sushipanda

Below is my latest Shanghaiist post, with some follow-up thoughts after:

According to the Shanghai Youth Daily (via CRI), 10 women have been scammed selected to make a trip out to Silicon Valley to meet the potential loves of their lives.

Apparently, an online dating website is organizing a tour in partnership with an agency in northern California for wealthy professional women who simply don’t have the time to find a good man here in Shanghai. Scheduled for next month, the tour will match these women with men from the Chinese mainland who, we suspect, also fit the description above (the “not having time” part, not the “wanting to find a good man” part).

Before all you busy, single women dying to take advantage of this special opportunity put away your Redberries and start packing the luggage, there are some criteria you have to meet. You’ve got to prove to trip organizer Bai Lamu, who’s “looking for quality, not quantity,” that you’ve got the goods.

And what exactly are the goods? Only 500,000 RMB cash money in the bank, a good education, a well-paying job, and your own real estate. Oh yes, and the 28,512 RMB fee you’re going to have to pay the service for the trouble of setting all of this up.

Shanghaiist worked in the heart of Silicon Valley for three years after graduation, and we can testify that the heterosexual male to heterosexual female ratio is indeed not exactly in the dudes’ favor. However, last we checked, Shanghai isn’t exactly a town with a dearth of single men. Yes, even men with 500,000 RMB cash money in the bank, a good education, a well-paying job, and their own real estate. This New Zealand Herald article references professor Valerie Hudson of Brigham Young University, who estimates that given the extant disparity in numbers between men and women, China will have 28 million surplus men by the year 2020.

Um, that sure sounds like a lot.

Sure, that projection is still 13 years away, and sure, we’re talking about Shanghai here and not the entire country. Still, Shanghaiist truly wonders: is it THAT hard to find 10 men here who fit the bill? Don’t they stand a better chance of finding Chinese men by staying in China? But hey, if these 10 lucky ladies can’t find millionares love in the Valley, Gilroy, home of the annual Garlic Festival, is only an hour’s drive away. Heaven forbid they spent their 25,812 RMB on nothing!

I personally don’t know too many local women here who fit all the requirements above, but I do know many very successful professionals who are very independent, yet know their way around men. And on the other side of the world, I have met a lot of Chinese from the mainland who are holding down good jobs in Silicon Valley. The thing is, they’re mostly brainy engineers who let timidity get the best of them and definitely DO NOT know their way around women. And in Shanghai, there must be hundreds of thousands of guys who fit that bill exactly.

It’s clear then that these ladies aren’t really forking over the money in search of emotional love, but rather assets in the form of cold, hard cash. And if that’s the case, then I wonder how sustainable those relationships, if formed, can actually be. I imagine they’re actually idealizing the situation, thinking that they’ll find socially adept and financially wealthy Chinese waiting to commit to them. Financially wealthy Chinese guys are in abundance; socially adept ones that are single and relationship-ready are a bit more difficult.

If the site here is charging $3k for this, the dudes are probably getting scammed for a lot more. Tsk tsk.

When my co-worker Kasper was out here last year for a brief assignment, he told me that he tried as hard as he could not be an “ugly, American expat.” He would use the term intermittently throughout his stay, and it sorta stuck with me. Ugly. American. Expat. I couldn’t change the last two, but I would follow Kasper’s lead and do my best not to be described as the first. Which, as the blessed few who have actually seen m with my shirt off know, can sometimes be an imposing challenge.

I was thinking very U.A.E. thoughts yesterday while crammed in a conference room for an all-day meeting at Shanghai Mart. Shanghai only has on average 12 days a year when the weather is actually enjoyable, and yesterday was one of those, so it was beyond miserable that I had to stay indoors staring at a painful procession of Powerpoint presentations. What made it worse was that the meeting attendees were all Chinese engineers.

Now, in my 3.5 years here I’ve met many Chinese professionals who have an excellent command of English. None of them have been engineers. I’ve also met my fair share of Chinese professionals who know how to make concise and lucid presentations to a roomful of people. None of them have been engineers.

Sure, I’m one to speak. I’ve gotten by on my lazy Mandarin for most of my time here, always avoiding anything above 3rd grade vocabulary by using its English counterpart (i.e. 你的 open-toed sandals really match those hideous socks that 你 are wearing). Still, I almost started crying when a very nice engineering manager named Frank unveiled his 35 slide behemoth. Frank is a happy, smiley engineer, but he is an engineer nevertheless. Which means he talks…

(wait five minutes)

…like this.

To top it all off, Frank decided to read every single thing written on every single slide. Perhaps this decision on Frank’s part was merely a reflection of a supplicant upbringing of sorts, not uncommon in Chinese culture; but on this beautiful day it really made me want to throw my laptop at him. And then stomp on his ears until radioactive slime oozed out. And then jump out the window and get picked up by a winged Jessica Alba.

Ok, so at that point I was the embodiment of U.A.E., so I stopped myself and pared it down a little. I would throw my laptop at him, but then rush over and make sure he was OK. Decent compromise, I guess. I could feel less guilty about that one. Sometimes, courtesy should take a backseat to efficiency, and we shouldn’t let people talk for the sake of talking. Unless it’s me, of course.

Everyone loves panda bears.

I’ve been known as “Panda Bear” or “Panda” ever since high school. Apparently, all the females on the school paper staff (of which I was not a member, by the way) one day exclaimed that with my slanty eyes and circular face, I looked very much like a panda. Since it was a gaggle of girls with whom I was dealing, I chose to ignore the borderline racist and chubby-ist logic and dutifully accepted my new nickname. Over time, I grew into it. Literally. In college, I pigged out on dorm food and added enough dough on my frame that, whenever I went into People’s Park and started chewing on bamboo, strangers would actually walk up to me, wanting to take a picture with what they thought was an actual panda walking the streets of downtown Berkeley.

I bring this up now because I’m listening to a fuckin’ great song by a band that’s already gotten a ton of online publicity. Since I made the life-changing switch to Mac last fall, I’ve gotten to play with a load of cool Mac-only apps, which led me to Peel (music blog reader), which lead me to…Panda Bear.

Ok, so this isn’t remotely close to being a music blog, and I don’t come remotely close to someone who can intelligently write about music…or, intelligently write about anything, for that matter. But don’t listen to me, refer to the band’s video yourself:

Everyone loves panda bears. I’ve gotten many e-mail forwards from co-workers and friends alike that include insanely cute pictures of pandas like the one below. On this site, the most liked to pages are the ones with the panda my family adopted for a year. Some copies of those pics are now sitting comfortably as the background of more than a few teenage girls’ Myspace pages.

Everyone loves panda bears. Thus, by the communicative transitive property of mathematics, everyone loves me. And, well…they should.

Everyone loves panda bears. But not everyone loves Hillary Clinton. Or, as this Wonkette post suggests, Pander Bear. Because she panders for votes.

“They’re forcing some poor underpaid sap to don a panda suit and harass the senator at various events. The joke is that she’s willing to “pander” for votes … get it? Because panda sounds like pander, and that’s a pun, and Americans love puns and pandas and hate Hillary.”

She’s referring to Republicans, of course. Which is OK, since, after all, everyone hates Republicans.

Yes, so I’ve changed the theme of this site again. Moving from Blogger to Wordpress has really fucked up my already puny productivity. Now that I have all this open-source power in my hand, I can do what I do best with my blog: freeload off of other people’s labor. And, with thousands and thousands of themes out there to choose from, what am I supposed to do…work?! Haha, very funny.

All of this started when my little post about Whisk dropping its free wireless Internet got picked up by THE blog du Shanghai, Shanghaiist itself (see link here). It was soon thereafter that I got an e-mail from the man himself, Shanghaiist editor Dan Washburn (I’ve shamefully kissed his ass on this blog before for no particular reason), asking if I’d like to be a contributor. Would I!?

Since then, I’ve been added to the Shanghaiist contributor distribution list. Since I still can’t shake the always-cool feeling of being in a top-secret club for cool people, I’m going to err on the side of dorkiness and say that I can’t describe what actually happens on that list. Suffice it to say that the future of blogging in Shanghai hinges on what happens in there.

It was on a dreary afternoon this past week that, one of the top-secret e-mails referenced the website of a Megan Shank. Apparently she’s a translator and editor who’s been in China around four years, and from the looks of it she’s very articulate and intelligent. And, since she chose the exact same theme that I did for this site’s more recent reincarnation, she also appears to have VERY good taste.

Now, we’ll never know who discovered the theme first, and since neither of us actually put effort into creating it, it probably doesn’t matter much in the grand scheme of things. However, I did spend a good deal of time choosing it, and as such I had a difficult time accepting that someone else so close to me in proximity (both physically and bloggily) was employing the same theme.

So, today is a new day, and this blog now has a new look. In my attempt to find something somewhat more unique, I’ve strayed far down the Google search results (page 34!) for this one. And what a bitch it was to install! I actually had to learn some rudimentary CSS and play with the code quite a few times before I could get it just this way. At the end of the day, though, I’m pleased with it. I think. Wait, let me search some more just to be sure…

For those of you interested, here’s my first (and only, so far) post for Shanghaiist. I even got a snarky comment out of it! My first! I’m so proud. And probably the only one feeling that emotion.

Well, not really. For the past few weeks, on my way to work at the Jing’An subway stop and on my way back at the Zhongshan Park stop, I’ve stared intently at this billboard, trying to figure out if Kevin Smith, writer and director of movies both crappy and good, was the Bob Harris of Shanghai.

On the right hand side, the advertisement shows that this man’s name is “Xi Li Er, Ka Mu,” but I swear to God it’s Kevin Smith. And he’s pitching Smooth and Romantic 黄酒, which just doesn’t seem like something he’d drink.

I was so fascinated by the picture that I finally decided to take a cellphone photo and throw it up here to see if anyone knows who this man, if not Kevin Smith, really is. Take a look at his picture (from CNN) below, and tell me it’s not the same person! The pic’s a few years old, but after watching the dreadful Clerks II a few weeks back, I don’t think he’s aged very much.

The guy in the cubicle an aisle away from me has burped out loud about 10 times in the past 30 minutes. I have totally cracked up to myself the last eight times, and I’m so anxious to hear his next one that I’m here blogging about it.

The poor guy who sits adjacent to me doesn’t burp, but he has this crazy habit of sneezing REALLY LOUDLY about 7-8 times in a row. He is by far the most deafening sneezer I have ever met in my life.

*Burp #11 just happened. This is hilarious*

Now, if the pregnant lady right next to me gushes out a huge fart, today will go down as one of the best days of 2007 for me. And for you, too, I’m sure.

In early ‘05 I made my first trip back to the States after moving out here. Wanting to make the most of my time there, I booked a flight on Jetblue out to New York so that I could eat bagels with Jean and get stoned with Betty in her Brooklyn apartment.

Since it was a super early flight out of SFO, I had bought a 12 inch tuna sub from Subway the night before and stuffed it in the fridge. Jetblue doesn’t serve any food on their flights, so my plan was to chomp down on the sub for breakfast and then take a little nap so that I would be refreshed upon landing at JFK. This plan required me to hold onto the sandwich all through check-in and security, so you can imagine how intent I was on eating it once I got seated.

After I boarded, I walked down the aisle looking for my seat. Turned out I was stuck in the center seat between two middle-aged men. Both were already in the middle of a conversation about how great Jetblue was, and they nodded politely at me (as most people do in the States).

The two continued their conversation as we took off, and I couldn’t help but pick up one some of the stuff they were chatting about. The guy on my right had started his own business on infrastructure consulting. His firm apparently consulted governments in emerging markets on how to build roads. The guy on my left was on his way to New York to give some sort of talk on how brains work. He had also started his own company in the Bay Area, focusing on neuro-research. Or something like that; I was way too busy eating my sub, which at this point had become quite pungent. Of course, I didn’t care, and continued stuffing my face as these two men continued chatting with each other.

Then, I heard Road Guy ask Brain Guy about what he did before all the brain stuff:

“Oh, I worked for a company that sold one of my inventions.”

“Oh really? And what invention was that?”

“The Palm Pilot.”

“Oh!” Pause. Road Guy’s voice quivered with realization. “You started Palm! I’ve heard of you before!”

I continued eating my sandwich. Yes, I was sitting next to one of Silicon Valley’s eminent luminaries, eating a stinky tuna sub and undoubtedly getting crumbs on his lap. Yes, I could haved tried to make some sort of impression on him, maybe join in and provide my own unique insights into the ways the world and people can be bettered. Yes, I probably could have not eaten that sandwich and come off as the irrelevant ignoramus that I was.

But I did none of those things. I kept eating, and Road Guy even made a crack at my sandwich’s expense to Brain Guy Palm Inventor. Later, I figured that the least I could do was to not gulp the thing down in front of them as they clearly would have preferred not to have tuna bits flying about in the air. Guess you can take a guy out of Shanghai, but you can’t take the Shanghai out of him.

I thought about this today because I came across this Wired article on Palm Inventor. His name is Jeff Hawkins, and I know now that two years ago, he was on his way to New York to talk about his book, On Intelligence. Seems he’s the latest guy to take a crack at figuring out artificial intelligence. Cool stuff. If only his technology can instill some intelligence in all those folks here in Shanghai who crowd the subway door as people are getting off. Reading about how passionate and driven he has been in his life to pursue his interests, I wondered if, in that moment two years ago, he had similarly appreciated my laser focus on that Subway sub.

Nah, probably not.