White Baby part 1 of 2

I think it may have cost me a friendship.

But it’s not my fault, I couldn’t help myself.

It had a been a great, fun-filled weekend, but by Sunday afternoon in the amusement park, we were all pretty wiped out. But the kids wanted to go on one more ride. So a few of us adults sat on low wall while the kids squeezed in one more ride on the tilt-a-whirl.

There are a lot of world-class attractions at the Chimelong Amusement park: rollercoasters, rides, and shows. But let me tell you what the number one attraction at the Chimelong Amusement park was last weekend.

My friend Amber’s kids are quite a bit younger than our girls, so we had been going on different rides all weekend. To be honest, I hadn’t spent much time with Amber and baby Malachi inside either of the parks. So I was a little surprised when I sat down on the ledge next to Amber and four-month-old Malachi. Passerbyers –especially young women- weren’t just stealing glances, they were gawking.

I was shocked. You would have thought this kid was John Bon Jovi. “Has it been like this all weekend?”

“Pretty much” Amber rolled her eyes. I knew that we were pretty deep into China, but come on people, please tell me you’ve seen a white baby before.

After about the eighth cluster of women walked and gawked their way passed us, I said more-or-less under my breath “Yeah, that’s right, we got a White Baby, right here.” Then I said it again. This time not so quietly and I did it while staring right back at the gawkers.

Then I found my rhythm.

Lumberjack part 2 of 2

The basic premise for the "American Lumberjack Show!" was that two teams –red and blue- were engaging in a variety of lumberjack competitions ranging from axe throwing, to wood chopping, to two-person hand sawing. Members of each team wore either a red or blue flannel shirt of which all the sleeves had been cut off. The men on each team wore either a cowboy hat or a mesh truckers ball cap.

It was really more redneck than it was lumberjack.

In addition to the several young ladies who were dressed like the barmaid Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke, each team had a young woman who was an active participant in all the rough and tumble lumberjack activities. They each wore short Daisy Duke denim shorts, pigtails, and a sleeveless flannel shirt that was tied off to bare their midriffs. They kind of looked like a poor man’s EllieMay from Beverly Hillbillies. Classy.

In between log-rolling and wood-chopping competitions, there was a lot of trashing talking –actually it was more trash gesturing since it was a Chinese audience and the actors didn’t speak Mandarin. The Chinese emcee did all the talking, whipping the characters into a frenzy. Three-fourths of the way through the 45 minute show –when the “score” between the red team and the blue was tied at 3 to 3- it all spilled over into an on-stage brawl.

Punches were thrown, groins were kneed, and several people ended up in the water tank. The lovely lasses and their bared midriffs were right in the middle of the fray. In fact, two of their team members had to pull them apart. It was straight off of the stage of The Jerry Springer Show. Classy.

When most Americans think of traditional Chinese culture, they think of silk robes, Mandarin scholars, emperors, Buddhism, natural medicine, and tea.

Nice to know that when the Chinese think of American culture, they think of barroom brawls, sleeveless flannel shirts with trucker hats, and feisty maidens in shorty McShort denim shorts.

It makes me want to wear my “Proud to Be an American” t-shirt for the rest of the week.

-Jack

Lumberjack part 1 of 2

I didn’t need to see the 4-D Happy Feet Show with the vibrating seats. I really didn’t have any desire to ride The Dive, Chimelong Amusement Park’s tallest roller coaster. But there was no way that I was going to skip “The American Lumberjack Show!”

We were in Guangzhou, about four hours into China by bus and by train. Seven families –about 25 of us- were doing a little weekend getaway. It had been organized by my colleague Tim “Mr. Hong Kong” Wong. Tim had gotten us a really nice package deal at a great hotel that came with tickets to the waterpark, the circus, and an amusement park -all of which were within walking distance from the hotel.

I was anxious to see how the largest and most successful amusement park in China portrayed America. Of all the aspects of American culture they could have picked –Hip Hop, surfer culture, Jazz, Westward Ho!, Motown, 1776, the Roaring Twenties- they decided to build a show around lumberjacks.

This I have to see.

As we settled into our outdoor bench seating hewn from half logs, I saw that some of the cast members were mingling with the crowd and posing for pictures. The couples wore coordinating outfits –with his shirt and her prairie skit in matching robins-egg blue. My instinct told me something was amiss. The cast members didn’t strike me as young men and women from Dubuque or Kansas City or San Diego. Later, I was able to confirm my intuition. The cast weren’t young aspiring performers from The States, they had all been hired from Eastern Europe: Czech Republic, Romania, Bulgaria. Ah, but they are tall, white and blond; close enough.

The show was supposed to be set at a tradition lumberjack camp/saw mill. And just to make sure the audience got that, on the side of one of the small wooden buildings on stage in big three-foot letters was the word “SawMel.”

Rainy Day

Okay, I promised myself that I wouldn’t be that guy. You know the one. The guy who moves to Hong Kong for two years, moves back to The States, and from then on every conversation is sprinkled with sentences that begin with “Well you, in Hong Kong they . . . "

Yeah, him. That guy. I don’t like him. He’s obnoxious. He’s the guy who “accidentally” refers to the elevator as the “lift” and the parking garage the “car park.”

I promised not to be that guy.

But, I've decided to give myself exactly one wild-card exception and I’m going to go ahead use it right here in the blog so that it is done and over with.

There is one thing -actually there's many, but I'll limit myself to one- that Hong Kong seems to get right. When we began working here, Julie and I had to sign up for the Mandatory Provident Fund (MPF). It’s a retirement system. We –like every other working person in Hong Kong- are required to save toward our own retirement. My wife and I had to each open a retirement account into which we contribute a minimum of 3% of our pay check each month.

Within the first few weeks we were here, our human resources department had an investment agent come in and give us an overview of all the possible mutual funds into which we could choose to put our money. These were mutual funds that had been pre-approved by the Hong Kong government and they were all pretty conservative and intended for steady, low-risk growth. We were welcome to contribute more than the three percent minimum if we wanted to.

These individual retirement accounts are attached to the employee and are completely portable. If I change jobs within Hong Kong, I just fill out the paperwork and I continue to grow my mandatory retirement account. In fact, they are so portable that when I leave Hong Kong, I am able to fill out some paperwork and then I will be able to withdraw my money from my MPF fund, take it the States with me, and roll it into my IRA back home. Sweet.

Hong Kong hasn’t always had the MPF in place. Prior to the introduction of the MPF they had a very modest tax-payer retirement system. When the MPF was introduced many older workers were too close to retirement to be able to save enough before they stopped working so the older tax-payer system was kept in place. So currently, Hong Kong has two systems operating side by side. But theoretically, in a decade or two, they should be able to phase out the older system and every one should be able to support themselves in retirement with money drawn from their personal Mandatory Provident Fund.

I’m no financial guru, but that seems pretty reasonable to me. Everyone is required to save for his or her retirement. By law, you have to put in a minimum amount, but you are welcome to put in more. Rather than being put in some fabled “lock box” the money is conservatively invested in the market where is grows. Rather than handing your savings over to The Big Guy to be used to pay other workers, your earnings remain yours.

Radical concept.

-Jack

Thanks to the linguistic influence of the British, any insurance or savings plan like this is called a “scheme.” Every time I hear the Hong Kong retirement plan called a scheme it makes me giggle. But I have got to be honest, the Mandatory Provident Fund sounds a whole lot less like a scheme than that Ponzi pyramid we’ve got going on the other side of the Pacific.

Okay, I am done now. Now if next time you see me, if I start a sentence with "Well, you know in Hong Kong they . . . " go ahead and slap me upside the back of the head.

Is It Now We Go?

This from one of my student's recent paper on the Holocaust “Hitler was doomed to die, so before Nazi Germany’s defeat, he poisoned his beloved dog and suicided with his wife Eva Braun.”

I have noticed that my students will use the word suicide as a verb (an intransitive verb to be precise). In standard American English, suicide is a noun. To turn it into an action, you need to embed it in “he committed suicide.” I am not the only one to pick up on this. My colleagues have noted this peculiar usage as well. Usually, when I encounter anomalies like this, my first instinct is to attribute it to the influence of the British. But my British, Aussie, and Kiwi colleagues are taking no credit for this one.

My second guess was that it mirrors Cantonese. Sure enough, after asking a few of my Cantonese-speaking colleagues, “he suicided” parallels how it would be said in Cantonese. My colleague who teaches first graders and who is also a Cantonese speaker tells me his first graders frequently use the following sentence structure “Mr. Tan, is it now we eat our snacks?” He tells me this is exactly the way the question is structured in Cantonese.

Another favorite of mine among elementary students is when they challenge each other to a competition, they use the word versus in a non-standard fashion. “Hey, Mr. Tan, come verse me in ping pong.” Or, “At lunch today, the boys are versing the girls in soccer.”Sometimes they just abbreviate it down to “vee-es” as in “Okay, I will vee-es you now.”

I love it.

-Jack

Pack Mule part 4 of 4

Finally, after fifteen minutes, she showed up; she was visibly shaken. We moved toward the taxi stand where we joined a long line of people waiting for the next available taxi.

While we waited, she told us what had happened. After her case had gone through the x-ray, the security guard had pulled her aside. A pair of guards escorted her to a side room, where they opened up and examined the contents of her case. They told her they were going to confiscate the majority of her materials. In the end, they only ended up taking half of it for which they wrote up a receipt that they gave her. She was told that when she came back through, she could pay a small fine and get back her confiscated materials. Then they sent her on her way to continue on with her trip. No long-term detention. No arrest. No cancellation of her visa.

Right about the time she finished her tale, our taxi pulled up to our rendezvous site. I was led to yet another room in yet another non-descript building. In the room, a contact was waiting for us. I was introduced to her and my hosts explained what role she played in the whole process, but I didn’t quite catch it. I was too busy trying to unload my materials and stack them on the table. From here, the materials would be distributed far and wide.

We didn’t spend any extra time lingering. My two hosts briefly conversed with their contact and worked out some future logistics. Then the four of us left. We used a different route as we made our trip in reverse.

After a quick meal at a fast food joint, we had enough time to make just one more trip across on this particular day. That was fine by me. It had been a long day. It was late and my back was sore. It had been an exhausting day.

And to be honest, my nerves were a little frayed.

Pack Mule part 3 of 4

I looked up to see a guard pointing at me and saying something. I faked surprise and confusion and hustled back to the x-ray machine.

I pushed my way through the throng of commuters putting their bags on the conveyor built. I hoisted my heavy case onto the rollers and gave it a push. I followed the crowd to the other end of the conveyor belt and waited. I’m sure it was only a matter of seconds, but it seemed like minutes. I kept my eye on the opening were my case would eventually emerge. It rolled out. I grabbed it, dragged it off the conveyor belt, and proceeded on my way. If the guard didn’t like what he saw on the screen and was going to detain me, it was going to be right about now.

I took a deep breath and headed off with my case. I waited for someone to tap me on the shoulder or grab my arm. Just start walking, I told my legs. But not too fast. One step. Two steps. Three. Four. The crowd started to fan out.

I was clear.

I picked up my pace. I looked up and tried to orient myself. There was the duty-free cigarette stand. Over there was the currency conversion kiosk my host had mentioned which meant that the exit to the taxi stand should be around the next corner. I made my way outside where I saw the man and the women waiting at the pre-arranged spot next to the news stand. We quickly and quietly moved to a less conspicuous spot out of the flow of traffic. We continued to keep an eye on the news stand. We were waiting for the fourth and final member of our group.

She didn’t come. We waited. Five minutes turned into ten. “She must have been detained,” my host speculated.