Everyone in China has a cellphone, so I need a cellphone.
I go with Zack, who’s helping us get settled. He did my fellowship to China last year, and is going to leave to Taiwan in a week to do it there this year. He studies psychology at Berkeley and specifically cultural impacts on cognition, so that’s how he gets to swing this serial international thing.
You get to pick your own cellphone number from an available set, but you have to flip through a three ring binder where they are written in by hand. It’s semi-meticulous bookkeeping, as it only represents that they may still have this number which they have to shuffle through the whole pile for.
Next to each number is a different price because better numbers cost more money! Lucky digits are 6 and 8 and they drive the price of the number up, while 4s bring the price down. To get a sense for the significance of the number, 8 consider the fact that the olympics are starting at 8/08/08 8:08pm
I got, 150 10 900 940. I kinda like it and it was cheap, since it’s got a 4 in it. To me and probably to you, it’s good because it’s got more 0’s consequently easy to remember. I wonder if lucky numbers are easier to remember for Chinese, though remembering cellphone numbers is pretty useless.
Everyone has a cellphone, and many people have very fancy phones which seems to always be out and played with, for tv watching, internet surfing, or playing music. I’ve seen one that’s worn like a wristwatch accompanied with a small bluetooth device.
Text messaging is ubiquitous, especially among students, since it’s cheap. I later learn that China Mobile made 1.2 billion US$ from text messages during the last Chinese new year. Take what you will.
I had to purchase a ~35$ (220RMB) handset since my US carrier did not unlock mine. I see advertisements for gold plated/diamond studded hand sets for more than my US salary — not that that’s saying much. I’m a graduate student.
7:40AM everyone’s on the bus in time. We’re sleepy and in probably our best shorts, but excited to see what the Ministry of Science and Technology has in store. Ushered into large conference hall that is overly formal yet has a dusty grey feel to it. We’re seated as if it’s going to be a 40 person panel discussion as each of us has a personal mic — the kind you press the button to activate and then the light indicates you can no longer talk without talking to the whole room. There is a cup on each table with a lid and the waitresses come around to serve tea, which is refilled more or less every time you take a sip.
The six hosts of the morning affair arrive in suits and ties and take their places at the podium in front of the stage. There is a representative each from the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Chinese National Science Foundation, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. The is a Science and Technology Secretary from the US embassy. These are long institution names, and they get repeated a lot. This is an official press conference style meeting. Feeling is we’re here for show. There are photographers and photographs. Immediately we’re invited to the stage for a group photo. The photographer seems a little disappointed in our inability to self organize according to height for the photo, this is in contrast to our Chinese counterparts who are remarkably good at self-organization.
Return to seats. Short speech from each panelist. Each solemnly reiterates and thanks every ministry name involved on the US and China side. We are told about the beginnings of great collaborations. Some phrases I recorded verbatim:
“I commend the students and professors participating in the summer program with the unwavering help of [names of ten institutions]. You are the ones that will light the torch of science and technology collaboration. Together we shall conquer the sorrow and step out of the shadow caused by the disaster [sichuan earthquake] and rebuild our homeland.”
Two alumi of our program are invited to give a speech. They remarkably follow the format set by the hosts of contentless thank yous. Then our attention turns to the man with the powerpoint, who we are told is Mr. Li. He excitedly announces “This presentation has a 100 slides.” … and probably a million words. This pattern repeats at several other future visits, (as does the content , since it’s all from the national statistics office whose job it is to make such master presentations from which all others are assembled.) He reads through the entire presentation with his eyes and finger fixed on the screen of the laptop, tracking the text, starting from “Introduction to China: Science and Technology Development”
I doze off and imagine the powerpoint theory lesson that made this all be, “Every slide needs to be interesting! You must insert a logo, at least one other image, a graph, and a table. Fill in all empty space with bullet points. Make the text small so you can fit more of it in. Something must twirl.”
It has statistics about science investment, 5 year plan meeting goals, graphs about attainment of targets (with strange metrics like, high-tech independence is at 41% up from 26% just 5 years ago!) This is done for every science related discipline/field/administration/whatever you can imagine. I think the presentation strategy is to overwhelm us with thoroughness, and we are overwhelmed. The stresses are that China wants to move up the production value chain and bring technology and innovation to the fore, and that it’s doing it here, here, here, … and here.
Once he flips the last slide, the meeting host announces, “That’s all for this ceremony!” And like that, they disappear.
We wander unremarkably back on the bus which chauffeurs us back to the hotel at 11:30AM. Good bye. Enjoy your first day in China. See you tomorrow at 7:40AM! This feels delightfully unrewarding and sobering.
Dizzyfyingly huge new terminal at the airport.
I fill out my arrival card in red ink — only pen I had on the plane — but the immigration official reprimands me, “You should use black pen next time.” I’m flattered by the possibility of a next time, and maybe this accounts for my reply that the red ink’s in honor of China.
On the ride to our hotel at the Institute of Mining Technology, it’s hard to make out anything country specific. Everything is new. Airport terminal, new. Cars, new. Big highways, new. New trees. New grass. Shiny electrical infrastructure. The whole scene is assembled from fresh pieces. We drive by the Olympics stadium, the birds nest and the water bubble, and within 10 minutes arrive with our bags in the lobby.
Now we’re back on the channel I thought I was watching. It’s a grey cement slabbed building with a fruit shack on the side and lots of parked/piled bikes. Students are making merry and loitering since it’s the last day of exams. A young girl asks me to sign my name and hands me a wad of cash wrapped in brown paper — supposed to last for the next two months, but doesn’t — and then asks for 10 RMB back as a deposit on the keys to my room. Says to meet in the lobby at 7:40AM.
My single room has THREE beds but no internet. Each bed is one third the size of my lofted nook in SF however. I push them together to make a master bed by the window. As I move the beds, I uncover mounds of sunflower, pumpkin and roasted watermelon seed shells — the work of previous occupants. I hide my wad of cash behind the radiator. (It’s no longer there as it is spent.)
Note about energy efficiency of hotel — after opening the door, the key is placed into a slot by the door to complete the electrical circuit. When you leave the room and take the key, the circuit is broken. So you can’t leave the AC blaring while you are gone. This also renders your refrigerator useless. All of us (fellow fellows on the hall) independently come up with a strategy to permanently close the circuit so that we can leave anything on while we are gone, such as chargers, rather than be constrained by the key nanny.
Hearing Chinese everywhere feels unusual. Feeling big eyed, confident and timid. Some of us trickle to the lobby or to the steps outside. Others are still trickling in from delayed flights. Jonah, a paleontologist, hands around a bottle of duty-free scotch. Sleep finds us soon and Ambian helps overcome jetlag.
I'm writing this on my flight to Beijing. I'm glad I got a day layover in Tokyo. It gave me an opportunity to recall our year long voyage of to the United States from Russia in 1989, through Austria and Italy. Other immigrants, after 1990, had stepped on the plane in Moscow and disembarked in New York, receiving the full impact of the cultural transition at once, and at the same time the illusion of a seamless transition.
I had the same opportunity now, to prepare for the culture shock of Beijing, by getting a dose of culture shock in Tokyo.
As I rode the escalator to baggage exchange, I saw a couple that were on the same plane as me from LAX speaking Japanese. The guy made a long drawn out exhalation of relief inserting the English phrase, "Well, back to reality." For me it was the other way around.
The first amusement was in the airport bathroom. I had expected the bidet -- the buttocks washing contraption. But I didn't realize they had thought of adding a button to electronically generate a masking sound for "embarassing bathroom noises."
I hope these cultural amusements do not stop. Today, we received a schedule for our first day in China. Following evening arrivals from 15 hour flights, we are expected to:
Please meet at 7:40 am on June 16 at the lobby of hotel to take a bus to the Ministry of Science and Technology. The latest one would be invited to sing a song on the way. : )
What a public affair, and at the same time, what a great idea?! The public character of the punishment is a collective deterrent for future lateness but this also serves to increase the individual alertness in the over-sleeper.
Since I’m an over-sleeper this is likely to be me. And since I don’t have a singing voice, I choose to see this as a reward in disguise — I get some institutionally controlled practice for the inevitable Karaoke evenings while having the privilege of providing amusement for my peers, while saving face because “I’m only doing this because I have to”.
Question, does anyone have song suggestions for the occasion?
So you run into someone you know unexpectedly — total coincidence! It’s a small world, right?
Well, if your world is small, perhaps you should go out and meet new people. Because you see, the world didn’t change its size based on who you re-met. Instead it was you who spent your small world potential by churning through the same social orbit.
By contrast, every time you meet someone new, you increase your small world potential by seeding the possibility of re-meeting this person. I postulate that with practice, it’s possible to accumulate this potential and use it like rocket fuel to overcome gravity and propel oneself into stable orbit.
This way, you no longer expend small world potential, but derive energy from the motion of the sociolestial spheres. In practice, this means that you can stop having a home (gravitational constraint) but live as a fully potentiated large world nomad without wearing out welcomes, rather bathing your perpetually grateful series of hosts with your comet tails and new found interconnectivity.
This thought crystalized when a certain character was described to me. Not everyone has this capacity. Incidentally, this character is now staying with us for a month.
fifteen minutes before the opening of the afternoon visa session, i joined the loose assemblage of peoples around the chinese consulate. returning veterans of the morning session clued me in:
i must queue on the right
for the deli machine
which dispenses the numbers
that determine the order
of being seen.
so, i took my place by the entrance, seemingly at the head of the line. yet before i know it, there were 20 people competing for the spot i had occupied alone, an amalgam of me and 19 elderly chinese.
on the other side of the glass doors two security guards were preparing for the onslaught. i could make out the russian names on their tags. the shorter one ‘A.’ had braces, the other ‘R.’ a cigarette in his mouth, and neither was older than 20. their clothes were oversized and since they huddled behind the machine which dispenses the numbers, i imagined them as meat clerks by the deli counter.
CHINA
For the summer of 2008, I hold the post of visiting fellow at Peking University in Beijing, China. Consequently, the present focus of the blog is to share this experience in real time. In this regard I also point you to my friend Eric Fogg’s Blog
TOLERABLE INSANITY
My goal is to share original content in the form of discrete vignettes. The style aims at communicating the revelation in asynchronous real time as to share the pleasure of first discovery, that elusive eureka orgasm.
SCIENCE
Science occupies most of my time. I want to share my fascination with science through explanatory entries, initially focused on what humans on the social plane can learn from biology of molecules.
for a while i've been signing electronic communication with ./peretz. it's a personal reference to a summer spent in a portland basement working at an open source non-profit. it's also an obscure reference to ./ command line prefix used in linux to execute a non-executable file in a directory with execution privileges. essentially, it's a trick to activate a disguised script and i thought it was a clever way to affect activating myself in signature. due to my policy of constant turnover in all unessential habits, i've been phasing this out.
recently i received an official document, titled attestation en anglais with a typo. the final punctuation before the sigature was ./ . i immediately wrote back to alert the authorities of this typo. the secretary to the french ambassador to nepal wrote back:
The "./." at the end is called "the diplomatic point".
google can't confirm, but it makes complete sense for a diplomat to use this command line trick to mark the writing executive.
--------Today I had the pleasure of sitting through traffic court. My case was 50th in order and I got to see about 30 people all of whom pled "guilty" or "no contest" to an average of three charges per person. 20 people or 40%, got bench warrants as "no shows". Some were deemed a flight risk and assigned $15,000 in bail. Most, as the judge passed them to Madame Clerk, were termed mere "standard procedure". Of the ones that appeared, most missed their first appearance date and had the additional "failure to appear charge" with a $235 fine. "Set by Sacramento. So, direct your complaints there," said the judge. Next most common was possession of marijuana with a fee of 158$, "the only misdemeanor for which the California legislature actually bans jail time. Don't ask me why," remarked the judge. Speeding, running stop signs, illegal left turns, no insurance, and everybody pled "guilty" "guilty", "guilty, your honor".
Most speeding infractions were eligible for traffic school for an additional 24$. (Only one person declined.) Those who could not afford to pay had the option of "working it off". One woman who came with a small child was there because she did not work off her fine the first time around. "I was pregnant, your honor." She was given an additional six months to account for a 540$ fine.
The case which compels itself to be featured started out quite uneventfully; a charge for "illegal u-turn", on the highway as it turned out 178$; and "failure to keep a logbook" 540$. The judge asked the tractor trailer driver who evidently was responsible for keeping some kind of record, "How bad was your log?" "I failed to record a filling stop, your honor." The judge continued scanning the report, "I see there was an accident. So you learned the hard way not to make a u-turn on the highway. How serious was it?"
The driver then leaned into the microphone and gently placed "fatal" on the record. The judge seemed puzzled how a fatal accident could yield two minor infractions. It was the first time he'd seen it. My read of the rest of the audience uncovered a lack of concern. Everyone was tending to their own sweaty palms. Imagine this black man in a suit, in a rural courtroom, confessing that his truck got caught in the median and stuck out across the highway and a human lost his life. "He ran across my triangles and flares, your honor." "Hmmm, the report does attribute the responsibility for the accident to the other driver. Strange... but, it's not up to me to make the determination. I just add up the numbers. How do you plead?" The driver pled "no contest", so that later he can claim not to have pled guilty. "That will be 718$ will you be taking care of that today or delaying for an additional court fee of 30$?" "I'll be taking care of that today." And with that he bowed his head and left the courtroom.
My arraignment was called. I pled "not guilty" and demanded a Trial by Written Declaration. Uneventfully granted with a continuance for two months for discovery. I was the first to plead "not guilty". And then I left the courtroom.
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