Just when you thought it was safe...

…WATER reared its ugly, pointy-toothed head again this week. Peter, back in Harbin for the week, went home from work on Wednesday to find there was absolutely no running water in the flat. He called Kevin to find out what was going on. Kevin phoned building management and came back with the response that it was switched off for ‘routine maintenance’ (nice of them to warn us) and that it would be back on ‘hopefully before Saturday’.

‘SATURDAY???!!!!!!’ shrieked Peter (who was flying back to Shanghai on Friday and didn’t fancy leaving toilets unflushed and taps in a dubious on/off position). ‘I’m sorry’, said Kevin glumly. ‘I don’t know what to say to make you happy’. Poor lad, he always takes it personally. In the event, it was back on by the time Peter got up on Thursday morning, but not before he’d texted me at 10.30pm saying he was going to bed because he was ‘so depressed about it’.

Then on Friday morning, I tried to turn on a tap in Shanghai, to find that the water had gone off here too! It had been fine half an hour earlier so I suspected it was somehow connected to the loud drilling, banging, and overpowering smell of solvent which had all been emanating from the flat upstairs since 8am. I went back to bed and by the time I woke up we were back on tap. What is it with these people though? Back home, if your water is scheduled to be switched off for five minutes you get a note through the door a week in advance. Here, the notion that they might be inconveniencing anyone simply doesn’t seem to cross their minds.

The chief species of water inconveniencing me at the moment, however, is that which I’m lugging around in my belly and my legs. A couple of Sundays ago I looked down to find my bump had undergone a sudden growth spurt and seemed to be sticking out several inches further than it had done that morning. At 33 (or is it 34 – they can’t decide) weeks pregnant, I am now the size of a house – no, make that a largish hotel - and need a crane to levitate me off the sofa most nights. Not much fun when the temperature is already hovering around the 30 degree mark – although believe it or not, Harbin was actually hotter than Shanghai this week. This – coupled with the frustrations of an internet connection which is becoming increasingly slow for unknown reasons – explains my lack of blogging recently. It’s a long walk to the computer these days, and this desk ain’t big enough for the both of us!

The size of my tum caused some consternation last time I visited the hospital. ‘You gain too much weight!’ ‘Too much eat!!’ (charming), ‘You have big baby! We must check!’. One ultrasound later, and Baby was revealed not to be a monster - apart from the head, which was already 92% of the size of a full-term baby’s! – nor was chocolate the culprit, or not the sole one anyway. No, my problem, it appears, is ‘too much fluid’. (Bloody water. I’m telling you.) So now they want to do another ultrasound tomorrow to make sure the fluid levels have stabilised. ‘But if your belly suddenly get bigger, call us and come in STRAIGHT AWAY!’ They certainly know how to stress me out.

The trouble is that having grown up with the NHS, to me the words ‘I’d like to run some further tests’ strike fear into the heart. British doctors only ever say this if they think there might be something seriously wrong with you. Otherwise their standard advice is ‘Take two paracetamol, go to bed and ring me in the morning’. So I’ve been having some trouble adjusting to the ‘We test because we can’ approach of private medicine, especially that practised by American-trained doctors and aimed mainly at American patients. I finally understand those episodes of ER where the storyline involved the docs haranguing some poor unfortunate who needed an arm transplant or whatever but couldn’t afford it because their insurance didn’t cover it.

In fact most of my preconceptions about private medicine have been turned on their heads. There are no hushed, white rooms or smiling nurses gliding about offering you biscuits. On the contrary, it’s all a bit like ER really, minus the shouting, the shooting and the helicopter crashes. Time being money, the doctors seem to see about six patients at once and scurry about between multiple consulting rooms. They run vast swathes of tests for everything under the sun, with no apparent consideration of the cost to you or actual probability that you might have the condition concerned.

When, in my naivety, I tried to refuse a certain test on the grounds that I didn’t think I needed it, it was too expensive, and, hey, actually, wasn’t I the ‘customer’ and therefore had the right to decline anything I didn’t want, all hell nearly broke loose. It became apparent that they had never encountered such a response before. The nurses were highly confused, the doctor embarked on a quite unwarranted prophesy of doom, and in the end I felt so bullied that I backed down, on the understanding that this was ‘absolutely the last blood test’ they would perform on me. Not so, as it turns out – but being Chinese, of course, they won’t tell you in advance what they’ve got up their sleeves for you in the future, preferring to spring it on you when you go in for what you think is a routine check-up. And nobody has the time or, apparently, the inclination, to consider the psychological impact of all this, or indeed to acknowledge that there might be an emotional side to pregnancy at all.

So, caught between Chinese vagueness and American hyper-efficiency, I sometimes find myself longing to wait three hours for a doctor who’ll say ‘Well that all looks ok to me, but come back and see me again if anything actually drops off.’ But I suppose that the standard of care I get here will be ultimately much better, the medical staff are more likely to speak fluent English, and at least I won’t die of MRSA. I just wish there was a fast track for this baby business. Nine months is a long time.

Business unusual (part 2)

Peter continues his account of his weekend trip to Lang Ya Shan...

Saturday was conference day. After an impenetrable breakfast of spicy noodles and various strange pickled vegetables, the real business began. First on was young Earnest Vet, who worked for one of the international drug companies. Although all in Chinese, most of his slides told the story quite well, plus I wasn’t much interested anyway, so I didn’t bother to get Kevin to translate for me. We were well provided with Chinese tea – large green tea leaves in a cup that is often topped up by a waitress with hot water from a flask. You kind of have to strain it through your teeth.

Next up was Dr Boffin. He was unbelievably boring. I have seen some awful presentations in my time but this was definitely prizeworthy. His subject matter was quite important to me – several of his slides overlapped what I was going to say – but he had lost the audience within five minutes. An interesting slide would be followed by five or six slides full of mathematical formulae involving logarithms to base e.

Now, in the west, if a speaker is a bit boring we try our best – don’t we – to be polite? We might stare into space and find ourselves thinking about what’s for dinner; what our partner might be doing back home; what was on the telly last night. In China they talk loudly to the people beside them. They turn completely around so their back is to the speaker and conduct group conversations with those behind them. They get out their mobile phones and call friends with a poor signal so that they have to shout. In short; it was like what happens in a primary school class when the teacher nips out for a ciggy. (Does that still happen? It certainly did in my day). Having a microphone didn’t help Dr Boffin at all – he still couldn’t be heard at all over the din. On one occasion he asked the audience whether that point was clear – there was a sudden few seconds of silence that spread like a wave around the room. People even turned around towards the front to see whether anything interesting had finally happened, some clearly put out that their conversation had been interrupted. Then someone near the front answered ‘no, not really’ so he was off again, with ever more detailed explanations whilst the audience returned to their own little worlds.

When he had finally finished, Dr Smooth took the mike. Dr Smooth was an independent technical adviser to Mine Host’s company and was due to speak later in the afternoon, but had obviously decided to try to save the day for Dr Boffin. He had Charisma. Buckets of. And a swept back leonine mane, just greying enough to add an air of refinement. It seems he lives in California, which probably explains a lot. In less than ten minutes he summed up Dr Boffin’s entire hour-and-a-half presentation in a very engaging and memorable manner. He cooed into the microphone. He whispered and they hung on to every word. He raised his voice to make the point and they all nodded emphatically (except the two wifies who chatted incessantly throughout the entire day, obviously). I was impressed.

Next was lunch in the lakeside restaurant, and then I was on. I had been a little concerned about having the post-lunch graveyard slot but, as the only westerner in the village, I was enough of a novelty to keep them engaged. I got a rousing cheer for introducing myself in Chinese and after that they were very good to me. Dr Ssu translated – he is quite a good speaker anyway - so I decided on the tactic of soundbite bullet points, each of which was instantly translated, and it seemed to work. I watched one old guy at the back gradually fall asleep but, apart from the two chatting wifies (who even listened for a few minutes at the beginning before resuming their conversation) they listened quite well.

After me it was Dr Smooth’s allotted slot so he began to smooth them some more. This time he didn’t have it so easy and got quite a bit of heckling. Chatting wifies chatted throughout and I think it was when he stopped talking and stared at them with a smoothie smile that things began to go wrong for him. This was taking liberties. It’s as though they can only take so much smooth at one go. Either that or they were just exhausted at being so quiet for my presentation. Whatever the reason, they were simply not going to believe some of the things he told them, and that was that.

Then came question time. All the speakers sat in front of microphones at the top table and the audience was invited to supply written questions. Some small gift was given to those whose questions were answered as a wee incentive.

We were flooded. The questions were quite good too, and demonstrated that at least some people had been listening throughout. They just kept on coming and coming. After an hour and a quarter and with more of the audience still waving the girls over to collect questions, Mine Host Jason had to call a halt whilst we answered the final eight. It was after 5.30 by now, we had been at it all day and wanted a rest before the onslaught that is dinner.

The audience really perked up then because it was prize time. Each speaker had been asked to give two questions to MH, the answers to which would appear in the presentation. These questions must have been distributed at some stage because the slips were all collected at the end and put into a raffle box. Most of the prizes were fairly small things donated by the companies involved. We supplied pens, mugs and backpacks all bearing our logo. Someone else supplied fleece jackets. The two top prizes were quite presentable though; a nice camera and a laptop. The whole affair was a bit drawn out with many looks of palpable disappointment as the crappy presents were distributed first, raising the excitement level for the final two. As the top table speakers took it in turns to pull the question slips out of the box I noticed that no attempt had been made to mark the papers. My questions were mostly answered correctly – I had made them pretty easy – but I didn’t see one single attempt to answer Dr Boffin’s questions. Some hadn’t answered any questions at all.

I finally got about seven minutes’ break before dinner. Mine Host was delighted with the day and sat me at his right hand, dismissing Kevin to a different table to make more room for the important guests. MH assured me that he would interpret, and his English being quite good, I concurred.

This was not a good idea as it turned out. He spent about 15 minutes at my table then set off on a tour of all the other tables delivering amiable good charm and lashings of baijo. When he returned to our table an hour later he was definitely not in a good way. His shirt was completely untucked and he began to mop his brow and complain of the heat.

Everyone then adjourned en masse to the KTV (karaoke) bar. The Chinese simply adore karaoke and will deny any suggestion that it’s a Japanese invention (but then they claim to have invented everything, including football). Indeed in Harbin we are often reduced to sleeping with ear-plugs in to block out the, ahem, dulcet strains of over-amplified ‘singing’ coming from the KTV bar next to our flat there – which sometimes goes on until 5am.

Anyway the farmers were well up for it that night. Going to join in the fun, I discovered however that the only drink on offer in the so-called ‘bar’ was tea. With what I thought was extreme presence of mind, I quickly slipped back into the dining hall and grabbed a mostly full bottle of something from the nearest table before it was cleared away. Sadly it turned out to be the revolting ‘dark baijo’, which I proceeded to struggle through. As my grandad would have said, I was glad when I’d finished it. I also – confession-time now – lost my karaoke virginity. With ‘Yesterday’. It was good for me. I was also the only singer to get a round of applause, probably because unlike all the others I was obviously able to sing the original words.

After that, I must confess the evening becomes a little hazy. MH was last seen slumped in a corner somewhere. Kevin had made an early exit and was nowhere to be seen. I finally retired to bed, silently thanking my parents for endowing me with a sturdy Irish constitution and wondering what state the Chinese would be in for the following morning’s sightseeing trip.

At this point my correspondent, pleading lack of time, concludes his account, so I'll just fill you in quickly with what I know of the following day's activities. The entire party - apparently looking remarkably healthy despite the previous evening's festivities - were taken to visit an old villa and a living monastery with integral Buddhist temple in the hills beneath which the hotel was built. Dr Ssu and Kevin both came over a bit religious. Peter did his best to enjoy the sightseeing - a process hampered by the fact that they were accompanied by approximately 9000 Chinese tourists aged 4 to 104, including about 70 school parties being escorted around the sites by students talking loudly into megaphones.

It quickly became apparent that Peter was probably the first westerner most of them had ever seen, as around forty 11-year-old schoolgirls queued up to have their picture taken with him. One actually trembled with excitement - or it could have been terror - when he put his arm around her for the photo. Nearly all wore t-shirts bearing text in 'English'. As usual though they didn’t believe in spell-checkers or proof reading so a good percentage had typos. A selection included 'Aple blossm', 'Memory make happy always' … and Peter's favourite: 'Harvard Univirsity'.

Then it was back on the bus for the long journey home - only 6 hours this time if you don't count the two hours required for Jason to get someone to come and unlock his office where he had left his car keys, so that he could drive Peter home.

Finally just a few more photos just to give you the general idea.

Business unusual (part 1)

As the last week has seen me do little of interest except poring over Mothercare catalogues, I thought for a change I would invite a guest correspondent (Peter) to regale you with his tale of a conference he attended a couple of weekends ago. Here in Shanghai it's easy to kid oneself that China is quite westernised really. The following account shows just how wrong such an assumption is. Enjoy.


We have recently taken on an agent who will sell our products to farmers in the Shanghai and Nanjing areas. The company was founded and is run by Jason. Jason is a rotund, jolly Chinese man who possesses considerably more acumen than is evident at first sight, like one or two publicans I have come across in the past. I was supposed to have addressed two seminars – one in each city – that he organised several weeks ago but these were postponed at the last minute due to an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in the area. The ministry got on with the job of wholesale slaughter without feeling the need to let the general public know about it or anything. Anyway they appear to have contained the disease because Jason got the go ahead last week to arrange farmer meetings again.

This time, rather than hold separate meetings, he decided on a different tack. He got us and two other companies whose products he sells to split the cost with him of a conference in the mountain resort of Lang Ya Shan, ‘a four hour drive’ away in neighbouring Anhui province. We were all to travel there by coach (via a factory belonging to one of the participating companies) on Friday, have a full day’s conference on Saturday with presentations by all the suppliers; then half a day sightseeing on Sunday morning before returning home. The opportunities for enormous banquets with much drink, good humour and guanxi would then clearly be maximised. Basically it would more or less be me versus 80 Chinese farmers. I could hardly wait.

Jason (Mine Host) picked us up in the driving rain early on Friday morning – me, our sales director Dr Ssu, and Kevin, who still couldn’t believe his luck that I had let him come along. The poor lad never gets to leave the Harbin office very often and, because he works for Boss and me who already speak English, he missed out entirely on a recent UK trip that all the other company interpreters enjoyed.

Mine Host took us to his office, an hour’s wet drive away on the northern suburbs of Shanghai, outside which an empty coach stood waiting. We were first ushered upstairs into a smoke-filled boardroom where, dimly through the fug, I got my first idea of what 80 Chinese farmers looked (and sounded!) like. Over breakfast of fruit, bread rolls (the sugary Chinese ones) and bottled water, MH did a formal welcome presentation giving the history and success record of his (several) companies before we were allowed to board the bus.

As we groaned through the pouring rain it became apparent that the coach had seen better days. Like in an aircraft, each seat had four switches above it for light, air control etc. none of which worked. No seatbelts. Obviously. Looking about, several seats had been crudely welded together. I’d prefer not to think about how they got damaged in the first place. I’m also not sure if the driver knew when to change gear, as it juddered up every hill and he almost stalled it a couple of times before we got to the motorway.

At least no-one was smoking though, which was a huge relief. Possibly worse than smoke though was the muzak blaring from a speaker just above my head. It alternated between trashy rock numbers with razor guitar riffs to big-voiced slow ballads. Having a headache to start with I eventually had to send Kevin to ask the driver to turn it down, which he did for approximately eleven minutes before it was back to full volume again.

We had a wee and fag stop about 11.30 at the M-way services. Kevin said the farmers couldn’t believe it when they were ushered back onto the coach – they wanted to know where lunch was; 11.30 being the usual lunchtime in China. Even the ‘box of strangeness’ that we have for lunch every day in the Harbin office usually arrives before 11.15. Luckily I had brought sandwiches just in case so I was alright, Jack. It was at this point that I noticed Mine Host wasn’t with us - up at the front of the bus as I had thought. It seems he had an important meeting and would join us by car later.

Soon afterwards we went through an M-way toll gate and were immediately pulled over to a waiting area by the side of the road for a routine police check. Twenty minutes later the driver was still talking heatedly to the policeman, surrounded by smoking farmers, so I sent Kevin to find out what was going on. It seems the driver had a fake driving licence.

Needing to stretch my legs now I wandered around the checkpoint area. All across the hoarding the length of the area were 20 or so giant posters showing horrific traffic accidents, most with close ups of mangled people or bits of people. On one of them the picture was blurred, but the inset photo of Princess Di sporting a dreadful 80s perm gave away the reason for its inclusion. I didn’t realise she was recognised here but I suppose the world’s best known road accident victim is an icon the world over.

An hour later and I was extremely glad of my sandwiches and reading book. They let us go eventually. The story now was that it wasn’t a fake driving licence but a wrong, or possibly out of date, licence for the coach itself. Apparently the bus company would get a few days to put the matter right. By now it was around 2.00 and we pulled off the M-way into a village where there was a nice little restaurant for a quick lunch. I was a bit hungry again by now so the farmers must have been suffering. There were even traditional costumes and folk musicians to meet us.

After that it was still an hour and a half to the factory. In true Chinese style, the entire bus save for me and the driver slept soundly all the way there. I could probably have done so if it hadn’t been for the omnipresent muzak, by now at lower volume but at that irritating boom-chack boom-chack level that reminded me of toothache.

Now, our company has five factories in China and this one was one of our major worldwide competitors so I felt a bit strange, not to mention exposed, when we all donned white coats and silly mop-caps for the tour. Dr Ssu’s cunning plan to give his camera to Kevin (who was dressed and looked generally more like the farmers), and pretend to be my interpreter himself whilst Kevin indulged in some amateur industrial espionage, backfired when they said we couldn’t take cameras inside the plant.

We FINALLY reached the resort destination at just after 7.00 (the ‘four hour drive’ thus having taking approximately eleven hours from when I was picked up at home) and dinner was meant to have been at 6.00 so it was dump the stuff and dash.

The place was a lot bigger than I expected – an entire resort hotel sort of thing set in a steep wooded gorge (my window was just feet from a sheer rock-face) with lots of open covered walkways passing by carp ponds linking different buildings. Whilst clearly being a holiday resort, there were no concessions for westerners; none of the staff spoke English, though most of the signs were bilingual – well Chinglish, anyway; we ate for example in the Anquet Hall. The hotel brochure was a spectacularly bad approximation of my native language. It’s as though they had given it to the manager’s primary school age child to translate, without bothering to get it checked by a real English speaker. I got the feeling that I was the first non-Chinese person ever to visit there.

Most impressive of all was the list of products on sale in the guest rooms. You’ll get the idea if you refer to an earlier post describing my experiences at a hotel in Yi’an, but this one, being a flashier place entirely, had more variety on offer. For some reason, Chinese hotels seem to imagine that their guests will have neglected to pack any underwear and so often have men’s briefs on sale in the rooms. This one offered a range, however, including ‘Women knickets’ and ‘Fatmen’s underwear’. Where the ordinary men’s briefs packet was illustrated with the standard posing western male model type, the Fatmen’s alternative showed a portly Indian gent.

You could also purchase, among other things, various teas, vermicelli, playing cards, ‘compressed towel’, and, for the ladies, ‘Women lotion – an adult-only pudenda washing lotion’. This delightful product, it seemed, could ‘clean the adult pudenda quickly and effectively, forming a protective barrier at the using part to protect human body from filth.’ It could also ‘relieve pruritus and get rid of peculiar smell’. Now you can’t say these Chinese hotel proprietors don’t think of everything. The whole (extensive) list of products ended with the promise – or warning, it was hard to tell which – ‘In the event of shortages of goods or adjustement period, whitout prior notice, locations!’

Dinner was the by now familiar banquet, with courses arriving all the time, much individual and collective toasting with baijo (52% alcohol Chinese hooch), m???jo (a wine-strength disgusting liquid) and beer flowing freely. By some accident or design the Chinese expression ‘gan bei’ means both ‘cheers’ and ‘bottoms up’ so mealtimes can be quite a challenge for some. As has been noted before, the Chinese don’t drink very much, if at all, but at least half the farmers had at least some beer. One large farmer across the table took a shine to me when he saw me ‘gan bei’ with the real stuff so he kept up a steady flow of banter, then later presented me his business card in a formal, if somewhat unsteady, manner. It seems I'd made a friend.


To be continued.....