Fuddland

We went to see Star Trek last night — excellent stuff, probably going to watch it again tonight. But one thing that doesn’t sit quite right is the Chinese name: the poster says Xīngjì Míháng (星际迷航). Now xīngjì means “interstellar”, which is fine, but míháng seems to mean “to get lost”. So the title of this film out here is “Lost in Space”. Er, wrong show guys.

As I made my way into the empty meeting room at just before half-past two to observe the three-minute silence, I thought about telling my colleagues what I was doing, but decided against it: it’s a personal choice, and I was interested to see how many people actually stopped work to mark the first anniversary of China’s worst natural disaster for thirty years.

I was surprised to find that no-one else stopped what they were doing. Not in my office, nor on the street below. I had been told that the city air-raid siren would sound at 2.28pm, lasting for the full three minutes, but over the sound of car horns and construction, I could only faintly hear the siren carried on the wind from the downtown area a few miles away. Either the Industrial Park area, where I work, doesn’t also have one, or for some reason it was not used. From the 28th floor I looked up and down the street, into the construction sites and at the cars and buses, to see if I could spot anyone who had downed tools or pulled over, but people were seemingly oblivious. I asked several [Chinese] friends in other offices in the area if their companies, or even they themselves, observed the silence, but no companies did, and most individuals didn’t either.

This is not to say that the nation is at all unsentimental about the tragedy: there are plenty of events taking place all over the nation to commemorate the earthquake, not least a day of specially-dedicated television. Given that many of the office blocks around here shook with the force of the quake, 2000 miles from the epicentre, I just thought more people here would mark it too.

My taxi had to wait [horn honking the entire time, naturally] which this chap scooped up the noodles that had spilled off the back of his bike. They were uncooked, and I can’t help but worry about where he was taking them. This street has a plethora of restaurants, some of which I have been known to frequent in the past. Rice for me from now on, I think!

I quite often have to talk to students about Western dining habits — the differences, the etiquette, and so on — and one of the phrases that appears in their vocabulary list is, “going Dutch”. The phrase always requires an explanation, after which the students generally nod and say that in China it is called “AA”.

The term “AA” has puzzled me since I first heard it, being made up of English letters as opposed to Chinese characters, and no-one seemed to know what it actually stood for. In fact, most of them had never even thought to wonder.

“What does ‘AA’ mean?” I would ask.

“Go Dutch,” the reply would come.

“No, I’m not testing you on something you just learned. I mean, what does it stand for?”

“Oh … we don’t know.”

They wouldn’t even guess, and I was similarly stumped. [I could see no obvious connection with alcohol or automobiles.] Until, that is, yesterday, when a student was finally able to put me out of my misery.

As anyone who has learned a language while living or working alongside its native speakers will testify, one’s vocabulary can have some fairly eclectic entries. I knew how to say “mobile phone charger” in Chinese before I learnt the colours of the rainbow, simply because buying a new one was more of a priority than shopping for oil paints. [And when I do get around to building up a palette, it will probably conspicuously lack a purple, because I have immense trouble pronouncing that particular hue.]

And so it was that, somehow, a student who earlier in the class had no idea what “to go on a date” meant, was able to inform me why “AA” means “to split the bill”: it stands for “algebraic average”, which is what most people mean when they say, “take the average”, but in the world of maths is more commonly called the mean.

This of course answers another question that I frequently get asked, namely why — given my background — I’m not teaching mathematics in China. Any country that adopts a mathematical phrase into its everyday language clearly doesn’t need any help from me.

This Friday, May the 1st, is China’s Labour Day — a national holiday to celebrate the toils of the worker, so our school is closed for the day. But since Friday is one of my usual weekly days off, I asked if I could choose which day I would like to have off in lieu, as we have done in the past when a public holiday falls on a regular day off.

“Oh, you’ve actually already had it,” came the reply. “Remember during Spring Festival when we gave everybody a four-day break instead of the usual three? That’s because we ‘borrowed’ one day from Labour Day.”

In other words, the company took it upon themselves to move our public holiday by three months and tack it onto another one. Whilst the one-day-longer Spring Festival break was of course welcome, extending the period that employees have to go until their next long weekend is not so good for morale. And since the school is still closed for this Labour Day, the poor people who don’t usually have Fridays off have to actually make up for the closure by working one of their days off during the next couple of weeks. As you can imagine, there are some unhappy mutterings going on below management level.

Still, it could be worse. Last month the local government in Guǎngdōng (广东) province announced plans to return the Labour Day holiday to its former status as a week-long public holiday [a so-called Golden Week], in order to stimulate the local economy. The plan was initially approved by the Central Government and people duly went ahead and booked trips lasting most of the week. But when several other regions also announced plans to follow suit, the Central Government reneged and Guǎngdōng was forced to scrap its official plans. But it looks as though lots of people are still going ahead with their trips, presumably either taking a couple of days of their annual leave, or perhaps even asking for unpaid leave.

Now I’m not an economist, but it seems to me that officially announcing a public holiday, only to cancel it after people have already made plans, is not only going to make people a bit annoyed [since when has that ever affected a policy change decision?], but more importantly is actually going to negatively affect the local economy, as people who go ahead with their trips are forced to save even more that usual to make up for spending-without-earning. I’m sure there have been plenty of unhappy mutterings down in Guǎngdōng this past month or so too.

Our building is having its windows washed this week — by men hanging from single, very old-looking ropes, with no back-up line. Here’s what that looks like from the 28th floor.

One of the niggling differences in working in China is the way you receive your salary: unlike in the UK, where you simply give your bank’s sort-code and account number to the finance department, in China your company decides on one particular bank to use, and the employees must all open an account with that bank if they want to be paid.

And so I am now a card-carrying customer of the Agricultural Bank of China, famed for the largest bank robbery in the history of the country. Since the four largest banks in China are all state-owned, there seems to be very little to distinguish them, and I’m not entirely sure why my company opted for this bank down the street when there’s a branch of Bank of China in the same building as our office. Perhaps it’s because of the 5% discount account-holders enjoy at the nearby Subway sandwich shop.

It’s been over about three years since I wanted to transfer money from here back to the UK, so I did a quick search for what information I needed to provide to the bank and was pleasantly amused to find my own post about it come back as one of the first hits. Armed with the relevant details, I went to my local Bank of China branch and told the nice lady at the Foreign Currency Transfer desk what I wanted to do.

Unfortunately I hit a bit of a snag because, as I was informed, a foreigner is only permitted to transfer up to US$500 worth of RMB per day. The amount I wanted to transfer was a bit more than that, and I didn’t really want to be going to the bank every day for the next couple of weeks, paying bank changes every time, so I asked if there was a way around it.

The first suggestion was to get an official tax statement from my company declaring that I’d paid the relevant taxes on my income. Whilst I have indeed been paying said taxes [honest gov’nor], I’ve tried getting the official form in the past and the best my company offered me was a spreadsheet printout stamped with the company seal of officialness. I showed it to the nice lady and she said it wasn’t the right thing. I was just about to leave and steel myself to try and extract the official official tax statement from my company, when the nice lady had another idea.

Chinese citizens are apparently allowed to transfer up to US$50,000 a year out of the country, and it turns out they can do this on behalf of a foreign friend. Naturally I can’t vouch for the true legality of this, but I was reassured by the nice lady that no trouble would befall the Chinese citizen in question provided they did not exceed the yearly limit. In that case, I said, could she be my friend for the afternoon and help me transfer the money on my behalf? [Having been asked countless times by complete strangers here if we can be friends, I had no qualms about returning the request on this occasion.] But she said that as a bank employee, she could not help me.

So I made a call to my very good friend and colleague [who happened to be just upstairs in my office], and within a few minutes the transfer process was underway. For some reason you have to state the amount you want to transfer in the destination currency, even though you only really know for certain how much money you have in RMB. There was a brief period of mild farce where every time they double-checked with me the amount I wanted to transfer, the exchange rate had changed and we had to recalculate that I had enough in my bank account to cover it. But it was all relatively simple to get done, and two days later the money had arrived in my Smile bank account.

By the way, my friend and I had to sign a total of four forms to complete the money transfer. When I arranged to get a throwaway pay-as-you-go SIM card for my Dad during his week-long visit, I had to sign six different pieces of paper. But at least the mobile phone company gave me a two free toiletry bags containing a toothbrush, toothpaste and a face towel for my troubles. The bank couldn’t even copy my name out of my passport correctly when I first opened the account, so it was particularly satisfying to finally close my — or rather, Davind’s — account with them.

With new-found confidence stemming from a combination of a macro lens, a photography partner or two [in the form of my Dad and my friend Lauren] and generally getting over my previous reticence, I have recently taken a great deal of candid and not-so-candid photos of people going about their daily business here in Sūzhōu (苏州).

Any guilt one feels about taking photos of people without their knowledge, let alone permission, is somewhat negated by the countless occasions on which I or foreign friends have been not-so-surreptitiously snapped while we’re having dinner or just walking by.

My Dad recently visit me for a week in Sūzhōu (苏州). He lent me his macro lens while he was here. Now I wants one.