My personality splits in languages

I had a major fight with my boss the other day and I found myself involuntarily switching into English although she's a Chinese as much as I am. (But she's also a foreign company trained senior employee, or manager, more than I am).

In the MNCs circle of Shanghai, people do speak a lot of English even when there's no foreigner present. Mostly because there're many professional terms that are better expressed in English and mutually understood in office or even out of office communication. E.g. in marketing we talk a lot about "positioning", "consumer insight", "consumer communication" - all these terms sounds quite lame when translated into Chinese, while other terms such as "value proposition" just defy any attempt for translation.

To me, the most ingenious expression of a concept come from its original language, and translations into other languages often seem inadequate, esp. if these languages are not linguistically related.

Hence, all the business language - esp. MNCs terms are better expressed in English.

And not only business contents, culture contents too. Many of us would rather watch "Sex and City", or "Boston Legal" with English subtitles instead of Chinese.

And it's not just that. A few years ago, I found myself doing inner dialog more and more in English and I started to realize that this is perhaps a psychological topic, this is about identity, coz language is such an essential, almost fundamental element of identity. When you choose an identity, you need to identify a language. Like Rap is the language of what, I don't know, youth rebellion?

I grew up in an out-flung province in the southwest of China and I grew up speaking the local dialect. My home country is most known in the past for its tobacco industry, its minority people and wild landscapes (it is known today for tourism), even though the city I grew up is a city like any other city, when I went to university in a central province, I often got asked "do you have elephants and peacock walking on the streets?" I was invariably furious whenever I was asked so. (It didn't hit me until many years later that perhaps the boys were just trying to strike up a conversation, trying to be fun, or even trying to flirt!). So when I went to university, I switched myself into Mandarin. And even when I went back to my hometown nowadays, I prefer to stick to Mandarin instead of re-adapting my old dialect because speaking my old dialect makes me feeling retracing the years of growing up and went back into my old self - the shy, clumsy child and teenager I once was. So I shed my local dialect like an old cocoon and I'm now my Mandarin speaking self, university-educated, self-awared, confident big girl - until I became Fortune 500-tint, English speaking marketing professional, highly educated, well paid, well exposed and almost worldly.

My colleagues have observed that I actually do presentation better in English than in Chinese, technically it's because when I speak Chinese, I speak too fast that sometimes I could stumble over myself. While in English, I have better control of pace. Also, while I'm perpetually mild and pleasant in Chinese, I'm more passionate talking about creative ideas in English, more decisive phrasing out my strategy. In the social context, I'm still shy in Chinese, but could be a lot more open in English. In sum, English is the building material I use to create my desired self. And when it comes to negative content, like fighting, like cursing, English could provide a buffer too. At one point during our fight, my boss said "we were always like this (push our agencies to the edge) when we were at XX company", and I found myself blunting out "in XX company, you had tons of money, you can fuck your Agency bad". See, I can not say "fuck" in Chinese, but I don't seem to have a problem saying it in English.

So, I'm good with my English, I feel quite at home with it now. And now I'm learning German, I wonder would it bring me another identity? Perhaps more split of personality than I already am?

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New KPI for Shanghai Gov.?

I'm not a person who read the local newspapers. I trust the city retains its hyper pace and tremendous volume of reality when I wake up every morning. It sure will catch up the gear to continue from where it's left at the end of yesterday - surer than my own wake-up.

But this headline caught my eyes "Playdown GDP, Set New Measures for Economic Development" on today's paper.

With the little economic knowledge I have, I always have a mistrust on the city or the country's GDP figures, and since most of technology and industrial development is out sight of my everyday life which confines within a small zone in downtown Shanghai where the only economic activity to be seen is shopping, since all I see on the spending of infrastructure is the continuous digging up of the old streets, brushing up on the same old walls of the same old buildings in this zone, I naturally grow a bias believing much of our GDP comes from such 0-value activity.

Hence I take the down-play of the GDP as good news.

What's more amusing is that while the beginning of the year is usually a time for us who work in corporates to "set objectives" and put down the measurements, it never occurred to me that the government also need to set their own "objectives" and look at the measurement. Sure, it's a good thing they do.

Now the paper says the gov stresses on the "change of structure" of the economy, the gov will no longer encourage the various districts to compete on GDP growth figure, but set some new measures such as "service industry development", "innovative industry development", "green economy development" - while the details are not clear here, the concepts sounds good, and I guess that's the first step.

A few colleagues were having a chat over lunch as usual, and talked about the issue of corruption, and one of us said brilliantly "a bureaucratic structure must have some corruption as a lubricant, it's fine as long as they're also doing some real work". He also cited that the Ming Dynasty, being famous on the ruthless crack-down on corruption (the emperor got the convict corrupted gov officials skinned - and made scarecrow out of the skins to warn the rest of gov officials), was also the Dynasty of most corruption… well, my history knowledge failed me here…

Well, I guess what I'm saying here is that I think it's a progressive sign that the city gov are setting new KPIs, I guess we coming so far indicated some people are really working and even learning.

Hope to look at their year-end report on these new measures!

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Short China, I don't think so

In this age of media, we average consumers frequently turn into our own opinion leaders in many a topics, including world economy, American politics and with more involvement as well as self-assurance, local economy. So I read from a popular Chinese magazine some recent discussion in the global media, if there is such a thing, about new debates of China economy.

James Chanos said short China, eh, but I don’t think so. Could an economist, or, a hedge-fund manager, in this case, really be able to read, understand and even predict an economy without going into the field? Jim Rogers is known for pro-China economy, but he really fly in here and he really wait in a bank to find out if it’s worth investing. I remember watching the news clip of this incident and was highly amused – the famous investor was just another short, balding, mid-aged man, lining up in a queue, frustrated with the slow-moving line and baffled by the complicated requirements on the part of the customer for a simple request. He couldn’t get his requested service on that day in that bank branch, in fact, in that city – an experience all too familiar for the millions of customers of China’s powerful stated-owned (and now stock market-listed) banks.

Jim Rogers thumps down on the Chinese banks, but not the China economy, at least, not yet. In fact, if you have been to Hong Kong over the Christmas holiday and seen the lines outside LV and Gucci stores; if you have recently tried to book a 5-star hotel room in Sanya for the coming Chinese New Year holiday, you wouldn’t think China economy is going to a flake, anytime soon.

My friend stayed in Shenzhen for two months and took a lot of taxis. He likes to chat with taxi-drivers, asking them where are they from, how’re their folks doing back in the inland towns and villages, what’s their plan for the kids. Then he said China economy is going to be fine for the foreseeable future. All the taxi drivers are hopeful and feeling generally good about their lives, there has been many changes back at home, a lot of development, and they’re all going to send their kids to university.

Back in Shanghai, there has been some highly-publicized over-the-new-year promotion in many competing department stores. It drew hundreds of thousands of shoppers over the New Year ’s Eve and one of the stores scored over one hundred million USD turn-over within 48 hours. While it’s a game requires too much physical and psychological stamina that beyond my own approach, I do find two of my colleagues, not surprisingly, two sales girls (who will never pass any opportunity of a price-off) had bravely participated in that big event and one of them bought one flat-panel TV and one new air-con as well as a bar of gold, the other was the real killer, however, she actually bought eight flat-panel TVs and ten air-cons for the three new homes of her own, her mother’s and her aunt’s!

Bravo my beloved Chinese consumer. With your hard work and high aspiration about life, let the huge ship of China economy keep steaming on, hopefully nobody would be smart or stupid enough, to screw us up.

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Walling up the city, waking up the residents

The drilling started from the edge of unconsciousness and with the first dim thought I knew the construction workers have begun their day. Why do they need the drilling for the mere task of dusting up the building? Later I found out it’s for the installing of new cases for the air-con every house has hanging out of their window – so if we don’t have World Expo, are we going to have all the air-cons flying and falling over the heads of pedestrians?

As nice as it is to know my air-con is not going to fly away, I don’t like to have my building walled up with rusty iron pipes and roofed with bamboo-woven boards and I don’t like to have construction workers dangling out of my window on their thick ropes. And I certainly don’t like to be woken up on a weekend morning at seven.

In name of the World Expo 2010, the city of Shanghai has entered into a frenzy of universal construction, as if it’s not already one huge construction site. Literally every building, as long as it can be seen from the streets, has to be dusted up and painted anew to show our best to the world. The standard coup is to wall up the building with the pre-historic type of scaffolding, namely rusty iron pipes screwed into each other to give the structure and dirty bamboo-woven boards as floors for workers to walk upon. From where they would engage themselves endlessly in the mysterious scrubbing and scraping which is supposed to leave the building cleaner and prettier; sometimes dirty waters would be streaming down from the bamboo roofs so you know they are bathing the walls. The sheer amount of noise, dirt, traffic inconvenience they created in the process so overwhelms the comically hopeful good results that the locals already changed the slogan of Expo 2010 from the official “Better City, Better Life” to the more appropriate “Messier City, Worse Life”.

The sheer scale of such work, with building-cleaning only a little part and the most visible one, makes one wonder how much of our lovely GDP figure arrives in this fashion of waste of economic and social resource and how much of our tax money is laundried into back-pocket through it. Thanks God we’re indeed such a huge economy that we could even afford such a level of inefficiency.

I don’t find my building much prettier now so far, but of course they have not taken away the scaffoldings, when they eventually do, as reluctantly as they might feel, I hope they would take away the garbage too. There is one shining point, I mean, literally – you know the kind of short iron bars everyone has out of their window as an old fashioned way of laundry-drying - you might already forget about it because most people are not using them anymore nowadays anyway – they have painted them silver and they’re actually shining in the good weather!

Now that’s something to be said for the Shanghai government, the most progressive one among their league as some contend, they really respect our rights and the old fashioned-way of laundry drying – because my Guangzhou colleague told me, after hearing my complaint about the mess in Shanghai that, the city of Guangzhou, in a separate frenzy in preparation for the Asia Game 2010, has not only the same amount of mess going on, but they have taken away the residents’ old-fashioned laundry-drying iron-bar when they’re not at home!

And if you ask when are all these craziness going away for this round? I just checked out the “Construction Notice” board out of my building, under the apology for the “inconvenience our restoration work cause you”, it stated civilly that the project is projected to be finished on Apr 31st, a good effort to make for the official grand opening of World Expo on May 1st, 2010.