Sunday, 12 September 2010

Book Review - Country Driving, by Peter Hessler

Country Driving is Peter Hessler’s third book on China, following on from the award winning River Town (2001) and Oracle Bones (2006). The book is split into three sections, all loosely based around the theme of driving. In the first section, he drives a 4*4 across North China, tracing the Great Wall, both physically and historically. The second section documents the years he spent living in a small village two hours north of Beijing. In the third section, he spends time in an economic development zone in the southern province of Zhejiang, getting to know the people and the region.

For anyone who has read the previous two books, they will know Hessler is an elegant and meticulous writer, and Country Driving is another triumph. Trained at Princeton and Oxford, Hessler shows us again the refined style that is the hallmark of his work. For a book on China, this is another must-read, superior to many of these ‘where is China going’ or ‘cracking the enigma of China’ books. By just living there and talking to people and working hard on his stories, he understands a great deal about the country, and presents it in a fashion familiar to those with and without experience of living in China.

I find a lot of books about China tend to be quite ‘shouty’, where the author goes out of his way to look for things that can be exaggerated to show the difference and/or similarity with his own country. This tends to overplay or underplay certain issues. In what can be quite a manic country, Hessler’s writing has a tremendously calming effect, with no hyperbole and few sweeping and unfounded generalisations, producing a very nuanced and accurate appreciation of China and his subjects.

Besides the elegant prose, another feature of Hessler’s writing is the time he spent on his projects. He has certainly been there, done that, and got the T shirt. The book covers a period of around 6 years. As he rightly notes, for a foreigner looking to accomplish something in China, the biggest investment is time. He spent a long time in China, and knows his subjects extremely well.

In writing this type of book, it’s very easy to be judgemental, and Hessler is refreshingly free from such statements. He displays a meekness not generally associated with his countryman. His research on issues such as the Great Wall and the developmental zone in section three is thorough and sensibly arranged alongside personal stories. Statements such as ‘for some reason’, or ‘who knows why…’ do not appear in the book. Everything in the book is researched as much as possible. For example, speed cameras on Chinese highways - it might sound simple enough, but finding out the real deal in China is often time consuming and very difficult, but Hessler sticks at it.

Anyone who has been to a developmental zone in China might find it hard to write something interesting about it. However, Hessler delves deeper, beyond the faceless concrete and steel, to talk to the people involved, understand the behind-the-scenes, and produce a rounded account of this time spent there. This type of ‘fieldwork’, done with an open mind and sense of curiosity, is certainly very conducive to appreciating China (or anywhere else for that matter). He tends to steer clear of political issues. Yet, funnily enough, by taking a sort of anthropological, detached view of his subjects and speaking to them in depth, he actually has a very, very sound understanding of general trends in the ‘macro’ issues facing China today.

Like many Westerners in China, he also has an eye for the absurd, and tells stories such as meeting Chairman Mao on an aeroplane and the driving licence test questions in a fairly centrist fashion, allowing the reader to see the funny side for themselves. Many of his personal tales are presented in this low-key, matter-of-fact way, which allows the inherent interest of them to shine through. It’s not laugh out loud material, but certainly makes for fine reading.

There is nothing particularly ground breaking about this book. Anyone who has spent a long time in China and makes an effort to get to know people around him will identify with everything Hessler says. What Hessler does, though, is combine this knowledge with great writing. This book is a winner on all accounts.

Wednesday, 21 July 2010

Racism in China

I've just read a good article by an American woman who lived in Beijing on what she calls the 'racism' meted out to white Westerners in mainland China: http://tinyurl.com/33rfxoa (Wall Street Journal website).

The point made - that white Westerners get preferential treatment - is generally true. As a white Westerner, there's probably never been a better time to live and work in China than now. You can get a reasonably well paid job just by being white and speaking English. I've made appearances on TV. I've made company videos where I've pretended to be a scientist in a white coat. My main job in the company I work for is just being there, a sign of excellence (see previous posts). The majority of people are generally fairly friendly and respectful towards you, usually more so than they are to their fellow countrymen. All courtesy of my race (and to a lesser extent, nationality).

A lot of Chinese, apart from some 'up to date', savvy, younger ones, think all white foreigners are American, rich, work as engineers, scientists or lawyers, drive around in expensive cars, have a huge house with a big lawn and white picket fence, and generally live the life of Riley. I met a guy once when I was making a TV programme and he asked me if I was in Xi'an as a manager or an engineer. Being a lowly employee is not something that white people are supposed to do, particularly in China.

It can be a bit embarrassing at times, and it only adds to the ugly superiority complex that some Westerners, particularly Americans, have in China. Although to call it racism, with the negative connotations that word holds, is a bit misleading. When people shout 'laowai' (foreigner) as you're walking down the street, it's because of curiosity or they're trying to be funny, and is completely non-threatening. The last part of this paragraph from the article is a case in point:

"For some white people hired for this purpose, it's not an easy situation to deal with. Ms Swartz felt she was treated like a child and even a 'zoo animal' at the firm. But she needed the job to take care of her newborn baby. She didn't start taking on any real responsibility, such as overseeing clients, until a manager overheard her speaking Mandarin. 'They didn't even read my résumé,' says Ms. Swartz, who studied eight years of Mandarin before moving to China. But she also believes that it's good for white people to experience racism because most people on earth have to deal with it, and 'it doesn't feel good'."

It might not feel great for some white people, but it's a lot better than the treatment dished out to black people. Black people get the hardest time of all. I went with a black friend to discuss making a travel TV programme once, and as we turned up at the door, the man looked at the black guy and his expression told the story very clearly: 'we want the nice looking foreigners'. The black guy left immediately. Black people have a reputation as being either poor, lecherous or both. Chinese men don't really like seeing a white man with a Chinese girl, but a Chinese girl with a black man is particularly galling. Indians, Pakistanis and South/South-East Asians also don't get the red carpet treatment as often as white people.

A couple of other points worth mentioning. Chinese people are very 'financialist', ie, if you're poor, we look down on you, and vice versa. This also applies to foreigners. If you're from a rich area - Western Europe, North America or Australia/NZ - you're good. If you're from a country poorer than China, you're not so good.

Also, a lot of Chinese people don't like to have dark skin. Dark skin shows you're a 农民 'nongmin', or farmer, and that you grew up or still live in the fields, have no 文化 'wenhua' (education) and can't speak standard Mandarin. Having pale skin shows that you're unaffected by the elements, you work in an office and have air conditioning - or for a girl, it means you have a rich husband so you don't have to go out and earn money. I have a friend who is insisting on having an operation to make her skin whiter. The worst insult you can call her is 黑蛋蛋 'hei dandan' - black egg. She always takes an umbrella out when the sun is out to stop herself from getting 晒死了 'shai si le' - tanned.

Friday, 16 July 2010

Foreigners from Botswana

A lot gets made in the newspapers about Chinese companies working in Africa. Our company is in on the act as well, with projects in Nigeria and Sudan. Such contracts are normally signed with major state-owned companies, who then sub-contract out various projects to other companies, such as ours.

Last Saturday, representatives from CEC, a Beijing-based state-owned company, and representatives of one their clients, the Botswana National Grid, came to Xian. The purpose, if the red banner hanging over the entrance was anything to be believed, was 'Visiting and Looking'.

As usual with our company, everyone only found out about it about a day or two beforehand. Everything runs through the boss, so only when he lets other people know, do we know. This meant that the day before, the translation department (including me) were busy hastily translating contents pages of manuals from Chinese to English. Preparation is, without exception, either rushed or non-existent every single time we have had important "foreign guests" visit. So I've given up trying too hard. Which is actually the best way to deal with it.

Being the company "vase", or token foreigner, I had to go along for lunch. The boss expects that my presence says "our translation department, and company in general, is high quality because we have a Westerner". Never mind that that's not true, it's perception that counts.

Lunch was to be taken in the Holiday Inn, a brand new, faceless hotel built on what five years ago was fertile farmland. We arrived quite early, before the others, so the boss got to ordering the food. With the customary rudeness and disrespect that rich people display towards poor(er) people, the boss barked his orders at, and made jokes at the expense of, a series of young waitresses.

Having dispatched them, he talked to me about his daughter. She likes cosplay, a Japanese invention where people dress up like videogame characters. Her parents forbid her from doing it, and expect her to take over the company when she is older. Obviously she is completely opposed to this, and the friction between her and her parents is typical of the huge generation gap. Not being an expert in parenting, I just nodded noncommittally to most of what he said.

Later the guests arrived: four Botswanans, two Germans and three Chinese from the contractor. Sideways glances and mild brow-furrowing suggested they were a bit surprised to see me, and it took an announcement five minutes into lunch to explain who I actually was and what I was doing there.

I spoke to the Botswanan engineer next to me about what he thought of China. He mainly noticed that it was very safe, which I've heard foreigners say many times before about China. He also marvelled at the economic development. I asked why so many African countries co-operate with Chinese companies in areas where technical quality is a requirement. The answer - cost.

At meals like these, there is always the problem of translating/explaining some of the dishes. And with broken English from our side and zero Chinese from their side, a lot of conversations drift into confusion, and jokes peter out into empty silence. The boss spent most of this time discussing "zhengshi" - real issues - with the representative from the contractor, leaving the chitchat to us underlings.

On my left was the "head of the business department", Mr Li Zhao. He is a middle-aged, slightly oily-looking man with a thinning side-parting and bad teeth, and he likes to carry one of these black briefcase-cum-handbags that are the preserve of unfashionable Chinese businessmen. He used to sell air conditioners. His supineness is the only reason he works here. (Only the boss has any real authority and power, hence the quotation marks around Mr Zhao's job title).

He said in Chinese to the girl from our business department "Why don't you tell everyone about the history of the dumpling". Perhaps aware of her own deficiencies in culinary history, she then cunningly said to everyone, in English, "Now Mr Zhao will tell you about the history of the dumpling". Then she said in Chinese to Mr Zhao, "I just said you will now tell us a story about dumplings, they are very excited".

The sweat beads started forming on his head as everyone looked expectantly in his direction. He first mumbled something about long history, different types of dumplings in different places, "the dumpling consists of an outside and a filling", and various other uninteresting pieces of bleedin' obvious information. Translating for him was quite awkward because his content was so weak. He said that the Italian pizza came into being when Marco Polo tried to make dumplings back in Italy, but couldn't do it and so just put the filling on top and called it a pizza. This might sound funny to Chinese ears, but the silence it was treated with let even Mr Zhao know that he was losing his audience.

Afterwards in the lobby, the translator from the contractor displayed some of the finest sarcasm I have ever heard from a Chinese person. "So Mr Zhao, I didn't realise you knew so much about dumplings, maybe next time you can tell us about the history of the noodle." Mr Zhao smoked his cigarette, content at the praise but being modest: "My actual speciality is Chinese history". "Wow, Chinese and culinary history, you know so much," came the reply.

In the afternoon, we held a small presentation about the company in the head office. During the Q and A, our boss displayed his skill at fending away very pertinent and direct questions from the German engineers. "Fobbed off" is I'm sure the feeling they felt the most. By the end, the head of their delegation was lamenting at the chaos and suggesting it was time to go to the simulation centre. But our company's relationship with the contractor is the only one that matters, so I don't think the boss is too fussed about what the 'laowai' (foreigners) thought.

The simulation centre is actually quite amusing. It is part of, and belongs to, the Xian Electrical College, and we just use it when we need to train some laowai. But we're very cunning. We put a battered old metal company sign on the door saying "XXX Company Simulation Training Center", and hey presto, it's ours! One Indonesian trainee asked me last year, pointing at all the dormitories on campus, "are all these students studying at XXX company?" Ahh, if only he knew.

The girl from the business department opened up a PowerPoint presentation to discuss the training plan. As soon as she opened it, the words "Trainin Scheduel" stared me in the face. As expected, at the first opportunity the Europeans asked me about the spelling. It should be highly embarrassing for me and the company, but I've already given up trying to make things better. It seems to me very obvious that anything like this should be checked (by me) first, and that if they don't give it to me, I can't check it.

But no one cares. It's interesting that it doesn't matter how bad the presentation is or how unprepared our project manager was, the boss never says anything. Keep your head down, speak when spoken to, don't give the game away, and you'll be fine.

Wednesday, 14 July 2010

Harmony in a sentence

Last week at the entrance to my apartment block appeared this rather striking red banner:
 
 
 
It reads "Peace and stability is the lasting theme of people's happiness". Maybe something happened that meant we needed to be reminded to not 'naoshi' - cause trouble. The woman who reads the electricity and water meters probably knows, but it probably doesn't do to ask more questions than is necessary.
 
Red banners such as this are a popular form of 'propaganda' in China. They originated from ancient Chinese scroll writing, and have been a favourite of the Government over the last 60 years. Over 95% of Chinese were illiterate in 1949, and so they were an extremely effective way of getting key messages across in simple language.
 
I went to a town near Xian last year and red banners formed guard of honour-like arches at every set of lamp posts all the way down the main street. The majority of them, like the banners in most places, exhort the need to be law-abiding, reminding us how good a stable and peaceful life is, and what the consequences will be if we we're not 'harmonious'. Universities like to use them as well, to remind us to study hard and become a useful member of society. Sometimes you'll see them on the sides of the street, telling us that "Xian is our home, tidiness relies on everyone" (it sounds better in the original). They're not nearly as ominous as a western journalist would make them out to be, and they seem to be accepted as part of the city decor as much as anything else.
 
It's not just the government that uses them. Companies use them when starting up or welcoming guests. Because of the way the Chinese is written, they usually get translated into something like "Welcome to Leaders from ABC Company Ltd for Visiting and Gyiding" [sic]. Our company has quite a few of these, and they're difficult to translate into something like natural English.
 
There are more examples of slightly less threatening "hengfu" at the often-interesting China Smack website: http://www.chinasmack.com/2010/pictures/funny-rural-chinese-advertising-depressing-propaganda.html.

Tuesday, 13 July 2010

Interviews, interviews, interviews

During the last 12 months, I have probably interviewed over a thousand potential translators. It's a fairly boring process, mainly because of the 'sameness' of the applicants and because I know the good people won't come to our company - only some of the people who scrape through will.

Recently, my first question has been "Hi, how are you?". A fair percentage of responses are "My name is ***", "I'm 23", or "What?". After I manage to extract a "I'm fine thank you, and you?" textbook answer, I ask them if they have an English name. Some of the names leave a little to be desired: Cherry, Summer, Daisy, Coffee, Mervin, Betty, Henry (a girl, and she had no idea what Henrietta was). Yesterday I was graced with the presence of someone called King Rick. King of what, I failed to ascertain.

I sometimes ask them "Why did you come here this morning?". The usual response (if they understood the question) is a "Durrr, how stupid are you?" face and the answer "Because I want a job". Then I ask "But why this job?". Then they say "Because my major is English and I love my major". From the ensuring conversation, it usually transpires that most people are so in love with their major they forgot to actually learn it.

Sometimes, before I even get the first question out, I get treated to an 'impromptu' speech. "Firstly, thank you for see me today, I am honoured to come to your great company, I want challenge myself, I think here I can do this. Thank you." Okay, lovely.

One person - it might have been our old friend Henry - said "thank you" at the end of every answer. "Where are you from?" "Xian. Thank you." "Why do you have a boy's name?" "I like. Thank you."

Most people who come here have depressingly bad English (because the good people go to other companies). It tends to be the people with foreign friends, work experience or confidence who actually speak better English. Whether someone has Zhuan Ba, a supposedly authoritative English exam certificate, is almost entirely unrelated to their ability to speak and understand English.

As for the CV, most of them are long on platitudes and short on experience, particularly for new graduates. A lot of Chinese university students are still seen as children, and most of them will not do any form of paid work until after they graduate. Almost no one will pay their way through university themselves, relying exclusively on parents and some occasional scholarships and government support.

Some people like to prepare an English CV and personal statement. King Rick - for it was he - prepared this moving letter. How he didn't pass will remain a mystery.

"MR (Miss),
"I prefer to recommend myself to your group rather than any other firms because I feel this job will be a challenge and I like to take challenges. Nowadays almost all the employers are asking for the experience. And to be honest, I'm just an unexperienced undergraduate from a college which is not famous, But I still want to tell you some advantages of mine so that u will not miss a talent. I have learned my main subject of journalism for four years, and there's really no need for you to worry about my sense of time and capacity of editor. I have been teaching my Israeli girlfriend Chinese for one year. Well, it was hard in the beginning, but now I'm sure I can handle it anytime. There is no smooth road in this world, but if we always keep learning, we can make all the impossible possible.
"Your company really attracts me. And every time I see it, I feel all the passion striking my mind. This is really amazing to stimulate my brain. I will have so much honor if I can join you.
"With all my heart, I truly hope that one chance will come soon. Appreciate it so much that you take your time to read my resume, and hope you'll see my potential standing in front of your.
"King Rick"

Power industry Chinglish

I used to feel a bit guilty about laughing at Chinglish. But I now realise it's not a one-way street. The Chinese like to laugh at foreigners when they butcher Chinese, so we should enjoy Chinglish with a clear conscience. Below are a couple of attempts at translation by an intern student in our company. She has since been taken off translation and is now in charge of ordering lunch...

Exhibit 1
"Indonesia north of sudan project now is in the construction item of equipment and has left the stage, the review are all construction units to many still not solved the problem of the staff are called "crunching a bone project". in order to ensure that the toc, the general handed over to the task particularly contractor to review and asked me to do our best to finish this job well. In June, review the professional’s tried this way and tries as a result, the timely..."

Exhibit 2
"The report about check that shows every thing at present running normally but the performance in each profession have so many difference and the normally instance is done too much work to remember. So it affect the overall image, the system on the wall and sanitation clean out, as well as part of the instruments and use of the performance. We believed that if we hard working and always change the mistakes in works, we could be standardization, scientization and institutionalization."

Exhibit 3
"To ensure effective leadership by the secretariat and the national audit office and the training class, the participants in each class needs the signature or get the handout in that day to identify . That can guarantee the attendance and supervision. After the training, we can participants from various professional and interpretation of the secretariat in response that the personnel involved in the training initiative is far greater than was at first anticipated. Many personnel are not only in time to the professional training but also active in other professional training. There is few people have participated in all 18 training and the publishing the exam. From the situation at the last examination and to make an encouraging for him, it was all very good for the training, it’s successful and effective."

The essence of my company

I have worked for power engineering services company SE Energy for over a year and a half now. As my contract draws to a close, I'm going to try and get across what is the essence of the company.

It is a 夫妻店 (fu qi dian), a 'husband and wife shop'. This term normally refers to a small business run by a married couple. Our company, with hundreds of employees and which is involved in the export of Chinese skilled labour to developing countries, should not, by my western way of thinking, be a fu qi dian. Such a big company, my natural instincts tell me, needs qualified, experienced and skilled managers and engineers to ensure all the things mentioned on the website - "Customer Orientated, Professional Services, Safety First" and so on and so on - can actually be achieved, thereby improving company performance, securing more clients, expanding, and generally becoming more prosperous and 'better'.

It took me the best part of a year to realise that this is not true. And, if anecdotal evidence from numerous friends is anything to go by, this type of large-scale fu qi dian is very common. There's nothing inherently bad or evil about it, but for people who like to 'do something properly or not at all', a fu qi dian will turn your hair grey. For our company is merely a vehicle by which the boss and his (second) wife can earn as much as possible while doing their level best to suppress outgoings. Whether things are done properly or not is entirely beside the point. Make as much money, register empty companies that don't actually do anything and spread around the profits so they're not all in one basket.

Chinese companies like to have four-character phrases as the company motto. The unofficial one for one company is pianyi jiu xing 便宜就行, which a colleague came up with and I translated as Keep It Cheap. Nothing else matters, just do it as cheap as possible. I have it written on official company paper on the back of the bookshelf in our office.

What comes across as bad management and decision-making to a western person is actually, from the point of view of the boss and his wife, a good decision. Why? Because it keeps costs down.

The boss' wife is in charge of finance, HR, translation and administration departments. She is, by western standards, completely unqualified to be a director of anything, and her impressive collection of apparently bizarre and stupid decisions is huge. My favourite instance was when we were late for a recruitment meeting because she was asleep in her office. She blamed us, demanding to know why we did not wake her. This year's new translator recruitment has been a complete cock-up from start to finish. The 'flow' of people in and out of our company is very high, because of the low salary. Our best translator had her salary cut last month because of her new salary system. And, mostly because of decisions made by the wife, the quality of the translation department has actually declined over the last six months.

This, however, is irrelevant. It's all about saving money. This year, no one on an annual salary got a New Year's bonus, almost unheard of for a company with lots of projects like ours. The fact that it caused two senior engineers to leave is immaterial. It saved them money, which can be put towards either their children's British education or one of their other companies. Also, with the company being completely owned by them, they see paying wages and salaries as 'giving' employees money, and look for constant ways to get an extra few RMB back off their staff.

Forty-year-old Mr Shi is the other member of our two-member 'Translation Quality Group'. While he might not be everyone's cup of tea with his fondness for talking about countries he's worked in, he's quite a gossip, which is conducive for me learning some interesting things. He asked me what it would take for me to sign a contract extension. I said the boss' wife would have to leave and go and enjoy her money. But this is the one thing that will never happen.

It might indeed improve company performance. But the key point is, if you get an outsider in to run things, there is a very high chance of someone running off with the company's money. Something similar happened in the company in 2008, and similar things happen all the time. The fact is, the boss' wife is qualified by the virtue of being the boss' wife and therefore the safest pair of hands.

It's all about money and trust. "Who can we trust with the money? Only us two. So we'll control everything."

The 28-year-old female manager of HR is a reasonably nice person, but is also a spineless lackey who works here because a) she would not have the title of HR manager in any other company and b) she probably has some 'guanxi' with the boss' wife despite denying it. She told me before that "everyone here is doing temping work". It struck me as odd for the manager of a large company to say this, but it is true. Many Chinese people would rather be "the head of a chicken than the tail of a phoenix", ie, they would rather have their own business and be in charge of it than earn money for people they have no connection with. While in practice this is often hard to implement, certainly a large number of people think this way. Having been here for a while now, I have a lot of sympathy with this.

As for their decision to employ me, a native English speaker, it may seem like a desire to improve the translation department. This was the initial brief I was given. On my second day in the company, the boss requested that I find co-operation opportunities with large European companies. It petered out and came to nothing, but over the course of the next year, I was asked four times to work in the business department. I gently and indirectly refused each time, initially because I wanted to improve the translation department, and afterwards because I didn't want to be to close to the boss, and the chances of this company working with major European power companies are precisely nil.

A large part of my role here is a 'huaping', a vase, a facade. "Look, we have a foreigner, we're a good company." Last October I went to Indonesia for a week. The sole purpose was a one-minute 'ambushing' of the Vice Governor of Shaanxi province who was in Jakarta at the time and was leaving a meeting. The boss' brother is a big cheese in the provincial trade department, so he helped set it up. (It didn't bother me, I got a free holiday to Indonesia.) Whenever important clients come to the company, I get wheeled out to do the interpreting - or more importantly, to just be there.

On completion of my Chinese language learning in summer of 2008, I wanted to find a job in a 'typical' Chinese company, and I was extremely lucky to find just such an opportunity. But I think I have reached the limits of what I can do here. So it's time to move on.

World Cup 2010

The World Cup has caught the interest of many Chinese people. If China actually qualified then interest would be even more huge. The Chinese men's national football team is also known as the national pig, a play on words and a fairly accurate description of what Chinese football fans think of their team. The national team is one of the few things to do with China that Chinese people will openly criticise and joke about. "1.4 billion people and we still can't find 11 decent football players" is a line I've heard many times already. It's particularly hard to take, as their 'poor' North Korean neighbours managed to qualify. At least there's a Chinese company with their advertising billboards around the pitches (China Solar), whose Chinese characters among all the Latin letters have caught a few people's eye.

There may be three reasons why Chinese football is rubbish. One is corruption. A colleague asked me before how common it was for national coaches in England to accept bribes to pick players even if they're not good enough. The Chinese FA is rife with corruption, so progress is difficult. Secondly, the national government perhaps doesn't focus as much on football as other sports, particularly Olympic sports. If the Party demanded a decent football team, they could probably knock one up. Thirdly, there's a Chinese phrase "one person on his own is a dragon, 10,000 people together becomes insects". They seem to be better at individual sports than team sports.

The Chinese only like the most famous teams. The idea of supporting underdogs is unheard of. They want big matches with lots of goals scored by famous people, like the players who feature on the adverts during half time. Messi appears in an advert for QQ (the ubiquitous instant messaging service). Argentina are possibly the most liked, but England, Germany, Brazil, Netherlands and Spain are popular as well. No one seems to care or notice much that the England team is a lot more hype than substance.

For the England-Germany game, most Chinese men were cheering for both teams and clinking glasses whenever something noteworthy happened. The clinking of glasses (sometimes 'ganbei', 'bottoms up') is like the seal of approval: that was good. For one of the earlier group stage games, I was sitting with friends on the Bar Street, a series of bars with TVs and tables outside. Because it was 0-0, the three Chinese guys sitting in front of us were having to scrape the barrel to find excuses to drink. After a few small beers, they started doing it with water. The girl with them was either asleep or texting for the whole game. Still, they probably got some face by sitting at the same bar as some white foreigners.

Wednesday, 16 June 2010

Xi'an City Wall Park

Last weekend I spent four hours walking right round the park that goes all along the outside of the City Wall. With the sky being more blue than grey for a change, I took my camera along with me...























Company outing

Last weekend was the annual company outing. In a surprising show of democracy, we were given the choice of three destinations, with the unanimous winner being a trip to Hanzhong, a small city of a million or so inhabitants that's in this province but south of the Qinling mountain range.

The morning coach trip started reasonably enough before the tour guide cranked into life. Tour guides tend to be attractive young women, but we were presented with a short fat man who was nevertheless equally annoying. Being the tallest person on the bus, and also the whitest, meant my decision to bring my MP3 was a correct one. He started playing a game where everyone had to say an adjective, then go round again and this time everyone had to say ‘My bum is…’ in front of their chosen adjective. I had my headphones on and pretended not to hear, saving myself a lot of unnecessary hassle, nomination for song singing and so on.

The Qinling mountains run across the lower half of Shaanxi Province and form a natural and formidable barrier between northern and southern China. They're the source of countless Chinese folk stories and home to an abundance of wildlife, most notably pandas. Newly built tunnels bore straight through the mountains, occasionally bursting out into sunlight to reveal the green-covered peaks before diving straight back inside.

Eventually we made it to Hanzhong. The city itself was as faceless and ordinary looking as most mid- to small-size Chinese cities. Lunch was taken in a restaurant where the food was served within one minute of our arrival, and after 15 minutes we were already being herded out. There was a wedding party going on, with large amounts of baijiu being consumed, and it looked rather more fun than our dry tables.

For the afternoon outing we went to the countryside to Wuhou Ci, or Temple of Marquis, a place commemorating the life of Zhuge Liang. Zhuge Liang was the Chancellor of Shu Han during the Three Kingdoms period 2,000 years ago, and remains a popular figure today on account of his all-round genius and wisdom. Romance Of The Three Kingdoms, one of the four great works of ancient Chinese literature, was written 1,000 years after his death and extols his exploits. As well as having contributed many of the genius ploys to the 36 Strategems, he is also credited with inventing military weapons, landmines and steamed buns.

There are actually lots of different Wuhou Ci around China, but the one here is the earliest, first built in 263AD, and continually repaired and modernised since. I found it much more pleasant and agreeable than many of the major tourist attractions in bigger cities, which are so often overrun with tourists. It was laid out in the usual way, a rectangular area laid out symmetrically around a centre line.

Inside the entrance was a small construction built to look like a city gate with a zither (ancient Chinese musical stringed instrument) inside. It commemorates the Empty City Strategem - Kong Cheng Ji 空城计 - supposedly used by Zhuge Liang. He was left stranded in a nearly deserted city with the enemy’s strong army rapidly approaching. He decided to open up the gates to the City and sit up on the Main Gate and calmly play the zither. When the enemy Sima Yi approached with his Wei army, he was suspicious and retreated, fearful of an ambush. It's now a common saying in modern Chinese meaning to use a false show of strength to cover up a weakness.

Inside was a series of neat and tidy buildings with red lacquer walls, with trees and rocks dotted in between. While the rest of our 40-strong group followed the incomprehensible guide around, I wandered off and found a secluded pond with a small pavilion in the middle with goldfish and pink lilies basking in the sun. It was here that Zhuge Liang was said to sit peacefully and mull over his tactics away from the frenzy of the battlefield – and perhaps tourists, too.

At the back of the site was a red wooden building perched high up on the wall with fantastic views over the verdant farmland and river beyond. Most people didn’t actually get to see it because they were too busy taking photographs of themselves. The sheer volume of photos taken was astonishing, with any opportunity for a photo being grasped. 'Pose' is now a word incorporated into Chinese and familiar to any young person, and ‘posing’ was the hippest thing going on. The favourite one is the classic victory V sign. There’s also the ‘pouty face with big eyes’, and leaning in front of someone else with arms outstretched. The favourite ‘pose’ of anyone older is to stand there with less expression than a Terracotta Warrior.

Later in the afternoon we went to a picturesque lake formed behind a dam. Before the dam was built in 1970, the area was the site of the remains of the earliest ancient boardwalks in China. To get from the ancient capital of Xi'an to the southern cities of Chengdu and beyond, crossing over the Qinling Mountains was the only way through, and a series of wooden boardwalks were built onto the edges of the mountains to make it possible. It took 1,900 years to complete. All that remains are a few photos in a museum.

It was a reasonably pretty area, with the lush mountain peaks rising straight out of the man-made lake, and a modern boardwalk hugging the edge, making it possible to walk a long way around in among the trees and above the water in places. Unfortunately, there was a tacky gift shop selling a cross between a recorder and an accordion, and two of the parents from our company caved in and bought one for their kids.

Evening dinner was identical to lunch, only in a different place because everyone apart from me had complained that the lunch was disgusting. It shows more my unrefined palate than my affable nature. After dinner, we were free to wander round the City. In the central square I stood with a group of old residents in battered old clothes expressionlessly watching a promotional event. There was a guy on a BMX on a stage jumping over a very frightened girl with dyed frizzy hair. The music blasting out from the speakers was that Chinese classic, Prodigy’s ‘Smack My Bitch Up’.

The second day started with a huge breakfast in the same restaurant from 12 hours previously and a short bus ride through the rain to South Lake, an extremely pretty lake dotted with small islands. It probably would have been even prettier had it not been completely shrouded in mist. The light drizzle and my lack of umbrella prompted everyone in turn to ask me how I managed without one.

Looking at the map and listening to the tour guide, it was clear we were only going to go to two of the most popular islands, a tiny fraction of the whole lake. A five-minute boat trip dropped us off at the far end of one. There was a small zoo with some bored and unimpressed looking animals hiding in the corners of their concrete boxes, and a place with monkeys where people were throwing in sweets with the wrappers left on. I wandered on up through the bamboo and over the bridge to the second island, home of the ‘Catching the Moonlight Tower’, a tall pagoda and hive of tourist activity. On seeing all the bumper cars, fairground games and general tourist pap, I wondered down to the lake edge and walked around the outside of the island, hidden among the wet green trees and away from the noise. There was a rusty old rowboat tied up with a fraying rope, and I was very tempted to hop in and propel myself into the mist to an isolated spot to enjoy the serenity that the Emperors came here for hundreds and thousands of years ago.

After about an hour or so I wandered around to the front of the pagoda, where it turned out the rest of the group were having a massive group photo on the steps leading up to the pagoda. I stayed down by the lake and watched the fish darting around under water. On the boat back, there was a frenzy of photo-taking as our brief trip away from Xi’an drew to a close.

Lunch might have been a ‘tour group meal’ we had in the same restaurant again, but it was extremely good (and free), so I stocked up. On the bus back, my friend and I amused ourselves by taking pictures of people nodding off in amusing positions. A couple of people noticed, and so were then unable (or unwilling) to get back to sleep for fear of being caught on camera. Infantile behavior rarely loses its comedy value.

This trip showed me again that China is huge and has a great number of places worth visiting away from the cities. It’s just a question of finding them and getting away from the computers, traffic jams and bad air that constitute a large part of daily urban life.



















Sunday, 16 May 2010

Office space

Since I last wrote, our company has moved into a new office on the edge of the Hitech Zone of Xian. True to form, corners have been cut and a few pence saved. The building is miles from anywhere, and certainly not in ‘the heart of the Hitech Zone’ as mentioned on our website. The floor we’re on was originally designed for residential apartments, but they took out the walls and put some MDF ones up in different places. Unfortunately, they’ve been put right up against the windows so most of them can’t open. Most of the offices don’t even have any windows, and not being allowed to turn the lights on means those guys sit in semi-darkness in winter. The ones that do have windows are roasting hot in summer. The toilets are right in the middle of the office, so any guests coming have to walk right past them - and some translators have to sit next to them. The boss is okay though. In his huge office, he has a 60,000RMB (£6,000) table and his own living quarters.

It’s not just our company that’s into cutting corners - the developers do as well. There are only four lifts for the 23-floor building, so at midday when everyone goes for lunch, the lift is full by the twentieth floor. I usually end up taking the stairs. Mornings aren’t much better. It might seem stupid not to have enough lifts, but is actually perfectly sensible from the point of view of the developer. Why should he pay more money when he doesn’t have to? They do the bare necessities and leave. It’s the same for residential flats. When you buy a new flat in China, you’re just buying a box of concrete and steel and it’s up to you to decorate it from scratch.

Recently we’ve been doing some recruitment events in three or four universities. This year we’ve done it in conjunction with an employment website company. The woman in charge is one of those very, very short people who’s constantly trying to prove herself. She likes to announce herself as my Chinese teacher at each event. She also has a habit of saying ‘only joking’ after her appalling semi-jokes, as if telling us will remind us to laugh.

Unfortunately, our boss’s wife, Mrs S, number two in the company, is also involved and so brings with her ineptitude and stupidity at every step. We were late for the second event because she fell asleep at three in the afternoon reading the newspaper. Then she got angry and blamed us for not waking her up. During the event, when asked by the short woman to introduce the company, she went off on a 15-minute tangent about how good the company is. Asked three questions, she successfully failed to answer all three. Afterwards, when her husband - Mr Q, the main boss - phoned from abroad, she said there were over a thousand students in attendance. I love the lies. There were actually about 250 people.

In fact, we were told that there would be hundreds of students at each event. Last Saturday, there was a written exam, the first part of a series of rounds to choose 50 translators. The company originally planned for over a thousand people to turn up. The actual turnout was 136, most of whom were not in the final year of university and therefore useless to the company. On Monday we had a meeting where one of the HR guys told her about the low turnout. She was both flummoxed and angry and blamed it on everyone except herself.

I wrote and marked the exam. The final part is reading comprehension, and the last question was a general knowledge question related to the text. Last year the question was ‘Who is Saddam Hussein?’ and it offered some interesting answers - ‘President of America’, ‘a black man’, ‘a bad man’ and so on. This year the question was ‘Where is Jamaica?’. Incorrect answers included ‘Africa’, ‘UK’, ‘London’, ‘Indonesia’, and my favourite - ‘Jamaica is in the Privy Council’.

In other news, four people from an Israeli investment company came with a Chinese investment company ‘for visiting’, as it’s called. Our boss, Mr Q, actually speaks reasonable English so, as main translator, I didn’t have much to do. I think maybe the Israelis thought his waffling, avoiding the questions and general vagueness were because of his English being limited. I think it was a deliberate attempt to fend them off. Mr Q doesn’t want to make the company bigger and better, he wants to get as much money out of it as he can. Ceding control of some of it may make the company bigger and better, but that isn’t his primary goal.

On Tuesday, Mrs S called me in to her office. Apparently the email I sent on her behalf to her daughter’s school in England did the trick of getting her her visa, despite her attendance in classes being lower than UK government requirements for overseas students. She reached into her draw to get something. I thought there would be a red envelope with 100RMB in there. I should have known better. It was a packet of Indonesian coffee beans. That’s now the third unwanted present she’s given me. Her husband spent the last week entertaining government officials in Bali, and presumably one of them brought that back for her. She probably thinks all foreigners have a fancy coffee machine and eat croissants for breakfast.

Other than that, every day is just the usual proofreading technical manuals, chatting to the guy opposite me about China in the 1980s and thinking about what to do when my contract and visa run out in July. Some interesting choices ahead.

Friday, 2 April 2010

Saturday morning swindle

A piece of writing about China would not be complete without reference to 'an ancient Chinese proverb' or some such. 崇洋媚外 - chong yang mei wai - is one of the first I learned, referring negatively to someone who overly admirers foreign (particularly western) objects and ideas. Generally speaking, this trend is present throughout all of China, as seen by the token foreigner who appears in adverts for luxury products. In fact, it probably accounts for half the reason why I have my current job. It also provides me with an extra income.

Last Wednesday, I get a call asking me if I'd like to pretend to be from the French Royal Professional Eye Beauty Association and give a short speech and deliver a prize at the new product launch of a Chinese make-up company. I said I would be delighted.

After work the next day, I went to an office hidden away in the back streets of old central Xian. I waited in the manager's office, admiring his extensive tea drinking set and Buddhist statues promising wealth.

The manager never turned up, so I spoke with another guy. I did mention the slight stumbling block of not being able to speak French, but he said it didn't matter. Waiyu - foreign language - is a collective expression used to refer to anything other than Chinese, so the fact that I would be speaking English instead of French was a non-issue. He dismissed my other queries as the ramblings of an over-worried foreigner.

Then it came to the key - money. The day before and again in the office, they asked me how much I wanted. It was the same when I got the job at the power company. It makes me uncomfortable. I asked how much he was offering. He insisted I first name a number. Then some random men came in and we sat around smoking Eight Happiness cigarettes and drinking tea for a bit. Later we went to a room to discuss again the money issue. I started at 500, he got me down to 400. I'm rubbish at bargaining, but in terms of consumer surplus, I was happy enough.

On Saturday morning, I turned up at nine o’clock at the hotel where all the guests of the company were staying. Previously I had been told 10am, then 8am, and after getting to the hotel, I sat in an empty room for an hour and a half, away from the crowds and watching live coverage of the drought in south-west China. When all the guests left, we headed off to the venue. It turned out to be a theatre, with all sorts of singers, dancers and the 'workers' of the company in the wings waiting to go on and do their lifeless performances showing how good their team spirit is.

Two flaws in the master plan quickly appeared. One, no translator. Two, if I really was a guest of the company from Paris, I should be sitting with the company leaders at the large table in front of the stage, not waiting in the wings with the performers.

Anyway, after hearing my name, I walked out and stood on a big empty stage in front of 200 people. I was given two bouquets of flowers, which I had to hand straight back to read my speech. For some reason, I read the following - written by them, translated by me - both quickly and in a very poor French accent.

Respected ladies and gentlemen,
Firstly please let me introduce myself. I am Jean Dupont, from the French Royal Professional Eye Beauty Association. On behalf of the Association, I would like to welcome Shanghai Yuze Biotechnology Development Company into our team and becoming one of our co-operation partners in China.
I would also like to tell everyone a good news. Yuze Company will, from today, having undergone stringent checks from us, have the only Royal Professional Eye Beauty Association manicurists accreditation in China.
We have a series of stringent checks and procedures in place for all our partners. When we were at Yuze, we saw that their attitude was serious, their service honest, and they were concerned greatly about the customers. Not only the standardised strict procedures, but also their diligence in production moved us. They showed themselves to be dedicated to raising awareness of eyes and eyes health issues, as well as the overall health of customers. A company which is so concerned about its customers is worthy of our trust. It is also worthy of the trust of everyone sitting here today.
Finally, let us applaud the new product showcasing of our partner, and hope that this range can bring us an even better future. Merci.

100% horse poo, naturally.

After the speech, the MC wearing a white suit and plastic glasses with no lenses came back on and addressed me by my Chinese nickname, apparently forgetting that I wasn't supposed to speak Chinese. A company 'leader' got up and I presented him with a fake but beautifully framed certificate. Then I walked off, put on my coat and met my 'contact' outside. He looked slightly disappointed, perhaps realising the same two problems that I had realised. Then one of the other men from two days before came out and invited me to lunch. While I was making my excuses, I was bundled away by one of the company's staff because some of the guests were filing out of the main auditorium next to where we were standing, no doubt wondering why this French make-up business guy who speaks accented English instead of actual French was now talking in Chinese about his afternoon of teaching English.

And with that I walked out into the spring sunshine, 400 kuai better off. There is obviously the moral issue of lying, but I chose to see it as a 'minor wealth enhancing opportunity'. Besides, in a few years’ time, when Chinese people are less inclined to be chong yang mei wai, my days of getting paid to put on a tie and sound like Inspector Clouseau will be coming to an end.

Myth busting

The dispersal of three myths:

1) All Chinese are hard working.

When I was studying at Auckland University in New Zealand in 2004, I used to make my way into the library some time around ten in the morning. I was lucky to find a seat, such was the keenness of my Asian friends to get in and practise for their IELTS test. If I went to my host university in the UK at ten in the morning, I could have had a whole row of tables, maybe even a whole floor, to myself.

It is, however, all a myth. Maybe it’s the lazy ones who stay behind and the hard-working ones who get the opportunity to go abroad (not actually true, either). And certainly people in Shaanxi and north China generally are regarded as less hard working than southerners.

It's laziness coupled with protestations of business that make it particularly interesting. One of the things I hear most often is wo hen mang (I'm really busy) and variations on it - mang de hen (so busy), mang si le (busy to death), mang feng le (so busy ive gone crazy), etc. I hear this mostly while I'm chatting on QQ, the instant messaging service.

Being busy means just doing your normal, everyday job. When they get asked to do something over and above their normal routine, then they just "beng kui" - collapse under the enormity of the onerous task placed upon them. They need a good xiuxi (rest) after that. I'm trying to work with a university on foreign student recruitment, and the people in charge of the website deserve a prize for stonewalling and intractability. They'll go home after eight hours of playing computer games and chatting on QQ and say how busy they've been.

The people in my office who have the least work to do like to make out they have the most. When one of the drivers comes back from picking someone up - a tough 45 minutes of sitting down and rotating his arms slightly - he'll emit lots of 'ooooh's and ‘ai yahhhh’ sounds, just to let people know how busy he is. When someone asks if he is free in the afternoon, he looks slightly pained and mentions how 'mang' (busy) he is. As soon as the person goes away, he sits at the computer playing on his QQ farm game until lunchtime.

There's another guy here who is employed purely because he is a relative of the boss' wife and can be trusted not to leak secrets and to keep an eye on people. He is probably the laziest and most stupid person I have ever met, but he's good at walking quickly and smoking and talking loudly on his phone in local dialect, which perhaps gives the appearance of being busy. He sits in on our meetings, and at the end repeats everything that was said like he's just thought of it, then recaps again (just in case we missed it the first two times), then concludes the meeting.

When our company moved office, I've never seen them so excited. Here was an opportunity to loudly move tables and chairs up and down stairs and show everybody how busy they were. If no one was watching or within earshot, they would probably just sit around smoking.

Another point worth mentioning is that, generally, Chinese people are willing to work long hours. The opportunity to earn money is rarely passed up by a Chinese, and they think anyone who does is either very rich or very stupid. But when they're not working, they do hardly anything. They seem to struggle to enjoy themselves, and ‘playing hard’ is not on the agenda. A group of Indonesian power station operators received training from our company in Xian, and for the closing ceremony they had prepared songs and skits and all sorts. The boss of our company lamented the inability of our staff to have a good time like the Indonesians. I think this trait is actually generally fairly well recognised by Chinese themselves, particularly those who have foreign friends.

Also, I rarely see anyone running.



2) All Chinese people are poor.

I should make some distinctions here. The older generation in China had it tough. My friend’s grandmother had to give some of her children to her sister to raise. My ex-girlfriend's father is now bald because he never had enough to eat in his teens when he went to work in the countryside. Anyone who lived through that period is very able to live and get by and be satisfied with their lot, especially now.

All change, please! Now it couldn't be any more different. Urban kids born after 1980, and even more so those born after 1990, couldn't be better off. One reason is the family unit. The parents pay for everything. Almost none of the post-1980s generation will pay their own university fees. Almost none of them will buy their own house - the parents will buy it for them. They'll find them a job, buy them a car, maybe even find them a husband or wife if they're still single at 25. A new group of people has been formed - 月光族, ‘the monthly spenders’ - post-1980s generation people who spend all their salary on shopping, drinking and more shopping because they know their parents will buy them a house. I think it's fair to say that, compared to their western contemporaries, most urban Chinese are better off.

However, the return part of the deal is that the kids are expected -and have a legal responsibility – to look after their parents in old age, ie, live with them. It strikes me that this has significantly financial advantages for all concerned compared to nursing homes, separate houses, etc.

My colleagues - mostly post-1980s generationers - like to point out my relatively high salary. And in turn, I like to point out that I pay my own rent, buy my own food, pay for my own plane tickets, and don't get red envelopes stuffed full of money from various aunts and uncles. A good half of these colleagues do not have to pay for anything. Particularly the women. The one child policy (see below) has indeed created 120 men for every 100 women, but this is highly advantageous for women. Girls who are relatively cool and open about going out for a good time never pay for anything. They're not expected to pitch in for the house. While many want to and will be independent, if they choose not to, they could easily get through life without lifting a finger (particular the pretty ones).

There are no slums in China. Brazil, Mexico, India, Indonesia, most of Africa – places which have had the advantages of decades of free world residence and support – have plenty. The closest thing resembling a slum in China are former villages that have been absorbed into the urban area. They might not be des-res, but they are hardly seas of poverty. The buildings in them get higher and higher as people expand upwards.

There are plenty of poor people in China, and being a city dweller I admittedly don't get to see a lot of them. But it doesn't seem too desperate to me. I was walking through a village the other day, and there were brand spanking new washing machines and big new red doors in battered old courtyards. Salaries are rising for almost everyone while inflation (property excluded) is manageable. The Chinese government is considering raising the rate at which tax is paid from 2,000 yuan per month to 5,000 yuan. This has regional implications, but it is the roughly the equivalent of anyone earning £30,000-40,000 a year not paying any tax.

There are 300 new cars a day on the roads in Xian alone - one million a month in the whole country. One million new cars a month? Think about that. More and more people are going on holiday overseas, eating western food, drinking whisky and enjoying the good life. The wealth is far from evenly spread, and this old route to economic growth is obviously unsustainable and will have only one ending, but for now, the rising tide has indeed lifted most boats, if only to varying degrees.



3) The one child policy is a horrible abuse of human rights, blah blah blah

Simple fact for everyone - the planet is chronically and totally unsustainably overpopulated. In particular, China. In the 1930s, due to hundreds of years of highly advanced agriculture and medicine, the population of China was already over 400 million. Chairman Mao, in charge from 1949 until 1976, advocated "more is stronger", encouraging people to have as many children as they could. Of all his decisions, this one undoubtedly was the most pig-headed and has the deepest legacy. In 1954, the projected population of China for the year 2000 was 2 billion. In 1978, sanity returned to China, and they implemented a policy which people, particularly non-Chinese, should be very appreciative of.

I've never met one single person who has said anything other than "there's too many people" in this country. It's so blindingly obvious. Try getting on a bus in any city in rush hour (or any hour for that matter). I've taken over a thousand journeys on urban buses. Quite often I was unable to actually get on it, let alone sit somewhere. There are people everywhere all the time. To find peace and solitude like that depicted in ancient paintings is a challenge in itself. Hard seats on the train are also a must-see for those human rights flag wavers. What about the right to some food and a place to live, something which would be impossible without the policy?

It's illegal to have a kid outside of marriage, giving birth is expensive, and you need permission before having a kid. It sounds pretty awful ('draconian' seems to be the adjective of choice in certain circles). No one particularly likes it. But Chinese are too practical and the situation too obvious for them to do anything other than accept it. With the massive increase in wealth that has now come about, a significant number of urban women only want one child now anyway, and almost none of them want more than two.

I like the phrase "responsible member of the international community". It usually has connotations of terrorism. But overpopulation is much more serious. And when it comes to population, China has been very responsible - due to its own reasoning rather than any desire to be a responsible member of the international community.

The policy is not as strict as it is made out. People from the countryside can, under certain circumstances, have two or even three kids. Ethnic minorities can have two or three. Obviously the rich and corrupt can get around it, and it has created a generation of ‘little emperors' - selfish, bad tempered and dependent children. The gender gap is also a real and undesirable side effect. But aside from the above points, do you really want a huge and increasingly wealthy foreign population spilling onto your doorstep? I didn't think so.

Tuesday, 2 February 2010

Modern concubines

Last Wednesday was the second of my two recent appearances at the local TV station to be one of the guests in a “light-hearted” chat show. For both topics, the person in charge thought it would be interesting to hear the “foreign” point of view, so I got invited along.

The topic of the first programme was something I became aware of a good year and a half after coming to Xian. It’s 'ernai', literally meaning ‘second grandmother’ but actually meaning private prostitute. I suppose the ancient term is concubine.

An ernai (sometimes called xiao san, or small three) is a girl, usually a university student, who, in return for large amounts of money, plus a car, a flat, etc, agrees to be the private prostitute for a rich man, usually a businessman or government official. It’s called ‘to be wrapped up’ (bao), which means that in return for having her material needs fully taken care of, she agrees to be on call whenever he needs someone to make him ‘comfortable’, to sit with him when he’s drinking baijiu with his friends, go on holiday with him, and to not do anything of that nature with anyone else.

After hearing about it the first time, I was pretty surprised. Afterwards, every single time I asked someone about it, they looked at me like I just asked them “Have you ever heard of chopsticks?”. It’s now such a common thing, no one pays attention to it anymore. One girl friend of mine who was a student at the Xian Film University and is in the know about things like this said about 10-15 percent of girls in her year were ernai, while another 30-40 percent worked as “masseurs”, “waitresses” in KTV bars, or prostitutes in high-class hotels.

If you ever see a red car, particularly a red Mazda, in China, it’s probably being driven by an ernai (or the “dakuan”, rich man, who is her ‘employer’). Beijing Foreign Languages University is the most famous in China for its legions of ernai. It’s the same at the universities here with the prettier students, ie, the music university, the arts university and the foreign languages university. Every Friday afternoon and Saturday morning, there’ll be piles of expensive German cars, usually black, waiting outside the main gate. A small procession of girls come tottering out on high heels and park themselves in the front seat before driving off. One of my colleagues at work tried to deny this happens, and everyone rolled their eyes. It’s fairly well accepted that the vast majority of eligible men (rich and powerful) will ‘wrap an ernai’.

This is, of course, not to say that everyone is in on it. Most girls would not do it, especially the conservative types like my colleagues. I often get told I should learn the ‘good things’ about China, not the 'bad stuff’, which is a pretty lame attempt to save face. However, I’m still fairly surprised by how most 'eligible' people would consider it and indeed do it. Most people talk about it like it’s nothing. I've been told that any man who can afford one will have one, while the richer ones will have two or more. I’ve got a friend from the music university who helps rich guys make contact with willing ernai from the ranks of her classmates.

The reasons for it are probably numerous. Most men over forty got married early in a much more austere age than now. With their one child grown up, wife unlikely to divorce him, and the money rolling in, the temptation is not insignificant. As for the girls, it’s a huge amount of very easy money in a highly competitive, over-populated country. A slightly more cynical take on it would be that it shows the pre-eminent position of money and materialism in modern Chinese society.

The topic of the second programme was why married women ‘stretch over the wall like a red apricot’. Or, in modern terms, why do they have affairs. I made the point that a lot of Chinese men, even now, tend to be nice and loyal before getting married, then after getting married and earning more money, they start to ‘wan’, or play around. I also said that sex life is near the bottom of the list for the vast majority of people when it comes to choosing a lifelong partner. Money, in the form of rich parents, stable job, high salary, etc, tend to be at the top of the list. These points were not denied. The other special guest, a 29-year-old psychologist, had just got divorced three days previously after discovering her husband had four different girlfriends during their four years of marriage, and never once came home before 2am.

In modern China, there seem to be ancient ways of thinking, communist (1949-1976) ways of thinking and ‘modern’ ways of thinking all jumbled into one and spread across different generations. Coupled with the unprecedented speed of unsustainable economic development, it’s hard to get to grips with it, particularly for the only children. As they say, ‘the forest is big, it contains every type of bird’.

Christmas, New Year and other bits and pieces...

Christmas passed without much happening. Despite the enormous popularity of Christmas among the younger generations, it's far from a public holiday so everyone went to work as normal. On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day, though, it seemed all of Xian came out to wander round the streets. The centre of town was blocked off to cars (although not my electric scooter) from four in the afternoon. By 7 o'clock, the streets that are normally choc-a-bloc with cars were even more choc-a-bloc with what can only be described as hordes of people. Hawkers were also out in force, selling Halloween face masks, Santa hats and a general array of absolute pap.

I did receive one Christmas card. I have a friend who works in the provincial trade department, and she said (the day before Christmas) that she would send me a card. So it was to my sheer delight, a week after Christmas, that I received yuletide greetings from both the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade Shaanxi Sub-Council and the China Chamber of International Commerce Shaanxi Chamber of Commerce. The spirit of Christmas lives on after all.

For New Year, national law requires companies over a certain size to give a small gift to their employees. Normally it's in the form of vouchers. But this year the boss' wife, who is in charge of the money, had a brainwave whereby she could save a few kuai. And so it was that each of us was given an enormous box of bananas and a slightly smaller box of tangerines. I estimated the bananas to number approximately 80-100. Despite being partial to the occasional banana, I felt slightly overwhelmed by the volume and smell of boxes upon boxes of bananas being stacked up in our small office. We were faced with the problem of transporting this lifetime supply of diarrhea-inducing fruit back home. My electric scooter is pretty good, but it was not designed to transport cargo. So I took about 30 of them out, and left the rest to someone else. I think he sold them over the weekend.

The day before New Year, the news headlines popped up on my QQ (the ubiquitous instant messaging service) with a report about 'Thief Village', a place in the countryside near Xian famous all over China for being an outlet of stolen clothes and accessories. I decided to go there on New Year's Day, one of my rare days off.

After about a 50p, one-hour bus ride from the southern bus station, I got off the bus on the main road running through the countryside, with few other people about. I headed towards a nondescript looking village. Not sure if I was in the right place, I was about to ask someone when they stopped me mid-sentence: "You saw the report on QQ then?"

The entire place is completely illegal, but even the huge introduction sign erected by the village council states 'clothing retail industry' among the selling points of Meng Family Village. Near the entrance is a block of small, single-storey shops, all with a bed sheet covering the doorway. Most of them sell the same things - shoes, clothing, belt, watches, and so on. From my research, it's mostly fake stuff but with some genuine items mixed in. I heard that if you make yourself friendly with the shop-owner, they'll bring out the best stuff from the back for you to inspect personally.

I don't think they get a lot of foreigners there, and I was greeted with plenty of 'hah-lows'. They don't like it when you say you're just browsing, so I said I was checking the place out for some rich foreign friends who were hoping to visit the next day. One shop, unassuming from the outside, had wooden floors and dark wood closets, with a very strong smell of leather. It could easily have been the real deal. Inside, rough but well dressed women with dyed hair were arguing with customers about the genuine-ness of the clothing. There's no fixed prices, so the final price depends on the bargaining skills of the two parties. I left with no damage to my wallet, but a good idea of where to do my gift shopping next time.

On the other side of the main road by the bus stop was a single-track road heading through the countryside with a sign for a mountain scenic spot. Having not much else to do, I decided to take a look.

Having not been to the countryside much, it's always good to have a wander round. I was struck by how empty and quiet the villages were. Urbanisation is taking in people and leaving behind old people to look after the kids. It seemed the kids, though, playing outside on the streets and in the fields, were better off than urban contemporaries stuck in front of their computers with no fresh air. I wa as also struck by the relative wealth. One battered old house with a missing door had brand new washing machine humming away in the courtyard, and many of the houses had big red doors and white tiles on the front, a sign of wealth.

After paying the five kuai entrance fee (50p) and avoiding the enormous dogs belonging to the old women in charge, I wandered up the mountain, Erlang Mountain. It's effectively in the middle of nowhere and not well known at all. I had the entire place to myself for most of it. There were lots of birds and pheasants flitting around among the trees, and the overall peacefulness brought home just how much noise there is in the city. A waterfall was completely frozen over, and I watched some university lecturers attempting in vain to climb round and over the side of it. One woman, like many others, chose to wear high heels for her Sunday afternoon mountain climb, which always interests me.

On the top section was the occasional mud brick house, and any reasonably flat part was given over to crops. I met up with a nice couple and wandered round with them for a bit. Later on they gave me a lift back to the bus stop. It's easy to see why so many people are enjoying high standards of living in China. Their small hatchback cost only 60,000RMB (about 6,300GBP), much cheaper than before. And with their only one child being looked after by the grandparents, they are free to go out and climb mountains and give random foreigners lifts.