A try at being serious.

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.

The Barrie Connection and other stories.

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.

Happy 牛 Year!

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.

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.

The sign says all you can eat...

...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!

Living the Life of Cassandra

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?

Easter Sunday of the Living Dead

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

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?

Contrasts (redux).

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

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.

Another Busy Week

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:

1. Printer manufacturers have one Hell of a scam going on with their ink prices.
2. Printer ink is really, really, really messy.
3. 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.

Hello From Downtown Baghdad

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.

Happy Birthday To Me

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

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.

Playing With Words

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

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.