sushipanda

Littered throughout this blog are rants and raves about how frustrating it is to deal with the proclivities of local Chinese folk, specifically the undisciplined way in which they try to get to where they’re going. Of course, I’m one of a countless number of foreigners who have commented thusly, most of the venting coming after the occasional maddening encounter with pushy queues, law-flaunting taxi drivers, and generally behavior that is ignorant to others who are sharing the same delicate environment. I’ve seen an expat push another man to the floor after his foot was stepped on in the crowd of an airport shuttle bus. I’ve seen foreigners almost hit by a taxi standing fast in front of the car, yelling at the cab driver in English. I’ve seen foreigners stuck inside subway cars, trying mightily to get out while streams of commuters crowd through the doorway.

Yes, many Chinese can be rude, obnoxious, downright uncivilized. But the world is a complicated place, and we foreigners who come here should take a good hard look at ourselves sometimes; we’re not all that different, I’m embarrassed to say. Two events from about a week and a half ago starkly brought that to my attention.

On Friday night, about four of us got dolled up and headed over to the new Infiniti building on Huai Hai road for the Diesel party. The event was located in a huge open space on the 6th floor of the building. When we arrived, there was a massive crowd waiting at the entrance. Apparently, the organizers of the party hadn’t jumped through all the regulatory hoops leading up to the event, and the police were warning them that they were in violation of a fire or building code of some sort. About 60 guests, almost all of them expats, were pushing up against the entrance, which was manned by a beleaguered staffer who eventually allowed us in ten people at a time.

For all the expat complaints about how disorderly everything is in Shanghai, it was interesting to see so many of them try to bulldoze their way to the front of the line, completely disregarding the staff’s calls for all of us to be patient and form a single-file queue. Young men sussed up in fancy suits and butt-tight designer jeans were yelling at the staff, screaming at their friends inside that they were inexcusably being kept out of the party. We quietly waited until we got to the front, but then had about 3 different people squeeze from behind to the front of where we were standing, feigning ignorance and insisting that their invitations should allow them in. Never mind that all of us had invitations. And when they lifted the rope every 5 minutes and allowed 10 people in, the scene was worse than the subway cars at rush hour at People’s Square.

The next day, I found myself hurriedly packing for my trip to Chengdu. I rolled my suitcase out toward the street, hoping to hail a cab right away so I could catch my flight out of Pudong. About 10 meters from my door, a taxi rolled up and stopped. It was dropping off a middle-aged foreigner, but seeing such an attractive fare so tantalizingly close, he pulled up short of the main door and asked me to please wait for him. I knew there was a passenger inside, so I said I’d be fine heading out to the main street, but he rushed out and popped open his trunk. Nervous about the time, I headed back and loaded by suitcase into the car; I mean, we were literally 20 steps from where the taxi was going to stop anyway.

The passenger got out and threw his money at the driver. He didn’t look very happy to be walking those extra 15 or twenty steps. I started to feel a little bad as I got into the car, but those feelings dissipated when the dude turned around, walked back up to the driver’s side and yelled out in broken mandarin: “你没有礼貌! (you have bad manners!). Then, he spit into the car at the driver and walked away.

The cabbie had been apologizing profusely to the man leading up to this event, and it wasn’t the most professional thing to do to stop abruptly the way that he did. But there’s something quite inhumane and violent about actually spitting at someone, and for a second there that driver looked really pissed. Then, he calmed down and headed toward the airport.

“That guy seemed pretty pissed at you,” I said.

“That’s the difference between Chinese and Lao Wai,” he responded without a beat. “A Chinese person will be willing to help us out and get out early. These foreigners just don’t understand that.”

Our sense of entitlement often clouds the very civility that we take for granted and judge others for not having. We often feel embarrassed at how primitive some of the Chinese who share our streets behave in light of the greater values and humanity we feel proud to possess. But the world is a complicated place, and everyone is full of contradictions. Sometimes, the real animals are us, who forget that we’re guests in this country, one that can claim a much older and richer history of civilization than our own.

Timmy asked me to get him a funny T-shirt while in Thailand for May holiday. I obliged and got him the “Broke” T-shirt pictured below. I got myself an awesome Transformers Autobot shirt and a classic Superman shirt. I’ve worn them all multiple times already, especially the Autobot shirt, which I put on every night after dinner while reenact Optimus Prime’s battle to the death against Megatron in “Transformers: The Movie.”

Oh shit, I think I’ve said too much.

Anyway, the one shirt that I bought and love but haven’t worn outside the house is a black one with two words printed in red on the front: Fuck Bush. There were tons of anti-Bush shirts in Bangkok and Phuket (I particularly liked the one that shows a vagina labeled “Good Bush” and a caricature of the president labeled “Bad Bush), but I chose this one because of its elegant simplicity. Fuck Bush. That sums it all up for so many people.

Yet, I don’t think I’ll ever wear it out in public, even though it’s a statement shirt and black makes me look skinnier. Maybe it’s all the years of having those dorky “West Wing Wednesdays” after we all graduated from college, when Roger and Harsha and Wil and I would rotate hosting duties for our weekly viewings of the heavy-handed but very satisfying television show. What an irony that it was a liberal-minded and sugary TV show that conditioned me not to disrespect the office of the United States president, one who has wrought so much shame to divide and mind-numbing destruction.

Still, I’m a lover, not a fighter (also a slacker, napper, scratcher, gorger 等等), and the last thing I want is to be met upon the street here in Shanghai by someone whom I’ve made angry with my shirt. It’s just a shirt, after all, with two simple words on the front. I can do without wearing it out of the house. I wish I could do the same with all the anger I have at my country’s president. Just check it at the door and pretend everything is all right. But I can’t. Maybe that’s why I stay at home all the time.

Just got back last night from a 3.5 day trip out to Chengdu to attend a Healthcare CIO conference. Aside from Beijing and Shenzhen, Chengdu is the Chinese city that I have visited the most, since there is a massive site out there where I’ve done some training and slacking. Last year I also tagged along on a market study of internet cafes, which was a totally cool and new experience for me. I was able to sit behind a one-way screen while watching people being interviewed by a 3rd party market research firm. After seeing the researcher ask the same questions over and over and over and over again, I happily discarded any ambitions toward a career in market research and decided instead that my perfect job would involve always sitting behind a one-way mirror – and watching the world go by in voyeuristic ecstasy, all the while crunching down on watermelon seeds and Chinese yogurt drinks.

Work aside, what I love best about Chengdu is the food, of course. Somewhere along the ragged evolution of my appetite, I fell in love with the nastier underbelly of Sichuan cuisine; the globs of duck blood, intestines, freshwater eel and pieces of other savory river slime are what come to mind whenever I think about the second tier city. Oh yes, and also Keith in his bathrobe from when we vacationed there last May. This trip, however, I was cursed with having to escort some of my American corporate partners on their first and last nights in town, which wouldn’t normally be an issue except for the fact that one of them owned two very important characteristics that affected my dining experience:

- He didn’t heat fish, lamb, duck, pork, beef, prawn, crab, or eel
- My direct bosses were waiting to hear from him on my performance at the conference

This is how David (who flew in from Beijing to partner with me on the event) and I, both intense lovers of red hot spicy Sichuanese food, found ourselves at a Shanghainese restaurant eating tofu skins and vegetarian noodles. Blech.

Food aside, the conference went very well. We got a lot of good feedback on the economic model that we were trying to convince them was worth implementing as they assessed their healthcare IT investments. One wonderful trait about all these purported leaders of the Chinese healthcare industry is that, like the rest of the population, a majority of them enjoy smoking. And free flash memory thumb drives.

Another commonality was the sheer unabashed way in which they admitted that increasing revenue and profit was by far what they and their fellow administrators valued…yes, even above patient safety and quality of care. On one hand, I love how they shove aside pretense and expose the true incentives of those who helm the industry; I wish healthcare executives in the US could talk in these frank and welcome terms. On the other hand, I STILL hope I never have to end up at a Chinese hospital for anything other than free Xanax.

More thoughts on China healthcare to come…

All right, so it’s been a while since anything has been slung up here. The reasons are as follows:

- Post May Holiday malaise. After one week of too little sleep and too much Thai food, what I craved was the opportunity to just laze about and not do anything in particular. Our original thinking was that we set the itinerary so that we would have time to spend at each point of transit: Shenzhen, Bangkok, Hong Kong. What ended up happening was that nearly half of our holiday mornings were spent in transit. Subsequently, as Mike put it best, once we got back to Shanghai we felt like we needed a vacation from our vacation. I don’t care what anyone says, my next vacation is NOT going to require me to wake up anytime before 10 am. Even if I’m stuck here.

- Actual work to be done. The week back turned out to be a never-ending series of meetings and number crunching as someone finally realized that the product we have been working on the past few months needed a price. So, that job came to me, and with so much responsibility thrust upon me, I naturally tried to milk it for all it was worth. That entailed lots of spreadsheet work and data checking that I probably could have made up, but it was good to keep the circle going during my little Paris Hilton moment. And by that, I meant that I went to the office everyday in skimpy designer skirts and tried to sleep with every executive I could find.

- Technical troubles. Those of you who were considerate enough to drop by the site were no doubt met by a strange Wordpress-related error message. Clueless as to what was happening, I did some quick research and learned that my ISP (I Power) had merged with another web provider, and overnight I had tons more bandwidth and a weird database error. Thanks to Mikkel and Betty, who brought this to my attention. Yes, believe it or not, I actually didn’t even check my site during that whole “pricing week,” and needed actual readers to tell me. In fact, I need actual readers in general.

- New T-shirts. Almost everywhere we went in Thailand during the holiday, there were cool T-shirts to be bought. I ended up buying a few. Few T-shirts I’ve ever purchased have been able to accurately convey the state of my existence as much as one that I bought in Phuket (shown below). I have decided to wear this shirt as a mark of shame until I can get off my schneid and actually start looking to grow and develop as an entrepreneur (or, at least, a diligent corporate employee). Thus, the blog has taken a bit of a backseat. Of course, it just takes one of you to write a check out to me for a a few thousand USD for all of this to change

*note: tons of photos were taken in Thailand, and though I promised not to exhibit the tired old pictures of mandarin skies and emerald waters, there were still some cool ones that I’ll post on Flickr once I can aggregate them all. You never think you would be fascinated at the sight of an elephant penis until it’s about 3 feet away from your head. Stay tuned.