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."