Why do the Chinese not search to understand what is really going on in Tibet? In my mind, this can be explained by two things: conditioning and fear. I had a conversation with a Chinese friend about it and she said that the torch relay protests are being taken personally by Chinese people.
Last night we went to a social evening for the Shanghai Boat and Yacht Club. As always, we had a lot of interesting conversations with people doing fascinating jobs in China. One guy, Jordi, works for a supplier for automotive parts. He mentioned that he went to an auto show in Beijing last week where literally 18 out of the 20 Chinese cars on display were almost direct copies of foreign cars. He joked that the game was “name that original” and then figure out the slight modifications that had been made for the Chinese version. So much for intellectual property!
Talking with him reminded me of all that we have learned living here and the naivety of a newbie. His business is commodities trading of some sort and his boss from Texas had sent him here because the China office was not meeting their deliverables and seemed to be disorganized. He has grand plans of getting things organized and fixed up in a few months while at the same time traveling extensively to Japan and India as well. I just looked at him and smiled and said, “good luck with that.” After that, he was talking to my friend Junie and he turned back to me and said, “you guys are depressing.” I asked why and he said that I had shot down his plans of doing well, rapidly at work and then Junie was explaining to him why you should not give money to children begging on the street. (Often, the parents will do cruel things to the kids to put them in a pathetic state in order to exploit them for money. Junie should know as she has spent countless hours volunteering at an orphanage that had kids without thumbs and eyes from parents doing just that. Also the kids on the street are not in school and by giving them money it encourages the cycle.) I quickly agreed with Junie and the guy looked genuinely depressed. I really had forgotten how much we have learned living here and it took a guy fresh off the boat and eager to succeed to remind me of all of the lessons learned.
One day Alecia and I headed about 75 meters out into the ocean where the deep blue meets the light blue. After watching so many Discovery channel shows, and Blue Planet DVD’s I knew that is where most of the fish would be. On our way the water was a little cloudy because the tide was changing and the sand was all over the place. At one point I am pretty sure we spooked a full size black tip reef shark.
We caught a 6:15 AM flight out of Shanghai which required us to get up “in the threes”, 3:15 AM to be exact. I was in a daze on the way to and at the airport. Around boarding time, I started to notice many of the male passengers dressed in Arab attire. Their presence caused me to think about my partially adopted, media-induced stereotypes I was trying to remove with this trip. I also hoped to remove some of my ignorance of the Arab culture.
