Shang High Life, #2

The Shang High Life, #2. July 1, 2001 An Honest Story Not About the Weather Savvy traveler that I am, I know that sitting at the front of the plane can get you out of the destination airport as much as an hour earlier than your less fortunate fellow passengers in the back. So, I was disappointed when I was assigned a seat in row 57 for the ten-hour flight from Sydney to Shanghai. I asked, with my best combination of Aussie and Good-ole-boy charm, if there was anything further forward. Row 11. Bingo. Second row of economy class, about 12 feet from the exit door. Also, by a quirk of logic and math, located behind the first row of economy class. Savvy frickin’ traveler should have also known that the first row of economy class is the bassinette row. Now, I’m not saying that Chinese babies are more intelligent than other babies. Nor am I suggesting that fifty years of socialism has left a genetic imprint that makes newborns cognizant of their collective power from birth. All I’m saying is that the four babies in front of me had it down do an art: the moment the wails of one began to wane, the next cooing comrade would take up the cry. Thus, each individual infant saved three quarters of the energy of screaming non-stop, while the group realized the same net impact on their environment. Anything would have been a relief: needles in my eyes, bamboo slivers under my fingernails, Celine Dion records. Shanghai airport, by comparison, was Shangri-fuckin’-la. My bags were first off, the customs guys actually smiled as they waved me through the green line, and instead of a non-English-speaking driver, I was met by my new boss, Wendy, a 50-ish Aussie, yoo-hooing energetically as I emerged from the melee. It was an incredibly thoughtful thing for her to do, given that it was about 10pm on a Saturday night. Wendy’s driver, Mr. Her—Wendy’s favorite joke: “He’s a Her!”—appeared and took my luggage, and we all sped off toward glittering Shanghai. Once under way, Wendy presented me with my very own Shanghai show bag. Sporting a bright orange Alcatel logo, it had my new mobile phone, a Lonely Planet guide for Shanghai, the names and addresses of several good bars and restaurants written in Chinese (so I would stand a reasonable chance of getting there in a taxi), and even my new business cards, English on one side, Chinese on the other. I was pretty impressed with Wendy’s thoughtfulness, and with the efficiency of it all. I hadn’t even started the job—hell, I hadn’t even been in the country an hour, and I already had my phone and my business cards. The only spoiler was my sneaking suspicion that I, too, would soon be expected to be this efficient. The business cards were a very practical offering. You’ve probably heard that they are incredibly important in most of Asia. Shanghai’s no exception. You can hardly sit down in a restaurant without the waiter giving you his “name card” and asking for yours. My first day in the office, the audio-visual equipment guy gave me his name card. I don’t think I’ve ever gone through a box of business cards in any job, but after three weeks here, I’ve just re-ordered. So, your name card is critical equipment. Asian name cards have a little extra coolness quotient, in that they’re all bilingual. The cards Wendy gave me when I arrived weren’t my first bilingual cards—I’d also had some in Korea years ago—but I still dug them. The difference between Korean cards and Chinese ones, however, is how your name gets translated. In Korea, as in Japan, they just translated my name phonetically as closely as possible, so I became something like Yoo-so-tun Su-pen-saa. In China, it’s different. They rarely translate Western names with phonemes in mind. In all likelihood, your Chinese name won’t come within coo-ee of sounding like what you’re used to being called. Instead, you get a name that has a meaning, with probably only vague sonic reference to your English name. Ideally, the meaning should reflect something about your character or qualities. So, for instance, a new acquaintance of mine at Alcatel, a good-looking French-Canadian bloke named Jean-Francois Pigeon, has a completely unpronounceable appellation that makes him “Beautiful White Horse” or “White Stallion”. How cool is that! In French this guy’s a pigeon and in Chinese he’s a freakin’ stallion. Ordering my business cards in advance of my arrival, my new secretary, Anna, had to be a bit creative. She had to come up with a name for me without knowing any of my qualities. Her solution: give me a name that would kind of sound like my English name, but also describe characteristics useful for my job. So, as of that moment in the car with Wendy, I became Tse Ho Dun. In the Chinese form of putting the surname first, “Tse” is an attempt to reference the initial letter in my last name: “S”. “Ho Dun” is about as close as Anna could get to “Houston”. Of course, I didn’t know this—or what Tse Ho Dun meant—at the time. I looked at the characters and they were…well…they were Chinese characters and, hence, indecipherable to White Boy. The next day, at a Sunday welcome lunch with the whole Alcatel Asia-Pacific communications team —sixteen courses, including “Juicy Fried Pigeon” (heads very much in evidence) ordered by Jean-Francois in a fit of what I assume was intended to be irony—Anna gave me a small slip of paper with the pronunciation and the translation of my name. Because all she had known about me was that I was a professional communicator, she had made me Tse Ho Dun: Honest Ambassador of the Story. Not as sexy as “White Stallion”, I grant you, but pretty damn cool. As we were talking about this, I passed my new name cards to my colleagues in return for theirs. Anna took a close look at the card I gave her and immediately confiscated all the ones I had passed around, not to mention the remaining stack in my pocket. She was mortally embarrassed. In one of the characters, the printer had made an error so tiny it had escaped previous notice. So, instead of being the Honest Ambassador of the Story, I had been transformed, on my first day in China, into a Sincere Weatherman.