A Delicate Subject

Ok...there's no way to put this delicately.  The traditional Chinese toilet is a hole in the ground.  With time, this has evolved into a high-tech porcelain hole in the ground.  With foot pads.

If you're a guy, this is normally not a big deal.  Most of the bathrooms also have urinals.   For that matter, if you have to go bad enough, then the world is your urinal if you're a guy.  I normally see at least one cab driver peeing in the bushes on my morning walk to work.

If you're a lady, or a guy getting too much fiber, then it can be a bit more challenging.   These "squat toilets" require a combination of balance, muscle tone, and keen aim that must take a lifetime to develop.  As they say, though, when you gotta go..you gotta go.

Most modern buildings, especially those that serve an international crowd, have at least one Western-style porcelain throne.  Call it a commode, or a water closet, or a john, or a stool, or whatever you like...it's a welcome sight when you're feeling the pressure. 

One other thing.  The best selling item in China seems be the personal package of kleenex.   Everyone carries one.  If you have to blow your nose, then 20 people will be there to offer you a tissue.  I've finally realized that it is not for worry of a runny nose that they all carry a package.

Signs of Spring

I've been playing catch up in my postings - trying to cover the six weeks or so that I've been here in retrospect. I'm finally to the point of covering current events. It's March 29 today, and it's now only the last few days that we're discussing. The past week has been a good one, weather wise. There's been no rain and the temperatures have been pretty steady in the mid-50s. The bad news is that there are none of those 70 degree days that come out of nowhere in the Indiana springtimes to warm you to the bone. The good news is that there are none of those tornados that come with those days.

The best news is that Theresa arrives this coming week-end, on Sunday. It's a holiday week-end too, with Monday and Tuesday off. Things are looking up in this part of the world.

Jinji Lake at Night

The previous post showed some images of Jinji Lake by day.  In one of the photos, you could see some weird hardware sticking up out of the water.  That weird hardware is part of the infrastructure for the water and light show.

 The water and light show is performed every Friday and Saturday evening at 8:00 pm sharp.   At least it is now.  I don't know whether it will be done more frequently when summer comes.   Right now, though, it is definitely just Fridays and Saturdays.  I know this, because I can see it from the apartment.

 In truth, it's water, light, laser, fire, and music.   The show goes on for at least 30 minutes with tunes blaring - tunes ranging from the Star Wars theme to more traditional Chinese melodies.  The water jets go up and down and sideways to the music. Every so often there is a burst of flames - guaranteed to draw "oohs" and "aahs" from the crowd...but not very oohsome or aahsome to photograph.  (The intense brightness overwhelms my camera.)

 You can just make out the laser in some of the photographs.  It's the green thing.  It darts and weaves around to paint images just like a kid waving a sparkler on the Fourth of July.  There is a point in the show where they turn the lights down and project holographic images on misting water.   These are probably the coolest part of the show.  They don't photograph well, though.

 I haven't yet figured out where they hide the working hardware for all this.  By that I mean the pumps and such.  Given the size and the heights of the jets, I'm curious as to whether they're using straight mechanical pumps or compressed air.  Also, I'm also curious as to how they make the flames... is it gas or are they atomizing a liquid like hexane?  It would be good to know should I ever want to build one of these in the back yard.

JinJi Lake Walk

The weather finally broke the week-end before last.  The temperature spiked up into the 50s and the sun actually tried to show itself for a change.   It was a good day to take a walk on Jinji Lake.

I'd mentioned before that our apartment is about a 5 minute walk from Jinji Lake.  The lake is geographically in the center of the Industrial Park and metaphorically in the center of residential and recreational life.  The real-estate prices go up as you get closer to the shore.   A lake view from your flat will cost you even more.

(By the way, one of the apartments I looked at was right on the lake.  It was a killer view - 21 stories up, unobstructed, and with a huge balcony   I texted Theresa to tell her that I'd found THE ONE.   She texted back that, after 28 years of marriage, I should have learned she is afraid of heights.)

So, here you go....a few photos of the lake it's shoreline parks.  (By the way, if you look at the photo at immediately above, you see some metallic things sticking out of the water.   Those will be explained next time.)

It's Easy to Love the Environment if You Already Own a Car

A gentleman from Taiwan told me this joke:

Two men, one from China and one from America, were classmates at Berkley back in the 1960's. Twenty years later, they were both successful businessmen in their home countries. China at this time was just starting to really open up, so the Chinese man invited his old friend to come visit.

The two had both been on the cross-country team at college, so on the first morning they decided to go for a run together, like in old times. They ran about 3 miles, and as they were catching their breath after the American says: "Wow, the roads are filled with nothing but bicyclists. I thought we were poor people on the South Side of Chicago... but these people here are so poor they can't even afford to buy a car."

The Chinese friend says: "Oh yeah? as we were running I overheard two of those bicyclists talking to each other. As they passed us, the one pointed at us and says to the other, 'I thought we were poor...but I don't feel so bad anymore.  Those two guys are so poor they can't even afford a bike!'"

I'm not allowed to drive in China, so I've been walking to work every day since I've been here. It's about a 50 minute walk each way. But it's good....I get my 5000 steps in each day and also get some quality IPOD time. Besides, there is no better way to get to know a place than to wander it on foot. Each trip, I try to take a different path.

So for me, being able to walk to work is an enjoyable novelty after 30 years of doing it in a car every day. The weather has been grey, damp, and chilly. But as long as it's not pouring down rain it's great walking weather.

And believe me, I'm not lonely on foot. Even though the roads are crowded with cars, the bike lanes are just as crowded with cyclists and the sidewalks with footists.  The Industrial Park, being so new, was laid out to be friendly to all modes of transport. Each road has at least two lanes going each way for the cars, and another two lanes going each way for the cycles. and then wide sidewalks on both sides of the street. If you get into the old city of Suzhou, though, you get a taste of what it used to be....with cars and cycles and pedestrians often sharing the same spaces.

Like most Americans age 40 or older, I saw my first non-history-book images of China when Nixon took his trip to Beijing back in the 1970s. In the newscasts, the roads of China seemed to be filled with nothing but bicycles and bicyclists wearing their blue uniforms and Mao caps. The gentleman from Taiwan....the one who told me the joke...said that it really was this way when he first started coming to the mainland back in the 1980s. The few cars you saw back then belonged to government officials (all Buicks, but that is a story for another time) or to the very few wealthy who were surfing high on the initial waves of capitalism.

It's only been within the last 10 years or so that cars have become the norm. It took a while after the initial opening up of the economy to develop a middle-class with the affluence to buy cars. And it's not like everybody has a car now. There is still a lot of car buying to be done.

China today seems similar to what my parents and their generation describe the late 1940s and 1950s to have been. At that time, you had all these people that grew up poor in during the great depression. These were folks who had been humping it to survive during the poverty of the depression and the hardships during the world war. Then all of a sudden after the war, people saw the economy boom and most saw their own lives improve, if not prosper. New housing sprang up in new places. New roads were built to those new places. And people began to afford cars so that every family had one. And many families began having two.

I think maybe that China now is a bit like the US circa 1950. Housing is booming as is road and infrastructure construction. People are buying cars, often for the first time. Not these little Smart Cars and two seaters that are so European. We're talking BIG cars...four door BMWs, SUVs, Mini-vans and the like. If you look at a parking lot in Suzhou, it would be difficult to tell the difference between it and one in Houston.

And I can't blame them for buying cars. I've been walking to work for 4 weeks and it's a novelty to me. If it's raining or cold, I can afford to take a taxi. But if I'd been humping it on foot for 20 or 30 or 40 years an all the weather, then I'm sure the novelty would have worn off long ago. Also, I've come to realize that if your two feet are your only means of transport then your whole world is reduced to a circle with a diameter of 2 miles, maybe 3 miles. And that's a small world. A very cold world during the winter. A very hot one in the summer. A very wet world from time to time.

To a person on foot, a bicycle is like a gift from the heavens. I figure a bike instantly increases the distance you can travel by a factor of 5. Even more if you get an electric scooter (which these days is actually the two-wheeled vehicle of choice, as shown in the photo at top). With a bike, your world becomes a circle of 10 to 15 miles in radius. Through the magic of pi-r-squared, that is almost infinitely bigger than the world on foot. But it still can be hot, and cold, and wet. Just as on foot, you can't carry a week's worth of groceries on your bike (though I've seen a lot of Chinese trying to).

No...a car is a wonderful thing. If it's raining, you don't have to put on your poncho and drape the front of it over your handlebars. If it's freezing, you don't have to put your coat on backwards to protect yourself from the wind. It may be a pain to change a flat tire on a car, but it's far less painful than walking two miles on an arthritic hip.

Several folks I know from work, mostly women, have gotten a car and begun driving only in the last 12 to 24 months. At the age of 35 of so. If you ask them what they did prior to that, the answer is either walk or ride a bike or ride the bus. To them, the car is more than just transportation. It gives them back an extra 1 to 2 hours per day in which they don't have to plod along as pedestrian or pedalist or fight the public transit system. It gives back even more time when they pack the trunk with groceries once a week, rather than lugging one or two bags from the market daily.

The Chinese have fallen in love with the automobile for all the same reasons that Americans did back in the 1950s. It's not transportation. It's quality of life. It's all the benefits described above plus all the others. Taking your kids to soccer practice after work. Getting quickly to the hospital when your newborn is running a high fever at 2 in the morning. Doing a family day-trip on the week-end to an amusement park 50 miles away.

Every now and then I see an article in some newspaper or magazine bemoaning the fact that so many cars are being sold (and will be sold) in China and India and other emerging markets. It's bad for the environment... more pollution and CO2 emissions and more demand to drill for oil. The stories usually come with a complaint that modernity is spoiling the natural way of life that people have lived for centuries. And that the people would be happy to continue to live that way if only the greedy capitalists would stop their seductive marketing.

Maybe it is a strain on the environment.  Maybe so.  But after 4 weeks of  humping it across Suzhou on foot, I won't begrudge anyone an automobile in this country or in any other.

Hello Pity

This is for my Hello Kitty girls; Amanda and Kali. Seen on a ladies hand bag rack. Just goes to show that China has its Goth Girls too.

March Weather

Our neighbor Dan in Greenwood is a weather man.   I don't mean weatherman as in the guy on the TV news.  I mean weather man as in betting man or leg man.   Weather is someplace between a passion and an addiction.  It just so happens that he's also a professional meteorologist.  But I believe that if he were a Wall Street Banker that he'd still have the rain gauge and weather station in the backyard as a hobby.  He's pretty good at predicting the weather too, which is no small talent given that Midwest weather can vary wildly from day to day.

He would be bored to death in Suzhou in March.   Even I can predict the weather in Suzhou in March.

• Today: Cloudy with fog, mist, and light rain.  High of 45
• Tomorrow: Cloudy with fog, mist, and light rain.  High of 45
• Next week:  Cloudy with fog, mist, and light rain.  High of 45

It never really rains hard.  It hardly ever rains at all, really.  But it seems that there is a perpetual mist - heavier than a fog and lighter than a drizzle - that hangs on all day long.  Every now and then we get a day that surprises us with some sunshine and relative dryness. But, hey, I can stick with my forecast above and still be right 80% of the time.  I'm not sure Dan has that high of a batting average back in Indy.

The Suzhou natives tell me not to worry, that it will most certainly change.  They say that it will stay miserably cold and wet through the Qing Ming holiday at the beginning of April.  Then it will get miserably hot and wet.  They say that there are only two seasons here - winter and summer.  And the one goes to the other without a break in between.

The Chinese seem to have a low-key and ironic sense of humor.  I haven't yet learned to tell when they are joking and when not.  I'm really hoping they are joking about the weather.

Plum Blossoms (梅花)

We left Jessie's wedding feast at about 2:00 in the afternoon to go to see the plum blossoms.   The drive took about 45 minutes, and most folks couldn't help but nap due to the after-effects of all the "gan bei".  The weather was kind of crummy - cloudy and misty.  Which was too bad because the areas around the lake and its islands are dotted with mountains (or more truthfully, big hills).  The municipal area Suzhou is as flat as Iowa.  It would have been good to see the mountains without the shroud of mist and fog.

The plum garden is on an island in Taihu Lake.  (The "lake" part of that is actually redundant...since the "hu" part of "Taihu" means "lake".  "Tai" roughly translates to "great" or "grand" or "really big" or something like that.)  Our destination was the largest of three islands.  It is home to a number of parks and temples and has always been a popular spot.  Until recently, it took a ferryboat ride to get there.  Now, all are linked to the shore by a causeway, with the big island marking the end of the road into the lake. 

The plum blossoms are to the Chinese much like the cherry blossoms are to the Japanese...and then again not.   And like everything in China, there are layers of deeper meaning.  They say the plum tree is the one that blooms in winter.  The flower is a symbol of inner strengh and character, because the plum tree is able to show its beauty despite the harsh and oppressive climate that surrounds it.  The plum blossom is one of the four gentlemen, the primary flowers of Chinese art.  Along with the orchid, the bamboo, and the chrysanthemum it gets a star role on the flowered tiles in a Mah Jong set.

The plum garden covers about 20 acres or so on the side of a big hill in the middle of the island.   It was packed with people on the day we visited.  The point of the visit is to walk the pathways and absorb the sites and smells of the blooming trees.   The pathways eventually go up the side of the hill to shelterhouse that looks down over the garden and the island.

We spent about two hours in the plum garden and then took the bus back to Suzhou.  The photo below shows my friends Alex, Sherry, and Jacky.   Just in case you were wondering what they look like.

The Wedding Feast

My Chinese work colleagues have been extremely kind and welcoming.  During my first week at the plant I was invited to go on a team-building event come the week-end.  The plan was that about 12 people were going to meet on Saturday morning, pile into a bus, and go to on an island in Taihu lake where the plum blossoms were just starting to bloom.  More on plum blossoms later.

Alex was kind enough to pick me up at the apartment on Saturday morning.  (Alex, of course, is Chinese.  If your surprised by the name then READ THIS.)  As we drove to the meeting spot, he told me that before going to the island, we were going to stop off at a nearby town to go to Jessie's wedding.  Surprised, I told him I could stay home if this was turning into a more private thing.  He said that it was OK...that Jessie knew that I was coming too. 

Jessie, by the way, is another colleague from work.  Like everyone, she is gracious and considerate and forgiving of the stupid mistakes an outsider makes.  Like most, she is young...probably not yet 30.  (I don't mean to sound crude, but it's difficult for me to judge the age of the Chinese.  A local friend told me they have the same problem with Westerners.  He said we look older when we are young and younger when we are older.)

When I got to the meeting place, Sherry took me aside and said that Jessie had asked her to pass on a message.  Essentially, Jessie apologized in advance because her home town was small and didn't get many Western visitors.   She was worried that I might be uncomfortable because people might stare at me and talk about me.  She said little children might act rudely, the reason being that many of them had never seen a non-Chinese face.

Now, this is what I mean by gracious.  Here is a lady that has plenty of things to worry about with her wedding - the food, the dress, who's going to keep uncle Bernie from drinking too much.  But still she took the time to worry that a guest might be uncomfortable? 

The bus trip took about an hour or so.  On the way they explained how the wedding thing is done in China.  In the U.S. we have a ceremony followed by a reception.   They do the same thing...but the ceremony part is relatively short and the party part lasts for about 3 days so that friends and family can drop in sometime during the period.  I was told it would be more of a wedding feast than a wedding ceremony.  And it was.

The wedding feast was, I believe, in Jessie's parents house.  They had cleared out the furniture from the ground floor and brought in as many tables as possible.  The bridal party had the biggest table in what I'd guess was the living room.  There were a few other tables in that room, and more tables in the adjoining rooms.

The photo at top is the table of the bridal party.  (Double-click on it to see an enlarged view.)  Jessie is at the top, with her husband.  She is wearing a red dress because red is a auspicious color. (There...I used the word "auspicious".  I could have used the word "lucky" but "auspisious" sounds more complex and better suits the complicated culture of China.)  In the West, the color red has some sinister implications of danger or prohibition or bad things.  In China, and the orient in general, red seems to imply nothing but good.  On the news, if the stock market figures are shown in red then it means they went up.  At the train station, the train number shown in red is the train you want to take.

Our group took up two tables right next to the bridal party.  In China, seating position also has implications.  These were places for honored guests.

Once seated, plates of food began to arrive.  Lots of plates of food.  Traditional Chinese dining is family style.  Everyone takes portions from shared plates.  When the plates arrived, they were placed in the center of the table.  Then more plates arrived and they were stacked on top of the other plates.   Sherry told me that Chinese people are very talented when it comes to plate stacking.

The photo above shows some of what was served.  There are strawberries and peanuts and beans and fried greens.  In the front you can see some jelly fish.  In the back are some dumplings and some shrimp and some pork.  This photo was taken early in the feast.  At this point, there was still much more plate stacking to be done.

Like weddings all over the world, the Chinese wedding invites people to indulge a bit in vices as part of the celebration.  There was plenty of alcohol....what they called pijiu, huangjiu, and baijiu.  Pijiu is beer, normally the Chinese brand TsingTao.  (TsingTao is a lager that is pretty similar to Budweiser or any other American lager that uses a lot of rice in the making.)  Huangjiu, or yellow liquor, is a wine made from rice and other grains.  Huangjiu is similar to Japanese sake, at least until you put it in your mouth.  Baijiu, or white liquor, is essentially what you get if you distill the huangjiu.  It's a strong liquor with a strong taste to match.  

"And what do you do with the alcohol?" I hear you ask.  Let's turn to our friends at the US-China Business Council for a textbook explanation:

Toasting: Toasting is an indispensable component of the Chinese banquet and it begins when the principal host offers a welcoming toast. Toasts are typically short (2 to 4 minutes) and may consist of a simple welcome, a brief statement filled with platitudes, or a substantive comment on the visit. Chinese rarely hold their glass at shoulder length when toasting, it is considered respectful to try and toast your glass lower than other's glasses.

Alcohol Cautions: Several types of liquor are traditionally served at Chinese banquets (beer, wine, and baijiu (a potent liquor, of which the most famous brand is Maotai). Glasses are kept full during the meal to allow for toasting. Beer and wine may be sipped, but baijiu is traditionally downed at once like a western "shot" in toasts with the Chinese guests. The Chinese toast "gan bei" literally means "dry glass.

In the photo below, you can see a toast of "gan bei" in progress. You may notice that the ladies in the group are toasting with orange juice.  It seems that the vices are only intended for the men.  I don't know if this is just the case in business circles or if it is a general rule of Chinese culture. 

Also, if you look closely at the photo above you will find evidence of another vice.  On the corner of the table in the foreground, you see some red things piled up.  These are packs of cigarettes.  Before the food arrived, a lady came around and piled packs of cigarettes on every table.  Red packs, of course, in keeping with the lucky nature of that color.  At a point, all the men at the table were expected to take a cigarette and allow the bride to light it.  And it seemed to be part of the ritual that the women at the table should try to blow out the bride's lighter...the intent not to be to prevent the smoking, but to have some fun in making it as difficult as possible.

Just as Jessie had predicted, there came a point where I noticed little kids kept walking by and staring at me.  After a while, they started coming up in pairs and threes to look me over.  Finally, one got brave enough to ask me something.  The only words I could recognize were the expression for "foreigner".  I told him that I was from the US.  He wanted to touch me to make sure I was real.  To him, I was probably the ugliest thing he'd ever seen - pale as a dead man and completely bald.  (Chinese men, I must say, seem to have great genetics for hair.  Never gets thin or falls out as far as I can tell.)

After a while, more kids wanted to talk.  Some tried the little English they were already starting to learn in school.  Then parents started coming over with their kids and prodding them to practice English with me.  My impression was that the parents who lived in the village could not speak English much, if at all, But they were beaming like a searchlight with pride when their children proved their ability to communicate with a real foreigner.

I'm not sure how to tell when dinner is over.  It certainly isn't because the food is all gone.  In China, if the guests are able to eat all the food, then it means the host did the dishonor of serving too little.  But at some point, the feast was over.  People got up to mingle and plates began to clear.  The old men started to sneak away from their wives so they could get card games started.   It looked a lot like every Catholic wedding I'd ever been to....beer, cards, cigarettes, talking, laughing, kids running around and parents trying to ignore them.  The language may have been different, but the sights and sounds and smells were pretty much the same.

I got invited to play cards...what game, I have no idea...but these old guys wanted to teach me.  But by that time we had to get back on the bus to go to the plum blossom park.  More on that come.

Jessie's wedding feast is something I expect to remember until my dying day or until my brain no longer works.  It truly was an honor to be invited.  It was a gift to be made to feel so welcome and included.  I wish Jessie and her husband long and happy lives together.  And I truly thank them.

Grammar Notes and Apologies

I don't have a lot of time to write and have even less time to proof-read.  When I do proof-read, I see grammatical mistakes that would make my old teachers like Mrs. Dowden faint.  Sorry for that.

I don't mean the stuff like starting sentences with "And" or "But" or the excessive use of "...".  That is done on purpose.  It's the way I talk.  It's the way I write.  If it annoys you then I'm afraid you're going to have to deal with it.

What I am talking about is the bad spelling and missing words and bad punctuation and the mismatches in verb tense and noun number.  So it goes.  At least I'm not turning in anything for a grade.

But here is one thing you need to know.....

I've recently been watching the TV Series Mad Men.  I got the first three seasons on DVD for 22 yuan, which is something like $3.75.  I suspect there may be some intellectual property issues with my DVDs. They certainly look legitimate.  And it's not like they were bought from some shady dude on the street.  They came from a fine, very legitimate-looking store in a mall.   So, in my defense, I don't think it's possible to buy anything more legitimate here.

So anyway, this series Mad Men is about these Madison Avenue advertising types back in 1960.  The show is a hoot.  These guys have three martini lunches and suck down scotch and bourbon while at the office.  They smoke all the time and everywhere.  Racism and sexism abound.  Men run the show and women are only around to do the secretarial work and to give the men something to chase after.   I doubt that any 2011 HR manager or corporate lawyer can watch without getting nightmares.

Though sensationalized, there is a little bit of truth in this portrayal of 1960's life.  This was before the civil rights movement and the women's movement and a bunch of other movements.   Society decided that fraternity party horseplay is only fun if you're part of the fraternity.  Things have changed through all the years and all the lawsuits.  Things have gotten better.

But not all things.  Grammar got messed up.

Nouns and pronouns have gender.  Some are masculine like "man", "men", and "he".  Others feminine like "woman", "women", and "she".  English has a few gender neutral nouns like "child" or "person"....but not enough to cover all the bases. It works pretty well if your talking about masculine or feminine things independently.  But once you get to a situation where you're talking about a combination of the two, then it gets screwed up.

And I blame the women's movement in the 1960's and 1970's for screwing it up.

More than one "woman" is called "women".  More than one "man" is called "men".  But what if you have a group of both men and women?  It used to be acceptable to call such a grouping "men".  The word "men" was understood to be a collective noun implying either all males or a mixture of males and females.  You know....like "all men are created equal"? 

Further complications come from the fact that English requires gender and number to match between subject and object and all things in between.  "The boy ate his lunch."  "The girl ate her lunch."  But take the following sentence...what word would you use to fill-in-the-blank?

"Each child will eat ____ lunch."

What word did you choose?  Mrs. Dowden said you can't use the word "its" because a human being cannot be an "IT".  She said you can't use the word "their" because, being a plural possessive, it doesn't match the singular "each child".  Did you pick "his or her" (or the more academic looking "his/her") to cover both possibilities?  Don't make me puke.

It used to be that you could say "Each child will eat his lunch" and no one would be insulted.  "Men" could be a group of males and females.  "His" could mean something belonging to a specific boy or a non-specific boy or girl.  "Mailmen" used to mean the people who delivered the mail, regardless as to whether they pee standing up or sitting down.  That's the way it works in French, though otherwise that language is the biggest butt-pain for gender agreement that exists.  Les Hommes sont toutes les hommes et les femmes.

I blame the feminists.  It may have been an unintended consequence of an otherwise noble cause, but they screwed up my language.   These days you have to say "all men and women are created equal" because otherwise you might offend by using just the word "men".   Now you have to say "Each boy or girl will eat his or her lunch" because it might be offensive if you don't cover every possible statistical combination.

Now that I think about it, maybe I should blame the guys like those in Mad Men.  If they hadn't been such unrepentant frat boys then maybe feminism wouldn't have messed with my language. 

It's taken a few hundred words to get to the point...but here, finally, is the point.

In this blog, I declare that:

• The word "their" can be either singular or plural.  If singular, it means either his or hers.
• The words "it" and "its" can be used for a human being of either gender.
• The words "guy" and "guys" are, were, and always shall be gender-neutral.  ("Dude" on the other hand, is always male.)
• The word "men", either standing alone or in combination words such as "weathermen", can be used for a collection of both men and women.

Anything else that looks questionable grammar-wise is probably a mistake.

There you go.  Got that out of my system.  Now, back to our regular programming.

Chinese Names

The first time I was in a business meeting in China everyone at the table introduced themself:

• Hi, I'm Daisy
• I'm Jacky
• I'm Minnie
• I'm Rainbow

It was like the opening sequence of the old Micky Mouse Club show. 

I'd expected to hear Chinese-sounding names like "Yao Ming".   But instead, everyone had a very English-sounding name...or at least everyone under 35 years old did.  I later asked, as discretely as I could, why this was so.  

The first part of the answer was that every child in a good school is studying English these days.  It's a global economy and Engish is the language of that global economy.  Parents who want to raise their children for success (and what parent doesn't) make sure that English is on the schedule at school.   In some cities like Shanghai...and I hear soon in all of China...English instruction is required in all the schools.  From the first year onward.

The second part of the answer was that it's normal for each child to choose a "Western" name they will use for the rest of that their life.  Or at least for their business life.  They recognize that Westerners have trouble with the traditional Chinese names.  Having a Western name becomes an advantage if you intend to work and play on a global stage.  The story goes that children choose their Western name around the age of 12.  And I hear that it's not unusual these days for parents to choose a Western name for their child at birth.

Hold on...it gets a little more complicated.   I only make you suffer through this once.

In the US and Europe and Latin America and everyplace I know of besides China, we have a First Name and a Last Name.  The last name is the "Family" name.  The first name is the "Given" name.  In China, this is flipped.   They have a Last name and a First name....or more accurately, their family name comes first and given name comes after.   Unless they use their Western name, in which case they flip and put the family name at the end where we would expect it to be.

Think Jacky Chan.

Jacky Chan (the actor...no relation to Charlie) is actually named Chan Kong Sang.  So he took the Western name "Jacky" stuck his family name "Chan" on the end.  I'm sure this hasn't hurt his career as a Western movie star.

You might think, then, that the local folks only use their Western names when they work with foreigners and they use their Chinese names when they work with each other.   Not as far as I can tell.  On most days I'm the only foreigner in the office, but I still hear everyone talking to each other using Daisy and Charlie and Minnie.  The Western name seems to have amalgamated with their Chinese identity.  Just as a nickname such as Bob or Jim or Millie becomes part of an American's identity.

Not everyone uses a Western name, though.   Older folks ("older" meaning my age) generally use only their Chinese names.   I assume that this is because they came of age before globalization got its legs.  And there are a few younger folks who speak very good English but still use their traditional Chinese names.   I don't know the story yet, but suspect it may express a wee bit of protest.  After all, Chinese names have worked fine for 5000 years....why change now.

What's the point?  The point is that you shouldn't be surprised if everyone I write about is a Minnie or a Charlie or a  Daisy.

Home ?

On February 19, I made the flight from Osaka to Shanghai. From there, it was two more hours by car to Suzhou. No hotel for this visit. My two suitcases and I moved into our apartment.

In the photo above, our apartment is in the building at the back....the one that looks like it has a hole in it's center. If you count up 14 floors on the right-hand side, then that would be our place.

Our temporary home is located in the Suzhou Industrial Park, on the North side of Jin Ji Lake. "Jin Ji" is Chinese for "golden chicken". I've yet to figure that out. It's not shaped like a chicken. Nor have I seen any chickens around. Our apartment looks South out over the lake. Though we've got a couple of buildings in front of us, we can still see a fair bit of the western side. (In the picture below, the lake is somewhere in the haze beyond the trees.)
The lake is pretty much the center of the Suzhou Industrial Park district. Most of the housing, shopping, and recreation in SIP centers on the lake. There are still a few industrial lots available for expansion on the East side of the lake. The parts lying West of the lake are near completely developed. There is still expansion on the West side, but it is going upward rather than outward.

Kyoto

Kyoto is just a 30 minute train ride from Kobe. Back in the day, it was the capital city of Japan before Tokyo. Today, it is an obligatory tourist stop due to it's historic buildings and artsy reputation.

The photo at top is the golden temple. The photo below is a Zen rock garden. I'm not quite sure of the rock garden. They tell me that if you ponder it long enough, it will give you spiritual insight. But where I come from, they would be parking cars on it.

The Adventure Begins

On February 11, I left the U.S. on a one-way ticket to China. Projected return date...sometime in February 2012. Theresa was not with me, since she is planning to come over at the beginning of April. She had a few more things to finish....like her last day at work, our granddaughter Kali's 5th birthday party, and packing up the air shipment of stuff for the apartment.

But oddly enough, the year in Suzhou begins with a week in Kobe, Japan. Business again. Our Japanese affiliate home office is located in Kobe, and we have a manufacturing plant not too far outside the city.

Kobe is a beautiful city, nestled in between the sea and the mountains that rise up just a mile or so inland. They say it has 2 million people within it's borders; though where exactly those borders are is hard to tell. It seems to be one continuous metropolitan and industrial area for the 45 miles or so between Osaka and Kobe. From what people say, the megalopolis continues farther West and South all the way to Hiroshima.

Whenever in Japan, I'm always struck by two things. The first is how neat and clean the country is. Everything looks like a model on display at a museum. The oil refineries and ship yards that line the coast always seem to have a fresh coat of paint. No rust. No trash heaps. In comparison, the drive from Gary into Chicago look like a scene from a zombie apocalypse movie.

The second thing that strikes me is how UNBELIEVABLY EXPENSIVE everything is. I rarely capitalize for emphasis. In this case, the emphasis is warranted. I'd always heard that Japan was pricey compered to the US. And it's gotten worse as the yen and the dollar have been going in two different directions for the past few years.

The center of Kobe is like one, unbroken, interconnected shopping mall. I've never seen anything like it. It goes on-and-on-and-on at street level. And the it goes on for several floors above street level. And it seems to go on just as many floors below street level. You can have the exact address of a restaurant and still not find it because it's above or below. It's the most three-dimensional city I've ever been in.

Note that the picture above is from the apartment of friends Dana and Rochelle. They're on assignment in Kobe and living there with their three children. Should you wonder, the recent earthquake was barely felt and caused no harm in Kobe. All there are safe and well.

Prologue - The January Trip: Part II

At 31 degrees North latitude, Suzhou is at about the same North-South position as the border between Georgia and Florida. Snow is not unheard of in Suzhou, but when snow comes the city is as about as well-prepared as Atlanta or Houston or any other Southern US city. Which means, of course, they're are not prepared at all.

Two days before I was scheduled to leave Suzhou in January it started snowing. Not a heavy snow, but it didn't stop. At the hotel, on the first snowy morning, they had about 2 inches of snow and an army of workers out clearing the parking lot with a makeshift thing made out of bamboo poles and two-by-four sections. On the second morning, they were back at it again with a fresh 2 inches of additional snow.

Evidently, they didn't have enough bamboo to clear off the main highway to Shanghai. It was closed. Luckily, the kind folks I work with helped me to take the train, and the subway, and another train to get to the airport for my flight out.

Prologue - The January Trip

I'd been to Suzhou a couple of times in 2009 and 2010. Both trips were fly-in-fly-out with no time to see much of the city. In fact, the hotel where we stayed was in the heart of the Industrial part of the Industrial park. You could walk to work at the plant site, but there was nothing else much within waking distance.

Beginning January 11, I made a two week visit to do a little prep work on the both business side and on the personal side. On the week-end, I spent a full day looking at apartments and then a couple more evenings the following week. Looked at about 15 or so and finally selected one (and after much texting and exchange of photos with Theresa).

Apartment hunting was my first chance to venture outside of my normal habitat within the Industrial Park. It seems there actually is a city there...with places where people live and shop and play. I had an extra free day on the week-end and took a walk over to the old city of Suzhou. It was a long walk, but I finally made it to the Humble Administrator's Garden.

Within China, Suzhou is known for historic, traditional gardens. The old city is splattered with them. Most of the native Chinese I've met, from places other than Suzhou, all have a story about visiting the gardens on a family vacation when they were children. Even on a cold day in January it was full of people.

The traditional Chinese garden was/is intended to immerse a person in nature so as to promoste the contemplation of life, beauty, and inner self. (Ok...I made that up, but I think it's pretty close to being true.) Each of the Suzhou gardens has it's own history and style. The Humble Administrator's Garden is the largest of them. Those who appreciate the finer points may rank one of the others ahead. But for a tourist, if you're going to see only one garden then this is the one.

Where is Suzhou ?

When a person first sees the word "Suzhou" they most often ask one of these two questions:

1. Where the heck is Suzhou?
2. How the heck do you pronounce "Suzhou"?
   

Let's start with question #1. More on question #2 later.....

Suzhou is in China (People's Republic of China for you geography nitpickers). It's located in the Eastern part of the country about 60 miles West of Shanghai. The litte push-pin in the picture above shows the location. At this scale, Suzhou is close enough to Shanghai that the push-pin blocks out the "Shan" part....so all you see on the map is "ghai" (if you look really close, that is.)

Beijing is about 700 or 800 miles to the North. Hong Kong is about the same distance to the South. I'm not sure how far it is from Indianapolis, but you get 7055 airline miles when you fly through Chicago to Shanghai. And if you're coming from Suzhou from outside of China, then odds are you'll be flying to Shanghai and then going on to Suzhou by car or bus or train.

Suzhou has been around for a long time as a city of one sort or another. It made the big time in China as a center of commerce along the Grand Canal. The canal "made" Suzhou much like the Erie Canal "made" the cities of Buffalo, Syracuse, and Albany in upstate New York back in the early 1800's. The only difference is that the Grand Canal did it for Suzhou a couple thousand years earlier.

Today, Suzhou is a conglomeration of the old town and a couple of new districts that were developed beginning in the 1990's. Where we'll be living is to the East of the old town, in the Suzhou Industrial Park (SIP). To the West is the Suzhou New District.

Taken all together there are are a bit more than 6 million people in the greater metropolitan area. The local folks say it's a great little "small town" to live in, as compared to the big cities like Shanghai and Beijing. After all, it ranks well down the list of most populous cities in China.

Enough for now. There will be lots more on Suzhou later.

By the way...the answer to question #2 above is that you pronounce it like the names "Sue" and "Joe",,,,,,SueJoe.

Welcome

This site is mainly intended for friends and family. I've never been a good writer of letters, so please consider any postings here as letters to you all.

If you've stumbled across this page by accident, then you're more than welcome to visit. Just don't expect much brilliant insight, pithy commentary, or perfect use of the Queen's English.

Here's what you can expect: Theresa and I will post about whatever we find interesting or worth writing about. If you've suffered through our previous attempt at blogging-while-living-abroad then you know what to expect. If you haven't..,...well good luck to you.

Here's what you should NOT expect:

1. Stuff related to my job: True, it is the job that brings us to Suzhou. But I'm going to try to keep a bright white line of separation between the personal and professional. That's less a matter of ethics, and more a matter of self-preservation. It's not a good career move to talk about one's job online.
2. Much stuff related to politics or religion: We happen to be guests in China. It's not polite to talk about politics or religion when you are a guest. I do not want to inadvertently write something that offends.
3. Open comments: If you're a blog-o-phile who loves to communicate by posting and reading blog comments....then I'm sorry. I've turned off comment functionality for now. If you are a friend or family member then you already know how to reach us by e-mail (or you know someone you can ask to find out how to reach us). Perhaps, in time, I will enable comments. But for now, I don't have the time to moderate them

I hope that this site provides you with more moments of enjoyment than moments of boredom. In the end, it is sent love and best wishes to you all.