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 →