On the road again: A month back in America

Ever since I was a little kid I’ve been traveling on airplanes, mostly to visit my mom’s family in the Midwest. I used to get airsickness back then, but somewhere in my teens I finally got used to flying. Recently it’s become even more a part of my routine, as I generally take a trip every few months. The last month has been quite a whirlwind – hence my failure to write since I first arrived in the US – filled with many flights, bus and train rides. I’ll share some of the highlights here, beginning with a summary of my trip in numbers:

79 friends & family members visited

55 hours of flying

34 hours of bus rides

30 days of travel

24 blue-sky days

15 nights out with friends

8 US cities

3 hiking trips

2 coastlines

1 priceless experience

First, I want to give a shout out to everyone who hosted my on my tour around the US, especially Don Parris, who has become like an uncle to me after generously hosting me three times on my various trips through LA. In Maine I staid with my lifelong friend Riley Roland and his parents, then with my sister in Baltimore, Lasha Leonov and her boyfriend in NYC, my brother in Amherst, and Artem Efremkin in Boston.

It was a strange and yet comforting experience meeting my parents in the Greyhound bus station in Phoenix. After 25 years of living in Maine, they had made the big move to Phoenix about four months earlier, but in a way it felt like we were just on vacation there. I spend a relaxing week with them hiking (in the Grand Canyon and mountains surrounding Phoenix) and sitting by the pool.

From Phoenix I told a bus back to LA, then a red eye to Boston and finally a bus up to Maine, to arrive just in time for Easter dinner with my dad’s family (but not before I collapsed on my grandma’s couch for a quick nap). I spent a relaxing few days in Maine, tossing Frisbees, getting re-acquainted with the beautiful New England countryside and slow-paced way of life.

Then it was off to Baltimore to visit my sister (who was originally going to meet me in NYC before she got sick). In one day I spent about 14 hours on and in between three different busses traveling half way down the East coast (note that in China that distance probably could have been covered in 5 hours on a high speed train). Still, I had the pleasure of watching and comparing the skylines of at least four major east coast cities, especially marveling at the uniqueness of the New York skyline and the new, almost completed “freedom tower.”

Two days in Baltimore with my sis. Two days in NYC visiting several friends. A walk along the Baltimore harbor front and bar hopping in Baltimore’s bar district. An NYU house party, coffee with a cleantech guru and drinks in the financial district. Then shipping up to Boston. Everything seems to be moving in fast motion now. Wish I had taken more pictures.

Six days in Boston & Amherst, and something happening every night. Drinks with my brother and his friends, then a hike to a hidden bunker the next day. Back to Boston and drinks with my cousin downtown, then Fenway Park 100-year anniversary tour the next day. Cleantech networking event and the Tufts Energy Conference. So nice to go to the Tufts Energy Conference and not have to worry about organizing it. Thanks to Conor Branch, Dan Resnick and Katie Walsh for keeping the legacy going, and great job to all this year’s organizers!

Then back to LA and up to San Francisco for a few days. In San Francisco I finally had a chance to meet a world famous parapsychologist and long time friend of my family (he went to high school with my grandmother!) named Stanley Krippner. Stanley was recently featured on the cover of the San Francisco Weekly and has done some pretty amazing things in his lifetime, not least of which was conducting dream experiments and being good friends with most of the members of the Grateful Dead. Also met some of the Beijing Energy Network founders, as well as another cleantech veteran, Caitlin Pollock.

One more day in LA with Don and my good friend Lisa Gilson, and then boarded a plane back to Shanghai, where I caught the train back to Beijing. Whew, what a trip.

To those of you who I didn’t have an opportunity to see, I wish you the best and look forward to crossing paths again at some point. For the near future though, I’m done with traveling for a bit and will be bunkering down for the summer in Beijing. I’ve still got a lot to accomplish in China before I consider a permanent return to the US. 

Reverse culture shock

Walking down the street, I spotted a small, hole-in-the-wall electronics store and peered in the window. Like so many of these in China, it contained just about everything you might expect: cell phones, smart phones, headphones, sim cards, memory cards, batteries, and much more. As I walked in I began trying to remember the Chinese words I would need to describe what I was looking for, and prepared myself for the blank looks and stubborn refusals that would inevitably follow. But as I walked up to the counter I realized I had entered a different reality. The clerk smiled at me, and speaking fluently in English, politely asked me what I needed. When I replied, he said “Yes, we can do that for you right away.”

Oh yeah, I’m back in America.

This is not meant to be a statement of patriotic pride, but simply to point out one of the key differences between my American and Chinese experience. While I was certainly happy to be back in America, in some ways southern California, where I first touched down, felt more like a foreign country to me than China. And it was about to get even stranger as I headed for Phoenix, where I’d be spending my first week back in the US with my parents.

During my first few days back in the US in a year and a half, I couldn’t help but start comparing things I like better about the US with those I like better about China. Here’s the short list I came up with:

Better in China

1.     Trains & subways: they’re newer, faster, cheaper, cleaner

2.     Busses: they leave and arrive on time

3.     Electronics: they’re cheaper

4.     Jobs: there’s more of them

5.     Fast food: it’s more abundant (you read correctly) and if possible, a little healthier

6.     Negotiating: everything can be negotiated

7.     Strip malls: they basically don’t exist here

Better in the US

1.     Customer service (restaurants, shops): it exists

2.     Banking: it’s faster and there are less restrictions

3.     Diversity: there’s more people who are different – on many levels

4.     Pollution: on a sunny day, I can always see every building less than a half a mile away

5.     Equity: you don’t feel like everyone is constantly sizing you up and fitting you into their narrow view of the world

6.     English: it’s not a struggle to communicate on a daily basis

7.     Space: you’re not constantly being squeezed into somewhere

It’s as if I’ve put my China life on hold, traveled through a time warp, and ended up back about where I left my American life in the summer of 2010. The time-warp lag is especially strong in this case, but after several days memories and habits of my old life started to come back to me. I’m sure by the time I return to China I’ll just be starting to feel right at home again.

“Welcome to tour our factory!” A business trip to the Huangpu River Delta

As the train pulled into Changzhou city station, the view from my window was not of high-rise apartments or tall office buildings, but traditional, three-story tenements surrounded by small plots of farmland. Exactly 46 minutes ago, we had left Shanghai and traveled over 100 miles to a small city of 3 million people on the Northwest side of the Huangpu River Delta. It was a warm, spring day, and as I stepped off the train, a warm breeze blew across the platform. Wearing a smart business suit and aviators, I looked quite out of place among the Chinese businessmen in their leather jackets and peasants hauling large bags of who knows what off the train. “Welcome to Changzhou, Mr. Daniel!” was the greeting I received from the factory sales manager and the driver who would be taking me on my first factory tour of the week.

As some of you may remember, I made a decision several months ago to start a business trading solar water heaters between the US and China. I first discovered the Chinese solar hot water phenomenon when, driving through Zhejiang province back in 2008, I noticed that the roofs of almost every apartment building were covered with these strange looking devices. In fact, for decades China has been a world leader in this little-known renewable energy source. Tens of millions of buildings all over the country use these devices to make hot water, and as a result, China holds 80% of the global market. Now, as solar hot water is starting to become popular around the world, including in the US, the thousands of Chinese factories that make these panels are beginning to export their wares. All but the largest Chinese factories however, are too small to have overseas sales agents or to figure out the logistics of shipping to the US. At the same time, most US based solar installers are too small to source the solar water heaters they buy internationally, or to purchase them in bulk. Therefore, my business idea is quite simple: purchase inexpensive solar water heaters from these factories, and sell them to the contractors and installers in the US who put them on buildings.

But with literally thousands of these factories all over China, how does one go about selecting a factory to buy from? Well, the first step was to find out which factories’ products have been certified by the US-based Solar Rating and Certification Corporation (SRCC). Only solar water heaters with this certification are eligible for the 30% federal tax credit that is available to consumers who purchase these systems. In addition, SRCC certification guarantees a certain level of quality, ensuring that the systems won’t break down or have little output after being installed on the rooftop. In the course of my research, I found a strange phenomenon: the cities of Changzhou and Haining, both located in the Huangpu River Delta region near Shanghai, contained no less than 10 and 16 factories, respectively, with this certification. Furthermore, while there are several famous brands of solar water heaters in China, I had never heard of the names of any of these factories. Well, I knew where I was to be going on my first business trip…

So on March 21^st, I boarded the high-speed train from Beijing to Shanghai, where I planned to spend the next week touring factories in the region. Traveling from Beijing to Shanghai is similar to the distance traveled from Boston to Washington DC – a good 12 hour drive by car in the US. The new high-speed train line that opened last June however covers this distance in just five hours. As we set out from Beijing, I watched the speedometer on a screen at the front of the train car climb to 100, and then 200, then finally settle just above 300 kilometers per hour (about 170 miles per hour). It was quite a sight to watch the countryside race by at a speed I’d only seen when taking off or landing in an airplane. In fact, for just around 80 US dollars, one can get from Beijing to Shanghai in almost the same amount of time it would take to fly (when considering the time it takes to check in and go through security at the airport). It’s difficult to think of China as less developed then the US in light of transportation infrastructure marvels such as this.

power plant as seen from the high speed train

on board the train as our speed climbs

In Shanghai I staid with my good friend from Tufts, Scott Goldman, who is working for Duke University in Shanghai, helping them to start a university business program on a brand new campus that Duke is building there. We had a good weekend out on the town with a few other friends, and then on Monday morning, I boarded another high-speed train for Changzhou. Once again, I was amazed at how easy the trip was. Although most factories are based out in the rural countryside, transportation infrastructure in China is arguably more modern than in the US, making the trip a breeze. I arrived at the first factory two hours after leaving the railway station in Shanghai, and after visiting two factories in the same day, I was shuttled to the train station and shipped back to Shanghai before nightfall. The next day I repeated this same schedule traveling to Haining, a city about the same distance from Shanghai, and quite near to the city of Hangzhou, where I spent the first semester of my junior year at Tufts studying abroad.

The factory tours themselves were in many ways what I expected. Having read many books written for businessmen sourcing in China, and having spent the last year dealing with Chinese business practices during my corporate training assignments, I felt quite well prepared for what awaited me. In fact, the biggest surprise of these visits was how few surprises I encountered. After reading Poorly Made in China, an account by an American who’s spent the last 10+ years helping trading companies source contract manufacturing in China, I was half expecting the worst: fake production lines set up to hide the real ones, “five star” factories with charades where visitors are asked to wear lab coats and gloves, only to later discover that these are not in fact standard practice for the factory. What I saw however seemed quite realistic: small, somewhat shabby looking buildings that housed the factories; production lines that had some quality control systems in place, but were far from perfect; defective products sitting out in carts in the middle of the factory floor. The floors of most factories were also covered in broken glass from the tubes used to make the solar collectors. No gloves, lab coats or clean rooms. Probably the strangest sight I saw was a female worker on a production line wearing a blouse, high heals and makeup!

making solar thermal evacuated tubes

I also received mixed reactions from the factory owners. On some of the tours, I was only introduced to the owner at the end of the tour, and our interaction was brief. At one factory however, the owner spent nearly an hour talking with me about what made their factory special, and how enthusiastic he was to do business with me. At the last and largest factory I visited, I didn’t even meet the owner, as he was in Shanghai on business that day.

All in all, the visits were quite educational. The most important discovery however was the confirmation that my instincts about the solar water heater export market were correct: most of these factories only received SRCC certification about a year ago, and many of them do not yet have US customers, although they are eager to get them. It seems that I’m entering the market at just the right time.

As I write, I’m on the plane from Shanghai to LA, where I’ll be starting a month long tour in the US. This trip is partly a long-delayed trip home to visit family and friends, and partly a business trip to scope out the US solar water heater market and start finding potential customers. And hopefully, my instincts about the US market will be as on target as they were about China…

Life in the third tier

As we cross the bridge spanning China’s largest river that runs through the heart of Changsha, for the first time I could see what China’s third tier cities really look like. Even in Hangzhou, what most would consider a second tier city, I had never seen so many buildings under construction. 30+ story apartment complexes and skyscrapers seemed to be sprouting up wherever I looked. Massive six lane highways were being paved through the middle of town. As we drove to the edge of the city, I could see rows of identical apartments stretching across the landscape, like American Mid-western suburbs, gobbling up farmland and transforming it into a concrete jungle…

My month living in Changsha gave me a glimpse into what life is like for the majority of the new urban Chinese. It also made me realize how much living in Beijing is like living in a developed country. Unlike Beijing, the changes taking place in these cities are massive.

The term “tier” is used to describe the level of development in Chinese cities. There are basically three first tier cities in China: Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. These cities contain all the modern conveniences of a developed country: there are hypermarkets with imported foods from around the world, internationals restaurant chains like Starbucks, Coldstone and TGI Fridays, bars, pubs and other forms of entertainment, Apple stores and outlet stores like Adidas and H&M, luxury stores (lots of them) like Prada and Gucci, giant malls that would dwarf many malls in America, modern apartments and offices, large theaters, libraries, museums, art galleries and other signs of high culture. Each of these cities has a population between 20-30 million people and is among the largest cities in the world. Perhaps most notably, these cities are also full of non-Chinese from around the world and many people can speak English.

Apple mania: anxious customers push and shove outside
Apple's flagship store in Beijing to be the first to claim the new iphone

Second tier cities – like Hangzhou, where I spent the first semester of my junior year studying abroad – are just a little less developed, but still have most of those modern conveniences. They range in population between 5-20 million (with the exception of Chongqing, a second tier city in central China which most people outside China have never heard of but claims a staggering population of 30 million).

Third tier cities are considerably less developed and internationalized. Most provincial capitals around China would be considered third tier. These are the cities that are going through the most rapid change and will probably absorb a large amount of the 300 million Chinese people expected to migrate to cities in the next 20 years (to put that in perspective, imagine the entire population of the United States migrating from the countryside to cities in 20 years).

Like Changsha, most of these cities have a have a larger commercial district than a major US city like Chicago, Philadelphia or Houston. Besides the tall buildings and sprawling highways though, the only sign of modernization is a shopping district in the center of the city with some luxury stores, a Walmart and Carrefour, a few coffee shops, bars and clubs. Once you get outside this relatively small area, the clash between these new cities and the traditional Chinese way of life becomes evident. Landscapes are transformed before your very eyes in a frenzy of modernization madness. Everything and everyone is speeding forward in high gear, all 1.4 billion people clamoring to get away from the farmland and to snatch up a piece of China’s newfound wealth.

The attitudes of the people, too, reflect this optimism. Everyone I met in Changsha seems to have dreams of a better future. The families for which I was teaching are quite representative of China’s new middle class. They grew wealthy mainly through the export business and finally saved enough money to buy apartments in the city and purchase their own cars. The wealth accumulation doesn’t end their, as those apartments will likely double in value in the next 10 years. While none of the parents are very well educated and can’t speak much English, they have dreams of their children going to school in America and some day having even more opportunities available to them. The ability to speak English and to have an international education is seen by many Chinese as the way out of the working class and into a new arena of prosperity. Their dream is in some ways an American dream, but with Chinese characteristics.

The Fog of Development

Looking out my window, I can barely see the buildings just across the street. “I was suppose to be escaping this by leaving Beijing,” I think to myself. Still, even down in a third tier, provincial city in the heart of Southern China, one cannot escape the relentless fog that covers this country. And when I say fog… well, if you’ve been reading the news about China building a coal fired power plant every week, or if you paid any attention to my blog before this, you know what I’m talking about.

So, how did I get from being in trouble with the police to living in Southern China? Well, it’s been quite a turbulent six months, and since many of you already know the story, I’m not going to dwell on it. Let’s just say I hope I never end up in Chinese court again.

What some of you may not know is that while I was suffering through court settlement hell, I was lucky enough to become acquainted with a beautiful Chinese lady who helped to take my mind off some of my troubles. While she wishes to remain anonymous for various reasons, I will say that she is a banker, and so she was able to “finance” a few weekend trips for us over the last few months to some of the more remote and tropical parts of China. That was enough to at least take some of the sting out of a difficult situation.

Then something happened that was quite… well, as my former mentor Sherman Teichman might say, serendipitous. Or as my mom would probably say, it was the law of attraction.

No sooner had I paid the settlement to the court, than I got an email from one of the school’s I recently started teaching for. They were looking for someone to move to Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, for a month to teach SAT prep to a small group of high school students. I’d be teaching six hours a day, but the pay was substantial: nearly three times what I would make in a normal month. I replied to their email 16 minutes after it had been sent, and within the hour I was signed up to move to Changsha. Just like that. When opportunity knocks, especially in this country, you’ve got to grab it by the horns.

And finally, here I am, five weeks later, preparing to fly back to Beijing in two days. While those days of teaching crawled by, when I look back it really seems like I just got here. This experience has given me a glimpse of what it’s like living in a real Chinese city; a third-tier Chinese city, where you still feel like you’re in a developing country. Where a new gated community and six-lane highway ends, abruptly, and gives way to farmhouses. And where, just like every other city in China, the fog of development hangs heavily. Of course, the locals don’t notice the fog. They only notice the new cars, houses and shopping malls. But maybe that fog will be lifting soon…

This entry is the first in what I’m hoping will be a series of shorter and more frequent posts than before. I hope you’ll stay tuned.

Traffic hazards, lazy policemen and corrupt doctors

Despite riding my electric bike through Tiananmen Square almost every day on my way home from teaching, on this particular day, I couldn’t help but to marvel at the sight of the Great Hall of the People and the Forbidden City. The latter is a relic of a 5,000-year-old civilization, somehow preserved through a tumultuous history. The former is a symbol of China’s rising power and authoritarian grip on a population of 1.3 billion people. And in the middle of the two, a 10-lane highway crowded with cars, trucks, busses, motorcycles and bikes. As I ride past, my eyes pause for a minute on the façade of the Forbidden City, framed in front of the setting sun, at the end of a rare blue-sky day in Beijing….

Smash! The front of my electric bike collides with a bicycle that had been meandering its way through the wide boulevard. My bike turns, falls and skids across the pavement…

Slowly I get up, dust myself off and realize I’m not injured, although my electric bike has a few scrapes and dents. Then I look over at the bike I hit. Somehow the bike is still standing (I guess because I hit it from behind?) and an old man is sitting on the ground behind it. A young man – another foreigner – had seen the accident and run over to see if the old man was ok. I set my bike upright again and paused for a second, unsure what to do. Then I walked over to the old man and offered him my hand. He also didn’t seem to be injured, but waved my hand away as if he didn’t want my help. Thinking there was nothing more I could do, and a little wary that the police might come over soon, I went back to my bike and was preparing to drive away.

Suddenly the old man jumps up, runs over and grabs my keys. He tells me I can’t go anywhere until I call the police. I try to wrestle the keys away from him, but he’s got a death grip hold on them. Then he sits on my bike and refuses to get up until I call the police. He claims that I hurt his shoulder in some way, and gestures for me to feel the bone in his shoulder. Sure enough, a bone in his shoulder is clearly in a place where it shouldn’t be. However the man does not appear to be in any pain, and there is no blood, bruises or any other sign that this is a new injury. “Shit man, this is fucked up,” says the other foreigner, who appears to be a European guy about my age. He knows just as well as I do what’s going on – this old man wants to blame me for a pre-existing shoulder injury and try to get some money from me. “I think you’ve got two choices,” says the other foreigner. “Either push him off your bike and make a run for it, or do what he wants and call the police.”

I looked down at the old man, stubbornly sitting there, grasping the seat of my bike. The man was obviously already crippled – he also had a deformed foot that was missing a few toes. I couldn’t bring myself to push him onto the ground and ride off, and the thought of abandoning my electric bike didn’t occur to me at the time. In retrospect, this was mistake #1 (I was to make many more that night). So I decided to walk over to the nearest intersection (a few hundred feet away) and talk to one of the police officers there. In my experience police officers would rather turn a blind eye than deal with petty cases like bicycle accidents, so I thought that the police would probably be slow to respond, and in the mean time I could convince the old man to get off my bike. But of course he wouldn’t budge until the police came.

After several police passed by the scene, a car finally drove up, accompanied by an ambulance. The police asked me for my passport, and I told them I’d left it at home (it was actually in my bag, but I was hoping if they thought I didn’t have my passport they might not want to bother and just let me go). The police proceeded to take pictures of the scene, ask about what happened. I told the police officers that I thought there was nothing wrong with the man, but they said only a doctor could make a judgment about that. I called a Chinese friend of mine to ask what I should do in this situation. He said I should go to the hospital with the man and have the doctor look at him. A simple examination should prove that there was nothing wrong, and probably only cost a few hundred RMB. I had a few hundred RMB with me at the time, and I tried to offer it to the old man in exchange for letting me go, but he refused. The police ordered that the old man be taken to a hospital, and since I didn’t have my passport, I was to come with them first to the police station (another police officer would take my electric bike and store it somewhere).

I called my roommate, who came to meet us at the police station to help me translate and resolve the situation. There were several police officers there, and they were all joking, smoking and taking there sweet time. They asked me some questions, like where I live, what I’m doing there, who I’m working for, etc (I gave them as little true information as possible). They kept asking if I had my passport, and just seemed to be stalling. My roommate pointed out that we should get to the hospital as soon as possible, to make sure they don’t run any expensive procedures that I then might have to pay for. The police offered to take me to the hospital, but they said I first needed to take them to my apartment to get my passport. I was getting impatient to get to the hospital, and at this point I figured the hospital fees would still be less than the cost of replacing my electric bike (if I was to try and escape from the situation at this point, abandoning my bike). So at my roommate’s suggestion, I pretended to search in my bag and discover that in fact I had brought my passport with me that day. I gave it to the police officers (mistake #2) so they could make photocopies; take down my information, etc. Finally, we headed off to the hospital with the police officer who had originally arrived at the scene. On the way I asked him to give me my passport back, but he said, “I still need it to fill out some forms.”

We arrived at an ominous looking building, which turned out to be the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Hospital. “Why the hell did they take him here?” I thought, and a feeling of dread started to spread in my stomach. When we went inside, I found out that the old man had been admitted to surgery. His daughter, sister and brother in law were there with him, and they told us that the doctor had said he required a metal plate to be inserted into his shoulder. The assured us that they didn’t want to do the surgery, but the doctor was insisting that it needed to be done. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, so my roommate and I called on the doctor to speak with him directly. The doctor approached us timidly, and said that yes, indeed the man needed surgery. When my roommate asked if the injury was caused by the accident, he bit his lip, looked down and said “probably.” He was obviously lying. There’s no way it wouldn’t be obvious whether an injury like that was recent or old, and this infuriated me. Afterward my roommate told me that is was quite common in China these days for doctors to proscribe extra and unnecessary procedures so they can make more money.

Meanwhile, the police officer was writing up a statement about the accident that he wanted me to sign. When my roommate read it to me, it described the accident accurately, but also said that because of the accident the man had sustained serious injuries. I refused to sign the statement on this basis. I was beginning to feel as if I was in a small room that was shrinking in on me every minute, and soon I would be squished into a position with no room for movement. This was all a big conspiracy between the family, the doctor and the police to get money from me, the “rich” foreigner. Then the police officer, who had been acting like an asshole toward me from the beginning, said he wouldn’t give me back my passport until I signed the statement. I began arguing with him and insisting that he re-write the statement, but he refused, and said, “let’s go back to the police station.” When we got outside, my roommate strongly advised me to not to go back to the police station. “If you go back there, there’s a good chance they will try to detain you for the night. There will be several of them and only one of you.” This idea frightened me, especially because my phone was running out of power so I wouldn’t be able to call anyone. So I told the police officer we weren’t going back with him and that we’d follow up the next day. When I said this he began to get aggressive. He got out of the car, came around to my side and tried to force me into the car. A rush of adrenaline filled my body, and I pushed back, trying to break free of his grip. Police officers in China are not allowed to carry any weapons, so it was simply his brute force against mine. Finally I broke free and made a run for it….

The next morning I called the US Embassy to report the incident. I told my story to one of the Deputy Chiefs, who was very understanding, but in retrospect was not all that helpful. He had someone from the embassy call the police station to ask why they were keeping my passport and on what grounds. After a few hours he called me back and said that the police responded that they were willing to give my passport back, I just needed to come into the police station and give them a statement about what happened. I remained optimistic that weekend that the situation would be resolved quickly when I went back to the police station. It also seemed to me that if the old man were truly faking the injury, the family would hold off on performing the surgery, for fear that they would have to pay for everything if I had disappeared. However that was far from the case.

I was told that the case had been transferred to another police station (on the opposite end of the city – don’t ask me how that makes sense) and that I should call them the following week to arrange a time to come in and talk. I wasn’t able to reach them on Monday and Tuesday, as no one ever answered the phone. Finally on Wednesday I decided to just go there myself with a Chinese friend who could help me translate. As I was getting ready to leave, I got a call from the police and was verbally assaulted by an angry police officer who demanded to know why I hadn’t come to the station yet. When I arrived, the police officer in charge of the cased, a Mr. Jiang, was less than friendly, and immediately demanded that I sign a form saying that they would be keeping custody of my passport, “until the situation is resolved.” They refused to discuss the accident any further until I signed this paper. This was of course not what I was expecting. An hour long stand-off ensured, during which I called one of my bosses (a middle aged Chinese guy) and he argued with the police man about why they were keeping my passport. It seemed that the police had no legal basis to keep my passport, but that because I had already run away once, they needed a way to ensure that I wouldn’t disappear again (and anyway, things rarely happen according to the law in China). Over the course of this discussion, I also discovered that the doctor had already performed the surgery over the weekend, to the tune of 30,000 RMB, or a little less than 5,000 USD.

The encounter ended in a stalemate. I refused to sign the statement for the time being, and I spent the next few days exploring other options, such as applying for a new passport through the US embassy. When I talked to the Deputy Chief again however he advised against this, saying that even without my passport they could potentially put a hold on my name at immigration that would prevent me from leaving the country permanently. He also said that the US embassy could not “quote the law” to the police officers, so they had no basis to demand that the police give me my passport back. He advised that I get a lawyer.

Over the next several days I asked for advice from the various people I know in Beijing about what I should do. There was some good and bad advice, but the consensus seemed to be that I had the right to see, and needed to find a way to get a copy of, the old man’s medical records and take them to another doctor to be examined again. This of course proved to be much easier said than done. One day I went to the hospital to try and find the doctor who had operated on the old man and see if I could convince him to give me the records. However all I had to go on was the name of old man (If I had been thinking clearly that night I might have thought to ask for the doctor’s name). In the bureaucracy of a large hospital, it took me over an hour to finally find my way back to the ward where I had been on the night of the accident. When I asked for the old man by name however, the nurses said they had no record of him and that he’d probably already left the hospital. I searched around for the doctor I had talked with on that night, but he was nowhere to be found.

I had a Chinese friend call the daughter of the old man and diplomatically ask if we could see the medical records. My friend told her that if the accident was truly my fault, I’d be happy to pay for the procedure, but that we needed to see some evidence first. She dodged the issue by saying that she needed to speak with a lawyer first to see what their rights were.

When I went back to the police and asked for their help in attaining the records, they claimed that there was nothing they could do either. They had already issued a decision on the case (the accident was entirely my fault) and they claimed that the family no longer wanted to talk with me and that I would have to take this to court if I wanted to protest further (which was a lie, as I called the daughter again later and she said they didn’t want to go to court). The police just wanted to get this off their chest and not deal with it anymore. When my boss called them back and demanded that they give my passport back if they weren’t going to help me, he learned that they had already entered my information into the immigration system. Now if I try to leave China, my name will be flagged with “suspicious activity.”

My bossed also helped me to look into getting a lawyer who could potentially help me use the law to get access to the medical records. She is a Chinese lawyer who came highly recommended from my boss’s friend, and apparently has over 20 years of experience dealing with cases in China involving foreigners. But she bills $200 USD an hour, and if the case where to go to court, I’d probably end up paying her even more than the cost of the surgery. She also didn’t sound too optimistic for my case. According to her, the family would indeed need to provide medical evidence in order to make me pay for the surgery, but I didn’t have the right to get the medical records myself and take them to another doctor. This is not very encouraging, because another Chinese friend pointed out that “medical records are created by humans, and what was created by humans can be changed by humans.” The doctor would also have an interest in covering up his trail if indeed he performed surgery unnecessarily.

Needless to say, at three times my monthly salary, it would take several months to save up enough money to pay for the old man’s surgery. If it is determined that the old man was handicapped from the injury, a process which will start three months after the accident, I could be required to pay more, for up to 2 years after the incident. In the meantime, I would basically be a prisoner in this city. Without my passport I can’t check into a hotel, take an airplane or do any banking. And even with my passport, I would not be able to leave the country.

I’m not going to let this happen. I’ll find a way to get the medical records and prove that I didn’t cause the man’s injury. But in the meantime, I need to explore other avenues for getting out of this. So I’m asking all of you who are reading this: if you have any suggestions or connections in China that could help me solve this, I would be grateful for your help.

Despite this catastrophe, my life has been progressing in a very positive direction over the last several months, and I remain optimistic that, whatever comes out of this situation, I’ll find a way to handle it.

The adventure of life continues.

Into the Dragon’s Lair

It’s 7:00am on Sunday morning and I reluctantly get out of bed, immediately down some coffee and head for the shower. At 8:00 I meet the driver of a “hei che” (black taxi) just down the street from my apartment. He greets me by asking if I’ve eaten (a common greeting among Chinese people from rural areas) and we take off toward the highway. A half hour later we’re driving through an industrial complex on the far south end of the city. We pass by buildings with logos of big western companies like GE, Volkswagen, IBM, until we come to a large, ominous cement building with a steel gate and guardhouse. My driver gets out and goes over to show the guard his ID. He’s interrogated for a few minutes, and then gets back in the car and we drive through the gate onto the grounds of the world’s largest and most infamous electronics contract manufacturer – Foxconn.

A Taiwanese company, Foxconn does most of its manufacturing in Mainland China (where the labor is cheaper). Just about ever major electronics company in the world – Dell, Apple, Nokia, IBM, Intel, Motorola, Samseung, HP, to name a few – does at least some of its manufacturing with Foxconn. The company owns a plant in Shenzhen that employs somewhere between 300,000 – 500,000 people – in one factory! The company has over 1 million employees in all of China, most of them migrant workers from China’s poorer inland regions. Foxconn is the latest Chinese manufacturer to come under scrutiny for poor labor practices, after it was discovered last year that 12 employees committed suicide at the Shenzhen plant within 5 months, half of these occurring in the same month. At the same time, a reporter was roughed-up by some guards at one of Foxconns facilities for trying to take some pictures (this story is especially amusing because of the way the writer talks about how the reporter claimed that he “was within his rights” to take pictures from the street – if he’s spent any time in China he should realize that “rights” in China are all relative, depending on who you are, where you are, and who you know). Its not surprising then that the guard yelled at me to put the camera away after I took the picture below.

Foxconn distribution center in the Beijing suburbs

Inside the building is dark, and I walk up a steep flight of stairs, then down a long hallway until I finally arrive at an empty classroom at the far end of the building. This is the first class I will be teaching at a big company, and needless to say, I’m a little nervous. My students filter in late – it’s 9:00am on a Sunday morning, and none of them want to be there. But has we begin class the mood lightens up, and I discover that despite hating their jobs, they are all eager to learn and advance themselves. Some of them even have the ambition to start their own companies. For most of them, I’m the first foreigner they have ever interacted with for an extended period of time.

My second assignment, which came a week later, was my first “VIP” class. VIP classes usually involve teaching a senior executive one-on-one. My student would be Mr. Liu Chaoan, Chairman of the Board for the North China Power Engineering Co. (NCPE), a large State-Owned Enterprise (SOE) that designs power plants in China. The plants they design include coal, IGCC (at type of gasified coal), nuclear, wind, solar… you name it. “Mr. Liu has very basic English,” I was told by my boss, Ben. “Your goal however is not so much to improve his English level, but to help him have a good time learning English. Entertain him.”

From the perspective of a corporate training company, this makes sense. Most of these executives are in their 50s and 60s, and have a lot more important things to worry about than English class. A few lessons a week is not going to do much to improve their English, at least in the short term. But this guy works with many international partners and clients, and probably is tired of communicating through a translator. At the same time, it sounded like he was not too happy about learning English, and saw it more as a chore than a path to advancement. Whatever the obstacles however, it would be my job to help him overcome these.

Not NCPE, but another large & similar SOE building

A human resources agent named Mr. Chen greeted me in the lobby on the first day and showed me to Mr. Liu’s office. He opened the door and stepped into a cavernous office that may be twice the size of my entire apartment. A long conference table stretched across one end with a TV mounted on the wall in front of it, some chairs and couches were gathered around a small table in the middle, and Mr. Liu’s giant desk was situated at the other end. Mr. Liu greeted me enthusiastically, but I could tell he was nervous. Then he paused for a minute and asked Mr. Chen if I could speak Chinese. I answered for him with “keyi,” which basically means, “I can.” He smiled and invited me to sit at the long conference table.

He served me some tea and then immediately lit up a cigarette. I began asking him very basic questions about himself using English, but interspersing Chinese where I thought I would be needed. He began to loosen up. Then I took out my computer and showed him some pictures I had prepared for the class (basically I just googled “funny pictures” and came up with a few good ones). The first was of a small kitten with the peel of some kind of fruit carved into the shape of a football helmet on it’s head (you’ve probably seen this one before). The second was of a hamster holding a machine gun. The last was two pictures of the Mona Lisa – one was the classical painting, and the other had been edited to make her appear to have blonde hair and breast implants. It said “Mona Lisa after a week in the US.” Mr. Liu thought this was hilarious. We proceeded to the textbook from there, but I could tell he was having fun. The next class I showed him some pictures from my travels around Europe and Asia, and in turn he showed me his pictures from his trip to the US. “This… my friend.” He said, pointing to a man smiling next to him in one of the pictures. “He is President of Beijing University.” They were sitting on the edge of a lake in Montana with the snow-capped Rocky Mountains in the background. This guy is the boss.

My next assignment was to teach Mr. Li, the Assistant President of SinoChem, China’s fourth largest state-owned oil company. SinoChem does some offshore oil exploration and production (Mr. Li’s division), but it also makes chemical fertilizers and other petrochemicals. Unlike the other classes, which are only twice a week, I teach Mr. Li almost every day from 12:00 to 2:00. Unlike Mr. Liu, Mr. Li is very energetic and enthusiastic about learning English. Originally from a small village south of Beijing (where most of his family still works as farmers), he seems to be the personification of the Chinese dream – working his way from being a farmer in the countryside to become a senior executive at one of China’s largest companies. I’ve grown to have a lot of respect for this man, despite the fact that he doesn’t believe humans are causing climate change (as I learned during one class). In fact, his company is at the center of the industry that I hope to someday make obsolete. As a wise man once said however, “the best teacher is the enemy.” I’m certainly learning a lot from him as well.

Some interesting habits of Mr. Li: he will shake his head and make an “ah” sound when I tell him something, which I used to think meant he understood. What I eventually discovered is that it only means he heard what I said, but not that he understood it (from what I’ve heard this is common among Chinese and Japanese). I was also watched in horror one day as, right in the middle of our lesson, he suddenly hocked a big loogie, and spit directly on the floor of his office. He’s done this a few other times since then. I new it was common practice for un-cosmopolitan Chinese to spit in the middle of the street, or even subway, but this took it to a whole new level. One evening he invited me to have dinner with him and his son, because it son was going to be taking an oral English exam the next day, and he wanted him to practice with me (not only was the dinner paid for, but I was also paid for the time). However Mr. Li spent a good portion of the dinner half lecturing, half arguing with his son about how he needed to practice English more. I could tell the boy was not having any of it. But we made some progress, and by the end of the dinner he seemed well prepared for the exam.

Despite the SinoChem building and office having the design and atmosphere of a modern, Fortune 500 company, I’ve learned about some practices that are surprisingly outdated and hearken back to the Mao era in China. One day Mr. Li told me that he had just come from a meeting with all the senior executives in the company, where they had performed “criticism and self-criticism,” a practice begun by Mao among party officials (all senior executives are required to be party members). Now on the service this may sound like a good idea, like the concept of “360 feedback.” But this idea doesn’t work so well in Chinese, were people are more concerned with saving face than with finding the truth and improving. And it doesn’t have a very good track record either. There were all too many times when Mao encouraged colleagues, academics and the general public to give honest feedback on what they thought about the government, only to follow it with a period of purging and “reeducation.” I can only imagine what these sessions must look like or what good comes out of them.

Dinner with Mr. Li Pilong, his son and secretary

Last Friday I immerged from Mr. Li’s office to find the secretary and some of her colleagues dressed in colorful cloths and with their hair in braids. I asked what they were doing, and they told me they were getting ready to go sing “party songs” with some of their colleagues. This was a general practice during the Cultural Revolution of the 1970s, when Mao encouraged the youth to march around singing patriotic songs (and causing chaos and destruction at the same time).

Everyday when I approach the ominous façade of the SinoChem building and see the fountains bubbling outside, I remind myself how lucky I am that I’m getting this peak into the culture of China’s SOEs. But it also reminds me how entrenched the interests are that continue to stagnate progress on addressing the most serious challenge of this century. Perhaps someday this building will be obsolete, but not for many decades at least.

So now I turn to my latest assignment, teaching two classes at Babcock & Wilcox Beijing Co. This company makes boilers for power plants, and is located on the far western outskirts of Beijing, almost where I used to live two summers ago with Niu niu’s family. The company has a large campus with many different buildings where the various components of the boilers are manufactured. I teach a class of engineers whose job is to provide technical support and quality assurance to the workers in the boiler component factories. My second class at the same company is for a group of middle management and support staff for the company’s senior management. For the first class I have to walk all the way across the campus to a dingy old office building, where as the later class is held in a very nice conference room in the corporate headquarters. After Foxconn, it was refreshing to find that these employees enjoy their jobs – for the most part.

The mixed impacts of China’s rise to economic prominence can be seen everyday as one walks, rides or drives down the streets of Beijing. However, I think the real harbinger of where China is headed is the inner workings of its most prominent companies. While many of the practices of these companies and their employees could be seen as backward, they are almost making enormous progress toward emulating western standards. This is most apparent in the desire and enthusiasm of my students to learn English and to continue improving themselves and their businesses until they reach or exceed western standards.

China Central Television, seen from the tallest building in Beijing, the China World Tower