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."