Kevin's space

A few nights back, we watched Die Hard 4.  It was terrible.  The movie was based on, as all the Die Hard movies have been, a handful of reliable stereotypes.  My father-in-law likes to complain that they screwed the story up terribly by not having someone in worse physical shape play the lead role.  Apparently that was one of the reasons he enjoyed the book so much:  he found the main character more like a normal person.  I guess American summer blockbuster movie makers would rather be able to apply a label to a person ("disgruntled estranged cop trying to make good") than actually try to do characterization.  And Die Hard 4 was chock full of movie stereo types:  Apathetic Hacker, Short-tempered yet well meaning law enforcement middle manager, jilted evil sociopath, and, most importantly, Evil Asian Kung Fu Hacker Woman.  I've seen a number of movies that have significant roles modeled around this stereotype.  While the movies aren't always what I hope for, the EAKFHW never disappoints.

I fully expected to meet hundreds of EAKFHW’s while in Shanghai. I based this expectation on the fact that I know so many people who match at least a few of the categories.  In my line of work, I meet a lot of hackers.  Not so many hackers in the typical mainstream media sense of breaking in to stuff, but in the more classical, purist definition:  one who produces elegant, quick solutions to difficult software problems.  Since I've been at Microsoft, I've met a large number of Asian hacker women, as well.  While they're not all Chinese, I honestly can't name too many Hacker women that aren't Asian.  Asian hacker women are actually the majority experience for me, of the broader "Hacker Women" community.

Since my 9-year-old started taking martial arts training a few years back, I've also had the opportunity to meet a number of Kung Fu women.  But none of them are Asian, and none of them are hackers.  And none of them seem particularly evil (though I'm pretty sure any one of them could take Bruce Willis in a fight)

Given the number of people I know that match at least 2 or more classes of the overall stereo, and that I've never lived anywhere larger than the Seattle areas, I figured probability would dictate that I'd meet a bunch of great representations of the stereotype.  Unfortunately, all the AHW I’ve met since coming here don’t really seem to be very evil, and I don’t think they have much Kung Fu experience, either…  I guess I always thought that the only reason I didn’t know any Evil Asian Kung Fu Hacker Women in the US was because our immigration bureaucracy was effective at keeping the evil ones out of our country. Perhaps they just don’t mingle much with us normal folk. Maybe they’re all from Xi'an. I’ll have to visit and see…

PS:  I intend no offense to any of the people I know (or who are reading this) that fit into any subset of the overall stereotype.  I don't have a single friend that doesn't fit at least one of the labels (and if you're a friend of mine, but don't believe you fit one of those labels, you're probably just evil :-)

My hair was getting out of control (I always let it get out of control), so I needed to get a hair cut.  There are at least 3000 different places to get your hair cut in Shanghai (I actually don't think that's much of an exaggeration)  I just went to the first one that I saw someone else actually getting a hair cut.  I went in expecting a slightly different experience, because I'd already seen a YouTube clip by some guy that showed the basics of his haircut.  Here's what happened:

First, she put some shampoo in my hair, and then squirted some water in it.  She worked up a good lather, and spent about 20 minutes giving me a very nice scalp massage.  Then she started scrubbing my ears, which is a little weird.  I've never had anyone scrub my ears before.  She took me over to the rinse stations, and rinsed my hair out, then sat me back down in the chair.  On the trip back to the chair, I saw a guy getting a neck massage in the chair.  After I sat back down, the woman asked me "<mandarin> Massage?" and made the hand sign for 6.  Actually, she pronounced it "massajee".  I figured, hey, nice neck & shoulder massage for 6 Yuan!  Sweet!  So after I said "Dui, dui", she led me into a side room that I hadn't noticed.  There were 3 or 4 other people in there getting massages (fully clothed).  So I figured I'd signed up for a full massage for a while.  60 minutes (what the 6 referred to) later, I'd learned the words for eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and hurt (the only one I still remember is "hurt" - tong).  I also learned the name of the woman giving me the massage (Yeng Hai-Xia), and learned that a Chinese massage can leave my neck & shoulders in dire need of a more American style massage.

After the massage, she washed my hair again and delivered me to one of the barbers who did a very good job of cutting my hair.  He hadn't seen my hair before it was washed, so he had no idea how I did it normally, though.  So after I parted my hair the way I've worn it since, um, 1991 (I'm a slave to fashion), he grabbed the blow dryer to finish off the job.  Now in the US at this point, I usually make it clear that I don't put any goo in my hair, but since this guy wasn't offering any goo, I figured I was safe.  Boy was I wrong.  After spending about 6 minutes getting the hair on the front top part of my head to  stick up about 2" above my scalp, he did his best to take the remaining 30 hairs that cover my expanding bald-spot and poof them up to make it look like I'm not quite as balding as I really am.  And he was quite determined.

Anyway, about 2 hours later, 110 Yuan lighter (about $16) I walked in to the apartment and, before Amy could start laughing too much, asked her "How do you say 'Not so poofy!' in Chinese?"

I left work very early today.  My wife called me at about 10:30, barely audible through her sobs, and told me that my next door neighbor, friend, and overall decent human being had taken his own life a couple of days ago.  I took a taxi heading home, where there would be noise & distraction to keep me from falling to pieces the way I did to the 2 poor individuals who I only met 10 days ago.  Riding 13 miles in an unfamiliar city in a car with someone I couldn't communicate with was very surreal.  I'm living among 20 million people, and I find myself missing one man who was 6000 miles away on Monday, and is gone, now.  He was a good man who was always willing to help us, and was a very good neighbor.  The world is worse off without him in it.  I will miss him.

I need to find something to do with these emotions, find someway to deal with them.  It's too sudden, and too shocking.  My only other close experience with death was when my older brother passed away so many years ago.  I had an opportunity to say goodbye.  I was crushed when he died - I remember crying to sleep in my wife's arms that night.  But his death was slow, gradual, almost predictable, and when he died, it was what he needed, and I knew it.  Cancer had taken his eye, and was destroying his liver.  It was tragic, he was so young, so brilliant, so unfulfilled - so much lost potential & possibility.  But it wasn't sudden, shocking, and unexpected.

My neighbor was in his 60's, and had talked about his grandson with a glimmer in his eye before we left.  Suicide is so strange a concept to me, having never really dealt with any sort of depression at all, despite a significant family history.  I wouldn't feel so confused if he'd had a heart attack, or fallen of a ladder, or gotten in a car accident.  There would be a clear reason why he died.  But I don't have a reason, and I never will.  That's very hard.  I think what's so very difficult is that there may never have actually been one reason.

And I now come to the same point I came to with my brother.  He will be missed, but life moves on.  Knowing that John had wished us well on our trip here, that he hoped my family would have an adventure, I'll move on and try to make sure that our adventure is no less adventurous.

I'm from the Rocky Mountains:  small-town Idaho.  I've lived in many random towns in Idaho, none of which had more than 50,000 people (at least not when I lived there).  I think only 2 of them even had more than 10,000 people.  If I had to pick one theme that summarizes my small-town lower-, then middle-class western upbringing (as in "west of the 'mid-west'" which is really the almost east to us westerners :-) ), it's self-reliance.  Some acquaintances of ours from North Dakota have the same general attitude, which is why I extend the assertion to anything west of Ohio:  If you can do it yourself, you should do it yourself.  I can lay tile [self-taught], so I've tiled something like 800 sq ft of floor.  I've remodeled a bathroom.  I've painted probably more 20,000 sqft of wall.  I mow my own lawn.  I've scraped probably 1000 sq ft of (non-asbestos) 'popcorn ceilings'.  I've built a bunk bed, a diaper-changing station, installed baseboard trim throughout almost all of my house.  You get the idea.  Living in Bellevue, major recipient of the financial wake of Microsoft, certainly brought a set of odd adjustments that required me to change my perspective a bit, but my core theme has really stuck.

Three years ago, I met an interesting guy from Virginia, who has lived all over the country, and even spent some time in Thailand.  He made an interesting comment, when I asked if he was painting his new house.  He said his skill wasn't painting, it was earning money by coding. So he focuses on that, and pays other people to do other things like paint his house.  This idea was completely foreign to me.  Why would he not just paint his own house?  He's single, hadn't really unpacked yet, and the idea of not painting your own house interior had honestly not occurred to me as a possibility.

Why am I talking about this, and what does this have to do with my current situation?  One word:  Ayi.

I believe a literal translation is something like "Aunty", but what an Ayi really does is a combination nanny/maid/cook.  All we really needed one for is to watch Casen while Amy is home schooling the girls, and maybe watch the kids one night a week so Amy doesn't go completely insane while we're here.  But that's really not a full time gig.  So she does other stuff.  Scratch that.  She does ALL the other stuff.  And it just feels weird.  She's a very nice woman, who apparently has an 18 year old son and husband who both live in Zhengzhou, where she's from.  And she does everything around the apartment.  She tidies constantly.  She cooks, she does laundry, she wipes Casen's nose.  All for less than minimum wage from 1983.  And from what we hear from other people. we're paying her very well.  So Amy & I aren't doing jack-squat around the apartment, now.  Amy's actually able to focus on teaching the girls, and she really doesn't need to do anything else.  And when I get home from work, Anna's cooking dinner, the kids are playing with each other, and Amy's feeling useless.  I spent the whole time until she left at 7PM just playing with kids and talking to Amy.  I washed the dishes, so Anna could shower and head home to where ever she lives, because I felt so lazy & useless.  Because if I can do something, I should. 

But I've realized something:  My strongest skill is earning money by working at Microsoft.  It has been for a long time, now.  And while I can cook, tidy, watch children, etc..., there are a whole lot of people on this side of the planet that can do all that, but can't earn much money doing anything else.  And there's another thing I can do.  I can help change that.  So I'm paying a very nice woman to wipe our 2 year old's nose.  Because if I can do something, I should.

I'm really having so much fun that I don't want to work.  I wonder if Microsoft would pay me to just play in China for 3 months?  Actually, when I stop goofing around in Shanghai and start thinking about work, I am pretty excited.  Besides Bruce, who I've known almost my whole career at Microsoft, and Terry Leeper, who I've know his whole career at Microsoft, I've also met 2 other members of the team I'll be working with, and I'm really looking forward to putting faces on the e-mail names of the rest of the group.  I'm going to try to catch the 7AM bus, because it looks like they killed the 6AM bus :-(.

For dinner tonight, we decided to try a "local" restaurant.  It's called "Little Sheep" and they serve what I believe are called "Hot Pots".  When we walked in the place, we had no idea what to expect, and I don't think there was a single person in the restaurant that spoke a word of English.  So we pointed, and my amazing wife communicated a few things in Mandarin, and we were good to go.  We got a 'Nourishing Soup' base which they put on a burner to start boiling, then we ordered strips of beef, lamb, a vegetable medley tray, a "medley of balls" and some noodles.  The kids did quite well with the chopsticks, though Casen only liked to skewer meat balls and hold them up to watch the steam as they cooled.  They all ate something, and Amy, Megan, and I all walked out feeling that thoroughly pleasant "too full" feeling of eating so much yummy food that you can't pack in any more.

We walked home at which point I trudged back to the Grand Gateway to try our ATM card again, as it failed at the Fabric Market.  Turns out that all the American Banks take an ATM hiatus at about 2 am Sunday morning, and turn back on around 6AM.  So no cash for us on Sunday afternoon (I visited 4 ATM's before Amy called me to confirm that Visa said that was true).  Stupid global roaming blackout!  Anyway, it turned back on around 6PM local time, and we've now learned our lesson...  I wet back and grabbed some more cash, along with some "Rocky Chocolate" ice cream for Amy.  Hot Pots for dinner, and Ice Cream for dessert.  Life is good...

I also thought I might start chronicling (sp?) the funny translations I see while I'm out.  Today's is "For You Shanghai, Youth Outstanding Person".  You might think that's not really funny, just gibberish, and if it were printed on some pamphlet, I would agree with you.  But that lettering is 8 feet high on a batch of signs that are probably 3 stories high.  If you're making signs that big, perhaps consulting with either a native speaker or a student of the language would make sense :-)

Off to bed before I pass out.  Jet lag still sucks, just not quite as badly as it did 5 days ago...