Master of Nets Garden, Suzhou

One of the smaller of gardens in Suzhou, the Master of Nets Garden benefits for a lower entry fee and best of all, is almost entirely overlooked by the busloads of tour groups.

Unlike the case in larger and better known attractions, this garden actually allows visitors to wander about in peace.

Much of the area is subdivided into rooms, courtyards, pavilions, gardens, walkways and airwells, interconnected with narrow doorways or screened openings/windows. It’s quite amazingly laid out. As one rounds a corner and enters a doorway, the scene changes surprisingly from a stern looking, wide open stone-paved courtyard into a cosy airwell with leafy palms and prickly pines.

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The Humble Administrator's Garden, Suzhou

For the past few weeks, I’ve been working in Suzhou on a particularly nasty engagement. As it’s just 40 minutes away from Shanghai by fast train, I usually return to Shanghai for the weekends to tend to my little fashion boutique.

This weekend, however, I decided to stay around and look at one of the many famed gardens around town. These ancient gardens were mostly the playthings of some wealthy character or other, and have intricate use and separation of spaces. Very architecturally pleasing – a comment which is mostly untrue for modern Chinese constructions.

I was at the Humble Administrator’s Garden. Was beautiful, though the crowd somewhat detracted one’s appreciation of space by filling most of it with bodies and loud chatter.







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One of the many bodies of water within the garden, with a covered walkway along one side.

These ladies were posing on the walkway for another camera next to me. I happened to have the 135mm lens on at that time and managed to squeeze off a shot before the scene melted.

A tree in a courtyard

A tree with a vagina

*prods at map with pudgy finger*
“we are here, and that building over there is this. To get out we need to go this way.”
*Drags pudgy finger along map*

After 9000 pudgy finger-prods the map fades, leaving a gaping white hole in place of the red “you are here” dot.

Elaborately framed openings are a common feature here. Most, if not all, are unique designs.

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In the afternoon, it started raining. I hoped the rain would drive some of the visitors away, but most were well prepared.

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China is the best!

Of late, I’ve been stationed at one of the many factories of one of the East-Asian electronics conglomerates.

This afternoon, I returned to our company’s little regional office to do some online work (made 2 comments on Facebook status updates, surfed through BBC news, and updated some drawings and sent a few email) as the client would not allow outsiders to plug into their computer network.

The accountant’s husband strolled into the office late in the afternoon to wait for his wife to finish work. In general, he is a friendly man, but he suffers from a severe case of the widely-prevalent disorder: the China-is-best mentality. Below are excerpts of our conversation:

[typing a text message on the phone to the gf]
[walks by behind]
It seems quite tedious to type using English isn’t it?
It’s ok, I’m used to it.
Yeah but it’s not as efficient as Chinese. You get half as many characters for each message, but each word only requires one character ².
True.
I think… that English is not as sophisticated as Chinese. Have you studied classical Chinese? Each word conveys so much information, that a short sentence is able to convey a very deep meaning.
Mmm...
And English is more of a mechanistic languages. There are only 26 letters, and words are formed by combining different letters¹. For sure, it’s well suited for the purposes of computing, but for communication between persons, Chinese is still the better language.

[truncated]

Well, you can’t really tell if you don’t study it in detail. For example, if you use only conversational-grade English, it is impossible to judge the level of refinement in the language.

[...]

There must be a significant difference in the level of civilisation between the Chinese culture and the Malay culture right?
Well of course it’s different. The Chinese culture is from China and the Malay culture is from the Malaysia-Indonesia region.
So how old is the history of the Malay culture? (here it comes, a set up move for the all conquering 5000-years-of-civilisation trump card.)
[I somehow answered that question in a sideways manner and we got distracted by the details about how old other civilisations are, including European and North American. So no mention of 5000 years.]


At end of the business day he offered to drop me off at the train station, thus saving me an hour-long ride in a bus with no air conditioning (temperatures in mid afternoon is 30 to 36 celcius these days).

Thus, I shall not further vilify him here, tempting as it may be.


Footnotes:

2. I am convinced all well developed languages contain a measure of combinatorics. For example, the expression “I need to have sex with a BMW” is conveyed by picking several words and grouping them into a sentence. The words, in turn, consist of a group of smaller objects lumped together.

In English, words consist of a series of letters arranged in one dimension. In Chinese, words consist of sub-words arranged in 2 dimensions. These sub-words consist of a certain grouping of strokes, also arranged in 2 dimensions.

The fact that English words are constructed in 1 dimension makes it easy to spell words by arranging the letters along the time dimension.


1. which brings me to the second point, how one can squeeze so much more information into a 70-word message compared to a 140-character English message.

Mobile phones contain a standard dictionary of common Chinese words (which is probably not a huge amount). Assuming that there are 16,000 common Chinese words, this requires 14 bits of information to correctly assign each word to a unique number.

Assuming that each character for the mobile phone carries 7 bits of data, this is enough for 128 unique symbols (26 lower case letters, 26 upper case letters, 10 numerals, and about 30 symbols). 6 bits can only give 64 unique characters, which is definitely not enough.

As above, assuming that each Chinese word requires 14 bits to encode, it will need 2 character’s worth of information to be transmitted.

This is advantageous compared to the regular way English is transmitted: 2 characters is enough to encode a word, while English requires up about 5 characters to encode a word (sometimes up to 22 characters, such as counterrevolutionaries)

Can this method be used to give a higer information density to alpha-numeric based text messages?

A proposed mechanism is described as below.

[ok I’m getting ahead of myself, this is supposed to be a footnote, not an essay. Next entry, perhaps]

Young man, do you want to have some fun?

When I went hunting for photo opportunities over the weekend, I arrived at a little area I had seen many times while cruising in the elevated light rail.

Access was through many little lanes connected to the main road. Each of these lanes fork out several times, but the paths inside do not connect.

The first lane I entered was pretty normal looking, because a police station was located inside the area.

The second lane was located just across the road from the long distance bus terminal, and most of the buildings were converted into motels and hostels.

The third lane looked rather normal, except for a woman loitering about at the entry of the lane. When she saw me approach, she asked, “young man, do you want to have some fun?”

Naturally, I ignored her. My idea of fun involves listening to instrumental music and sipping coffee while stroking a purring kitten in a BMW 7 series, so I walked ahead without acknowledging her presence.

Most touts would give up on you and find another target if you ignore them and gave them no hope of having any business out of you. Not so for this woman. She followed a few steps behind me, continuously asking if I wanted to rest, if I wanted to play, if I wanted to have a look at the girls first etc.

I stormed ahead without acknowledging the parasol-carrying woman. I wanted to take photographs, not have sex with strangers.

Further into the area, I noticed something different- there were women loitering around the streets. These were not the housewife-kinds that sit on little stools outside their kitchens plucking vegetables or watching their grandchildren play. These women were standing in the lanes with a bored look waiting for something to happen.

Shit, I seem to have stumbled into a vice den of sorts.

I turned to leave, and faced the woman who had been muttering her offers to set me a play date. I pretended to see her the first time, listened to her ask if I wanted to have fun, acted dumb and watch her rephrase her question into an invitation of “lets go and see the girls.”

I gave her a puzzled expression and asked her in exasperation, what are you asking? She skipped around embarrassing question and suggested I go take a rest, cocking her head in the direction of her brothel (presumably).

With a look of mock horror, declined her gracious offer and left, leaving the sex with strangers to other desperate souls.

Me, I just want architectural photographs and sex with a BMW.

Old Shanghai (2)

On Sunday, I took a walk to another group of old buildings, this one located near the long distance coach terminal.

It is similar to the other area I visited previously, with quaintly crooked lanes, disorganised groups of houses and women washing vegetables along the lanes.



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However, this area is earmarked for demolition. The process of evicting residents from their decades-old homes is common practice in Shanghai. The city government kicks everyone out and pays them a hefty sum to cover the astronomical cost of getting a new home, and these residents generally feel quite lucky to be able to get a free upgrade in housing.



More than 2/3 of the buildings in the area have been made inhabitable. The roofing has been removed, the upper level floors completely smashed through, and everything of possibly any value has been scavenged. Roof tiles, window panes, doors, washroom fixtures, wooden stairs, electrical fixtures… everything that can possibly be reused has been taken away by successive scavengers. What remains among the standing structural members (these are too difficult to break without machinery) are huge chunks of concrete, masonry and other odd reminders that someone used to call this home.





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This used to be a kitchen- the window has a little square frame where an exhaust fan used to reside, and decades of hot oily air had deposited a film of disgusting black muck on the frames.



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News in 120 seconds

Fuck this shit.

Yet another engineer has resigned. Guess who will be doing all the work now.


***

Moving on to a less miserable topic...

Chocolates!



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At 28 RMB for a box of 8 pieces, it is not a trivial matter. That it consists of a smallish biscuit entombed in a chunk of milk chocolate is a redeeming factor.

The beautiful Super-Takumar 50mm/1.4 is there as a reference for scale, seeing that it is a familiar object and most people would have an intuitive grasp of its size.


***

And now, some updates from the fashion capital of China, Shanghai.

Three-quarter length stockings have become quite popular here, the owners proudly assaulting the eyesight of the general public with their frightful aesthetics.





Designs vary, ranging from plain translucent material throughout, to more complex patterns such as opaque nylon above the knee, translucent nylon below the knee, and finished with a bold lace trim at mid-calf height.

Now to wait for the rest of the world’s sense of fashion to catch up, and we’ll see an explosion of these things from Milan to New York. Delightful.

Joke of the day

China Squeezes PC Makers
Beijing Is Set to Require Web Filter That Would Censor 'Harmful' Internet Sites

BEIJING -- China plans to require that all personal computers sold in the country as of July 1 be shipped with software that blocks access to certain Web sites, a move that could give government censors unprecedented control over how Chinese users access the Internet.

The government [...] says the effort is aimed at protecting young people from "harmful" content. The primary target is pornography, says the main developer of the software, a company that has ties to China's security ministry and military.

The government, which has told global PC makers of the requirement but has yet to announce it to the public, says the effort is aimed at protecting young people from "harmful" content. The primary target is pornography, says the main developer of the software, a company that has ties to China's security ministry and military.

The software requirement was outlined in a notice that was issued by China's Ministry of Industry and Information Technology on May 19 but that hasn't yet been publicized by state media. The notice, a copy of which was seen by The Wall Street Journal, says PC makers must ship PCs to be sold in China as of July 1 with the Green Dam software "preloaded" -- pre-installed or enclosed on a CD.

Foreign industry officials say companies have been given little time to properly test Green Dam. "The lack of transparency, the shortness of time for implementation, and the incredible scope of the requirement that is not matched anywhere around the world present tremendous challenges to the industry," said an industry official who has discussed the plans with several major PC makers.

An excerpt from "China Squeezes PC Makers", Wall Street Journal, 8 June 2009.

Old Shanghai

Hidden among Shanghai’s endless blocks of high-rise buildings and badly designed metro stations are quaint little pockets of antiquity.

These decades old clusters of houses resemble the disorganised clutter of squatter houses: narrow crooked lanes that will not fit vehicles with more than 2 wheels, tiny houses built side-by-side with common walls on 3 sides, abrupt forks and branches in lanes that lead to more branches or sudden cul-de-sacs.

Fortunately, the abject misery of squatter housing is not present here. Houses are built of brick and mortar (I suppose so- anyone living in a corrugated sheet metal shanty will freeze to death in winter), there is running water, the lanes are paved with cement and provided with adequate drainage and there’s a marked absence of reeking piles of rubbish.

My walk through the area was surprisingly calming. The narrow crooked lanes do not let in any sounds from the busy streets outside, and the pace of life inside seemed considerably less hectic.




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Not all houses are created equal. The buildings on the left side have carefully laid brickwork and beautiful door and window frames, as the next image will show.




Quaint, Almost
Except that the light bulb has been replaced with an energy saving tube





Hey, where did the boy go?
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Quaint, Almost
Except that the bicycles have been replaced with electric scooters


It was said that there were 9,000,000 bicycles in Beijing¹, but that number is likely to continue decreasing over coming years. Electric bicycles, mopeds and scooters are replacing bicycles as the affordable means of personal transport.

Electric bicycles are powered by a lead acid battery, usually tall and narrow in shape unlike those found in cars. Typically, the rather heavy battery is recharged by hauling it indoors to be plugged into a charger. Also, some people make it a point to take the battery indoors as its high price and good resale/salvage value makes it a target of thieves.




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Footnotes:
1. "Nine Million Bicycles", Melua, 2005.

Adventure at a post office

Let me tell you a story.

I went to the post office with my envelope.
The envelope is from FedEx, made of manila card with a clear plastic pocket for the air waybill.
I used a sheet of A4 to tape over the orange and purple logo on the front and wrote the destination address there nicely. And slipped another piece of paper into the air waybill pocket to show the return address.

The girl at the counter asks, “Is this a letter?”
“Yes.”
“Erm, this is not an envelope.’
“It is.”

She then goes to ask someone else if it is an envelope.
She returns, “No that’s not an envelope.”
“It is a courier service envelope.”

She leaves her position to consult with another colleague.
On her return, she tells me with an air of finality, “You cannot use this envelope.”
“Fine, sell me your envelope.”

For 60 cents, she gives me a normal brown paper envelope. I write the delivery address and tear open the beautiful FedEx package to repackage my goods. She eyes the contents suspiciously.
“What is that, you cannot send that as a letter.”
“What?”
“Only documents can be sent as letters.”
“So how do I send it?”
“You need to send it as a small package.”

In the end, I decided not to mail it. I’ll repackage it properly as a ‘letter’ and mail it another day.



Online, wiser expatriates have advised exasperated newcomers to lower their expectations when in China. Expect everything to go wrong, and you’d be fine.

Sigh.

Finally putting things into practice

I have been unable to access any blogspot sites since Friday, a remarkable coincidence with my little outburst against the local government regime. Perhaps they are related?

Anywhere else and I’d have said bullshit, but this country has proven itself at being able to throw up unpleasant surprise after unpleasant surprise after unpleasant surprise.


***

In the intervening time, I have FINALLY taken the time to actually start some financial planning. Like what the texts books have been telling me since… June 2007.

1. Identify financial needs and goals
2. Allocate assets

In line with item 1, I did a budget forecast of my next big thrust into fatherhood dictatorship, and the initial results were not encouraging. 10,000 AUD just to secure a miserable seat in the Outer Party’s Supervisory Committee is just… depressing.

How the fish do these crooks finance themselves into the Inner Party Censorship Board and Economic Planning Council? Ok fine, stupid question: they are crooks.


The asset allocation bit was a bit trickier. Having made earlier contributions to various mutual funds, I had to break down each fund into its constituent asset types to find my total exposure to each asset type. Then compare the existing allocation to the target allocation etc etc.


Ok I’ll not bore you with the number-crunching and data manipulation game.

China is a great place to live in

Excerpts from a chat:

I'm convinced the Chinese government grew up eating shit.

We have an additional electrical control box to send to Australia. It’s going to be quite a hassle because the customs/capital control does not allow goods to go out without an invoice.

Same goes for funds moving in/out. Need to reconcile to import/export documents etc., and if the client sends the money early, it sits in the bank account. You cannot access it until the payment time as stipulated on the invoice/contract.
So if your purchase order says "payment of 50k on June 15 2009", and the overseas client pays in February (a fantasy, but it happens), you cannot touch the money until June 15.

The logistics lady just said since it’s a replacement box we don’t have to reconcile to invoices. But customs can only let it out AFTER the existing broken one is back in the country. Even if the broken one is broken beyond repair, unsalvageable, a total write off.

Shit for brains. MCH.

Oh, and my post title is a lie.

I stumbled out of the study heading for the washroom, my eyes fuzzy from a night of sleep. I see my aunt and cousin in the living room, so I greet them with an artificially crisp ‘good morning’ before turning into the loo.

Freshened up by the quick wash and my dragon breath banished, I join them in the living room. The night before, my aunt had just arrived back from the United States after some MBA-related classes.

She asked me how I found my work in Shanghai to be like.
“It’s ok, I suppose,” I reply vaguely.

She tells me that as I am starting out my career in China, I have to be particularly cautious as most standards of best-practice are not adhered-to. It’s important for me to develop a methodical, thorough approach and avoid picking up the bad habits.


She’s right. I have noticed a general approach that the Chinese workers seem to take: as long as it works, it’s ok. Never mind that the standards are not adhered to, as long as the equipment works (on the most basic level).


***

On my return from Hong Kong, I was faced with a shit-storm of sorts. It turns out that one of the projects I’m working on is a mess. The electrical engineer did not adhere to much of the basics of the electrical code, including using wrongly colour coded cables, lack of separation between cables of different voltage categories, insufficient documentation…

And he did try to wriggle out of the mess by saying we should try to talk to the end user to see if they will turn a blind eye to these violations. As long as the equipment works.

Gah.


***

After talking for a bit, I slipped away to get ready while my aunt fed her daughter breakfast. I, on the other hand, was going with Jean for some much-needed dim sum.

On the recommendation of my granduncle, we visited Dou Hiong. It was supposed to be a good balance between reasonable price¹ and excellent food², and we were not disappointed.




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Top: prawn dumplings
bottom: steamed lotus seed paste buns; chee cheong fun with char siew




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Top: ham sui kok
bottom: siew mai; char siew pau

Total damage: 156 HKD for the above and servings of prawn dumplings and siew mai.

Footnotes:
1. By Hong Kong standards. Doesn't help that cost of living in HK is a bit on the high side
2. Again, by Hong Kong standards. This is a good thing, as HK food standards are already high

A walk in the dark

An Orgy of Escalators
Shanghai Times Square

Meyer-Optik Görlitz Lydith 30mm f/3.5

A colour image is impossible: lighting in the escalator atriums consist of a nasty mix of tungsten and fluorescent light. If I white balance for one, I get swathes of maroon/green for areas illuminated by the other.



Shanghai has a few elevated highways, all of which are massive infrastructure developments and enable motor vehicles to drive in the sky.



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This is the pedestrian bridge from which the previous photo was taken. Due to the pedestrian bridge's longish span, it is prone to a bit of oscillation when heavy vehicles thunder overhead. Feels like a cruise ship.

Unicorns rock!

Bollocks, now I can't sleep. And to think I was hoping to sleep at 8.30 pm. So far I've only managed a 90 minute nap. Very good!

Nothing soothes the frayed psyche like Vanilla Ninja and a good set of headphones. Of course, a frothy café latte would be a good addition but that’s just wandering into the realm of fantasy. Not in China.


Figure 1. "I'm sorry, we don't have café latte. How about a unicorn instead?"

Vanilla Ninja are very popular in their native Estonia and have had a brand of both ice cream and kohuke named after them, marketed exclusively in their homeland due to their celebrity status in Estonia.

-Wikipedia

Nothing cements your celebrity status like having your own brand of ice cream. Lingerie and perfume doesn’t even come close.


I’m exaggerating- coffees do exist in China, although not widely available and at rather high prices (relative to the per capita GDP). The market for coffee is still very immature- cappuccino might turn out to be aerosol whipped cream on black coffee. Best to look at the pictures in the menu before taking the plunge. Even chains like Starbucks and Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf are not exempt from inconsistent quality.

Oh, and there are no documented sightings of unicorns in China.

Century Park, Shanghai: an attempt

I thought the Century Park would be a good place to start my search for peach blossoms.



The crowd at the ticketing counter (large parks in large cities have admission fees) was a massive turn off. If I want crowds I can simply go into Tesco and bump carts with the obnoxious self-centred shoppers there who park their carts in the middle of isles.



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So, bollocks to the park, I took a walk around the perimeter.




An Identity Crisis

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Fairy Tale Optics

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Jupiter 9 at full aperture, 85mm f/2 results in a soft, hazy image

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And I saw this boy trying to fly a kite.



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