Tonight, my rusted red chain fell off my gears twice as I biked from
the Russian district to Alfa’s 80s night.  I had pedaled through the
starry night with my bike squeaking away, tires deflated and bell
decapitated, over dusty construction sites and behind rickshaws
stacked with four inch four pound plastic bags of paper to be
recycled.  I was taking my bike back from my office, as I had biked to
work yesterday morning, as each pedal a struggle.  Either I was
physically tired, my tires were flat, or my gears were jammed.
Something wasn’t right. Continue reading →

As soon as I got outside my apartment the other day, I stopped in my tracks.  It was clear I wasn’t going to get milk anymore.  I jumped on my well-loved bike — easy to spot with its very unique I <3 NY sticker plastered on the frame — and set off.
 
I think I knew that that would be the last pure day of autumn, before the air starts to smell like winter as you try to breathe in through a stuffy nose.  The sky was a brightly back-lit blue, and as I hurled through the archway of generous maples lining the street in front of the Canadian embassy,* I could feel every ridge and bump in the pavement clearly through my handlebars.  It was the kind of day that makes you notice the beauty in ordinary things:  the mini-thrill of a trunk pushing up the pavement into a baby jump; the comfort of the old ladies in well worn clothes sitting with their ankles crossed on a banister in front a sign encouraging studying; the man swept up by the flood of people leaving the subway but so satisfied biting into a steaming soft spring roll; or the women with bamboo poles along the river bank walking between the reeds.  I rubbernecked at the guy looking in incredulous and helpless awe at the invisible dent in the front of his pulled-over car. I slowed down to stay behind and watch a rollerblader listening to his headphones and waving his arms gracefully to the music. And I nearly got hit by a car when I realized the air in the alley ahead of me was full of spinning yellow leaves making their slow and final descent toward the yet untouched black asphalt.
 
People say that China’s economy is built on cheap labor, but it’s more than that:  this country is built on optimism.  It’s not just that people work for little money, it’s that they work hard for little money, and in large part because they think that it will lead to something better.  It’s one of the reasons I came here, actually, rather than Russia. Continue reading →

My good friend who was transferred 6 months ago to Beijing, working at Microsoft, wrote a note about China that I thought you would really enjoy reading. So without further ado, here are some excerpts:

“At this very moment, I’m sitting in the Industrial Bank of China, trying to pay my credit card bill.   The venue is like the Chinese version of the DMV, where you take a number and then spend forever waiting for your turn at the teller window.   The bank is packed with people; sophisticated folks with designer clothes, school children in their track suits, and even my favorite ma tuan (sesame ball) vendor with a wad of bills so thick I wonder how really makes his living.  What an inspiring place to write about my new life! Continue reading →

A good opening sentence should be like a vodka shot:  clear, quick, strong, and with a sharp finish that gets you reved up for what comes next — i.e. it shouldn’t ramble on like this Aabservation does with no intention of stopping, completely unrelated to the main topic:  in this case, the question “bells or brakes?”, a with-us-or-against-us type of question which came up last night, when I was biking to a party and panicked for a moment when I realized my brakes were worn out — but quickly regained confidence (and speed) as I realized that my bicycle bell at least was working, meaning that instead of slowing down, I could just announce my arrival and others would get out of my way, which I did, often, and in so doing realized that I would rather have a fully functional bell than fully functional brakes — perhaps a revelation about a change in my attitude toward risk-taking since moving to China (or perhaps the attitude that brought me here in the first place?) — and beyond just me, I started to wonder whether China itself is a country that values bells or brakes more — a question which, after a considerable period of high-speed contemplation (and pedaling), I came to conclude:  yes, China is indeed a country that would rather be able to slow down safely than charge forward bells a-ringing (think of China’s slow unwind of capital controls, its patient and quiet emergence as an international power, and the truly measured pace of its transition from a centrally planned economy to an open one), while the US is the country with the largest bells in the world, and which loves ringing them (think of the US’s strong attitude to foreign relations and its love of global media attention)… though I’d love to hear back from you whether you agree with this assessment and (perhaps more interestingly) whether you would rather have working bells or working brakes, with only one requirement for your reply:  that you, like me in this Aabservation, try writing using as many punctuation bells & whistles as possible (bonus if you can incorporate Chinese backward commas and <<>> quotes), but that you strictly forbid yourself from using a period to brake your train of thought (a ridiculous challenge — I know — inspired by a hilarious and geeky late night conversation on punctuation in a rooftop bar with a handful of copy-editors, writers, researchers and blumblum friends):  a gimmick which is (outside of Victorian literature and legal documents) only sustainable for so long, and eventually (as you can see) must at some point come to an end.

Cheers, Liz

After a wonderful year and four months of persuading monks to wear bunny ear muffs while overlooking Mount Everest, blowing on beer bottle tops as part of a music ensemble, teaching 600 students English by singing ‘I will survive!’ on a Saturday afternoon in rural Yunnan, inadvertently biking through military training exercises in a patch of forest behind downtown Beijing, staring at a perfectly flat plain with no trees for two days on the cross Australian railroad, and drinking a lot of green tea, I am now back in a suit and working full time in Beijing. Continue reading →

So you want to do business in China, but you keep hearing about the fact that there is no “rule of law,” or that it’s “unsafe.” Well, last night I sat down with a lawyer friend of mine, and listened as she told me the biggest potholes in the road of China Opportunity.

At one point, my stomach full of Korean food and my brain stuffed with terms like “judicial review” and “normative law” I asked her to stop. “I don’t get it,” I said. “This doesn’t make any sense. Can you explain it again?”

She smiles and says, “No, if you don’t get it, that actually means you get it.”

So what is fishy about the Chinese legal system? I don’t know law from a chicken leg, but here are three things I’d be careful about: Continue reading →

At some point, I went public. Not sure when or why, but turns out I have shareholders (or should I say stakeholders?), and responsibility to them to accomplish, well, something. Oddly I’ve had a lot of conversations recently about the little things, like what are we supposed to do with our lives, and whether we should try to save the world (and pandas) or just enjoy life as it comes (like pandas). As much as I loved the laid-back panda life in Chengdu, I found that I couldn’t just loll around all day. I had the ambition chip planted in me a long time ago, and still have a deep sense that indeed, with great privilege (thanks mom and dad!) comes great responsibility. In short, I feel I owe it to you, my stakeholders, to do something meaningful. (Eeps!)

And of course, I want to live a reasonably comfy life back in good old New York one of these days, which doesn’t come cheap.

So I’ve settled on energy and pollution Continue reading →

Red China is slowly becoming chartreuse.  In February my life-long friend, fashion follower and now Doctor Kristina Perez (having just gotten her well-deserved PhD from Cambridge for her dissertation on the occasional-goddess and Arthurian character Morgan La Fey) came over to China for the first time, with Wallpaper* and Elle Decorations magazines in hand.  So we went on a tour of a part of China that I knew almost nothing about:  the trendy part.

I get Google news alerts in my inbox filtered for “China,” and everyday the past week or so the top article has been about Bond’s debut last night in Beijing. Ignore the fact that movie has been “out” on pirated DVDs and Chinese websites since it first played in the US. Last night was the first time it showed in theaters in China! It was the talk of the (cyber)town! Continue reading →