Supermarket

The Clash song, " Lost in the Supermarket" comes to mind. As does Don DeLillo's White Noise, his description of the overwhelming

• Stuff is huge. I was looking for a pint of milk for cooking. The only thing available were 1/2-gallon containers. Not one quart or pint container in the whole aisle.
• Incredible variety. You can see how delicately brands are delineated from one another. In the dairy aisle: whole, 1%, 2%, fat-free, fat-free organic milk.. that's not to mention almond, soy...
• Plastic. On everything. Packaged to the max, vacuum-wrapped and tightly bound. A FrontLine I saw years ago had a French advertising consultant talking about how, in France, plastic packaging leads to associations with "the morgue, body bags, death, decay." (Maybe more appropriate for bleu cheese than others.) I laughed at that until the vibe I got today.

At the margins

Too many people, when the exercise, stop way before they should 'cause they got something inside their mind that says, "aw, thats too much pain."

Flopping through a modified P90X routine (P80X?) this morning I was struck by this little pearl. Pushing out pushups on the floor of my living room, I neared the end of each set with my arms wobbling like spaghetti on the last couple of reps. On the last couple pushes, form goes out the window and it's just about getting it done. Whether I get it done on that last rep or two, in the moment, feels like it has very little to do with physical strength. At that point, it is all about mental resolve and a battle of you versus yourself. I find that when I am feeling confident about other things in my life, when I am in a positive mindset, that's when those last few reps can happen--when the pain is manageable and when you can get some real work done. After all, workouts are like life in that the real progress gets made on the margins. At meetings, sticking around with folks after things break up to ask and answer questions often reveals new ideas, problems, and perspectives. At networking events, bouncing off someone that has also stayed an extra 15 minutes proves the connection of a lifetime. At parties, mini-parties on the fringes are often the most fun part of the night. Entrepreneurs operating at the fringe of a company or an industry, situating themselves in the vanguard, are situating themselves for success. In a workout, also, it's all about work put in at the margins. Everything else is going through the motions. Margins vs. Motions.

CONTRADICTION: Gaining face by losing it

You'll often hear, on getting to China on business, that drinking culture here is a bit different. As it's put by some: "it's good to puke." Overindulging at a client dinner shows new friends that you are willing to hold nothing back in dealing with them, that you're "letting it all hang out" and are able to let them "have something on you." In other words, by losing face, you gain friendship and can form guanxi.

I have been getting back into basketball these days. The realtor who is trying to sell the apartment I'm living in (for my landlord, not for me) was adamant that I come to the 6:30am game in Taiyanggoing park, down the street, to hang out and 锻炼身体, "work out, exercise your body"--and to help them practice their English, which I'm happy to do. When I first got to China, I played basketball on the college campus where I worked. I certainly got worked out. Inspired by the moves of Russell Westbrook and Kobe Bryant, and generally with no previous formal coaching, recreational Chinese ballplayers have an out-of-control style that led to my having no less than 3 bloody noses and a handful of bruises my first month on the court. This danger was exacerbated by the fact that I myself am totally out of control and am still trying as hard as I was in 7th grade to move gracefully walking down a sidewalk much less driving down the lane. In an effort to reinvigorate my spoken Chinese, get a workout, and have some fun, I decided to give basketball in China another shot and join the daily game down at the park. I've gone twice now, and while I've not shared some baijiu with the fellas (yet), I've built up a respectful, friendly relationship with some of them.

Today, setting up shop down in the post, I was being d'ed up by one of the bigger guys--one with a Fresh Prince-style flattop hairdo that generally is associated with military types, according to the dictionary of Chinese hairdos. The dude is actually way nicer than his hair would let on, and we were playing each other with the right kind of competitiveness, contesting shots cleanly and playing pretty closely. At this particular moment, gassed after about 20 minutes running around a half-court, I pushed off with my back to gain some separation for a turnaround, and nothing was there. I stumbled into the air and did a backwards somersault on the concrete, as I went down hearing the rising "oooooOOHH" of the guys on the court and the dudes playing pingpong next door. Just total amateur hour. After popping up with a smile--unhurt, but with my 面子 mianzi, or "face," flung out the window and screaming as it fell to the ground--I was helped up and high-fived as I jumped back on the court. After the game, chatting amiably, it felt genuinely friendly, like a gap had been bridged. I had "gracefully" embarrassed myself, let it all hang out, but shown myself capable of having a good time. In the West or in China, that's what life is all about, isn't it?

What motivates China in the "Age of Ambition"

I haven't read Evan Osnos' new book yet. In the meantime, I'll take a stab at predicting what he'll call up as some of the motivating forces behind Chinese folks who you don't hear much about in the nightly American news hour. I just had his book zapped to my Kindle today and look forward to seeing how my predictions match up with his observations. After 6 years living in Beijing, my take on what animates the ambitions of Chinese today:

1) One billion customers to serve: I could not initially get my head around the number of different sportswear companies with the exact same logo as Nike operating in Beijing. I then considered the sheer number of people these days looking to buy sportswear, like Mr. Clean and the college kids playing pickup basketball on campuses all around the city. There can exist 4 different stores sitting on the street right next to one another, occupying the same market niche, because if just a fraction of a percent of the hundreds of thousands of passerbys decide to pick up a tanktop or runners at that store, they're set. As James McGregor describes in his book, while the story of the past several decades has been China as a producer, the story of future decades will be that of selling into and inside China--a reality to which the rest of the world is slowly waking up, but of which Chinese are acutely aware and positioned to seize advantage.

2) Adaptability as a way of life: Connected to the phenomenon of having so many potential customers at your doorstep, that businesses seem to pop up (and out) so quickly in Beijing is not surprising. Peter Hessler remarks in one of his books how being handed a business card in China listing 15 different proficiencies is not uncommon. Off the top of my head I can count 3 plumber/electrician/locksmiths within a 10-minute walk of my apartment. On most skybridges arching over the ring roads surrounding Beijing, you can find vendors selling everything from mobile phone stickers to socks. Particularly for the emergent middle class, things change so quickly, one cannot afford to approach making a living by siloing yourself and only doing one thing to get by. Businesses and families in the developed world are concerned that things are changing too quickly to keep up--commercially, psychologically. The level of adaptability displayed particularly by young people in China, is particularly extraordinary.

3) Searching for "something else": Walking to the subway through an affluent Beijing neighborhood a year ago, I heard an electric bike behind me accelerate rapidly and then swung in front of me. The driver was a kind-looking lady with glasses who asked if I would like a teaching job; they needed teachers immediately. I declined, but took her card, which read: "Holy Education." I asked if there was a lot of demand for ESL that mixed in Bible stories with learning about nouns and verbs. She said they couldn't find teachers fast enough. "It must be difficult teaching religious education in China, no?" She said that Bible stories are used as reading material without getting into the intensely religious parts--surprising, given the name of the company. In the past year or two, in conversations with parents and students, I have never heard more mention of Jesus than in any time past. Even those whoa are not expressly Christian had some very pointed questions during this past Easter, which is translated in Mandarin as "resurrection holiday." As affluent Chinese come to see how purely material metrics for success can often prove unfulfilling, and how particularly Christian spirituality can offer some kind of higher purpose, it will be interesting to see if Chinese families continue the search for new ways of living "the good life."

4) Used to the competition: In 2011, Amy Chua's book caused a stir with the suggestion that "Chinese parents" are superior in creating "stereotypically successful kids." I have met enough people here in Beijing to understand that China, like anywhere, seems to have just as many successful or failing people as anywhere else. An interesting learning experience was when I worked at Tsinghua University--one of China's two or three premier universities--and in my spare time helped students prepare applications for graduate schools in the US and UK. These were China's high flyers--students who competed against millions of other applicants to win admission to Tsinghua. When I mentioned the idea of a "safety school" to add to their list of MIT, Cambridge, Berkeley, and Yale, they simply shrugged it off. "I need to get into one of these places," they said. "Otherwise, I'll just stay in China, work and live at home." Why the obsession with only the top tier? "My parents would be disappointed with anything else." Many students had inculcated the desires of their parents and now could not differentiate between those and desires of their own. Regardless, they were--they are--extraordinarily driven and utterly unwilling to settle for anything less than their absolute best--which they are convinced is as good as anyone else's best, not just in China, but in the world.

Mr. Clean

I can't speak for other gyms, but at mine there's a Mr. Clean. And by a Mr. Clean, I mean a few different guys who very closely resemble a Chinese version of Mr. Clean. I know for a fact that there are multiple Mr. Clean's as sometimes they come to the gym at the same time. He's characterized by a couple different features:

• 50-60 years old, from my guess (maybe older)
• high-end gear, usually including knee braces and lifting gloves
• day-time, non-lunchtime lifting, perhaps a retiree
• FUBU- or Sean John-style street jersey
• frequent phone calls while on treadmill or stationary bike
• spends a lot of time working out, but also a lot of time chatting
• very loud conversational tone of voice
• putting up some impressive weight and not afraid to exert himself despite age
• smiling and willing to throw you a spot, especially when you're lifting less than him
• always, always the shaved head

Here's to you, Mr. Clean. It's been tough keeping up with you around the bench press. God knows I will not be attacking the weight room like that when I'm your age!

The Congo and China

Just watched an episode of Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown which touched on a connection that is shared, in my mind, between China and the Congo in the way both places are perceived by the world outside.

An eastern Congo city on the shore of Lake Kivu is the launch point for Bourdain's run to the Congo River, a part of the world brought into memory for many westerners through Joseph Conrad's The Heart of Darkness. The city of Goma, it is described by Bourdain's fixers, could be seen as a stand-in representative of the Congo's larger situation; surrounded by at least 8 different tribal militias battling for influence, everything from levels of danger to the availability of food and water fluctuate wildly from day to day, hour to hour. The culture is amazing, to Bourdain's main interest the food and people are amazing, but the Congo as it exists now can simply not sustain any type of sustained media attention--it's too crazy, it's by turns stable and unstable, the situation is too complicated. As a documentary filmmaker on the show describes, "you can't fit the Congo into 3 sentences on a nightly newscast."

I'm not the first person to note that China is best conceived--can only be conceived--by casual observers, journalists, policymakers, or anyone else by allowing for a tremendous amount of cognitive dissonance, for the existence simultaneously of contradictory information leading to contradictory conclusions. The "contradictions" thread on this blog is dedicated to fleshing out some examples. China is organized and built up in a way that, from the images I saw just now, is lightyears ahead of the Congo. It's problems, however, are well-documented, and its situation--political, economic, social--is just so incredibly complex. It is a place that cannot fit into 3 sentences on a nightly newscast, yet because of its rising importance this is what we try to do many evenings on CNN, NBC, ABC, and FOX News. It is a place that is convenient for western news outlets as it accommodates so many different 3 sentence wrap-ups, each of which can be substantiated in some way--made to mean something by different people, for different watchers, to different ends.

So what to do? Give up on understanding these places? Unlike the Congo, China at least has the benefit of rising clout as a growing global power. There are lots of economic and other incentives for everything from people-to-people exchanges to foreign investments that will continue to build greater understanding over the near term. Congo, to this point, has had no such luck. An interesting comparison: urban Chinese routinely lament the horrors of traveling home by train each Chinese New Year. The trains are packed, there's barely space to move, and tickets are difficult to get. One of the most heartbreaking parts of the Bourdain's program is when they visit an old Congolese railway station that used to be the hub of a route that went all around the country and then all the way down to South Africa. Now, there's no more locomotives, and no train transportation across the city, much less the country. At least in China, there are trains that exist that can be crowded in the first place. Appropriately, Bourdain ends the show describing the hope of the Congolese people in the face of a very uncertain future.

1 big reason Americans can't afford to ignore China

The Rhodium Group just published a report showing that the US-China relationship is at a crossroads: for the first time in modern history, more money from Chinese companies is coming into the US than the other way around. These trends are only accelerating:

It is important to observe that US investment in China isn't stopping; although the rate of foreign direct investment (FDI) growth seems to be stagnating, US investment in China will continue to be an important feature that should be of significant interest to Chinese officials. Of greater importance to this relationship, as the Rhodium report points out, is American policymakers' increased consideration of this sea change--most importantly, I would argue, as it relates to employment of Americans in America by Chinese-owned firms:

Although the number of jobs currently produced by Chinese employers in America is relatively small, the number is increasing exponentially. Major takeaway: going forward, the career paths for hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of Americans based in the US will be defined by their ability to understand and navigate Chinese culture, language, and corporate behavior.