The hare had escaped.  The farmer yelled at his hunting dog, “You’re a highly trained animal!  How could you let that little hare outrun you?”  The hunting dog replied, “Master, I was merely hunting for my lunch;  he was hunting for his life.”  — Aesop’s Fables

I recently went back to the U.S. on a business trip, and caught up with friends I haven’t seen in a while – so the usual ten minute synopsis of recent developments in their relationships, job, and education.  My friends are at the age now where summer is now just considered “wedding season,” but people don’t really have kids yet.  It’s a moment when we’ve finished processing all the norms our parents gave us, and are now deciding what ones we consider our own.

One such norm is gender equality, specifically in the workplace. Thanks to the women’s movement, men and women can, at least in theory, now do the same jobs, get paid the same for doing them, and advance to the same seniority at them.  My mother fought hard for that privilege.  She was one of ten women in her medical school class of over a hundred.  Thanks to my parent’s generation (and my parents!), I could attend a formerly all-boys school in New York, play baseball on a co-ed Little League team, work on a historically male Wall Street trading floor, and drink scotch at a formerly all-male New York Athletic Club.  I have been told me there’s a glass ceiling somewhere out there, but I haven’t yet felt it.  We women have my parents’ generation to thank for such liberty.

And yet, I don’t have to look too far ahead to see something that looks suspiciously like a glass ceiling still out there in the workplace.  I don’t need to barrage you with statistics proving that there are notably few female CEOs, directors of companies, or Congresswomen in the US.  Here’s one fun fact though: Lehman Brothers, where I used to work, promoted 199 people to Managing Director last year. 176 of them were men. Only 23 were women. 

So why, after all these decades of gender equality, are women – ambitious, talented, smart women – still not keeping up with men in the workplace?

It’s not just the “glass ceiling” preventing women from rising higher.  There’s also a “concrete floor” preventing men from falling behind, a floor built by you, and by me.

Continue reading →

I had seen the Big Five before I knew what they were.  It happened Wednesday January 28th at 5:50pm in Kruger National Park in South Africa, the moment I caught sight of a leopard — the last of the “Five” — hidden in the grass and about to pounce on an African gazelle.  I had spent almost two full days scanning the horizon from our ten-person open-top safari Jeep, seeing zebras, giraffes, hippopotamuses, baboons, wildebeests, impalas, wart hogs, vultures, hawks, and the other Big Four — lions, elephants, water buffalo and cheetahs.  I really hadn’t been paying attention to what the Big Five were, too enraptured by the sunsets and the blue sky, the peaceful coexistence of zebras and warthogs and impalas grazing together — and an inexplicable affinity for a chicken-like bird with a huge red eye spot that would suicidally cross the road. Don’t ask why.

I might have overlooked this Big Five thing entirely, had not the manager of our lodge that evening asked a British couple in our Jeep how our magnificent day had been.  “It was pretty disappointing,” the glum bride-to-be replied. “We missed seeing the leopard, which ran away before we could spot it.  So we only saw four of the Big Five.”

I thought about her comment the next two days of my safari trip. I thought about it when I was back in New York last month, listening as people shared their concerns about their careers.  It echoed in the back of my mind when talking to friends about failing relationships, about challenging grad school applications, nerve-wracking job applications, indeterminate health checkups, volatile pension savings.  It seemed everywhere there were people looking for, and just missing, elements of their own Big Five, whatever they were — career, family, love, health, house, finances, future.

And yet, despite this financial crisis, despite illness, and breakups, and losing jobs and identities, so many of you, unlike the British couple, have found the good in all this.  You’ve come to appreciate the blueness of the wide open sky, and the vividness of the sunsets.  You’ve found your red-eyed chicken.  You’ve deepened your friendship with your fellow travellers.

Look, I am glad that we have the Big Five to look for:  it’s a great excuse to go on safari. 

But I guess I’m not too bothered if we don’t spot that last leopard.  In the end, I just really enjoy being here, watching chickens cross the road, spending time with you on this ride together.

The upside of this financial crisis was that my friend was able to join me shoe shopping last Thursday at Harry’s Shoes on 83rd and Broadway.  He still had his severance package in hand from that morning’s trip to his firm’s “16th floor,” a blue folder that those kind people in human resources suggested he put in a white envelope to be more (you know) discreet.

I really wasn’t expecting New York to be quite so bad.  We read about it in the news here in China, but just aren’t feeling the financial crisis quite that hard.  China’s GDP is still growing a “worrying” 6 to 8%, people estimate — multiples of the pace of the developed world even during the good years. 

But as soon as I landed in New York last week, even before I crossed the tunnel from Newark airport into Manhattan, it became clear this crisis was as bad as the papers were saying, if not worse: my cab driver told me that I was just his second ride during his 12 hour shift, when he used to average 5 rides a day;  he thinks this will last so long that he’s considering moving back to Turkey after 5 years here in the States.  Later my parents took me to a good restaurant which normally required reservations;  it was so empty they let the three of us sit at a booth normally reserved for 8 on a Friday night.  When I met up with friends in a bar last Thursday for a brief “what are you up to” drink, the stats were depressing — a full quarter of my friends had been laid off in the past few months, and another quarter were worrying about their jobs or working extra jobs for colleagues of theirs that were laid off.

I went home that night feeling like Scarlett O’Hara picking her way through the bodies laid out near the hospital in Atlanta, grateful that I could at least return to the still surviving economy of China.  It felt that night that New York had fundamentally changed.  Even after 9/11, New York had a fighting spirit to it, a rallying passion.  Last Thursday, though, walking between the vacant office towers of midtown, it felt like New Yorkers were getting ready to abandon the city, and take its soul with them.

The next day, I walked through Columbus Circle.  The subway station is a mess:  construction marked out by blue plywood boards, walling in passages and blocking exits.  Up on the street, yellow cabs jolted over potholed pavement that had been poured quickly in patches during the black night — overused roads that never have enough of a break to heal fully.  No one else noticed the constricting plywood walls or the mutilated streets, though.  New Yorkers just deal with it, and move on anyway.  Watching them pick their way through the hazards of this urban jungle, I realized they would get through this too.

E.B. White wrote “Here is New York” in 1949 to describe this very same city that swept me through its tunnels and spit me out onto its streets last week.  He noted, “Mass hysteria is a terrible force, yet New Yorkers seem always to escape it by some tiny margin: they sit in stalled subways without claustrophobia, they extricate themselves from panic situations by some lucky wisecrack, they meet confusion and congestion with patience and grit — a sort of perpetual muddling through.”

When I left New York last weekend, the sky was blue and spring was in the air.  I left dreaming of lazy flocks of unemployed bankers and lawyers, with a falling reservoir of savings and a rising surplus of time, soaking up the free things with which New York summers drench its citizens:  free movies at Bryant Park, cherry blossom festivals in Brooklyn, Shakespeare at the Delacorte Theater, Philharmonic in the park, swing dancing at Lincoln Center, free concerts everywhere.  They will gather amongst errant frisbees and oversized dogs, and spend the time they wished they had when the churning economy was rushing them along.  They will spend more time with each other, now, and ask themselves what it was that they imagined their life and world would look like before all this, before they became corporate assets that travel up and down in elevators each day.  And from the supernova dust of this financial crisis, new constellations will form that I can’t imagine yet.  But they will.

And while they rebuild the economy through this solemn time, they will wear black. Not because they are mourning the passage of something wonderful, that moment in time when life was good and hard and easy.  They’ll wear black because they are New Yorkers, who have always worn black, and have been ready — always ready — to muddle through.

If you want to see a short snapshot of my life, I have a cameo at the 3rd minute of this webcast on people finding jobs in China:

http://video.nytimes.com/video/2008/12/25/business/1194835801113/reverse-brain-drain.html

Tonight I went out to celebrate Obama’s victory, and the end of an administration that history has already judged as a failure in so many ways.  As an American living abroad, no failure has hurt me more than America’s loss of esteem in the world’s eyes.  Why did I feel I needed to slap Canadian labels on my luggage all these years?  Why have I been so embarrased to let people know I’m American?

But tonight, it finally hit me what today’s election meant to our country — and to me — when I overheard a young woman raise her glass and toast proudly, “I’m an American!”  Tomorrow, I’ll go back to being skeptical of “change” and critical of the new administration too (as always), but for now, it feels great to be an American.  I am proud of the democratic process, proud of my fellow Americans, proud of Obama and his team, and proud of this moment in history.

And I’m not the only one.  Here’s a video I took (endure the first 5 seconds of static please) of a spontaneous outpouring of patriotism that erupted on the rooftop of the Saddle in Sanlitun, a bar district in Beijing, so you can see for yourself what this means:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9l6nQsnHYA

Congratulations, America.

As always,

Liz

I still don’t know what Obama’s voice sounds like.

I don’t watch foreign television here in Beijing, and for whatever reason, haven’t caught Obama clips on Chinese TV, though I am sure they have them.  When I realized my pretty unique situation half a year ago — how many non-deaf eligible voters in the whole world don’t know what Obama sounds like? a hundred?  — I started to make a concerted effort to avoid videos of him speaking until I could read his policies and platform objectively.  I basically ran out of time, unfortunately, and now only have 15 minutes to share my thoughts, so apologies for the haste.  In a few minutes, I’ll bike over to a restaurant in Beijing where I can watch CNN.  If Obama is elected
president, I’ll hear his voice for the first time when he gives an
acceptance speech.

But before I do that, I wanted to write down why I felt it was
important to not hear him in the first place:  when asking people what
they liked about him (most Americans living in Beijing are Democrats),
almost everyone pointed to a time they heard him speak — the 2004
convention, or a key debate.  And it had me wondering: was this just a
charismatic guy, who could work a room better than a “beady eyed” and “grouchy” McCain?  Were his supporters getting swept up by his
charisma more than by his policy stance?

In broad strokes, I do agree with Obama’s policies on most topics —
though his seemingly protectionist stance concerns me and I’m not
clear whether an Obama administration will be able to fix the key
problems in America’s health care system.  And there are bigger things
that worry me about McCain, including his choice of Sarah Palin for
VP, that had me cast anti-McCain absentee ballot more than I was
casting a pro-Obama one.

But as I’ve talked to people about my “charisma concern,” I realized
that actually, for a president, personal character SHOULD matter, a
lot.  Other legislators in D.C. should be, well, people who legislate,
and so when you vote for them, you should be voting for a set of
policies.  But a president is special;  he (or one day, she) needs to
be a leader, someone who can react to problems that we can’t
anticipate, build consensus to get things done, make prudent decisions
under pressure, listen when it makes sense to listen, and speak when a
clear voice needs to be heard.

More to say (always), but my 15 minutes are up.  Obama’s 15 minutes,
though, look like they be far from done.

Happy 2008,
Liz

Six years ago tomorrow, I was typing happily away at my computer when my hands stopped working. When I say I couldn’t use my hands, I mean that for the next many months I couldn’t:

• cut food with a knife and fork
• tie my shoelaces
• turn the key in the lock
• squeeze the hand brakes on my bike
• wash my hair very well
• hold a pen or write
• type a single word on my computer
• push buttons on a cell phone
• and much much more!

Here’s the thing: this happened to me one day in November, suddenly, while I was basically a healthy person, and completely changed my life my senior year at college. Looking back, Continue reading →

This will be a quick one, as I have a latte to drink before it gets cold.  I am in California, meeting my family before heading to Maui for a wedding and then back to California for my college reunion.  So before the events of the next two weeks–
 
I feel a little fresh off the boat to say the least.  I divided by 0 when the customs official asked me why I was visiting China, and I had to explain that, actually, it was the US that I was visiting.  Money has flummoxed me too:  I can’t really understand how people distinguish bills when they are all the same shape and color.  And this concept of adding tax to prices resulting in inelegant numbers, like $8.61, seemed very odd to me;  in China, prices are in denominations of 1s and 10s, with no fractional and useless change.  When my sister went to pay for a $2.06 coffee with her credit card, nobody batted an eye.
 
Americans come in all shapes, colors, ages and sizes, but everyone I met has shared that perfect pearly smile.  Why are all these people smiling at me?  What do they want from me? It’s a little unsettling. 
 
Silicon Valley in particular is bizarre. I am sitting in a cafe at 10 am with a circle of a dozen ladies who lunch in spandex yoga suits and sundry comfortably-dressed intellectuals reading the paper or on the internet.  Get over the fact that the WiFi I am using to connect to Gmail has been provided by Google itself — Big Brother anyone? — but getting lost driving around this part of the country is like wandering aimlessly on the web:  there’s VeriSign, with a lovely fountain over its blue tile corporate logo, and Palm, a megaplex branded with 20 foot orange circle corporate logos, next to BMC Software, down the street from Coupons.com and StartupYou’veNeverHeardOf.com or eThis and eThat. 
 
Appropriately I have been reading Stanford Magazine, which is actually really good (and may indeed inspire me more to donate the alma), which talks about algorithms and mountain climbing and equality and eating habits.  Stanford, and this little famous valley, are driven by curiosity and the sense that any imaginable is possible.
 
Beijing is like that too, I suppose, but in a different way.  Outside the window of my cafe are a parking lots, seven American flags, and trees in every color of foliage. 
 
I am not in China anymore.
 
Eeps, battery dying, and my three pronged plug doesn’t work in this country.  I wonder if buying a converter for my power source will be as hard as converting back to an American myself….
 
Cheers,
Liz

Useful tips that take a moment to learn, and save a lifetime of frustration. Continue reading →