If I Was in This Club

BOSTON - I sometimes copy-edit at bilingual Chinese-English publication here. Like all newspapers and magazines, we tend to get a fair amount of junk sent to the paper from hapless public relations people around the country. Today's delivery was one of the best. Our newspaper became the proud owner of "China Picture Book: CEOs Making Money and Having Fun in China."

Haven't heard of it? Neither had I.

If you're interested, you can order the book here. I would recommend it, unless you're looking that perfect gag gift for someone soon to depart to China. The book is the worst combination of empty management manuals, glossy travel guide and public relations department creation.

A choice excerpt:

"In China, a CEO is treated like a king! Police escorts, personal meals with the mayor, gifts at every gathering... and the business ain’t bad, either!"

Super cool! When Joe Mancuso (picture at the bottom of this paragraph) does the writing, I do the buying! The book is so over the top it's ridiculous. The main "story" deals with Mancuso, as he tours China with a group of fellow Chief Executive Officers who are members of something called the "CEO Club," which he founded. He visits all the major tourist spots of China. There are goofy photo-ops of him and his friends parading on the Great Wall, sauntering on the Bund in Shanghai and looking goofy during minority dance celebrations.



China has 54 officially recognized minorities. It seems Mr. Mancuso has waltzed with at least 43 of them.

I feel sorry for everyone involved in this pitiful enterprise. To the clients of Mancuso, who really were just brought along on a glorified tour of the country. They had plenty of "ceremonies" and "escorts" and "receptions," but little actual business. It looks fun, but for the money that these people must have paid (and considering they are allegedly in charge of the medium-sized companies back in the States) it seems like a waste of time.

The Chinese don't come off better. The book portrays them as rather stupid, for so lavishly laying out the red carpet for these quasi-celebrities. The English text of the book is constantly outlining how easy it is to do business in China, because the locals are just dying for white people to come and do business with them.

The apotheosis of this is a page that written entirely in English. The book is supposed to be a guide for Americans who wanted to do business in China, but in an effort to cover all markets, it's presents in both language. (For rather unclear reasons, it reads in English from front cover to back cover, but in Chinese the other way around.) The page of just English text -- which helpfully points out that it isn't in Chinese -- tells the BIG SECRET OF DOING BUSINESS IN CHINA. This secret turns out to be... all Chinese think American investors work for Fortune 500 companies!

Boy, the Chinese are so stupid. They fête and fête white people who are actually small potatoes. The truth, I'm afraid, is more complex. First of all, major investors know who the Fortune 500 companies are, and don't leave their handlings with small-time dealers like the CEO Club. These remaining companies are still valuable for certain provinces and communities, and they are a big deal there. But it isn't going to drive government policy or anything. The potential business they bring is important enough that its better for the hosts to err on the edge of formality.

Their Web site promises "a firsthand look at American CEOs visiting, networking, and learning how business is done in China... and insight into Asian culture, historical landmarks, and information on all major Chinese cities." There's some truth to that. What the buyer of the "China Picture Book" gets is an inside look into how American business are bumbling their way through one of the biggest potential markets in world history.

Meeting you, I am very happy.

BOSTON - I’ve seen the light, and his name is Ma Dawei.

Ma Dawei is a fictional character with whom my Chinese classmates and I have become intimately familiar the past few months. Today I met him, and it was one of the most fascinating lectures I’ve ever attended.

A little background: I’ve been studying Mandarin for nearly a year now. The textbook my school uses for the first two years of study is the “New Practical Chinese Reader” Beijing Language & Culture University. The text consists of grammar lessons, reading passages, character maps and cultural notes, but the most important part is the dialogues. Here a set of six reoccurring characters who live in China interact in increasing sophisticated ways.

Overall the dialogues are pretty good, but there are some necessary concessions in order to introduce vocabulary and grammar at the right pace. An example, from the lesson we’re studying this week:


Lu Yuping: Where is the kitchen?
Wang Xiaoyun: The kitchen is to the north of the living room. The bedroom is to the east of the living room. There is a big balcony at the outside of bedroom.
Ding Libo: Mr. Reporter, you have already asked so many questions. You must also want to write an article to introduce Ma Dawei’s rented house.
Lu Yuping: Asking questions is a reporter’s professional habit.

Over the course of the year, these six people have almost become fellow classmates. I wanted to know what happened when Lin Na lost her bike, or why Wang Xiaoyun didn’t like the Chinese opera performance, and not just because it was homework.

Imagine my surprise when our teacher informed us two weeks ago that Ma Dawei – one of the main characters from the text - would be coming to our university. As a special bonus, the usually quite stingy-on-the-grades Chinese department would be offering a half-point on our final grade for attending. I was there.

Ma Dawei is really Brian Connors (a cartoon representation is at the top of this entry, which bears no resemble to the actual person), a slightly stocky Irish-American 28-year-old from Michigan. He’s not ugly or goofy or any of the stereotypes that sometimes are attached to foreigners in Asia, but he wouldn’t stand out in a crowd, either. He’s just an ordinary American dude, an ordinary American dude who speaks really, really good Chinese.

How good is Ma Dawei’s Chinese? Until three weeks ago, the entire Chinese department thought his voice was dubbed on our textbook’s audio and video cassette tapes (that’s a bit of misnomer, because all our materials are now online). When informed otherwise, my teachers promptly invited him for a pep talk.

“Chinese people often tell me that I speak better Mandarin than they do,” he said. “And most of the time, it’s true.”

Connors’ standard Mandarin accent is top-notch. In a three minute introduction, Connors managed to get the jaws of the vast majority of the Chinese department on the floor by speaking so quickly and fluently.

He gave tons of advice. I haven’t spent too much time in Mainland China – just two months – but it was just long enough to realize that what he was saying was absolutely true. Avoid hanging out with Americans while on your language program. Even if you’re speaking Chinese, talking with the locals will be much better. He also said to expect your relationships with Chinese people to be almost exclusively business-based at the beginning.

“Understand what you are both bringing to the table,” he said.

I dealt with this last point in Hong Kong. It felt like the locals who wanted to hang out with me only wanted to use me as a fountain of knowledge about the English language. Sometimes in order to make long lasting friendships, at the beginning they might have to be based on the tools and skills that each person brings to the table. For Connors, that was playing music with a local band (which brought in extra cash for having a white person frontman) and valuable conversation experience for him. I’m not sure what the comparable skill would be for me, but I’m certainly going to be thinking hard about it in the months to come.

Ma Dawei is a China success story. He completed the challenging John Hopkins in Nanjing program and is now enrolled at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government. He co-owns a café in Beijing with an attached English instruction program called Sculpting in Time. He plans to return to China after graduation and run the café full-time. It’s a long way from his upbringing.

“I’m just an ordinary dude from Michigan who likes Phish,” Connors said.

Was it worth it? I’m entirely sure from his talk. There were undercurrents, although mostly unspoken, that he wasn’t completely satisfied with his life in China. It seemed be a question of not if he would come back to America, but when.

As for the café, I hope to gather a little first-hand experience this June when I’m in Beijing. Connors set the bar pretty high in his description, so I am expecting the best.

One more thought from Mr. Connors was notable. “Living is China is incredibly strange experience,” he said. “Everyday there was a crazy event that I could have written a short story about.”

Considering my own planned future, I certainly hope that’s true.


(The title of this post is an overly literal translation from one of the New Practical Chinese Reader’s beginning lessons. I believe it was uttered by or to Ma Dawei, but I’m not really sure. The Chinese is： 认识您，我很高兴)

Les quartiers Chinois

MONTREAL - Montréal has many virtues: it's bilingual, friendly, multicultural, has bars that are open all night and best of all -- is drivable from anywhere in the Northeast. This weekend my friends and I packed into my Toyota Tercel and drove through Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts for a spring adventure.

I have always loved Montréal. These days the strong Canadian dollar may mean it's not the steal it once used to be, but my two visits in the past year have confirmed it to still be a fun place. And so it was this time. I seriously could see myself living here at some point in the future.

There's one aspect about the city that is certainly not world-class: its Chinatown. I've been to quite a few Chinatowns (although not to the most famous ones -- such as San Fransisco and Vancouver -- and Montreal's does not measure up. Rather than just mope about the state of Montréal's Chinatown, I've decided to list a few that make Chinatowns so great, and why Montreal's doesn't measure up:

1. Intriguing names

Ocean Wealth. Bao Bao Bakery. Most people come to Chinatowns for the food. Since there won't be any comforting chains or golden arches, the key determining factor on where to eat (minus a recommendation) is the names. Therefore, in a good Chinatown, places will go out of their way to make sure that you will be intrigued into stopping by. This may be through the use of not-quite-correct English or maybe overly descriptive names. Either way, it's going to beat another "East Wok" or "Happy Garden" in the race to decide where to eat.

In Montreal, the whole city seems to be caught up in a rash of bland names. We walked by a restaurant named Restaurant. Several cafés named Café, and more "Bistro"s than we could count. The same thing has leaked into Chinatown, where we were faced with the prospect of chowing down at the Ughyur Restaurant or Vietnam House. Ho-hum.

2. Hideaways

Boston has a restaurant known as the Wai-Wai. Reaching it is not easy. It's one a far-flung block of Chinatown, populated mostly by underground Eastern style hair salons. Here it's possible for a man to get a haircut for $7, as long as he has a high tolerance for karaoke. The Wai-Wai is down a flight of stairs, and barely visible from the street. The decor is vintage 1954 Hong Kong style. The air conditioner probably has not worked in the last two or three decades. Inside you can get a very greasy but very tasty barbecue pork and rice (cha siu fan!) along with some strange looks not usually found outside of Asia.

Montreal's Chinatown is rather compact. It consists of two blocks starting from Rue Rene Levesque down toward the Saint Lawrence. In the middle there is an intersecting pedestrian-only block. That's it. There aren't too many places to get lost and find little alleys in three blocks. There might be some really cool places hidden elsewhere in Montréal (there's a rapidly growing Asian, especially Vietnamese, population), but Chinatown isn't the place to look.

3. Knick-Knacks

In London I bought a small turtle statue. One time with my sister and friend, we purchased three "rice paddy" hats. These not only provided entertainment for the evening, but along with a pair of overalls, served as my costume for a party a couple weeks later. And it's the perfect entertainment in between a large meal and what will surely be an equally large dessert.

This is getting a tad repetitive, Montreal didn't have very many fun shops. My friend was not able to find red bean Popsicles, and there were precious few funny hats. Not even a replica PLA hat to replace the one I bought in Beijing and the star fell off. Since we did our fair share of partying this weekend, I guess saving a few dollars on trinkets isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I don't mean to say that there is no redeeming qualities in this Chinatown. I had an excellent dim sum meal at La Maison Kam Fung, and I did see a few trinkets that caught my eye at one store. But the best Chinese place was way over in the Plateau area, an antique store filled to the brim with dancing Buddhas, lacquer dish sets. There was a sense that somewhere, underneath all the crap, there might be buried treasure.

I offer one piece of advice to the planning committee in Montreal: demolish the sex shops-and-theater area on Rue Saint Catherine near the Chinatown Gate. Allow Chinatown to expand into that area. There are certainly enough places for people to get a C$10 lap dance in the city.

I assure you: the Chinese-Canadians will make very, very good use of the space.

Mengzi Mixup

BOSTON - The path to the East slams shut at the door to Miner Hall.

This is the lesson I've learned with my recent dealings with the Tufts Philosophy department. My time here is winding down, and that means I'm take care of my final degree requirements and assorted paperwork. This has meant in the past couple weeks I've been trying to get credits from courses I took in Hong Kong approved to count toward my diploma. This has in general been an easy process: complete a form online with the course name and a short description, and three or four days later, it shows up on your transcript.

I did receive one surprise. While in Hong Kong, I took several philosophy courses. Philosophy is not my major, but I'm interested in the subject and considered it as a field of study for a time. At Hong Kong University I was fortunate to take a class in the fall on Mencius (孟子), the famous Confucian scholar. He's often referred to as the "first Chinese philosopher" or the "founder of Chinese philosophy." Not according to Tufts philosophy Department: my petition for credit was denied.

This is a school that recently flew its president, Provost and Board of Overseers for a two week schmooze-fest around Mumbai and Delhi, and is constantly releasing press releases with quotes emphasizing that Tufts is trying "“advance its international mission,"” and be at the forefront global citizenship and leadership. (You can reach more about that trip here: http://www.tuftsobserver.org/news/20051209/tufts_in_incredible_india.html)

Tufts is supposed to be a bastion of liberal thought and diversity. There is a mandatory world civilization requirement, and all students are required to take six classes on foreign language and culture. We have dozens of Asian groups -- even a Gamelan Ensemble. But too often, these initiatives aren't evenly distributed around the university. The more activists push for superfluous actions like an Asian-American Studies major and censuring Google for its operation in China, the more suspicious the rest of the university the becomes. The result is unfortunate: "traditional disciplines" retreat into their own fiefdoms.

I mentioned this to my adviser -- who is a professor specializing in Chinese politics in the Political Science Department -- and she didn't seem surprised. "They should really call it the Department of Western philosophy," she said.

I don't disagree.

The Course of Things

BOSTON - Here's the plan: keep a regularly-updated blog that will document and try to find a common thread through my planned adventures in Hong Kong, Wichita, Kansas, New York and finally Beijing. I'm not sure if there's necessarily something to tease out here, but I figure the best way to find out is to force myself to regularly write about the events in the places around me, and how the larger events in the world are impacting the way we are now.

I'm going to try, but at this point I really can't make any promises, to focus on the locality that I am in at any given moment. That's why I'm throwing up the dateline on each entry, as part of a larger experiment to see how where I am effects the way I write. We'll see how that goes.

The real meat of the blog should begin from the date of my graduation in late May, but I admit that I will probably be posting things from time to time before then. Since I've never had a blog before, consider it a "soft opening" before things really get going.

One more structural point: I've decided not to share this blog with anyone for now. I think in the future, after it's been kept for a few weeks or month, I might mention it to friends and family, but for now, nothing. There seems to be so much baggage that comes with "writing a blog" these days, that I want to keep things on the down-low for the meantime, and give myself the opportunity to back out at anytime. But of course, this being the Internet and a public and searchable blog anything might happen.

And that is what I'm hoping will.