Adventures of a Vagabond

Living in Beijing sometimes reminds me of staying in hostels. Every week, I somehow end up meeting new people that all start by asking the same questions.

“Hi, what’s your name?”

“What are you doing in China?”

When I mention I work at Microsoft here in Beijing, within five questions I’m inevitably asked, “so Microsoft sent you out here?” Occasionally, someone will just be the straight-shooter and ask, “are you on a package?”

Ah-ha. Ex-pat lingo. Let me talk about the three types of working ex-pats.

Working to Live – Most of my friends fall into this category. Typically these are people that love China or feel called to China and found some job to support their habit. They show up on tourist visas and look for work on the ground, usually teaching English. The work is technically under the table, so every few months a 3-4 day run out of China is needed to get a new tourist visa.

Transferred Professionals – This is the category I fall into. We’re a group that love China or feel called to China and created a win-win for ourselves by finding a job to advance our careers at the same time. We have residency, get paid in local currency, and pay taxes. The pay puts you squarely into the local middle class, though in absolute amounts you’d probably be making more back at home.

On Assignment – Ah yes. Highly coveted. People ‘on assignment’ are sent by their companies because of a specific need here on the ground. For Microsoft this means that the job found you and not the other way around. As you imagine, people in this category are senior and/or being groomed for a future position. Since these folks didn’t necessarily want to be in China, they get compensated appropriately. You get paid in $/£/€. You get a very generous housing allowance. The international schooling for your kids is paid for. You’ve got the retirement benefits of your home country and bulletproof health insurance. You get the driver. Sometimes you also get a hardship allowance and your spouse gets an allowance for his/her social activities. This is what it means to be ‘sent’ out here and be ‘on a package.’ It means bank.

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Answering clearly the ‘why are you here’ question is very important to me. Sadly, most of the time, this question isn’t so much getting to know who you are, but really just ascertaining your motive and/or social status. My replies are swift—no, I wanted to come and transferred out here; no, I’m not on a package.

Especially in Beijing, it’s easy not to live in China. With all the international-grade offerings of malls, housing, and restaurants, it’s easy to lead a life exclusively inside that international community and have the local communities, people, and culture just fade into the background. That’s not why I’m here. China’s grreeeat! I’m here to grow, here to see, and here to connect with China—as hard as that can be sometimes.

If any of you have been to China, you are undoubtedly familiar with baozi (包子), the tiny steamed breakfast food of delightfulness.

Now presenting, SUPER BAOZI MAN!

Super Baozi Man vs. Sushi Man

Super Baozi Man Dragon Fist

Originally from China Geeks.

China Forces Dozens of Mexican Travelers Into Quarantine, in today’s Wall Street Journal. As I entered into China yesterday though Beijing’s terminal 2, I can certainly believe this.

According to accounts from Mexicans in the hotel, Mexican travelers arriving on various flights from Mexico and the U.S. were singled out by health officials who boarded the aircraft wearing white protective suits, masks and rubber gloves. They led away Mexican passport holders. Several travelers said Chinese television camera crews surprised them at the doors of their aircraft as they emerged. They said the filming continued through the windows of an isolation ward at the Beijing Ditan infectious diseases hospital.

Walking to immigration, a makeshift station had been deployed with an infrared camera with some software that checked body temperatures while people were on the move. I’ve seen similar stations between the Shenzhen/Hong Kong border in the south that came up after SARS and this didn’t bother me.

Just before passport control, passengers were stopped and asked to fill out a Health Information form and to present it at the “Health and Quarantine Station.” These stations are always there but typically unmanned. I nearly started laughing as I handed my form to the attendant. Taped on the corner of his station was a full size sheet of paper written with the words “MEXICO” and “墨西哥.” (Mexico in Chinese.) The attendant glances at my “countries visited before arrival”, holds it up against his “MEXICO” sheet, confirmed I did not have the requisite glyphs, and waved me through.

LOL. Wow. That’s China for you. Had I written MX, Cancun, or anything of that ilk, no problem! The letter of the law is the letter of the law. When it comes to matters like this, particularly with segregatory issues, implementation is no different: no principles, no niceties, just crisp execution without concern for the periphery. =(

(For the record, I’ve just been in the US.)

Last weekend, I had the opportunity to go to Nanshan, a “ski village” about an hour outside of Beijing.

The mountain is so incredibly Chinese in that it’s forcibly built–I knew something was up when the marketing on the site focuses on their amazing snowmaking capability using Austrian equipment. As a result, the snow is really a contiguous sheet of ice draped over a portion of mountain and land that would otherwise be brown and dead. The ice includes an off-piste section complete with planted trees, a random cabin with no doors that solely exists to provide a picture-perfect roof jump, and other "natural" rock outcroppings. It was, in other words, absolutely hilarious.

This said, I had a ton of fun. The ice softened to slush toward the afternoon and we ditched crappy rental gear when we discovered tents from Burton, Forum, and Nitro that were unconditionally lending out demo boards for free to promote the sport. There was one somewhat short but challenging mogul run at the top that was good for developing skills. I’d certainly go back and would recommend it for the experience alone.

This coming weekend the same crew of folks are heading to either Wanlong or Duoleimedi, a pair of ski resorts about 3.5 hours away that actually feature real snow. It’s been snowing quite a bit in the city this week, and it’s the nice dry snow you get in Colorado, so I have some hopes of hitting some powpow. Failing that, the weekend of the  28th we’re all headed to Korea to check out Yongpyong, which was a candidate for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

The night of the Feb 9th marked the end of the Chinese New Year period with the Lantern Festival. For the last fifteen days here in Beijing, the crack of fireworks and chest-thumping booms of exploding aerials setting of car alarms have kept many up at night or served as alarm clocks in the morning. Fireworks are used to scare away the evil spirits in the upcoming year, so there’s an emphasis on being as loud as possible.

I was still in Seattle for the all-night fireworks in every direction, but I’m told that the Lantern Festival was the second-largest night as everyone blew off the remainders of their load and threw in a little extra for good measure. I think it’s absolutely justified to say that any fireworks show I’ve seen in the US, now or in the future, is going to be completely pansy compared to this evening.

People were tugging in fireworks into the central square in my building complex on carts topped with boxes and small-barrel sized fireworks that had be hugged, not carried. This is far beyond the stuff you can buy back home. And literally every housing complex around me had a similar show happening.

Monumental. I loved it. I hope that the Mandarin Oriental fire doesn’t result in the ban being brought back. (As an aside: I have my doubts about this being an accidental fire. All of China is filled with buildings more susceptible to fire.)

More photos at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nanoflux/tags/chinesenewyear/

Tonight marks the end of the crazy fireworks that have been going off during at all hours for the last 15 days. This year’s activities definitely went out with a bang, I couldn’t believe how much firepower was released into the sky. And this was only a fraction of the actual Chinese New Year. July 4th seems completely pansy in comparison.

But there is one tragedy from all this. The government allows fireworks to be let off in the city during this period and it looks like something at the nearly-finished Mandarin Oriental got hit.

It’s said to be a total loss.

[Huffington Post]

For some reason or another, I hold this fascination with popular sayings and local culture. Nothing humors myself more than using some stupid-sounding slang or phrase prevailing at the time. Maybe this explains my vocabulary lately largely consists of: epic win, epic fail, FTW, oh noes, 0wned, and adding an ’s’ on verbs paired with singular subjects.

But cracking this code in Chinese is even more thrilling, and for this, chinaSMACK is my best friend. This site takes popular articles or posts on the Internet and translates them into English, preserving the daily jargon. I’ve learned some crazy things, SY is short for masturbation, ML is to Make Love, and TMD (他妈的) is the equivalent of dammit.

Perhaps even more interesting are the articles that they translate. I’m told that they’re quite a bit out of date, but it’s all still news to me. One post has impressions of Obama winning the election and there’s a running series on Chinese People Secrets, very similar to PostSecret.

The comments on the articles (translated from the originals) give some fantastic insight into China’s netizens. And it makes reminds me that no matter how different cultures and values might be, we have more in common than we have in difference.

This past afternoon, my roommate Will, his friend John, our friend Dan, and I decided to go for a true only in China moment…the shooting range. Yes, gun ranges aren’t anything new and even I’ve been to a couple over the years to fire a few rounds with various handguns, plus a few shots with an Uzi.

But what range in the good ‘ole US of A lets you fire RPGs, bazookas, and AA guns? BAM! We’re there!

OK–I’m talking myself up a little bit–though this was the case in the past, even some things get deemed “too dangerous” in China.

However, what this place did not have a shortage of, were fully automatic assault rifles.

When we arrived, some 40 miles outside of Beijing, we were led into a room with guns mounted and lining the walls. You might have thought that this was some military museum, but think again, a woman in high heels (everyone working here is a woman) shows up and hands us each a checklist of weapons and asks what we wanted to shoot. You pay by the bullet here and the price is (relatively) high.

After we finished selecting from our menu, we were whisked away in a minivan into the nearby mountains, arriving at a proper rifle range. Proper to an extent–you fired while sitting in a chair and the gun was bolted to a table to prevent recoil. A little less fun, a little less dangerous, but definitely prudent.

We started by softening things up with a Chinese QBU-88 sniper rifle. Yeah. Pretty lackluster. Moved up to a Chinese QBZ-95 short-range assault rifle. Little bit better. Then we moved into the European made Steyr Stg. 77 AUG Assault Rifle. John, who doesn’t understand any Chinese, went first. But I followed him and my Chinese was able to puzzle out what the guy overseeing with me was trying to tell me: liánfā means fully automatic fire! And he was telling me that a soft squeeze would fire one round, but a firm pull was gonna let this baby rip. Helllll yeah. I pulled the trigger and filled the hall with sound, with shocked sounds of awe from my friends.

It was on. And closing our set, the weapon of choice around the world, the AK-47.

Unfortunately, the problem with being the photographer is that you’ve never in your own shots, and John was an excellent photographer today. Thank you! John had the impressive new Nikon D90 DSLR, which on top of a fantastic image sensor, also does 720p HD video.

I gotta say, today was a good day.

From Fully Automatic Guns, China. Bring it.

My absentee ballot has arrived here in Beijing! After filling out the forms provided on VoteFromAbroad.org, I mailed in my registration just before the cutoff date. As a result, my ballot was sent directly to my office in Beijing!

My vote will count in the state of Washington. I know it doesn’t matter that much really, it’s pretty much guaranteed to go to my candidate already, but I feel pretty strongly that I be counted this year!

Go Obama! (and go Sound Transit Prop 1!)

straight up: This might be a surprise to you, but Internet banking is more secure in China than it is in the US. Though the system has room for it’s share of improvement and my bank doesn’t offer a version for non-Chinese readers, once things work, they work well.

While signing up for Internet banking here, you’re usually told that it’s either highly recommended or mandatory to use two authentication methods. For example–one method might be username/password and another might be a hardware device that you have to plug into your computer. This is known as two factor authentication (username/password + hardware). Some places even require a separate PIN number, which might even count as a third factor.

The hardware device varies by bank. Here’s what I’ve come across.

USB Key

This is the most common option I’ve seen, used by at least ICBC and China Merchant’s Bank. However, for this to work properly means that you have to install software on your computer. Considering the vast majority of computers here in China, that means it’s only tested and designed to work with Windows XP and IE6. Considering I use Vista, Windows Server 2008, or a Mac, it’s pretty much a fail.

Code Card

ICBC has this alternative and brilliantly low-tech solution. They issued me this code card, which is a grid of squares with a scratch-off thing. When you want to make a transaction on the website, you will be prompted to enter, say, c2. You scratch c2 off on the card and type in the letters or numbers you get.

RSA SecurID

However, the one I like best is only offered by the Bank of China (to my knowledge). BoC actually issues out RSA SecurID tokens to all their Internet banking customers. RSA SecurIDs are like the code card above, but the number is changing every 30 seconds on this device and last for five years. It’s a cool long term solution–this method doesn’t have to worry about being compatible with any given version of Windows or Mac.

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It’s good stuff. I’m really curious to know how Internet banking got this way here.