The rejects? Pure blurs. He doesn't sit still long enough to photograph well. (It doesn't help that he's fascinated by the camera so when he's aware of it he'll lunge straight for it. This is why there's so many photos of him pointing at the camera and grinning.)

I'd like to close off this blog entry with a gallery of photos with attached commentary.

You better not be trying to steal my bun, Mister!

This is that blurring thing I was talking about earlier.

Maybe if I close my eyes and wish really hard, I can get another car!

A rare moment of stillness. He can't see the camera either.

One of his favourite toys, accessory courtesy of yours truly.

The three toys in sharp focus, Lucas in the back being fed.

Same scene, different focus.

Beware the Joaninator

2009-08-24T20:51:00.004+08:00

Yeah, I said I'd do this yesterday, Mom, but life happened and as it is I can't even do the mega-update I was planning. Here's a brief summary of my current status for those just sitting on the edge of their seats. I'll be posting details on each of these later as I get time alone.

The move was a success, although I threw my back in the process and was in agony for a couple of weeks afterwards. (I need some medication now. I'm fresh out.)
The new apartment, although smaller, is far more intelligently laid out and outfitted so it's actually much more comfortable than the older, larger place. And it has a seated toilet. I can read again finally!
Lucas adapted almost instantly to the new environment and is entering his "terrible twos". Wilful but cute, so that makes up for it.
I've been doing a little bit of daily teaching every day for a bit of spending money.
We're actively looking for our own apartment now.

Each of those items will get expanded upon within the next week (knock on Lucas' head).

Now to explain the title.

There was one little incident in the move that was a bit negative. (I mean aside from shoving a shard of glass from a broken ink bottle deep into my thumb while unpacking.) The incident was unpleasant, but I emerged from it with a newfound respect for the toughness of my wife.

The complex we lived in was a "secure" complex with on-site, live-in security and all that jazz. All of this is run by the building manager, Mr. Peng. Mr. Peng is an irritating tick of a man; the kind of guy that shakes your hand and leaves you feeling mysteriously oily. Having him in charge of security is kind of like having the RCMP investigate its own officers' misconduct: futile and a recipe for disaster.

One thing, for example, that Mr. Peng does is he rents out empty apartments in the complex off the books to his friends. He also treats the security guards like dirt and is suspected of entering tenant apartments when they are not present (he's never been directly caught at this but there's lots of circumstantial evidence).

After moving, Joan and I went back to the apartment to clean it. We decided that the school treated us decently so we're going to be decent and clean up the place for them. This was a huge job that was shaping up to be a multi-day thing. (Marion, your "Magic Erasers" were utterly defeated by the kitchen. I was shocked.) During our time there, Joan had her scooter plugged in to charge up. When she left to pick up lunch, she didn't want to carry the charger all the way up to the fifth floor only to carry it all the way back down again when she got back. Instead she put it in the (secured) stairwell under the stairs.

When she came back it was gone.

She knew right away that Mr. Peng had taken it. Why? Because he'd tried it earlier and was caught in the act. At the time he pretended he was looking for the owner of the charger, but in reality he was walking away from the place he found it and doing so rather furtively. So when it went missing for real, he was the first (and only) suspect.

Joan worked herself up into a real fury over this. (Mental note: never steal anything from Joan. Ever. For any reason.) She was angrier than I've ever seen her before. And in the process we cooked up a scheme to get the thing back.

Joan wrote a note saying, basically, "my husband saw who took it; we won't say anything if it's returned to us within an hour". She posted this note on the building manager's door. This led to Mr. Peng's first error. He came to confront us about the "outrageous accusation". He challenged me to my face to say that I'd seen him do it. I hadn't, but he didn't know this. There are lots of places he could have been seen from and he knew it. Without any friendly gesture and without anything he could hang any hopes upon I nodded certainly. Yes, I'd seen him walk away with it.

This was the gamble. Had he stuck to his guns he'd have left room for doubt and it would have been a "he said; she said" scenario with no resolution. He was, however, shaken by the absolute positive he'd got from me there. Suddenly he wasn't so sure he'd gotten away with it.

First he tried the "I'll help you find out who took it" route. This was mistake #1. He went out and acted all concerned, asking any of the tenants outdoors if they'd seen anybody who didn't belong entering or exiting the complex. A woman who'd been outside with her son for a long time and who'd been near where anybody entering or leaving would have to have passed said "no, no strangers entered or left". This eliminated an outsider. The rest of the tenants in the building were not on the list because a) they were mostly gone and b) we're talking about people who are making a MINIMUM of a hundred grand a year.

Next, shaken by me saying I saw him walking away with the thing in his hands, he went to his apartment to show me the thing I must have seen: a plastic bowl of sorta-kinda the same colour. This was mistake #2. In doing this he placed himself at the scene of the crime at the time it happened. When he showed us the bowl, I just flatly laughed at him, explaining that I can tell the difference between a small, rectangular light cyan object and a large, round dark cyan object at only 5 stories. (Hell, I could probably spot the difference a block away!)

Now is when the Joaninator sprang into action. She gave the man a tongue-lashing I've never seen her give anybody before. (Hopefully I never see it again.) In the process Mrs. Peng joined the conversation and it turned into a three-way shouting match. A shouting match Joan won.

In the end she won the cruelest (and most appropriate) way I can even imagine. She threatened, in short, to expose Mr. Peng's sideline rental service. You know, not only threaten his livelihood, but to basically say "give this thing back or you're going to jail for something else I know about you".

For face reasons, of course, Mr. Peng couldn't admit he stole the thing. Instead he offered to pay for the missing charger "because we're such good friends". Joan phoned the dealer, got the price on the recharger and took the money. Then we left. And we didn't bother doing the deep cleaning we planned on because, frankly, we lost interest in being nice to the people running the building. Let them hire a cleaner now.

A little coda that was entertaining. The recharger cost 100RMB. When Joan went to get it, she told the story to the shop attendant who laughed and said it's too bad this wasn't known beforehand. The recharger, you see, was on special for 100RMB. Usually it was 150RMB and the shop staff all agreed that a thief should have been forced to pay the higher price.

A small story to tide the gap.

2009-07-29T11:01:00.002+08:00

I know, I know. More than a month. Trust me, I've been really busy and now am in the middle of moving. I'll have a post with lots of cute pictures of Lucas and stuff, but for now I'll just relate an early story of my stay in China.

Now I have to explain about my first school. It was a crappy little community college-like affair whose leadership had Grand Ambitions. (I have to capitalize it to get the scope of it across.) To accomplish its aims it had to do a lot of renovation and upgrading. One of the most visible upgrades was an actually-quite-impressive sports field.

It was a very modern sports field, all things considered, replacing a dusty clay track with a modern spongey-rubbery sort of deal, for example. The bleachers were being completely replaced (albeit with the ubiquitous concrete-covering-bricks construction that plagues most of China's buildings). While this was going on, there was landscaping being done all across the campus as well.

It is the landscaping to which I will be turning my attention because, one day, while teaching classes, I happened to look outside my classroom window. What I saw left me baffled. Two workmen were working fastidiously in the blazing afternoon sun alongside the sports field fence.

One man, apparently the foreman, was digging what looked like over-sized post holes. He'd dig one of these holes, proceed 3m down the fence, dig another hole, proceed 3m and so on. The second man was two holes (6m) behind him, very carefully and thoroughly filling in the holes. It went on like that with mechanical precision. One man digging an over-sized post hole. An empty post hole being left in the sun. One man filling in a post hole.

I was, of course, very curious. I was new to China and I knew the Chinese had different ways of doing things. I simply couldn't fathom what the pair were doing. Was this some bizarre way to aerate soil? Or was it a way to take the hard clay and loosen it up to aid in irrigation? I set out after class, student in tow, to find out.

The workmen were just countryside enough to be positively thrilled that a foreign teacher was expressing interest in their work. They showed me their equipment, talked about the weather and such (through translation, of course) and finally I got to the point.

"Why is it that you're doing this here? You dig a hole, and he fills it in two holes behind you?"

The answer was very enlightening in a Chan (Zen) sort of way.

"Oh, our work group usually has three people," the foreman explained. "But today the tree planter is in the hospital, sick."

Saturday night's alright for sweating...

2009-06-27T22:39:00.002+08:00

Apologies to Elton John for misappropriating his lyrics there, but damn is it hot today.

It's Saturday night. I've spent a day teaching my adult students (without breakfast this morning to boot). I went shopping for some necessities (Lucas got his first taste of Lego-like blocks!). Now I'm sitting in my apartment at almost 11PM drenched to the core because it's 32°C (75% humidity – humidex calculation says it feels like 47°C!) and my apartment is being "cooled" by a single room-sized air conditioner off in the corner of a single bedroom.

Welcome to summer in Wuhan, one of the "Three ~~Hells~~ Furnaces" of China. (The other two are Nanjing and Chongqing.)

And it isn't even July yet!

Junior Problem Solver

2009-06-18T11:14:00.002+08:00

(This is another Lucas story. Sorry.)

Short story, but true. Lucas and I are playing with the toy vehicles he's obsessed with. I get a little toy plane wound up and aim at at Lucas. He steps aside and lets it sail under the bed. Far under the bed.

I asked Joan to get the laundry stick (a thing used to get stuff on and off the high points where we hang laundry) but she was too busy to get it. I didn't want to try both keeping track of a hyperactive toddler while going out to the balcony to find the stick, so I just told Lucas "sorry, I can't get it".

Lucas, pauses, staring at me. He then trundles off to the corner of the room where we have a long-forgotten old mop handle leaning for obscure historical reasons. This mop handle is something nobody's even glanced at for over a year. Lucas, however, not only spotted it but figured out how it could be used to get his precious aeroplane. He stands pointing at it making eager sounds and sure enough, I go get it and retrieve the plane.

That's already pretty impressive in its own right. This gets better, though. My son has a mischievous streak in him and as soon as the handle was put back he took his plane and threw it under the bed. He misjudged the distance, though, and I was able to snag the plane without the stick. So he threw it again, much more successfully. He glances up at me with twinkling eyes full of mischief, laughing at my expression.

Of course I'm not a nice person so I had Joan take him from the room for a short time. In that time I rescued the plane and hid the pole. When Lucas came trundling back he made a beeline for the plane and, as expected, laughed as he threw it under the bed. Then, when I didn't immediately go pick up the stick to rescue it, he trundled off to where the mop handle used to be and, without looking, pointed at it making urgent sounds. I affected confusion. He looked. The most crestfallen face I've ever seen him put on without crying materialized. He was utterly baffled, actually touching the wall to make sure the thing was actually gone.

Merriment ensued.

Busy week

2009-06-14T21:22:00.004+08:00

Well, anybody afraid that this is going to be another Lucas blog entry can rest assured that I will only be mentioning him once. Since that mention was in the previous sentence, you know the rest of the blog won't be quite as tedious as it usually is.

In September of 2006 Joan decided to do something she's wanted to do since she was a teenage girl: straighten her teeth. Her two front teeth were crooked, you see, twisted in place by quite a large amount. Nobody really noticed this, of course, but she knew about it and was very, very insecure about her smile as a result. Those of you who've seen my earlier (sadly non-digital) photos of her will know that it's rare to actually see her smiling in a photo (or, rather, when she did smile, it was always a closed-mouth Mona Lisa-style one). Which was actually quite a shame because when she's smiling (naturally, that is) her face lights up like a pinball game that's just hit the "free game" jackpot.

September of 2006 marked her decision to move away from this. She went to the dentist, got evaluated, got four teeth pulled and thus began a two-year (maximum!) process of adjusting her teeth. This week, on Wednesday, June 10, 2009, the work was finally completed. Yes, the two-year maximum process took just under three years. Three years of discomfort and three years of metal in the mouth. Sometimes sharp metal. Even with metal in her mouth, however, Joan already started to smile properly and naturally, wearing the braces almost as a badge of honour.

Finally, however, it's over. Above and to the left you can see what Joan's smile looked like on Tuesday and to the right you can see what it looked like Wednesday. Pretty big change over a day, isn't it?

Of course it's still not completely over. She has retainers she has to wear 24x7 (except when eating) for a year, then nights-only for another year. She's had to relearn how to talk because the retainers occupy quite a bit of space in the mouth, but they're visibly much less intrusive than were the braces before.

In other news, and the reason for my delay in posting any news at all, I have officially signed my new contract at my new workplace. I'm moving over to the Hubei Provincial Communication Technical College (or something approximately like that which I'll translate better when I get the energy) in under a month and will be starting teaching there September of this year.

The general run-down on the new place:

The staff are friendlier and more communicative than my current school, not to mention better organized and better capable of communicating in English.
The salary is a bit higher, but so are the teaching hours (the hourly remuneration is about the same).
The students are going to be of much, much lower quality than the main campus (and possibly even slightly lower quality than the Sweathogs campus).
The new apartment is a bit smaller, but much more nicely outfitted (it has an air conditioner/heater in each room, for example).

Also, again unlike my current school, they're willing to let me move in over the summer. One thing that I really didn't like about ISSWHU the first year I was there (albeit about the only thing at the time since I hadn't been introduced to the Sweathogs yet) was that they positively refused to allow us to move in over the summer. Instead I had to stow my possessions at a friend's apartment and live in Joan's apartment in Hanyang over the summer and then hastily move everything in while I was also planning lessons and getting oriented in the new location just before I started teaching. Why? They didn't want to be responsible for me or my behaviour over the summer before I started working for them.

So the move is a mixed bag that, in my opinion, slightly tilts toward the "plus" side of the scales when I measure them.

No other particularly interesting news to report otherwise. I mean it's damned hot, but I think I've been complaining about that loudly to anybody who'd listen since I first got to China. (How hot? Try 35C at 84% humidity.) I am going to really enjoy living in an apartment where I don't have a single room-sized air conditioner trying to cool down a sizable two-bedroom apartment.

An exchange on Facebook of the "truth hurts" variety.

2009-06-04T13:15:00.003+08:00

Names elided to protect the guilty.

You're blocking XXX? How come?

Something she did on my blog a few years back made me decide I'd rather exist in a world in which she does not exist. Since the digital world is easily adjusted to allow the editing of life, I proceeded to make the world I wanted.

What exactly did she do on your blog?

Was it the time she described you as cranky and sexist, or the time when she said you were turning 52 on your birthday, or was it the time she called you an adult baby, or was it the time...?

I will let her guess which time it was.

Those North American women. When will they learn just how spoiled they are, and bow down to your genius?

;-) Do you still feel that way?

Yeah, XXX can be tactless. Like me. I suppose it's why we get along. She actually asks me now and then to read over emails she is sending, where she is trying to say something subtle and difficult.

I suspect she still has unresolved anger over arguments with you. You know, stuff you said about women and their periods and how feminism is all bullshit.

I'd like to think being married and reproducing has changed you somewhat. Mike told me that you seemed to understand your wife is the boss, as it is with nearly all partnerships, I suspect.

I've been in therapy for a year now. I am getting my shit together. I even applied for an art show with the city of Ottawa. But lately I find myself getting in touch with old rage. And I suspect that's the real reason I'm talking to you lately. No one I've met has ever been better at rage than you.

I don't know if I mean that as a compliment or an insult.

Take all of this as you will.

I feel that way more than ever about North American feminists. When seeing women who have REAL problems in life it's hard to take seriously the whining of Canadian and American women.

As to the tactless thing, you pale in comparison to XXX. At your most tactless people still mostly liked you. At her least tactless people mostly tolerated XXX. She was put up with because you were liked -- a sort of "take the good with the bad" approach.

I have an advantage over these people. I don't have to put up with her at all. Nobody can (legally) edit a person out of their physical lives, but my life with my old crowd is all-digital now. I can edit anybody out I care to without having to get my hands bloody.

Please edit me out of your life too.

Why? If you want out of my life you just have to stop inserting yourself into it.

He took this to heart and blocked me on Facebook like I blocked his girlfriend. Nothing ends a friendly relationship than telling a guy that his girlfriend is a total and absolute bitch with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

A try at being serious.

2009-05-31T21:43:00.002+08:00

Usually in this blog I'm flippant and irreverent, at least when I'm not angry. Since I've been challenged, however, to write something that's difficult and thoughtful I thought I'd first try my hand at being serious.

I'd like to introduce an old woman to you. She's nobody special. I mean obviously she was someone special to her family and friends, but on a scale beyond that she was nobody anybody knew about or would care to know about.

I saw this woman almost every time I walked between my home and the nearest supermarket or the nearby bus station. Say I saw her about three times a week. She was a shrivelled-up little thing. Short. Wrinkled. Every (visible) piece of flesh sagged under the weight of years. I would guess she was in her late seventies or possibly even older.

How can I guess her age? Whenever I saw her, she was sitting outside of the little house—shack, really—that served as her family home as well as a teeny cigarette and booze shop. The shack had four generations of people in it ranging from a child not much older than Lucas to this woman. A bit of math and I've got her in her late seventies and possibly even her early eighties.

This woman was in the deep throes of dementia. It was clear every time I saw her that she did not have much time left in this world. She would sit in a crudely-made bamboo chair under a piece of fibreglass sheeting propped up by a stick acting as a crude sunscreen and rain shelter in front of the family home, stare down at the ground and mumble to herself constantly. She didn't interact with anybody; her family would address her with respect and kindness, would take care of her, but she never really directly acknowledged them.

This was the normal state of affairs. Sometimes, however, she would, fleetingly, show glimpses of awareness of her surroundings. She might smile at what was probably her great-grandson, for example, and reach out to him. Or (and this is where I come in) she might actually look up at the world, see a stranger—a foreigner—and smile with almost childlike wonder. These moments were rare as far as I could tell. I maybe saw them once a month or less. It was their rarity and their unexpectedness that made them inexplicably valuable.

The more perceptive readers will have noted by now that I persist in using the past tense to speak of this woman. About two weeks ago, you see, something changed in that home and tiny shop. A large wreath suddenly occupied that primitive shelter in front of the shop that the woman sat in. Too, the house was alive with visitors: people smoking, people playing 麻将 (Mahjong) – people, in short, having a good time at all hours of the day and night for two days straight. I caught this at roughly 6PM and then again much later in the day. It was clear that the family was awake and active around the clock.

Why is this significant? That's how the Chinese mark a death. Think something along the lines of an Irish wake and you've got it about right. To help ease the spirit of the dead person into the afterlife you celebrate. You don't go to sleep (or, rather, more accurately, there's always somebody awake and active). In this way you drive off the evil spirits and calm the recently dead. Everybody in the family and in the circle of friends participates in this ritual to ensure that there's no time without the noise of a happy family.

Why else is this significant? That old lady I never knew anything about, but who would on infrequent occasions make eye contact with and reward me with a smile of purest wonder and joy, I've never seen since. When the wreath disappeared, so did she. I've never seen her sitting outside the little shop that was her home since.

This leaves me unaccountably sad.

OK, before Mom kills me...

2009-05-29T22:40:00.007+08:00

...I should probably keep my promise, albeit two days delayed.

This is another Lucas entry people, so if you're not interested in a parent's obviously unbiased view as to his spawn being the cutest thing in the world, move along. I understand there's a blog featuring paint drying that's probably more interesting than this one will be.

So, I keep getting asked what Lucas is like. I keep getting stymied in trying to explain it. How, exactly, do you describe a whole personality in a few, short sentences? Lucas is a human being (if only just barely at times). And despite being under 18 months old he's still a complex creature. For example he's got "exhuberant, laughing bundle of joy" and he's got "cranky, whiny little thing". Talk about range! ~~Jack Nicholson~~ Heath Ledger's got nothing on him!

OK, snarky levity aside, I guess it's time to try and explain what Lucas is like. I'll supplement this with a few pictures.

From Lucas

In general Lucas is a joy. He's happy and mirthful and interested in everything around him. Even the things I don't want him to be interested in. Perhaps especially the things I don't want him to be interested in. You've all seen his happy, interested face in previous entries so I won't bother showing those. Direct your eyes to the picture on the left instead for what his face looks like when he doesn't get what he wants. What's happening there? He wants something and Daddy isn't giving it to him. So he's grabbing Daddy's leg and looking really cranky.

Now usually Lucas isn't cranky. He's cranky a little bit when he's tired but doesn't want to sleep. He's cranky a little bit when interested in something that we won't share with him. Otherwise, however, he's fine. Except when he's sick. Like he was this week, with a cold. See that cranky face above? Imagine a week of this. (This isn't to say that he's always cranky when he's ill. He's just cranky a whole lot more often and switches from giggling to cranky faster than Sichuan Opera singers switch masks.)

From Lucas

One of the other things you don't get to see much of in photos is Lucas sleeping. This is a tragedy, really, because it's one of the things that he's really, really good at. He sleeps with gusto (as you can tell from the photo gracing the right). A bed that's big enough to hold two adults (one of whom is known for being a restless sleeper no less) isn't big enough to hold Lucas without having a tent around him to prevent him from splitting his head when he rolls off. Like he did last night. The rolling off thing, I mean, not the splitting head. The tent on the bed (which, again, you can see in past pictures) saved him from everything except the fright of his life. His screeching howls brought three people to his room in about two heartbeats only to have him suffer the indignity of having those same three people laugh at his terror as we found him trapped at the foot of the bed by the tent. (I know this makes us awful human beings, but it was damned funny!)

From Lucas

Of course he doesn't always sleep in a bed. When Joan and her mother go shopping they bring Lucas along and Lucas often gets worn out from pointing at things and grabbing at things and in general getting overstimulated and overexcited by things. A lot of times when they return, the picture you see to the left is what I'm greeted with.

We generally just leave him in the stroller until he wakes up by himself. This could be hours later.

From Lucas

The walking thing that had us so scared earlier in the year has gone swimmingly. Lucas now trundles around under his own steam and turns our hair white one at a time as he does bone-headed things like walking into corners and door or stumbling over deceptively level floors. Luckily we have a harness rigged up on him that usually permits us to catch him before he hurts himself. The main problem here is that he just gets so excited with whatever has his attention that he forgets about small things like "balance" or "not being in the same place as hard objects". We don't always keep him in a harness, though, as you can see by the picture to the right. (The indistinct thing in the bowl, incidentally, is Lucas' very short-lived pet shrimp. No, I will not be explaining that any further.) Mostly we have him in the harness when outdoors (because falling there can be really bad) or when he's tired and his balance hits levels that in Canada would make a breathalyzer test mandatory.

So there's a thumbnail sketch of my son. The extrovert toddler inflicted upon to introvert parents. (I'm sure that I'm being paid back for something in a past life. Saṃsāra can be a real bitch.) I hope this has given enough of a taste that I stop getting hounded by a frustrated grandmother who has yet to meet her grandson. (In a similar vein I hope that peace breaks out in the Middle East and that I get a hunk of that green cheese from the Moon.)

A shift in direction...

2009-05-17T15:37:00.003+08:00

For years Jeff has been my little hole in the Great Firewall that allowed me to ~~download pornography~~ access the web unhindered while living in China. Basically the Great Firewall is a joke that only stops lazy people and stupid people (neither of whom you really want on the Internet anyway, so you could view it as a public service). Jeff, very kindly, kept a server in his basement hooked up that allowed me to redirect all requests for web pages that were deemed a danger to the state here through a Canadian server that allowed such things.

About a month ago this server's connection went flaky and died. Jeff, being newly married and kind of in a complex part of life, didn't have the time to check it out. I didn't mind, though, because very few sites I really cared about got blocked. That changed this week as Blogger turned out to be a threat to the Chinese government. It became imperative that the problem get solved and, for some reason, Jeff was incommunicado.

I decided that it was really unfair to have Jeff be responsible for my free (as in freedom, not beer) Internet access and embarked on a project to change this. So as of today I have my own tiny, cheap VPS in the USA that runs my little backdoor to the rest of the Internet; the stuff the Chinese government thinks is too dangerous to be seen. Like my blog here. The one I'm posting. Telling you what a bunch of utter shitheads the Chinese government is for being afraid of my little key-clickings telling you harmless, inoffensive things about China (for the most part). Apparently I am a danger to the state. Funny, I don't feel any different from last week this time....

Mr. Hu Jintao? I want the six hours I spent debugging this setup back. Please mail it to me you frightened little child.

Ever have one of those days?

2009-05-12T21:45:00.002+08:00

So...

I'm not sure how to begin this, to be honest. It's just too damned surreal a day. It started off normally enough. I woke up a half-hour before my alarm went off and stared at the ceiling because, for a change, I'd actually had had enough sleep. I had a nice leisurely shower and breakfast and then ambled off to work. I came home, did the job search thing, planned my week's lessons for Wuhuan Engineering and generally relaxed or played with Lucas or both.

3:15 rolls around and I hit the road. I got to Wuhuan way early and wound up playing a video wargame on my N800 for almost an hour before my classroom was opened. (They're way off out in the boondocks, you see, and bus service there can be very, very fast like today or I can wind up with scant minutes to spare because of snarling traffic. Yes, I said "snarling" there. It's called a pun. Look it up.)

Anyway, my teaching goes exceedingly well (I have a really good class in Wuhuan and love teaching there), but the first bit of surrealism invades at about that point. Joan calls about an hour in at 6PM. She'd forgotten I was off teaching you see and was on her way home from work when the batteries in her scooter ran out. She had called to see if I could come out and pick her up, taking the scooter home. Since I was about a three hour walk (more, even?) away that wasn't really feasible so the poor little girl wound up having to push her heavy scooter home a distance that's a good 20 minute walk for me at full speed without a load. And push the scooter up the hill. It's a pretty damned tall hill.

Anyway, I finish my teaching, catch the shuttle bus that takes me about half-way home and then the public bus that drops me off about a 25-minute walk from home. (About 5 minutes, yes, away from where Joan ran out of battery power.) As I get off the bus, I call Joan to make sure she got home OK. Had she left the scooter somewhere, you see, I'd have picked it up on the way seeing as I carry the keys with me for just such a possibility.

Joan made it home alright, but she wasn't in the apartment. Nor was her mother. Nor was Lucas. They were all stuck out in the hallway because Joan's mother had broken the key off in the lock at about 5PM after returning from some shopping. They were stuck outside and had already tried one locksmith and were on their second in getting the door opened. Needless to say I rushed home as quickly as I could, finding my family sitting in the stairwell while a locksmith hammered and picked and hammered and picked and hammered and picked and ...

Well, I got it in my head that perhaps food would be needed for the spud (and the rest of the family, but mostly the spud). It was 9PM by that time, however, and any of the places we'd have wanted to get appropriate foods from were closed. I was sent off on a mission to get some things and managed to find none of them. I instead had to get more expensive alternatives that were sorta-kinda the things we'd sent me out to get in the first place.

This emptied my wallet, incidentally, of all my spending money for the month.

This trip itself was a half-hour round trip so I got back shortly after 9:30 and, just as I pressed the elevator call button, I got the message that the door was opened and I didn't need to go get the food after all.

Lovely.

So how was your day?

Annoying aspects of life in China.

2009-05-10T19:45:00.002+08:00

I went, at Joan's behest, to give a sample lesson at a language training school. I had misgivings about things even before we went and, to my intense depression, found that my misgivings were, if anything, optimistic.

First off, they wanted a 40-minute sample lesson. For a class of students ranging in age from 3 (!) to 9 (!!). This is, flatly, on the face of it, ludicrous. "Oh, they all have the same English level" is not a defence. A three-year old has the attention span of an average gnat while a nine-year old has the attention span of at least three gnats. Teaching to one will bore the other, no matter what.

Oh, and of course, I had about 15 minutes to prepare for this lesson. And nobody could tell me clearly what the students had or had not yet learned. "They've almost finished the first book." "How many units remaining?" "We've started on the second book." "So you've finished the first?" "We've almost finished." Ad nauseum.

So I assembled a lesson from nothing for an age group I have no experience with and an age range which is clearly ludicrous. Only to find out that the main teacher of the class was basically incapable of communicating in English. Joan had to do interpretation on those rare occasions where I needed instructions translated because the class teacher was utterly useless. And, of course, I had three-year olds mixed with nine-year olds.

To call the resulting lesson a travesty would be too unkind to real travesties.

Did I mention that it was incredibly hot as well? That we went an hour there and back for this? I didn't? Consider it mentioned now.

Yeah, so, well, I missed a day. Sue me.

2009-05-09T19:06:00.002+08:00

Yesterday, courtesy of a week of insufficient sleep followed by a night with at most four hours of sleep I was a zombie come update time. I'd like to say that I decided not to write my blog but that's not what happened. Instead I sat at my keyboard and drooled lightly. No decision was involved at all.

I had my first Saturday session teaching at Wuhuan Engineering today. It went well. As is usual for adult students I had a class of motivated people willing to do what I told them even if sometimes they weren't quite sure why. (I always wind up explaining why, but I like to leave a bit of a sense of curiosity in my students at times to keep them interested.) The theme of this week's set of lessons was "learning how to learn" so I closed off the week with a semi-unregulated discussion consisting of them discussing (in English, this being the whole point) things like what they wanted from the course and how they viewed the relationship of teacher to student.

I got some surprisingly good thoughts from them. I really love teaching adult students.

In other news, it's hot now. Yesterday cracked 34C and today I think peaked at 35 or even 36. Even now, at 7PM, it's 31C. Thankfully we haven't hit the high humidity yet. It's only 55% which makes the current "feels like" temperature something like 35. Given that it's only early May, I think this summer is going to be a real scorcher to make up for last summer's mild summer.

Good news and bad news.

2009-05-07T21:00:00.004+08:00

These always seem to come in pairs. (This is actually an improvement over how it used to work, so I'm not really complaining. Much.)

On the good news front, I started my 100-hour session with Wuhuan Engineering today. It was a delicious experience (as adult teaching in China always is because the students are highly motivated) and, at the end of the class, several students, independently, approached me to say how much they enjoyed the class. "I loved it!" as one young lady exclaimed.

On the bad news front it appears that I am not continuing to teach at ISSWHU next term. You may have noticed me referring to them as lacking communication skills (and competence, among other things) in my last post. This incident is a perfect example of what I'm talking about. On April 8th I got this in my email (all errors from original):

Secondly, could you let me what's your project about next semester, if you want still teaching in ISS ,please let me know as soon as possible. thanks!
If you want re-sign the contract ,and the Teaching office and students also approve your work, I will prepare the contracts as soon as possible, also , if you intend to leave, I will prepare your Lecommendation Letter for you.

I've highlighted the important part in bold text. This is typical of the way this school communicates. It commits to absolutely nothing until the last seconds. Every second word out of anybody's mouth is "maybe" or some functional equivalent thereof.

I'm not a moron, though. I replied with "sure", but also started my usual low-intensity job search because until I have a contract I consider myself as available. Indeed yesterday I gave a sample lesson/job interview at another school (which if I get the job could mean I won't even have to change apartments) because there was deafening silence from the ISS. Two weeks after they sent that message, in fact, I sent another email saying, basically, "I replied before but haven't heard anything so just in case it didn't make it through..." and again got deafening silence. Then, today, I got this email:

Firstly, many thanks for your hard work in our school these three years. You are a excellent English teacher.
But I am sorry to say that we have enough English teachers for next semester, so I am afraid we can not sign the contract with you. If you find a new school I will prepare the recommendation letter for you.

So what happened? Well this being China any number of things could have happened and nobody will ever bother to tell the truth. Maybe I stepped on some toes and someone behind the scene decided to get revenge. I consider this unlikely, however, since I've been here for three years and my behaviour hasn't really changed in that time. Had I been stepping on toes there would have been two previous opportunities to get rid of me.

The possibility I think likeliest is that the school is in financial trouble. The hints of this I already saw in my second year, second semester. The East Lake ("Sweathogs") campus has always been this school's cash cow. The main campus gives them a sort of legitimacy in that they give out real, recognized degrees there (they're real Wuhan University degrees with the Wuhan University stamp) while the East Lake campus is where the (very wealthy) dregs of China's educational system wind up. The gallows joke doing the rounds among the foreign teachers was that the school had a skill-testing question as its entrance requirement: "Are you willing to pay double the going legitimate rate to get a degree that is worthless? (The correct answer is 'yes'.)"

What happened, however, in year two, semester two of my time here was that half the students vanished. Vanished because the ISSWHU had its accreditation threatened, specifically because of the complete and utter lack of academic standards at the East Lake campus. The school had to divest itself of half (or even more than half) of its students at East Lake or face closure. That had to hurt income!

More clues arise over year three. Suddenly East Lake campus has an Italian guy and a Spanish guy teaching English, something that sounds an awful lot like cost-cutting to me. Also they reneged on a promise to me that I wouldn't have to teach out at East Lake. This sounds like it was a case of mollifying the administrator at that campus (who bizarrely seems to have more power than the Dean) who was probably upset at the difficulty in selling English lessons by non-native speakers. (The irony is that the two guys in question, despite being non-native speakers, are better English teachers than several of the previous native speakers were! Remember, appearances are what counts in any kind of business, not actual performance.) In addition my teaching hours got reduced from the first term (14 hours raised to 16 when one of the foreign teachers went back home to die) to the second (12 hours).

The big clue, however, is that even at the main campus they're losing students. I'm teaching the same four classes this term that I taught last term, but what I've noted is that all of my classes have shrunk. They all had 29 except for one at 36 last term, but this term my largest class has 29 and my smallest 21. Discussing it with other foreign teachers I'm also seeing that my shrinkage is on the lower end of the scale. One teacher reported a drop from 36 to 16 students. (I note here that this isn't students just not showing up to class. This is students who've moved on to another school!) Talking this over with some of my better-informed students I find out that the students in general are very disgruntled with the poor quality of education they perceive the school as providing. The better students stopped studying for their ISS classes and instead studied for a placement exam that would allow them to move to a better school. The rest are increasingly despondent and bitter. Only a few have done the "given lemons, make lemonade thing".

So why was I singled out for not being continued? Well, I'm the most expensive of the foreign teachers. A combination of better credentials, experience and a raise for year three probably made me the one to cut as the accounting death spiral begins.

Thankfully I'm a cynic and didn't put all my eggs in one basket, eh?

Film at 11.

2009-05-06T17:51:00.001+08:00

I'll just let my son speak for himself again.

Mounting income.

2009-05-06T12:47:00.003+08:00

So, the first request from the string of "I'll talk about that in the future" things in my last entry was for details about money. This came from Melissa Barna, the wife of the son of one of my mother's best friends. ("Confused? You will be on the next episode of Soap!") So, Melissa, this one is for you!

The school I currently work for is not especially generous (nor communicative, nor competent, nor...). Actually none of the government-run schools in Wuhan is especially generous unless they're off in the "suburbs" (the locals' term for the farmland surrounding the city) and desperate for people willing to live away from anything resembling civilization. The practical upshot of this is that at 4700元 per month, I'm not exactly rolling in cash. A single person can live very comfortably off of this, but with three more people (one a toddler with all the expenses this entails) it becomes, well, not a strain but more bland a lifestyle. And it's definitely not conducive to building up a good savings account. This is why, of course, I ignore my contract and do extra work outside of the school. (Everybody does it and contracts are basically wallpaper here anyway, so it's not as if I'm doing anything risky.)

One job I've had lined up since October of last year is a three-hour weekly stint at a local middle school. My weekly salary at 12-16 hours (currently 12) with my main school is 1085元. Adding an extra three hours of teaching boosts that by 450元 because I'm being paid 150元／hour in the sideline job. (By way of comparison my main job's hourly rate ranges from 68 to 90元/hour depending on how many hours I've been assigned.) So basically it's a nice almost 50% boost to my pay (from 1085 to 1535元/week) that does the family good and it's not a whole lot of extra work.

There is, however, another job I do. It's an infrequent one, but it's incredibly lucrative. A local engineering firm does a lot of international business. They take the ability of their employees to communicate with foreign business partners and customers very seriously and, as a result, have embarked upon a very ambitious project of upgrading all of their employees' English language skills.

A former colleague of mine worked contract for them for a couple of years. Last summer he was told that the company wanted to run two courses and asked him to recommend another English-speaking language instructor. Now for a variety of reasons (this is China, after all) the original plan fell through, but I guess they were impressed by me in the interview, so when the usual fall course opened they had me split hours with Peter. (I originally felt a little uncomfortable with this because it felt like I was being used to replace Peter, but Peter had by then gotten an even more lucrative, full-time position so he didn't mind.)

The courses they run are 100 hours in length, 10 hours per week. And they pay a whopping 280元/hour. That's more than three times my hourly rate even this term where I'm teaching only 12 hours a week in my main school. And it's almost double the rate I'm paid by the middle school. This means that my weekly income is now 4335元. So by taking two extra jobs I'm almost quadrupling my base weekly income for the next ten weeks and I'm almost tripling my previous total income with just that one job!

I worked it out. Last year I only got 7 hours out of the 10 per week (with Peter getting the remaining 3) so I earned from that company 19,600元 for that one session. That's 4 months of my base salary, by way of comparison. This time around my total income from that company is going to be 28,000元; about six months of my salary at my main school. Thus for a lot fewer total hours of teaching (albeit more preparation work being required since each 10-week course is about 3 terms of English teaching hours!) I'm getting about the same amount of money. (The school only pays me ten months out of the year, you see.)

On top of that, the school still has the added problem that I hate half the students! I'm still teaching the Sweathogs, though at least now it's fewer hours than teaching my real students. By comparison even the worst of the engineering company's students are well-motivated and hard-working. So I'm getting less money, more work and students I hate. What's keeping me teaching here?

Well, this is where China's systems work against me. To stay in China I need a job with an employer sanctioned by the state to hire foreigners. And to be fair to my school I get a few benefits from them to go along with the headaches of incompetent administration, poor facilities and, in many cases, terrible students. One of those benefits is a rent-free apartment; another, subsidized utilities.

Still, for two 10-week sessions I make as much money as my main "real" job. If I could get a third one guaranteed that would more than cover my costs of having a business visa, renting my own apartment (or paying for a mortgage on one) and would leave me with a whole lotta hours to fill with other possible ventures (or a whole lot more hours to spend with my boy watching him grow while driving his mother and grandmother insane).

Yeah, I'm still working the angles.

Back in the saddle.

2009-05-05T20:19:00.004+08:00

From Lucas

So, it's been almost a month since my last update and I've had several people (Roger, Karim, Barb, Mom) nagging at me to update finally. And you know what? They're right. Yes, I've been a busy little sleep-deprived beaver, but that's not a good enough reason to ignore the blog completely.

From Lucas

So, to make up for this, I'm (tentatively) committing myself to updating this blog every day from today (Tuesday) until Saturday. Then I've put my blogging commitments every Sunday in my Google Calendar (which I am also tentatively committing to keep up to date) so that you know without having to nag what's up.

From Lucas

OK. So this is going to be another Lucas post. After a partial application of the treatment (we pulled him early because of a bad respiratory illness contracted while in the hospital), Lucas has had a near-miraculous improvement. He's now walking, verging on running, like a champ (presuming, of course, that champions routinely stumble and wind up just this side of falling flat on their faces only because their parents or grandmother has cat-like reflexes combined with a sixth sense for baby stupidity). When I squint right, I still see hints of the problem that he has, but he's adapted really well once shown the way and, so far, we've seen no strong need to return him for a second round. (We may still do that, however, especially with the recent two-month-and-a-bit tripling of my salary which I'll get into in a later post.) On top of everything, Lucas has, since his treatment, been in general a whole lot more cheerful (and cheerfully destructive, which again will be highlighted in a later post).

From Lucas

And he's car-obsessed. Which again, you guessed it, will be highlighted upon in a later post.

So what will I be talking about in this post? Well, frankly, not much of anything. I thought I'd let my son talk for himself in the medium of being too damned cute for the camera.

The Secret to Good Postal Service

2009-04-08T10:55:00.002+08:00

I live in a "communist" (more properly "socialist") country. Well, in name anyway. (In reality the world's lowest concentration of actual communists is in the Chinese Communist Party.) As such I live in, at least by popular perception, a surveillance state in which every move I make is watched by the agents of the state. This paranoid worldview has some merit, of course. Just to make sure people don't think I've gone native and am acting as an apologist for China's government let me make it abundantly clear: the Chinese government is evil. More evil, even, than the American government or the Canadian government. (The fact that the Dalai Lama is more evil than the Chinese government is a separate issue that I'll address at some other point.) The problem with using the word "evil", however, is that to most people this brings up comic book imagery—evil for the sake of doing evil—and that is patently not true. The evil has a purpose and a direction and, as a result, can actually be dealt with. We are not talking psychopaths exhulting in their service to evil here, we're talking normal people without the usual checks and balances that other, slightly less evil, societies place upon them.

So why am I babbling about evil as a precursor to talking about good postal service? Well, it's instructional, you see. Most expatriates living in China have the cartoon version of evil in their heads and are convinced that lurking behind every wall and around every corner is an agent of the 公安 (Public Security Bureau, a.k.a. police) just waiting to do something hopelessly evil for kicks. My first teaching partner in Jiujiang was that way. She would tell me tales in hushed breath of finding a microphone concealed inside a Santa Claus candle that was only exposed because the candle burned down to the point where you could see it. (She told it as a first-person story. Oddly enough, so have about two dozen other people from all around the country which leads me to believe that either these people are all passing along an urban legend as personal fact or that Santa Claus candles are very common surveillance tools spread all over China. I know which I believe.)

There I go again, talking about evil and not about postage. Well, the thing is, you see, that China Post is known for opening mail. Packages especially. Most expatriates have had lots of experience with getting packages in the mail that had been very obviously opened, rifled through and then passed on to them. And, of course, this leads to suspicions that things have been removed. (In many cases things have been removed, in fact.)

I don't have this experience. In eight years of living here I've had two packages opened and three which went astray. (There was also one that was delayed by a humourous whole year.) And the reason why? Basic psychology at work.

Yes, China Post opens mail. (So does Canada Post, incidentally. And every other mail system in the world. But since they're not labelled with the "communist" pejorative people assume it's for a "good" reason.) The trick to not getting your mail opened is to be aware that the people opening it aren't comic book villains. They're underpaid, overworked ordinary people just like you. In short, they're lazy. Just like you. If they have a choice of packages in front of them to inspect, they're going to take the one that's easy to open. The packages my mother sends (like the one I got today) are no such thing. My mother probably single-handedly props up various tape manufacturing companies' stock prices just by the way she packages the boxes. At least five metres of tape wrap every parcel. The parcel I got today might have had a grand total of 20 square centimetres untaped. This is not a parcel that's easy to open. This is the kind of parcel that an overworked, underpaid worker just like you is going to pass over in favour of another parcel that's got thin paper wrapping it (if any) and a few pieces of tape strategically placed to hold it in place.

That is how you get good postal service in China.

Settling down to the new routine.

2009-04-06T20:21:00.002+08:00

So, the last couple of weeks have been very crazy and I lacked all energy and desire to think about my life at all, not to mention telling people about it. Things have settled down (somewhat), now, so I'll do a brief recap.

Lucas' medical problem is definitely not a serious version. There is every indication, in fact, that he could have learned to walk on his own and just been a little odd-looking while doing it for the rest of his life. There's even the possibility that there isn't a problem at all and that he's just a slow developer walking-wise. Still, that being said, I support the therapy for him. It's really simple analysis:

We don't do the therapy. Lucas has a problem. He's saddled with it for life. (bad outcome)
We don't do the therapy. Lucas doesn't have a problem. No change. (neutral outcome)
We do the therapy. Lucas has a problem. The therapy helps him. (good outcome)
We do the therapy. Lucas doesn't have a problem. No change. (neutral outcome)

If we don't do the therapy, we've got one bad possible outcome and one neutral possible outcome. If we do the therapy we've got one good possible outcome and one neutral possible outcome. (I'm not factoring in the cost of the therapy because the analysis is specifically for "should we spend the cash?" I'm also not putting in pessimistic evaluations like "we do the therapy and it makes things worse" for reasons I'll outline below.) Basically the answer writes itself, doesn't it?

Anyway, after some serious adjustments to lifestyles, we've settled into a new routine. I've had glimpses of his treatment in bits and pieces over the last little while but today, courtesy of visiting friends of Joan's mother and my own availability because of the national holiday (Grave-Sweeping Day), I got the whole picture and can paint a copy of it for those of you who haven't fallen asleep because of Yet Another Lucas Blog Entry (YALBE). Here's what my son goes through every day.

First he's bundled up and taken to the hospital. Upon arrival he's scheduled for the "neural channel balance" treatment. When the time comes, he's taken into the ~~torture chamber~~ treatment room and hooked up to the machine. The first round, for ten minutes, has electrodes on his wrists and at his elbows. He's given low-voltage, low-amperage shocks about 2.5 times per second making his muscles twitch. He hates this with a passion and starts squalling along with the 10-15 other babies in the room being given the same indignities. After a few minutes of this he stops squalling and just whines a lot. Now I'll point out that this treatment is not painful (I tried it out once for a lark as a form of exercise a few years back). It's just really, really annoying and to a baby undoubtedly really, really frightening.

After the ten minutes on the arm, the electrodes are moved to the ball of the foot and the back of the knee and he's left twitching there for 20 minutes. He hates this even more and squalls the entire time, exhausting himself. When this is finished he's moved to a different machine and hooked up behind the ears. I don't know what this particular machine is called since the labelling is all in Chinese, but it doesn't seem to cause any visible twitching. Further, once the electrodes are glued on and the machine turned on, Lucas slowly relaxes and, because of the exhaustion from the first two rounds, falls asleep. This goes on for 30 minutes.

Once the ~~electroshock~~ neural channel balance treatment is completed, he's moved over to physiotherapy. There a very nice doctor (and very patient, something he has to be to deal with a child as strong and wilful as my son!) puts Lucas through his paces. Now in the past, according to Joan, Lucas actively fought with the doctors. I saw no signs of this today, however. He didn't cry. He didn't struggle (much). He whined at a couple of things, but mostly he just patiently endured and played with Joan and I while the doctor forced his feet and legs into proper postures and held him there for a while. (The one time he whined loudly, but not quite cried, had the doctor forcing him to squat and stand repeatedly for about five minutes straight.) This goes on for about 40 minutes. After that Lucas is left free to crawl (and walk!) around the physiotherapy room with its padded floors and walls (not to mention the large selection of toys and balls, the former supplied by the various parents in the room who share with each other).

Some of the equipment in this room amused me. It looks very basic and unsophisticated, like a rustic's notion of a hospital, but each piece was actually quite well-designed for its task. One piece, for example, for assisting with balance, is basically a platform with a V-shaped bottom. The doctor stands on the platform, helping the baby stand, and then rocks the platform back and forth. In a western hospital this would be an expensive piece of electrical equipment, likely computer controlled, but in the end would do exactly the same thing -- just for a thousand times (literally) the price. Sometimes the technology fetish of the west amuses me.

Anyway, back to Lucas' day.

This is his lunchtime. Normally he's taken back to his bed in the hospital and is fed, but today was special. We dragged him out of the hospital and into a restaurant with Joan's mother and the visiting friends. After that we returned to the hospital for the ~~manual torture~~ massage therapy. Again Joan insists that he usually fights the doctor and screams loudly, and to give her credit the other babies in the room (six tables, four were active) were certainly lending credence to this report. Whatever the reason, though, Lucas today just slept through it. I mean that literally. He slept through 30 minutes or so of the 45-minute massage.

The doctor was very good. Very strong, but very skillful, fingers worked over my boy quickly, precisely, firmly and yet gently. (I wish I could find a masseuse like that for my back!) Lucas woke up toward the end, when the massage moved up to his head, and he started a low-grade whining when the masseuse started working on his head around his face. Otherwise, however, he was having more fun playing with Joan and me than he was having annoyance at the massage. This despite the fact that all around him were babies screaming at the top of their lungs as they were manipulated up and down the entire length of their bodies.

Then it was time to come home again, Lucas cheerful, practically bubbling and me silently bursting with pride when I mentally compared his behaviour with that of the other babies I saw. (That same comparison, incidentally, is why I so confidently assert that his problem is not a serious one.) I also left with considerably more respect for Chinese hospital treatment than I went in with. Chinese hospitals are still a little weak on germ theory, it seems, but surgery and now physiotherapy they're both top-notch at in my opinion.

Judging the RCMP fairly.

2009-03-23T11:57:00.002+08:00

According to William Elliot, the Commissioner of the RCMP, we should not judge the RCMP unfairly in the Robert Dziekanski affair. I agree with him fully. We should be 100% fair in our judgement. We should listen to the evidence impartially and then reach our conclusion. Only then should the RCMP be disbanded and replaced with a force that has civilian oversight of its operations.

The problem Mr. Elliot is having is that the fair facts are utterly damning of his organization. The more facts spill out in this inquiry, the more utterly damned the RCMP comes out. The force has lied, cheated and even attempted outright theft to keep these facts from coming out and, as a result, has lost any and all credibility it may once have had.

The latest (and last) of the four state-protected killers (I refuse at this point to call them "police officers" any longer) has finally given his version of events. This was the guy in charge of the goon squad that killed Robert Dziekanski and his testimony is the most risible of all, and the most inadvertantly revealing. One thing that I missed before (quite possibly because it wasn't reported) is that the four killer goons were sitting down to a meal when they got the call. I think this is an important thing to remember when reconstructing what likely really happened. He also claimed, in the most farcical portion of testimony so far (and when you consider the previous testimony about the threatening stapler position that's really saying something!), that in the ten minutes it took the goon squad to go from their meal to Dziekanski that they didn't exchange a single word. Just how stupid do these people think we are?

Let me piece together what likely happened to lead to Dziekanski's death.

Bureaucratic bungling beyond all reasonable (and most unreasonable) levels left Robert Dziekanski tired, confused, dehydrated and distraught stuck in a foreign country where nobody could or would speak with him.
He "acted up" as a result. (Anybody who feels this is not a 100% expected outcome should try it themself sometime: being confied in a tin can for twelve hours followed by ten hours of wandering around an increasingly hostile place with no food, no water and no communication.)
A call goes in and interrupts four hyper-macho thugs in uniform at their meal.
The four decide to get in, get the job done and get out in the quickest possible way. I submit the interruption of their meal predisposed them to using force and violence just out of raw anger.
They follow their plan (and yes, I believe they planned this).
Dziekanski didn't act the meek, docile sheep they wanted to see, so they tazed him multiple times as a show of power. A show of who's the sheepdog and who's the sheep, so to speak.
In a staggering display of callousness they don't take the time to monitor the person they've just electrocuted five times. (Were I a snide bastard I'd suggest they were planning how they were going to continue their meal.)
In a continuing display of said callousness they refuse to take the handcuffs off when an emergency treatment team requests it, convinced that the by-now-dead Dziekanski (who they probably thought was unconscious) posed a horrible threat to the four burly, armoured men around him.
Oops. He was dead already. Time for the cover-up to begin.
They consulted with each other to make their notes tell the same story.
Oops. Someone had video.
They confiscate the video for "the investigation".
The goons' superiors and the RCMP public relations weasels cook up a story that made the killers' actions sound reasonable. They increased the amount of screaming and violence from their victim from zero to a credible danger while reducing the number of officers involved from four to three.
Oops. The person with the camera isn't docile sheep and wants his video back.
Oops. The video makes it to the media.
Oops. The media does its job for a change and shows what really happened.

Now if William Elliot and the rest of the RCMP leadership were smart, they'd just 'fess up at this point and say "the officers in question screwed up, as did our training and leadership". But that's not what they do. Instead they circle the wagons and go in all out Massada mode. They pile lie on lie, prevarication on prevarication and build up a teetering, wobbly stack of shit that is now sliding down in a brown avalanche and staining the RCMP's reputation (along with the rest of the country's!) in the process.

And they're still too stupid to see that it's the end.

This is why I think it's time to disband the RCMP and replace them with a real police force with real oversight. I don't want people as stupid as the RCMP have shown themselves to be to be in charge of our national safety and security. If we're going to have criminals running things, at least, for God's sake, let them be smart criminals for a change!

...on the other hand...

2009-03-18T14:54:00.002+08:00

I ended off my last blog post on Sunday with a chipper thing about surprises I like. Today's blog entry is a not-so-happy one.

It starts with happy news, of course. Today marks the third year since Joan, in a weird fit or something, decided that she'd actually spend the rest of her life with me. The fact that I've been blessed with this for three years makes the rest of my life worthwhile. Lucas' addition to the family over fourteen months ago amplifies this.

The event has been overshadowed, however, by some bad news. (Indeed the event almost passed me by unnoticed.) Yesterday Lucas was at the hospital to check into something that worried Joan and her mother. It turns out I should have been worried too.

Lucas' slow development in walking is not because of normal variance in children picking up the skill. He has been diagnosed as having something called "Central Coordination Disturbance". This seems, on my digging, to be a code phrase for "Cerebral Palsy". Specifically, it seems, that the version of CP in question is "Spastic Diplegia". Caught early enough there is treatment for it that can bring it under control and give him a semblance of a normal life in terms of walking, etc. He'll never be graceful or nimble (no world-famous athlete or dancer here), but if the treatment works he'll at least be able to look somewhat normal while walking or possibly even running.

Of course treatment is open-ended and expensive (and, naturally, not at all guaranteed to be effective). How expensive? Savings-account draining expensive. The minimum cost is 4000RMB for a twenty-day course of treatment. I make 4700RMB per month. Do the math and you see bank accounts draining to zero in no time at all. (Thankfully I married someone who is good at saving or there wouldn't be a savings account to even start draining!)

This is the final nail in the coffin of my teaching. I was getting tired of dealing with the spoiled brats of China's wealthy, self-proclaimed elites already. Now I have an added incentive to leave: teaching just doesn't pay enough. It's time to go back into software for real.

Anybody who knows a friend who knows a friend who knows someone who's looking for a seasoned software developer, please feel free to pass on my email address (ttmrichter@gmail.com), my GoogleTalk address (ttmrichter@gmail.com) or my YIM address (michael_richter_1966). I'm in the market again.

Surprises

2009-03-15T12:59:00.002+08:00

The growth of a child kind of creeps up on you. You just all of a sudden notice, for example, that the kid you were once able to comfortably hold with one hand and your forearm is now so big that you can't hold him up high enough to keep his feet of your chest while playing on the bed. (You also find out that the kid you used to be able to toss around like a baseball now throws your crippled back when you try it. I learned that the hard way this week.)

It's the intellectual development, however, that sneaks up on you the most quietly, especially in the pre-vocal stage. Its difficult to spot what the child is learning because there's no quick feedback like you'd get if the child could talk.

We got some feedback from Lucas this week.

A long time ago we got this flashcard/book type of affair with pictures of animals in it. Patiently his grandmother, his mother and I would show him pictures and say the name of the animal. (In Chinese at this point. Starting next month he gets the same treatment in English.) At first Lucas was uninterested in them (except for wanting to eat them). After that he just wanted to play with the cards, fanning them out from the rivet that binds them all in one corner, bending them and generally being his destructive self on them. He also enjoyed touching the pictures and running his finger along the edges. There was, however, no sign that he understood the language at all. (That pre-vocal thing and all that.)

Then the hammer dropped this week. While playing with Lucas, Joan asked him (in Chinese) "Where's the dog?". She was, of course, referring to his favourite pal, the Snoopy-like stuffed dog. The cards, however, happened to be out and fanned open and the picture of the dog (a dalmatian) was exposed. Instead of pointing to his favourite pal, Lucas reached across and pointed at the picture of the dog. This sent a wave of excitement through the family and poor Lucas was pestered for the entire length of his attention span (roughly twenty seconds) with "where's the lion?" and "where's the tiger?" and "where's the elephant?" and such questions. He very ably identified the animals (even some of the more difficult ones). He'd confuse the lion and tiger quite often and sometimes got the chimpanzee mixed up with the monkey. But overall his comprehension of those words was better than my Sweathogs' would be given the same vocabulary.

These are the kinds of surprises I like in my life.

Delightful Chinglish

2009-03-08T17:40:00.002+08:00

I had a fun week with the good students. The subject was idiom and translation—basically an introduction to not speaking Chinglish. Of course it's hard, typically, to find a good example of why learning proper idiomatic expression is important. Luckily I had a secret weapon at my disposal: the packaging of a lock Joan got with her new electric scooter. (I know I promised pictures when we next had good weather. We honestly haven't had any good weather recently. The closest we got was a half-overcast day on Friday and instead of going out for pictures we worried more about things like laundry.)

This lock package has what is probably the most delightful example of how not to do it that I've seen in China. It is absolutely breath-taking in its incomprehensibility. Let me give you a taste:

Quality is our fundamental
Ares locks on a "quality-oriented, good faith for the first" for the purpose of the constant pursuit of true wood products is expected, good looks, so that Every consumer to buy a Heart, and must feel at ease.

Maintenance:
In the course of use, such as the case of Ni Chen debris into the Keyhole, a key rotation or impeded access difficult situation, not to inject viscous – The lubricants, use a small gasoline into Suoxin, and then repeatedly inserted key cleansing, and afterwards in a few keys on the increase Qianfen(pencil Core Mo) can be lubricated.

(Note: all formatting and spelling errors above are verbatim from the package. I made sure there are no transcription errors.)

And so it goes on and on. Splendid, isn't it? It's like the god of bad English descended to make a perfect example for my lessons.

What I initially intended to do turned out to be too difficult, so I had to dumb down the exercise a bit. Originally my plan was to have them try and back-translate the Chinglish into the original Chinese and then translate it properly. It turns out that they couldn't recognize the relevant Chinese idioms and structures when expressed in another language. In the end I had to have someone in the class type out the Chinese on the screen so that they could just do the straightforward one-way translation.

The point of the lesson, of course, was to show that there's an awful lot more to language than mere grammar and vocabulary; that when (not if!) they found themselves having to do business in English with people from around the world they'd better learn idiom as well on top of everything else.

Of course their translations were better than what's on the package. (They'd have to be!) However the exercise highlighted other problems. Aside from the usual bunch of spelling and grammar errors (which aren't really important here since I'm not teaching English majors) there was a big difference in communication style. Their translations were circumlocutory and frustratingly vague with overuse of the passive voice. This is not the favoured language for business communication. Next week's lesson has practically written itself!

One of the questions I asked the classes was "Why is there any English on this package at all?" I got the usual suspects in terms of answers: maybe they want to sell abroad or to foreigners living in China, etc. I did get an interesting thought from one student however. He opined that the English was there to make the company look international to Chinese eyes. If he's right—and he well could be—then the quality of the translation doesn't matter at all. It's intended to wow the rubes, after all, not native speakers. That was food for thought, something I always like getting from my students.

Yeah, so, well, delays happen.

2009-03-05T12:08:00.002+08:00

I know. Sunday update on the next Thursday. I got busy. Sue me.

Sunday I spent most of the day buying a replacement external DVD drive so I could finally get Joan's new laptop working the way I wanted it to work. (English Windows, Chinese Windows add-on, English Office, Chinese Office add-on.) That was two days total work. (I am not making this up!) Oh, and I installed Ubuntu on it, complete with Chinese language support so that when Windows died I'd have some way to recover the lost data. (This is why I use Ubuntu, after all, when I found that I could recover my data on my trashed system using Ubuntu, but there was no way I could do it with Windows.) Anyway, on top of all that I had some problems accessing Blogger and it was Thursday before I thought to try again, so here I am.

Other than the excuse above, this is going to be an all-Lucas post. If Lucas bores you, you might want to tune out and visit a site with interesting content.

Lucas is developing into quite the little handful. He's very demanding, very active and very assertive. Pretty much exactly what I expected which is why Joan and I were always hoping for a girl. He's also large. Very large. I don't have exact measurements right now, but he's probably around 75cm tall or more and definitely over 30 pounds by now.

He's developed a few idiosyncracies which can be cute or aggravating depending on circumstance and person. First, now, he's very clear on what he wants and when he wants it, he'll point demandingly and then stare at the person who's supposed to get it for him. This can sometimes lead to comical tears when he does things like points at the light fixture on the ceiling and gets crushed when nobody will go get it for him. (I find the tears in these situations funny. Joan, not so much. I'm just a bad man at heart.)

The second idiosyncracy he has is his fascination with faces. He loves to grab onto various parts (nose, lips, ears, etc.) and examine them closely. Or if he's in a more active mood he just loves to scratch over them. (I can't begin to count the number of times I've had to pull my head back quickly because he was about to claw my eyes out.) He also likes sticking his fingers into ears, nostrils or even mouths. Hell, sometimes he loves sticking his whole hand into people's mouths if they're stupid enough to let him.

A final idiosyncracy is his nomenclature. He knows I'm "ba-ba" and Joan is "ma-ma". He even usually gets Joan's mother somewhat right as "djia-djia" (it should be "jia-jia"). He has, however, identified personality traits with other things. Things that are comfortable and comforting are also "ma-ma". Things that give him food (outside of milk) are "djia-djia" and things that he finds fun and exciting (I'm the one most prone to throwing him in the air and swinging him around, after all) are often "ba-ba".

Development-wise, he's a bit of a slow one. Kind of like his old man. He's only just now learning how to walk, for example, and he's really, really bad at it. We have a little harness for him that we use to let him trundle around without him falling flat on his face or, I think, he'd never walk at all. Of course I know that normal child development has walking going on between 9 and 18 months, but Joan and her mother are positively convinced that he has some major problem and are constantly worrying. (This seems to be generally Chinese woman behaviour: worry over everything whether or not worrying accomplishes anything.) Lucas, of course, is oblivious to all of this as he screams and giggles while trundling forward at breakneck speeds. He's positively delighted at the mobility. And the accessibility of all those interesting things he could only see from a distance before.

The adventure continues. Next time I'll really post on Sunday instead of delaying so long.

Ice storm cancelled...

2009-02-26T10:02:00.000+08:00

...due to lack of interest.

We're going to get some freezing rain tonight and tomorrow morning, but no ice storm.

Weather warning (plus the shame of Canada).

2009-02-25T18:50:00.003+08:00

First the shame side. The Province has an interesting editorial that harmonizes with my view on that Robert Dziekanski fiasco in Vancouver. Nobody who isn't circling the wagons can look at that situation and say that everything went the way it should have. As the editorial points out, every involved agency in that sordid affair has brought changes into effect to prevent such an incident from happening again. Every agency, that is, except the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

The RCMP in this matter have smeared not only their force's honour and reputation, they've smeared the reputation of the country as a whole. I know of no Canadian expats anywhere who've not had to contend with people asking questions about Robert Dziekanski and how his death was allowed to happen. Canada's image as a kind, gentle and above all humane nation was struck a serious blow by this affair and it looks like the RCMP are bound and determined to keep it that way.

The testimony of the first officer (Constable Gerry Rundel, for the record) is flatly laughable. Four burly, presumably well-trained men (they'd better be damned well trained for the price tag that force bears!) in body armour felt afraid of a solitary pudgy man with a stapler? Excuse me? If it were not an actionable piece of slander or libel (whichever applies to online communication) I would suggest that Constable Rundel has been spending just a little bit too much time in the special section of the evidence room with the funny plants if he thinks this is a plausible explanation.

This goes double for when this same "peace officer" said he was afraid of the man's combative stance. (That combative stance, for the record, as the video shows, was hands down at his side, albeit with a stapler in his hand. Pretty fierce weapon a desktop stapler. I can see why four burly, well-trained, armoured police officers were in fear for their lives!)

Finally, the flat-out lying in the testimony gets to me. Constable Rundel claims that the four "peace officers" in question didn't discuss a game plan before encountering Robert Dziekanski. That this was allowed to go unanswered in the inquiry is beyond belief. In the video of the matter – the full video, not the bowdlerized version that reached television – you can clearly hear one officer asking for clearance to taze and another giving it: both before the officers had even come on the scene, mind, to assess the situation. Not only had some planning been done beforehand (and caught on record) but that planning basically consisted of "let's taze him and call it a day".

Not the RCMP's finest hour indeed. I can't help but remember that the Airborne regiment was disbanded for similar behaviour and they, arguably, had something resembling a reason to pound that Somali kid. (Not a good reason, note, just something resembling a reason.)

OK, rant is over. On to the weather. Tomorrow is going to be a lovely day according to forecasts. A high of 0C with freezing rain and the threat of a full-blown ice storm. Given the hinky nature of infrastructure in this city, if the ice storm happens you can expect me to be incommunicado for anywhere from a few hours to a few weeks depending on the severity. If I suddenly drop off the face of the planet don't worry about it. I'm probably just shivering in my home without electricity and/or Internet.

Global warming my ass.

First week of school.

2009-02-22T21:13:00.004+08:00

Well, before I talk about my usual boring drivel, let me talk about a shameful thing I have done. I have signed up for Facebook. I resisted it for years, but it finally caught up with me. (Thankfully I've managed to avoid the pressure to sign up for MySpace or LiveJournal!) My blog here gets echoed over to Facebook, but pictures and stuff like that don't show up over there so this blog is still the main point of contact if you want to keep track of things.

The shame aside, this week was my first week of classes in the new year. In a pleasant surprise, I'm now only teaching four hours at the Sweathogs campus and eight hours with the real students. Three out of my four classes in the main campus are my students from last term and the last one is the one I inherited from Virginia after she went home in the middle of last term because of her cancer's sudden and drastic return. (I'll blog on her at some point but right now don't feel like it for reasons which will become obvious when I finally do get around to it.) The two classes at the Sweathogs campus, however, are new to me. They were Gudrun's students (the new teacher who replaced Peter when he ditched for a job that paid over five times as much) last term, but apparently I got them this term and she got at least two of mine from last term. The poor girl.

I really hate having to constantly contrast the two campuses, but really, it doesn't get much more "light and day" in comparison. Out of my four classes at the main campus, each class 27-29 students (except for the one I got from Virginia which weighs in at 39), I had four students missing total and maybe two or three who came in a few seconds late. Out of my two classes at the Sweathogs campus, one class at 24, the other 25 students, I had six students from one class not show up at all and three from the second (plus an additional four who snuck out at break and didn't come back before I closed the door). And I had well over a dozen total who came in late – some of them as much as fifteen minutes late.

You may have spotted that bit about the ones who snuck out at break and didn't make it back in time? Yeah. I'm harsh with those retards this term. And here's the funny thing: I told them I was going to do it. I gave them a single sheet of very simple rules that very clearly stated I would be doing this! It doesn't get much clearer than "the door closes when the bell rings and if you're not in here, you're marked absent". Yet four boys decided to sneak out during the ten minute break to buy breakfast. (Why aren't they buying breakfast before class starts? Well, you got me there. I have no damned idea!)

This term I'm not going to take any bullshit from these cretins. Their marks are divided into 40% for performance in the first half of term and 60% for the second half. I told them that missing class three times means that first mark is 0 and missing class five times means that second mark is also 0. And four boys decided to test it and are 20% of their way to getting zero for the whole course.

God-damned idiots.

At least, however, I get this all over with early in the week. My first class with the Sweathogs is Monday morning and my second is Wednesday. Tuesday, Thursday and Friday mornings are good students and Friday afternoon is my last class of good students. I end the week on a very high double note.

The weather has taken a turn for the colder in this first week. In the two weeks leading up to classes the weather was getting warmer and warmer to the point that we were seeing 25C in the daytime and lows of 11C at night. Now, however, we're getting rain and temperatures that break 10C in the daytime only if we're lucky. I know you guys in Canada are laughing at the notion that this represents cold weather, but let me point out three salient features of this weather: humidity that never goes below 80% and is usually stuck straight up at 100%, medium to high winds and, last but not least, nothing at all is ever insulated so that outside temperature and humidity is pretty much also your inside temperature and humidity. Only the winds get broken. Somewhat. When your crazed wife and her crazed mother aren't opening them all for circulation. (I'm SO in trouble for that now when Joan reads this!)

Still, the weather this winter was a joy compared to last winter. This winter we had the usual two days with snow, none of which stayed on the ground longer than a few hours. It's almost embarrassing that I had a winter jacket, a fleece vest, a pair of winter gloves and a nice wool sweater sent from Canada this year to keep me warm. I mean I put them to good use here and there, but for the most part it was all overkill.

The Barrie Connection and other stories.

2009-02-15T18:00:00.003+08:00

So, tomorrow school restarts and we'll see if my conviction to blog at least once a week (holidays notwithstanding) holds true.

Last time I posted I made a cryptic reference to synchronicity and Barrie. I thought I'd expand a bit on this this time.

Many years ago, while I was in the Army Cadets (2596 Royal Canadian Dragoon Cadet Corps)—where I met Canada's current Chief of Defense Staff while he was still a lowly 2nd Lieutenant—I went to Ipperwash Army Cadet Camp over the summer and had my first real romance. That first romance was with a girl (Marie Ruddy) from Barrie, Ontario. Fast forward a few years and we come to the story I related last week about my half-sister Anne. Who lived, at the time, in Barrie Ontario. Rounding it out, I've done on-and-off searches for various classmates and friends over the years and finally, just a short time ago (as in less than two weeks before today), I tracked down one of my buddies from Lahr Senior School, Brent Kogan. Who after a stint in Winnipeg wound up running a business in Barrie, Ontario.

I wonder how many other Barrie connections I will uncover in the upcoming years?

So, enough reminiscence and back to the present. Joan bought a bicycle over the summer because she was tired of taking very inconvenient buses to get to work. (Walking to catch the bus that took her to work was basically almost half the distance to work to begin with.) That bicycle was stolen last week when she went out to Huazhong University of Science and Technology to register for her Master's program. As a result she had to get a replacement and this time chose to do what she was supposed to do in the summer: get an electric scooter. (I still don't know what made her think a bicycle was a good idea.) After five hours, 38 minutes, 25 seconds (I was counting!) and visiting at least ten different places selling these things we finally bought one. It's a cute little unit which I'll have pictures of shortly when the weather lets me take pictures that don't suck. It's a dark-ish red bike designed to hold one person Joan's size comfortably. (When I get on it it's comical how wide I have to spread my legs to be able to turn the handlebars!)

The theft of the bicycle, however, reminded me of something that's been in my thoughts for a while in reference to China: honesty. For all practical purposes it doesn't exist here. Or, rather, it exists as long as you redefine it.

As far as I can tell when someone is introduced to you in China as "honest" it means "he probably won't steal money from you". In terms of speaking the truth there seems to be very little to no honesty outside of the family unit. Lies drop from Chinese mouths like they do from fishermen or cops telling stories of their exploits. Even during the negotiations for the scooter I saw glimpses of this. Joan was not entirely enthused at the price of the unit she eventually bought (directly as a result of me telling her to buy it because she so obviously liked it!) so the price dropped by a token 100RMB to help sway her decision as "the lowest we can possibly go". Later a man bought a black version of the same model and was getting it outfitted while Joan was still dithering. She boldly approached him and asked him how much he paid for it. (Signs of mistrusting the sales staff, obviously.) He answered 2580RMB (Joan was being offered the bike for 2480). Later he came in while we were (well, Joan was) still dithering and asked quietly what we'd been offered. Without missing a beat Joan told him "the same as you".

This is a small example, of course, and not that different from what you'd get in an equivalent situation in Canada (with the exception of boldly walking up to raw strangers and asking what they bought something for, I think), but it's the proverbial thin end of the wedge. This is how absolutely everything is done in China: you say whatever the other side wants to hear to get your goals accomplished with no regard for the truth. The only place where honesty in the sense we mean it enters the vocabulary is within the family unit (as I mentioned before) where, in typical Chinese fashion, the dials are all turned to eleven and the honesty verges on the brutal.

Food for thought. I'm not sure where the thoughts will lead or what will follow from them, but it's still something to ponder I suspect.

Holiday is almost over.

2009-02-11T20:04:00.005+08:00

Well, at least I think it's almost over. This being the Wuhan University International Software School nobody's actually bothered to tell me when my classes begin again. I'm guessing they'll begin on Monday, but undoubtedly I won't be told for sure until Sunday night or something. I think in the three years I've been here the longest lead time for information like this that I've ever received (without digging for it on my own) was three days (and that was for a 2-week intensive course with the same class every day for eight hours! – four semesters of English in two weeks).

I also decided to take a break from the blog over the official holiday, so I have a bit of catching up to do.

One of the first things of interest that happened during the holiday was a student of mine (Li Zefeng) who is one of two people at the Sweathogs Campus that has any worth as a student (and maybe one of six who have worth as human beings)—I am not exaggerating here!—dropped by for a visit. We talked a little about his future plans and goals (something I'll likely bring up in a future blog entry if I run out of family material) and he, naturally, brought gifts: a package with two tins of nice 西湖龙井茶 (West Lake Dragon Well tea—an internationally famed tea), a bag of coconut candies which Joan promptly hid from me and now doles out in small doses and a box of dried black wood ears (a kind of edible fungus, and a tasty kind to boot, but I think they're also considered medicinal). In return for this I gave him some software that will assist him in building the skills that he's not getting at his phony school.

The family did a few visits during this time, but as it's always awkward when I go visit because of the intrinsic clash of the communication barrier vs. the natural Chinese desire to be a good host, I stayed behind most days. Sadly this included a day when Joan and her mother were supposed to be buying a house-warming present for her uncle but she instead went to visit a park with Lucas for most of the day. I have pictures from this that I will be sorting through and uploading for Sunday's returned regular update so hold on for a bit. (Hint: Lucas does his incredibly cute routine again.)

Ah, what the Hell! I'll do that right now!

OK, I'm back. Here are some selected photos of Lucas at the park:


From Lucas

The last interesting thing to happen to me over this holiday was hearing from my half-sister Anne again. "Half-sister?" the two of you who don't already know the story are asking. "What are you talking about?" Let's get into the wayback machine to give some context.

Back when I was 30 years old and living in Ottawa writing software for Pronexus, I got the most surreal telephone call of my life. My mother called up and started saying things that I thought, at first, were a joke. There were only two problems with this theory: this kind of joke is something more that my father would have done (my mother has no discernible sense of humour!), and there was no punchline. The basic story was that six years before I was born my mother had a baby daughter out of wedlock and had immediately put her up for adoption. I won't get into the gory details of all this, but the practical upshot of it all was that I was told at 30 that I had a half-sister six years older than me.

As it so happens, I was the closest person to my newly-(re)surfaced half-sister. I got in touch with her by telephone and then drove my way from Ottawa to Barrie (which reminds me that there's an awful lot of odd synchronicity between me and Barrie) to meet her as the first representative of the family. The meeting went OK, she then went on to visit my mother, the two corresponded for a while.

Then she dropped off the planet.

Now, many years later, my mother asks me if it's OK for "Anne" to get in touch with me. I had by this time almost completely forgotten about this Anne and thought it was weird for her to ask me if my cousin Anne could get in touch with me. (Thought running through my head was "well, duh!") So I told her that there are only two people in the family I didn't want to ever hear from and one of them wasn't even in the family anymore. The rest were more than welcome. Then I found out it was half-sister Anne my mother was speaking about. (Not that this changes anything. There is still only one current family member I don't want to hear from.)

It was interesting to hear that Anne had contacted the rest of the family once again, so I of course looked forward to her email. I almost missed it, however, because changes in Anne's life involved a change in her name. I was looking for an email from Anne Crannie and instead got an email with a subject that looked like it came straight out of a spam artist's from an Anne Howat. For days it sat in my inbox because I was taking it easy for the holidays and didn't really want to wrestle with spam settings and the like, so it took me a while to find out that this was half-sister Anne. Once I did read it, however, of course I rattled off a reply (largely incoherent) and a pointer to this blog.

Thus stands the state of the family. And now that I've had my Spring Festival hiatus, I'll be posting every Sunday(ish) again.

The Cow Arrived

2009-01-26T00:10:00.002+08:00

Lucas slept through it without so much as a whimper. Despite it getting so loud it was impossible to hear people speaking.

Happy 牛 Year!

2009-01-25T20:56:00.002+08:00

The title, for those who can't see Chinese characters (and those who can't read them even if they can see them) says "Happy Niu Year" where "niu" means "cow" (we're entering the year of the cow) and it's vaguely pronounced like "New" (in reality like KNEE-OWE done as a single syllable).

As I start typing this it's 9PM on the eve of Spring Festival (a.k.a. Chinese New Year). As is traditional, the family has had a delicious lunch (stuffed lotus root, lotus root and spare rib soup, Wuxi-style spare ribs, a local green with no English name, cold sliced beef with green chilis and a meatball/mushroom dish) followed later on by a delicious dinner of the traditional dumplings (consider them to be Chinese pierogies and you're about right) that you're supposed to eat for the holiday. And, of course, I'm reporting to you live from ... well, Baghdad is quieter now, so let's say I'm reporting to you live from the Gaza Strip. Firecrackers are going off all around me (it's traditional to set off a string of them before eating) and in preparation for the actual new year people are already letting off fireworks.

This is going to get louder, much louder, in three hours when midnight hits. It's an experience that can't be described to anybody who hasn't been through it (or through something similar like a really vicious firefight). The individual pops and explosions of fireworks will not be distinguishable when the real show starts. It will instead be an insanely loud roar that even closing all the windows and doors will do little to alleviate.

It's glorious!

This will be Lucas' second Spring Festival, but this time he might actually be awake to watch the fireworks in the sky. (Last year he was far too young to see anything, really.) I'm looking forward to his reaction to the fires in the sky.

I'll say something tomorrow about all this assuming: a) I survive the experience again, and b) I remember.

It always works out in the end.

2009-01-19T21:07:00.002+08:00

So, I did my usual holidays thing and missed what day it was. As a result I didn't do my Sunday update. This turns out to be for the best, however, because it saves me the effort of making two posts and it gives me the opportunity to expound at length on some of the mystifying aspects of Chinese culture.

Today was the 19th of January and, while I was enjoying one of those rare mornings where I can sleep in after having gotten a decent night's sleep, the phone suddenly rang. It was about 8AM or so. Joan's cousin was calling. She and her family were on the way to visit. (Consider how an average Canadian family would react to being told—not asked, note!—that someone was on their way to visit. Directly from sleep. With one hour being a possible arrival time. Maybe two. Most Canadian families would go ballistic over this. For Chinese families this is the norm.) So up we got in a rush. For a change this wasn't a case of Joan just forgetting to tell me that visitors were coming today (she does this often) but was instead a complete surprise to her as well. Like a well-oiled machine we leaped into action. Joan fed the baby, I showered, Joan's mother made breakfast (热干面 – Wuhan-style "hot dry" noodles). Then I ate, got the baby handed to me while Joan swept the floors.

Arrival time was 9, maybe 10. So they arrived by 11. (The culturally-German in my audience are already grinding their bicuspids into powder here. I can hear it all the way over in China!) By this point the house was in passable shape and ready for the comedy to ensue. You see, the family was over for Lucas' birthday. They screwed up a little, though, seeing as Lucas was born on the 9th and they thought it was the 19th, but still their hearts were in the right place. That and they came bearing gifts including a sizable 红包 ("red envelope") with an embarrassing amount of cash in it.

A decent visit was had by all, partially courtesy of Joan's mother's ability to cook up a fancy, sizable meal from nothing on short notice: beef and carrot hot pot, "mountain medicine" (a weird sort of yam, I think) with pork, stir-fried cucumber and sausage, mixed vegetables, chicken feet, and a few more dishes which escape my memory now.

It is this whole thing working out in the end that always mystifies me with Chinese culture. These are some of the most disorganized people I've ever met in my entire life. I have never seen people who plan so much for so little effect, for example. (That is when planning is done at all. In personal lives it rarely is.) Yet, somehow, everything gets muddled through to a satisfactory conclusion. I wish I could learn this trick. Life would be a lot more relaxing if I could just know in the back of my mind that things always work out (in a muddled way) at the end.

Speaking of muddled things (nice segue for talking about Lucas, isn't it?!): Lucas was a champ for most of the day. Cheerful, charming, etc. All the things he's famous for. Unfortunately this ended (thankfully after our guests left) this afternoon. He's constipated, you see, and he's really unhappy about it. And he makes this unhappiness known at a very high volume.

Medical

2009-01-12T21:44:00.004+08:00

Lucas was taken to the hospital today for his routine checkup. He is in perfect health. He's been officially measured to be 79.5cm tall (~2' 7") and 12.1kg (~27lbs).

Weekend Update

2009-01-11T23:06:00.004+08:00

As promised, here's my Sunday update.

Aside from Lucas' birthday (about which I've already posted) this has been a nice, relaxing week. I haven't had classes and the paperwork I have to do is on hold because I have no idea when or where to send it. Sometime soon I'm going to get a panicked call from the Foreign Office asking me when I'll hand in my marks and after that I'm on my own until school starts again sometime in February. (The FO in this school has simply the worst communication skills I've ever encountered in my life. They're not actively evil like my previous school. They're just incredibly incompetent.)

I've been spending some time assembling what I need to make Joan's new computer something that's useful to her and which I can actually understand when the time comes for me to fix problems. The major problem I have right now is when Joan has a problem with her computer (my old Sony laptop from 2003) I can't be of much help. It's all in Chinese, and Joan doesn't know the technical terms in English. Trying to diagnose a problem when I have to wait for her to translate (badly) every piece of text on a dialogue box, guess what it really says and then try to see if I can fix it is not good for my sanity.

So what's my solution? Well, I've managed to track down a copy of Windows XP Professional in English. I've also managed to pick up the "MUI" (Multilingual User Interface) pack for it that includes Chinese. I snarfed a copy of Office 2007 and am in the process of tracking down the Chinese Language Pack for that as well. I've used a virtual machine on my laptop to test out the configuration and make sure everything works as expected. The result is, when I've finally got it all installed on Joan's machine, a computer that has everything in place for her to work in her native language, but which will allow me to work in my native language should any problems arise.

Have I mentioned at all just how much I hate Windows these days?

From Lucas

Anyway, no other particularly interesting news to report. I did have someone ask me what Lucas' favourite toy is. Before his birthday I would have responded that his favourite toy was his stuffed dog that looks almost, but not quite, completely unlike Snoopy. Every morning when he gets dumped on our bed to play, he always spots the dog and starts pointing at it making "Ah! Ah!" sounds quite adamantly, and if we don't get it for him (and by "we" of course I mean "me") he gets a little bit upset.

Things change, however, and it's looking like that house I got him for his birthday (you can see a piece of it in one of Friday's pictures) is topping the list. He's still asking for the dog and still gets upset if you don't give it to him, but now the dog mostly lies there disregarded except for an occasional pounce. The rest of the time is spent with him puzzling over the house.

Life is good.

This just in...

2009-01-09T18:57:00.004+08:00

Usability note: the pictures can be clicked for a full-size version.

From Lucas

Today was Lucas' first birthday. Mini-me (as I call him in a fit of "originality") or Rice (as I call him when I want to do cross-language puns—"rice" in Chinese is "大米" which is pronounced similar to "dummy") has disrupted my life for a full year and, in that time, has accomplished many important things, to wit:

He has managed to avoid being returned to the hospital together with a request for a refund.

He has managed to avoid being "accidentally" left behind in a public place for others to stumble over and take home.

He has managed to avoid being sold to some poor, unsuspecting people blinded by his cuteness and unaware of his darker side.

Of course he has accomplished all of this by just being too cute for words. He's very lucky he's cute, given how often he drives his mother, his grandmother and me to distraction (in decreasing order of incidence).

From Lucas

Lucas' birthday was full of activity. For me at any rate. Yesterday, already, I had gone out to order a birthday cake and in the morning I got up and went to the bakery to pick it up. I was 100% in charge of the birthday cake and I got a good one, I think. Lucas was born in the year of the pig, so the piglet-face cake seemed perfect. I think the bakery did a good job with it, but I'll let you be the judge of it.

From Lucas

For his first birthday presents Lucas received:

A toy "mobile phone" with a changing picture, two different opening and closing sounds, a talk button that plays one of several different melodies at random and digit buttons that play one of twelve different touch-tone numbers at random. (No, there's no link between the button you press and the sound you get. I thought this was funny.)

A remote controlled car. (I won't get into why we bought this, but it was only 30RMB and is actually pretty damned sophisticated.)

An activity play center for children 1-3 years of age that plays music, has the blocks and shaped holes thing and a few other things. Lucas has already really taken to this. You can see a bit of it in the picture here.

From Lucas

There's a fun tradition the Chinese do for the first birthday that I thought I should describe. In the pictures on my web album (click any of the photos here to get there) you'll see that Lucas is on the bed surrounded by a lot of things: his toys, of course, but also a musical instrument, my hand-held computer, an abacus, books, an MP3 player, etc. The idea is that you do this and the thing he shows the most interest in is the thing that will dominate his life. If he picks up a pen and plays with it, for example, he's going to be a famous writer. If he picks up a musical instrument and toys with it he'll be a musician. If he goes for a book, he'll be a great scholar. That sort of thing.

From Lucas

I'm happy to report that Lucas spent most of his time with my portable computer (the N800) and with a musical instrument. I approve of both of these choices and I look forward to watching Lucas' career with either one of the two.

From Lucas

One last tradition to report is the traditional birthday food. In the west the birthday food is cake. In China it's "long life noodles". You can see a bowl of them here. Of course at one Lucas can't eat all of that (although he does eat most of its ingredients now! As a result we had to take up the slack for him. If you look at that bowl, however, you can see why it leads to long life. It doesn't get much more nutritious than that witches brew of noodles, vegetables, mushrooms and pork!

That's it for this special report; I'll be back on Sunday with the regular update. As I said before, click on any of those pictures to access the photo album for more pictures of the birthday event. I'll just leave you with one more picture: a family greeting of sorts. (I'll leave it up to you to find the picture of us trying to get Lucas to stop eating a book.)

From Lucas

Reboot

2009-01-04T19:33:00.008+08:00

OK, so it's been a while. I've had a busy year with a son who's driving everybody in the family nuts. He should be VERY thankful that he's cute because there are time when this has been the only thing saving him....

How cute is he? Just follow the link and decide for yourselves. Here's a little clue, though: I really, really, really do not like babies. They're ugly. They're smelly. They're noisy. They're just all-round irritating. Except for Lucas. Lucas is none of those. Well, OK, smelly he is at times. Noisy he is most times when he's awake. He can be irritating at times. But he's not ugly!

This is a new year and with it comes a new resolution. I've been slacking off on the blog—this time for over nine months!—and this is not good. People who matter to me are finding it hard to keep up with my life because we're not online at the same time very often and when we are one or the other of us invariably has to leave soon. So I've decided to try and commit to a blog entry once per week, on a Sunday, barring major dysfunction in my life.

There is something that would help with this, of course, and that is this weird concept called feedback. Part of what has been demotivating me in blogging is getting no feedback unless I practically beg for it on my hands and knees. Please! I know some of you have subscribed by email or by RSS. And those of you reading the web page, just look down at the part below that mentions comments. Give me feedback! If I knew for certain that my posts were being read and appreciated, I'd have far more motivation to keep things up to date.

As an afterthought, it would also be nice to know what kinds of things you find interesting. After seven and a half years in China, what's around me is my life. It's normal to me. I've lost the ability to tell when things are weird or interesting because weird and interesting are so subjective that there's no way for me to know which is which. My 老外 (foreigner) eyes are almost gone. So I'll need some guidance here for what you want to know about.

That being said, here's a proper update. Today was not an auspicious beginning for my re-found desire to blog. Lucas was a pain all night—constantly waking up and fussing—and by morning he had become intolerable. I was beginning to understand what parents whose babies have colic go through. Constant crying, no respite for any reason. That was my Lucas.

It turns out he was constipated. (You emphatically do not want to know how this was figured out. Just trust me on this.)

After the problem with his constipation was settled, Lucas was his usual, cheerful, giggling, overactive, extroverted self again. You know, the boy that made me realize that having a son wasn't as bad as I thought it was going to be. (Joan and I both wanted a daughter, you see, but the universe mocked us both and gave the introverted parents an overactive, extroverted boy.) Sure he drives his mother and his grandmother to distraction at times. (Both of them have a tendency to try and control him. This does not work. I just ride things out with him and gently direct him away from whatever he's doing and as a result get along with my sanity mostly intact.) Sure he's noisy. Sure he's disrupted every aspect of everybody's life. But he's so damned cute about it! How could I not love him?

Speaking of Lucas (like that's going to be rare now!), his birthday is five days away. We bought him his presents already and I'll have some pictures of his birthday party. In contravention of Chinese tradition we're not going to have a big do with the family for reasons which are complicated to explain but basically boil down to not wanting to get into the game of escalating gift-giving. The pictures will show a modest celebration and a birthday boy who will have his first exposure to birthday cake.

That's it for this update. Next week, when my vacation is finally in full swing (I still have to calculate and turn in marks tomorrow), I'll update you on my work situation.

The Many Faces of Lucas

2008-03-02T14:07:00.006+08:00

I've been pestered enough, now, for pictures, pictures and more pictures. I've decided to do something about it. First I registered with a dynamic DNS outfit (if you don't know what that means, don't worry). Then I rigged up my laptop to be a server behind the firewall. Then I did a quick hack and put all of Lucas' pictures to date up on that server. Right now it ain't pretty, but it works. I'll work on pretty (and on videos functioning) later.

Now the pictures are VERY large. They're 3264 x 2448 pixels (which is just over 3.5MB each picture). As a result I do not intend to display the full-sized pictures on that web page. What I will do is take requests. If you like a picture, make note of its name (you'll see it to the right next to the word "Image" -- something like " p1000225.jpg") and send me an e-mail. I will, on a periodic basis, collect together all the picture requests and upload the full-sized images to a file-hosting site that allows larger files (but is a pain in the ass to use) and email back the access information. This is the way things are going to have to stand until I can get myself a proper Virtual Private Server host. (If anybody feels like donating US$20/month, to this end, drop by http://www.slicehost.com/ and set me up with a "256slice"—or better if you like!—running "Ubuntu Gutsy (7.10)" and I'll get to work on that right away.)

Until then, you'll have to make do going to http://ttmrichter.dyndns.info/lucas and looking at the smaller pictures and requesting the large versions if you really want them. Keep in mind that the pictures in question are hosted on my laptop in my house. If you can't get to it, try again later. Any one of a billion things might be wrong -- including my laptop being turned off or disconnected because I'm using it elsewhere.

Six months is long enough, isn't it?

2008-02-10T11:38:00.000+08:00

So, I've been incredibly lazy and demotivated in the last six months. As is typical for China (and, indeed, anywhere) I've been hit with the "no good deed goes unpunished" thing this year and had, thereby, my life sucked out of me. I could rant for a while on this subject, but I think it's better, given the catching up I have to do, to just give you the executive summary: three of the foreign teachers at the main campus of WUISS did such a good job and were so popular with the students that in punishment for this we were sent to the Sweathogs campus (a.k.a. "The East Lake Campus of Wuhan University International Software School, a business division of Wuhan University"). So instead of having 14 hours per week with students that were an active joy to teach, I got, last term, only six hours with students of that calibre and 10 hours with the Sweathogs. (Yes, they increased my teaching hours by two so I could have more exposre to these dullards!) These students, in particular my early Friday class, are so worthless—not just as students but in many cases as human beings—that I just found myself not wanting to think about things.

Added into this was the increasing stress of my imminent fatherhood. Joan, as can be seen in the picture next to this paragraph, was increasingly obviously going to be changing my life still further with a bouncing baby basketball child of some indeterminate gender (you're not allowed to know this in advance in China and Joan didn't want to spend the money it would take to get the answer through bribery). The nervousness I felt around this I couldn't let show because Joan was already nervous enough for about fifteen people. I instead kept it bottled inside and pretended to not be worried.

Joan, in retrospect, is a pretty incredible girl. Where most women in China won't work for three months before giving birth, Joan was working literally up to the night before the exciting series of hospital visits leading to final delivery of our child. Those hospital visits in themselves were nerve-wracking—we went three times with false labour before we finally got the real thing—and in retrospect I'm very happy that the school completely screwed up in organizing a special class (it was to have started on the 7th of January but actually started on the 14th) because I'd have been useless in the classroom while all that was going on. As it was, I didn't feel particularly useful, but at least I could be there a little bit.

(I had to keep rushing home, you see, on the off chance the school gave me the information I needed for my classes so I could plan. In the end I had three days' notice to plan for a 14-day—uninterrupted!—course where I taught over four terms of English in two weeks to a single class. Three. Days'. Notice.)

Anyway, by now anybody who actually bothers to read this blog already knows that on the 9th of January, at 12:40AM, in the city of Wuhan, Lucas Richter (a.k.a. 王森鋭 – Wang Senrui) was born to two loving, exhausted and emotionally drained parents. It was a difficult delivery, made even more difficult by the fact that he weighed 4.35kg (9.57 pounds) that finally led to delivery by caesarian section. Still, it's all over now and Joan is recovering nicely from the surgery, albeit getting a wee bit cranky at our child. (Ironically I have more experience with babies than Joan seeing as I was babysitting at about the same time she was born....)

Lucas is, as of yesterday, one month old and has already wrought massive changes to our life. Now of course some of this is because of the horrific weather we've been having—China is experiencing the worst winter in living memory right now, but I'll be saying more on that later, complete with pictures—which has crammed us all, effectively, into the only heated room in the apartment. (I have a small space heater in the office, so I can do work there, but it's not very comfortable.) This crazy weather is beginning to let up, but we're still all stuck in that one room complete with jury-rigged bed extension for Joan's mother to sleep on. Still, all that aside, Lucas is now the master of our household. When he wants to eat, he eats (or our ears bleed – our choice). When he wants to sleep (which isn't often enough...) he sleeps. And, of course, when he decides that he wants to sleep on a person, not on a pile of blankets so soft it would embarrass a cloud? He sleeps on a person. (The choice, again, is that or our eardrums bleed.)

On the whole, though, to be fair to the little tyke, he's been good. I've babysat for kids far more prone to squalling and I've heard the horror stories of not getting any sleep at night because that's when the baby is active. Lucas sleeps through most of the night without fussing, waking up only at midnight and, typically, 5AM for feeding. A minor adjustment to my sleep/wake cycle will account for those late night feedings without me getting too wiped out by lack of sleep.

Lucas, at this point, according to everybody, looks a lot like me. (This will, of course, change and already has.) He's a big-'un and he definitely has my eye shape. His nose, to me, looks more like Joan's and his eye colour....

Well, people keep asking me about the colour of his eyes. I keep having to say "I don't know". It's frankly quite embarrassing, but the truth is that, despite Lucas' eyes having opened long ago (first glimpse of them was day 3 -- by now he's looking at things and actively tracking movement) I still can't really describe his eye colour. The eyes are dark. Very dark. But not dark like Chinese eyes which reach the point of almost looking black. There's a hint of blue to them. Or something. Maybe dark hazel? I have an idea. Click on the picture next to this paragraph (I took a closeup) and decide for yourself. Maybe then you can tell me what colour the eyes are.

Anyway, that's enough catching up for today. I promise that I will restart blogging with something resembling regularity so that my mother doesn't kill me. I'll also have more pictures to show next time around (it takes a while to upload these things!) including what it looks like in Wuhan when there's more than three days of snow in a winter.

Am I missing something?

2007-08-09T20:11:00.000+08:00

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?

And another blogger in the family

2007-08-02T21:56:00.000+08:00

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.

Help me! I'm melting!

2007-07-28T14:26:00.000+08:00

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 get confirmation that I am, indeed, living somewhere in Bolgia Eight.

Humidex of 51?!?! Come on! Why not just set me on fire, dammit!?

Bad Moon Rising

2007-07-28T08:16:00.000+08:00

"I hear hurricanes a-blowin'.
I know the end is comin' soon.
I fear rivers overflowin'.
I hear the voice of rage and ruin."

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....

Let's fade out to a time about two months ago. As before the world suddenly turned black, but I had no idea what was coming. Curiously I looked out the window at a world plunged into twilight grey. I watched as a lake whose surface is usually glass suddenly started to froth. I watched as a sign atop a nearby hotel suddenly lost one of its characters, the "letter" floating away like a leaf caught in a zephyr. Only the leaf, in this case, was a sizable chunk of metal.

I continued watching, still not quite fathoming what I was seeing as a large strip of stainless steel siding was stripped from a building's roof. As trees ever-closer to my apartment started sway and, in some cases, actually bend in the wind. Then it struck the building, just as I was getting out of my chair to investigate further. The wind blasting through my wide-open window (three metres away) nearly pushed me back into the chair.

Needless to say this started a big panic. Windows were shut everywhere and clothing, which was snapping in the wind like ever so many flags, was hastily collected. All just in time for the rain to start falling. Rain with drops so huge that at first glance I thought it was hail.So you can understand why, upon seeing the world go dark, I rushed into action. And none too soon, because the tempest that struck last night was far worse than the one I first witnessed.

First came the winds, easily stronger than the one that stripped the siding from a building and tossed it around like crumpled paper. The trees were all bending last night and, surveying the scene this morning, several of them snapped. A nice, tall pine, for example, that has always had a good, triangular profile now looks like it's wilting because the top snapped and is hanging to one side. Three trees right next to my building have had major load-bearing branches just break off, one falling toward and almost leaning on the building. A pile of wood palates in a neighbouring yard that was once stacked neatly is now scattered to the four corners and what's left of the pile proper has a thick tree branch stuck on it.

Next came the rain. Only the rain didn't come in drops. It came as a torrent. I sometimes joke about Niagara Falls opening up over Wuhan. Last night it did. I won't be joking about it anymore. Now unlike that last rainstorm I detailed, East Lake didn't jump its banks and flood streets. This rain didn't actually last all that long. It fell out of the sky and briefly turned all the streets into rivers (I'll explain how I know this below), but the torrent lasted maybe five minutes. Then it turned to regular rain for about 20 minutes. Then it went away leaving only (much-weakened) wind behind.

And lightening. Oh man was there lightning last night! The most glorious display I've seen since that tornado that wreaked havoc in Edmonton and then passed over where I lived in Regina (sans tornado). When that storm struck, there was constant lightning, turning the world into an eerie, strobe-lit scene. I even witnessed it striking a radar tower at the airport (which then spewed sparks far and wide and proceeded to catch fire).
That's what it was like last night, although as far as I could see nothing actually hit the ground; it was all an aerial display that put the best of fireworks to shame for sheer glory. (Oddly there was very little thunder, and what there was was very muted rumblings long-delayed after the lightning that triggered it. I think the closest the lightning ever came was about 5km from timing it -- and that was the stuff that was directly overhead!)

And the power loss. Did I mention that yet? I didn't? Well, suddenly, with no warning whatsoever, all the power in my building cut out. And in the neighbourhood buildings. And in the surrounding neighbourhoods. Indeed as far as the eye could see there was no light at all (aside from the flickering stuff overhead). Now there's an inconveniently placed mountain between me and the bulk of the city, but given what I saw, I suspect the whole city had been plunged into darkness. Obviously the lightning did touch down somewhere, and where it touched it wreaked havoc. For a good 20 minutes nobody had any light other than the occasional flashlight or candle visible in the windows. Then, after I briefly looked up from my Nintendo DS, I noticed that the business district kitty-corner across the lake from us had light. Shortly afterwards the neighbours around us all had light. We were an island of darkness in the neighbourhood, matching the university behind us. Our compound is owned by the university, you see, and, apparently, gets its power feed from the university, not the neighbourhood grid.

At this point I got tired of sitting in the dark while everybody around us had light. The rain had long ago stopped. I was curious to see what the rain did in the neighbourhood, and it was time for my evening exercise walk anyway. So, over Joan's objections (who was convinced I was going to get struck by lightning which had, by that point, receded to over 20km away) I went out for my walk. This is where I saw the aftermath and concluded that the rain had turned all the roads into raging rivers.

Everywhere I looked I saw signs of things being swept into the streets and down the hill -- including things like piles of bricks. The street vendors were all out in force by this point, but it was apparent from watching them that they were tense and unhappy. One DVD vendor was carefully inspecting his stock, for example, while one vendor of fried potatoes had a pile of raw potato chunks piled on the dirt next to a half-empty bucket of the things. Obviously it had been knocked over by a miniature flash flood.

We got our lights back, eventually. In fact the timing scared about ten years from my life. When I went out for my walk I, naturally, walked down the stairs. (Elevators use electricity, recall.) When I reached the last step, I stretched my arm out to open the door and at exactly the same moment that I touched the door, all of the university district lights came on. The hallway lit up. The building's exterior lights lit up. The bank of electrical metres lit up and beeped in unison. I jumped out of my skin and clung to the ceiling.

All in all quite a fun day.

Announcing the family's newest blogger!

2007-07-27T08:08:00.000+08:00

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.

Catching up.

2007-07-25T12:41:00.000+08:00

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?...

Baby pictures are in!

2007-06-26T17:58:00.000+08:00

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.

The sign says all you can eat...

2007-06-25T18:16:00.000+08:00

...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!

This comes as absolutely no surprise to me

2007-06-11T13:30:00.000+08:00

Study: 38 Percent Of People Not Actually Entitled To Their Opinion

CHICAGO—In a surprising refutation of the conventional wisdom on opinion entitlement, a study conducted by the University of Chicago's...

If I never hear the expressions "to each their own" or "it takes all kinds" or "everybody has a right to their own opinion" ever again in my life, well it's 41 years too damned late. Not everybody's opinion is equal. Not everybody's opinion is informed. Not everybody's opinion is interesting. Not everybody's opinion is valid.

As far as I can tell, it is the people who live mediocre lives, think mediocre thoughts and otherwise excel at mediocrity who hold this view. Since they can't actually argue a position that's coherent, believable (or even plausible, at times), they recite mantras to make all disagreement go away.

I really think that The Onion is a better news source than the major news sources, despite being essentially devoid of what would ordinarily be termed "facts". I'm not sure if this depresses me or delights me.

Of course a lot of this comes as a reaction to teaching now. Before I joined the profession, I really didn't "get" Mr./Mrs. Garrison, one of the characters from Comedy Central's South Park television series. The various teaching jokes like "there's no such thing as a stupid question, children, just stupid people" and "OK, would someone like to try that who's not a complete retard?" just fell flat for me. It wasn't until I started doing the job that I realized the pain of being a teacher. There are students I've had in the past who I just inwardly winced at when I saw them eagerly waving their hands to ask (or worse, answer) a question. Why? Well, the two quotes from Mr./Mrs. Garrison say it all, really.

I think that this is the kind of thing that you can really only understand when you live it. I'm sure that many of my rants on software and software development in the past caused blank incomprehension in the non-technical.

"Summer... turns me upside down."

2007-06-07T18:19:00.000+08:00

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:

As the temperatures rise, the clothing gets skimpier and skimpier. Yes, I'm married, but this doesn't mean I'm dead! Watching the cute local girls wander around in clothing that would make a By Ward Market streetwalker gasp in shame (without the cynical, self-consciousness you'd find in said streetwalkers) is a good way to take my mind off of the searing heat.
The city explodes with greenery and flowers. A city that in the winter is the epitome of dingy industrial cities, grey and lifeless, suddenly sprouts green everywhere. The underlying acrid scent of pollution that permeates everything is masked very effectively by a bewildering variety of sweetly-scented flowers. They're even nice on the eyes—almost, but not quite, matching the scantily-clad girls.
A lot of my favourite foods here are summertime foods: especially the cold noodle(-like) dishes. These are coming to the table more and more often.

OK. That's pretty much it for the good. Now let's talk about the bad:

There is, of course, the searing heat. Today it was "only" 33°C. It's been warmer already—today was actually a bit of a relief—and it's going to get worse and worse. I've seen as high as 42°C with humidity well in excess of 70%.
The growth of all this greenery includes some plants (which I have yet to identify) which drive my nose nuts. This starts in early spring, goes away for a while, restarts around this time of year, disappears in early summer, then comes back at the tail end of summer. Every year for the past six I've lived through this and I hate it. I was allergic to nothing in Canada. It was a bit of a shock to find out how the allergy-plagued people live, let me tell you!
One word: mosquitoes. This place is a positive paradise for those little blood-sucking vermin. They invade everything. They'll even fly to the 20th story of skyscrapers and plague people. They're merciless and they're beyond counting. If you spend an evening killing them and managed to destroy 20, you can rest assured that there's dozens more hiding where you can't find them ready to come out at you when you're no longer looking for them.

Now it's time for the positively weird:

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.)
The second weird thing is probably leaping out at you in that picture while I babbled on about the sheets. Notice that funny dome over the bed? It's a tent. There is a tent over my bed. It is mesh on all sides, including the bottom. It zips up tight allowing nothing to get in. Since Joan is pregnant now she doesn't want us to light mosquito coils at night (what we used to do to keep mosquitoes from eating us alive). So instead we bought a tent to put on the bed. I was a bit sceptical at first, but it does work well. I even (mostly) fit!
The final weird thing is the bedding again. Ignore the covered half of the bed. For Joan the weather is still too cool for the bamboo sheets, you see, so we've folded a quilt for her side of the bed. Back over on the bamboo side, look at the odd pillow. It's made of woven grass on the side you can see. The other side is thin strips of bamboo. The filling is buckwheat husks. (It was once scented with chrysanthemum blooms, but those have long since faded away.) This is the pillow you use to keep your head cool at night. The side I have up now is suited to moderate heat. The other side is stiffer (and takes a lot of getting used to!) but is very suitable for the blazing heat later in the summer. Of course by that time I'll be firing up the air conditioner, so that side of the pillow will rarely see action. But it's there for the inevitable days where the power company decides to just shut down the electricity without warning. (Let's hope they at least pick a windy day for that!)

So, that was my little taste of China for this post. Hope you enjoyed it.

My eyes! They're burning!

2007-06-05T21:42:00.000+08:00

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.

Living the Life of Cassandra

2007-06-04T21:44:00.001+08:00

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?

OK, this scares me.

2007-05-27T09:58:00.001+08:00

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.

I don't know how to nap.

2007-05-26T19:06:00.000+08:00

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.

It's Official. My life is disturbing.

2007-05-22T14:39:00.000+08:00

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.

How to Waste your Time, the Intellectual "Property" Way

2007-04-10T18:31:00.000+08:00

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?

I think it's time for someone to kidnap copyright lawyers and entertainment company executives and force them, at gunpoint, to live in the countryside of China for a year without access to their millions. Then, maybe, they'll just grab a clue and figure out that their fight is self-defeating.

Easter Sunday of the Living Dead

2007-04-09T13:05:00.000+08:00

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?

Don't Step in the Leadership

2007-04-03T15:07:00.000+08:00

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?

Surreal, Troubling News

2007-04-01T10:13:00.000+08:00

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.

Contrasts (redux).

2007-03-28T21:46:00.000+08:00

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.

Contrasts

2007-03-25T15:53:00.000+08:00

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...

2007-03-18T14:58:00.000+08:00

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.

Another Busy Week

2007-03-17T19:29:00.000+08:00

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:

Printer manufacturers have one Hell of a scam going on with their ink prices.
Printer ink is really, really, really messy.
Printer ink is also very, very, very persistent.

I'll be sure to keep you posted on the fascinating life of printer cartridges.

Other computer-related stuff isn't so happy. My network feed has been ... well, it's China Telecom. That pretty much says it all. It's low-grade service presented by a bunch of people who'll be paid the same whether the customer is happy or not, so would rather sit on their fat asses all day than actually provide a service. This is what happens when you have government-mandated monopolies (or, as Microsoft demonstrates, monopolies of any kind).

Sometimes doing business in China is intensely frustrating. I knew that China Telecom was going to be a problem the moment they set up my connection. The guy setting it up got very antsy when it turned out I wasn't going to be installing China Telecom's spyware/adware to connect -- and that, indeed, I wasn't going to be using Windows at all. He kept trying to load the software -- Windows software, note! -- on my system and was wondering why it wasn't working. While he was out talking to someone on the phone, I just took the userid and password he was using and put them into my router. Time taken? About ten seconds. When he came back, I was merrily surfing away. He still wanted to go hassle someone else to get a Windows laptop to "check my connection". (Apparently having the connection working in front of him wasn't enough to convince him that it was working. Or something.)

Sure enough, the first thing I found out about the feed after a week of use was that they had about 100 people connected to a line which could give actual broadband service to maybe a tenth of that. During the evenings in particular I'd get about 5KB/s speed tops. About the same as using a dial-up modem. That's "broadband" according to China Telecom. I decided then that I really want to get a different provider.

The building I'm in has boxes for China Netcom. China Netcom isn't very reliable as a provider in my experience -- they go down more often than a Vegas streetwalker -- but when they are working they are bloody fast! My normal speed when I was using them was 8 times the maximum speed I can get from China Telecom even in theory. (900KB/s vs. 120KB/s) That means that they were over 100 times faster normally than what I'm getting from China Telecom, say, right this minute.

Try contacting China Netcom sometime, though.

Their equipment has no telephone numbers on it for contact or servicing. Their web site is a dog's breakfast of one window after another before you get numbers that... don't work. Email? Hah! No business in the world has good email support. Not even the companies that exist, for all practical purposes, entirely on the Internet. A big telecom company? Not a chance.

So after literally months of searching, we finally figured out how to contact China Netcom. Who don't serve this building. They have the equipment here, though, because when they get enough customers they'll hook up the boxes and provide service to the building. But they won't actually sign up any customers because they haven't hooked up the boxes. The circle of stupidity that was this explanation apparently made sense to them, even as it sprained my brain before I thankfully shut it off.

So back to hammering China Telecom. They insisted up down and sideways every time they were contacted that they could do nothing to increase the speed of service. Until the last conversation where they said if we contacted the University office (which had hitherto never been God-damned mentioned!) we could actually pay more for improved service. Which is something I literally asked one week after getting connected and seeing how crappy the service was!

And we still can't upgrade because of stupid bureaucracy that Joan doesn't have time to deal with and the foreign affairs office doesn't want to deal with because it would mean actually doing a job.

And this is business in China. Big business, I mean. Small businesses aren't run by retards. They want money and if you're willing to give it to them, they're willing to bend over backwards and then twist themselves into a pretzel to help you give that money to them. I'm getting my leather jacket resized now, for instance, and while they're at it I asked for a couple of alterations to the styling. No problem there! But big businesses? They seem to think that just existing is reason enough to give them money. "Give us money," they say. "We'll figure out what we'll offer you in return. Someday."

I mean really! I was there, I was waving (metaphorically) hundred-RMB notes in their faces saying at the top of my lungs "I have money! I want to give you this money! Price is no object! Let's do business!" and getting blank incomprehension in response. With China Netcom they just had to string one cable about 25 metres. That's it. And I was willing to pay a month's salary to get it! About enough to pay for ten people in one of their existing accounts for a whole year! And China Telecom? Add "incompetent" to "criminally corrupt" to the list of charges I'm drawing up against them in my head.

OK. Now I've got that out of my system.

In other news, at just the right time I'm getting two of the books from my wish list sent to me. Someone also shipped me a book that has opened my eyes to web design. It was in electronic form, so the physical copy is now in my wish list as well -- it's a really good book about web design with hardly any HTML or CSS in it. A book that isn't just boilerplate and pages and pages and pages of code, but instead offers a deep glimpse into the world of visual design.

Tomorrow -- China Telecom willing -- I'll be making a very special celebratory blog post, so please stay tuned.

First Week Ruminations

2007-03-11T13:01:00.000+08:00

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:

I have to get used to waking up at 6AM every day again.
I have to figure out where my classes actually are (as opposed to where I've been told they are).
I have to re-introduce myself to my students because, as with students anywhere in the world, they've forgotten everything they learned prior to their long vacation.
I have to get back into the whole "delivering information" mode that's atrophied over a month of disuse.

After five years of this, though, this all becomes increasingly easy. (Except for that first item.)

So, this week I just did a mostly teacher-talk lesson. I had to go over the previous exam and identify the strong points (many!) and the weak points (only two) the students had. I also started off the extracurricular activities I have planned for this term -- in effect replacing the school's anemic "English Corner" with one that the students actually want to attend. And, finally, I went over a brief look at what was happening this term. (The secret words are "public speaking".)

One thing I've found I really like with this batch of students is their eagerness overall. In five of my seven classes, for example, we actually had to elect people into the positions for running the new English Corner. Enough people were interested in the position that I didn't have to appoint anybody in the remaining two. I put my contact information -- notably my instant messenger accounts -- up on the screen and now have at least a dozen students who've gone to get GoogleTalk accounts to speak with me online. From this I stumbled over a couple who are avid Linux users and a couple more who, because I'm using Linux, want to give it a try. So now I think I'll also be arranging a WUISS Ubuntu User's Group as an outside activity to help these newcomers learn more about Linux. I've also ordered 300 CDs from Canonical's free "shipit" service to give as gifts to the students.

So, now the week is over and the weekend upon me (and also almost over) I find I'm a little bit lonely. Joan went off on a junket with her female colleagues arranged as part of International Women's Day (little-known trivia: the Mandarin pronunciation of the date -- 三八 or "sanba" -- is a homonym for a Cantonese epithet for women). She left very early Saturday morning and her mother subsequently took off for a while to the apartment in Hanyang (like she does most weekends). As a result I've been here mostly by myself which is now sufficiently unusual that it's actually uncomfortable. I guess that means I'm well and truly used to married life.

Something I'm still not used to is back pain. (You'd think that by now I would be, wouldn't you?) While under control, it sometimes flares up and this last month of inactivity made it flare up more. Following this with the week of lugging a laptop to and from class has left my back in pretty bad shape. The medication is controlling it -- I'm only taking it when it flares really badly -- but I'm running out of it to the tune of eight remaining doses. After that I'm going to have to either get some more shipped to me at tremendous expense or go on another likely-fruitless search for methocarbamol here in China.

Printer Shafting

2007-03-09T16:45:00.000+08:00

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....

Hello From Downtown Baghdad

2007-03-04T19:58:00.000+08:00

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.

Windows Security And Other Oxymorons

2007-03-04T16:17:00.000+08:00

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.

Aren't They Just The Cutest Thing?!

2007-03-03T17:25:00.000+08:00

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:

closed;
overcrowded;
overpriced;
both overcrowded and overpriced.

So Spring Festival is, instead, a time of high stress family visits interspersed among long periods of intense boredom. You can't even do any decent shopping for geek toys or the like over much of that period.

So, needless to say, I'm looking forward to going back to work.

In traditional Chinese fashion I got sent my teaching schedule just shortly before the break began, too late for me to point out to them that the document they sent me couldn't be read. (It's a) in Chinese and b) garbled.) So I didn't even know which classes/subjects I'd be teaching until just this Thursday, not to mention small, unimportant details like where I'd be teaching them or when. I did finally get that information (with only one small question outstanding, but not requiring resolution until next week Wednesday -- so I expect to have an answer Tuesday night) just in time to plan lessons and arrange notes.

And today the monitor of one of my classes sends me an SMS message asking "will you be teaching us this term?". My answer is the typically Chinese one: "Maybe". Of course in context that means "yes". The monitor's response was a single word that makes me glad for my time spent in China. "Great!"

I didn't stay in China because of my employers. I didn't stay in China because of my coworkers (although I always found one or two at each place I liked -- Hello Nick, Wendy & Xiaoling!). I did stay in China to pursue the girl who later became my wife, but there was two years before that to account for.

No, the reason I stayed in China long enough to find the girl who'd later be my wife is simply the students. With the exception of the students attending the ratbag RMIT English Worldwide program at the Wuhan University of Science and Technology's International School (the non-REW students, too, were great!) my experience with students in China has been universally positive. My current school is no exception.

Just how stupid do they think I am?!

2007-03-01T10:15:00.000+08:00

Received in the email today:

THE YAHOO LOTTERY INTERNATIONAL. INC

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Sutton, Greater London Sm1 4te United Kingdom.

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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..

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Wow! What a birthday present! One million dollars! I'm so there, man!

Replying by email (they lie, I lie):

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.

Update: March 3, 2007

Well, no word back from them. I guess they don't want to give me my million dollars to save my daughter....

Happy Birthday To Me

2007-02-27T10:47:00.000+08:00

So, today is my birthday. I've already talked about the present I got (and the amusing way in which it was bought) in yesterday's blog entry. Today I'll talk about the birthday itself. I'll be updating this entry as the day progresses so stay tuned.

My day opens up with the best present possible: waking up next to the beautiful girl who was somehow sufficiently brain-damaged to become my wife. After that a printer is next to nothing.

I woke up long before Joan did, so I spent much of the morning watching her and listening to her snore lightly. I also experimented with moving around and watching her move after me (although this had the side effect of continually shrinking the space available to me on the bed). Finally she woke up and wished me a happy birthday. We then got up.

Joan's mother had been busy. When we got up, we were faced with the traditional birthday...

...noodles. Yes. You read that right. Birthday noodles. You were expecting cake?! Which country do you think I live in again?

In China the birthday tradition is to make a bowl of "long life noodles" -- basically a spicy noodle soup with slices of beef, vegetables, mushrooms and other things (this one had spicy sticky rice dumplings, for example)
-- and, to be strictly traditional, share it with family and neighbours. (We decided to keep it in the family, however. We're not that traditional. Our neighbours aren't Chinese and wouldn't understand the meaning of it anyway.)

That's it for the morning report. Stay tuned as I update my birthday report over the day.

Afternoon update:
Joan had to go to the dentist today to get her braces adjusted, so I was left pretty much alone all afternoon. I tinkered with my printer, mostly, figuring out how to make it do its tricks and such. I also, as an acid test, printed off an e-book I'd been wanting to get run off at a print shop for a while. The new printer is sweet: fast and yet with good quality output. This even though the Linux drivers don't support it fully.

Evening update:
My birthday dinner was delicious. Joan's mother bought some 夫妻肺片 (Lit. "Married Couple Lung Pieces" -- mysteriously named because as far as I know there's no lung pieces in it, nor any married couples), a dish consisting of sliced beef, sliced beef tripe, sliced beef blood vessels, peanuts -- all in a peppery, garlic oil sauce. Other dishes included 腐乳 (fermented "cream tofu"), a marinated tofu and pepper dish, some Chinese cabbage hearts, and fried, spicy fish.

After dinner my friend from SCUM dropped by with his girlfriend. Oh, and a new coffee maker as my birthday present, so now its time to find some decent coffee.

Night-time update:
So, I headed out for my night-time walk and fell into a mud puddle, coming home dripping wet. Fun, fun, fun. Still a decent birthday overall.

Shopping Shell Games

2007-02-26T20:00:00.000+08:00

Today was spent buying my birthday present (a new HP Deskjet D2368 printer). I had spent yesterday looking at printers while Joan and her mother were out shopping for clothes (without, as usual, buying any) and then the evening figuring out which printer would work with my Linux system.

I always have fun watching Joan while shopping. Joan is a natural bargainer who, despite always being friendly and polite and nice, manages to cut throats like a pro assassin. She will bargain for almost anything -- I really do pity the poor fool of a car dealer that mistakenly believes that he can slide one past her when we come to Canada....

What I noticed, however, that is really alien to we westerners in China, is the culture of deceit that pervades everything here. Taxes are avoided as much as possible, but only if the buyer is willing to trust that the seller isn't going to screw them over on warranties or the like. Fake goods are everywhere and quick changes can happen when your back is turned. Even something as simple as price tags are not indicative of the price -- they are the starting point of negotiation. Anybody who pays the price tag on any sizable purchase is a fool. This is true whether or not the place you're buying from is a major chain or a small corner shop, incidentally.

Starting prices can vary significantly depending on a wide variety of circumstances including:

the seller's guess as to what you can afford
what kind of relationship the seller has with his supplier
whether the seller is a woman or a man (men tend to be more push-overs)
whether the goods are legit or not (fake goods -- of any kind! -- are epidemic-level)
whether you want an "official receipt" (tax receipt), an "informal receipt" (proof of purchase, but otherwise under the table) or no receipt at all
how willing you are to just leave and not buy
how many other people sell the same thing
what kind of store is selling the goods
what your skin colour is (the Chinese can be insanely racist at times -- and foreigners get stiffed, always)

How wide can this vary? Well, the lowest initial price we got from a shop was 320元 and the highest was 495. And the final price for what I got was 300, with an official receipt. (Joan is very good at "salami tactic" brinksmanship.)

Of course Joan then found out that the expensive part of printers isn't the printer, it's the ink. (290元 for a black and a colour cartridge.)

Another interesting ritual whenever buying anything major in China is the unpacking and verifying contents ritual. The printer I got was in an HP box with HP seals all over it and HP-branded packing tape covering every possible means of ingress or egress. Yet, before money changed hands, the seller brought out a carpet knife, deftly sliced the tape and seals, opened the box and showed us that it contained everything it was supposed to contain: printer, cables, manual, disk, trial cartridges, warranty card, etc.

I've been buying computer hardware all of my adult life in Canada and never felt the need to open up branded items to verify contents, but here it is necessary. If you don't do it, you will get ripped off someday. I know this because I know several foreigners who did get ripped off this way: "1GB" flash disks, for example, that turned out to be deftly switched for 256MB ones -- all sold without a receipt, of course, so no way to get what you were supposed to get. The seller has notoriously short memory when faced with a customer he's ripped off without a receipt....

(Just a friendly clue: never buy anything in China that's worth more than about 10元 without a receipt if there's any chance whatsoever that you may need to trade it in or get it repaired.)

So, anyway, fun observations at an end, my day ended well with a nice new printer and another blog entry about the weirdness that is my life in China.

Down The Rabbit Hole

2007-02-24T17:32:00.000+08:00

Only it's not a rabbit hole this time. It's....

Let's back up a bit.

So, this afternoon Joan goes to the washroom. (We have a squat toilet here to Joan's delight and my eternal unhappiness.) As she prepares to go, the gold chain around her neck which has my father's old wedding band on it unlatches and slithers down her chest and into the toilet.

The wedding band, luckily, lands next to the toilet on the floor.

Still, the chain is down the "rabbit hole" -- about a one-meter drop down to the trap. (This, incidentally, is why I prefer western toilets. I mean another reason why. As disgusting as it would be, I could, in a western toilet, just reach my hand in and grab the chain.) Further, the way the plumbing is set up, to get to the trap and open it to gather the chain would require us to go to our neighbour downstairs. Who isn't at home, this being Spring Festival and all that. On top of that, we need a monkey wrench to open the trap, a tool I sadly do not have in my toolbox. Of course we could just hire a plumber but since this is Spring Festival season the for-hire workers we can usually not throw a brick for fear of hitting three or four on the head are nowhere to be seen.

So we've been using half-assed measures like snipped coat hangars tied to wooden poles trying to snag the chain from the toilet. As of 5:30PM today, about an hour after the incident happened, I managed to snag it to the point of it being visible once. Sadly it slipped off and plunged back down the hole then. Since then I've not been able to snag it again. Joan's trying it now.

I'll update this post with our progress for those who are sitting on the edge of their seats wanting to hear how it comes out.

Update #1
As of 6:30PM still no luck. Joan hasn't quite given up hope yet.

Update #2
We've given up as of 7:10PM. I can only think, "Thank God it wasn't me who dropped it -- I'd not hear the end of it for the next six months!"

In other news, it turns out we forgot a scheduled class with our four girls at the hospital today. I hate holidays.

Final (I GOD-DAMNED HOPE!) Update:
The chain has been found. It never actually fell down the toilet. It fell into Joan's clothing after a segment gave out. (The clasp is rock-solid.) She had me, her mother (and herself, but that's not important) fishing in a stinky, grotesque toilet for hours. She went out for a walk with the necklace hanging somewhere inside her clothing. Then, when getting ready for bed, it fell out on the bathroom floor.

How irritating.

I Use Jabber

2007-02-23T22:01:00.000+08:00

I have a lot of Instant Messenger IDs, but the one I am slowly pushing people toward is Jabber (a.k.a. XMPP). The problem, you see, is that the various Instant Messenger networks don't play well with each other. MSN talks to MSN only -- and to a few others who do a lot of work to reverse-engineer MSN's protocols with unreliable results. AIM and ICQ use the same protocol, but as far as I can tell don't interoperate. AIM just licenses ICQ's technology but an ICQ number can't talk to an AIM user. (I may be wrong on this specific one.) Others? They're locked out again unless they've reverse-engineered the protocol, again with unreliable results. The same extends to Gadu-Gadu, QQ, YIM and the whole sorry pack.

Jabber/XMPP solves this problem by being an open standard. Anybody can run a Jabber server and Jabber servers can talk to other Jabber servers if so desired. This means that a company can own its own IM server for internal communications (without paying the horrendous licence fees some of the commercial properties demand) while still connecting to the outside world and other Jabber servers. Indeed there are even bridges that allow you to connect Jabber to MSN, AIM, ICQ, etc.

But that's not why I want to use Jabber.

I want to use Jabber because it doesn't tie me in to Unka Bill or his monopolist cronies. It allows me to use whichever client software I feel comfortable with on any platform I'm comfortable with (where MSN only legally allows you to use Microsoft's client software on Windows, for example) and it allows me to use whichever Jabber provider -- free or paid -- I choose to use. (Currently I choose GoogleTalk.)

So if you want to Instant Message me? Use one of the ones on the sidebar of my blog. But pay attention to that "preferred" option. Because slowly, but surely, that list is going to shrink. But a Jabber/XMPP account will always be there.

Edited to add:

If you want to make the switch to Jabber, it's pretty easy:

You need an account. The easiest way to get a reliable one is to sign up for GoogleTalk. If you're more adventurous, try out the various other public servers available.
You need client software. GoogleTalk allows you to use a web page for chat, but this is not convenient for most purposes. (It's a boon for people who travel, though!) Instead I recommend Pandion as an easy-to-use setup. Even my mother could install and use Pandion with only a little remote hand-holding on my end! If you don't run Windows or if you want to try something other than Pandion, there are a lot of clients to choose from. (This is one of the benefits of using open standards.)

OK, This Is Seriously Cool!

2007-02-22T18:52:00.000+08:00

What can I say? Interested in where I live and what it looks like? Just follow the link and all will be shown! (Flash will be needed.) You can see where I work as well if you like. Joan works up here. Here's where we buy groceries most of the time. I spend most of my meagre allowance here. Joan spends all my money here. (I'm going to die for that crack!) And here is where the best thing happened in my life. (Mom, Andy, Marion, Misha and Jeff will remember that place well, I think.)

The "L"-Word

2007-02-21T17:40:00.000+08:00

A question posed in a colleague's email today got me to thinking. The subject? The dreaded (by ignorant elements of the expat community) "L-Word": 老外 (laowai). It's the generic Chinese word for "foreigner" and is formed of the character for "old" and "outside". There is a persistent myth, spread in all sorts of places that "laowai" is a pejorative.

I'll just go on the record right away as saying this is bullshit.

I've always pretty much considered this view bullshit from a little bit of sleuthing (hint: look it up in the "word ocean" -- the Chinese language's equivalent of the OED and see if it's flagged as a pejorative or not) and because my two best friends in China (and the nicest married couple in the world) did not look embarrassed when others used it in my presence, but just to be certain I went to a source I trust: my wife.

Her answer was unequivocal. "What?!" was the first response. This was followed by "Of course not!" (That she herself has no problems using the word in my presence was another significant hint, BTW.) After my providing the context -- some foreigners feel it is an insulting term -- and a few moments' confusion she finally asked "Why would they think it was an insult?"

Her reactions were spontaneous, instantaneous and as honest as I've ever seen. That pretty much settles it for me.

The so-called evidence used to "prove" that the term is insulting includes this damning piece: "They never address you as 'laowai' so it must be an insult!" This is, to put not too fine a point on it, the most specious piece of bullshit reasoning I've ever heard. They don't call me "Jianadaren" (Canadian) to my face either. Am I to infer from that little fact that being called a Canadian is a pejorative too?

The primary reason they don't address foreigners as "laowai" is quite simple: unlike "laoshi" (teacher) or "laopo" (wife--affectionate) or "laogong" (husband--affectionate), "laowai" is not a term used to address people. It is not a title. It is a noun. I am not "Yan laowai" like I am "Yan laoshi". It has nothing to do with insults and everything to do with basic vocabulary!

Another piece of "evidence" is that they don't refer to you as "laowai" in formal circumstances. They use instead words like 外国人 ("waiguoren" -- lit. "outside nation person").

Well, duh. Welcome to the wild, wooly, wonderful world of "register" and "formality". "Waiguoren" is the formal register. It is used in circumstances where formality is expected and most interaction with strangers, unlike in the English-speaking world, is considered relatively formal in China. "Laowai", in contrast, is informal register more suited to banter in informal situations. Indeed it is "waiguoren" contracted and having the neutral "lao" put in front (in the same vein as "laohu" means "tiger" not "old tiger", "laoshu" means "mouse" not "old mouse" and so on) to distinguish it from other uses of "wai". The Chinese don't use "laowai" in interaction with us for the same reason we don't typically say "Hey Dude!" to the boss in a new job in place of "Hello, Sir/Ma'am".

You will find, if you Google on "laowai", a plethora of nonsense where people will insist, quite vociferously, that "laowai" is a pejorative (to to the bemusement of the locals). Why would this be if it really isn't an insult?

Enter speculation.

I think that the people who believe "laowai" is an insult are people who harbour in their own thoughts disdain and distaste for the locals. Whether this comes from the typical white arrogance you find in expats around the world (especially the British ones in my experience, but not exclusively them) or if it comes from a reaction to culture shock, the fact remains that a lot of expats everywhere in the world harbour concealed (or not-so-concealed) dislike for the locals around them. Enter the very Freudian notion of "projection" -- attributing undesired or shameful thoughts and attributes onto others. They feel dislike for the people around them but cannot, for a variety of reasons, admit this even to themselves. So they instead claim that it is the others who are intolerant and who have the hatred, not them.

And it doesn't hurt that most western countries, especially the USA (and to a lesser extent Canada), simply adore victims. Everybody wants to belong to a victim group, so if you're white and middle-class, why not just make one up to apply to you?

Playing With Words

2007-02-20T21:36:00.000+08:00

I like words. I like words in particular that don't exist. One of my favourite episodes of Duckman, for example, involved a running gag surrounding the fictitious word "proxyglossoriasis" (spelling approximated) which is supposedly a disorder in which one replaces the word one intends to use with the next word in the dictionary. The effect is hysterectomy.

I also like using the word "spectabulous" -- coined by Greg Porter of BTRC, if memory serves -- which is defined as "being so good that you have to invent a new word to describe it". (It's a portmanteau of "spectacular" and "fabulous" you see.

In that vein, there is a word I use which I also coined. It is a portmanteau of "China" and "anaphylaxis": chinanaphylaxis. It means "having a psychological allergic reaction to living in China".

Today was a big chinanaphylaxis day.

I knew it was coming. It's Spring Festival time and this is when the Chinese are at their most Chinese. Today, in particular, was visiting the relatives who visited us yesterday (as previously blogged). The day was a disaster from the beginning onward. I'll gloss over the gory details of getting there and just let you imagine an unhappy rant about people who can't seem to communicate what they've got planned for you, where it will be, when it will be and how many places you're going to stop off at in between for indeterminate lengths of time. Because, apparently, actually telling people what is planned for a day is a State Secret whose revelation in advance is punishable by death. Or something.

Anyway, that set the tone for the rest of the evening. Which consisted, basically, of me sitting in the corner of an apartment and playing my Nintendo DS. (Thank GOD -- or at least Misha -- for that thing!) I would get called up to eat or to play the trained monkey for a while every so often, but mostly people around me were having a great time socialising, talking, reading, watching TV, etc. while I was bored out of my skull.

Insert here a long, unhappy rant about a culture for whom the word "no" means "he's just being polite, so let's force him".

And the worst thing about it all? Nobody was doing this to hurt me. Nobody at all was saying "what can I do today to piss Michael off the most". They were just doing what good Chinese hosts and families do. It just unfortunately was badly timed (c.f. above re: the horrific trip there) and badly executed ("culture clash" is the term bandied about most often). So not only was I aggravated most of the day, I had nobody to actually point fingers at as the malevolent source of the aggravation. This actually makes things worse.

The day wasn't a complete write-off. The food was good (although not as good as the food cooked by my mother-in-law). I lost track of all the dishes, but the best one was the tripe with mixed pepper. The stir-fried squid with mixed pepper was a damned close second. And my darling wife accidentally referred to "Andy" as "Candy" and then looked charmingly perplexed when I mentioned that I doubted Andy went to Mexico for that kind of operation....

Spring Festival

2007-02-19T22:55:00.000+08:00

So today is the second day of the New Year (Chinese reckoning) and I've had my wife's aunts, uncles and cousins over for dinner. My mother-in-law did her usual excessive cooking routine and made assorted delicacies and specialities. If memory serves there were (in many cases the names are made-up to describe, not translated):

homemade meatballs and fish balls with wood ears and some kind of mushroom;
fried chicken drumsticks;
lotus root and spare rib soup;
stir-fried green beans with some kind of leafy vegetable I couldn't identify;
battered lotus root with pork;
some kind of vegetable that has no English name (菜苔 in Chinese, although I may have the characters wrong);
pork and taro root cracked rice casserole;
mutton and carrot hot pot;
wormwood salad;
stir-fried beef tripe and pepper;
a mixed cold dish containing marinated beef, beef blood vessels, tripe, coriander and peanuts.

All of this was after the huge breakfast of homemade dumplings (Chinese dumplings are like Polish perogies) and the day full of snacks of various sorts.

And, yet, somehow I'm still losing weight over the holidays.