Only in China

Maybe you're distracted by the glimpse of a (rare) blue sky in Beijing, and you can't see the orange specks dangling off the side of the 20-story building:


By individual ropes:




The rope, from my close-up observation:


That seems slightly frayed:



Bi-annual window washing.

月饼 Yuebing

It's Mid-Autumn Festival time - (zhong qiu jie - 中秋节) - the harvest festival. The moon is supposed to be at its fullest this time of year, and thanks to Chinese weather modification for the recent PRC 60th Anniversary, the sky is clear and blue, which means we might actually be able to see the moon (it doesn't happen often).

中秋节 is one of only a few major holidays in China and most of the country has a week off from school and work. 200 million people are expected to be traveling over the next week to vacation and visit family and to eat mooncakes.


We don't expect to receive many mooncakes this year.


If anything, we should be giving the things to other people because that's what you do in this season - give piles and piles of mooncakes to bosses and teachers and people you want to impress. The more expensive, the better.

But we're foreigners, so we're exempt from some of these traditional guanxi building activities. And besides - we're way too late in the season to get our hands on any of those Haagen Daz ice cream mooncakes, as one must get one's order in months ahead of time.


Mooncakes are kind of pretty.


And they are traditionally filled with red bean paste, or lotus paste, or some other paste-y substance, sometimes with a salted duck egg in the middle. Because you know - it looks like the full moon.


The thing is - apart from the giving and the sharing and the general good feeling mooncakes impart, I have yet to meet a Chinese person who likes to eat them.

Except, of course, for the Haagen Daz ones. Which are basically overpriced ice cream sandwiches and my high school language partner argues that they aren't really mooncakes in the first place. She doesn't like mooncakes either.

Running attack

More in the odd Beijing adventures department -

Long story short - a few months ago Andrew, Peng, et al. entered a running competition at our gym on a whim. As in run on a treadmill, those with the best times in all of China get a trip to Singapore to compete in the all-Asia competition.

With a little sweat and a lot of luck, they made it to the China finals.

Peng, Andrew, and team at the finals on Sunday, 8 a.m. :



Teams of runners came from all over China to compete in Beijing. The bad news: no trip to Singapore. The good news: they didn't come in last.

Guanxi. 关系.

Andrew has dived back into Beijing a little quicker than I over the past week. We arrived, after a total travel time of about 23 hours (Indiana to San Francisco, San Francisco to Hong Kong, Hong Kong to Beijing) on a Tuesday. With jetlag. And zero intention of re-entering our chinese life until the weekend. The plan, basically, was to collapse. And unpack later.

But on Thursday, around 8 p.m., Andrew got a phone call. From the Director. About being in the Talent Show. At the Academy. On Friday. At 8 a.m.

Let's face it. He didn't want to go. Jetlag can be brutal and after a month of living out of a suitcase, sometimes it's nice to just curl up in your apartment and let the world move on without you for a little while. Skipping that to be in a talent show? Like someone doing cartwheels and singing God Bless America while twirling a baton? At work? Seriously?

Well. There's a little something important to know about living, working, operating in China - 关系。Guanxi. Relationships. It's a good thing to have. Being able to speak the language is helpful and all. But you're not going anywhere if you can speak the language and can't get the guanxi going.

Andrew has a pretty good handle on the language part. And quite frankly, a fair bit of the guanxi part. But it's just not a thing that you collect and move on. Guanxi is high maintenance. Especially when you're a Ph.D. student and visiting researcher whose data collection involves interviewing and sitting in on meetings and tagging along on projects and generally a lot of good will and generosity of busy working professional planners.

So when the Director who is hosting your research fellowship in his International Urban Planning Research Studio at the China Academy of Urban Planning and Design calls you at 8 p.m. at night and wants you to come in early the next morning in order to play back-up for your co-workers who, in your absence, have been practicing for weeks their live performance of Claptons' "Tears in Heaven" - well - for the sake of guanxi - you say yes.

In celebration of the upcoming 60th Anniversary of the PRC and also the 55th Anniversary of the Academy, each department and then some at the Academy had an act. An entire day devoted to 26 acts ranging from Flamenco dancing to choir singing to Bollywood lipsynching to patriotic military marching. And one particularly moving rendition of "Tears in Heaven" with one jet-lagged foreigner strumming along in the background.

Back to business

We're back. Back in China. Back at school. Back at work. Back on-line (at least for now). More to come.