Nine day traffic jam.

Surely at this point the traffic jam is close to letting up, right? Not so fast. According to state media the congestion is expected to continue until workers finish up the construction projects on September 13.

Michael Johnston, Seeking Alpha, August 24, 2010

I live in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, a fairly large (not by Chinese standards, of course) city located just across the Rio Grande from Albuquerque. Many people commute each day across the river, to and from jobs in ABQ and RR. And they frequently complain about how bad the traffic is during morning and afternoon rush hours. “Ha!” I say to these people. “You don’t know what a traffic jam is really like. Go to Beijing!”

Although it does seem as though the traffic is a little heavier in the morning and evenings in Beijing, mostly the city is embroiled in one huge traffic jam all day long. (I’ve not been out on the streets of Beijing in the middle of the night, so cannot accurately report on what the traffic is like at, say, 3 AM. I suspect, however, that it might be just as congested.) The problem is exacerbated by the fact that Chinese drivers, particularly cab drivers, respect no rules of road courtesy. If an opening in the traffic flow appears, every car, bus, and bicycle will surge into it, immediately creating a clog where there was once a gap. A red light is just a suggestion. I pretty much ride around the city in the back of a cab covering my eyes with my hands.

And forget about trying to cross the street with any sense of personal safety. Who has the right of way in Beijing? It’s all a matter of size: First through are buses, then cars, then bicycles (and other odd vehicles). Then people. A pedestrian crosswalk is nothing more than a target zone. I was once actually “bumped” in the rear end by a car wanting me to get out of the way. In the middle of the crosswalk! At some of the larger intersections in the city, there are actual “crossing guards,” in uniform, waving red flags and holding the throng of humans back with a long rope, tied at one end. I do not actually speak Chinese, but I’m pretty sure this is what the guard was saying as he roped us in to prevent us from surging into the street:

“Wait . . . wait . . . wait . . . . ” (He drops the rope.) “OK! RUN NOW! RUN LIKE HELL!”

And off we go, trying not to get hit by the right-turning vehicles who pay no attention to the humans scampering among them. Here’s how I have learned to survive an intersection crossing in Beijing: I squeeze myself into the middle of a crowd of Chinese, and when they go, I go. In China, there is definitely safety in numbers!

The second question I am asked most frequently about my travels in China (after “How was the food?” a question which I answered in an earlier post) is this: “What were the – er – ‘facilities’ like?”

I am happy to report that the “facilities” I have encountered in China have gotten much better over the nearly five years that I’ve been visiting there. During my first visit (in 2006), I was appalled to discover that going to the bathroom in most public places (such as the famous multi-storied “Silk Street” market) was tantamount to descending into one of Dante’s lower circles of hell: The restrooms were (how can I put this diplomatically?) dirty, stinky, putrid, ghastly, icky vestibules of vileness. And the “toilets” were simply porcelain bowls in a hole in the floor, over which I was expected to squat and aim accurately. (Try doing this successfully wearing panty hose!)

To compound my plight, I found it fairly difficult to hover that close to the floor for the requisite length of time and then raise myself up by means of my quadriceps alone. (I once tried putting my hands on the floor on either side of the porcelain to push myself up, but instantly realized that that way would lie madness. And require a tetanus shot.) Once, after one of my early trips to the People’s Republic, a friend of mine back in the States asked me, “I’m thinking of visiting China. Do you think I would like it?” I looked at her, a hefty woman of close to 300 pounds and nearly six feet tall. I looked at the cane she used to compensate for her bad leg. “Umm, maybe you should think about a vacation somewhere else,” I had to level with her. “You would never be able to pee in China.”

The “anterooms” in Chinese public restrooms were also appallingly unsanitary. No hot water. No towels of any kind. Chinese women would simply rinse their hands in cold water and then walk out, waving them around in the air to dry. (I quickly learned to carry my own tissues on every outing.) And in some places, the wash basins were communal; men and woman would visit separate rows of stalls, but come together for the cold-water-rinsing routine. Egad. When I deplaned at the San Francisco airport after my first trip to Beijing, I wanted to kiss the floor in the women’s restroom. (Not really, of course, but it WAS very clean!)

In my subsequent trips to China, I have found that public restrooms are not so much any longer the horrible abattoirs of my first trip. Indeed, in most of the modern buildings in Beijing, especially the magnificent “western” hotels like the Shangri-La and the Kempinsky, the toilets are equally “western,” with ample supplies of toilet paper, hot water, and hand towels. And they smell lovely. In other, less stunning edifices (like the Carrefour shopping mall complex), I have learned that if I go to the very end of the row of “grounded” toilets, I’ll find a clearly marked “handicapped” stall, where there will be a – praise the lord! – western toilet.

My dear Chinese friend Elizabeth always tells me, “When in China, do as the Chinese do.” I try, believe me, I try, but there are certain things I will always try my best to avoid – like fried scorpion appetizers and squat toilets.

In case you haven’t heard, there’s a fun website out there called I Write Like, which contains an “analyzer” that can tell you which famous writer your own prose most resembles.

Here’s how it works (as explained by 27-year-old Russian software developer Dmitry Chestnykh):

“Actually, the algorithm is not a rocket science, and you can find it on every computer today. It’s a Bayesian classifier, which is widely used to fight spam on the Internet. Take for example the ‘Mark as spam’ button in Gmail or Outlook. When you receive a message that you think is spam, you click this button, and the internal database gets trained to recognize future messages similar to this one as spam. This is basically how ‘I Write Like’ works on my side: I feed it with ‘Frankenstein’ and tell it, ‘This is Mary Shelley. Recognize works similar to this as Mary Shelley. Of course, the algorithm is slightly different from the one used to detect spam, because it takes into account more stylistic features of the text, such as the number of words in sentences, the number of commas, semicolons, and whether the sentence is a direct speech or a quotation.”

Bemused, I decided to see how the analyzer would assess my own writing, and submitted this paragraph from my earlier post about the difficulties of learning Mandarin Chinese:

“Ay, ay, ay, but Chinese is SO foreign to my brain! There’s nothing for me to build on what I already know; sometimes it feels like I’m just memorizing gibberish. A case in point: I have learned how to (slowly and haltingly) count out loud to 10 in Chinese: yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba, jiu, shi. But when I do, I feel like I could just as well be saying, ‘la, de, dah, do, dee, yee, moo, qua, blah, foo. Maybe if I were five years old this all would be much easier–my aged brain just cannot seem to keep up with all this new information.”

The analyzer immediately recognized this as my literary homage to James Joyce. Of course! “La, de, dah, do, dee, yee, moo, qua, blah, foo” is one of the more memorable quotes from Ulysses. Or is it from Finnegans Wake?

Hmmmm, I wondered. Do I ALWAYS write like James Joyce? So I tried another piece of prose from my blog, this one about my adventures with weird food in China:

“The other 10% of the ‘food’ (and I use that term loosely) I encountered in China included scorpions (live and wriggling on a stick or fried up crispy on a plate), sauteed duck tongues (with horrible little bones in them!), and anything made out of frog, including frog dumplings (the only dumplings I COULDN’T eat in China). I saw ‘horse’ on a menu once, and also dog.”

Joyce again? No, no, not at all–it appears I am also able to channel Margaret Atwood in my writings about Chinese food. I was sure that the analyzer would have pegged me for Stephen King here: scorpions? duck tongues? frog dumplings? Doesn’t that sound pretty scary to you? Ah, well, Margaret Atwood is well-known for her futuristic novels (such as The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake), so maybe this particular shoe does fit.

Yeah, right.

I figure that since I go to China at least once a year, stay there for 4-6 weeks at a time, have to depend on taxis for transportation and local restaurants for nutrition, I should at least make a stab at learning the language. And besides, most of my students are also fluent Mandarin speakers (even the ones not originally from China) and I know they would be delighted to help me learn. What more motivation do I need?

My husband bought the Rosetta Stone Chinese (Mandarin), Level 1 & 2 Set with Audio Companion edition the first year I went to China, thinking, I’m sure, that this computer-based language program would live up to its promise: “The fastest way to learn a language. Guaranteed.” Well, maybe I would have more faith in that guarantee if the language I was learning was French (which I minored in in college) or Spanish (which I studied in high school and which is of course all around me here in New Mexico) or Italian (like French and Spanish, a Romance language with similar syntaxes), or even Latin (if I could just find some dead Romans to talk to).

Ay, ay, ay, but Chinese is SO foreign to my brain! There’s nothing for me to build on what I already know; sometimes it feels like I’m just memorizing gibberish. A case in point: I have learned how to (slowly and haltingly) count out loud to 10 in Chinese: yi, er, san, si, wu, liu, qi, ba, jiu, shi. But when I do, I feel like I could just as well be saying, “la, de, dah, do, dee, yee, moo, qua, blah, foo.” Maybe if I were five years old this all would be much easier–my aged brain just cannot seem to keep up with all this new information.

And of course don’t even talk to me about learning to read Chinese characters; I’m sure my head would explode. I’ll stick with the Pinyin (“romanized” letters) for now.

But I’d like to get beyond the subsistence stage, where pretty much my vocabulary is limited to things you can eat: lu cha (green tea), pi jiu (beer), jiaozi (dumplings), mi fan (rice). I can’t even remember at this moment how you say, “Where is the restroom?” (In public restaurants, my Chinese friend Elizabeth told me, all you need to do is hold up your right index finger and give the waiter a questioning look, and he or she will know immediately that you need the toilet and point out where it is.) One of the most useful phrases I know in Chinese my colleague Barrett Mandel taught me the first time I visited Peking U: “Bei Da xi men” (which means, “Beijing University, west gate,” where my hotel is on the campus). I was thrilled to discover that I could get into a cab anywhere in Beijing, tell the driver, “Bei Da xi men!” get myself to the west gate, and then, by means of grunting and pointing, get myself to the actual hotel.

So I shall persevere, but I doubt that anytime soon I will be able to participate in a discussion of Kant’s philosophy with an educated Chinese person. Maybe a Chinese kindergarten student?

The students in my Beijing International MBA (BiMBA) classes are amazingly techo-savvy. The administration at BiMBA had loaned me a cell phone to use while I was in Beijing and had nicely pre-programmed it with important phone numbers. The only problem was I didn’t know the phone’s own number or how to find it. I gave it to my Chinese student Dolly (who fortuitously also worked for China Mobile) and she found the number for me in three-tenths of a nanosecond. Another student knew how to hook my laptop up to the projector, and yet another showed me how to upload video files to the Internet. Martin Jacques (When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order, see my previous post) believes it all comes down to the speed with which the Chinese people are attempting to catch up with the rest of the technological world: “. . . Chinese modernity, like other East Asian modernities, is distinguished by the speed of the country’s transformation . . . . Habituated to rapid change, they are instinctively more at ease with the new and the future than is the case in the West, especially Europe.”

Here’s another way of looking at it: In my lifetime, we’ve gone from a telephone wired into the house and owned by the phone company (and available in any color as long as it was black), to a pink Princess phone or a Mickey Mouse phone, to a wireless phone that you could carry around the house (but not too far from the base), to a cell phone that just allowed calls, to an iPhone that allows nearly everything except the ability to beam yourself to your listener (an app that is in development, so I’ve heard). Many Chinese have gone from no phone to iPhone.

But mastery of technology has its own drawbacks, especially when the medium itself becomes more important than the message. My Chinese students know pretty much how to use every bell and whistle that PowerPoint provides, and frequently they try to cram every one of them into their presentations. Since they are also nervous about having to stand up and speak in public in their second language, they try to put every word they will say on their PPT slides and then just read the slides to the audience. The result? Their presentations become as bad and as boring as those of many presenters in the US!

So I try to talk my students out of their dependency on technology, particularly as it pertains to making presentations. “Less is more,” I tell them. The fewer slides in your presentation, the more opportunities you will have to engage and interact with your audience. “Keep It Simple, Stupid” (the KISS principle), I emphasize. Then I remind them: “Did Chairman Mao use PowerPoint? Did Confucius?”

Aha, point made: You don’t need technology to lead or to teach. You just need to communicate.

I’ve just finished reading Martin Jacques’ data-packed analysis of China’s growth, When China Rules the World: The End of the Western World and the Birth of a New Global Order.

In the book, Jacques discusses the impact of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, with its astonishing spectacle of 2,008 drummers whacking wildly away on the fou (a traditional Chinese drum). He goes on to say, “After the Games, there was general agreement that China had raised the Olympic bar to a new level which it would be well-nigh impossible for others to equal, let alone surpass.”

This passage reminded me of an hilarious article by the always amusing New Yorker essayist and critic, Anthony Lane, who in “The Only Games in Town” (the New Yorker, August 25, 2008), pities the poor Londoners who will have to try and improve on the Chinese effort. Lane imagines Lord Sebastian Coe (yes, the former Olympic runner, now chair of the English Olympic preparations), “hiding in the men’s room, calling home to order more light bulbs. You can imagine the rising panic in his voice: ‘They had two thousand and eight drummers, all lit up. Yes, two thousand and eight. And what have we got so far? Elton John on a trampoline.’”

I was in Beijing for the run-up years before the Olympics, so I got to experience first hand the rising feverish frenzy of the Chinese at this chance to show the world what they could do with a stockpile of pyrotechnics (originally invented in China, of course) and 1.3 billion people to make it all work. With every trip to teach my fall class, I noticed all kinds of improvements: new buildings going up, trees being planted, major tourist sites under wraps for rehabilitation, signs everywhere announcing the 8/8/08 event (8 is a lucky number to the Chinese). During the Olympics themselves, I watched the proceedings from my Albuquerque, New Mexico, home, annoying family and friends alike by repeating constantly, “I’ve been there! I’ve been there!”

At the start of my class in the fall of 2008, I complimented my students on a job well done. “It was amazing!” I told them. “The opening and closing ceremonies were astounding!” Big smiles on all their faces. And then huge laughs when I read them Anthony Lane’s comments about the British and Elton John. I suggested that the British should just give it up, not even try to top the Chinese performance, as there surely would be no way they could be more impressive (except maybe if they could transport the entire opening ceremonies to Mars or someplace). “They should just bring out the Queen and have her sit down with all the spectators for a gigantic tea party.” My students happily agreed.

I am a visiting professor in the Beijing International MBA program at Peking University, where once a year I teach a course in communication skills to students pursuing their MBA degrees.

The BiMBA program is quite unique among other graduate business schools, with its focus on global business practices and entrepreneurial skills. Among the classes that full-time or part-time MBA students take, for example, are such offerings as “Business in China from a Historical and Cultural Perspective,” “Global Leadership,” “Innovation Management,” and “Entrepreneurship.” The goal of the program, as its website declares, is “to cultivate corporate leaders who are familiar with China’s market environment as well as international business practices and are thus empowered with a global vision and a local mindset.” In my own class, “Report Writing and Presentation Skills,” my teaching colleagues and I focus our students’ learning on the practical applications of communication theory, such as learning how to write an effective business plan or deliver a persuasive presentation to potential venture capitalists. Not surprisingly, whenever I ask my class, How many of you want to start your own businesses after graduation? nearly every hand in the room goes up.

My BiMBA students display an amazing variety of talent and intelligence, and they bring with them to the program a multi-layered background of work experience. Most of the students in my part-time class, for example (who attend class on Saturdays and Sundays) are currently working as mid-level or higher managers in many of the top companies in China: Lenovo, China Mobile, Pfizer, Intel (to name just a few). Not all the students are Chinese. This is an international program, remember, and in any given class of, say, 24 students, I might have 20 Chinese nationals, plus a German, a Ukranian, a Brazilian, and an American. The classes are all taught in English (thank goodness for me!) and while some students are more fluent than others, the majority of them constantly astound me with their ability to communicate effectively in English. (Speaking in public, as you may know, is considered the number one human fear. Imagine trying to speak in public in your second language!)

It’s an old adage that the best part about teaching is how much you learn from your students. In later posts, I will share with you more of the lessons I’ve learned from my BiMBA students.

People who learn that I’ve been to China frequently ask me, “How was the food?”

“Well,” I usually reply, “I’d have to say that 90% of the food I had in China was absolutely delicious.” The Chinese, after all, are the masters of stir fry, and you can devour dishes like chicken with cashews (similar to what you can get in the US), or sauteed lily root (which I’ve never seen in the U.S., but which is absolutely delectable), or an entire fish submerged in hot oil (and yet surprisingly not at all greasy). Even now as I type this, my mouth is watering for dumplings–meat or veggie filled–like soft little savory pillows, with a side of soy and vinegar dipping sauce. (One of the first Chinese words I learned was jiaozi–to my ear, “jow- zuh”–dumpling. I can also order lu cha—green tea. With this extensive vocabulary, I figure I’ll never go hungry in China!)

The other 10% of the “food” (and I use that term loosely) I encountered in China included scorpions (live and wriggling on a stick or fried up crispy on a plate), sauteed duck tongues (with horrible little bones in them!), and anything made out of frog, including frog dumplings (the only dumplings I COULDN’T eat in China). I saw “horse” on a menu once, and also dog. (Thank goodness the menus were in English. I think.) One time when I had some chest congestion, my well-meaning Chinese friend Elizabeth (Xaiofang) ordered a “special” soup for me in a restaurant in Shanghai. When it arrived, it looked kinda OK, and smelled like a nice broth, but when I stirred it up with my spoon, I found a grayish squarish lump of something with swiss-cheesy like holes. “What is this?” I asked Elizabeth. “Pig lung. Good for chest congestion.” Eeuuuww!

Oh, but wait, just wait: Lots of other people eat food just as weird to outsiders. The Scots are famous for their haggis—a sheep’s stomach stuffed with God knows what leftover animal parts and grain. (And, if you’re lucky, a wee dram of some excellent single malt to take the edge off.) Here in New Mexico a traditional dish, called menudo, is relished by many for its tasty combination of red chile sauce, posole (corn), and tripe (cow’s stomach). Yum! (One recipe I found says menudo is the perfect remedy for a hangover.) And I don’t care how fancy-dancy the French restaurant is—I will never eat a snail, no way, no how, no escargot.

I guess it’s just like my Irish grandmother used to say: “To each her own taste, said the old lady as she kissed the cow.”

I never really wanted to go to China. It was not high on my list of “dream destinations.” England, yes, Ireland (most definitely yes), maybe Greece, Spain, Germany . . . . all the European countries. But the Asian countries? Nah, too far to fly, too FOREIGN. And the language barrier–insurmountable, I thought. I had studied Latin and Spanish in high school and French in college. I figured I could probably pick up Italian pretty quickly if I wanted to. But learn Chinese? At my advanced age? No way!

And then one day a dear friend of a dear friend of mine, who had been teaching at Beijing U. for a number of years, said “How’d you like to teach in China?” And I immediately said, “Of course!” (I mean, seriously, who could pass up an opportunity like that?)

I’ve been teaching for over four years now in the Beijing International MBA program at “BeiDa” (Chinese shorthand for Peking University), instructing international students (most of them Chinese nationals, the rest from all over the world, including the US) in the fine art of “business communication”–report writing and presentation skills.

I have chronicled my adventures in and out of the classroom in Ellen’s China Diaries (which you can read at your leisure on my web site). With this blog I plan to continue my explorations of all things Chinese, from my struggles to learn Chinese, to my opinions about the current state of the Chinese economy and what that means for us westerners, to movie and book reviews.

I hope you enjoy your time here with me. I look forward to your comments!