Big Bull in a China Shop

Traffic hazards, lazy policemen and corrupt doctors

2011-09-28T10:07:00.001-07:00

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

2011-05-25T23:56:00.001-07:00

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

“Welcome to Join Our Company!*”

2011-05-22T19:43:00.000-07:00

*Only Americans, Canadians, Australians and British will be considered

China is full of hilarious translations, to the delight of any native English speaker who comes here. This will be the subject of one of my posts at some point, as I, like many foreigners before me, have been gathering pictures of the funniest translations throughout the country. But “welcome to join our company” in particular is the perfect metaphor for my experience looking for English teaching jobs over the last two months.

The Chinese word for "house" is the same as "family"

China will soon be the largest English speaking country in the world. Everyone here wants to learn English, and as a result hundreds (probably thousands) of companies have sprung up that offer private English training services to those wealthy Chinese that can afford them. A native English speaker can find a teaching job here with almost no effort. Even some non-native English speaking Europeans manage to find teaching jobs (as long as they have a white face, it doesn’t seem to be that big a deal to these companies). But the challenge lies in finding a good company to work for. Indeed, the quality of most of these companies matches the quality of the English grammar in their advertisements and correspondences. I’ve heard countless horror stories from former teachers about poor treatment, late pay, not being paid, contract breaches – you name it. And as a foreign teacher, often without a work visa in the first place, there isn’t a whole lot you can do about it. So at the end of January, I set out to find those rare companies that treat their employees well and provide quality, career-advancing positions. It’s been quite a roller coaster ride of excitement and disappointment. Even after spending nearly a year in China and seeing many strange things, I’ve encountered some situations in the past two months that have given a whole new meaning to the ridiculousness of this country.

A trip to the amusement park with my Chinese friends

As some of you may recall, I decide back in early January that, after four months of investigating clean energy jobs in China and not finding anything to my liking, I would spend the next several months teaching (either English, or other subjects like math that are often taught in English), working on improving my Chinese and trying to start a business. In mid-January, I stumbled across an odd job advertisement that seemed too good to be true. Almost all job advertisements for foreign teachers here are posted by agents, who are a bit like headhunters, but their job is pretty straight forward since few schools are very picky about their teachers, as long as they meet the “nationality” requirement (see above). The opportunity involved going to a small city about four hours south of Beijing and teaching math to middle school students for a two week “winter camp” during the Chinese holiday season. All travel, food and lodging expenses would be paid for, I would be able to return to Beijing on the weekends, and the job would pay 300 RMB per 45 minutes (about $45), with six 45-minute sessions per day. Altogether, it would amount to 18,000 RMB (nearly $3,000) for just two weeks of teaching. Skeptical, I went in for an interview with an elderly Chinese university Professor who spoke very good English and described the job to me just as it had been laid out in the advertisement – no hidden strings attached.

I immediately signed myself up and was preparing to depart on this strange teaching adventure within two weeks. The company was going to arrange everything, I was told. All I needed to do was show up at the train station. I proceeded to cancel all my plans in Beijing for the next two weeks and stopped pursing other job opportunities. Then, three days before I was suppose to leave, I got a text message from the agent who had introduced me to the job, saying that, due to lower than expected demand, the classes had been canceled…

So I was going into the two week Chinese Spring Festival holiday season, with very little money, no job prospects on the horizon and no chance of finding any while the whole country stopped working and spent two weeks traveling home for the holiday. “Not to worry though,” I thought, “it’s only a two week holiday, and after that everyone will be clamoring for English teachers again.” What I didn’t realize is that I was going into a prolonged two month slow-season for the English teaching market.

Throughout the holiday season I continued to respond to advertisements and going to “interviews.” Usually an interview simply means meeting your prospective employer, usually an English training school; them asking you a few routine questions that seem completely pointless, and then you conducting a “demo” lesson. This usually means you spend anywhere from 10-30 minutes giving them an idea of what your teaching style is like and what material you would use. The problem is that you will often go into one of these interviews/ demos without a clear idea of what you would be teaching/ what the job really is, so its difficult to prepare. Two experiences stand out in particular where I found out during the course of an interview that the job I had come to apply for was completely different than what was being offered.

The first involved a conversation that I had with an agent who described a job to me that sounded like tutoring a small group of young adults a few times per week in advanced business English. The day of the interview, I met the agent at a bus stop, along with a young British guy who was apparently being taken to apply for a similar position. On the way I learned that in fact the subject I would be teaching was more specific – something to do with marketing. I quickly started trying to revise the demo I had planned in my head to incorporate some marketing elements, although I still didn’t really know what to expect. When we arrived at the location, I realized we were not going to a regular “school,” but to an actual university. So they wanted us not just to tutor young adults, but actual university students, paying university tuition! Did they realize that I had just graduated from university less than a year ago myself? Did they really think I was qualified for this? “Oh, that’s right,” the agent said, “you should tell them that you’re 26 years old and have been teaching English for two years.” As I soon discovered, almost all agents and schools ask you to lie about your age and experience to their clients.

We entered the university and met with our prospective employer, an elderly woman who we found out was a Professor in the School of Economics & Management. I looked at the British guy, who seemed just as clueless about what was going on as I was. After giving our demos, the Professor didn’t seem too satisfied and told us how we could have done them better. I have never been outright rejected for a teaching job in China, and that wasn’t about to change with this job. It seems that if you get to the interview stage – and that isn’t hard to do – you’ve pretty much been accepted. After giving us her criticism, the Professor took us to her office and showed us the curriculum she wanted us to teach.

There were three classes in total, and they were not English teaching, but teaching actual business classes in English. One of them was on advanced business management theories; one was on e-commerce, and the other… well I can’t remember what the other subject was, because at this point I was just stunned at what was going on. This professor wanted two recent graduates with only bachelor’s degrees to teach advanced, graduate level business courses, to tuition-paying graduate students, and the Professor didn’t really seem to care that we had no experience. On top of that, she was going to pay us 200 RMB per hour (exchange rate at the time was about $1=6.6 RMB - I’ll let you do the math) for a three-hour class, once per week, but claimed that “she usually spent a good part of the week preparing for each class” - time which we would not get paid for. We also had to develop part of the curriculum ourselves, in a way that would meet certain “learning requirements,” which the school needed to check off in order to get the course accredited. Was she just trying to outsource some of her salaried responsibility on the cheap? Or was this university actually sanctioning her to hire inexperienced recent graduates to teach these courses at meagerly pay, simply because we were native English speakers? Needless to say, I thanked her rather abruptly, and left.

Throughout February I “interviewed” with many other schools, some of which I decided I didn’t want to work for, and some of which would bring me in to fill out a form, answer a few questions, tell me everything was all set and that they would be calling me about classes… and then I’d never hearing from them again. I traveled across Beijing one day for one interview that morphed into a completely different job as we conducted the interview. The position was advertised as something like a part time teaching job, 10-15 hours per week, at 150 RMB per hour (pretty standard). When I arrived, the owner of the school, who didn’t speak any English, greeted me and instructed me to do a demo for how I would teach SAT prep. No problem, I’d done SAT prep before so I launched into my introductory spiel about how the SAT was designed to trick you and how I would be teaching strategies to beat it. Unlike most schools however, this guy was not satisfied after the first demo, and had me do another one on teaching math to high school students. Then he asked me if I could teach AP Calculus and Physics. I got a 3 on the AP Calculus test in high school and had never studied AP Physics. This guy then started drilling me on my teaching methods and what I would do in certain situations. This was almost a welcome respite, to know that at least one of these schools actually cared about the ability of their teachers, or so I thought at first…

But the situation quickly devolved into my first real experience negotiating with a Chinese man for a position that I was not that excited about. He prefaced his offer by talking about how their school was one of the most prestigious in Beijing (maybe that was true, but I’d never heard of it) and then went on to add 25 hours of administrative duties per week to the job description, and offer me a salary of 6,000 RMB per month and a year long contract (I made the rookie mistake of telling him earlier how much I had made at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and I’m pretty sure he just added 1,000 RMB to that). I was not at all happy with this, and went on to explain to him that if I worked that many hours per week doing just teaching at market rate, I could make 24,000 RMB per month. He obviously didn’t understand foreigner’s salary expectations. So he upped his offer to 8,000 RMB, plus a three-month bonus of 600 RMB.

Now I realized I was fighting a losing battle. I should have just walked out right there, but I was polite and told him I would consider it. So he pulled out the big guns. On his laptop, he showed me a presentation he was preparing to give to some investors about a real estate development and school that he wanted to build in the US. He told me how he had all these connections back in the US, and how if I worked at the school long enough, maybe I could become his business partner. Nice try buddy, but you’re not impressing me. I told him I’d think about it, and headed for the door.

After a month and a half of this, I was starting to get a bit discouraged. But finally, things began looking up, when I got an email response to one of my numerous inquires that was not from a Chinese person with broken English, but from an American! He worked for a corporate training company called Oxford English, and wanted me to come in for what finally sounded like a real interview and demo. Sure enough, this American guy and I hit it off, and a few weeks later he set me up with a teaching job that was better than anything I had imagined. Every weekday for two hours around lunchtime, I would be getting paid 200 RMB per hour to tutor the Chairman of the SinoChem Oil & Gas Exploration Company. SinoChem is China’s fourth largest state-owned oil company, a relic of the communist era that had been morphed into s semi-competitive, multi-national corporation. Now this guy’s office is bigger than my apartment, and he can barely string together a full sentence of English. So we’re starting with the basics. It’s actually a lot of fun, good money, and has given me a unique look into the culture of China’s State-Owned Enterprises (SOEs).

The SinoChem building, just down the street from Tiananmen square

Soon I found another corporate training company called Morgan English, a Canadian joint venture company. While the manager is Chinese, he spent some time living in Germany, and is different than the other Chinese managers in that he actually gave me some useful preparation tips and training before throwing me into a new class. Through this job I quickly added three more classes; two of them also training VIPs (i.e. SOE executives) and one teaching a class at one of China’s most notorious manufacturing companies, Foxconn (if you don’t know why, google “Foxconn Apple”). And by mid-March, I was teaching 25 hours, seven days a week, running all around Beijing to my students offices, and had almost too many classes to handle.

So after weeding through all the low quality companies and learning a lot about the culture of the English teaching industry in Beijing, I’ve settled into a somewhat-steady part time job, and I’ve still got some extra time to study Chinese and pursue my own company. Teaching at these companies has been quite an eye opening and hugely valuable experience already, but more on that to come next time…

A snowless winter

2011-05-22T19:30:00.001-07:00

Well, it’s a little ironic that I haven’t written an entry for this blog in almost four months. It’s not that I didn’t have any time, but… when I had time to write (back in February), nothing was happening, and when things finally started to happen, well, I was too busy to write! But here’s a little update on what I’ve been doing the last few months.

To summarize it all in a few sentences, I was riding the roller coaster of job (and sole) searching for some time, as well as traveling, and finally beginning to flirt with really doing business in China. I’ve been to Korea, Mongolia and Shanghai, survived the Chinese holiday season, and eaten dinner with one of China’s top business elites (more on that in another entry).

In the last week of January, I moved into my new apartment with my new Chinese roommate, Allen. It’s a ten-minute walk to the subway, and just a 20-minute walk to the Sanlitun Village, Beijing’s premier hub for luxury & import stores, restaurants and nightlife. While being near a popular foreigner area is a plus, my immediate neighborhood is quite Chinese, and in a very good way. My street has a large “wet market” or what we might call a farmer’s market in the US. I can buy fresh fruits and vegetables, eggs, meat and lots of other delicious Chinese treats pretty much everyday. There are also two small restaurants (called a “xiao chi” in Chinese) right outside my apartment door, and I frequent them enough that I’ve gotten to know the owners pretty well. I’ve got a bike that I ride everywhere, and since Chinese bikes are just as crappy as the “Made in China” stereotype, I’ve had to visit the local bike repair shop four or five times in the last two months. Luckily the guy who runs it isn’t the type to cheat foreigners, and each repair has cost less than a dollar! A few days ago I finally got an electric motorcycle, and I’ve been enjoying the freedom of weaving between cars, bikes, people and busses without having to peddle for my life!

A peak into our apartment

I’ve even begun to adopt the Chinese habit of getting up around sunrise and going to bed around 11pm (at least on weekdays). Some mornings I’m out the door around 7am to go grab some steamed buns for breakfast from outside the wet market. As I walk down the street, it’s already bustling with people, bikes, carts and rickshaws. I arrive at the steamed bun stand, where the two girls running it are scrambling around to meet the demands of ten or more customers gathered around it. One of them shouts at me to ask me what I want, and then smiles, since I’m the only foreigner who ever goes there, and she already knows what I’ve come for. The chaos of this street reminds me that I’m still living in a developing country, and it’s places like this neighborhood – crammed in between the modern high-rises and skyscrapers – that gives Beijing it’s real Chinese character.

The first two weeks of February marked the Spring Festival and Chinese New Year, a holiday season that could be compared to the Christmas holidays in the US. During this time, everyone in China goes home to be with their families. For weeks before the holiday began I would spot long lines outside the train ticket counters disbursed throughout Beijing, and when the holiday came, it felt as if Beijing had suddenly emptied out. You could navigate the streets between 4pm and 8pm without getting stuck in a traffic jam, and you could take the subway without being packed in like a sardine. My guess is that several million people left Beijing to return to their home cities and provinces during this time (with a population estimated as high as 20 million, Beijing is home to millions of migrant workers). Finally, Beijing had become quite and peaceful.

And then the fireworks began.

China is the land where fireworks were invented, and during Spring Festival they certainly live up to this reputation. Imagine being in New York City on New Years Eve, and that at least one family in every apartment building in the city decided to set off their own fireworks to celebrate the new year. Now imagine that instead of just doing it when the clock hit midnight, they were shooting them off constantly from 5pm until 3am. Further, imagine that this continued for 10 days straight. Yeah, that’s basically what happens in every city, town and village in China during Spring Festival. I honestly would not be surprised if the money spent on fireworks during Spring Festival in China exceeds all the total money spent on Christmas presents in the US during the holiday season, but that’s just a guess.

So here’s my typical, noob-foreigner reaction to this epic fiesta:

Day 1: Wow, this is so cool!!

Day 3: Man, the Chinese really like their fireworks!

Day 5: Ok, this is starting to get a little annoying…

Day 7: Seriously, do you have to launch the loudest and most obnoxious firecrackers outside my bedroom window at 2am?

Day 10: I’ve had enough of these f**king fireworks!!

Thankfully I had a short reprieve from the madness during a weekend trip to Seoul, South Korea in the middle of February. It was once again time for me to leave the country for a visa trip, and there also happened to be a big swing dancing festival in Korea that weekend.

Festival instructors showing off some moves

Arriving in Korea, I in some ways felt like I was back in the US – the country is more developed, and the style of buildings remind me of what you’d see in San Francisco, or even a street in small- town American. On the other hand, I felt like a tourist again, because I could not speak one word of the language (well, actually just one word, which I only knew from watching Arrested Development). Surprisingly few people in Korea speak English, and I definitely got lost several times. When I finally found my way to the dance studio, I was immediately overwhelmed by the beautiful Korean girls, and by the amazing swing dancing skills of the Korean men. In fact, I found out that Seoul has the largest swing-dancing scene of any city in the world – people there go dancing almost every night! Over the course of the festival (which included several workshops), I probably danced with at least 50 Korean girls, and said less than 50 words to all of them combined, since most of them couldn’t speak much English. I also got to spend a morning with my Korean classmate from study abroad in Hangzhou two years earlier. She took me to walk around one of the popular shopping and restaurant districts, and we had a very touristy Korean meal.

A street in South Korea - looks pretty familiar, no?

I staid in a hostel for most of the trip, but spent the last night in a Korean Sauna, or Jim-jill-seong. Basically you pay about $6 (half the price of spending the night in a hostel) for 12 hours in the sauna. But this is no ordinary sauna – it includes hot tubs, showers, fitness equipment, massage chairs, and mats that you could sleep on (although it was pretty hard to sleep). The sauna is separated into a men’s and women’s area, so naturally most of the men just walk around naked… but that wasn’t the strangest thing. As I was sitting in the hot tub, I tried not to pay attention to what the men taking a shower right across from me where doing, but I’m pretty sure this one guy spent a good half an hour madly scrubbing just in his pelvic region. Some of the stories I’ve been told about these places get stranger still, but I’m not going to share that here…

Around this time I was still looking for a job, so I had some time to work on an interesting project with my friend Van Yang. Van is a documentary filmmaker who moved to China a few years ago and started his own film studio last fall. I think I’ve mentioned him and the fact that he’s quite talented before, so I was very excited to help him create a video about China’s 12^th Five Year Plan (FYP).

For those of you who don’t know, every five years the Chinese central government creates a plan for the country’s economic, social and political development in the next five years. I think Jonathan Watts describes the process that goes into this best:

“An army of cadres, officials and academics have spent years laying groundwork for the plan – the 12th since Mao Zedong started Soviet-style strategising in 1953. They have one of the world's most ambitious administrative tasks: plotting a course for a continent-sized nation, a 1.4 billion population and a $5 trillion economy that is growing at double-digit speed every year.”

The 11^th FYP was a watershed in terms of its focus on clean energy and environmental protection (although some of the impacts of this are questionable), and the 12^th FYP promises to continue to expand this trend. The statistics are staggering. In the next five years, China will invest nearly $600 billion in water conservation projects, build the equivalent of seven more Three-Gorges Dams (the largest dam in the world), install 10 million electric car charging stations, plant 12.5 million hectares of forest, build 35,000 kms of high-speed rail (half the length of the entire US interstate highway system), and build nearly 40 new nuclear power plants.

The scale and pace of the change taking place in China right now is unrivaled in all of history. But much of the world does not understand the role of the FYP in this transformation. The goal of our video was to inform and inspire people around the world by sharing the facts about the 12^th FYP in a visually pleasing, easy to understand videographic. You can see our final product here.

We had an ambitious plan to time the release of our video with the news about the plan’s release in China, and have several key media sources use our video to spread the news. We got off to a good start, with China Central Television (CCTV) getting word about our project, and featuring us on their program, “Rediscovering China.” You can watch the clip here (the show is 25 minutes, with our group being featured in the last 5 minutes). A few days before the plan was released, the show aired on Chinese national television (I even got a text from my friend in Shanghai saying “I just saw you on TV!”). It was pretty exciting, and we were all ready for our big release…

…and then the earthquake and Tsunami hit Japan. All the news agencies lost interest in covering the release of the plan (and thus our video), and turned their attention to the devastation on Japan’s west coast, and the near meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear plant. That morning I got a text message from a Chinese friend saying “radiation hit the Philippines today and is headed for the Chinese coast. Stay indoors and cover your thyroid with iodine!” Prevailing winds actually would carry the radiation out into the Pacific and toward California, so there was nothing to worry about in China. But apparently the panic was spreading, and by noon the next day I heard that all the stores on the east coast of China were out of salt (a source of iodine).

And now finally I come to the title of this post. In all my life I’ve never gone an entire winter without snow, but this year I came very close. Aside from a few flurries one day back in December, and a small snowstorm while I was in Korea that had all but melted by the time I returned, the Beijing sky was nearly cloudless from November to April. Millions of acres of crops failed this spring due to the lack of water, and this is a trend that has only been getting worse. Beijing is most likely seriously feeling the effects of ramped industrialization and the slow approach of climate change. It’s been a strange few months, and it gets even stranger in my next post about looking for an English teaching job…

A Chinese family enjoying the snowless winter with an ice-sled

“Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it! For boldness has genius, power and magic.”

2011-01-17T08:43:00.000-08:00

That’s a German saying that a friend once said to me when I was in a rut. It’s something I try to keep in mind whenever I find myself doubting whether I can do something, or when I’m unhappy with what I’m currently doing.

Last week I finished three intense weeks of working three jobs: a full time SAT tutoring job, and two freelance jobs, one helping a Chinese guy named Sam Wu to edit his business school applications, and another helping the China Energy Storage Alliance prepare a paper on US, European and Japanese energy storage policies.

So the question right now is, what’s next?

I’ve been told that I’m welcome back at the Research Center for Sustainable Development. I’ve also been tentatively offered a full time research job at the China Energy Storage Alliance. Both would be decent options to get some more experience in my chosen field…

But the funny thing that I realized recently is: I’m tired of sitting at a desk doing research. Yes, you might be thinking “it’s only been a little over seven months since you graduated Daniel – two of which were spent working at a “summer camp” in France – and you’re already tired of sitting in front of a desk? Bad news…” The other thing I realized though is that sitting at a desk doing research is not going to get me where I want to go either. So where do I want to go?

Sure, I still want to work in clean energy, but I also want to be an entrepreneur: I want to run my own business, be my own boss, and build new innovations that will change the world. I also want to become fluent in Chinese (duh, that’s why I came here…), travel around China and Southeast Asia, meet some interesting people and have new experiences. I recently came across this quote that just about sums it up:

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover." ~ Mark Twain

Ironically, I came to China with the idea that I WAS NOT going to teach English. Everyone who comes here from the US and Europe comes to teach English, and I wanted to be different. But recently I began rethinking this. Teaching English, as well as some other subjects taught in English, are the highest paying jobs a recent graduate can find here by a long shot that don’t really require any specific skills or experience. Why shouldn’t I take advantage of my most marketable skill – being a native English speaker – to make some money, and spend that extra time and money I will save studying Chinese, having some fun experiences, and looking for new opportunities in the cleantech sector while I’m at it?

Another thing I realized about a year ago is that almost any clean energy business that’s worth starting requires at least a few million dollars in start-up capital. With relatively little business experience, there’s no way I’m going to attract that kind of capital right now. And being in a foreign country where energy is highly regulated and government connections are a necessity to start an energy business, this would be nearly impossible for me at this point.

However, one business I’ve thought about starting is importing Mongolian vodka to Beijing. Yes, Chinggis vodka, which I discovered during my trip to Mongolia, is not currently sold in Beijing. However, it has won international awards for its taste, and it won the five-vodka tasting contest I hosted at my friend’s apartment last month, easily beating name brands like Absolute and Sky. Considering the low selection of vodkas and the name recognition that Chinggis has begun to build within the foreign community here (I wasn’t the first to discover it on a visa trip to Mongolia), I think there might be a market for it. And I’m sure there are other opportunities out there as well.

So I started out with the idea that I was going to come here and find a clean energy job… and that somehow has evolved into teaching English and maybe starting my own business… You never know where life will take you, as long as you are willing to sail with the winds.

Fairwell, Niu Niu

2011-01-17T08:37:00.000-08:00

I received some bad news shortly before Christmas. Niu niu, who was my “host father” when I was living in China last summer, passed away, at age 61. (Important Note: I created this blog with the intention of telling stories about my China experiences, so normally I wouldn’t mention things of such a person nature, but Niu niu was such a significant part of my China experience that it seemed appropriate). A few months ago the doctors discovered that he had cancer, and in November he had surgery to remove it. The surgery was successful and he had been home recovering. But he also had a heart condition, and died of a heart attack suddenly in early December.

Luckily I had the chance to see him one more time when I first returned to Beijing last September. On a crisp fall day I traveled out to his apartment on the edge of the city, where sprawling apartments and the massive Capital Iron & Steel mill meet a small village at the foot of the mountains. Last summer I spent a lot of time hiking with Niu niu in those mountains, but since was not in any condition to be hiking now, I had to go that day alone. It was a beautiful day and the colossal view of the steel mill from the mountains was just as I remember it. As a result of these hikes, I wrote an article for an online news organization called GlobalPost last summer, about the water pollution and scarcity problems that I had observed, and that Niu niu had told me about.

When I arrived at the bus station to meet Niu niu that evening, I could see right away that his health had deteriorated. We went to his apartment and had a good conversation, catching up on the past year. So far niu niu is the only person I’ve ever really gotten to know solely through communication in another language (he can speak about 5 words of English). Then we ate dinner with his wife and daughter, and his wife commented on how my Chinese had improved. This was encouraging, as I’d rarely heard her complement anybody.

As I was leaving, Niu niu told me to come and visit every once in a while, “yinwei women shi pengyou,” (because we are friends) was one of the last things I remember him saying to me.

In the two months that I lived with him, Niu niu taught me a lot about life in China, especially for the more rural, working class citizens that many foreigners rarely interact with. He was a good friend, and he will be sorely missed.

In my humble opinion, Mr. Chairman…

2011-01-16T18:37:00.000-08:00

“…Well, I work for the Chinese government,” is my typical response these days when people ask what I do in Beijing. At the least this gets some raised eyebrows (I usually tell them I’m a ninja right after that), and it’s always a fun icebreaker. But these conversations usually don’t convey what a unique and eye opening experience working at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has been.

Like many of the other 10 million or so people working in this city, I’ve spent the last three months squishing into the subway or braving the chaotic roadways of Beijing during the morning and evening commutes. On the days I was feeling adventurous (and the weeks when I was living in an apartment that was close enough), I mounted a rickety, one speed bicycle and joined the fleet of other bicycles, electric bikes, scooters, motorcycles, cars, trucks and busses, honking and barreling their way through the crowded streets. There is no rhyme or reason to this mess, and very few traffic laws are obeyed – the winners in this giant game of chicken are usually the ones with the most guts and the biggest bumpers. Being on a bicycle put me second to last in the pecking order, just ahead of the pedestrians, so I had to be bold if I was going to get anywhere.

Rush hour in the subway

A few times during this commute, I would approach a major intersection with four to five lanes on either side of the road and line up with the rest of people, bikes and motorbikes. As this crowd grew and began to achieve a critical mass on both sides of the road, it would inch farther into the line of moving cars, which would begin to get narrower, speed up and start honking loudly in response – like a stream trying to squeeze through a narrow channel blocked by rocks on either side – daring one person to step into their path. Finally, a gap in the cars would emerge and the crowd would suddenly pour across the road – creating a solid barrier of people, bikes, motorcycles, and sometimes even horse drawn carts. The unlucky car that still had a green light would screech to a halt, honking in frustration. Somewhere in the cluster of people and vehicles, I would begin weaving my way to the front, narrowly avoiding hitting, or being hit by, other earnest commuters.

A few hundred meters after each intersection usually came another obstacle course: a bus stop. Whoever designed Beijing’s streets somehow overlooked the fact that the busses have to pull into the bike lane to pick up passengers. So as three or four busses would pull up to let on the throngs of passengers waiting at the bus stop, the bicycles were suddenly either forced out into open traffic, or had to try and squeeze between the bus and the passengers before the bus doors opened. At these times I felt like a tinny dingy trying to navigate between large ships in a congested harbor. I took some videos of this morning commute recently (this was challenging and a little dangerous, because it meant I only had one hand free to slam on the brakes or turn suddenly in traffic). I’ll be posting them on Youtube shortly with a link here.

Rush hour on the streets

Finally, after a good half hour of metropolitan madness, I would arrive at an ordinary office building in the heart of Beijing.

This office building however is home to an organization that many Chinese people dream of working for. The Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS) is China’s most prestigious institution for social science (read: economic) research. CASS is one unit of the greater Chinese Academy of Sciences, and each unit is home to several different research institutes. While not a direct department of the government, one of my colleagues explained the relationship between CASS and the Chinese government by the location of the CASS building in relation to the rest of the city: In the old days, China was ruled by an emperor who lived in the Forbidden City, the palace that still sits at the center of Beijing. The Chinese believe in fung shui, an ancient spiritual art that puts great importance on the physical location of certain structures and aspects of a home or city in relation to the others. To this day, the land that sits on the same axis as the Forbidden City in Beijing is considered much more desirable, because of the positive fung shui it provides, and the closer to the palace, the better. Today, the main Chinese Academy of Social Sciences building is built on this axis, in the same location as the home of the ancient emperor’s economic & financial advisors.

Research Center for Sustainable Development office building

The Research Center for Sustainable Development is housed in a small building just to the north of this main building, and it is in this building that I came to be one of two foreigners working for CASS. By my third day on the job (when the whole institute went out for lunch together), everyone already seemed to know my name, even though I still hadn’t met most of the researchers there. Over the following weeks, I got to know many of my colleagues on the Climate Change Team over lunches – which were usually eaten in a cafeteria across the street – and also came to understand the hidden hierarchy that defines the relationship between each individual in my office. While nobody has a title except “PhD,” each person has a distinct rank, based mostly on seniority and perhaps a bit on expertise. I went out to lunch one day with the Institute’s Communist Party Secretary (every government outfit has one of these people to make sure everyone is following the party line), along with a guest of his and several other researchers. Everywhere we went, the Secretary and his guest would go through the door first – in fact they’d both insist that the other walk through first – and the other researchers would follow in order of “rank.”

The funny thing is that, as a foreigner, I can sense that many of my colleagues are unclear as to where I fit into this hierarchy. For example, I once caught a woman who is 30 years old and has a PhD referring to me in a way that implied we were equals, even though I was technically working on a project under her supervision at the time. While this in some ways puts me at an advantage and gives me more flexibility, this and the language barrier also create some limitations.

In fact, this is perhaps the first time in my life where I’ve sometimes felt that I was being ~~discriminated against~~ [After talking with a friend of mine, I realize this is not the best language to use. Everyone at CASS is very open minded, and I don't think any of them hold a prejudice against foreigners - I think I was letting some of my other experiences spill into the writing of this one]. This is not the fault of any of my colleagues in particular – they are all very nice to me – but I have twice now been excluded from meetings for the simple reason that I am a foreigner. Both involved discussions with high-level government officials that were considered somewhat sensitive – probably involved climate negotiation strategy or something. And maybe they had good reason, considering the WikiLeaks revelation that the US is using espionage to manipulate the climate change negotiations. But it still felt unnecessary – whatever they had to discuss probably wasn't that high level, considering some of my Chinese peers were allowed to attend.

So what have I actually been doing for these three months, you ask? Well, I spent the first month editing the English language version of a 200+ page book that the Center was publishing on a new proposal for the climate change negotiations. That was fun… (Not. Although, I did learn a lot about this specific proposal and I also learned some Chinese climate change vocabulary).

For the rest of the time though, I was doing some independent research on clean energy product trade between the US and China. This is a hot topic, because of the cleantech “trade war” that has been escalating between the US and China in recent months. Back in September, the United Steel Workers (the largest steel union in the US) filed a trade complaint to the US government, stating that China is unfairly subsidizing the production of cleantech and environmental goods, such as solar panels and wind turbines. Under rules that China agreed to abide by when it joined the World Trade Organization (WTO) back in 2002, countries are not allowed to subsidize domestic companies whose manufactured goods are mostly produced for export to other countries. In recent years, China has become the world leader in the production of solar panels and has made a major contribution to bringing down the cost of solar worldwide. However, this is partly because the Chinese government provides domestic solar manufacturers with many different forms of subsidies. In addition, 95% of the solar panels produced in China are exported to Europe and the US. Both Republicans and Democrats used this fact as significant political fodder during the last election (China bashing was about the only area in which the two parties seemed to agree). They claimed that China’s actions were costing the US “green jobs” and enlarging our trade deficit with China. As a result, the Obama administration agreed to go forward with the USW’s complaint and launch an investigation into China’s cleantech trade practices through the WTO. This action aroused much anger among leading politicians and academics in China (including some at the center in which I work). To them, this action seems very hypocritical on the part of the US government (and in some ways I have to agree).

So I set out to look at the trade data on clean energy products between the US, China and a number of other leading cleantech exporters (Germany, Japan, Denmark, India and Brazil to name a few). My goal was to find out whether China was in fact the biggest culprit when it comes to widening the US trade deficit in clean energy products. So I spent several weeks poring over data from the US International Trade Commission’s online DataWeb (this site is a pain – horrible user interface), analyzing the data and compiling it into charts and graphs. I then gave a presentation to my colleagues on my findings. Luckily they let me do it in English (my Chinese isn’t quite good enough for this yet), but I made the power point in Chinese, and we had some discussion in Chinese as well.

My main finding was that Japan and Denmark in fact were the two largest contributors to the US clean energy trade deficit (measured in terms of imports and exports of the two largest product categories: solar panels and wind turbine components), with China coming in third. India and Brazil were also significant contributors. My supervisor for this project (whose title would probably be something like Associate Director of the center if she had a title) seemed satisfied with my findings overall. In fact, since she is a fairly prominent party member, I like to think that my research might actually make its way to some of the higher-ups in the Chinese government. This got my imagination going, and at one point I had this amusing fantasy of suddenly being called into a meeting with the party Chairman and President of China, Hu Jintao, and being asked to give him a brief on my research…

In addition, as I mentioned a while back, I also participated in a public debate on the same subject at the Beijing Energy and Environmental Roundtable (BEER). This is a bi-weekly (or so) speaker series organized by the Beijing Energy Network, a group of about 1500 foreign and Chinese energy professionals working in Beijing. We had been asked to debate the notion that “China’s clean energy subsidies are fair, reasonable and justified.” There were two teams of three people each, and I was on the team debating against the notion, along with an Italian professor of geochemistry and a Chinese professor of environmental politics. Our opponents were the China economic correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, the Founder of a company called Dragonomics, and the Director of Climate Change for the British embassy. The debate was great fun, even though my team lost (having two non-native English speakers on the same team in an English language debate was maybe not the best idea, but I admired their courage none the less). I’ve since joined the Beijing Energy Network Organizing Committee, where I will be helping to plan speaker events and other initiatives (hmmm, kinda like Tufts Energy Forum…)

Thus ended my short stint working for the Chinese government. As the Christmas season approaches, I’m going to be taking on an SAT prep job with the Princeton Review for three weeks, as well as a few freelance jobs doing editing and clean energy research. With a short weekend visa run to Hong Kong in the middle for Christmas day, I’m going to be pretty busy this holiday season. Should keep my mind off the festivities I’ll be missing back in the US.

祝圣诞节和新年快乐！(Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!)

Jumping Through More Hoops: The L-Visa Trip to Mongolia

2010-12-18T08:56:00.001-08:00

Several weeks ago I went through one of the initiation ritual of being a foreigner living in Beijing. It was one of the strangest things I’ve ever done…

Many foreigners are living and working here on a tourist (L) visa, because work visas are notoriously hard to get unless you already have a job with a foreign company before you arrive. It’s relatively easy to get a tourist visa for up to a year, but with the stipulation that you have to leave the country every 30, 60 or 90 days, depending on the type of visa you get (mine is 60 days). When you are working a full time job and don’t have much extra money, the cheapest and quickest way to do this is to travel a few hundred miles north to the border of China and Mongolia, cross over and come back.

Before leaving, I thoroughly researching what my fellow foreigners had done in the past on one of these trips. “Take a bus – it’s the most convenient and one of the cheapest ways to get to the border,” one of my friends had said. “Once you get there, you just have to find one of the jeeps that can take you across, as you aren’t allowed to go on foot. You just have to paying them – but I don’t remember how much.”

So late one afternoon, I boarded a long distance bus from Beijing to Inner Mongolia. These busses come fully equipped with three rows of bunk beds (something I never thought possible given width of a standard bus, but the Chinese managed to squish them in) for the 12-hour, overnight journey to the small border town of Erlian. We set out as the sun was setting and stopped for dinner a few hours later near a large power plant on the edge of Inner Mongolia, one of China’s largest and most desolate provinces. As I climb out of the bus into the freezing night, I saw a giant cooling tower framed against a vividly starry sky – the first stars I’d seen since entering China two months earlier.

That night I didn’t get much sleep. Just as I saw starting to doze off in my tiny top bunk, the bus must have started going through some mountains, because we were suddenly twisting and turning all over the place. Between motion sickness and feeling as though I was going to fall out of my bed every time we went around a corner, I only managed to doze for a few hours. When I woke the next morning, I looked out the window to see the sun just beginning to rise over the endless, flat grassland of Inner Mongolia. Arriving in Erlian around 7am, everyone disembarked and immediately began pilling into several pick-up trucks parked around the bus. Many of my companions on the bus did not seem to speak any Mandarin, so I assumed most of them were from Mongolia and had arrived here to cross over the border as well. I went up to one of the drivers and asked him in English if he was going to Mongolia. “Ah, Mongolia!” He replied in a thick accent and nodded his head enthusiastically. “The jeeps will be pretty obvious when you arrive – you can’t miss them,” one of my friends had said before I left. Confused, tired and thinking that maybe my friend had really meant trucks instead of jeeps, I pilled into the back of the pickup along with three other passengers and a load of cargo.

The trucks parked at the bus station

After dropping our companions off at various places in town (this should have given me a clue), the driver set out for the border gate. But when we arrived he stopped before the gate and said “Mongolia! 100 kuai!” I had broken two of the cardinal rules of getting around in China: Never trust an overly enthusiastic Chinese man, and always clarify/ negotiate a price before getting into a car. In protest, I began saying in mandarin that he was “cheating me,” and discovered that this man also spoke some mandarin. I managed to negotiate the price down to 25 kuai, although this was still too expensive (the “fair” price for crossing the border as I found out later is about 30, and the price of traveling across town should be about 5). It was now about 7:30, but the gate didn’t open until 8:30. So I walked back toward town to see if I could find somewhere to eat. After about 20 minutes of walking through the almost deserted down, I realized that it would take me hours to find food at this rate. A man was park on the opposite side of the road watching me, so I over to ask him where I could get some food and where I could find one of these jeeps.

The man turned out to be a local taxi driver, and he knew a number of places I could get food. He also offered to help me stop one of the jeeps that would be coming through shortly. Just then one of these jeeps started coming down the road. We stopped the driver and my new friend had a brief conversation with him in Mongolian. Then he said to me in Mandarin that it would be 60 kuai. Something told me that this was too high, so I tried to negotiate, but he just shook his head and prepared to drive away. “This is the best price you will get,” my taxi driver friend said. I tried one more time to bring the price down, but the jeep driver wouldn’t have it. Finally I started to walk away, a common tactic that usually gets Chinese people to call you back and bring their price down. But this driver just drove away – a good sign that his price had in fact been the fair one. “I told you, that is the lowest price they will offer,” my new friend said. “Usually their price is higher, but I can help you get a discount.” Feeling silly, I apologized and told the taxi driver that I would appreciate his help getting the next one. Then I asked him to take me into town to find some food. As we drove I had a nice conversation with the taxi driver. He seemed as though he really just wanted to help me. I started to let my guard down.

We pulled into a parking lot, next to several small, hole-in-the-wall type restaurants. The taxi driver told me I could leave my duffle back in his car, and led me toward the nearest restaurant. We soon learned that it was closed, and move on to the next one. Finally we found one that was open, and I ordered a breakfast of generic, white buns with meat in them and some kind of Mongolian milk tea. “Take your time eating,” the taxi driver said, “I’m going to go move the car closer.” I sat at a table, watching him walk out of the restaurant and across the parking lot. Then with a sudden jolt, my complacency disappeared and alarm set in…

How could I have been so stupid? Although he didn’t know what was in it, my duffle bag was sitting in his car with my ipod, camera, and about 1000 RMB in cash. He could easily drive off with my bag and I wouldn’t have the slightest idea how to ever find him again. I jumped up and ran out into the parking lot, just as he was starting to drive in my direction (the exit to the parking lot was also in the same direction though). But it turned out I had nothing to worry about. As he drove up and parked in front of the restaurant, he looked at me quizzically, and I made up the excuse that I’d forgotten my hand sanitizer to clean my hands before eating. As I rummaged around in my bag pretending to look for it, I grabbed my valuables and buried them in my coat pocket.

Returning to the roadside near the border gate, the taxi driver helped me to stop another jeep (this one packed to the bursting point with cargo), and “negotiated” another 60 kuai deal for me. I took out the money to give to the jeep driver, but instead the taxi driver accepted it and directed me to squeeze into the front seat (the jeep had so much cargo that the seat itself was already pushed all the way forward, with the head resting against the glass of the front windshield). As I climbed in I notice out of the corner of my eye that the taxi driver and jeep driver were quietly exchanging something.

We arrived at the border gate, where the driver stopped and began arguing with some Chinese people waiting nearby, who looked like they also were looking for a ride. Finally he agreed to let one Chinese guy also climb into his jeep for the ride across. I was a little annoyed, as my head was already pressed against the glass and I had barely enough room to wiggle my toes. But as this guy climbed in, I noticed he was dressed much more cosmopolitan than most of the others. “Do you speak English?” I asked him. “Of course,” he replied in an American accent. “I’m from Austin, Texas. My name’s Frank.”

It was a relief that I had finally found another foreigner going through this crazy ritual. And what’s more, he had already done it nine times. As we drove across the border, he told me about how all the taxi drivers and jeep drivers were in on this whole scam together – how my taxi driver “friend” probably got a cut of the 60 kuai for convincing me that it was the market price – as well as many other details from his past experiences. Within 30 minutes we had gone through the two border gates, gotten the stamps we needed on our passports to prove that we’d left the country, and arrived in the open grasslands of real (outer) Mongolia. And then we turned around and went back through into China. I was in Mongolia for about 10 minutes.

Driving back to Beijing in the van - there's apparently a dinosaur museum in Erlian, so they had these dinosaur statues to advertise it. As you can see, there's not much else for hundreds of miles.

When we came through the gate on the other side, there were some vans waiting that Frank said could take us back to Beijing for about the same price as the bus, but we would leave in the afternoon and get back that night. We asked the driver to pick us up in town around 2pm, and set out to go explore the bustling border town of Erlian. After about 20 minutes of walking down the main street we were already bored, but I had one last mission in mind for my trip to Mongolia: bring back some Mongolian vodka that I’d heard about, called Chinggis (native spelling of Genghis). My friend had told me you can get this stuff in Erlian for less than $10 a bottle, and the quality is about the same as some of the high-end brands you’d find in the US (it’s much better than Absolute, for example). I went into a few shops that were selling it, and eventually negotiated a good deal for eight bottles, which I planned to sell to people in Beijing when I got back.

A few hours later, Frank and I piled into the van, and started heading for Beijing at top speed. We arrived back around 10pm, and the driver dropped me at my apartment. Feeling very car sick (getting back in eight hours meant this guy was speeding everywhere) and hungry, I was glad to be back in Beijing (in time for Halloween the next night), having successfully completed my first ritual visa trip.

Sino-American climate & energy relations

2010-11-16T07:27:00.000-08:00

As many of you know, this is a topic of great interest to me. Recently I've been lucky enough to participate in the dialogue on this issue at a higher level than usual. A few weeks ago I had an article published in the first issue of the Collegiate Energy Association Journal, and next week I will be participating in a debate on China's support of its clean energy sector for the Beijing Energy & Environmental Roundtable. Finally, my job at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences has given me the opportunity to give a presentation and write a policy memo (both in Chinese... gulp) on how the current political environment in the US is affecting its actions toward China on energy and climate change. My audience will be some of the Chinese delegates who will be attending the upcoming climate summit in Cancun in a few weeks, so its pretty important that I know my stuff.

I'll have more on how the debate and presentation went next week, but first here's the text of the article I wrote for the CEA Journal (it was written last spring):

“Why Moving to China is the Patriotic Thing To Do”

By Daniel Enking

I recently had the privilege of sitting in on a strategic discussion on energy innovation in Massachusetts, led by Congressman Markey and Undersecretary of Energy Johnson. Hosted at Tufts University, the discussion brought together several dozen of New England’s leading cleantech professionals to voice their concerns and give their input on how the Department of Energy and Congress could better support this sector.

Several times during this discussion, the specter of Chinese competition was raised. Far from just Thomas Friedman’s rhetoric, there seems to be real concern that China is beating the US in the global “cleantech race.” As Congressman Markey pointed out however, the “brain state” can help America to win this cleantech race by creating and retaining human capital and encouraging homegrown innovation.

Afterward I was taking with a prominent member of the Boston cleantech community who was asking me what I plan to do after I graduate. “Well,” I said, “I’m planning to look for a job in the cleantech sector in China.” His response caught be by surprise, “Oh, really…” he said, in a tone that implied it might as well have been the 1960s and I had just told him I was going to go build rockets for the Soviet Union. It suddenly dawned on me that this had probably been the wrong thing to say after what I had just heard. “Well, yes…” I stammered, “but my motivations are patriotic at heart.”

In fact, this was not the first time my motives for planning to move to China had been questioned. A few weeks ago, in response to hearing what I was planning to do after graduation, one of my friends had asked me in an only semi-mocking tone, “Why do you hate America?” The truth is, I believe there are two false assumptions underlying these statements.

First, the cleantech “race” between China and the US is not a zero-sum game. In a recent white paper, “Joined at the Hip: The US-China clean energy relationship,” Bloomberg New Energy Finance makes the case that both countries have their own comparative advantages when it comes to developing, manufacturing and installing clean energy systems, and these advantages are necessarily complementary (this is not a new concept, by the way). While China may be able to drive down the cost of manufacturing, many of the technologies and component parts for solar panels and wind turbines were and are still being developed in the US.

Second, moving to China does not make me an un-patriotic American. Rather than just seeing an opportunity to personally profit from the cleantech boom in China, I see an opportunity to gain skills and experience by working in China that I can then use to help these two countries to cooperate more on clean energy in the future. As many people have recognized, the Sino-American relationship will probably be the most important bilateral relationship of the 21st century, and energy is one of the most significant challenges we will face this century. But without a certain level of mutual understanding that can only be gleaned from cultural exchange, this relationship will not be able to flourish.

In the end, I believe I’m doing my country a great service by moving to China, and I hope that many other Chinese and American students see the same opportunity as I do. America may need to lead, but our energy challenges cannot be solved alone.

A thousand points of light…but where’s the course?

2010-11-16T06:48:00.001-08:00

Well, it’s been almost a month and a half since I’ve had a chance to sit down and share what’s been going on. My only excuses are that I’ve been super busy, and that my daily life in Beijing has not made quite as interesting of a story as the time when I was traveling around Southeast Asia. But it hasn’t been boring either: in fact, my life nearly six months after graduating is anything but stable and routine. So here’s a quick summary of what I’ve been up to.

Apart from my full time job/ internship at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (which I’ll detail in my next post), my spare time has been consumed by mainly by three things: Looking for an apartment, looking for an part time English teaching job, and going to lots of social/ networking events.

The first is not as straightforward as it might sound. Rather than just bunking up with some other expats, which would have been the easy thing to do, I’ve been looking for a Chinese roommate that would be willing to speak mostly Chinese with me. Many people have told me this is by far the best way to immerse yourself in Chinese language, but its also pretty hard to connect with Chinese people in Beijing who don’t speak much English. As a result, I’ve continued to “couchsurf” around Beijing, staying mostly with my Tufts classmates and sometimes with people from couchsurfing.com.

My first stab at looking for a Chinese roommate involved going on the Beijing Craigslist and a website called the Beijinger, which also allows people to post classified ads. But most of the people posting these spoke English, or were just real estate agents advertising apartments that were not guaranteed to also have Chinese people living in them. The few that were posted by Chinese people were often located in horribly inconvenient locations far away from the city center (in Beijing, that can mean over an hour to get to work on the subway, not to mention an expensive cab ride home after a late night out). I then tried a few of the all Chinese classified websites, but after I finally deciphered the specific terms describing the conditions of the apartments that were being offered, I realized almost all of these were being advertised by real estate agents as well. I finally found one category called “he zu,” which literally translates to “cooperative renting.” This seemed like a good shot, since it implied other Chinese people would be living in the apartment I would be renting. After looking at a few of these places however, I realized this wasn’t what I was looking for either. These apartments were designed for people who wanted to isolate themselves: they usually didn’t include a common room of any type, but instead had three or four bedrooms that might as well have been separate apartments. So that on to plan C…

I decided I might have to relax my standards a bit, and start looking for Chinese people who also spoke English. Just as I was starting to do this, I came across a classified written by a 23 year old Chinese guy who was looking for a roommate, and from the looks of the ad didn’t speak very good English. I gave him a call and the next day we met over dinner to discuss the potential for us to room together. His English name was Allen and he worked for a German NGO doing Corporate Social Responsibility work. Even better, we spent the entire dinner speaking Chinese. I thought I’d found my roommate at last…

But then he sent me an email a few days later saying his landlord wouldn’t let him out of his current apartment for another two months (or else he would lose the two months rent that he had already put down in advance, a common requirement in Beijing). With winter setting in the number of new places to couchsurf dwindling, this wasn’t an option for me. So I went back to Craigslist and almost immediately found an apartment being advertised by two young Chinese girls. They can both speak English, but at this point it’s probably the best I’m going to find. I’ll be moving in there in a few days, but I may still search for an apartment to live in with Allen after his two months rent is up.

About three weeks ago, I decided in order to make some extra cash, I should start doing some English tutoring on the side. There are tons of schools in Beijing looking for part time teachers to do one-on-one tutoring, and they pay pretty handsome hourly wages: about the equivalent of $30 per hour. After a quick search on the Beijinger, I found a few schools looking for part time English teachers. I sent my resume to one, and got a positive response in less than 24 hours. “All right,” I thought, “I’m on my way to some relatively easy extra income!”

Not exactly… after going into the school’s corporate-looking office for an “interview,” I was “hired” under the condition that the school would pair me with potential students, and I would do a free, 20 minute “demo” for each student before starting to teach them. Over the last three weeks I’ve done about seven demos, some of them taking nearly two hours because the students showed up late and demanded longer demos, and so far I don’t have a single student. What they didn’t tell me is that I would be competing with several other potential teachers for each student, and that even if the student liked me the best, there was no guarantee that they would even start taking lessons. Some had problems with the price – another wanted two demos and a week worth of free lessons before starting to pay. A few days ago I finally decided I’d had enough. I’m not looking for a school that will either pay me for the demos, or guarantee that I will have a certain number of students (other foreigners have told me these schools exist).

And finally, the more fun – although just as unfruitful – way I’ve spent my free time: going to Beijing social events. From bar trivia nights, to energy & environmental networking events, to Tufts alumni events, to Ultimate Frisbee pick-up, to concerts, to house parties – Beijing is full of opportunities to meet foreigners and Chinese alike. I’ve met a lot of cool people, but more of them seem to be in the same situation as me (either unemployed or unhappy with their current job) than have been able to offer me any leads.

And this is where I find myself at the moment: with less than two months until the official end of my internship (not to mention when my student loan payments kick in), I’m starting to wonder what my next move should be. I recently received some advice from a friend that I should consider looking for a job in one of China’s “second-tier” cities (i.e. not Beijing, Shanghai or Guangdong). This is not the first time I’ve been given this advice by a wise person who I look up to. It’s true that these three cities are becoming saturated with foreigners and repatriated Chinese students who have the advantage of being bilingual, and it would be a more unique/ immersive experience to go somewhere like Hangzhou, Kunming, Chengdu or Wuhan. But the main problems are 1) How do I find a job in one of these cities without going there first and 2) Is my Chinese good enough to get by in a work setting where almost no one speaks English? The answer to these two questions is still unclear, but I’m going to have to figure it out in the next month or so, or settle for what I can find in Beijing...

The World’s Toxic Waste Dump… or, One Man’s Trash is Another Man’s Treasure

2010-09-28T20:36:00.000-07:00

So far I’ve tried to devote most of my posts to travel stories, with an occasional commentary on my favorite topics: the environment, energy, international politics and culture. However I recently had an idea that I’m dying to share with you, even though it’s only marginally related to my current travel adventures.

I want to talk to you about trash. And pollution. And how we can turn these things into valuable resources.

Last year I saw a video about what happens to electronic waste from the United States and other western countries. It shows how most of it is exported to places like Africa, India and China, and how one city in China is overrun with electronic waste pilling up everywhere. It gets sorted through and “recycled” by Chinese workers, who suffer from mercury poisoning and breath in toxic fumes from burning plastic. I saw some of this pollution first hand last summer, and it is not pretty. You can see some pictures of China’s worst waste and pollution disasters here (warning: some of these photos are quite disturbing, so don’t look at them right before eating dinner).

E-waste dump in China. Image published by Time, 2009

If you are like me, looking at those pictures probably makes you at least a little queasy, and probably also makes you feel pretty pessimistic about the human race’s chances of survival if we keep doing things like this. From mountains of car tires, to millions of tons of food scraps, to electronic waste, to greenhouse gas emissions, our civilization is producing and dumping unimaginably large amounts of waste into the water, earth and atmosphere every day.

Ok, many of you already know this is happening. Some of you even have some ideas on how to solve it. But did you know there is an emerging school of thought that says that in fact we can recycle, reuse, and reduce our waste down to zero? When I was in elementary school, my 3^rd grade teacher, Tom McKibben (brother of the climate activist Bill McKibben), asked me to draw an invention. So I drew what I called an “everything recycling machine.” You simply put all your trash into one end of the machine, and it would magically appear on the other side as something useful, like food or energy or water. Of course as I grew more mature, I realized that this was impossible… or was it?

Enter William McDonough, famous architect and author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. I saw him speak at the World Future Energy Summit nearly three years ago, but his words have stuck with me every since: “If our design is for destruction, then we are doing a pretty good job. If not, then we need a new kind of design.” His idea is that everything from your house to your car to the soles of your shoes can be designed in a way that it can be reused in the future, or when it gets discarded, it will be able to seamlessly integrate back into nature without any harmful side effects. Here’s another interesting article on how companies can design their products and services to be fundamentally sustainable by thinking about the materials going into them.

Fully recyclable shoe based on the Cradle to Cradle method.

So here’s my idea. After successfully starting a compost pile at the Tufts European Center this summer (thanks to George Ellmore’s expert and enthusiastic advice), I started thinking about compost. Compost can be made from many things, but especially from what in fact accounts for almost 50% of our trash: food and paper waste. What’s more, as that compost is breaking down, it’s producing more than just fertilizer for your organic garden: it’s also releasing heat – enough heat to boil water – as well as methane gas, and water. Harnessing these resources can be achieved simply with a closed storage container for your compost, with tubes to siphon off the methane into one tank, and heat water in another tank. So what was once considered trash – food scraps, paper, other organic materials – could now be used to heat and power your house, as well as fertilize and water your garden! That sounds pretty close to an “everything recycling machine” to me. The saddest part is that a Frenchman named Jean Pain came up with this idea back in the 1980s, and its only now being given serious attention by cities like Boston as a way of using waste to solve our waste and energy problems. I think there might be a potential business in this idea.

Jean Pain's compost to energy method. Image published by Reader's Digest, 1981

So I started thinking about where something like this would make sense. The first place that comes to mind is Dragon Spring Temple, the only temple in Beijing where there are still monks practicing Buddhism. My friend Bonnie, founder of an organization called Green Living, introduced me to the temple last summer. The temple is a beautiful and tranquil place, with an organic garden situated inside the walls. The only problem is that the inhabitants just set up a small coal power station to provide the temple with electricity. Since the temple houses nearly a hundred people in a nearby dorm, where they probably produce a lot of food scraps, an energy and organic fertilizer generating compost pile would make a perfect pilot project to replace the coal furnace.

This would be a great thing to implement on a large scale in China, because it addresses many of China’s environmental problems all at once: the need for waste disposal, clean energy and potable water (which can be extracted from the compost or added to fields with the fertilizer). But it would also make a lot of sense in my hometown of Freeport Maine, where the concentration of restaurants producing food waste (there are at least 30 in downtown alone), and organic farmers looking for non-industrial fertilizer right down the road, creates a perfect market. Going a step or two further, what if this technology were refined to the point where a small system could be retrofitted into every American home? In places like New England, where you are always raking leaves and hauling branches off your lawn, the products of these otherwise annoying chores could be put into a mini power plant to provide you with methane for producing electricity, heat for space heating and cooling, and fertilizer for your backyard garden! This could be the new Bloom Box, but unlike the Bloom Box it could probably be developed and scaled for much less money.

This might be my new project when I return to the US in a few years. For now though, I think being in China presents a great opportunity for a business like this. Now I just need to get my Chinese skills up to a business level…

Please comment and let me know what you think about this idea.

Breaking the “Expat Bubble”

2010-09-23T23:43:00.000-07:00

So here I am, at last, in Beijing: my final destination in China and probably my home for the next few years. But making a new life here – one that allows me to become fluent in Chinese while also working in the clean energy sector – is much easier said then done.

In fact, I recently realized that my life for the past several years has been working toward this moment. Almost exactly eight years ago, at the start of my freshman year in high school, I walked into Sherman’s Book Store in Freeport, Maine and saw a book called The Hydrogen Economy. Intrigued by the title, I bought the book that would in the following months open my eyes to the ideas of climate change, peak oil, the conflicts in the Middle East, the rise of China, and the promise of renewable energy. My friends in high school will remember my constant obsession with hydrogen (many jokes were made about it around the lunch table) and my teachers will remember how I tried to tailor all my school projects to address this topic. During my senior year I did a project on the rise of China and the country’s quest for energy resources to fuel its economic development. When I got to Tufts, the natural course of action seemed to be to start studying Chinese so that I could one day go to the Far East to work on one of the world’s most daunting environmental challenges.

Studying languages has never come easy to me. I had quit French half way through high school to study Latin, and because Latin at Freeport High School is painfully easy, I never learned any good language study skills. So the first few years of studying one of the hardest languages for a westerner to learn were tough, to say the least. It was often difficult to remember why I had started and a few times I was close to giving up. But studying abroad and working in Beijing after my junior refreshed my memory and strengthened my language skills. As some of you will remember, I lived with a family on the outskirts of Beijing, an area dominated by one of Beijing’s largest steel mills, which is surrounded by coal power plants that extend all the way into the surrounding mountains. I wrote an article about the area’s environmental problems for an online news publication called GlobalPost, which you can view here.

So now I’ve graduated and finally returned to China to begin doing what I set out to do eight years ago: bringing the green revolution to China. But how exactly do I get started?

Since I arrived in Beijing I’ve encountered a few realities that have constantly challenged me to reassess what I need to do in order to meet my goals of becoming fluent in Chinese and getting to know the Chinese clean energy sector:

1) The Expat Bubble. The community of foreigners, or “expatriates” in Beijing is very small in comparison to the city’s overall population, making it feel as though you are living in a small town when it comes to meeting expats. Furthermore, expats all like to do the same things, such as go to bars, attend lectures and networking events, play Ultimate Frisbee, go hiking, etc. So its very easy to meet other expats, and bond over the funny English translations that you see daily, or the Chinese peasant man that you saw pulling a cart down the street, or the part-time English teaching/ translating job that you just landed. But aside from a few Chinese people I met through my internship and a student-run conference last summer, it’s been difficult to meet any Chinese people, or hang out with them with any frequency. And the ones you do meet often speak English. I was warned about this phenomenon before I came here, but now dealing with the realities of it has proven challenging.

2) A saturated market. It seems like everyone has gotten China fever every since foreigners really began to realize the vast potential of the Chinese market in the last 15 years. The energy and environmental sectors in particular have become a popular area for foreigners to work, as China is poring massive amounts of money into stimulating this area. This combined with the economic crisis that has driven many young Americans to China where they become “economic refugees,” has made clean energy jobs for foreigners in Beijing much more competitive.

3) While my Chinese language ability is conversational, it is still not up to a level where I can use it in a professional setting. As the job market for foreigners becomes increasingly competitive here, Chinese language ability is becoming a critical skill that is required for most good, high paying jobs.

The fact that five of my classmates from Tufts are also in Beijing only intensifies the bubble. On the other hand, it also adds a level of familiarity and comfort to know that a little bit of Tufts came with me to Beijing. It has also made it much easier for me to live here while I search for an apartment and Chinese roommate(s). The first week I was here I staid with my friend Sam Goodman, whom I worked with last summer at JUCCCE, and who I brought to Tufts last year to talk about his new book, Where East Eats West: The Street-Smarts Guide to Business in China. This week I will be staying with my friend Alex Ornik, whose roommate is back in the US for a few weeks. I’ve also managed to get back in touch with a few other friends I made last summer through events like the Beijing Energy Network, Green Drinks and the International Youth Summit on Energy and Climate Change.

While they are still part of the expat bubble for the most part, rejoining these networks has helped me find several job opportunities so far. The Beijing Energy Network is a Google group that hosts regular speaking and networking events at venues in Beijing, and people posts lots of job opportunities on the group page. Green Drinks is an environmental networking event that has chapters in cities all over the world. Through these events I found a job opportunity to work as the Communications Manager for an NGO called the China Carbon Forum. In this role I would be helping to plan high level meetings and discussions among the Beijing energy communities top executives, do event follow up, work with sponsors and maintain the website. This sounds like a great opportunity, but the downsides are that I would be speaking English most of the time, and the pay is next to nothing. I also interviewed for an internship position with a firm called Sindicatum Carbon Capital, which develops clean energy projects to be registered under the Clean Development Mechanism, a global framework set up under the Kyoto Protocol that allows countries to meet their carbon reduction obligations by purchasing credits created by projects in other countries. Since China has no commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions under the Kyoto Protocol, but is now the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, there are dozens of companies that have sprung up in China solely to develop these projects.

It was a bit of a wake-up call however, when I was asked to conduct part of the interview with Sindicatum in Chinese, and I realized how much my Chinese skills have deteriorated in the last year. There is still a lot of advanced vocabulary that I haven’t learned or forgot since I stopped studying Chinese about a year ago. It’s going to be a steep learning curve to get my Chinese up to a professional level within the next few months.

The internship that I just accepted however is probably the most interesting among these and for the time being doesn’t require a professional level of Chinese ability. Before I came to China, Professor Gallagher at the Tufts Fletcher School introduced me to one of her colleagues, Professor Pan, who heads the Research Center for Sustainable Development, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and is also connected to Beijing University. In this role I would be working for an arm of the Chinese government (also at a very low salary) to put together a policy brief on energy policy in the US and Europe, and to help edit the Institute’s English language publications. While my work will be mostly in English, I will be exposed to the workings of a Chinese organization, and working pretty much exclusively with people whose native language is Chinese. The internship will last for a month, with a possible two-month extension and pay raise if things go well. This will pay me just enough to cover living expenses and will give me time to continue look for a full time job.

And speaking of full time jobs, I went in for an “informational interview” at Bloomberg New Energy Finance a few days ago. Of all the companies working on climate and energy in Beijing, this company is the one I want to work for the most. Bloomberg is an internationally recognized media and financial information company, which conducts in-depth research on the “new” energy market in China and sells it to leading investment firms and project developers. The Chinese office manager with whom I interviewed was very nice and enthusiastic, and was interested in considering me for a position at some point in the future if something should open up. It would probably require a higher level of Chinese than I have now, so this will give me a stronger incentive to find a way to break this expat bubble and start immersing myself in Chinese language and culture, the only sure way to learn.

Yesterday the Chinese celebrated the Mid-Autumn Festival; a holiday where many Chinese people go home to be with their families, and everyone eats small pastries called “moon cakes.” Yesterday was also one of the cleanest days I’ve ever seen in Beijing. The sky was perfectly blue and a cool breeze began blowing in from the Northwest. As I went for a run in Ritan Park near Beijing’s Central Business District (CBD), it was hard not to be optimistic. But I’ve still got a lot of challenges ahead.

Around the World in a Day

2010-09-23T23:13:00.000-07:00

Almost every country in the world has a pavilion displaying their country’s greatest achievements in Shanghai this summer, for an audience that will rank in the several tens of millions. As I write this, 55,368,100 people have visited the Shanghai World Expo according to their website, and with a month and a half left to go, close to 70 million are expected to have visited before the end. When measured by the number of visitors and duration of the event, the Expo easily surpasses the 2008 Beijing Olympics as China’s largest international event in history.

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So what is the World Expo?

Remember the World's Fair that was hosted in New York in the 1930s and 1960s? Well, it’s kinda like that. Except rather than being dominated by corporations, each country has its own building (or in some cases groups of countries have one big building housing all their pavilions) which contain everything from miniature movie theaters playing videos about the country, to commercial and cultural exhibits, to interactive activities that help you learn about the country. Some of the pavilions have really cool interior and exterior design – you can see some really good pictures here.

Because the vast majority of the people coming to visit the Expo during its six months of operation are probably from what Tufts alumnus Dan Loeb identifies as China’s 100 million person ‘consumer class,’ most of the pavilions are designed for an audience that is well off, but not quite as worldly as most foreign travelers visiting the expo might be. As a result the material in the pavilions is a little basic, and many of them failed to follow the “Better city, better life” theme in favor of advertising their country’s best tourist destinations. I was lucky enough to get this and many other perspectives on the Expo before going to tour it from Scott and the many other students Ambassadors for the US pavilion. So when I finally went to the Expo, I knew what was worth seeing and what wasn’t (I was also able to cut a lot of the 2-3 hour lines when Scott showed his staff badge at the entrance – thanks Scott).

Outside the massive "theme" pavilion

Scott and I ended up spending most of our time in the “theme pavilion,” the largest pavilion at the Expo, where a number of thought-provoking exhibits and videos told the story of urban living, pollution, and the path to sustainability. The first section had an exhibit focusing on the lives of six families from different cities around the world (Phoenix, AR, US; San Paulo, Brazil; Johannesburg, South Africa; Melbourne, Australia, Amsterdam, Holland and Lijiang, China). The exhibit included life-sized wax status of each family, and a short video documenting their everyday lives. The goal was to show how similar the lives of people are in cities around the world, despite all our cultural differences.

A cool idea but a bad translation

The second portion of the pavilion had some very provocative displays demonstrating the problems of urban sprawl, urban waste and pollution. There were 50-foot tall models of apartment buildings made entirely out of beer crates and other urban structures constructed from materials that would otherwise end up in the trash. There was a mural depicting an urban landscape with famous buildings from every city in the world in the background, and mounds of trash in the foreground. Later on we came upon a room with a dome shaped ceiling playing a video depicting the evolution of a Chinese cityscape. It began with a small town in the countryside that quickly sprouted high-rises, skyscrapers and a concrete jungle of highways and overpasses. The sky turned dark and mounds of trash began to pile up. Then, out of the trash began to grow flowers. The buildings began to sprout solar panels and wind turbines grew out of a hillside that was previously lined with apartments. The sky turned blue again and a river flowing through the center turned from brown to blue. It was a very powerful image that I hope began to captivate the imaginations of the millions of Chinese people coming through the pavilion.

Vision of a better future

The “Better city, better life” theme of the World Expo is a great indication that the Chinese government has realized that it will have a serious problem on its hands if it doesn’t begin to address urban pollution and climate change. This is also evident in the many “eco-city” projects that have begun to sprout up around China. Whether this goal will be achieved and these projects will be successfully implemented however is another question.

A “high context” culture

2010-09-13T02:54:00.001-07:00

Figuring out how to get around in China can often be a complicated and annoying process. Often times the signs don’t make any sense (today I saw a road sign that directed you either North or South on a road that was clearly running East-West), and the fact that the road signs are sometimes written with phonetic pronunciations often doesn’t help you communicate where you want to go to a Chinese person, unless you can read all the characters anyway – because without knowing the tones, you could be saying something completely different than what is written.

Asking Chinese people for directions can be an even more frustrating process than trying to navigate by yourself. The fact that China is a “high context” culture (you are always expected to read deeper than the actual words that people say) and that Chinese people are constantly worried about saving face makes the simple question of “how do I get to location A?” much more complex. The most common response to this question is “It’s in that direction” with a tone that suggests the place is very easy to find, combined with a waving of an arm in the general direction, even if the place you are looking for involves turning onto several different streets. I’ve also discovered (the hard way) that even if a person has no idea, they will sometimes still point you in a random direction with an attitude of utmost certainty, in order to save face. The fact that my Chinese is still a bit rusty doesn’t help either.

The best way that I’ve discovered to insure yourself against being the victim of bad directions is to ask several people for directions to the same place and go with the greatest common denominator, and to ask multiple follow-up questions. Here’s an example from when I was trying to navigate my way back to the Hangzhou Train Station by bus. I had just boarded one bus and was trying to figure out to which bus I needed to go next.

(In Chinese)

Me: “Excuse me, do you know what bus I should take to get to Hanghou South Station?”

Old woman: “You want to go to the train station or bus station?”

Me: “Train station”

Old women: “Well, to get to the bus station…”

Me: “No, the train station…”

Old woman: “Oh… then you want to take the 76 bus.”

Old man next to her: “Yes, the 76 bus!”

Second old man next to him: “That’s right, it’s the 76 bus!”

Me: “ok, at what station should I change to that bus?”

[Old woman looks like she is pondering]

Old women: “You said you want to go to the train station?”

Me: “Yes, the train station.”

Old woman to a middle aged women standing nearby: “He wants to go to the train station…”[at this point they start arguing very fast and I can’t really understand them]

Middle aged woman: “You want to go to the train station? Then you should take the 315 bus.”

Me: “Ok, how do I get to that bus?”

Middle aged women: “Hmmm, how do you get there…?” [Puts her finger over her mouth and looks up, pondering. The old woman starts arguing with the old men. Then the middle-aged woman joins in]

Old women: “You want to take the 76 bus. I will take you there.”

Middle aged women: “No, it’s definitely the 305 or the 315 bus. I will take you there!”

Old man: “Yes, she will take you there, follow her!” [Said with no indication as to which women I should follow]

Second old man: [seeing the confused look on my face] “Do you understand what we are saying to you?”

I vaguely remembered seeing a 315 bus at the train station the day before. I looked at the old women, and she appeared to have lost the argument, because she didn’t object to the middle-aged woman’s offer. So I agreed to go with the middle-aged woman, and a few stops later I followed her off the bus. We walked for a few blocks and then came to the bus station, where a sign indicated that the bus did indeed go to Hangzhou South Train Station. When it comes to giving direction, Chinese people are either not very helpful, or overly helpful. There is rarely an in between. But if you want to get past the generalities in the ‘not very helpful’ stage, you have to be persistant.

Déjà vu in Hangzhou

2010-09-13T02:07:00.000-07:00

There’s a famous Chinese saying that goes something like this: “Above there is heaven, below there is Hangzhou and Suzhou.”

Two years ago I studied abroad in what is considered one of the most beautiful cities in China. Hangzhou is only an hour and a half train ride from Shanghai, so I decided to take a day trip to visit my old Professor and my Alma Mater.

Before leaving for Hangzhou however, I returned to one of the areas in Shanghai that my friends and I had frequented when visiting Shanghai two years ago. Renmin Guangchang, or the “People’s Park” is situated across the river from Pudong (the famous part of Shanghai’s skyline that includes the Oriental Pearl Tower), in the heart of Shanghai’s financial district. There is a hostel near the park at which my friends and I staid, and a street with lots of good restaurants (the real reason why I came back here). Shanghai is famous for a certain type of dumplings, called “Xiao long bao,” otherwise known as Shanghai steamed dumplings, and there is a restaurant called Yang’s Fried Dumplings that makes an especially good Xiao long bao. The minute I arrived at People’s Park I was hit with major déjà vu. Although I remember the area well, I didn’t remember exactly where the restaurant street, or Yang’s, was located. I walked around in search of this place for almost an hour, returning to our old hostel at one point to ask for directions. I finally found what appeared to be Yang’s Fried Dumplings, but something didn’t seem right – the storefront looked the same, but the street it was on was not as I remembered it. The road was freshly paved and wider than I remember, and I didn’t recognize any of the other restaurants nearby. Perhaps I don’t remember it as well as I thought, or maybe a lot has just changed in two years – in China, this is very possible.

Area around People's Park

Line outside Yang's Friend Dumplings

I arrived at the Hangzhou South Railway Station in the early afternoon and got on a bus that I hoped would take me across the city to the edge of Xi hu, or the West Lake, where the campus for the International School of Zhejiang University is located. When I was studying abroad my friends and I had rarely taken the bus, as most of the places we went in Hangzhou were close enough to ride a bike, or it was more convenient to take a cab. Traveling across Hangzhou by bus though, I realized how large the city is and how much of the city I hadn’t seen. With a population of about 6 million, Hangzhou is still considered a medium sized city in China. It took me over an hour to cross Hangzhou’s sprawling outer rim into the heart of the city, situated on the east side of Xi hu. Arriving at the West Lake, I was reminded of why the Chinese compare Hangzhou to heaven: looking across the lake one can see several pagodas sitting atop the hills that turn into rolling mountains which form one of China’s largest nature reserves on the east coast. Lilly’s grow at the lake’s edge and a causeway lined with trees crosses the lake near its center. I bough some yang rou chuanr (lamb cabob) from a restaurant stand and ate lunch on a bench by the lakeside, remembering the time that I met a girl from Chengdu via couchsurfing and walked with her around the lake one afternoon.

The West Lake

View more pictures from Hangzhou and Shanghai here.

My old Professor and the Director of the Tufts in China study abroad program, Jay Yang, had asked me to come to his class that afternoon and give the students some advice about living in China. When I arrived at the Zhejiang University campus, flood of memories came rushing back; of walking to lunch with my classmates, riding my bike to class, and playing Frisbee on a field under the shadow of a 50 foot tall statue of Mao Zedong. I have a lot of great memories of that time, but as I walked across campus I realized most of them involved my Tufts classmates or other foreign students, and very few Chinese students. So my main piece of advice for Jay’s class was for the students to break out of their foreign student bubble and go find Chinese friends. This is difficult to do at Zhejiang University, where all the foreign students are housed in the same dorm and take language classes together. But during my time in China I’ve found other ways to make Chinese friends (on 25 hour train rides for starters). In the long run, meeting locals is the best way to improve any language and to really understand the culture.

Zhejiang University Foreign Student's Dorm

Contrary to my own advice however, I invited some of the students out that night to Reggae bar, a nightclub in Hangzhou that I had frequented as a student. Reggae bar has a relaxing atmosphere and often has live bands playing. Once again I was reminded of my nights out in Hangzhou, and all the good times spent there. One of the most vivid memories I had of my time in Hangzhou however was my apprehension toward speaking Chinese. As I visited all these places that I hadn’t seen for two years, I realized how far my ability and confidence in speaking Chinese has progressed. One sign of this was that although Jay spoke to me mostly in English, he sometimes drifted into Chinese, most of which I understood. The last time I was in Hangzhou I usually couldn’t understand what he was saying, so he always spoke to me in English. Hopefully by the next time I return to Hangzhou I will be able to speak with him entirely in Chinese.

Another travel “adventure”

2010-09-13T01:38:00.000-07:00

Me and all my bags

I thought I had figured this out.

As I barreled through the Shenzhen train station, with 60 pounds of baggage hanging off me, I really felt like a bull in a china shop – pushing people aside, saying “rang yi xia, rang yixia!” (“allow me a second to pass”), and nearly taking out an old women with my garment bag. It was 1:20. My train was scheduled to leave at 1:28.

After my last trip I decided to start planning more in advance. I was going to wake up at 9:00, pack my bags, eat breakfast and head out by 11:00; plenty of time to take the subway from Hong Kong to Shenzhen and go through customs, then get a quick cab to the train station. At 9:00am on September 3^rd, my phone began playing a really loud and obnoxious rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.” I turned it off and rolled back over, then thought better and turned back to reset my alarm for 9:10…

At 11:30am I finally woke up and looked at the clock. In alarm, I jumped out of bed and rushed into the living room, where I began frantically shoving my cloths and other belongings into my two backpacks’, duffle bag and garment bag. I couldn’t figure out what had happened until I looked at the clock on my phone and noticed it was 10 minutes fast. In my semi-conscious state earlier that morning I had accidentally reset my clock instead of my alarm. I finally left the apartment at 12:05pm and ran across the street through the poring rain to the subway. I still had enough time to make my train if I hurried, and taking a cab all the way to Shenzhen would have been almost as expensive as my train ticket, so I continued with my original plan.

Getting off the subway in Shenzhen, I rushed to the customs gate. Even though Hong Kong is technically part of China now, it still functions very much like its own country. You have to pass a customs office to exit Hong Kong, followed by a Chinese customs inspection to enter China. As I waited in the line market for “foreigners,” with my four large bags, I drew some stares even from foreigners (who I would think by this time are used to seeing strange sights like me in this crazy country). Finally reaching the other side, I rushed to the road and grabbed a cab at 12:45. I threw my backpacks and duffle bag into the trunk (I’ve gotten quite efficient at this by now) and jumped into the back seat with my garment bag. Seventeen minutes later we pulled up to the Shenzhen train station where I leaped out of the cab and ran around to open the trunk. I pushed the button but it wouldn’t open. The cab driver came around with his key and turned the lock, pushing in the button, but it still wouldn’t open. He kept pushing it, banging on the hood, and jiggling the key. It wouldn’t budge. The cab driver knew I how little time I had, and he began to start getting frantic (this is not to mention how I was feeling at this point). Two men selling carts for travelers to use to bring their luggage into the train station came over to see what was going on. “What time does your train leave?” One of them asked. “about 1:30” I replied. “1:30? Oh, you’re not going to make your train!” No sh*t. Thanks for your optimism.

I climbed into the back seat of the cab to see if the seat would pull down and I could get my bags that way, but after prying down the seat, there was only one small opening, far to small to fit my bags through. Finally, after banging and jiggling for about fifteen minutes, the trunk finally came open. It was now 1:18. I threw my forty-pound backpack on my back, grabbed my other bags, and started running toward the entrance. The entrance to every train station in China has a security check point, with a metal detector and conveyer belt for luggage like in an airport. Thankfully these lines always move fast, but the speed at which they move and the chaos that ensues as people queue to go through them only reinforces their pointlessness. As I threw my bags onto the conveyer belt and began walking through the metal detector, a little girl ran between my legs, setting off the detector. The security guard didn’t even flinch however, and I quickly grabbed my bags (nearly getting knocked over in the process by people frantically trying to grab their own bags behind me) and began running toward the escalator to the platform. I arrived at the platform at 1:27 and ran toward a closed gate with a women standing on the other side. “Open the gate!” I shouted. “I can’t” she replied. “The train has already left.”

Frustrated and exhausted, I slumped down on the floor by the gate, panting. I pulled an orange out of my bag and began pealing it, hoping to retain some energy before I figured out my next move. A security guard came over and told me I had to move, but at that moment I physically couldn’t carry my bags any further. “Wo xian chi, ranhou qu.” I said rather forcefully (I’m going to eat first, then I’ll go). The guard didn’t like that, but one of the other guards seemed to take pity on me and told me I could stay for the time being. He asked me what had happened and I told him. He took my ticket and wrote something on the back, telling me to go down to the ticket office and ask them to change my ticket. Thirty minutes later, after I had regained my strength, I lugged my bags downstairs and waited in the ticket line to see what my fate would be. The lady at the counter looked at what was written on the back, and then gave me a new sleeper ticket for the next day, with no additional charge.

I found a cheap hotel and spent the night in Shenzhen. Sitting in the hotel room, I considered the fact that things could have been worse. At least I still had a bed for the 25-hour train ride the next day. I knew these kinds of things would happen when I started on this adventure, and I’m sure there will be more before the end. But someday I’ll laugh about this. For now I’m just glad to have a shower and a bed.

Couchsurfing & sight seeing in Hong Kong

2010-09-12T21:21:00.000-07:00

It’s amazing to see all the different types of people, from different walks of life, that you meet when you are traveling. Staying at Sean’s tiny apartment on the outskirts of Hong Kong, with his mother, two brothers and lots of other couchsurfers, it really was like staying at a busy hostel. For a few days you cross paths with very different people from all over the world and connect through the one thing you have in common: a passion for travel (for those of you that aren’t familiar with couchsurfing, check out their website).

Out to dinner with Sean's couchsurfers. More pictures from Hong Kong here.

For the first few days of my stay, Sean was also hosting an Australian man, three German men, and a girl from the Netherlands. In his tiny apartment, that meant 2 people in a full-size bed, one on a cot, and two on the floor. So for the first two nights I slept on a yoga mat. But it was better than that hard seat on the train ride, and Sean’s family was quite generous, cooking me a few meals, helping me to wash cloths, and allowing me to stay for nine days. Through couch surfing I also met up with another women from Hong Kong named Margot, a very friendly, lively character who is conversant in several languages and is thinking about starting a business to bring street art into mass the main stream through a unique marketing campaign. She also offered to introduced me to several people she knows in Shanghai so that I have some people to meet when I get there.

A few days after I arrived, one the Germans, Marko, and I took a day trip to Lantau Island, Hong Kong’s second biggest island. Lantau is probably the least developed of Hong Kong’s Islands, aside from the airport. We first took a cable car that brought us from the train station half way across the island, up over the tops of some 2,000+ foot tall mountains, to end at the world’s largest statue of the Budda. This thing must have been over 100 feet tall and sits up on a cliff overlooking the ocean and nearby islands. After seeing the Budda, we traveled by bus down into a small fishing village, one of the few areas that has been minimally impacted by Hong Kong’s rapid development. We went for a boat ride through the village and then out into the open ocean where we saw dozens of large trade ships coming into dock at Hong Kong’s port. As we zoomed across the water, I was momentarily brought back to zooming across lake Annecy in a sporty little sailboat. Finally, as we rode the bus back around the island to the train station, Marko and I saw some beaches and stopped for a quick look that turned into three hours of hanging out on the beach and eating dinner in a little café on the beach’s edge. When I decided to go for a swim, I discovered that the water was a warm as a heated pool. “I could get used to living in Hong Kong,” I thought to myself. Unfortunately virtually no one in Hong Kong speaks Mandarin as a first language. I’d be hard pressed to perfect my Chinese here.

A refreshing, cold beer on the beach...no I was not paid by Carlsberg to include this.

See more pictures of Lantau Island here.

I also was beginning to realize that Hong Kong has a lot of opportunity, but not much in the way of clean energy (at least not that I could find in a week). This was confirmed when I met with two Tufts alumni to get some career searching advice. Michael Fung, the Chairman of JP Morgan Asia, has an office on the 29^th floor of a building in the heart of Hong Kong’s financial center. After meeting him in France this summer (the Tufts Board of Overseers had their annual meeting at the European Center in Talloires), he agreed to meet with me to give me some career advice when I arrived in Hong Kong. He said if I wanted to work in clean energy, and practice mandarin at the same time, I should go to Shanghai or Beijing. He also gave me some helpful advice on networking and presenting myself, commenting on how I was dressed that day (I scored pretty high marks except for not having a blazer), and how I could make myself memorable to people. The whole meeting was quite fast paced and formal, but went quite well overall. If I ever want to get a job in banking I might have an in…

My interaction with Tufts Overseer James Soutar on the other hand was quite different. One night he invited me to a “party” at a bar he owns in Hong Kong called “Home.” The party turned out to be a gathering of an organization called “Internations,” an organization that organizes social events for expats in hundreds of cities around the world. While James had to leave before I arrived, I met him the next day at his bar, in a very casual atmosphere. He gave me some similar advice, and especially emphasized that I should “do what I love, and the money will follow,” a mantra that I continuously try to live by. Hearing it from a successful hedge fund manager and bar owner though was quite insightful…

During one of my last days in Hong Kong I met up with my friend from Dan Resnick, a current graduate student at the Tufts Fletcher School. Dan was traveling through China with his girlfriend after doing an internship with the Clinton Global Initiative for two months in Swaziland. We spent most of the day walking around in Hong Kong’s various outdoor markets, taking a ferry across the Pearl River, and eating a delicious seafood dinner of crab and lobster (Though Dan thinks all lobster tastes the same, I insisted that Maine lobster is the world’s best).

And finally, I am off to Shanghai to continue my job search and see China’s current pride and joy, the Shanghai World Expo…

The Asian Century?

2010-09-01T07:59:00.000-07:00

Today (August 29^th) I accompanied my friend Jenna and her family to Church, located on the 79^th story of one of the tallest buildings in Hong Kong. This was not the traditional church that I grew up with (and even less like the church that many of you grew up with). There was no alter, no pews – in fact nothing that resembled a church in the slightest. The pastor wore a suit and tie rather than a robe (although he was a 66 year old American – the one thing that made this believable) and stood at a transparent lectern. Behind him was a band that played and sang modern Christian songs rather than psalms, and a wide screen TV displaying the lyrics and passages from the scripture. The mass consisted of singing songs and the pastor’s sermon. There was no parading in, no alter boys, no communion, and no rituals. And I thought my church back in Freeport was progressive. This brought a whole new meaning to contemporary Christianity.

Anyway, after the mass was finished, I met another young American named Nick who had moved to Hong Kong a year ago to start a new life. We began talking and it turned out we are both interested in a lot of the same things – China, business, international affairs. Then he made a startling confession. He said he wasn’t planning to return to the US. “There’s no more opportunity in the US,” he said. “All the opportunity is here, in Asia.”

Looking out the window of the 79^th story of one of the tallest buildings in Hong Kong, at the surrounding skyscrapers, trade ships, cranes and construction sites, at first it was hard to disagree with him.

View from Jenna's church

But his comment disturbed me, and for a while I couldn’t stop thinking about it. No more opportunity in the US? The US has always been the land of opportunity. For over 200 years it has welcomed immigrants from around the world seeking a better life, with more opportunities and freedoms than any other country. But other questions continued to plague me. Is the US political system and the US treasury, just like the investment banking sector, going bankrupt, as so many people are beginning to believe? The 20^th century was the American Century, as Henry Luce stated in 1941, but these days everyone is talking about “the Asian Century.” China has grown at three times the pace of the US for the last 30 years, and some of its neighbors (i.e. Singapore, South Korea) have grown even faster. An increasing number of young westerners looking to seek their fortune, like Nick and myself, are going to Asia where business is booming.

And as many of you may suspect, I have been thinking a lot recently about whether I could see myself permanently moving to Asia. And now I realize what really disturbed me about Nick’s comment: I used to think I would only move to Asia for a few years and then return to the US, but lately I have become increasingly uncertain. There's so much opportunity here that its tempting to consider staying.

Part of the reason I’m going to China is for the disorderliness, for the chaos, the discomfort, and the conflict – because it will be an adventure and because there is an almost endless number of problems to be solved there (check out this really cool video made by a friend of mine that does a better job at describing these issues than I ever could). But there are also plenty to be solved in the US – and plenty of conflict and chaos there as well. And I don’t believe that there is no longer any opportunity in the US. As long as American’s continue to hold their government truly accountable, and don’t let apathy and ignorance take hold, America will continue to be a dynamic, prosperous society. And above all, there is one thing that the US will most likely continue to have in the next century that Asian countries may not have: innovation and creativity – because unlike Asian societies, American society rewards and encourages initiative and independence. The rise of Asia presents a healthy new challenge of the US, and as long as we don’t give up on our core values, I think Americans will rise to the challenge.

But as this contemporary church at the top of a skyscraper demonstrates, Americans also need to make sure we don’t get stuck in our old ways, that we are aware of what is going on in the greater world, and that we continue to move forward, adapting to the changing world around us.

I think for now I’m still set on returning to the US after a few years. China is an adventure that will help me to see the larger world and bring some of the insights I gain back to the US, where we need it now more than ever. Asian Century or not, I still believe in the American system – it just needs some work.

Returning to Hong Kong, August 22nd – 25th

2010-09-01T06:54:00.000-07:00

I woke up Sunday morning in Lijiang to a wonderful sound: silence. For a minute the blue, semi-transparent curtains of my room tricked me into thinking the sky outside had turned blue, but when I pulled them back, the sky was just as foggy and gray as ever. Still, it wasn’t raining…yet. So I decided to suck it up and go hiking in the nearby mountains as I had planned. I set out around 8:30am on what was suppose to be a six-hour hike (round trip) to find a village in the mountains near a lake called Wenhai.

No sooner had I left Yuhu village then the rain began again. I was wearing all quick-drying athletic cloths, but in the interest of packing light, I had left my rain jacket in Hong Kong (real smart during the rainy season, I know…) and was only wearing a semi-water proof running jacket. I took shelter under a pine tree for about 20 minutes until the rain lightened up and then trekked on. The rain continued off and on all morning, and I continued to find shelter under trees and ledges. As I continued into the mountains, the trail began to diverge into several different paths. I had been given rough instructions on how to get to the lake (stay on the main trail, heading Southwest, and when you pass a dam you know you’re almost there), but it was getting increasingly difficult to tell which trail was the main trail, and on several occasions I found myself on the wrong trail and had to back track. It has already been two hours and I didn’t feel like I was getting anywhere.

One of my hiding places from the rain

I began to hear a stream or river running in the distances. Was I supposed to cross a river? There was no indication of this on the very touristy-looking, imprecise map I had been given. As I crouched under yet another ledge in the middle of the forest, about ready to give up and go back, I began to hear voices shouting near the river. Even though it was still poring, I began running down the trail, hoping I would come across someone who could tell me which way to go. As I emerged from the trees at the edge of the stream, the rain began to stop and on the opposite bank I saw a group of men leading a family traveling on horseback. I crossed the stream and asked the men how to get to Wenhai. They told me they were heading in that direction and that I should follow them.

These men were local Naxi who had made a business out of leading tours on horseback of the valley and mountains surrounding Yuhu (I’d seen their office in the village earlier), and the family that they were leading had come from Kunming. As does every Chinese person I meet, they asked me what I was doing in China and where I had learned Chinese (I’ve gotten pretty good at answer these questions by now). Most of them were from other Naxi villages nearby. They walked this trail almost every day, which was evident by the horse tracks and droppings in the mud, and by how well they knew the trail. Every so often they would pick berries and nuts off the trees and give me some to eat. I’d normally never eat strange berries and nuts in an unfamiliar wilderness, but these men were native to the land and seemed to know it very well. When they stopped for lunch they also offered me a bun with meat and vegetables, which I gladly took since I realized I hadn’t brought enough food. Finally we reached the top of a pass between the mountains and the dam that was shown on my map came into view. The men pointed me along a road that circumvented the lake and disappeared off into the fog. “It’s about another 30 minute walk to Wenhai from here,” one of them told me.

Sure enough, after about a half hour of following a windy dirty road through another mountain pass, I spotted Wenhai lake down below me. I descended to the village, which was even more remote and ancient looking than Yuhu. There were horses grazing and farmers working in rice patties in the lush plane at the lake’s northern end. Aside from a few cars and electric wires, there was no evidence of modern civilization anywhere. It was already 3:00pm so I didn’t spend long in the village, but began following the road back to Yuhu. Suddenly as I came around a bend I was greeted by a startled pack of wild horses, who half trotted, half galloped off the trail. Still, I was able to get pretty close and take some good pictures.

Dam at the top of the mountain pass

Wenhai village - view other pictures from the hike here.

When I finally returned to Yuhu, the guesthouse was bustling with activity. It turned out it was Javad’s niece’s birthday, and his wife’s whole extended family had come over for dinner. Javad’s sister in law also had some friends visiting from Japan, and there were two more Americans who had come to stay at the guesthouse. As I was talking with one of the Americans named Conrad, he mentioned that he was currently at graduate school in Geneva. “Oh, I just spent the last two months not far from there, in Talloires, France,” I said. “I just graduated from a University called Tufts…have you heard of it?” “I just graduate from Tufts a few years ago.” Conrad said. What a small world.

I was starving from my hike, and wolfed down my food as I listened to people speaking Japanese, Naxi, Mandarin and English around the table. I also talked with Javad’s brother in law, who was originally from Chengdu and was quite an avid mountain climber. He told me that he had climbed the Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, a 4,000 meter (12,000 foot) mountain that boarders Tiger Leaping Gorge. It’s one of the largest mountains in the region and also is the most southern, glacier-covered mountain in the region. He told me that if I returned to Lijiang again he would guide me up the mountain. After dinner we had a birthday cake for the little girl, who had just turned nine, and who insisted that we all perform something for each other (she was really taking advantage of being the only kid among 15 or so adults). For my performance I told the story (in Mandarin and English) of how I got “married” to one of my classmates in a role-play of a traditional wedding ceremony in Lishui, China. I’m not sure if the story made sense to the Japanese speakers (who spoke very little English and Mandarin), but it was fun and confidence building to know that I could tell this story in Chinese.

After wondering why I had come to Lijiang the night before, this day had turned out to be quite an adventure. I may not have found Shangri La, but I did find a small, tranquil Chinese village in the mountains, and meet some really interesting people. And in the end, that’s what really counts.

The next morning I began the long journey back to Hong Kong. This time I took a train rather than a bus from Lijiang back to Kunming. Once again I was squished into a series of seats crowded around a table with five Chinese people. It turned out that these people were all traveling together and had never met a foreigner before. I spent a good part of 10 hours answering their questions and talking about differences between China and the US. It was really interesting to see what Chinese people who are not as exposed to the international community (unlike a lot of the Chinese people I’ve met in the past) think about Americans and the US. We even talked about the war in Iraq and the US Presidential elections.

When I arrived in Kunming it was late at night, and I immediately headed for the ticket window to buy a ticket back to Guangzhou before going to my hostel for the night. I first went to the ATM to withdraw some money, and noticed a homeless man sitting outside the door to the ATM room. There are so many of these types of people around the streets of China’s cities that I did what I usually do and ignored him. Fifteen minutes later I opened my wallet at the ticket counter to pay for my ticket, and noticed that my ATM card was missing. I suddenly realized I’d left the card in the ATM! Cursing myself (I’ve done this before in a foreign country) I ran back to the ATM, vainly searching to see if I’d dropped it on the ground or by some miracle someone had taken it out and left it near the machine. When I arrive at the ATM the homeless man suddenly got up and started excitedly babbling in what I think was Mandarin, but his accent was so thick it was hard to tell. He pointed off down the plaza and I eventually realized that he was pointing to a police car. I ran over to the car and asked the police if they had found an ATM card. They thought for a minute, and then one of them reached into his pocket and pulled out my card! Thanking them I ran back to the homeless man, preparing to give him a 10 or 20 kuai note so he could go buy some food. But when I got there he refused my money. “If you want to thank me, go buy me a cigarette!” is what I finally discerned from his babbling. So for the first time in my life, I went to a convenience store and bought a pack of cigarettes. I returned and handed one to the man, who nodded his approval and told me to continue on my way.

The rest of my journey back to Hong Kong was pretty uneventful. I had a bed this time on the 26-hour train ride, so I spent most of the time reading and sleeping. When I arrived in Hong Kong I retrieved my other backpacks from Jenna’s mom’s office (with quite a bit of difficulty as my phone battery had died and I didn’t have any way of getting in touch with her) and finally arrived at the home of my new host Sean, whom I’d found on couchsurfing.org, at 10pm. Sean lives in a small apartment with his mother and two brothers. On top of this however, his apartment has become couchsurfing central in Hong Kong in the last few weeks, as his endless generosity has made it difficult for him to say no to anyone (in fact me and the other couchsurfers staying there began calling his place “hostel Sean”). So the night I arrive there was also an Australian and three Germans staying at his apartment. I slept on a yoga mat on the floor. But it was an improvement from Chungking Mansions, and I was just happy to be staying in one place after a week of traveling.

Looking for Shangri La, August 17th – 21st

2010-08-29T12:24:00.000-07:00

What am I doing here?

This is what I started to ask myself, as I lay in bed at a Naxi guesthouse in a small village 20 kilometers from the city of Lijiang, listening to the soft pitter-patter of the rain outside. It wasn’t one of those existential, “what is the meaning of life,” questions, but the simple question of why I had come all this way, traveling more than 38 hours by train and bus, to arrive in a cloud-covered valley with little prospect of doing what I had come to do: go hiking in the mountains.

Lijiang sits in a valley near the edge of the mountain range that eventually becomes the Himalayas about 500 miles to the west. Lijiang is also a few hundred kilometers north of the capital of Yunnan province, Kunming, the “city of eternal spring.” Yunnan is a highly biologically and geographically diverse region, from glacier-covered mountains to temperate plains, to rainforest in the south. Ever since I unsuccessfully applied for a Fulbright grant a year ago to do research here on China’s solar energy development, I had been itching to travel to Yunnan. Just north of Lijiang, only a few hours by bus, sits the region that is supposedly the basis for James Hilton’s “Shangri La” in his 1933 novel Lost Horizon. Shangri La has come to be synonymous with a utopia, isolated from the modern world, were the people never grow old and everyone is always happy. I had hoped to travel there, or at least near there, to go hiking in Tiger Leaping Gorge. After two months in the beautiful French Alps, I seemed to have this idea that I was going to find another paradise in the mountains and valleys of Shangri La. It turns out my expectations for this trip however were highly unrealistic.

Lijiang Valley during the rainy season

As I prepared to leave Hong Kong only a day after I had arrived, I received multiple warnings that there was currently flooding and landslides in the west near the mountains that I wanted to travel to. “It’s the rainy season,” everyone kept saying. Still, I ignored these warnings and decided to base my expectations on the weather.com forecast that “weather in Yunnan is just as varied as it’s geography,” and hope that I would be lucky enough to hit a patch of sunny days.

In order to get to Yunnan however, I first had to find a long-distance train from the Pearl River Delta to Kunming. Perhaps the most industrialized and densely populated region in China, the Pearl River Delta is lined with the mega cities of Honk Kong, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, as well as many other cities. In order to get a train ticket to Kunming, I first had to travel three hours by subway and train up to the Guangzhou railway station (there is no way that I know of to buy train tickets remotely in China) at the northern end of the Delta. I left Hong Kong Tuesday afternoon after lugging most of my bags to my friend Jenna’s mom’s office in downtown Hong Kong, where I would be leaving all but a small backpack for my week-long journey. Between navigating my way through the transportation system, going through customs into China, and waiting in a long line at the train station, I finally reached the ticket window around 9pm. “One ticket to Kunming with a bed please,” I said in Chinese. “We don’t have any sleeper cars available until Thursday” the attendant told me. I had been told that I shouldn’t have any problem buying a train ticket for that evening or the next day, but it seemed that Kunming was a popular destination this week. Slightly surprised and annoyed, I ended up buying a non-sleeper for the following evening. Looking back now I’m not sure why I bought a non-sleeper – perhaps I was just too tired to concentrate – but this would prove an interesting choice.

Waiting outside the crowded Guangzhou railway station to get a ticket

After spending the night at a cheap hotel and an afternoon walking around a park in Guangzhou (I decided this is one of my least favorite cities in China), I boarded the train to find myself sitting in a hard, upright seat next to six other seats crowded around a small table. Not only was every seat filled, but there were people standing and sitting in the isles – for a 25 hour train ride! Where did they expect to sleep? I would soon find out just how resilient the Chinese can be.

As the only westerner for at least 3 train cars, I began to draw people’s attention and I soon had a cadre of Chinese people crowded around me, listening to me explain in my rusty Chinese what I was doing in China, traveling in a non-sleeper, non AC car, to Kunming. My main interrogator, A 26 year old man who had originally been standing in the aisle, squeezed himself between the three women sitting across from me, and proclaimed me his new “Waiguo pengyou” (why-gwuo pung-yo is the best pronunciation guide I can come up with), or “foreign friend.” He then ordered a 25ml bottle of bai jiu, the Chinese hard alcohol, for each of us, along with some spicy chicken legs and cow tongue. Thinking I might as well make some friends for what would otherwise be a nearly unbearable train ride, I spent the hour from 12 to 1am eating chicken legs and cow tongue to rid myself of the disgusting taste of the bai jiu, and then drinking more bai jiu to counter-act the spiciness of the food I was eating. After we had finished, my new friend invited me to smoke with him near the door connecting our train car to the next. Throughout high school I was vehemently anti-smoking. Even now I’m still generally against it and smoke very rarely, but I’ve come to realize that 1) So many other things in modern society are giving us cancer too and 2) like drinking, smoking can be a social lubricant, especially in developing countries where the social stigma against it doesn’t exist as much as in the US. In fact, so many men in China smoke that exchanging a cigarette is a form of social currency and a way of building valuable social capital in a country where foreigners are often distrusted (as I would learn on two other occasions during my trip). So I reluctantly joined my friend for three cigarettes over the course of the night. Thanks John for teaching me how to hold a cigarette correctly.

Sleeping on the train to Kunming

After we’d been talking for a while, my new friend ask me if I wanted to come back to his home city of Chengdu with him, meet his family and see the city. This struck me as pretty bold request considering we’d just met six hours ago. It sounded exciting, but it would mean another 18-20 hours of train riding once I reached Kunming, and who knew what I would find when I arrived in Chengdu. Maybe this guy wanted something from me and had been buying me drinks and calling me his friend to get me to come do… I don’t know what. I think I was just making up excuses not to deviate from my plan, as my mind was still set on hiking. I declined as politely as possible. With people sleeping in the aisles, either slumped against the seats or sitting on stools leaning over themselves, I tried to sleep in my hard, upright chair, without much success.

View from the train to Kunming

After 26 hours with very little sleep, lots of bad food and plenty of alcohol, I arrived in Kunming around 11pm, found my way to my hostel, and passed out. The next morning I began trying to figure out the best way to get to Lijiang and looked for a hostel in Lijiang for that night. In China you have to buy any train or bus tickets at the station that they leave from. This makes it quite difficult to plan ahead if you only arrive at your destination a day or two before you want to leave, because as I learned there is no guarantee you will be able to get a ticket for the time, or day that you want at that short notice. Consequently I didn’t have any trains, busses or hostels booked more than a day in advance. But as I searched for a hostel in Lijiang and everything was booked, I realized it was Friday and Lijiang must be a popular weekend destination. In desperation I got on the website couchsurfing.org and began looking for someone living in Lijiang that I could stay with, although these people often want a little more advanced notice than half a day. And that’s how I found the Nguluko Guest house in Yuhu village, 20 kilometers north of Lijiang city. I contacted the American manager, who said they would have a bed for me that night and he could even pick me up at the bus station. The price was a little more than a hostel, but it included meals.

The staff at the hostel directed me to a bus station where I could buy a bus ticket pretty short notice to Lijiang. Even though Lijiang is only about 300 kilometers away from Kunming, it took about 10 hours to get there. On the way we traveled over some pretty treacherous, twisty, pot-hole filled roads with cliffs straight up on one side and down on the other. When I arrived the American, Javad, greeted me and then drove me out of the city to the small Naxi village of Yuhu. The Naxi are one of the 55 ethnic minority groups in China. While they look Chinese to most westerners, there are subtle differences in facial features between them and the main ethnic group, the Han Chinese, which constitute the vast majority of the country’s population. It was once again late when I reached my final destination for the evening, and after a quick tour of the guesthouse I went right to sleep.

Nguluko Guest house (taken from their website)

It had been sunny in Kunming the day before, so I was hoping I would wake up the next day to a beautiful view of the mountains. Instead, the first thing I noticed as I became conscious was the steady sound of falling rain. With a slight dread growing in my stomach, I slowly got out of bed and descended to the courtyard, which I had to cross in order to get to the Kitchen for breakfast. Almost all the houses in the village are designed in a traditional Chinese style with an ornate courtyard surrounded by a two-story building on all four sides. While Javad was the business manager, the guesthouse was the home of his parents in law, two Naxi Chinese. They both dressed in very traditional clothing, spoke very little English and some Mandarin with a heavy accent. In fact the man looked as if he had just come from the Chinese military, as he constantly wore a straightjacket and cap. They were very friendly however and cooked great food. Yuhu village itself is quite remarkable. Aside from some modern conveniences like cars, electricity and running water, the Naxi seemed to live much like they probably had for the last several hundred years. According to Javad, even though the Naxi were traditionally a nomadic tribe, they had built permanent settlements in this lush valley. Their beliefs and way of life is actually much like that of Native Americans – they are mainly animists and live close to nature. They are also one of the few cultures in the world that still uses a hieroglyphic language.

Naxi elders playing Mahjong - for more pics from Yunnan, click here.

That day I decided to go into Lijiang city and see the “old city” there, although after Yuhu this actually proved quite touristy. Still, I found a cool little Tibetan café to hang out in, drink coffee and use the Internet. As night fell, the bars of the old city began to come alive with lights, music and dancing. I thought about going to hang out in one of them, but I didn’t know anyone, and Javad’s parents in law had already cooked dinner for me. Even though it was very interesting staying in the Guesthouse, there never seemed to be anyone around except some Naxi (whose speech I couldn’t understand very well) playing mahjong. And since it was still raining too hard to go hiking, I was beginning to wonder what I was going to do here. I grabbed a cab back to Yuhu, but in the dark my cab driver got lost and had to stop several times to ask for directions. It was dark and foggy and for a while I thought we would never find the village. The third time we stopped, the driver rolled down my window to ask directions from an old man. As he did so, he passed the man a cigarette. I have always had a hard time getting accurate directions from Chinese people (even if they don’t know, they will pretend like they do to save face), but I suddenly realized that somehow, this little gift was going to motivate this man to give us accurate directions. We eventually made it back to the Guesthouse and ate dinner and then went to sleep wondering what I was doing in Lijiang during the rainy season, with no friends and no sun. Paradise, whether it’s Talloires or Shangri La, felt especially far away…

Arrival in Hong Kong, August 16th

2010-08-29T09:48:00.000-07:00

Note to self (& other would-be travelers): Never travel with backpacks instead of suitcases when your bags weigh 60 pounds and your backpack straps are highly uncomfortable.

Before I started on this trip I convinced myself that it would be easier to travel to unknown places (i.e. possibly on rough terrain) with back packs rather than suitcases, as traveling in India two years ago with two large suitcases proved difficult. Now I realized I’d much prefer the suitcases. I managed to pack my entire life for 2-3 years into four bags – a large backpack, a small backpack (which I wear on my front), a duffle bag in one hand and a garment bag in the other. When I have all four of them hanging off me it looks pretty ridiculous, and I drew quite a few stares as I walked through the streets of Hong Kong from the airport to my hostel. I’ll include a picture here sometime soon.

The hostel in which I spent the first night is called the Oriental Pearl, located in the Chungking Mansions, a large mall/ apartment complex in the heart of the Kowloon district, downtown Hong Kong. The same hostel is actually described by the author of the book “Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven,” a memoir about two women traveling in China in the early 1980s (for anyone whose been to China though, the book is not that good). Unlike the rest of the city, it seems like the building and the hostel haven’t changed much in 30 years, as there are still lots of sketchy characters hanging around the entrance, the elevator up to the hostel still has paper sidings on two of the walls, and the rooms are hot and cramped with broken AC systems.

My tiny little, four person suite

The ground floor of this complex is filled with stalls selling knock-off phones, watches, shoes, cloths and everything else commonly found in China. Surprisingly there are also quite a few Indians and Africans working and living around this area, which I suspect is not characteristic of the rest of Hong Kong. Skyscrapers densely enclose the street outside with shops at their base, and bright neon signs advertising various stores and products. It looks a lot like New York, but with some distinctly Asian characteristics (i.e. signs with Chinese characters). I’ll be staying here for one night, then hopefully heading off to Yunnan tomorrow morning.

Aside from the sketchy Chungking Mansions however, what I’ve seen of the city so far is quite interesting. As I was riding the train in from the airport, we passed lots of high-rise apartments nestled into the sides of mountains. In fact I’ve never seen such tall apartments before – some of them are as tall as commercial skyscrapers that you’d expect to find in the middle of the city. Being located on a mountainous island makes land very limited though, so I guess they have to compensate somehow. This evening my friend Jenna treated our friend Siauxi and me to an all you can eat Korean BBQ (where you actually cook the meat yourself on a heated platter in the middle of your table), in the more upscale center of the city. Hong Kong even has its own Times Square, and the area again did look strikingly like downtown New York.

The street outside the Chungking Mansions

Tomorrow starts what will probably a pretty complex travel route (I have to go from Hong Kong to Shenzhen to Guangzhou to Kunming to Lijiang…) with plenty of surprises along the way. I’m going to brace myself and hope for the best.

Energy Policy & Sustainable Urban Development in Singapore

2010-08-29T08:58:00.000-07:00

So why study these things, and why Singapore?

I think the answer to both these questions is best summarized by the theme of the Shanghai World Expo: “Better City, Better Life” (I will be visiting here next week – to learn more about it see http://en.expo2010.cn/). In 2007, for the first time in history, the majority of the world’s people lived in cities rather than in rural areas. In the next 20-30 years, it is projected that some 300 million Chinese will migrate to the countries booming cities. The story is similar in India and other large developing countries. If we are going to prevent environmental catastrophe and improve health, safety and standards of living for people around the world, the answer lies in the world’s cities.

In order to make cities more sustainable and less reliant on dirty energy, better city planning and more city-wide energy efficiency and clean energy programs are needed. Singapore, perhaps more than any other city in the world, has planned its growth carefully – mainly out of necessity – has focused above all else on improving life for its citizens, and is home to some of the most progressive urban environmental experiments. I wanted to learn more about what is being done in Singapore to see how it could be applied to Chinese cities, which in contrast often lack careful urban planning and are reap with environmental problems – in fact 7 of the 10 most polluted cities in the world are in China.

Thanks to Michael Quah at Singapore’s Energy Studies Institute, I learned a lot about Singapore’s energy policies and was able to meet with a key decision maker at the National Environment Agency. While in Singapore I also observed first hand the implementation and effectiveness of some of the cities environmental programs.

At the Energy Studies Institute with Michael and another researcher Valerie. Looking awkward for yet another research picture...

My meeting with Michael above all got me thinking about energy and sustainability policy in the context of different political systems. And while I believe strongly in the American political system – based above all on liberty and equal opportunity – Singapore’s success does raise some doubts about the ability of the American system to address long-term problems. Energy policy and planning in the US is plagued with subsidies, the influence of special interest groups (whether it be the energy companies themselves, environmental groups or others), and elected officials who often don’t think beyond the next election cycle. This makes something like energy policy, which requires long-term goal setting and system-wide thinking (i.e. considering how various aspects of our society interact with each other and how they are related to energy policy, such as transportation systems, electric power systems, trade policy, social welfare, economic growth, environmental problems, food production, urban planning, etc.) very difficult.

As Michael pointed out however (Michael is an American, originally from Michigan) Singapore has virtually none of the political problems that America, and even China, have. Because it is a small city-state, run by one party that does not have to spend millions of dollars to run for re-election, there is very little influence of special interests on energy policy planning. This leaves Singapore’s leaders (who I might add almost all have PhDs) to rely on the people who they should be listening to: scientists, economists and professional urban planners, who study the trade-offs to different energy policies from a fairly pragmatic and unbiased perspective. Case in point: Singapore may be one of the only countries in the world that does not subsidize it’s energy industry – at all. I know for those of you who don’t study energy policy it’s hard to understand the significance of this, but it’s actually quite amazing. This means that gas prices are not artificially depressed to encourage car ownership – in fact car ownership is generally discourage in Singapore (although there are still a lot of cars). It also means that people pay high prices for electricity, so they tend to conserve that as well. At the same time however, it means that renewable energies also are not subsidized, making them currently uncompetitive in Singapore.

What Michael told me then is that Singapore wants to act as a laboratory – a testing ground for the latest environmental and new energy technologies. It will not encourage them through subsidies – which are market distorting – but through innovation incentives, like research grants. It also especially encourages environmental solutions if they also mitigate another major concern for Singapore: energy security. As a small island nation with very few natural resources, Singapore was until recently dependent on its sometimes-unfriendly neighbor, Malaysia, for water. It also imports the majority of its food, oil (which it then refines into gasoline), and natural gas for electric power generation.

Taking environmental concerns, energy security and economic development into account has resulted in energy and resource policies that put Singapore at the cutting edge of innovation in this field (although an important note: many of the technologies that made this possible were developed in the US). Here are the main energy & resource initiatives that Singapore has implemented in the last decade:

1. Converting almost all of it’s electric power production to natural gas. This makes economic and well as environmental sense – natural gas has gotten cheaper in the last two decades, as has the cost of transporting it as Liquified Natural Gas (LNG). Of all the fossil fuels, natural gas also emits the least carbon dioxide.

2. What power isn’t produced form natural gas comes from trash incineration. The ashes from this process are then put into a landfill built on reclaimed land that has been designed to preserve marine ecosystems such as coral reefs and mangroves. The ash acts as a strong fertilizer for these ecosystems, and just burying the ash rather than the garbage saves valuable land space. This also eliminates the problem of methane leaking from landfills (methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO2)

3. Non-CO2 air pollutants are strictly regulated, giving Singapore very clean air and water.

4. Singapore is exploring the best way to implement battery-charging stations throughout the city to encourage electric cars.

5. Singapore has a top-notch mass transit system – you can get almost anywhere in the city by subway or bus with ease.

6. Singapore is one of the greenest cities I’ve ever seen in that there are parks and trees everywhere, and the government is working on a plan to connect these parks to encourage more recreational use. There are also several experimental green roofs in the city. This vegetation helps absorb carbon dioxide and decrease the “heat island” effect.

7. The Marina Barrage that I mentioned earlier is an ingenious plan to create a barrier between the ocean and the fresh water at the mouth of Marina Bay, where most of the islands river run into. This effectively separates the salt and fresh water, creating a large fresh water lake in the middle of the city that can be used as a reservoir.

the Marina Barrage barrier

The Marina Barrage exhibition/ education center

8. With the help of NASA technology developed for the space station, Singapore recently finished a project to recycle the city’s wastewater back into drinking water. Between this and the Marina Barrage, the country is now 80% water self-sufficient.

9. In the last 10 years Singapore as pursued an ambitious, citywide energy efficiency program. This has helped to reduce the country’s energy intensity by 15-20% in the last decade. There are many components of this program, which I learned about from the energy efficiency director of the National Environment Agency. If you want more details on this, I can send you my final case study.

Not to paint a completely rosy picture of Singapore, there are a few problems with all this. The first is that in order for all these initiatives to get passed – indeed, the tradeoff of having a government that can conduct such careful planning – is limitations on personal freedoms. For example, because the government has strict control over all property development, there isn’t much room for creativity or innovation. On a side note, it was a little disturbing to see to police officers chasing after someone who was crossing the street in the opposite direction of everyone else on a crosswalk during national day. Another problem is that despite all these improvements, Singapore’s overall energy consumption is still rising because of rapid economic growth, and the only thing that will truly combat this is throwing some renewables into the energy mix. Finally, by some definitions, Singapore’s status as the world’s largest port makes it highly energy intensive. Ships that dock there have to fill up with fuel, which is then burned on their international voyages. Determining who is responsible for that CO2 is a big challenge that will continue to perplex policy makers for a while to come.

Overall however Singapore can serve as a model for China – and for the world – on how to effectively manage energy and water resources, promote sustainable economic development and resource security. If we can find a way to inject some of Singapore’s secret sauce into the world’s major cities, we will be well on our way to solving our energy challenges.

Singapore, August 8th – 15th

2010-08-29T06:18:00.000-07:00

First let me just say thank you to Sherman Teichman and the Institute for Global for making this trip to Singapore possible with their generous sponsorship. The main purpose of my trip to Singapore was to investigate how this progressive city-state is implementing solutions to climate change, through sustainable urban planning, energy efficiency and using cleaner energy sources. This continues some work that I began but wasn’t able to finish for my internship at the Joint US-China Collaboration on Clean Energy (JUCCCE) last summer: writing a case study of Singapore’s energy efficiency programs to present to Chinese mayors during JUCCCE’s Mayor Training Program. The purpose of this program is to present examples of how these mayors can implement energy efficiency and other energy planning programs in their own cities. At the same time, spending a week in a country that I believe is one of the world’s most interesting political experiments was quite eye opening. So this entry will detail both the fun things I did in Singapore, as well as some of my research findings.

Marina Sands Hotel & Casino

After spending only six days at home (which for the first time didn’t feel like nearly long enough), the prospect of returning to such a foreign place as Asia seemed a bit daunting. But as I arrived in Singapore I was greeted at the airport by the beaming face of my friend Sharmaine and her two brothers, who took me to their apartment where I would be staying for the week. As we drove across the southern end of Singapore, I got my first glimpse of Singapore’s skyline, and a close-up view of the newest building in Singapore, the Marina Sands hotel and casino. The building has three towers, with a structure that looks somewhat like a high-speed train spanning the top of all three towers. It’s definitely one of the coolest buildings I’ve seen. The rest of the skyline is dominated with modern skyscrapers, most of them financial buildings. Palm trees and other plants lined the highway. And as we drove over a bridge we could see off in the distance, across the water, one of the darker sides of Singapore: gas flares from the oil refineries.

A little background on Singapore: In just a generation, this small city state has grown from a large fishing village when it gained independence from Britain in 1965, to one of the richest, most modern nations in the world (in fact per capita income in Singapore is higher than the US). This dynamic growth has classified it as one of the “Asian Tigers,” along with South Korea, Taiwan and Hong Kong; four small Asian nations that have achieved rapid development since the 1960s. This small island now has a population of about six million, making it one of the most densely populated countries. The government is extremely conscious of land conservation, giving rise to some of the tallest high-rise apartments I’ve ever seen. As we drove past them, Sharmaine commented that these high rises are in fact public housing, and that some 80% of the city’s population lives in them. In contrast to the US, where mostly poor people live in public housing and there is a certain stigma associated with them, in Singapore this a very normal thing. This, more than anything, is a reflection of Singapore’s political-economic system: the country is technically a democracy, however one political party has been in power since the country’s independence and the opposition parities are very weak. The state also owns a significant chunk of the economy. On one hand, it seems that no one wants to vote the ruling party out of power because they have done such a good job developing the country into a modern state, but at the same time there are rarely any opposing candidates to vote for. So in reality the country is very authoritarian, but has a very capitalistic, free-market oriented economic system.

Sharmaine's family's condo

When we arrived at Sharmaine’s condo on the west end of the city, I fell asleep almost immediately, having gotten very little sleep for the last two nights. When I woke up around noon the next day I was greeted by a blast of heat and humidity – but also a beautiful view from the back porch of a lush palm tree garden lining the path that snaked through the condo. I was then shepherded out of the house by Sharmaine’s family to Holland Village, were we ordered breakfast/ lunch from hawker stands (the government has actually designated certain areas throughout the city for hawks so that they don’t just pop up haphazardly). That evening we also went out to dinner with Sharmaine’s extended family and friends. In fact, throughout the whole week her family was extremely generous and welcoming. Thanks for a great time, Sharm J

The next day, August 9^th, was Singapore’s National/ Independence Day (also my mom’s birthday). I was lucky enough that my friend Dilys was able to get us tickets to the national day parade (a fact I was reminded of several times by Sharmaine and the other Singaporeans I met who had never attended the national day parade before).

I’ve never seen a more elaborate display of nationalism.

What I thought was just going to be a simple parade was actually an elaborate five-hour performance including pop stars, choirs, dancers, light shows, a military display, fly-overs, parapenters and fireworks. Around 4:00pm we gathered in a 30,000 person temporary stadium that had been constructed in the heart of the city near the old parliament building. The show began with four MC’s riding in on motorbikes and leading some activities to get the crowd fired up. A choir composed of high school students from across the city sang some national day songs, as did a Singaporean pop star Kit Chan. As the songs were sung, I learned that a new pop song is composed every year for national day. Then the real show began.

The parade began with a series of fly-overs by Singapore’s most high tech military aircrafts. From above the clouds, a group of parapenters jumped from airplanes and circled high above the crowd, with smoke tailing from their shoes, which held small thrusters to allow them to propel through the sky. They landed in the middle of the stadium one by one as the MC’s described their experience and commitment to national service. Then in the distance we spotted a formation of five jets flying toward the center of the city. As they flew low over the stadium we were suddenly struck by the rumbling sound and felt the intense vibrations from their engines. Just as they flew overhead they suddenly twisted in the air split off in different directions, as the MCs described with great enthusiasm the impressive capabilities of these aircrafts. After the flyover, a dozen military companies paraded out into the center of the stadium and stood in formation facing the Parliament building. The Prime Minister had arrived by this point, and he gave the command for the leading officer to march the troops off down the street to start the parade. As the soldiers left, dozens of Singapore’s most high tech tanks and other military vehicles began parading down the street in front of the parliament building. Seeing these modern war machines set against the backdrop of Singapore’s financial district, created a really strong image of wealth and power. As dusk turned into night (we’d already been there for three or four hours), performers and glowing floats paraded out into the stadium and gave several performances that reminded me of the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics. At the finale of each performance, fireworks would erupt from all four corners of the stadium and from the tops of all the major skyscrapers in the city, with the largest display over Marina bay, which sits at the heart of the city near the financial district.

Foreign spectators might think from this display that Singapore is an aggressively nationalistic country, but in fact the military display was mainly to deter Singapore’s unfriendly neighbors, aka the much larger countries of Malaysia and Indonesia. Singapore’s government is in fact very peaceful, commerce and free market oriented. But every country that grows wealthy will have jealous enemies, especially if those countries are poorer – and much larger.

I spent the rest of the week between research meetings visiting various parts of the city such as Singapore’s many parks, Little India (very much like real India, except cleaner and more orderly) and the Marina Barrage (I’ll explain this really cool concept in the next entry). Sharmaine also took me to see a Mandarin Chinese musical called December Rains, or 雨节 (the direct translation is really “rainy season”), the first of its kind produced in Singapore, and on Saturday evening we went out clubbing. I’d like to detail each of these experiences, but in the interest of not going on forever, if you want to learn more about them we’ll just have to talk in person. Overall it was a great week and I only wish I could have spent more time there, but I’m sure I’ll be back soon.

Also, you can see more pictures from my trip to Singapore here.

The title of this blog

2010-08-25T17:58:00.000-07:00

I sent this in an email to many of my readers, but I wanted to post it here in case some one new reading this is wondering about the title:

As some of you know, my Chinese name is “Da niu” or 大牛 (pounced da-nee-oh), mainly because it sounds like ‘Daniel.’ The literal translation into Chinese however is “big bull.” Most of you probably know the saying “a bull in a china shop.” For those who don’t, it’s basically a metaphor for someone who charges into a fragile situation without much regard for the circumstances, and acts in a rash or clumsy way. While this is something I try not to do on a regular basis, I realize that despite the time I’ve spent in China in the past, I’m still a foreigner with very little knowledge of the intricacies of Chinese customs and norms. Therefore I’m bound to get myself into some fragile social situations that I simply don’t know how to handle, and maybe even break something (metaphorically). My goal is to learn as much as I can from these experiences and document the most interesting ones here. And maybe I'll even eventually get to the point where I'm no longer a big bull in a china shop.

Talloires Time

2010-08-16T22:26:00.000-07:00

Written 08.01.10

Welcome to my first post of my new travel blog. While this post is about France, the rest will be about my 2-3 years in China. I hope you enjoy.

Also, you can now view the rest of my pictures from Talloires here.

Well, my last few weeks in Talloires flew by and now it’s been a week since I said goodbye to the Tufts European Center and the French Alps. As I write I’m on a plane headed to Singapore, where the next leg of my travels begin. Before this I spent about five days at home in Maine, spending time with family and friends and repacking for my move to China. I’m starting to get that strong feeling that I suspect often comes to most people who spend years traveling around the world – a feeling of being uprooted and adrift. I’m setting sail into somewhat familiar waters, but without a clear idea of where I will end up…

So here are a few highlights from my last few weeks in France:

The sound of cowbells will forever remind me of Talloires

One Friday evening, Gabriella took John, Dave and me to visit a man named Francois, who lives in a house on a ridge above St. Germain, and close to a mountain called the ‘Don de Lanfon.’ Before we left, Gabby cautioned us to bring warm cloths; even though it was not more than a 15 minute drive and only about 800 feet higher than Talloires, the area below the Don has a completely different climate. While Talloires is almost subtropical (there are actually a few palm trees growing near the hotels), Francois’s house sits in an alpine meadow. We arrived as the sun was starting to set behind the mountains on the opposite side of the lake, and were stunned by the amazing view of the lake and mountains from Francois’s house. The house itself is also pretty cool: completely off grid (with only a few solar panels to provide electricity), the house is more of a log cabin with only a fireplace for heat, but the entire Southwest side is covered in windows, bathing the house in sunlight for most of the day. The rooms were very compact: the master bed is lofted above the bathroom, and

As we watched the sunset and the moonrise, Francois and two of his lady friends served us a delicious dinner of sausage, cheese and sautéed wild mushrooms he had picked himself that morning (a week later, John and I would go forging for wild mushrooms early in the morning, but with no success). Francois is a big, friendly, but crass Frenchman, who loves to tell stories (most of them about women) and make dirty jokes. Over the course of the night he also promise to set all of us (Dave, John and me) up with French girlfriends. He talked completely in French, but between his hand motions and Dave’s interpreting, I was able to grasp most of the meaning. As the night went on, Francois continued to bring out bottle after bottle of wine, and the conversation got more and more boisterous. By 1:00am we had consumed seven or eight bottles of wine between about five of us. We finally stumbled back down to Talloires, were I immediately crashed in my bed.

The next night Dave, John and I went with Emmanuel (John’s old host sister) and her friend to a foam party at Macumba, the largest club in Europe. Located on the outskirts of Geneva just before the Swiss border, the building is the size of a small mall, and boasts six distinct clubs/ dance rooms, several restaurants and other attractions. As we entered the complex, we saw people emerging from one of the rooms soaking wet and covered in soapy looking bubbles. We’d been given some coupons for the event a few days earlier, which had pictures of swimming suits, scuba masks and flippers under “dress code,” but we’d taken this as a joke. Now, dressed in clubbing cloths, we felt a little naive. But we continued on into the room where house music, strobe lights, and a waterfall of foam poring from the center of the ceiling greeted us. There were also several cannons shooting foam from the sidelines. After a few hours we were completely soaked with soap, and there was about two feet of foam on the floor. It was a lot of fun, but every time I managed to wipe the soap out of my eyes I’d get another blast of foam in the face. Next time I’ll bring my scuba mask.

During the last week John and I went for a final, two-hour sail on a Hobie Cat 15. It was a windy day and the middle of the lake was covered in white caps. We managed to get one of the pontoons slightly out of the water, but the boat we had that day was an older model and we instead ended up getting a lot of water in the face every time we went over a big wave. Still, we made good time and managed to zip half way across the like in the first hour. We had a close call where a large cruise boat approached in our blind spot and we only realized it was there as it sounded it’s horn a few hundred feet in front of us. On the way back we skirted a high cliff where people were jumping off into the water, and we slid around the peninsula opposite Talloires where a large castle stands guard over the lake. We also saw another Hobie Cat capsize twice in the middle of the lake not far from us, and we realized that could have been us if we’d gotten the newer model that day. I was actually a little disappointed that we didn’t capsize, as I think it’s an experience all sailors should have. Better luck next time.

Finally, a few days before I left I managed to hike up to the top of the Don de Lanfon. This is one of the mountains clearly visible from Talloires, and the name means “child’s teeth,” because of the 2 mile long, 300+ foot tall rocky outcrop jutting up in the center of the peak. I set out around 4pm from Talloires one cloudless afternoon, first hiking to St. Germain, and then following the road behind it up to the alpine meadow where Francois’s house sits. From there I entered the forest on what I thought was a trail that Olivia, John and I had discovered a few weeks earlier. It turned out there were many trails however, branching out in different directions, and as I continued and the mountain got steeper and steeper, I began to realize I was no longer on a trail.

Soon I came to a small clearing with felled trees across my “trail,” which had turned into a ravine heading straight up the mountain. Not wanting to lose time by going back however, I decided to press on. I figured it wouldn’t be that hard to find my way if I just headed straight up the mountain. In hindsight this was a good assessment, however I sourly underestimated how steep and difficult to climb the mountain would become. As I continued up the ravine the incline reached 45 degrees or more, and with the ground covered in leaves and pine needles, it became very slippery. I found two sticks to help dig into the ground and pull myself up the mountain, and grabbed onto trees wherever I could. It was hot and humid in the thick underbrush, and flies and mosquitoes began to swarm around me. Just as it was beginning to get unbearable and I thought I’d never reach the top, I saw a clearing up ahead. I emerged from the woods onto a field of small rocks overshadowed by the Don (the big rock itself), and climbed gingerly across, trying not to start a rock slide with me at the front. Finally I reached the foot of this colossal rock, and found a trail that appeared to circumnavigate its base. I followed it in the direction where I thought the real trail was, and finally came around to a grassy meadow where the trail continued upward. As I reached the top of a grassy ridge right next to the Don, I realized that there was no way to summit the rock from this side. The cliffs jutted straight upward hundreds of feet with no passable route that wouldn’t require climbing gear. From the ridge however I had perhaps the best view yet of the lake and La Tournet. It was a great way to end two months of hiking in France.

Reaching the Don at last

It's strange the way time passes in Talloires. You'd think, like most fun experiences, the time would move by fast and before you know it your time in this beautiful place would be done. While I think I will always feel like I didn't have enough time in Talloires, time passed in a way that makes you feel like you've been there for decades. At the end of each day, I would say "wow, did I really do that this morning? it feels like so long ago." I think this is partly because the pace of life in Talloires is much slower than the fast world of Tufts in Medford/ Boston. But the area also has an enchanting characteristic to it that you can only understand by going there (if you are planning a trip to France anytime soon, I wouldn't recommend anywhere else). I will forever be reminded of Talloires when I hear the sound of cowbells ringing in the distance, or see the moon rise over a lake. I feel very grateful that I had the opportunity to spend two months in this wonderful place, and I hope everyone reading this has had, or will someday have, an experience that makes you feel the same way.