May 29th, 2008
I think I’m stuck in a huge dark forest now and I need a compass to run out …
Making Enemies
April 16th, 2008
I did go out of my way to flame the China-bashing crap on the local expat, so I end up making enemies again.
But I’ve made up my mind to continue my fight. All I’m saying is, I’m determined to be the ultimate reminder of their living in another country and another culture. I’m not just the curious stare and stroking of their hairy arms …
Hehe, they took it hard and are getting all this paranoid …
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The bullet train is not bullet fast!
April 10th, 2008
This time I traveled to and from Shanghai by train. I took the last bullet train D652 yesterday, which left Hangzhou at 5:30pm. I paid 75 yuan for a seat in the first-class compartment.
The train looks great from the outside, slick and smart, though the interior is obviously not as classy as the Shinkansen. I peeked in the other second-class compartments and compared them to my first-class. To my surprise, I found they looked quite the same. Or mine just got more roomy chairs. But is it worth it to pay 21 yuan extra for a possibly roomy seat?
My real disappointment came when the train pulled into Shanghai Main Station. I looked at my watch and found the ride actually took one hour and forty minutes, more or less the time duration for the old trains. My colleague told me normally it’s one hour and eighteen minutes for the bullet train. So why did this one get so slow on me? Because it made two short stops along the way? It just didn’t make sense.
For my return today, I took the K137 train back, which left Shanghai also at 5:30pm. It’s not a bullet train and the entire travel was actually a long haul from Shanghai to Changsha. At first I expected it to be slower, but when I disembarked it at Hangzhou East, I was surprised to find the ride only took one hour and 30 minutes, about 10 minutes faster than the bullet train. The thing is, it also made two stops and even stopped in the middle of nowhere on the rail for some other train to pass. And you know how much I paid for the ticket? 25 yuan. 25 yuan for a similarly clean, quiet and comfy express train!
If the bullet train is meant to cut our inter-city commuting down to one hour and eighteen minutes, I think I should let the train authorities hear my complaint about yesterday’s slower bullet train. What’s more, I actually paid 50 yuan more for a slower train!
So, why this confusion of the rating schedule for not distinctly distinguished train service or speed? I don’t have a clue at all and only have to root for the fact they haven’t been able to phase out all the old trains. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had options and were all but forced to pay more to ride smart-looking but slower bullet trains.
Busy as a Bee
April 7th, 2008
I don’t have wings and those tiny feet of a multiped, but I’m just as busy as a bee! Worse yet, I don’t harvest. I’m all but bleeding myself to please all kinds of people.
The winter lull very much created by Christmas, the New Year’s Day and the Spring Festival was kind of declared over in March, but it’s the month of April that finally opened the floodgate of Hangzhou’s diplomacy. Now, my office is being besieged by myriad requests for courtesy calls on the city leaders. It’s not about efficiency anymore. It’s rather about how many people could actually do how much work. In other word, we’ve more or less reached the breaking point of the maximum number of delegations for each of us to juggle.
I guess I’m still being polite, upbeat and alert on the job, at least so on the surface. But sitting in my office and temporarily relieved from the stress of working on the spot, I often find myself drifting into a daze, screaming inside to be left alone.
The protocol division of the Foreign Affairs Office works with city leaders and their secretaries in a strangely direct way. But sadly, it’s mainly for such proximity of our working relationships that we are on a short leash with them. Most of the time, we are treated like a standby tactical team responding to outside pleas and indisputable instructions from the top. We can’t even allow ourselves to be snobby with people operating outside the City Hall. Since requests for courtesy calls are always directed at city leaders, there isn’t much latitude left for us to say a flat no to seemingly important delegations.
Maybe I’m just being tired…
qing ming is over!
April 6th, 2008
The qing ming holiday is over! Drove back to Hangzhou in the afternoon.
I wasn’t in any rush, so I let the car ride around 60 mile per hour, a speed leisurely enough to enjoy the beautiful views on both sides of the road. We had too much rain for the holiday, but it’s bright and clear today. The new growths on those rolling hills all took on a lovely hue in the warm sun. But truly representative of the time of qing ming were still those small or big patches of yellow rape flowers (don’t have a clue why this oilseed plant is called rape), blooming in a most noisy way in the newly ploughed fields.
Had a great time with my parents and friends during this weekend holiday. I went to visit my grandpa’s tomb on the first day. It’s raining but the rain didn’t stop the tomb-sweeping crowds. I didn’t sweep the tomb because it’s in a hillside public cemetery and everything is being taken care of by the cemetery watchers all the year around. We offered wine, food and burned the sacrifitial money in front of the tomb, and I didn’t forget to light a cigarette for my grandpa. There were people everywhere in the cemetery, so it’s quite a sight watching so many plumes of smoke rising up on the hillside. But I still wanted to complain about something. It’s the annoying nonstop broadcast in the air of fire warning. They got this big trumpet speaker to repeat the badly worded awareness-raising talk. I believe it’s simply the invention of the local government. It’s stupid and way too loud for a cemetery. Oh, my god, it even blared some silly pop songs at regular intervals.
Yeah, if it was not for the fact that I was constantly drunk from the parties, I would have kicked in the county mayor’s posh government den and dragged him all the way to the graveyard to give him an earful of the trumpet blasts.
About the parties, last night I had a big dinner with old classmates from high school. Okay, they are not just old classmates. They are my best mates too. We were happy for the reunion only about two months after the Spring Festival. Good spicy food but heavy drinking. After six or seven bottles of beer, I was pretty drunk. Then we went on to have a singing party in a karaoke joint. Everyone did a song or two, and cointinued drinking was like giving each other applause. But the singing was by no means the closing epidode of the night. After that, I was taken to a restaurant to drink beer again. So more rounds of beer and more crude jokes…
Until we were swaying in the street like the town’s new bullies, completely numb to the midnight lightening and thunder blasts…
April 3rd, 2008
Slanting rain on Bright and Clear Day
Kept my lonely soul wandering in pain.
— Du Mu, Tang Dynasty
qing ming
April 2nd, 2008
I let my son call her grandma, telling her we are coming home tomorrow for qing ming, the Bright and Clear Day. Somewhere in their heated grandson-to-grandma conversation, my son suddenly bursted out loud, "I want the sweet one!"
I knew what he was so excited about. It’s the sweet qing ming pie stuffed with sugar and sesame paste. It’s my favorite too!
After he got off the phone, my son told me his grandma is making lots of qing ming pies tonight for us to consume on the holiday.
From my childhood the scene of making qing ming pies has been ironed in my mind. Remember all the kneading, rolling, wrapping, impressing, steaming…
5th Anniversary
April 1st, 2008
It’s always true perfectionists suffer a lot more than conformists and opportunists. Today marks the 5th anniversary of Lesile Cheung’s passing. I wish I could go to the Shang Tian Zhu Temple sometime during the day to renew my repects for him.
Inside one memorial hall of the temple, there is a shrine for him - okay, it’s not much of a shrine, but rather a memorial tablet placed along with many others. The tablet and his place in the memorial hall were arranged by one of his local fans, and hanging from his slot in a huge shelf of memorial tablets is a notebook, on which fans are free to write down their thoughts of remembrance
