One morning I came into work and noticed a colleague laboriously backing her car into a parking spot.   I was waiting to hold the elevator for her, but it took at least three attempts to get the car positioned just right before she got out.   Yes, she’s one of the few folks in our office who owns a car.   While waiting, I noticed that all of the other cars also had been backed into their parking spot.   And ever since then I’ve looked to see if the pattern held.   It does, with an occasional exception.     When she was done parking, I greeted her and asked,

“Why do you back your car into the parking space?”
“Oh, It’s easier to leave that way.”
“But, I bet it’s harder to back in to a parking space than to back out, isn’t it?”
“Hmm…maybe.”
“Why does everyone back into their parking space?”
“That’s the way were were taught.”

Getting ready to fly back to the US was a complete mess. Many other events happened simultaneously and I was forced to stop delaying errands for whatever reason. I discovered that, once again, the Shekou Ferry would be totally useless to me; I thought I could make the quick trip from there to the Hong Kong airport for my 10am departure, but of course, the earliest they offer is 7:45am, and they wouldn’t let me on (thankfully, I called in advance). So, that meant staying the night in Hong Kong, poor me. Before I left, I needed to receive my sea shipment which was due to arrive at 10 in the morning. For two months, my goods were slowly making there way to me – aboard a ship slowly chugging it’s way across the Pacific, then sitting somewhere in the Port of Guanzhou waiting to get cleared for customs. While being inspected, I reckon, someone found it necessary to pound a double-pointed nail about a three fourths of an inch into one of my guitar cases! Why? Thank goodness it didn’t hit anything vital. Anyway, the very day the shipment arrived in my apartment, I’d be hauling one of the guitars back for Christmas vacation. Pure brilliance!

Before the shipment arrived though, I went to check my email and suddenly the wireless internet connection that I’d used yesterday didn’t work. Dang, now I was unable to verify if my ticket was issued. But, I couldn’t go anywhere because the shipment would be arriving in less than an hour. I should never have waited so long to issue the ticket, but I was also trying to coordinate some timing with the vet in Redmond regarding getting the proper certificates for my cat to come back to China.

I went to get the laundry out of this new washer/drier combo that the landlord bought. So, why were my white t-shirts a sick brown-grey color after the wash finished? Maybe it was the liquid soap concoction I made after mixing the dry detergent with water. Nah, that can’t be it. I walked 10 minutes to Walmart and picked up some official liquid detergent and ran the laundry again, but the job hadn’t finished by the time I left for Hong Kong some six hours later (I hope it’s done).

The delivery went smoothly, thankfully. The crew came in like a hurricane, ripped all the boxes and packaging apart, cleaned it up, and left. The whole incident took about 15 minutes. I had called Xiao Liu earlier for a 10:30 pickup. I had to get to the office to check my email and then find someone to help me with some banking business.

Sure enough, checking email at the office, I learned that my ticket wasn’t issued! Dang, less than 5 hours before heading to Hong Kong and I didn’t have a ticket. This had the potential of “huge mess” written all over it. I must have confused the agent by saying, “These times are good, please issue. If there is a Northwest flight available, please book that instead.” And the response was, “Nope, no NW flight. Want me to issue this one?” Ah well, lesson learned…be more clear. Xiao Liu wasn’t available for a lunchtime run to the bank, so I called Xiao Ji, who’d be ready in a moment for a quick run. I spent that time replying to some work emails.

A few days before, I had tried to return some money that Mingjie had let me borrow as a deposit on my new apartment, but the cash machine kept refusing the order at the last moment. So, I enlisted Michael to come to the bank with me to help me fill out the proper forms to pay back Mingjie and to deposit the December rent into my landlord’s account. We took a number and sat for about 20 minutes. At least it worked without too much hassle. Michael told me that as few as five years ago and certainly ten that very few people used the banks. Now, with a lot of folks moving into the middle class, the banks are drawing huge crowds, a problem that the banks don’t mind, I’m sure. Xiao Ji didn’t have time to take me back to the apartment, so Michael and I went to have food at a cheap Hunan restaurant. After a half an hour or so back at the office, I received a confirmation email that my ticket would be issued in the morning and I had a reservation at the Shangri La. OK, now the real stress was over. All the big items were taken care of. Xiao Shang had some time to take me back to the apartment about 15 minutes later. Things weren’t desperate now and as I write this, it doesn’t seem like a big deal, but I’d given myself a headache having all this stuff to take care of in one day before leaving for an international flight.

I then realized that some of the plants in the apartment would surely be dead by the time I got back, so I called up Xiao Liu again for a quick shuttle over to the office to drop of my keys with Peter (he lives 5 floors above me). I took my belongings with me and Xiao Liu took me to the Fu Min subway stop, just before the border with Hong Kong. That was an interesting conversation. He acted like he understood me. I was trying to say that I wanted to go to the north-south subway line to minimize the number of subway switches that I had to make since I was carrying so much bulky luggage. He seemed to get that and said, “OK, fine.” But, when I asked about the subway stops, he said, “Oh I don’t know where that one is.” Where was the miscommunication happening? Well, I never figured it out, but we found the Fu Min stop without too much trouble and I was on my way.

I began to relax once I was on my way to Kownloon on the KCR train. As usual, the Shangri La was just great, totally comfortable and perfect service. Check out the view from the room. I went out to an Indian restaurant that I frequent, then came back, finished up some work and personal emails, then to bed with the windows wide open.

(above) The nice view from the hotel. Check out the building lit up with “Merry Christmas”.

The following morning, the taxi driver was looking to rip off a foreigner. Speaking in Cantonese (apparently he understood zero English), he asked if I wanted to take a ride to the airport for 825 Hong Kong Dollars, about $105. I declined. For one, that was way too expensive, I didn’t have much cash on me, and I like the Airport Express. A few moments later, he dropped the price by 600 HKDs, totaling about $29. I turned him down again. He must have asked like three more times for the same price. When I arrived at Kowloon Station, the bill was 37.6 HKDs. The drivers always round the cents, so that meant 38 Hong Kong Dollars. This driver didn’t want to give me my measly 2 HKDs though, but I decided to keep asking anyway. “Qing ba liang kuai gei wo.”, I asked Mandarin, not Cantonese. He pointed at the excessive baggage price as if he were trying to fool me or something. But, the 10 HKD for the excessive baggage was already included in the 38 HKD. Finally and reluctantly, he handed me over the 2 HKD coin.

On the Airport Express train, I noticed that the Cantonese and Mandarin announcements had never sounded so different. That’s a good sign! I couldn’t tell the difference in the two a few months ago, but it’s quite easy now. The rest of the trip went well.

I finally have a new apartment. I was about to write a blog entry about the negotiation process which seemed pretty entertaining at the time, but pretty uninteresting now, so I’ll pass on that. Instead, here’s a picture of the final signing of the documents, which took forever! Way longer than I’ve spent during the closing ceremonies of buying or selling a house.

(l-r) Signin’ papers (my landlords are sitting on the far sofa), a view from the deck.   See between the two large apartment buildings?   There’s a tower sitting up on a hill.   That’s called Yuan Bo Yuan.   I haven’t been there yet, but will check it out soon.   To the right is a funny looking tower.   That’s the China Merchant’s bank tower.   The first tower to the left of the Yuan Bo Yuan Tower is a prominent building next to where my temporary apartment was located.

My landlords are nice folks, always smiling and offering me tea.   The poor husband wanted to show me the view but didn’t realize the glass doors and walked square into the glass panel.   He never lost his smile though, but dang that must have hurt!   He knocked his head good.   They speak zero English so communicating is limited with my small vocabulary.   There were so many domestic words that I realized I didn’t know while talking with them.

I arrived at the apartment to drop off some sheets and spend the night. But, while I was wandering through the living area, I heard an odd squeaking sound. “What is that??”, I thought. It didn’t sound like any “normal” apartment sound. Then I realized what it must be: rats! Not just ordinary rats, but the famous rats from the Guandong province, aka “Canton”. Ugly and huge brutes they are, Cantonese rats.

(above) I wonder if they look like this.

Immediately thought of a famous line from The Insidious Fu Manchu where Nayland Smith is captured by Fu Manchu and is about to endure the “Six Gates of Joyful Wisdom”…

“Cantonese rats, Dr. Petrie, the most ravenous in the world . . . they have eaten nothing for nearly a week!”

(above) The Insidious Dr. Fu

Well, that was an immediate downer. I returned to my temporary housing that night depressed and stayed for a couple of more weeks until my goods finally arrived. In the meantime, I got in touch with the landlords. They brought their young son with them, who was maybe 15, but had pretty decent English. They said that they’d never heard any rats above in the time that they lived here. But, just to be sure, we called up one of the maintenance workers who brought a step ladder and a flashlight. We popped one of the ceiling tiles in the kitchen up and peeked in. There was no sign of a rat or anything running around up there. It was clear of any droppings, bedding, or any sort of evidence like that. I did notice that the living room was sealed by concrete from the kitchen. We didn’t hear any rats then either.

Of course, when I finally returned to the apartment to receive my things and get settled in, I heard the sounds again. “Dang, that doesn’t sound like anything that’s not alive”, I thought. I imagined that maybe it was some sort of metallic little cart with a squeaky wheel, but I couldn’t really reconcile that sound. I also thought I heard feet skittering around too. They didn’t weird me out like they did that first night so I just ignored it. I’ll just have to keep my eyes and ears open for more nocturnal visitors.

At ever bus stop now, you can see one of these policemen with a giant billy club for crackin’ would be thieve’s heads:

It’s that time of year again when the thieves are especially bad. What time of year, you ask? Why, Chinese New Year, of course! That’s the time of year that almost all Chinese people make mass exoduses back to their home towns. Shenzhen, being a city of immigrants, sees its population shrink by fifty percent, if I had to guess. When people return to their hometowns, they don’t want to return empty-handed. If they’ve gambled their money away or spent it on drinking or prostitutes, then they’ll try to find a stash on an unsuspecting person.   A deep-pocketed foreigner is always a favorite target. Coming home with their pockets pulled-out would not be good for one’s face. When I first heard this story, or this ritual, I almost couldn’t believe it, but it was true. Having been in China for a few months now, I can’t believe that I once questioned it.

If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you’ve seen examples of the popularity of parks in Chinese life. When your home is so small that you can’t comfortably host people, then you use the restaurants for dining (hence the vast number of restaurants) and the parks for getting together for social activities and talk (hence the popularity of parks). Here are some shots and short movie from parks that I’ve visited recently.

I was especially impressed at the quantity of people at this one park in the north of Shenzhen just across the street from the concert hall. The lake was full of rented boats and people feeding the ravenous fish. Even more crowded were the broad open spaces. These places were load with people doing every park activity imaginable: flying kites, selling kites (of course), kids running around, parents chasing the kids, knitting, picking their noses, listening to music, sleeping, kids peeing, and even a public dating forum. The dating forum was interesting: under a wooded area, people clipped personals of themselves to closehangers with a picture and basic information like job, where they live, how much they made, and if they had a car (for example). Phone numbers were listed and people went from ad to ad checking each other out and writing down numbers.

Another neat place that I visited was a park established around a reservoir. This was located in the MeiLin neighborhood, which may have been fun to live in due to it’s complete lack of foreigners, but it was far from a subway stop and work.

(above) Looking down from the top of the reservoir (note the giant Chinese character on the right), Keep smiling and don’t lose face!

This park was backed against the hills bordering Shenzhen, and, like a typical park, most of the trails were all paved and fitted with nice stones and stairs. Of course, it was quite crowded, and being in this neighborhood lacking foreigners, I got lots of stares. I was on a tour with my Chinese teacher and we decided to go down to a “temple”. Being Shenzhen, this temple, which looked pretty old, was actually built in 2004! On the broad promenade before it was a man drawing elegant traditional Chinese characters on the ground with a special brush and some kind of water solution that dried a bit slower than water. I was particularly interested and my Chinese teacher started talking to him (I couldn’t follow this conversation at all). It turns out he was a retired man whose hobby was Chinese calligraphy. He’s started a club a few years ago which had grown to nearly sixty members. He was intently engaged in writing one of Mao’s poems when we approached. He was friendly and smiling and offered both of us some of his pen and ink drawings. He repeatedly mentioned that he wanted to make friends with foreigners like me and was always interested in showing his work to diverse folks. We walked away with a nice poem on silk paper and a drawing of ducks. I will have to bring these to Da Fen Cun (the art village) and have them framed.

After the temple, we hiked down and out past lovely and fragrant “Yellow Flower” bushes and goldfish ponds. Upon exiting the park, we stopped by a church. I’d wanted to look inside a Chinese church for a while, but I haven’t attended due to the language barrier. Of course, that’s no reason, I’ll have to go and write about it. While we were there, there was a group rehearsing for a service. We arrived right as they were ending their practice, and I’m guessing they said the Lord’s Prayer to end their practice, but I’m not sure. Their punctuated shouts reminded me of something out of the military though. To end the day, we hit a neighborhood Hunan restaurant. Once again, I was cautioned not to chose food that was too spicy. So, to show that we wild barbarians can handle spice as well as any civilized Chinese, I ordered the spicy food and asked them to make sure it was hot. It was. Very tasty!

(l-r) A misty goldfish pond, the church in MeiLin, Hunan cai!

I had lunch with a Chinese colleague recently and I started the conversation about perceptions of different types of people.   For example, from his point of view, what did he think that most Chinese thought of Westerners and Americans, in particular?   I got a similar answer.   Westerners, especially Americans, are open people, who are almost always direct in what they believe or think.   They’re also considered (for the most part) to be honest and trustworthy.   I think this is the educated Chinese point-of-view, and it’s one that I’ve heard before.   I shared that many Americans think that Chinese, and Asian folk in general, are work and study hard and are perceived to be better in technical, scientific, and engineering subjects.   That reminds me of a funny email I saw showing and image of the 2003 graduating class of Wuhan Polytechnic University, a crowd of button-downed, straight-haired, ultra serious, science nerds.   And then soon followed by the funny image of an American University (was it University of Colorado?) featuring fat frat boyz brandishing beer bottles and bare-breasted girls.   The caption of the email read something like, “Why America is Doomed”.

I’ve heard other interesting perceptions of Westerners.   These are entertaining, like:   Westerners are more animal like because they’re bigger, stronger, have longer arms, have more hair, etc.   And those blue eyes look more like animal eyes than normal human eyes.   What else would you expect from a place that’s self-named as the “Middle Country” (What Chinese call “China”)?   Anyway, I thought that latter perception was entertaining, and I don’t mind being thought of as closer to the animal world, what the heck?   But, I do wonder if that’s what they’re thinking when I get the long blank stare.

Then again, some Chinese look to Westerners as demi-gods.   The US, for example, with its much smaller population and greater wealth is basically guiding China into the ultra modern age with technological advances.   There are many everyday examples from the adoption of Christmas as a holiday (even though almost no one knows anything about it) to pop singers inserting phrases of English into their songs.

Another interesting thing about the Chinese, and most Western folks don’t realize this about Chinese, is their discomfort in being as direct.   In fact, Chinese are much more roundabout and subtle, preferring to give hints   or just not say anything rather than be direct.   This is evident everywhere, and very pronounced at work where you have direct Americans not accustomed to this talking across the ocean to Chinese people asking them how the project is going.   You’ll be hard-pressed to get a direct and honest answer and if the real answer is “not so good”, then trouble lies ahead.   I’m still trying to figure this one out.   It’s a tough nut to crack.   More later.

This is similar to my blog entry on the phrase “Long time, no see“, which I’m convinced was borrowed from Mandarin.   The other phrase that I’ve discovered is “The more, the better.”   As in “The more money, the better” or “The more, the merrier”.   In Mandarin, the phrase is “you4 duo1, you4 hao3″.   Chinese and English are so different that I don’t think these two phrases just happen to be identical in both languages.

This entry is not for the squeamish…

One side of China that requires a tolerance of poverty, suffering, etc. is witnessing the pitiful beggars that inhabit the city, especially in Hua Qiang Bei. Where do these poor folk come from? I don’t know but I’ve heard similar stories from different people that will make your skin crawl: Some of the beggars, not all of course, are forced to beg by gangsters who have have bought them at a young age or have in some other ways coerced them to beg. The most disgusting part of the story, which I’ve heard more than once, is that they are often deliberately maimed. These pitiful maimed beggars are a steady stream of income, you see. Is this true?? Where do these gangsters come from? Are they ever captured and prosecuted? How could anyone be so low to do such a thing? And we think things are rough in the US. A begger who has no fingers is a fairly common sight, or missing an arm and their fingers on another arm, or a leg. Every so often, you can see something more horribly unusual: A man with nothing but skin where his eyes should be playing a Chinese musical instrument, a begger with at least 1/4th of his skull missing wandering between traffic with a small collection bowl, or…well, that’s enough.

(above) A common beggar in Hua Qiang Bei

(above) This guy is doing something to make money. Maybe his condition is due to mercury poisoning? He seems to be as positive as he can.

Ever wonder where the word “kowtow” came from? Here’s the definition:

kow ·tow /ˈkaʊˈtaÊŠ, -ËŒtaÊŠ, ˈkoÊŠ-/ Pronunciation Key – Show Spelled Pronunciation[kou-tou, -tou, koh-]

–verb (used without object)

–noun

[Origin: 1795–1805; < China kòutóu lit., knock (one's) head]

Every weekend at the base of the stairs leading from the subway to the street along Hua Qiang Bei is a woman or girl (I can’t tell because I’ve never seen her face) who sits with her legs splayed out to either side, leaning forward with her chest to the ground and repeatedly bouncing her head just within a few centimeters of the ground. She does this for hours on end. This is a beggar kowtowing to the massive crowd bound for Hua Qiang Bei.

Here’s a movie (3 meg) from the crowded streets around Hua Qiang Bei. There are no shots of beggars, except a short one from the back side. In the last clip (starting at the middle of the entire movie), listen closely for the sweet tones of the Chinese violin, the “erhu”, and the eyeless artist playing on the right handside: