The Wild Wild East

All good suggestions by three of the four people who read my blog. Your contributions will not be forgotten. However I feel I finally have something to write about - not having anything to write about!

I sat down for an interview today for a story I'm working on. I met with a guy who works for a hedge fund here. I expected a 10-15 minute chat, it ended up being an hour long discussion of how China may be the most exciting place on earth.

So far, I've struggled to have anything to really write about. I've attempted to avoid things such as "oh man, the taxi drivers here are carazay!!!1!!11!" and "boy, the Olympics have really opened this place up." It has been difficult to come up with good observations that aren't completely idiotic (for references of idiotic observations please see my last post) and I've been trying to figure out why. Perhaps I know why.

The interview/chat I had today left me pretty much dizzy. This guy, Sage, has been in and out of China since 1987. I literally asked about 6 questions and that yielded about 45 solid minutes of diatribe on topics ranging from the internet (what I'm writing about) to the economy, expats, and most everything else. At the end of this meeting I reached one conclusion.

This place is, essentially, Mars. Up can be down, black can be white, dogs and cats can live together, etc. I suppose for my time here so far I've attempted to relate most of the things here to stuff I'm familiar with, usually things stateside. That's a big mistake. You can do it, of course, but you're really shortchanging everything that's important. The differences are far more impressive that the similarities, the similarities are almost inconsequential when compared to the differences.

If you were to get deeply philosophical on this, you could argue that nobody would be able to give a truly effective viewpoint on China. The base assumptions I make about anything and everything automatically cloud any observations I could make, rendering them half-truths at best.

I had read a reasonable amount about China before coming here. I would not say any of it was wrong or misleading. Instead, it's like giving somebody a look at a Monet painting from 10 feet away - "cool, it's a semi blurry picture of people standing near a lake" - without allowing them to check it out up close. Sure the big picture is somewhat clear, makes a reasonable amount of sense, but without seeing it up close you can't quite understand what makes it impressive.

The guy I sat down with kept using a great word to describe China - chaos. Things often time don't seem to make sense. Not that there isn't logic behind individual happenings, but you can rarely extrapolate that logic to other areas. Like the points in a Monet painting, everything seems to be happening independently but somehow coming together to make some sort of picture.

Obviously, I don't have a very good grip on what I think, let alone how to describe it to other people. I guess that's part of the difficulty of writing about things here. The general narrative is elusive and may not even exist. Hence, be prepared for a strange, mind-numbingly confusing posts in the future. If anything, it should be fun to watch me try to figure this stuff out.