China Trips: Northwest (0)

This was the story, or rather a series of stories, of my business trips to the Northwest of China in 1997 and 1998. I wrote it prior to another trip to the same region in August, 2003, for quite a different purpose. (In fact, I am leaving today, August 14, with my wonderful teammates.) This new trip was what inspired me to write about those trips 5-6 years ago. More than once in the past I was compelled to tell these stories, but this time, I finally did it.

I posted the "chapters" to a "blog." For those of you who are not familiar with a "blog," it's a wonderful tool for you to keep a journal and share your daily thoughts. The thing with a blog, however, is that the newest entries are posted at the top, which makes perfect sense for a journal; people want to read your latest. But for a series like this, which I wish you would read in the order I wrote each chapter, you would have to scroll down to the bottom and begin to read it backward. I couldn't find a way to configure it such that it would display in the reverse order.

So this was what I did: I utilized the edit function of each blog entry combined with massive copy-and-paste actions to repost all the entries in the reverse order. Here, right in front of your eyes, you have all the chapters in the "correct order." Please pay no attention to the date and time stamp. I couldn't possibly write the last chapter two weeks ago and then the first chapter today. I am not that good.

Enjoy.

China Trips: Northwest (1)

The first time I saw China's Northwest was in the summer of 1997, during one of my business trips. According to my record, this was my sixth international trips for my customer support duties, but somehow, in my memory, this trip was almost like my very first trip to China. It was during that trip, I saw the China that I never knew.

Up to then I had enjoyed these international trips trememdously. The company I worked for was headquartered in Japan, although our division resided in San Jose, California, developing a network management software to monitor the telecommunications networks that were made up by equipments provided by our parent company.

My line of duty was to help customers to install or upgrade this piece of software, and if they ran into problems that they couldn't resolve, I would travel to the site.

The first such trip occurred in 1996, nine years after I left my home country, and the first stop was Chengdu, the captial city of the Southwest province Sichuan (or in America, often spelled as "Szuchuan" as displayed on those Chinese restaurants signs). Prior to that trip, I hardly ate anything spicy. That changed rather dramatically after merely two days of stay in Chengdu. After all, I didn't intend to starve myself. The second stop of that trip was Nanjing, which happened to be my birth place. Nanjing is close to the East coast, only 200 miles away from Shanghai.

The next few trips included stops at Shanghai and Nanjing (again), also a couple of cities in the Southwest China. It was hard to complain if I could keep going back to my hometown, but nothing was really impressive. True, China had been going through some incredible changes - on the outside, at least, but when I got closer to the people - oh, and those ever existing crowds - I saw that the changes on the inside were much slower. Shanghai looked quite different now, but more spectacular changes were yet to come at that point.

One exception was a trip to New Zealand at the beginning of 1997. That one was utterly impressive - not because of the job, of course, but because of the location. I had never experienced more clear an air. I went there with Sam, an American-born Japanese, who became one of my closest partners at work. We got sunburnt, and my explanation when we returned to California was that we worked in front of the Sun workstations all day every day.

Meanwhile, I actually began to look for a different job. I had some communication issues with my management, and these trips were a good escape. But for the long run, I thought I'd better get another job. In fact, I went to a job interview with Yahoo!, a company that was growing rapidly. The job ad was looking for someone to do "surfing" on the web to collect links. I didn't think that was particualr attractive, but I went to the interview anyway. Halfway through the interview, they suddenly asked me if I would be interested in a different position. Yahoo! was expanding to include services in different languages. For example, they were planning to launch a Chinese Yahoo!, and they asked me if I wanted to be a "producer" of such a project. As far as career advancement was concerned, this was like a dream opportunity. Naturally I said I was interested. They asked me to come back for a second interview.

I told them I had to go to China for another trip in August, and I would be happy to come to the second interview after the trip. Before I will describe this China trip in Auguest, 1997, let me move fast forward a little bit: The second interview with Yahoo! was also successful, and they asked me to come back for a third interview - in other words, I was getting very close to get the job. But I had to go to China again in September. These two China trips were for the same project and could very well be considered the same trip. In any case, I thought these were the last trips I would make to China.

Little did I know.

China Trips: Northwest (2)

The trips in August and September of 1997 were part of a major telecommunications backbone projects in China. At the time, the country was speeding up the development of its infrastructures, mainly in the forms of transportation (building new roads) and telecommunications (backbone networks of fiber optics). In the field of telecommunications, eight backbone project contracts were signed in 1997. The company I worked for, Fujitsu, took one of them, while the others were divided among companies like Siemens, Lucent and Alcatel, as foreign companies dominated this field.

The Fujitsu contract was called the ADB Project as it was funded by Asian Development Bank (ADB), but in Chinese it had a different name: Ji-Shi-Tai-Yin Project, as each character denoted a major city on this backbone network: Ji'nan, Shijiazhuang, Taiyuan and Yinchuan, respectively, each one a well-known capital city of a province. Here came an interesting twist: There was a fifth major city in this network called Yulin, but it was not included in the project name. Probably because it was not a major city like the others. In fact, I had never heard of it. But we were supposed to install a Sun workstation at this city along with our software. In that sense, it was as "major" as the other four. I kept wondering how come I never heard of this Yulin.

Later, of course, I learned more about Yulin. In fact, today when I speak of China's Northwest, I speak of Yulin more than any other cities.

My August schedule was hectic. Literally I ran from one city to another every day. By the time I reached Yinchuan, I had covered more half of the cities, with workstations booted up and software installed and running. I thought my work was almost completed, or so I thoguht.

Geographically Yinchuan was already Northwest. In fact, it was "more northwestern" than Yulin, which I was yet to visit. We flew in Yinchuan from Beijing, and it was already very dark outside when we arrived. It was a very cloudy night, as we could hardly see any stars, nor many street lights on our way to the hotel. That was my first impress of the Northwest: Not many people lived there. But it was really dark, and frankly I couldn't be too sure. In fact, I didn't have a good look at the city until I left Yinchuan a couple of days later.

Our customer at the Yinchuan Telecom (all these telecom companies we visited were state owned, under the same giant umbralla of China Telecom) was a Mr. Guo. He was a very bright and open young man with a shaved head, and I liked him immediately. It didn't take me long to explain the basics of running the software, and he was eager to learn a few more things. The installation went very smoothly, so did our training session. I was ready to leave the next day.

(During the remaining of this trip and my next couple of trips to China, Mr. Guo called me a number of times to ask questions about the software. I was very glad to do it because as he was able to resolve the problems, I didn't have to go to Yinchuan in person. In fact, I only went to Yinchuan one more time. Many times I wished that our customers at others sites could be as responsible and eager to learn like Mr. Guo. He actually came to America a few years later for some training, and he called my office from SFO airport.)

My next stop would be Yulin, but I was not going to take an airplane. Instead, I was going to travel with Mr. Deng, a hardware engineer from Nanjing (where Fujitsu had a partner company), on motor vehicles. The reason was that we needed to take a look at some hardware equipments along this line; there were a few optical cards to be replaced. I didn't give it much a thought until I saw the vehicle we were going to take to leave Yinchuan. It was a "mountain jeep." Not as bulky as a Hummer, nor as luxury as a Land Cruiser or a Land Rover, but it certainly beat anything I'd seen by then in China.

That was when I realized, the fun had just begun.

China Trips: Northwest (3)

Mr. Deng spoke fluent Japanese, as that language was his major when he attended the Foreign Languange School in Nanjing before he also studied telecommunications in college. This was obviously an advantage as we constantly needed to communicate with Japanese engineers. And with me, he didn't have to speak English. Mr. Deng was quite young, but he had lost quite some hair. I later heard from his coworkers in Nanjing that it was because he studied too hard in school. He didn't appear to be a bookworm type of person to me at all, however. Rather, he was quite down to earth and full of street smart. I couldn't complain to have such a company.

As we were leaving Yinchuan, I noticed that it was in fact a nice and clean city. I saw more green than I expected out of Northwest until I realized that Huang He, or the Yellow River, ran through nearby.

The landscape began to change gradually as the jeep drove further away from Yinchuan. There was less and less green on the ground. We stopped a couple of times as Mr. Deng went to examine the hardware equipments along the way. Without going into any technical details, we had a general term for these telecommunications equipments: We called them Network Elements, or in short, NEs.

The places we stopped at were not longer cities. Soon it was not even a town. Finally we arrived at a place where there wasn't even a complete street. Simply a few low buildings standing together out of nowhere. There was a post office and a restaurant. Then, in a room next to them, there were some NEs all by themselves. Nobody was there watching them. We wiped dust off the racks, and we were on our way again.

Now no more houses in sight, and the road became bumpy, very bumpy. Soon I realized that we couldn't get lost on this road, because there was just this one road. The jeep could only go forward. Of course, with the bumpy road, it also went up and down. Occasionally our heads hit the ceiling. Mr. Deng said, "You don't experience something like this in America, do you?" I said, "Sure we do. Have you heard of Disneyland?"

Finally we were able to adjust to the bumpy movements, and I began to look out the window to do some sightseeing. That was when, suddenly, something grabbed my heart. A certain feeling grew stronger and stronger inside until it became almost overwhelming. What exactly did I see?

I saw a vast land. Now, it wasn't that I didn't see a vast land when we first got on this portion of the road; I saw it at the beginning. But one look, however impressive it was, didn't really mount to much. It was after hours of driving that the endlessness of it finally caught up with me. And there was something else other than the vastness.

I certainly had seen big land before. Driving in California, say from San Francisco to Sacramento, there were plenty sights of large land. But looking at the crops on the sides of California highways, one could easily imagine the process of sowing and reaping. There was liveliness in that large land. Here in China's Northwest, however, I didn't see such liveliness. The land didn't appear to be able to grow anything except sparse grass. One could tell - one knew - that no one lived on this land. That vastness came with emptiness.

What I would remember the most, however, was neither the vastness nor the emptiness. Rather, it was a battle in my heart. I had this urge to shout, "What a waste!" But something inside me prevented me from letting it out. There was a little voice saying, "No, this cannot be all waste." That little voice was saying, "There is hope." I did not know where that voice came from, but that battle I would never forget.

China Trips: Northwest (4)

Our goal for the first day of driving was to reach a place called Ding Bian before dark. Ding Bian was on the other side of the border between two provinces. Thanks to the "mountain jeep" (or "cross-country jeep") we were riding, it looked like that we would hit our goal. The road had been uneven and bumpy most of the time, and a couple of times we had go over deep water pits. Several times we saw cars or trucks got stuck in some bad spots on the road, and even more times we saw vehicles broken down on the sides of the road.

Later I read on a literature magazine carrying a story describing exactly this same road. The story told how some local farmers made a living by helping out those vehicles that got stuck on the road - they simply charged the drivers. To increase their "earnings," some farmers created pits on the road to make it easier for vehicles to fall in. Luckily we didn't have to deal with anything like that.

However, once we reached Ding Bian, we had to say good-bye to the jeep. It belonged to Yingchuan Telecom, and we were now in a different province. (After all, we were taking a free ride instead of renting it.) Deng was confident that Ding Bian would provide the next vehicle for us to continue.

We were received by local officials. Now I realized that Ding Bian, although labeled as a city on the map, was really a town. It might have the administrative right over a much bigger area, but the town itself was really not that big. After dining at a local restaurant, for example, the restaurant owner gave me a lighter as a gift, although he knew that I didn't smoke. The name of the restaurant was engraved on the lighter, along with its address: "Next door to the theater." I had a feeling that the address of the theater was "next door to the restaurant."

Historically, however, Ding Bian was an important military checkpoint at the border - against invaders from the North. "Ding Bian" literally means "to settle the border." In other words, here was an ancient battlefield.

Deng introduced me to the local officals as a "foreign expert." I felt uneasy about that term, although I indeed held a foreign passport. Between me and Deng, we hardly felt like foreigners to each other, not to mention we grew up in the same city. But soon I found out Deng's intention: He was trying to gain extra favor in the arrangement for our trip. After all, not many "foreign experts" ever visited this place.

There was no hotel in this place, and I spent the night at a guesthouse where they received officals from other places. I didn't know where Deng spent the night. He probably handled it all right, as it was clear that he had been here before. He only worried about this "foreign expert."

China Trips: Northwest (5)

The next morning we were informed that the local officals couldn't find a car from their office, as all cars were sent out on assignments. What should we do then? The locals pointed and said, "You take that car to the next town, where they will have further arrangement."

I looked it up, and it was a car which exterior looked too familiar. We got in the car together, and I whispered to Deng, "Is this really a police car?" He nodded, as if he was not surprised.

My excitement didn't last very long, because quickly a few more people crawled in. When the door finally closed, there were three people in the front and four people in the back. One of the guys in the back - sitting next to me - even tried to light up a cigarette until Deng stopped him. The whole situation in the car was probably illegal by any country's traffic law, but for the moment, "we are the police."

The car ran very fast, to no one's surprise, and a couple of times they used siren to clear up the traffic in front. Not that there were many vehicles on the road, but the road was simply too narrow, and our driver was feeling very competitive that morning.

One by one people inside the car reached their destination. Before I could enjoy the breathing room, we arrived at the next town. We jumped on our next vehicle - a small van - and continued our journey.

Soon we saw the Great Wall. It was not at all what I had imagined.

To see the Great Wall had been one of my longest awaited dream. By then I had been in Beijing a couple of times, but each time the stay was too short to do any sightseeing, including to see the Great Wall nearby. Finally, here, near the ancient battlefields in the Northwest, I saw the Great Wall.

I couldn't believe my eyes. It was nothing like what I had seen in the post cards, where tall brick walls and broad pavement on the top symbolized a once magnificant empire. That was the sections near Beijing, which were restored in the Ming Dynasty (around 500 years ago). Here, we saw a section of the Great Wall that was built much earlier, more than 2,000 years ago in the Qin Dynasty. It was only about two-men tall. I couldn't see how wide it was from our van, but later I had a chance to walk on the top of it, and it was barely wide enough for two people walking side by side - unlike the sections near Beijing, where it was said that five horses could run side by side at the top.

The word for the Great Wall in Chinese is Chang Cheng, which literally means "long castle." Whoever translated it to "Great Wall" must have seen the sections elsewhere first, for here, the wall was nothing "great," but it was indeed very, very long. I couldn't see the end of it. Despite its unimpressive height, its sheer length did create an awesome feeling.

I soon learned two very interesting facts about this section of the Great Wall. One was that it was made of earth, not typical building bricks or stones. Or more precisely, tamped earth without any further treatment. How could such a wall stand 2,000 years? To answer that, one had to know the earth of the Northwest. It was the Yellow Earth. A main characteristic of the yellow earth was that when water washed through it, the yellow earth didn't absorb much of the water or got "resolved" by the water. Instead it let the water permeate; and that only made the earth more sticky and holding itself stronger. The more the water washed, the stronger the earth became, so to speak. That was the same yellow earth that the people in the Northwest had used to build their houses for many years.

The second thing I noticed was that the road we were driving on appeared to be in perfect parellel as the Great Wall. (Due to my work, I paid much attention to the roads because the optical fibers were buried along and off the roads - so that if any section of the optical fibers got damaged, the repairman could arrived at the scene quickly by the road, although ironically, often the optical fibers got cut because of road constructions.) The driver explained that when they first built the road, they studied the geography of this area, including the mountain shapes and river trends. The road builder finally concluded that the current route was the best route to take advantage of the natural barriers. The "perfect parallel" between the route and the ancient Great Wall could mean only one thing:

Somebody discovered the same thing 2,000 years ago.

China Trips: Northwest (6)

Soon after the Great Wall disappeared from our sight, our road ahead began to upward onto hills and mountains. We had entered the region called the High Plateau of the Yellow Earth. (Actually, the road before we hit the mountains was already on the high plateau.) Building this road - again, there was just this one road - must have been difficult, while the road construction was still going on during our trip, making the ride uneasy constantly.

In the mountains, we saw people living in caves. These cave were actually quite well built, but imagine a house that could receive sunshine from only one side all year long. But there was virtually no way for the local people to build the kind of houses like elsewhere. Building a caved house was probably the most practical and economical way.

We reached a town called Heng Shan (literally means "horizonal mountain"), where we had lunch and changed vehicle one more time. The lunch was not serve in a restaurant, but we were invited into someone's house - my impression even today is that it was a cave, but not like the caved houses I had seen in the mountains. Anyway it was a very simple dewelling. My entire lunch consisted of two bowl: One bowl of rice and one bowl of lamb. In nothern China, rice is not usually served - as opposed to the South - and it was probably out of courtesy of my presense, they served rice. The lamb was absolutely delicious. And that was it. There was absolutely no vegetable for that meal, extremely rare for me. But I could stand one meal, and honestly I enjoyed it.

Our next vehicle was a jeep, but not nearly as good as the cross-country jeep we had earlier in the trip. In fact, at times I thought the whole vehicle was going to collapse. The driving was "normal" by Chinese standard. In other words, "crazy" by American standard. That was an observation as soon as I first visited China. In the big cities, where roads were plenty and wide, it was not too bad except nobody seemed to pay attention to the traffic lights or other vehicles, but once you get to the countryside, where there was no traffic lights and you had to pay attention to other vehicles because the roads were so narrow, that was when I really opened my eyes.

Typically there was just one lane on the road - often this one lane was for both directions! But somehow a car could pass the car in front on this one lane. How was that possible? Well, it would be impossible in America. Also at times, a car would pass the car in front while there was another car coming this way. All these cars were sharing this same lane, right? Then incredibly, the passing car managed to get ahead just in time and avoid an almost certain collision. At first my heart almost stopped a few times, then I finally got used to it - or perhaps my heart indeed stopped.

From all my experience I had two observations: One, the drivers were extremely good at calculating the exact moment to avoid the collision. Sometimes I wondered why they made it so dramatic. Couldn't they just wait a little before passing? Then I realized that if they waited - like the way I would drive - they would probably never move ahead much. Two, while they had the concept of "road", the drivers had no concept of "lane."

What amazed me was that hardly ever I saw a traffic accident in China. The way most of the drivers drove, it was almost guaranteed to have accidents. Of course, there must have been accidents in China; I just didn't witness one, and I thought I should have seen them quite often like what I had seen - and a couple of times directly involved - in California. Finally it dawned on me that it was probably not a fair comparison. There were definitely a lot more cars in California; everyone drove a car, or two.

What impressed me the most that day on the winding road was not the driving; in fact, it didn't impress or scare me anymore. It was the pedestrians we almost hit a number of times. Usually it was an old man, wearing white cap and smoking a pipe, walking slowing across the road. Even when the jeep almost hit him, he did not change his pace. When we got close, I was even able to see the expression on the old man's face. And what an expression I saw!

The best way to describe that experssion was "expressionless." There was no fear, no scare, no surprise. Yet I couldn't say there was peace either. It was simply empty, almost reminding me of the vast land I saw earlier. I was shocked that he was shocked that a car almost hit him. Didn't he realize that his life could be taken away, or did he not care anymore?

China Trips: Northwest (7)

After two days of rocky ride, we finally arrived in Yulin. It turned out that Yulin was the center of the whole region called Shann Bei, or the northern Shann Xi province. ("Shann" is short for "Shann Xi," and "Bei" means "north.") Almost every educated person in China heard of Shann Bei, one of the poorest places in the country, although perhaps they never heard of the name of Yulin.

[Note: The actual pinyin for "Shann Xi" should be "Shan Xi," but since there is another province called "Shan Xi", this "Shan Xi" is usually spelt as "Shann Xi" to show the difference.]

When we arrived, the local hotel - there were actually a few hotels in the area, but near the center of the city there was only one hotel - was already fully booked. We had to check in a guesthouse where several people shared one room. It was awkward for me because I didn't know where to put my luggage; all the other guys didn't appear to travel with luggage at all. Not to mention there was no private shower. But I thought I could live without shower for a day. (I didn't shower the previous night already.)

But soon Deng ran to me saying that he found a room in the hotel, so I could stay there instead. Obviously a relief for me, although it was not quite life-and-death. Deng must have perfected his "foreign expert" pitch by then.

The next day I went to visit my customer in the local telecom. On my way there I noticed that there were altogether two long streets in the whole city. Between the two streets there were allies, of course, but overall I couldn't believe this was a center city of a fairly large region.

Once I got to the office, I asked, "Are there names for these two streets?" A man answered, emphatically, "Of course there are! This side is the First Street, and the other is the Second Street."

If I wrote this in Chinese, I probably didn't have to explain. In English, an extra note is required, I think. Now we've seen plenty of First Streets in America, and typically the numbers go to double digits or even triple digits. The term that man used for First Street was "Da Jie," and Second Street "Er Jie." "Jie" means "street", while "Da" and "Er" usually are used to decribe one's children: "Da" means the first born, and "Er" the second born, and so forth. If one calls his children not by names like "John" and "Mary" but by "The First" and "The Second", that was how that man was calling the streets.

Later I found a map of the city - I couldn't find such a map in the local stores, only found a book on the whole province where a map of Yulin was included - the two streets actually had official names. But all the locals I encountered called them "Da Jie" and "Er Jie."

A couple of years later during my last visit to Yulin, a third street was under construction.

China Trips: Northwest (8)

At the Yulin Telecom office, a Sun workstation already arrived. No one in the office had touched it, they explained that they knew nothing about this computer. I went ahead and installed Solaris operating system and our software. A group of people were watching on, but none of them showed intention to learn exactly how I was doing it. I figured that they had didn't have any advanced computer knowledge.

The installation was completed rather smoothly, then I explained how they could execute our software. They asked me to write it down in the greatest detail in Chinese, so that they could follow it exactly. I did that, then I tried to explain why and how they would perform each step. They asked no explanation. They said the instructions were good enough; they would just follow it (without understanding, it sounded). That was fine with me, but what a contrast to Mr. Guo in Yinchuan.

Then they had this lady to try out my instructions - all of them were middle aged, as opposed to other telecoms I had visited where most operators were young.

The lady sat down and began to read the instructions. Our software could be brought up by a simple command "FlexrPlus". She looked all over the keyboard until she finally found the key "F", and she typed it. I explained that since it was a UNIX environment, the commands were case sensitive. So instead of the lower case "f" she typed, she ought to enter the upper case "F." She looked at me and asked, "How do I do that?"

In my profession of technical support, there are many compilation of "jokes" to describe how stupid the customers are at one point or another. I enjoyed many such jokes, although personally I never intended to compile a set myself. I could laugh at those jokes only because I wasn't dealing with the people directly. Once I was, there was nothing stupid about anything.

And this lady in the Yulin office was not exactly stupid either. She was simply ignorant of computer knowledge beyond my initial imagination. Had I met her on the street, I wouldn't be as surprised. But this was one of the main sites of a project of many million dollars. I suddenly realized that I had to put myself into a different gear of customer support. Right away I wrote a little line of script so that they only needed to type "fp" to run our program.

From that day on I paid more attention to the Yulin office than any other site. Sympathy might have played a part in it, but as far as my job was concerned, for the whole project to succeed, obviously we couldn't allow any weak links.

Later I found out that few engineers from the three sides - China, Japan and the U.S. - were willing to go to Yulin. The condition there was poor, obviously, but perhaps it was also because when it came to technical issues, it was almost hopeless to try to communicate with the operators in Yulin. In fact, later whenever there was a need for a visit to Yulin, my name was automatically on the list. I apparently could handle the condition, but more importantly, I could handle the communication.

China Trips: Northwest (9)

My next trip to Yulin was a month later. I went back to China to make sure all the workstations and our software were up and running at all sites. Well, all sites except Yulin. They had some technical difficulty that no one seemed to be able to explain, so I had to go. Once I was on site, we were able to figure out what happened. It was rather simple, and if you are reading this, I ask you to hold your breath and not to laugh yet.

Basically I had a script written which ran periodically to check the entire environment for the software. It would store the data on a floppy diskette so that if anything went wrong, we would have the data to analyze. The script was automatic. In fact, I set up almost everything automatic. The only manual labor would be inserting a floppy diskette.

Well, that was exactly what went wrong. One of the operators tried to insert the floppy diskette upside down. If it was not the right way, the diskette wouldn't go in easily. So this person forced it in. Then of course they couldn't get it out.

Actually the floppy diskette was not eassential to the whole program; it could still run just fine. But they were so worried about the floppy diskette situation that they shut down the entire machine until I went there.

I asked if there was any computer shop in the city. Actually there was. An hour and 100 RMB yuan later, the problem was resolved. "I told them on the phone that it was the floppy diskette!" The team lead complained. I could imagine why no one on the other side of the phone believed or even understood what he said.

(Okay, now you can laugh.)

Yulin, in my memory, would always be the easiest and the most difficult site to support.

It was after that second trip, I sent Yahoo! an e-mail saying that I decided not to pursue the "producer" position. I simply stated that I had developed a heart for the customer in China (and you can say that people in Yulin were a big part of it). I never really talked much about this particular decision to many people. Likely my friends would try to talk me out of it, and I could end up changing my mind. Or perhaps I should go ahead and complete the interview process and see if I could get an offer from Yahoo! - then I could make a decision. But by then I probably couldn't resist such an offer. In short, I didn't put myself in a situation to follow my head. I was following my heart.

That phrase - "following your heart" - has been uttered many times. In reality people make most decisions based on both head and heart. Honestly I believe people who incline to follow their heart make more mistakes - short term, anyway - than people who incline to use their head. But aren't mistakes what make life more exciting, and at the end, more rewarding?

China Trips: Northwest (10)

The next few years I kept going back to China. In fact, from 1997 to 2000, I averaged 5 trips a year to China, literally going every other month, while the trips lasted between two weeks to six weeks. I personally loved to travel, even though most of these business trips were not close to places I wanted to go.

I often joked with Nanjing engineers if they had NEs in exotic places such as Gui Lin, Huang Shan (Yellow Mountain) or Xi Hu (West Lake). I'd love to go to support there. They said they did have NEs in Jiu Zhai Gou ("Nine-village Valley") in Sichuan, but they never seemed to have problems - not with the software anyway. I ended up keep going back to places like Yulin.

Twice I went to Yulin in the early winter (November to December), and I was warned that it was going to be cold there. That time I went through the route from Beijing to Xi'an to Yulin. Along the way I felt fine. It was cold, but bearable. Once I arrive in Yulin, it did feel different. I had to keep moving my body parts. I got in a cab, and asked, "How cold is it today?" He said, "18 degrees (Celsius)." Right away I thought that was impossible. It couldn't be that warm. But a second later I realized what he was saying. He meant 18 degrees below zero (Celsius), which was about zero degree Fahrenheit. Later I found people in Yulin regularly omitted the "below zero" part in winter when they talked about the temperature. I began to talk like that too.

I found there was actually a Bank of China in the city, the only bank system in China where you could exchange foreign currencies, as long as you had a valid foreign passport. That was somewhat a relief in case I needed to stay extra days. Cash in China was absolutely necessary in almost all the places. In Yulin, that included to pay for the lodging. Credit card was not accepted.

The only decent hotel in town was the Yulin Hotel. I didn't know how many stars it had, two or three, but I wouldn't have called it a hotel elsewhere. It offered hot water at limited hours. But I wasn't there for vacation anyway.

When I first checked in the hotel myself (previously the very first time, it was done by Mr. Deng), I enjoyed a little conflict with the lady at the counter. She told me the room rate, and I proceeded to hand her my U.S. passport. She filled out a form, and asked me to put down a deposit in cash in the amount of a night's stay. It was twice what she told me of the room rate. I said I thought the room rate was such and such. She said, oh, for foreigners, the room rate was twice as much.

I traveled enough in China to know that there was indeed such a widespread "rule." At that moment, however, I felt like to do something about such an "unfairness." I looked into the lady's eyes and said, "Now look at me. Do I really look like a foreigner?" She looked at me and couldn't say a word. Finally after a long pause, she said, "All right, I will treat you as a domestic guest then."

Well, I guess I wasn't really going for "fairness." I got that only because I was indeed a Chinese by birth. I did that for very practical reasons. I always tried to save as much cash as I could, especially in areas of lodging and transportation, because if I ever ran out of cash, I might have to sleep on the street. After all, a winter day was only 18 degrees.

The funny thing was, a few months later when I went to Yulin again, the same lady received me at the check-in counter - I only realized that it was the same lady when she uttered my name in Chinese without hesitation. I wondered how many people ever checked in this hotel in a year. But then again, not many people went to Yulin with a foreign passport. Even rarer was a foreigner who looked exactly like any other "domestic guest."