6. Miss Manners

Fortunately, I was tired enough that I managed to get some rest.

Early the next morning Wing and I were joined for breakfast by Mr. Zhou, a Chinese gentleman from our host city.  Since “Zhou” sounds a lot like “Joe,” I quickly took to calling him that.  It was never quite clear to me who exactly this Joe was. All I knew was that he was going to help us convert that slim wad of Ben Franklins into local currency.  But first, we had to eat.

We went to the hotel’s breakfast buffet, filled our plates and sat down.  Among other things that I mostly didn’t recognize, Joe was eating an egg.  Rather, I should say that he was engaging in some sort of activity that involved a fried egg and his mouth.  He would lower his head to his plate, and then using his chopsticks push the egg towards his mouth while he sucked it in, sort of the way a vacuum cleaner might.  The egg would then stay in his mouth for a moment, and then it would suddenly be back out on his plate.

He repeated this process several times:

• sucking sounds
• chopsticks push egg into mouth
• most of egg returns to plate

I had heard that birds feed their young by regurgitating, and had always thought less of them for it, but this was far worse.  While this was happening, the most horrific slurping noises were being created by the interaction between the egg and his mouth. And all the while, he was trying to explain to us the plan for the day.

“Burble, burble…slurp, something in Chinese, something in Chinese… slurp slurp, gurgle, snort…something in Chinese, slurp,” is what Joe seemed to be saying.

Wing did his best to translate for me, but most of it didn’t register as I struggled to divert my attention from Joe’s captivating performance across the table.

“Mumble, mumble…dollars…something, something…FEC…mumble, mumble…thousand yuan…help to exchange…RMB…slurp, snort, nervous laugh…special exchange place…something, something, slurp…heh heh mumble,” is what I recall hearing from Wing.

To be fair, none of the slurping or snorting was coming from Wing. He was only responsible for the mumbling and the nervous laugh. As we proceeded through this unforgettable meal, Joe raised his bowl to his mouth and made all kinds of clucking noises as the food was messily transferred from the bowl to his mouth.  All of this was interspersed with a variety of hearty belches, none of which seemed to cause him any embarrassment or concern.

Having spent a fair bit of time in Europe, I knew that Europeans often displayed and appreciated table manners more than we casual Americans did.  Being from Long Island, I figured I came from the less refined end of the American spectrum of manners in general, and so I was always sensitive as to whether any aspects of my behavior might inadvertently cause offense.  Needless to say, I had never personally been on the receiving end of such a transgression, mainly because I just didn’t care too much what anyone did.  My breakfast with Joe changed all this.  I was actually taken aback by Joe’s apparent lapse of manners and even felt offended by it.  In fact, it was the first time in my life that I had ever been offended, by anything at all.  I looked over at Wing, hoping for a sympathetic “yeah I know this is unbelievable” kind of glance, but he didn’t seem to be the least bit perturbed.

Manners never mattered much to me, that is, not until I had breakfast with Mr. Zhou.

After breakfast, Joe, Wing and I got into a taxi.  Joe barked the address to the driver.  The driver sped through town; swerving, zigzagging and cutting off every vehicle that didn’t otherwise cut him off. We stopped in front of one of those non-descript slabs of concrete like those I had passed the day before.  It seemed to be some sort of office building but I couldn’t quite tell. All of these buildings seemed similar to me. It could have been a factory of some sort, or a prison, or maybe even another hotel.  Joe led us up a few flights of unfinished concrete steps, down an unlit hall and into a dark and shabby room.

Inside was a man sitting on a bed who seemed to be expecting us.  He motioned for us to sit down, but there were only two chairs remaining for the three of us.  Joe and I sat. There was enough room for Wing to sit next to the man on the bed, but he remained standing. This wasn’t exactly what I had in mind when I thought of a currency exchange office.  I knew that I needed to exchange American dollars for local Chinese currency, and I knew that this wasn’t a service that was officially provided for in China, so I knew not to expect a brightly lit place with a big board on the wall with all the exchange rates so you could see just how much you were being ripped off.  But this isn’t quite what I expected either.  It didn’t feel right to be doing business in this cross between bedroom and office, but I had no choice but to go through with it. I felt just as I had when marching toward that Tupolev the day before: resigned due to a lack of alternatives.

I presented my slim wad of twenty one-hundred-dollar bills and was given roughly eleven thousand and some odd Chinese RMB.  The largest bill in China then was the 100 RMB note, but it was newly introduced and in short supply, so I was mostly paid in 50s and 20s. The result was hundreds and hundreds of bills, so many in fact that there was no way they could be stuffed into my pockets.  Fortunately I had a really large computer bag with me, the kind that had space for overnight clothes on one side and my computer and documents on the other.  Since I was on a long trip, I wasn’t using the clothing side.  I counted and loaded the money into the bag, which was now overstuffed, and we made our way back down the steps and out onto the street.

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5. Mainland China

After arriving at the Guangzhou train station we made our way though passport control, where we were subjected to a generous amount of pushing and shoving before we were able to get our passports stamped. But this was nothing compared to the pandemonium among the unruly crowd on the street trying to find a cab to take us to the airport. Sure, we were in China’s third biggest city, but even so, it was obvious that Chinese people had different expectations of personal space than I was used to.  It must be a function of the general overpopulation – at a certain point there’s just no reason to be polite.  Whereas in America you are generally expected to give two to three feet of space to a stranger, in China it is more like 0. It’s sort of like a game of marbles, with everyone going at the same time.

Somehow we got a taxi and were soon on our way to the airport amid a sea of drivers who seemed intent on starting a game of bumper cars. We managed to arrive unscathed at the Guangzhou airport, and after passing through another checkpoint where I had to show my passport yet again – which to me seemed odd as I was headed for a domestic flight – we eventually found ourselves standing on the tarmac walking to our plane.

Having been somewhat of an aircraft buff, I prided myself on being able to call out the make and model of any commercial jetliner after just a quick glance.  The one we were heading for seemed easy.  It was a three-engine plane with the horizontal stabilizer mounted high in the tail fin.  That makes it a Boeing 727, one of the easiest to identify.  But there was something wrong.  It seemed bigger than a 727 should be.  I scratched my head, knowing that there weren’t too many other planes with a similar configuration, and wondered what it might be.

“Wing, is that what I think it is?” I said.

“Sorry?”

“That plane, the one we’re headed to.”

“Yes, it is China Eastern plane,” Wing said with his nervous laugh.

“I mean the kind of plane.  It doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before.”

“Heh heh,” his nervous laugh being his only reply.

Wing had no idea what I was getting at.  I realized with not a little trepidation that I would be flying for the first time in my life on a Russian plane.  It was a Tupolev, and as we got closer, I saw the numbers 154.  This was a Tupolev 154.   Yikes!  I had just read an article about Tupolevs.  The 154 was among the most common, and like most Russian aircraft, had a terrible safety record. They had been falling out of the sky left and right for years. The fact that the Russians would often blame the accidents on pilot error didn’t calm me any.

“Wing, this is a Russian made plane we’re about to fly on.”

“Oh?  Russian plane?” he said as his nervous laugh trailed off.

I wanted to tell him that a guy with a name like Wing ought to know more about planes, but I kept my mouth shut.  He wouldn’t have gotten it anyway.

There was no turning back. My luggage was already checked and I needed to get to Changsha, so I marched forward with the rest of the crowd.  I tried to keep in mind that even though Tupolevs crashed with much greater frequency than any planes I had ever flown on, the chance of this particular flight crashing was probably still very low. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that I would have a better chance of getting hit by lightning. Of course getting hit by lightning would be quick: I wouldn’t see it coming and it would be over in a second. On the other hand, if this shitbox went down I was probably going to know about it for a while beforehand and would be able to ponder the horror of my demise as the plane collided with the earth in a fury of screaming and explosions. Anyway, I put that out of my mind for the time being and concentrated on getting my bag into the overhead.  The fact that the overhead bin was more like an undersized shelf didn’t help much.  Nor did the seat belt, which reminded me of the impossible to adjust and all but useless lap belts in the 1965 Dodge Coronet that I rode around in as a kid.  None of this seemed to ruffle Wing or any of the couple hundred other all Chinese passengers, so I did the best I could to settle in as I began to observe the strangeness that was domestic Chinese air travel.

There was something surreal about the whole experience.  As we prepared for takeoff, not only did the crew not bother with the usual formalities about buckling your seat belt, folding your tray table and putting your seat back upright, but they didn’t seem to care or even notice if people were seated.  As we were barreling down the runway, more than a few people were still standing in the aisles fidgeting with their bags.

To my surprise, and possibly also to the surprise of the pilots, the flight went smoothly and in a few hours we were nearing our destination. As we turned onto final approach, the pilot said something over the PA system, which, judging by the reaction of the other passengers could probably have been translated as “We are now on final approach, please unbuckle your seat belts, stand up, disregard your own safety, and get your bags down before we land.” It was as if we were on a train about to pull into the station. I was half surprised no one tried to open the door to get a head start on the others as we were touching down.

So here I was, finally, with Wing, in Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, in the heart of the Chinese mainland.  Prior to that hullabaloo a few days ago over which city Wing and I were meant to go to, I had never heard of Changsha.  I had heard of Hunan though. There was a restaurant in my home town serving spicy Chinese food called Hunan Palace.  Of course there was nothing palatial about it at all.  It was your typical over-lit, semi-dingy restaurant with dirty welcome mats, no decor and plastic seats in a non-descript suburban shopping center.  The Chinese, it seemed to me, even then, had this penchant for overstatement.

As I looked around in Changsha, I started to think that overstatement could be a relative thing.  For the guy from Hunan who had made his way to America and opened a restaurant in a reasonably well-to-do suburb, his place probably was some kind of palace.  My first impression of Changsha was that it was similar to Guangzhou, with teeming and chaotic crowds.  Bicycles were everywhere, and seemed to account for about 90% of the traffic.  Most disappointing, though, was that apart from an abundance of loud and inelegant Chinese signage, not much about Changsha looked Chinese.  I was certain that since China had such a rich cultural heritage, with over 5000 years of history, I would be treated in China’s heartland to beguiling scenes of Chinese pagodas amid a landscape of elaborate oriental gardens, but all I could see were row after row of box-like and often run down cement buildings as far as the eye could see.  And as it turned out, the eye couldn’t see all that far as Changsha was enveloped in a thick haze.  This, of course, was smog, and it was worse than any I had encountered, even in places known for smog.  LA is known for smog, but in LA, the sky is still blue much of the time.  This was much worse than LA.  It was even worse than the North American capital of smog, Mexico City.

My first trip to Mainland China in 1993. Where are all the pagodas and Chinese gardens?

We arrived at the hotel.  As I would come to expect, it had a grandiose and overly elaborate name that included a proudly displayed English translation: The Changsha Golden Sunshine International Five Star Elite Grand Hotel, or something like that.  Who wouldn’t be excited to stay in such a place?

As we walked into the lobby, I noticed it had a marble floor.  So far, so good, I thought.  But as I stood there waiting while Wing was handling the check-in formalities, I started to realize that the lobby was kind of shabby.  The marble floor was dirty, and there was a woman pushing a dirty mop across it.  I suppose she was making sure that the dirt got evenly distributed and ingrained permanently into every pore and crevice.  There were large floor to ceiling windows, but they were filthy and the curtains that hung in front of the windows weren’t any better.  A few yards away, three men were seated next to one another in the only chairs in the lobby.  They seemed to be working for the hotel, but they were just chatting with one another as they smoked.

Wing finally finished with the check-in procedure, and we headed to the elevator.  Our rooms were both on the seventh floor, and as we got out of the elevator, there was an official looking woman sitting at a desk.  Wing showed her some paperwork, she looked it over, grunted, and then motioned with her hand that we were cleared to proceed down the hall.  I guess she was some sort of floor guard. This was starting to feel more like a prison than a hotel.

My room — or cell I guess you could say — turned out to be just as dreary and cheerless as the lobby. It had a rock hard mattress and a smattering of ash trays thoughtfully placed at five foot intervals throughout the room.  I suppose these could come in handy for smokers who preferred to pace and smoke all night rather than try to sleep on the slab of concrete they called a mattress.  I went to the bathroom and was thrilled to learn that not only did I have a somewhat normal looking toilet, but that it wasn’t guarded by another lady at a desk.

 

4. Hong Kong

When I landed in Hong Kong, all of my assumptions about what China would be like were quickly confirmed.  While Hong Kong had a distinctly Chinese flavor, it was more or less like anywhere else I had been.  Sure, some things were different, but these were all the things I had come to expect as being within the realm of differentness.  There were signs in Chinese, Chinese-looking people and Chinese restaurants on every corner.  But there were also lots of tall buildings, plenty of signs in English and – despite being a vibrant and bustling city – it had a certain orderliness to it.  Hong Kong would be just another destination in my travel log.

Hong Kong was teeming with Chinese flavor, but wasn't that different from other places I'd been.

I was briefed about my upcoming China trip by Harry and Wing.  Harry was the manager of our Hong Kong based partner for the region.  Wing worked for Harry and would be accompanying me in China as my translator and guide.

Harry, like many honkies – “honky” being the amusing and entirely innocent term that many Asians use to refer to people from Hong Kong – took to introducing himself with an English name, presumably on the basis that his Chinese one is both unmemorable and unpronounceable to most gwai los – gwai lo being the not entirely innocent term used by honkies to refer to white people like me.  In Cantonese, it literally means “ghost person” but can also be translated as “foreign devil.”  Wing, on the other hand, was one of the few honkies who seemed to go by his Chinese name, possibly because it was easy for we ghost people to remember and pronounce.

“Do you have the Chinese written name for the city you’re going to?” Harry asked me.

“How would I have that, Harry?  All I was told was Changsha in Hunan province and that you would have the details.”

“But is it Zhangsha in Hunan or Zhengzhou in Henan?” Harry pressed.

“I think it’s Changsha, not Zhangsha and not Zhengzhou,” I said.

Harry made some phone calls and I overheard various pronunciations of Changsha, Zhangsha, Zhangzhou, Zhengzhou and Changshou.  I also heard variations of Henan and Hunan.  It had something to do with how these places are pronounced in Mandarin, the predominant version of Chinese on the mainland, and how that Mandarin pronunciation is relayed to a Cantonese-speaking honky via an English-speaking gwai lo.  Harry continued this charade of back and forth phone calls for two days before concluding that the meeting would be in Changsha in Hunan province and not in a city of a similar name in Henan provice, some 900 kilometers (550 miles) to the north. This was not exactly comforting.

The confusion reminded me of that poor guy from Oakland who a few years prior had mistakenly boarded a 15-hour flight from Los Angeles to Auckland, New Zealand instead of the one-hour flight to his home city in the Bay Area.  He realized his mistake when, once airborne the pilot informed them the route would pass over Tahiti.

It seemed odd that Harry, who kept telling us how much of an expert he was on China, would so easily and for so long be confused over a basic matter as where we were meant to go.

I next learned that I would be giving a presentation on voice mail to an audience of some 200 people, all members of the People’s Liberation Army. In all my travels, I just couldn’t imagine that the military, any military, would have much interest in voice mail.

 “Hi, this is Sergeant Qing. I’m currently fighting for my life on the front lines, but your call is important to me.  Please leave me a detailed message and I will respond as soon as possible if I make it back. Thanks for calling and have a great day!”

There would also be an “entry fee” for us to present.  The fee was eleven thousand Chinese Yuan (then about US $2000), also known as RMB, which stands for Ren Min Bi or the “People’s Currency.” This wasn’t a huge amount in the overall scheme of things, but it could only be paid in cash and only in RMB, and RMB was not available to foreigners. This was getting more interesting by the moment.

In those days, foreigners were supposed to use an entirely different currency, known as FEC or Foreign Exchange Currency.  FEC theoretically was worth the same as RMB with a one-to-one exchange rate between the two.  The problem was that FEC could only be spent at officially designated outlets, and local people couldn’t do much with FEC.  Not knowing how to handle this situation, I went to a cash machine in Hong Kong and withdrew the equivalent of about US $2000 in Hong Kong dollars, which was easy enough.  I then went to a bank in Hong Kong and converted it back into a slim wad of twenty American hundred dollar bills that I could easily keep tucked away in my pocket.

As I made my way with Wing to the railway station in Kowloon to catch the train that would take us across the border to the Chinese mainland, I was starting to get the feeling that my past travels – some 40 countries in all by that stage – hadn’t prepared me for China.

 

3. Voice Mail World Tour

I finished work in Finland on a Friday and was to start work at my new gig the following Monday.  I turned up that September morning in 1991 to a squat and outrageously ugly building in an unremarkable industrial park just off one of the exits of the Long Island Expressway, which I took to be a bad sign.  The traffic was extremely light which I took to be a good sign.  The building was dark and the front door was locked.  I took this to be a bad sign.  Three years in Finland made me forget that the first Monday of September is Labor Day, a national holiday in America.

I came back the next morning, and found the lights on and a receptionist at the front entrance.  I took this to be a good sign.  I waited for about an hour in the lobby before anyone came to greet me.  I took this to be a bad sign.  This scrappy little company was in the business of selling voice mail systems.  These weren’t your garden variety voice mail systems. These were really, really big voice mail systems.  They were the mainframes of the then booming voice mail industry — ones that could answer the phone and take messages for the residents of an entire city, or, in some cases, even for a whole country.

That's me in the middle, pausing for a picture on a Sao Paolo street during my "voice mail world tour."

For the next few years from my home base on Long Island, my job was to convince telephone companies all over the world to install our systems in their networks, and give voice mailboxes away for free.   I breezily skipped from week to week between places like Stockholm, Singapore and Santiago; Madrid, Manila and Mexico City; Jerusalem, Jakarta and Rio de Janeiro, and seemingly everywhere in between.

Americans often get teased when they travel overseas, especially by Europeans, for their lack of geographic knowledge.  This teasing is usually entirely justified.  In high school, one of my friends was surprised to learn that there was a body of water separating England from France. Another once asked what language was spoken in France.  My own knowledge would likely not have been much better except that I looked at those maps in the airline magazines to figure out where I was headed.

This prepared me well for Lucas, a Belgian guy with one of those “I’m so European and you’re so not” attitudes. He was friends with some of my friends and we were at a restaurant in New York City.  He was annoyed that too many people he’d met in America had never heard of his country.

I asked what had become somewhat of a standard question in these situations.

“Lucas, do you know where Andorra is?”

“Andorra?  Vat iz diz?” he replied with his superior European accent.

Success again!  Remarkably, it turns out that many Europeans have never heard of Andorra, which happens to be a country in Europe.  (It’s a tiny country, in the Pyrenee mountains between Spain and France, and they do have voice mail there.)

In the unlikely event that Andorra hadn’t managed to stump him, I was prepared to ask Lucas where Idaho is, and then remind him that since Idaho is seven times bigger than Belgium, it’s seven times worse for him not to know where Idaho is than for an American not to know where Belgium is.  So to all you geographically challenged Americans, just remember where Andorra and Idaho are, and you’ll be prepared for the likes of Lucas.

With my constant travel to the various near and far flung corners of the globe, I came to view virtually all the countries I had been to as mere flavors of fundamentally the same thing.  In the winter of 1993 I was given the assignment to take my first marketing trip to mainland China. I still hadn’t been to Asia, but I felt ready. Surely, it couldn’t be any different from the other places I’d seen.

 

2. Suomi

I lost no time in applying to the Work in Scandinavia program, and after a short while, I was offered a three-month summer internship working for the Posts and Telecommunications Bureau of the Government of Finland. This was not exactly what I had in mind.

I wasn’t even sure if Finland was actually in Scandinavia. I had a vague notion that Finland was to the right of Sweden, but when I checked my map of Europe, all I saw was some place called Suomi.  I soon learned that Suomi was the Finnish word for Finland.  This seemed odd.  In English, we of course call it Finland.  The French call it Finlande.  In Spain it’s Finlandia.  The Germans refer to it as Finnland.  Even the Chinese go along with the general scheme, calling it Fenlan in Mandarin.  The Finns’ very own next door neighbors on their left border, the Swedes, simply call it Finland.  The Russians on their right border just put a Russian accent on it: Finlyandiya.  But to the Finns themselves, it’s Suomi.  This was going to be a strange place indeed.

Just as the Finns came up with their own name for their country, they seemed to have also decided that it would be part of Scandinavia. But they were sort of the stepchild of Scandinavia, the wannabe, not the real thing. Even though I really had my heart set on Sweden, I would have been okay with those other Scandinavian countries: Norway and Denmark.  I had met people from those countries too, and they seemed just as cool as the Swedes. But I hadn’t ever met anyone from Finland. For all I knew it was an unfriendly country that frowned on naked breasts, if you can imagine such a thing.

The Posts and Telecommunication Bureau of the Government of Finland was essentially the Finnish telephone company, and that also didn’t quite capture my imagination. I was starting to have second thoughts about the whole thing, but time was growing short. At the very least, Sweden was right next door and I’d be able to go there on weekends. I accepted the offer.

The internship in Helsinki turned out to be much better than I had expected. I arrived in July of 1988 and easily fell in with a group of friends there from all over the world.  We were fortunate to experience what for Finland was an unusually long and warm summer. Finland’s summer seemed no less reasonable than the summers I spent growing up on New York’s Long Island.  Being so far north, Finland doesn’t have a lot of poolside sundecks, but they do have a lot of saunas.  In fact, the sauna was invented in Finland, and naked breasts were not only permitted, but encouraged in the sauna.

Career-wise, things seemed to be going pretty well too. Finland was working hard to modernize their national telephone system, and since America was seen at that time to have one of the most modern, and one of the few competitive telecom markets in the world, I was viewed at age 22 as something of an international telecommunications expert. Of course my only real credential was that I had operated American telephones, had been sent and occasionally even paid telephone bills. This was apparently good enough for them. At the end of the summer, the Posts and Telecommunication Bureau of the Government of Finland offered me a real job and again I accepted.

I spent the next three years trying to learn to speak Finnish – a feat that can’t really be accomplished unless you were born in Finland – and traveling whenever I could. Finland was an excellent base from which to explore, on weekends and during vacations, the rest of Scandinavia to the west, as well as the Soviet Union – as it was called in those days – to the east.

My family had one connection in Finland, an elderly fisherman named Masa living in a remote town not far from the Russian border with whom my father had many years prior established an unlikely friendship. One weekend, I decided to go visit him.  My half-Finnish half-Australian co-worker, Tomi, tagged along as a translator.

Hamina is a small coastal town a few hours drive from Helsinki.  Masa had made his life in that town, and wanted to make sure that we saw everything there was to see there.  This took about seventy five minutes. After that, Masa and his wife Enni had put together an elaborate dinner for us with his family at their lovely home. During dinner, Masa told us that he had lately become the master of ceremonies aboard a cruise ship that makes a 24 hour round trip each weekend from Hamina to the small town of Vyborg just past the border in Russia, and asked if Tomi and I would like to join the following evening.

“That sounds like fun, Masa, but I left my passport in Helsinki,” I said, “and somehow I don’t think I can go to the USSR without my passport.”

Tomi translated, adding that he didn’t have his passport with him either. I thought that would be that, but Masa said something to Tomi that made his eyes bug out.  I braced myself for the translation.

“Masa said it doesn’t matter. He’s friends with the Hamina police who handle border control here and he’ll vouch for us.”

“I’m not so worried about his Finnish friends. What do we do when we get to Russia?” I said.

“Oh, not to worry. Just stay on the boat when it arrives in Vyborg. The fun part of the trip is the cruise, not the few hours in Russia,” the translation came back.

Still, I worried.

Despite my continued protests, we found ourselves the following evening aboard ship and departing the Hamina harbor.  The partying began immediately, and it quickly became evident that the focus of this trip had little to do with Russia.  It was merely a means for the Finns, who are used to paying hefty taxes on booze, to get liquored up for half what it would cost in Finland.

Fourteen hours and more than a few drinks and a few winks of sleep later, the boat was in the harbor in Vyborg and the Finns were filing off waiting to enter the Soviet Union.

“Come on, let’s go,” Masa said. “Let’s have a look at Russia.”

“But I thought we were supposed to stay on the boat here in Russia?  Remember, we don’t have our passports,” I protested.

“Don’t worry, these guys are my friends too. Just show them any kind of ID.”

I was bleary eyed and in somewhat of a daze, otherwise I might have been nervous presenting my expired New York State driver’s license to the Soviet border control guard.  Remarkably, he not only let me in, he smiled and said to me in English, “Thank you.”  He did the same for Tomi when he presented his expired student ID card.

Tomi and I showing off our "CCCP" internal travel documents, hoping this wouldn't be the first day of the rest of our lives.

I did wonder for a moment if I had just begun the first day of my new life. But the thought quickly passed and before we knew it, we were back in Finland with the story of a lifetime. It didn’t seem all that dangerous at the time, presumably because I was young and stupid.

Even though Finland had offered me some unique opportunities, there was one negative that was inescapable. That first “reasonable summer” turned out to be an anomaly.  Finland was in the midst of a heat wave, and was having the warmest summer of the past century.

As soon as I signed on for that permanent position, winter set in quickly.  September was already freezing.  December was even colder and also dark.  In Helsinki in December, the sun peeks over the horizon, moves laterally for a few hours then sets, presumably because it doesn’t like what it sees.  Spring is nice because the days are brighter again, but it’s still freezing.  Finally summer came, but it was a normal Finnish summer, which meant it was chilly.  Then it was winter again.  People joked that Finland only had two seasons: winter and July.  But it wasn’t funny, and after three years of this, the weather took its toll on me.

I was looking forward to finding a new home-base from which to further my travels, one in a warmer climate. When relocating from Finland, “warmer climate” is one of the simplest objectives to achieve.  An opportunity arose to work for a company that had sold us the voice mail systems we deployed in Finland.  The company was based on Long Island, about a half hour from where I grew up. Long Island wasn’t exactly what I had been looking for, as I wanted to continue exploring the world.  There was the allure of that Long Island weather, which compared to Finland made it practically a tropical paradise.  The position was in international marketing, which meant that I’d have plenty of opportunities to continue exploring the globe.  So I packed my bags and headed home.

 

1. In the Beginning

The journey that led me to China started a long time ago. The year was 1988 and I had just graduated from Tufts University with a degree in Electrical Engineering. Many of my classmates thought I should have taken a job with one of the defense contractors along the Route 128 high tech corridor in the Boston area. That’s what they were all doing, but somehow that didn’t appeal to me. Maybe it was because I had spent my junior year abroad that I felt sure the world had more to offer me than a cubicle in some big corporate entity.

One day, a few months before graduation, I was on my way to class. As I entered the lobby of Anderson Hall – the old semi-stately red brick building where most of my engineering classes were held, the answer to the question of what to do next with my life was written out on a poster in bold letters:

Work in Scandinavia!

I had managed to travel considerably both during my junior year abroad and in years prior, but had never made it to any of the Scandinavian countries. This wasn’t due to lack of interest. In fact, I had been keeping a list of places I wanted to visit, and the more I traveled, the more the list grew.  Scandinavia had been on the list ever since I started backpacking my way across Europe from my base as an exchange student in England.  But it wasn’t until my backpacking tour reached the far flung destinations of New Zealand, Australia and a variety of Pacific islands that Scandinavia managed to climb to the pinnacle of my list.  Scandinavia does not have a large population, with the three primary countries of Scandinavia (Sweden, Norway and Denmark) today having fewer people combined than Shanghai, but I bumped into Scandinavians everywhere.  There was that incident in Australia that made my mind up for sure that I needed to visit these people on their own turf.

It was a warm sunny morning and I was staying at a youth hostel in Sydney, the kind where you sleep in a large dormitory type room with as many as 20 beds.  The accommodations weren’t luxurious, but I was a poor student and for $10 a night I wasn’t complaining.  This hostel was unique in that it had a swimming pool, a rare and welcome amenity for a traveling student.

My plan was to take a quick swim, then go out and explore the city. When I got to the pool, there were four people there, three of whom were stunning and blonde and sun-tanning topless on the pool deck. And they were women, I should add, if that wasn’t already apparent from the ‘e’ at the end of blonde. (Blonde is one of very few adjectives in English that conveys gender, but  I’m getting off track by discussing grammar.)  I got to talking to these ladies, and not only were they beautiful, half-naked and my age, but they were also friendly! Where I was from, even fully dressed women were nowhere near this friendly. And they were all from Sweden (at least the three topless ones were, I now have very little recollection of the fourth).

A friend sent me this postcard, which served to confirm my views about Sweden.

That was it! I had to get to Sweden, or at least somewhere in Scandinavia. Like Steve Martin’s character in The Jerk, I had found my special purpose in life.

While not all of the Scandinavians that I bumped into on my travels were as ideal (or as naked) as the sun-tanned blondes in Sydney, nearly all, both male and female, were friendly, intelligent, easy going and good looking.

“You’re doing what?” said Sternberg, one of the guys in my engineering classes. “I’ve got this great offer here from General Dynamics. I’ll be making more than 30K a year.”

That seemed like a lot to me at the time, but it didn’t sway me. The poster in Anderson Hall that day sealed my fate. The defense industry would have to wait.

 

 

Shanghaied: Tales of an Expat in China

 by Erik & Trevor Laurence

In 1993, Erik Laurence first went to China for a business meeting.  The experience left such an impression on him that he vowed never to return. Fast forward sixteen years and he finds himself speaking Chinese and living there with his family. Shanghaied tells the story of how that happened, and some of the fun he had along the way.  The stories are mostly Erik’s but the writing is a joint effort with his brother, Trevor. Shanghaied is being written one chapter at a time and shared here as a blog.