Adam’s Not Here

A short post here, mostly just to break the ice. After the planning conference in Beijing, I met with my Dad, sister and her boyfriend to travel around for 2 weeks. We spent a few days in Chengdu and the rest of the time in Yunnan province. This in Mid and Southwest China. I had heard a lot about these places and was quite excited to see them. Won’t really go into much detail here, but I have uploaded the photos to the gallery now.

The trip sort of solidified my impression of tourism, which had been developing over my last few trips. Basically, I hate sightseeing. If something is designed (i.e. is man-made) to be a tourist site, chances are I won’t like it. What I do really enjoy is visiting natural settings. And so, on this trip our 2 day hike through Tiger Leaping Gorge was definitely the highlight.

My friends Steph and Evan have talked about the screwed up nature of tourism much more eloquently than I, but the common idea between us seems to be that once you have traveled a certain amount, the novelty of being “somewhere else” kind of wears off and you really start to question your presence in a place that in a lot of ways, has no meaning to you. If you aren’t going to take the time to stay there and become acquainted with the place on a meaningful level, then what is the point? I’ll leave that open.

I plan to start posting a little more regularly now. I’ve got just over 3 weeks left. The pressure is on to complete my research, it’s going somewhere, but I am still not exactly sure where. I’ll be coming back with something, but it may take a while to decide exactly what it is I have.

China takes great pride on being able to trace its civilization back over 5 000 years. They are proud of their rich history and the many achievements they have made over time. It seems that we are finding out these days that everything was done by the Chinese first. Be it the discovery of the Americas, or the printing of books, they got there first. Now fast forward to the 21st century. With the Olympics coming, the Beijing has been engaging in a series of public education campaigns, to socialize the citizenry towards more civilized behaviour. It’s been happening a little in Shanghai too, with Expo 2010 coming up. Last year, I didn’t think too much about this stuff, although reading a story in the paper about classes being held to tell people not to walk down the street in their pyjamas was always good for a laugh. However, coming to Beijing now I have definitely noticed a difference from my visits in October 2005 and May 2006. Taking the subway to the guesthouse when I first arrived, I was struck by how people lined up for the train at the marks where the doors stop. This wasn’t just one or two people, but two neat lines per door, with 10-15 people in each one. I was amazed as I clearly remember my first visit here, when people would swarm around the doors and push onto the train without even giving people a chance to get off first. Let me tell you, it’s night and day. The campaign against spitting all over the sidewalk doesn’t seem to have been as successful, but over all it looks like Beijing may soon give Shanghai a run for its money when it comes to model behaviour.

At the beginning of this June, Shanghai got pretty serious about the honking of car and motorcycle horns. For years they had been putting up signs and telling people not to honk, but progress was pretty slow. Then last week they started a well publicized crackdown, with 2 000 RMB fines for violators. If a fine of just under $300 Cdn sounds pretty steep, just consider the fact that that is around the average monthly salary in Shanghai. More even, for taxi drivers. Needless to say, people paid attention. I didn’t even notice the effect at first, since the new fine coincided with my move, I just thought the area I was in was particularly quiet. But when I was out for dinner with Mason last week, he mentioned it. And it just clicked, we were sitting outside on the patio, without being inundated with car horns, and it was because of the new fines. I’m sure all the economists are out there, saying ‘incentives, we told you so.’ In any case, with all the constant talk about the rapid physical change in China, I found it quite interesting to see these two dramatic examples of behavioural change. I guess it’s not that surprising, considering China’s history of black and white changing from one day to the next, at the behest of the Communist party, but it is impressive to witness nonetheless.

I picked up the keys for my new place this evening and I’ll be moving in tomorrow. It’s a two-bedroom place that I’ll be sharing with a Chinese girl who works as a legal consultant for an American law firm. She’s quite friendly and when she is not at work is usually studying for the Chinese equivalent of the Bar exam. Hopefully her studious nature will inspire me to really get cracking on my research. Her English is quite excellent, which is unfortunate in a way, as I am sure that will be the language we will converse in. Maybe I can get her to use Chinese with me, although she’ll have to be patient enough to repeat everything slowly and at least 10 times….

It’s exciting to be moving into a new area. It’s still downtown, but in an area that I am not as familiar with. It’s in Jing’an district, which is a little more upscale than where I am now. There are a fair bit of foreigners in the general area, but it’s more working folk and less tourists. It will be fun to get out and explore the streets, hopefully I’ll be able to find some nice restaurants.

I took the bus to get home after picking up the key to the new place. I found and empty seat near the rear door and sat down. When I sat down I noticed a few people looking at me, and two girls in particular were really looking me over. You don’t have to be here for too long for your ego to get inflated, so I just figured they were checking me out and didn’t think much of it. After about 5 minutes, with just a few blocks to go until my stop, a girl leaned over to me as she walked up to the front of the bus. “Excuse me…. Be careful….,” she said as she pointed to the window beside me. Rice was splattered all over the window, and all around the bars and floor around and behind my seat. I couldn’t tell if someone had thrown up or just spilled a container of rice. Either way it wasn’t pretty. The bus was pretty dark so I hadn’t even noticed, which was weird considering how obvious it was after it was pointed out to me. I guess I am turning a little Chinese or something - don’t want to lose face - since I continued sitting in the seat until we got to my stop. Although, I guess it’s pretty hard to salvage any face from that situation. Oh well, I had to do laundry anyway.

The original goal for my time here this summer had been to try and find a planning internship. Not only would this fulfill a requirement for my program, it would allow me to come back here while getting some real work experience that would hopefully get my foot in the door towards finding a real job here after graduation. However, as I found during my search, not a lot of places take on foreign interns here. As far as I could tell, most firms only hire foreigners with lots of experience, and usually for managerial type positions. I suppose the logic is that a Chinese person will work for a lot less than a foreigner (for anywhere from 1/2 to 1/6 as much, depending on the position), so at the entry level why pay more for the same work? In China, there seems to be a real dearth of experienced people with management level qualifications, so at this point it’s worth it to pay the big bucks for foreign staff. So anyway, the shake out from all of this was that I was unable to find a position. Since my backup plan came through, I headed over here to do research instead. At the last minute, just a few days before I flew out, I got word that a local firm was willing to take me on as an unpaid intern. As my grant was already going to cover my expenses, I decided to take the position and hopefully get some good work experience.

They call themselves a Canadian company because they are registered in Canada. The founder is Chinese and he and some of the senior people were educated and have some work experience in Canada. However, all the staff is Chinese and the language spoken in the office is Chinese and their headquarters is Shanghai. As far as I can tell, this is pretty much a Chinese company trying to brand themselves as Canadian. This isn’t so unusual over in China, as being a foreign company gives you some real cachet.

I arrived at their office in Pudong last Monday at 9:30 AM, not really knowing what to expect. And as it turned out, neither did they. From the beginning, it was obvious that they really didn’t know what to do with me. I spent most of the first day just waiting to talk to someone, it was almost 4 PM by the time I was given any work. The work I was given seemed ok at first, but as I presented my results, it quickly became apparent that what I had done had no bearing on the project and they had already decided what they were going to do. By the end of the second day I had had it. Most of the time I spent there was wasted waiting around. It didn’t take long for me to see that what little work I was being given was mostly just busy work to try and keep my happy. I felt silly leaving so soon, but I was already going numb after two days.

On the weekend I met up with Pei, the guy that had put me in touch with this company. We had a really great conversation over drinks and dinner and he was able to share a lot of his insight into the design and development industries over here. Pei confirmed my feelings about the difficulty of starting off here as a fresh graduate, in terms of finding good work and a reasonable salary. He said that having even just one or two years of experience in the West before coming over to China makes a world of difference. I had been feeling a bit down after my short-lived work experience and now facing the difficult task of getting my research going, but Pei seems pretty intent on helping me plug into things here.

A couple of quick links today, before I get my act together and put up another post.

How to write a China article. In a word - brilliant.

Ben’s Blog. Have you ever wondered what it’s like to work as a “little brother” for 24 cents an hour in a Chinese hair salon? I know I have (honest!), and this American guy has decided to make a 1 month experiment of doing just that. He’s nearing the end now, and his blog has proved to be quite a well written and insightful chronicle.