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I admire Peter Hessler’s ability to write about China without coming off as trite or condescending. He doesn’t traffic in banalities and doesn’t pass off his own experiences as anything but fragmentary and personal. It may also be that among the few China books I’ve managed to read in the past years, only Oracle Bones resonated in a way that made me feel it was trying to express a sense of loss: painting a picture of a Beijing that I know (or knew), and somehow capturing the sense of a city fleeing from its past while mired in it.

The reason I mention this is that I stumbled across a short commentary by Hessler on the Wenchuan earthquake:

In the minds of many Chinese, major earthquakes are often connected with political events. This week’s disaster is the largest since 1976, when a quake in eastern China killed more than two hundred and forty thousand people. That was the year that Zhou Enlai and Mao Zedong both died, and the Cultural Revolution ended. At that time, Willy was a newborn in rural Sichuan, far from the epicenter, but even there his parents felt the tremors. His mother was bathing her two sons and her first instinct was to put some clothes on them—later, she said that she couldn’t stand the thought of them dying naked. In a neighboring village, the peasants slaughtered all the pigs, even the smallest ones; they believed that it was best to enjoy what they had before the world ended.

It’s those last two sentences that humanize it all. I was chatting with Echo a few days ago and remember being surprised how shaken up she was. Up until that point, I’d been totally oblivious to the earthquake, donating money in charity drives and reading the news online, but otherwise unaffected by the media blitz. Echo was badly affected though, and what brought it home to me was when she said:

“Beijing is technically a very dangerous place, but it’s actually quite safe because it’s 皇城”.

“皇城?”

“Yeah. Geologists say it’s dangerous, but the city has been safe for more than 800 years because it’s been the seat of the Emperor.”

Pointing out that geomantism went out with dowsing in scientific circles didn’t seem the best response, so I stayed tactfully silent. I figure if I can eventually win on the “drinking-cold-water-does-not-kill” front I’ll be happy enough. But it struck me how illogical and small our efforts are to impose order on the outside world at times of tragedy. Even when they make sense, they don’t make any sense.

At any rate, I’m moving back to Beijing quite soon and am hoping to avoid earthquakes. Will post the details on that later. Hope things are going well for all of you reading. The entire Hessler piece is online at the New Yorker if you haven’t stumbled across it elsewhere.

Tags: wenzhou

Not exactly working late at the office, but am reluctant to leave as my new Ubuntu-powered Fujitsu ultraportable (S6410) tears through:

• downloading 400 MB of java tools and resources for generating the Chinese Perakun plugin.
• downloading 600 MB of a bilingual english-german corpus from http://statmt.org
• downloading 300 MB worth of open source flight simulation software from a Ubuntu mirror
• generating an English language model with SRILM for SMT work

It’s been about a month since I purchased the new laptop and I’m pleased with it (not to mention the new office bandwidth - I’m getting a sustained 200kbps from http://statmt.org on a 600MB file hosted somewhere in the United States). There are minor compatibility issues with Ubuntu and the keyboard that keep me from totally recommending it. The most irritating is that applications occasionally stop recognizing keyboard input when other windows open and I have to shuffle around closing things until I can type again.

Still, the most surprising thing I’ve found since buying this machine is how rarely I switch into Vista and how quickly - once there - I start chafing at the lack of productive software tools. It seems that whenever I’m in Vista I need to throw myself through hoops downloading and installing software. Was it always this much trouble? Or have I just become more reliant on a wider range of software? I’m still stunned that Vista doesn’t include a codec capable of DVD playback by default and that Fujitsu didn’t bother to install it by default. Between Apple’s momentum with mobile devices, Ubuntu’s ease-of-use with apt-get and Microsoft’s attempts to flagellate me with Vista (which often goes unresponsive for non-trivial pauses while it “thinks” about God-knows-what) and Microsoft Office 2007, I ‘m happy to be out.

Why doesn’t Microsoft run a software repository anyway?

Just when I’d met China halfway and accepted the lunar cycle, I got this email explaining the “Cycle of Organs”. It is hands-down the strangest list I’ve run into in six years of working and living in China:

一、晚上9-11点为免疫系统（淋巴）排毒时间，此段时间应安静或听音乐 。
二、晚间11-凌晨1点，肝的排毒，需在熟睡中进行。
三、凌晨1-3点，胆的排毒，亦同。
四、凌晨3-5点，肺的排毒。此即为何咳嗽的人在这段时间咳得最剧烈，因排毒动作已走到
肺；不应用止咳药，以免抑制废积物的排除。
五、凌晨5-7点，大肠的排毒，应上厕所排便。
六、凌晨7-9点，小肠大量吸收营养的时段，应吃早餐。疗病者最好早吃，在6点半前，养
生者在7点半前，不吃早餐者应改变习惯，即使拖到9、10点吃都比不吃好。
七、半夜至凌晨4点为脊椎造血时段，必须熟睡，不宜熬夜。

Writing this on the plane back to Shanghai, after an extended weekend of sorts in Beijing. First things first, I’ve got to give some love to the new airport here. It involved a leap of faith to head to Terminal Three (Shanghai Airlines hasn’t updated its ticketing system to let passengers know… ahem… where exactly the plane is), but that was the right decision. And the new terminal is a thing of beauty. The architects followed the design of the Pudong terminal in Shanghai: large and amazingly clean glass walls stretch up on all sides towards a curved roof that arches across the entire breadth of the terminal. There’s an enormous feeling of spaciousness and general organization. Also a touch of the Hong Kong railway terminal in their decision to place the restaurants and shops that dominate the concession area on an elevated platform. Kudos to the team that designed and built it.

What can I say about the weekend except that it was good. Flew to Beijing on Sunday and encamped at a hostel in the university district. Spent Monday morning wandering through 中关村 in a quest for the Fujitsu outlet: I really like their ultraportable S-series because the machines are light, compact, have great battery life and come with a 13-inch screen, which hits the right balance between size and usability: it’s usable on a plane but still “feels” like a fullsized machine. Eventually found them tucked away in the basement of one of the main complexes, and bought an S6410. Have been using it for two days and am happy with the choice. The only downside is that the machine came preinstalled with Vista, which refuses to play nicely with SSH, despite my best efforts to coax the firewall into opening port 22. Assuming I can massage the wireless card into working with Linux I’ll be happy to remove it. Sad to see that Linux has made essentially zero progress in the laptop market since my last purchase about three years ago.

Spent Monday afternoon and evening working in the 978 art district, and then Tuesday morning back in 五道口 at the cafe that used to be 雕刻时光 but is now called 桥咖啡. I asked the waitress about the name change, and she muttered vaguely about some sort of falling-out between the owners. Whatever it’s called, the cafe is still a good place to work. Had breakfast, telecommuted and ended up in an interesting conversation with a former speechwriter for Pierre Trudeau who is doing management consulting work in China. We talked about both Canadian and American politics (he is very positive on Obama and considers the liberal party to be in disarray). After lunch I rediscovered the old Beijing tradition of the 午觉 and was pleased to find my laptop picking up the Wifi signal from 桥咖啡 about a fifty meters away and through several walls of cement. Way to go Fujitsu!

Headed to see a friend of Echo’s at BCLU later that afternoon before taking the subway to 国贸 for Danwei’s Second “Plenary Session” that evening. The event was well-organized: Jeremy handled the panel while Rob fielded questions from the crowd. There were the standard roster of throwaway questions everyone equivocates on, but still some surprises. The most interesting panelist was a woman from Channel Four News in Britain who deftly skipped past the politics when asked about the protests in western China to point out that no-one in the Western media has access to what is happening on the ground and there isn’t much informed reporting that anyone can do about it.

Ran into Jim, Joel, Elyse and a few others at the session. Chatted with Jim about Marx and the British Labour Movement, and eventually headed off to Sandglass where we hooked up with Joel and eventually Chris and looted the fridge until around 2:00am. I was surprised by how of the Beijing crowd had headed down to Moganshan for the conference on literary translation. Did not sound like I would have enjoyed it though. Waking up early to argue over the wording of sentence-level translations? Sounds like a combination of work and group struggle session.

Only hiccup has been getting back. Shanghai Airlines booked my return ticket for the 27th rather than the 26th and I didn’t catch the error since I’d simply asked for a ticket on Wednesday morning.

Tags: beijing, danwei, sandglass