T.I.C. 2008
It’s been exactly a year since my last visit to hometown Montreal, and I’m about to return for another visit next Monday. I’ve been working at IBM Shanghai — precisely IBM China Systems & Technology Labs (CSTL) — for a year and a half now. I’m starting to forget how it was like to work from home at Montreal, waking up at 8:15am every morning, cleaning the shit of the dog and feed it first, then making my own coffee while opening up the laptop to download the latest emails, watching at the snow accumulated at my window and occasionally the snow pile messe at the parking lot in front of my Lofts St-James condo. After a few conference calls and many chat sessions, went to lunch at Quinos at the Eaton Centre then back home for a short nap on the comfortable IKEA sofa, spoke a few words to the dog that invariably slept underneath the sofa as soon as I got on it, then got back to work until diner was ready. Life was very easy and very comfortable, all the fun was at the photo shooting, golf courses and red wine! There wasn’t anything bad with that lifestyle, really, except a bit boring. I was feeling like living a retired lifestyle and I want to keep that for after 50!
Fast forward a year and a half later, waking up at 7am every morning, arriving to the subway station right underneath my apartment buidling around 7:50, the subway is normally packed shoulder-to-shoulder, unless the next train is the 8 wagons model instead of 6, standing in the train is fine but it’s a bit hard to read anything when someone’s back almost touches your nose… Arriving at the Zhangjiang High-Tech Park station 40 minutes later, there’s a shuttle bus to carry employees to IBM office, otherwise a 15 minutes walk is as convenient too. My cubicle at the new IBM office building is quite spaceous even by modern North America standard (not the 80s’ dual occupation office room), with good meeting room facilities like network, wireless and permanent projector almost at every corner of the office building. Going to lunch usually around 11:30 at the next building with random colleagues of various teams, the food isn’t bad, but can’t be qualified as good neither… But it cost less than 2$ bucks most of time! High-end coffee shops are mushrooming at every corner of Shanghai these days, the dominant players being US-based Starbucks and Japanese-based Coffee Beans and Tea Leaf. Such a coffee costs 3 times the price of my lunch at office, but still it’s constantly full packed without any empty seat during weekend!
My work day has been quite busy since April, usually spending almost the whole morning responding to emails, afternoons are always filled with 1 or 2 meetings, sometime 3, and then it’s 6:30pm before I realize it. Then Mary would message me asking the time of my arrival to home, which is usually 7:30pm these days, taking the same fully packed but fast and convenient train. Arriving home is always a moment of joy for me, undress, sit down and the diner is already on the table, hot, smell good, hungry, bingo! Can’t complaint about that!
In case you’re still wondering what TIC means by now, it’s actually an acronym coined by a friend’s german friend for This Is China. Whenever he sees something weird to his western eyes, he would say “Of course, TIC!” That actually happens to me more than few times, ranging from insignificant things like server serving red wine in a water cup entirely filled or eating birthday cake in a disposable cup with chopsticks; to ironic things like a adult-oriented night club opening in front of the city’s public policy school and selling adult sex toys exposed at most public pharmacies visibly at the entrance; to the very surprising things like gangsters proposing to people to pass the driving exam for 100$ bucks openly in front of the police station (traffic laws are under police’s juridiction), while at the exam desk a piece of paper taped on the wall saying that it’s illegal to pass exam in another person’s behalf. What can I say, TIC!
I’m glad that the Beijing Olympics games are over now, it’s been such a persistent propaganda over the past 4 years to remind citizens to behave in front of foreign visitors. I’m actually very proud of the success of this event as much as the records of Chinese athletes. With 51 gold medals and 100 total, nobody will ever doubt Chinese people’s ability in any sport from now on. But more importantly, this event has served to open up the eyes and minds of millions of westerners who have been seriously deprived of fair coverage of modern China. More than anyone else, western news outlets have been lying and covering up modern China to their readers for many decades, choosing instead to show a backward negative image of China to boost their own moral. TV reports have shown that most western foreigners were amazed by how they were warmly welcomed and served by the young Olympics volunteers and ordinary citizens. They will return to their homeland to pass the message that China is not what their corrupt news agencies try to project. There are certainly many fundamental problems remained in this country, like any other country, and we’re working very hard on improving it without actually killing everybody else outside of our border who do not buy into our vision! We do not need to bad-mouth anyone else to drive public opinion to support any policy. We do not make friend with despot and brutal dictator regimes in order to destroy common ennemies and then turn the gun back to the friends to destroy them in turn, this is called systemic betrayal and this is not a sustainable foreign policy for a superpower……..
Friends at my hometown invariably ask when I’m going to return there for good, I really don’t have an answer now, but certainly not before 2010. Life isn’t too bad here, so far. I still have plenty of things to learn and see, because This is China.