Draggin' Air

The temperature has dropped suddenly in the last two days and I've had to break out the winter coat. Last year, when I arrived in Shanghai, I was surprised by how cold the winter was in this city near the sea. This winter is predicted to be even colder than last year's.

This weekend Gman and I are off to Hong Kong for a long weekend. We've been cooped up in this 17-million person city for months on end so we need to spend some downtime in a little 5-million person village like Hong Kong. It's been a few years since I was there but I think I can still find my way around enough to get Gman to the Peak. We'll be flying on Draggin' Air.

Snug as a Bug

At a dinner the other night a Shanghainese couple had their newborn along. She was cute as far as I could tell but I could only see her sleeping eyes - the rest of her was wrapped in a blanket and this was topped off with a knit cap pulled over her little ears. The blanket was wrapped around her and tucked in so tightly that it made me feel panicky just to see. How could she stand this without going berserk? Swaddling babies like this is the norm in China I've noticed and the habit is carried on into adulthood. When the temperature drops below 50 F adults here start wrapping themselves in layers of cotton to keep snug as they walk around the streets.

Control over movement begins in infancy and children are often immobilized by Chinese parents - not allowed to explore their environment or manipulate things in their little universe. The other thing I've noticed is that Chinese parents don't seem to speak to their babies as much as American parents do. I think American parents tend to try to control their children verbally rather than physically as seems to be the case in China.

 

Eggs come with serial numbers in China 

Palms Through Windows

It's a rainy Thanksgiving in Shanghai. Gman and I celebrated with the traditional watching of the Simpsons followed by a big Thanksgiving pizza (no stuffing) and chocolate chip cookies. The Peavine and Lincoln City football games of years past were replaced by reading and video games. As I relaxed in an overstuffed chair I put my book down and listened to Windham Hill's Winter Solstice and watched the palm tree dissolve into the night through the open window. The palm fronds against the darkening sky took me back to my Hollywood kitchen window that looked out over the palms of Laurel Canyon. I used to look out that window at the Southern California sky at sunset and wonder what I was doing there - so far from Peavine. Now I'm even farther away and I am still puzzled by the confluence of events that brought me here.

We have much to be thankful for. Good job. Good school. But we miss our family.

The Bad Boys of the Internet

Living in China where the Internet is monitored and controlled really makes one appreciate a free Internet and freedom of expression. People here are put in jail for saying the wrong thing in a private email. The shameful thing for us Americans is that most of the technology that has allowed the Chinese Communist Party to monitor what people say online has been provided by US technology companies. These companies offer all sorts of rationalizations for providing the Chinese with these technologies but it really just comes down to making a buck at other people's expense - sometimes people pay with their freedom or even their life.

In the not quite so serious category we have our friends at Narus, a California-based tech company that has provided the Chinese with technology that allows them to cut off Voice-over-the-Internet communications with the outside world. Chinese and expats alike were using services such as Skype and Vonage to call outside China at cheap rates and on scrambled signals. The Chinese didn't like that. Their monopoly phone company didn't like it either. So in comes Narus earlier this year and sells the Chinese technology that permits them to cut off this information pipeline. Narus calls it "unauthorized Internet usage". I hope that Congress takes a look at this and considers a law to make it illegal for a US company to sell China or any other dictatorship a technology that limits free expression or communications with the outside world.

But the threat to free expression is not limited to dictatorships. We have the same looming threat in the US. It's called the threat to "Internet neutrality" and the threat comes from large corporations such as Verizon, the cable companies and the Baby Bells. In the last few years they have been working hard to buy enough of Congress to enable them to end the common carriage tradition of capitalism - at least as it is applied to the Internet. They want to own the Internet and charge both content providers and consumers higher prices to use the Internet. The result? The US has already fallen behind ten other countries (such as South Korea and Iceland) in per capita Internet access and access to high-speed broadband. South Korea's Internet access speeds are 100x the average in the US. For more info see here.

Cold Drinks Anytime

Tom Friedman has come and gone. The rainy season has started. I've started wearing a jacket on some days. Fall is here to stay for awhile. I can't believe Thanksgiving is this week.

The Shanghainese start wearing coats earlier than anyone I've seen - and bigger coats at that. I'll be comfortable in my shirtsleeves and people all around me are wearing heavy coats. I'm not sure why the Shanghainese are so paleng, or fearful of the cold. Maybe it's for the same reason that my Chinese teacher gets bent all out of shape when I drink a cold drink in front of her. "It's not good for your health to drink cold drinks," she says as she sips her hot tea. I've always drunk cold drinks I say. "The colder the better!"

Twelve Girls, Tom Friedman and Sputnik

Dean will want to set his TIVO now. The 12 Girls Band is coming to PBS. I didn't get to see the show but I will go listen to Tom Friedman of the New York Times tomorrow. He's speaking at Three on the Bund. Today, in the Times, he had an interesting opinion piece regarding how he expects China will become a focus of the new Democratic Congress and asks the question; will America use China as a Scapegoat or a Sputnik? I hope it's the latter.

Tracking Device or Mobile Phone?

G-man got his first mobile phone this weekend. He thinks it's for him. He doesn't realize it's for me - so I can find him. I tried to get one with a GPS device in it but they don't have them in China yet - at least not for civilians.

That Old Forest Fire Smell

The sky suddenly became smoggy this weekend and smelled like a forest fire. But there aren't any forests nearby and the land is so crowded with people that I can't imagine a big countryside fire. Any fire would kill so many people that I would surely have heard about the catastrophe. Walking outside was akin to smoking several cigarettes. But what was the source of the pollution?

Today, a Chinese friend told me the smog and smell were due to farmers burning rice husks both for energy and waste removal. I'll have to look further into this to see if there is validity to his claim.