I've been keeping busy! As in, yesterday I was in the office for 12 hours. There is no official 'clock in' or 'clock out' time here, at least not so far as I have been told. Nor, as far as I can tell, is there an official 'lunch time'. I tend to eat when everyone eats (usually ordering into the office, eating, and going straight back to work) and leave when most of the marketing people leave (this is where I sit--some of the consultants will have left an hour or two before, some stay much longer). The effect of this is interesting in an psychology/economics sense--I at least feel a strong pressure to not take an hour for lunch, to arrive early and to leave late, so as not be seen as a slacker. Larry, of course, as CEO, essentially lives in the office (he has two full wracks of clothes here, and no permanent address in Shanghai). Fortunately, Jason, Malinda's cousin (Malinda is Larry's niece--convoluted enough enough family for you? And Jason, as we found out last night, is actually a second cousin, or a cousin a few times removed) arrived a couple days ago. He's a Cornell student here for a couple weeks to intern too and we're sharing a desk and projects...ahhh hooray for having someone to 'manage'--but really, he's good fun and insists on things like a lunch hour, which I hadn't even realised I was missing (a little too easygoing, perhaps?).
In any case, Larry's new book launches in Beijing tomorrow so the marketing area has been a-flurry over getting ready for that, and we've been getting sucked in. My primary job has still been data collection and analysis, and either Larry or I finally figured out what he was going for so I've been getting statistics that are maybe even useful! And, as its the end of June, probably endlessly updating the office data. But as much fun as spreadsheets have been ("a learning experience...") we're moving on to greener pastures! Larry is decidedly NOT tech savvy (both a good and bad thing) so we've got the very general assignment to "create an internet presence" and "do 'viral' marketing" etc. You know, the stuff young people and small companies do for cheap with big results...maybe. I worry that without maintenance (you can't just 'create' digg, twitter, and facebook accounts, you've actually gotta do stuff with them!) this effort will be half-hearted and ineffective, but there are some basic things (a wikipedia page! online photos!) that we are working on right now that are actually kinda cool, with the bonus of forcing me how to use the sites and do some basic HTML. I think Larry also wants us to do some astroturfing, aka fake 'grassroots' campaigning, like spamming forums with "I just discovered this new book!" kinda stuff from 'unrelated people'. Morally questionable, but again, probably a great thing for me to know. Giving me lots of new ideas for theatre marketing...
On the social front, have been meeting some cool people. Randomly have gotten to know a bunch of the dancers from the US pavilion at the Shanghai World Expo, and that's been great for having people with some sense of ART AND BEAUTY IN THE WORLD in addition to money money money. Also, they're pro dancers. Like, music videos and broadway shows pro. Which is awesome. And last weekend I went to a party on a boat with them, hosted by the Spain Pavilion, and that was pretty sweet--free alcohol, and ON A BOAT! What else? I've been eating for about 10RMB a meal (that's about $1.4) which makes me happy, and I have hilarious interactions every time I try to do something as simple as buy fruit from a fruit stand...I got enough basic Chinese to ask for things but not nearly enough to understand the responses.
Half-formed thought-of-the-week:
Don't blame the West. Westernisation of Chinese culture, etc. Or at least, don't blame it exclusively. Blame urbanization at an incredible pace. I've been reading shanghaiexpat.com, an expat forum, and a lot of the complaints are about 'rudeness', spitting in the streets, littering, doing 'private business' in public, not saying sorry, etc. Some of the responses have said "hey, it's a cultural thing", but the best ones have said "look at any early-stage city, or cities with a lot of migrants from the countryside. Habits that in the country are fine or even best-practices in crowded cities become disruptive. People need time to learn how to live in cities. Give China a generation or two. The government is trying to 'rush' 'civilizing' behaviour for the Olympics and Expo...this will come by itself in time." It's an interesting thought, I'll be fascinated to see if it is proven correct.
Wednesday, June 30, 2010
Saturday, June 26, 2010
Tragic but funny
Further Blogservations:
Or, Why the US is Fat and Sick (Compared to the Rest of the World).
Everyone in the office in Shanghai has been coughing up a storm, myself especially--who wouldn't, the air is basically brown and the tops of the skyscrapers are shrouded in a haze of *something*. Last Monday I asked Xi, the head of marketing who's desk is closest to mine, what she'd done over the weekend. "You know," she replied, "stayed home...tried to get rid of my cough." Xi lived in the UK for a while and her English is exceptional.
"Oh," I ask, "What did you take?"
She hesitates for a moment. "You know, in China, we use some food as medicine. My mother made me special drink...it has...pear...mushroom....some sweet (candy), and a, how do you say, a type of medicine juice. Chinese cough syrup!" Then yesterday, around the end of the day someone starting handing out sweets around the office (Xi keeps a seemingly neverending supply of cough drops that appear whenever I start coughing), and on the packet I noticed, written over and over in big letters, VITAMIN C. Melinda, the other Western Intern and Larry's niece, said, "doesn't this company make cough drops? Is this candy or cough drops?" They were lime flavoured, soothing on the throat, and doubtless great for the Vitamin C levels.
And it got me thinking back. In Costa Rica, when one of the staff was sick, they made him drink something whose main ingredient seemed to be cinnamon until he got better. In Korea last summer, the Jim Je Ban, the public bath, was not a luxury or just a way to keep clean but a health institution that you would visit weekly for the same reasons you brush your teeth each day. Likewise, acupuncture and massage have health connotations. And when we order into the office, I've twice now pointed at a picture on the take-out menu only to have Xi say, "I do not think that will be good for cough, it's too spicy."
Colonial Brian goes "Ah, how quaint! Folklore!" while Sceptic Brian makes unfavourable comparisons to homeopathy and remembers the words of Robbie, my chemist roommate from first year: "I don't understand people who are against taking pills but drink all these teas. It's all the same at a chemical level! The pills just distill them and give you more of the same good thing." But I can't help thinking there is more than that. Somehow, there is a world of difference between the hippy who drinks green tea (for the polyphenols and catechins! totally good for your health!) and eats Big Macs and the Chinese office worker who tells me I shouldn't even order something spicy because I want to look after my cough. It's a difference of categorization, or a nominal difference or a question of norms or somesuch structural BS that I normally dismiss as impractical and academic but does actually affect the way people act. Here, it's a question of how people relate to their bodies and to their health.
Ken Robinson says of academics, "they view their bodies as a way to get their heads to meetings" and that we "educate from the waist up...then above the neck...and slightly to the left." This slots in nicely with Descartes dualism, the idea that the body and mind are categorically different and that our bodies are mostly useful as vessels for our minds. And I would argue that this conceptual separation manifests itself in the way we treat our bodies. They probably need some sustenance and some exercise, yennow, at least a base level, but beyond that we'd really rather be watching TV or typing away at the laptop. But in China it's a common sight in offices and even just in the street in the morning to see people in groups and alone exercising and stretching as part of their daily routine--again, like brushing your teeth. It's team-building and it's brain-awakening and generally 'good for you'. I think there is a lot more of a sense, not only here but outside of the 'West' in general, of the delicate balance of our bodies (did the Greeks and medieval scholars have this with the idea of 'balancing the humours'?) and the fact that EVERYTHING we do affects them. It's a two way street--certain medicines are foods, but all food is medicine--you don't want to eat anything too spicy if you've got a cough!
What could be the cause of this? Moving from rampant speculation to rampant speculation, I'd hazard a guess that generally harsher conditions, harder living, and a greater closeness to manual labour, as well as just the sheer LACK of ability to fix something if it does go wrong, all contribute to the sense that anything you plug into the body's equation will come out the other end. We have weight loss pills and anxiety pills and cold pills, indoor gym memberships and holidays to help us 'relax when we get too stressed' and paid sick leave. All of these wonders of the modern age allow us, somehow, to be lenient, to be lax when it comes to taking care of ourselves on a day-to-day basis. For us, the very meaning of the word 'medicine' focuses on 'treatment' rather than 'prevention'.
Which isn't to say that everyone in China doesn't smoke (universally considered healthy for you, by the way, until maybe 150 years ago) and have horrible health problems, just that the way in which they CONCEIVE of their problems seems somewhat different to a Western mindset. And sure, we are starting to see, with food especially, the (re?)emergence of smoothies and health food stores and organic movements--but even look at the rhetoric for these! They market themselves as 'good for you', sure, but its not just 'good for you', its 'good for you COMPARED TO xyz'--still the rhetoric is of treatment, though in this case maybe of a more society-wide ill, rather than simply 'harmony within the body' detached from any movement or stigma (F***ng vegetarians and hippies! Get off my lawn!).
I'm sure a lot of this is wrong, but hey, it's a theory! I'd love to hear thoughts from people who know what they're talking about. And, in my own defense, I'll leave you with the words of UK comedian Eddie Izzard: "There was Socrates, he was great, he invented questioning. Before Socrates, no questioning. Everyone just sorta went 'yeah, I suppose so.'...and Aristotle, Aristotle said the sun goes around the Earth--wrong! Wrong...But in his day you didn't have to prove a theory...they went 'well done! That's a theory! That's fantastic. Just a few photos, alright...'...and Leonardo da Vinci invented a helicopted that *did not work*--and so did I! "
Or, Why the US is Fat and Sick (Compared to the Rest of the World).
Everyone in the office in Shanghai has been coughing up a storm, myself especially--who wouldn't, the air is basically brown and the tops of the skyscrapers are shrouded in a haze of *something*. Last Monday I asked Xi, the head of marketing who's desk is closest to mine, what she'd done over the weekend. "You know," she replied, "stayed home...tried to get rid of my cough." Xi lived in the UK for a while and her English is exceptional.
"Oh," I ask, "What did you take?"
She hesitates for a moment. "You know, in China, we use some food as medicine. My mother made me special drink...it has...pear...mushroom....some sweet (candy), and a, how do you say, a type of medicine juice. Chinese cough syrup!" Then yesterday, around the end of the day someone starting handing out sweets around the office (Xi keeps a seemingly neverending supply of cough drops that appear whenever I start coughing), and on the packet I noticed, written over and over in big letters, VITAMIN C. Melinda, the other Western Intern and Larry's niece, said, "doesn't this company make cough drops? Is this candy or cough drops?" They were lime flavoured, soothing on the throat, and doubtless great for the Vitamin C levels.
And it got me thinking back. In Costa Rica, when one of the staff was sick, they made him drink something whose main ingredient seemed to be cinnamon until he got better. In Korea last summer, the Jim Je Ban, the public bath, was not a luxury or just a way to keep clean but a health institution that you would visit weekly for the same reasons you brush your teeth each day. Likewise, acupuncture and massage have health connotations. And when we order into the office, I've twice now pointed at a picture on the take-out menu only to have Xi say, "I do not think that will be good for cough, it's too spicy."
Colonial Brian goes "Ah, how quaint! Folklore!" while Sceptic Brian makes unfavourable comparisons to homeopathy and remembers the words of Robbie, my chemist roommate from first year: "I don't understand people who are against taking pills but drink all these teas. It's all the same at a chemical level! The pills just distill them and give you more of the same good thing." But I can't help thinking there is more than that. Somehow, there is a world of difference between the hippy who drinks green tea (for the polyphenols and catechins! totally good for your health!) and eats Big Macs and the Chinese office worker who tells me I shouldn't even order something spicy because I want to look after my cough. It's a difference of categorization, or a nominal difference or a question of norms or somesuch structural BS that I normally dismiss as impractical and academic but does actually affect the way people act. Here, it's a question of how people relate to their bodies and to their health.
Ken Robinson says of academics, "they view their bodies as a way to get their heads to meetings" and that we "educate from the waist up...then above the neck...and slightly to the left." This slots in nicely with Descartes dualism, the idea that the body and mind are categorically different and that our bodies are mostly useful as vessels for our minds. And I would argue that this conceptual separation manifests itself in the way we treat our bodies. They probably need some sustenance and some exercise, yennow, at least a base level, but beyond that we'd really rather be watching TV or typing away at the laptop. But in China it's a common sight in offices and even just in the street in the morning to see people in groups and alone exercising and stretching as part of their daily routine--again, like brushing your teeth. It's team-building and it's brain-awakening and generally 'good for you'. I think there is a lot more of a sense, not only here but outside of the 'West' in general, of the delicate balance of our bodies (did the Greeks and medieval scholars have this with the idea of 'balancing the humours'?) and the fact that EVERYTHING we do affects them. It's a two way street--certain medicines are foods, but all food is medicine--you don't want to eat anything too spicy if you've got a cough!
What could be the cause of this? Moving from rampant speculation to rampant speculation, I'd hazard a guess that generally harsher conditions, harder living, and a greater closeness to manual labour, as well as just the sheer LACK of ability to fix something if it does go wrong, all contribute to the sense that anything you plug into the body's equation will come out the other end. We have weight loss pills and anxiety pills and cold pills, indoor gym memberships and holidays to help us 'relax when we get too stressed' and paid sick leave. All of these wonders of the modern age allow us, somehow, to be lenient, to be lax when it comes to taking care of ourselves on a day-to-day basis. For us, the very meaning of the word 'medicine' focuses on 'treatment' rather than 'prevention'.
Which isn't to say that everyone in China doesn't smoke (universally considered healthy for you, by the way, until maybe 150 years ago) and have horrible health problems, just that the way in which they CONCEIVE of their problems seems somewhat different to a Western mindset. And sure, we are starting to see, with food especially, the (re?)emergence of smoothies and health food stores and organic movements--but even look at the rhetoric for these! They market themselves as 'good for you', sure, but its not just 'good for you', its 'good for you COMPARED TO xyz'--still the rhetoric is of treatment, though in this case maybe of a more society-wide ill, rather than simply 'harmony within the body' detached from any movement or stigma (F***ng vegetarians and hippies! Get off my lawn!).
I'm sure a lot of this is wrong, but hey, it's a theory! I'd love to hear thoughts from people who know what they're talking about. And, in my own defense, I'll leave you with the words of UK comedian Eddie Izzard: "There was Socrates, he was great, he invented questioning. Before Socrates, no questioning. Everyone just sorta went 'yeah, I suppose so.'...and Aristotle, Aristotle said the sun goes around the Earth--wrong! Wrong...But in his day you didn't have to prove a theory...they went 'well done! That's a theory! That's fantastic. Just a few photos, alright...'...and Leonardo da Vinci invented a helicopted that *did not work*--and so did I! "
Friday, June 25, 2010
Thought for the day
In China, age differences make a huge difference. "Of course," I thought when I first came, "It's a cultural thing. Respect your elders and all that. Traditional!" But talking with the people in the office (who are mainly late 20s and early 30s) here I can see how much this is the product of recent history. Simply put, the difference between the exposure and opportunities that China presented to a 27-year-old and a 30-year-old growing up are vast--and this is probably increasingly true with my generation here as China opens up its doors to the West. In Korea I saw a similar thing, though it manifested itself differently and more dramatically: a comparatively small youth population (especially in cities, it's increasingly expensive to have kids) whose parents all had many more siblings and were accustomed to large families, so that all of those resources and attention (and pressure! Your future IS the national exam) were lavished on just one or two kids compared to a previous generation's 7 or 8. In both China and Korea, on different time-scales, economic development has meant a hugely expanded world of opportunity for youth. Several things I've read suggest that Chinese are unconcerned with Western fixations like free media because, for the first time, everyone has good access to enough food. 'Human Rights' seem not to be the most fundamental rights, after all--but the free-speech-ful hobo begging for food in any major American city could tell you as much. And of course you have to factor in things like the One Child Policy and a rich and turbulent modern history that I am by-and-large ignorant of. The experiences, opportunities, and expectations for each subsequent generation (and even each year within generations) are vastly different from one another.
Monday, June 21, 2010
Poem inspired by the 25 floor elevator ride
"The Corporate Pastures of Our Green and Pleasant Land"
They stood in solemn silence, four abreast,
With upturned faces reflected in chrome
Elevator doors, and laboured breathing
Heavy through gaping mouths. Still no one spoke,
But deeply breathed in grime and dust and smog,
Patient, waiting for the pond'rous machine
To reach the nadir of its heavenly
Descent, a growling beast on the slow track
Going down...down...down… (Stop. Another man,
Another automaton, clambers on
To stare glassy-eyed at the mirror doors).
Still no one speaks! The silence is not bleak,
Nor dull, nor rev'rent, nor even sullen.
The passengers do not resent the beast
Or love it, as disciples with lower’d gaze,
But merely ride in its enflamed gullet
Without a second thought, heedless and bored--
Poised expectant to stream out like a flood
Bursting over the waking world's dry dam
In a sort of sweaty wakeful sleep.
To dream, through android days, of electric sheep.
Thursday, June 17, 2010
Day 1: June 17 2010
1. Created list of data analysis tasks
2. Re-familiarised self with Excel
3. Graphs
pie charts of cases and revenue by location
bar charts of age and gender by location
3-d bar charts of experience of employee (at and out of Wang-Li) vs time to get a promotion
4. Added values for May resume tracking
5. Started to compare associate resume tracking/candidates passed line manager/received offer
6. Reviewed and edited article for newsletter of Larry interview
7. Read a bunch of promo material/company stats and 50 pages of Larry's book "Know the Game, Play the Game"
Larry is looking into hiring a full-time data analyst but in the meantime seems to have decided that I am good enough. Again I grudgingly thank my education in Chile that had me spending hours on spreadsheets. And thank my time-wasting on entrepreneurial/economics blogs for giving me anything even close to the vocabulary that I might need. And almost wish I'd done the statistical analyses rather than just written essays for bio last semester (the essays I got perfect scores on? no, wait, nevermind, I don't wish that!).
So my 21st birthday has been my first day in an office. Smells like justice! Or maybe just fate. In any case, slightly musty with a lukewarm water cooler and a bunch of Chinese girls. Everyone has a Western name and it's still impossible to remember any of them. I've been taking it all very seriously, writing everything down (including names/schools/jobs/physical descriptions), which is immensely helpful. I have probably done more work today than in the last year, at least in one concerted spate. And that's on 8-hour jetlag! Open office=24-hour supervision. Oh, also, yennow, "open community" etc. Not that I'm not writing this from the office....but then again, it's 5:30pm and no one shows any signs of letting up. I've been awake for 12 hours, I am officially done...
2. Re-familiarised self with Excel
3. Graphs
pie charts of cases and revenue by location
bar charts of age and gender by location
3-d bar charts of experience of employee (at and out of Wang-Li) vs time to get a promotion
4. Added values for May resume tracking
5. Started to compare associate resume tracking/candidates passed line manager/received offer
6. Reviewed and edited article for newsletter of Larry interview
7. Read a bunch of promo material/company stats and 50 pages of Larry's book "Know the Game, Play the Game"
Larry is looking into hiring a full-time data analyst but in the meantime seems to have decided that I am good enough. Again I grudgingly thank my education in Chile that had me spending hours on spreadsheets. And thank my time-wasting on entrepreneurial/economics blogs for giving me anything even close to the vocabulary that I might need. And almost wish I'd done the statistical analyses rather than just written essays for bio last semester (the essays I got perfect scores on? no, wait, nevermind, I don't wish that!).
So my 21st birthday has been my first day in an office. Smells like justice! Or maybe just fate. In any case, slightly musty with a lukewarm water cooler and a bunch of Chinese girls. Everyone has a Western name and it's still impossible to remember any of them. I've been taking it all very seriously, writing everything down (including names/schools/jobs/physical descriptions), which is immensely helpful. I have probably done more work today than in the last year, at least in one concerted spate. And that's on 8-hour jetlag! Open office=24-hour supervision. Oh, also, yennow, "open community" etc. Not that I'm not writing this from the office....but then again, it's 5:30pm and no one shows any signs of letting up. I've been awake for 12 hours, I am officially done...
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