Echo

Important Lesson Reminder.

DO NOT LOSE FOCUS.

We spent 5 days in Taipei, overcoming jetlag and spending time with my grandmother. Weather is hot and humid, food was utter gluttony and cheap, and I think even my hair got fat. My uncle offered me a job at his company in Taipei as a sales assistant, just for about 6 months, saying that I could use the opportunity to take Chinese classes at night and strengthen my professional Chinese through baptism by fire. It’s actually an interesting offer. I wouldn’t make as much as I would in the US, but I also wouldn’t pay taxes here. I don’t know if I’m ready to jump back into an office environment by moving to a new country though. Like I said, moving to a new city and starting a new job are challenges enough in their own right, but to move to a new country where I’m basically illiterate and starting a new job where 90% of it will require me to speak a language in which I have a 4th-grade level vocabulary will be brutal. It’s interesting to me because I’m adaptable and a survivor so I’ll survive and make it work, and in the end, it will make me a better person with more tools for it, but maybe it’s something I should consider in the near future. Moving back to the bay area and working for the dark side will be challenges enough. If there’s any silver lining, it’s that I won’t have to deal with any relationship distractions when I get there.

We didn’t do much in Taipei outside of eat. There’s this one handpulled noodle place up the street from my grandmother’s that’s amazing, and the shopkeeper always remembers my brother and I. Probably because by Taiwanese standards, we’re huge (to give you an example, I’ve never found a bra for sale in Taiwan bigger than a B cup, and a woman’s shoe size bigger than an 8). She saw us and said we both lost a lot of weight. Michael is definitely looking a lot leaner, especially since we’ve cut his medications. I’m actually 7 lbs heavier since the last time she saw me, but I have a theory that when you shed “issues,” emotional baggage that you’ve been clinging to, people tend to think you lost weight. In the last few years, particularly from 2007 and on, I’ve been making a conscious issues to deal with issues from childhood and on, and let go. People are always saying I lost weight, even though I haven’t. I think it’s an aura thing. Or maybe we just carry it in our bodies, even when they don’t have physical weight.

We moved on to Shanghai where we met up with my dad who was already there on business. We stayed at a 2 bedroom executive suite in the Marriott which was beautiful. If I found a condo like it, even if it was a ground-level one in Fremont, I would be so happy. It was a beautiful, modern place with dark wood-paneling and well laid-out. We were there to visit the World Expo, this giant city-sized sprawl of pavilions representing about 191 countries and 50 organizations. The place was a zoo and you need weeks to be able to see everything. The first day, we visited Turkmenistan (yes, none of us had even heard of it), Morocco, Spain, Italy and Germany. Spain was the most exciting, featuring a live flamenco dancer and a beautiful slideshow. Italy was the most impressive (they have so much culture and civilization), and Germany, which requires up to a 3 hour wait most days, was exactly what you expect–it looked like it an oversized stealth bomber and featured all of their cutting edge technology including a 1.3 ton ball that was supposedly moved by sound, but a bit underwhelming given the wait time. The UK Pavilion was modeled after a dandelion and was the most stunningly creative. They featured “a dazzling cube formed by more than 60,000 slim and transparent acrylic rods containing seeds of different plants that were collected in a bio-diversity project.” Blew my mind. I’ll post pictures later.  Though sidebar–the giant dandelion made me think about how in Ghostwritten, David Mitchell had talked about how Italians gave their city sexes and all agreed that the sex of each city was correct, and how if England were a person, it would be a closeted gay man.

We were exhausted the next day and limping around from all the time spent on our feet, so our entire family went for foot massages, then headed out to the Expo after the sun set. We checked out the Sultanate of Oman (cool), Pakistan (skip), Tibet (recommend the short film for breathtaking landscapes), Nepal (a great view), France (all captions written in either Chinese or French), Netherlands (check out the floating rock and take your picture with some sheep!) and the Africa Joint Pavilion (worth taking a look, especially since chancese are, you’ll never visit those countries in this lifetime).  To anyone planning to visit the World Expo, I highly recommend seeing the less popular pavilions first, and then waiting until after 7pm to visit the popular ones, because the tour groups leave after 7 so the lines move faster. We wanted to see Japan which is the most popular, but even minutes before the cut off, the line was a 3 hour wait and the people in it looked exhausted.

We drove from Shanghai to Suzhou today, the city where my dad’s family’s from. Suzhou is an industrial city famous for producing writers and poets. My mom’s family is from Winzhou, which is known for producing very shrewd business people. My mom is always saying that people need to understand that I’m two people with two distinct personalities–one is very artistic and creative, the other is very business and success-oriented. Whenever one side gets its way, the other is always restless, but there’s a balance somewhere where both sides can be happy. I think it’s interesting that my personality splits along the exact lines of my parents’ lineage–the Suzhou (poetic) and the Winzhou (business).

My parents bought a condo here a few years ago while Suzhou was up and coming and very inexpensive, since my dad’s business is here, and my brother and I got to see it for the first time today. It’s a beautiful place adjacent to a shopping mall and next door to another mall with a grocery store. There’s even a Coffee Bean downstairs (in the Los Angeles coffee wars, you’re either a Starbucks person or a Coffee Bean person. With my laidback and friendly demeanor, I am a clear Coffee Bean person). I also think that it’s good because should the world erupt in political upheaval, we have a place in China to escape to. Several members of our family have also bought places in Suzhou, using them as rental properties for now.

In closing, just some random notes:

-Facebook is banned in China. I couldn’t figure out why I couldn’t sign on until I was troubleshooting through Google and discovered that fact. My mom says it’s because China doesn’t like people networking and talking.

-I’d discovered in Amsterdam that Lay’s Potato Chips distributes different flavors in different countries. I was looking at them at the supermarket today, and found a Blueberry flavor. Blueberry -flavored potato chips! Of course I bought a bag! And they are what you’d expect. Blueberry-flavored, like cereal. With salty accompanying taste, like a midget riding in the sidecar of a motorcycle. A confused kind of disgusting.

-A 600ml bottle of TsingTao beer. That’s a giant bottle. I brought it up to my parents and asked them how much they thought it cost in RMB (exchange rate is 6.8 RMB = $1 US). 8 dollars was my mom’s guess. 10 dollars was my dad’s. Nope, I said. 2.80 RMB. That’s 41 cents US. Do you realize how big of drunks Americans would be in China?, I asked. Well, bigger drunks than they already are.

-Mainland Chinese people have not really learned the art of the queue yet. They’ll shove ahead of you if you so much as give them some daylight, even if they only move up 1 person in line. And they push up against you. It’s kind of irritating, but my mom’s point was that this is all new to them. It’s a social grace that they’ve never learned, but give them 20 years. I’ve always worried about how China’s power potential is so far ahead of their civilization. I hope so. It is a country of so many people that they run into each other all the time without noticing. It can get pretty irritating after a while. Yesterday, I was standing still, taking a picture and this old lady full on slammed into me, then turned around and yelled at me to watch where I was going. When I told my family about it, my uncle asked if I talked back to her. I told him I told her to watch where SHE was going. I kind of felt bad because she was elder, and I’d lost my patience and gotten rude. But he said, good. People can be really rude here. But my mom has a point. These are still our people. They just grew up in a different culture.