Where have I been?

I know, I know. You’re feeling out of the loop. You’re feeling that I up and went to China, sure, you heard from me for a while, but then, you assume, I was either speaking too much Chinese that I forgot how to communicate in English, or I went on one of these crazy cross country by broken down bus trips and never returned. Fear not. The real answer was really just lack of computer.

So, I’d like my first shout out to be to Mister Capital “J” David “Poppa” Nelson, for bringing me my own machine. Pop, I promise you’ll hear from me more often! Yes, I own my very own computer, a nice little laptop, for the first time since my lovely ‘machine that never actually worked’ that I schlepped around in college. It took five days and six people to get the machine to connect to the internet, but finally, I can sit in my pajamas, listen to my own music, and write to my people, no more smelly smoky internet cafes for me. I really couldn’t be happier about it.

My life has had some changes, as life so commonly goes, in the last month. I think I left off when I was going on my ‘business trip’ to Shanghai and Nanjing with my health care consulting company. My duties on this trip varied from standing around looking white to attract the attention of other heath care people to entertaining our conference speaker, and English man by the name of Nicholas Hall. We ate well, when my boss James was taking us out, and Nicholas’s lectures on health care advertising, marketing, branding, etc, were interesting, but a 10 day trip with my co workers was a little long! I got to see Nanjing, which is a quickly developing city, like so many in China, but is so untouched by the government. For example, Beijing used to have all these great outdoor markets, that since have been turned into giant ugly modern malls. Nanjing still has these markets. Good air, good parks, good food. Wu Xia [Xiao Wu’s daughter] is moving to Nanjing for her job in November so I am looking forward to visiting her there.

On the weekend during the conferences, I took a side trip to a small town called Shaoxing. Shaoxing is a smaller version of two larger more touristy towns called Hangzhou and Suzhou. The Chinese have a saying that ‘above there is heaven, below there is Hangzhou and Suzhou’. These are towns with canals, beautiful white stone bridges, and gardens that people from all over the country flock to see. Shaoxing is more of a regular less tourist infested version of these towns, and the original home of Lu Xun, a famous writer in China. [He wrote from 1918-1936]. Shaoxing is also the original home of stinky tofu, which I failed to try, because I spent the whole weekend breathing in its horrible stench.

Prior to this trip, I received a text message from a friend that said: “work for an American company, make USD $3000 per month”. Not enjoying my current state of poverty, I replied to this text, sent my resume, and next thing I knew I was being offered a job at a company called Jones Lang LaSalle. It is a real estate company, originally a joint venture between a Chicago company and a London company that specializes in market research and property management. Mostly what they do in Beijing is manage the high end residential and office buildings. How it works is a resident pays 4.5 RMB per square meter to JLL, and we clean the lobby everyday, maintain the outside landscape, and provide services similar to a concierge at a hotel. This concierge like service has been expanded to be called ‘personal butler service’, and my job is to explain to potential buyers just what this service consists of. In addition, JLL maintains the clubhouse, which is, at the location I am working at, kind of a smaller version of a country club. We have a green house [complete with palm trees], bar, swimming pool, sauna, Jacuzzi, spa, gym, even simulation golf.

I am the manager of 4 assistants, who JLL refers to as ‘angels’, based on the fact that they were hired because of their beauty, and they are the ones who will greet you when you come to my clubhouse to look at the sample room and consider purchasing an apartment there. I was hired also based on my looks, my lovely white skin and Roman nose landed me yet another job. As much as I enjoyed working at Hui Ling, it was fairly obvious that getting anything done there was close to impossible, not only because of the language barrier but also because the administration was not moving at any kind of pace. Really I hated teaching English with a passion, it just lost its fun when on the 7th week my students needed to be reminded what ‘weekend’ meant. And the idea of working for a well known major stable company making A LOT more money than I ever have before was appealing. So I started here mid-September, so far I have been in training, which has fizzled out, and now we are just waiting for the clubhouse construction to be finished so we can go stand around and look pretty and white. It should be finished early next week.

One downfall of the job is that it is on the north fifth ring road, a good distance from my home, and I need to take the shuttle bus up there, so my nice bike commute is over, but its probably for the best for my lungs. Another downfall is that I think the job might be the classic Chinese job of standing around an overstaffed building waiting for business. One friend told me to look at it as getting paid to work on my Chinese. And my Chinese has been rapidly improving, as the angels do not speak English, thus I must ‘manage’ in Chinese, which pretty much means lots of patience and dictionaries.

The dictator behind this mission is a money bags Napoleon syndrome of a 5 foot Hong Kong man, the developer, his company is called Shi Mao. He is the one who thinks beauty and white skin sells, and he’s probably right. A couple weeks ago we all assembled in a room for his review, me and the angels, the waitresses, bartenders, and security men. He walked in, we were all prepared for some propaganda sounding speech of how well we were all going to do, instead he started whispering to the club manager, Felix, grimaced at us, and left in a huff. I was told that he thought the waitresses were ugly and the security guards too frail. Our photos were taken for his review, so the ‘difficult looking’ [as ugly in Chinese is directly translated] folks could get the boot and be replaced by better looking youngsters.

So, I’m hoping for the best. The angels are pretty cool girls, and so are the waitresses, and as my sister says, you can do anything for a year, especially when this job affords a life I couldn’t leave before [ie my new laptop!] and the idea of paying my debts back should get me through the boringest of days. It will be an adventure regardless.

On my living side of life, I briefly had a new roommate, Lila Buckley [her new job screwed up her business card to read “Lila Buckleg”] hailing from Ukiah, California. A graduate of Middlebury, she studied Chinese and lived here before, and had set up a job with a Chinese environment related NGO. When she got here they told her that they had free housing provided for her, which came as a surprise to both of us, and so after a month of living with me she moved to her more free-er location. I can’t blame her, I remember what it was like to make the NGO salary. She’s a cool girl though, so we still hang out.

So I have my little apartment to myself, I have turned the smaller bedroom into an office. For the last week my father has been living with me, starting off with a bang up trip to Ikea for further house necessities, and the old man has since helped me really clean the floor [apparently soap is required??] clean out my nasty kitchen [although Lila did give it a good start] buy a second set of sheets, wash everything in my house, set up my internet, even put down contact paper on my shelves. He does the dishes and laundry when I leave, and is waiting with a big hug when I get home from work. Pretty much I’m thinking of hiring him to be my full time live in ‘ayi’ [Chinese for house cleaning person].

Mom and Hayley left last Saturday [I will get to our trip in a moment] and my dad stayed an extra week to see former colleagues and customers. In China, when you leave with the reputation that my dad left with, when you tell them that you are coming back to see everyone, they do it up. My dad is always surprised at how well they treat him, I have to remind him that if he did a shit job at IBM they might not be treating him like an emperor, but it is because he left as a virtual IBM God, and that is why he gets the royal treatment.

In the last week we have gone to banquet dinners every night. For those of you not familiar with banquets, you go to a very nice restaurant, and get your own proviate room, and sit at a giant table with 4-12 people and eat everything. In this past week I have tried many a strange item. Here’s the short list:

At the duck banquet: duck feet, duck entrails, I skipped the duck tongues this time, although they did look appetizing and the other Chinese at the table were wolfing them down [I ate one once when I was 17 and almost ralphed]. The duck feet were pretty good, but they were pretty disguised in mustard and cabbage. The entrails were chewy.
At the Sichuan hot pot: pig esophagus, pig stomach, goose entrails, chicken feet, cow stomach. The chicken feet were actually OK, but they were the rare de-boned kind. The pig esophagus was also OK. Nothing too terrible, but not all that good either. I don’t think I’ll be ordering these delicacies again.
My favorite banquet was with those crazy IBMers, we went to a Taiwan restaurant and had delicious scallops, pigeons, beef, many yummy more regular foods, and as in traditional IBM style, lots of cheers-ing, lots of beer.
Banquet #4 was with my dad’s organizations partner, the foundation that is doing NFTE training in China [teaching kids and adults entrepreneurship]. The head of the organization here, called Bright China, is a very kid man named Mr Shao who has more money then most, owns many buildings, and gives 100 million RMB to his programs [which extend well beyond the entrepreneurship training]. On this night we ate Shanghai style and enjoyed duck egg wrapped in pig ear. Why not? Those two items seem to go hand in hand to me.


The weekend before my family came I had registered to participate in a set of bike races: on Saturday was the team road race and Sunday was the individual and team mountain races. On Friday for lunch, I enjoyed a traditional Chinese dish called a ‘meat pie’ and didn’t finish it so thought I would take it back to the office and enjoy it later in the day. Yum yum. Ate the rest of it at about five o’clock, did some errands after work, and got home and started feeling ill… very ill. Had the famed ‘la du zi’ [which I learned does not translate as spicy tummy but still sounds like spicy tummy to me]… anyway, was very ill, somehow I managed to get up and go to the race on Saturday, I was motivated by the fact that I was the one who had asked my teammate to set this up, the team race required a steep entry fee and he had connected with the Norwegian Salmon Promotion Board to sponsor us. [When I think biking I think salmon, don’t you?] So I managed to take the subway to the race and complete my one lap, it was only 9 minutes long, and we still won the road race. I went home and slept for 17 hours, was still sick Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday morning I finally got it together because my sister was coming that afternoon!

Wednesday morning we flew to Yunnan province, the southern most province in China that bordered Burma, Laos and Vietnam. We went to the north western corner to a town called Lijiang to start our two day hike of Tiger Leaping Gorge. This is a beautiful gorge, and a beautiful hike, you’ll see photos soon. Along the hike are guesthouses to eat and stay in, each with a great view of the adjacent mountains and the clouds that drift through them.

Everything grows in Yunnan, so we ate 9 kinds of mushrooms, tons of fresh vegetables, ginger tea, so yummy. The hike was necessarily strenuous but we managed to have a good time. On Saturday we met up with Pat and Dave, who flew from Beijing, and spent a few days touring Lijiang. Lijiang is a cute old town with little cobbled streets and no bikes or cars that was destroyed in a earthquake in the early 90s and rebuilt in the same style, but seems a but like Epcot center. Packed with Chinese tourists, most on tours, and filled with a billion stores, we shopped, ate, walked, and drank yummy coffee until our next destination- 3 hours south to Dali, another beautiful mountain side town with a lake. This town was a little more authentic.

In the end this blog is getting very long and listy and boring and maybe its just cuz I’m trying to write the last two months of my life in as concise form as possible I seem to leave out the things that are interesting and just tell the who what when where. Well maybe I’ll go back and elaborate.

But that’s it for now. I’m proud that I’ve gotten this far in organizing my life. This weekend I managed to get a maid, someone to keep the dust bunnies from attacking and the dry cleaning woman from not selling my clothes I’ve left them there for that long. She comes for only $1.25 an hour. Can’t beat that. I haven’t gotten to the masses of emails, so if you haven’t received a personal one from me [mom] either CALL ME or just rest assured that you are not the only one. Hope everyone is good. Photos up when my website and computer decide to become friends again.