My Mother is in Town for the Games

My parents arrived in town yesterday for the games. As soon as she put down her luggage, my mother started dusting, cleaning, laundering and having my dad hang a string in the kitchen to line dry the laundry. And she complained about her knee, about my niece being too loud, and about me not making enough money.

The same old mother despite my many tete-a-tete regarding the importance of leaving time for exercise, recreation and peace of mind, especially at her age.

It's a bit of a relief to step out and go about my usual work. Taking a cab about town, I saw cops everywhere, tourists having replaced the residents everywhere, and all the unfinished construction sites prettied up everywhere. Seven years in the making and it's happening in less than 24 hours? It felt surreal. For beneath all the heavy makeup, Beijing still looks the same--the haze hanging over the city ("Let's see how the government can manufacture a clear day tomorrow for the opening," chuckled the taxi driver), the strong desire to put on a face-enhancing extravaganza at all costs (A friend said it felt like the family is receiving important guests and all the poor relatives have to go into hiding, just like old days), and the visiting foreign reporters fishing for the same old China stories (Can we interview you to understand more of the underground church? asked a foreign reporter).

I dragged my parents out for a walk after dinner, much to my mother's displeasure (she still has tons of cleaning to do, even though our ayi just came for his weekly cleaning today). I took them to The Place Mall which is rumored to have the second largest LCD screen in the world. The huge screen was filled with Coca Cola logos due to an event there sponsored by the company. I kept on describing how wonderful the images on that screen were in other non-Olympic days.

I wanted to impress my mother, tacky tourist trap or not, to get her mind off cleaning. She had not wanted to come in the first place. I had pleaded with her. It's probably the last and only Olympics she would experience in person. I want her to be happy, however briefly, even though she appears bent on denying that to herself.

So I'm praying for a safe and good Olympics, for my mother and other Chinese who are like my mother. Just to be able to have fun for a brief period of time. It might be a silly party and people have all the reasons to scorn at this show-and-dance on top of the environmental and human rights problems. But I've learned (or forced) to be more patient, for Beijing has changed faster, much faster, than my mother.

And for my mother, I hope she can enjoy the silly party, even just a little bit.

Muddy water and live fish

When I worked as a product manager in Silicon Valley, the business rationale ran something like this--let's find an unmet need, figure out an innovative way to satisfy that need, and voila, we'll make a lot of money in the process.

Now more than 4 years back in China, I'm still struggling with the Chinese business rationale--let's find something to sell, pile on tons of superlatives and expert opinions to shove it into the mouths of prospective customers, and hope that they swallow it so we can make a lot of money in the process.

Of course it's not quite clear cut as that: I remember all of my friends, the "insiders", laughed at the expensive Siebel CRM systems and how they tend to way underdeliver their promises; then again in the US we can, and the press can, laugh at the overzealous sales people and watch Siebel go downhill.

In contrast, here in China, in the industry of Internet advertising that I'm in, there's a consensual hush over the big industry secret--that several well-known websites routinely resort to clandestine software to fake clicks on their clients' advertising to enhance the clickthrough rate.

So that justify us to cheat in a similar fashion to enhance customer "satisfaction"?

No, we will never do that. That's against the core values of the company. But we can use fancy terminologies to enthrall the market. To promise some hi-techy panacea that'll transform China's internet landscape. We'll use "top-notch" technology to deliver superb clickthrough rates, whereas in reality we simply leverage the cheap manpower and the shuffling around of some resources. So suggested the boss.

Then we shall add all the data points together and make the customer report look good?

Oh, that wouldn't be ethical, would it?

But we already fooled our customers into believing our "technologies." Why not add the numbers together? Those numbers are real, just not generated in the way we promised the customers.

That wouldn't be right, would it?

The boss pondered on.

I am always at a loss at the ambiguous line of business ethics in discussions like this -- so we can't cheat, but we can't be entirely honest either; we can't be as low as those despicable media that everyone secretly despises in the industry, but we can't be entirely clean ourselves.

Everyone cites the tired saying--water doesn't harbor live fish if too clean (i.e., something muddy has to exist to protect the fish from fisherman).

Yet unlike many old China hands who disdain the backward Chinese business ethics, I thoroughly enjoy this ambiguity. It's challenging. It prompts me to think often where I shall draw the line: other than the cold seemingly self-evident values taught in business school ethics classes, I have to be responsible for my employees (how do we compete in a tricking market place?) and my customers (how do we provide some real value even if not in the ways promised?).

It's both challenging and enjoyable for it's alive. The discussion is alive. My boss, my staff and I are alive--how do we define the ethical line in our business? Despite what the professors have said in classrooms, we, like kids, have to search for the line all over again by ourselves in practice.

Tonight after dinner, a sales person sought me out. She bought me coffee and vented her unhappiness. Her team leader was selfish and untrustworthy. She felt stifled and unappreciated. She felt sad about her team, for a team is not a team if not a winning close-knit team that helps each other to excel. She cried. She wanted a chance to lead her own team, to do things right.

I enjoy the ambiguity and the earnestness in China. For despite the muddiness of the fish water, people, deep down, want to do things right.

I trust that the water would clear up gradually, and more fish would survive eventually.

The Residents are Angry

For days, residents chatted excitedly among themselves in the apartment complex where I'm staying, while cops watched wearily from their patrol cars just outside the gate. The compound is perhaps the most expensive in the neighborhood, beautifully landscaped with lush plants and flowers and with a tiny muddy river running through it.

The agitation came from the river--the government wants to clean up the river and turn the banks into public recreation areas with boat docks and bike tracks. Not a bad idea considering how polluted the river is right now. But the residents are angry--as property owners, they had not been consulted before being told that walls would be built along the banks and their apartment compound's land would shrink.

That would decrease the value of our property! One resident seethed.

Owners' association organized late-night planning meetings and public rallies. Huge banners unfurled from the top of the tallest building proclaiming the residents' "strongest resistance." On Saturday afternoon during a rally a resident was arrested after an altercation with a plainclothes cop. More confrontation. Riot police was called in. The intersection was jammed.

A resident said that he had taken photos of the plainclothes cop and he would post it on the Internet. Another chimed this is our property, they can't do whatever they want here; doesn't the government want a harmonious society; we are all for harmony here! (A beer-bellied cop chuckled awkwardly nearby.)

A day later I came down the building and saw two cops helplessly surrounded by angry residents again. Many were yelling "get off our property," "you don't have any right to be here." Even a kid learned fast--"Get out, cop!" he screamed at the top of his voice.

It's exciting that finally one hears some angry voices up close. Only confrontation begets negotiation which begets some semblance of true harmony.

Let one hundred voices bloom.

Christian Asylum

At one of my previous companies in Beijing, we sent one of the young colleagues to the US for training on a business visa. It took us quite some effort to get the visa for her. After she came back from that training, she worked for us for a few more months and then quit and used the same visa--not expired yet by then-- to go back to America.

She taught Chinese at some community center on the West Coast. Sometimes she sought my advice on MSN on how to find her ways in the US. School or no school? Which major? Before she left for the US, she had cried in front of me, feeling sorry for having to leave the company and uncertain what she could do in a foreign country. She swore that she had never planned to take advantage of our good intention (and visa sponsorship) in the first place, and it was accidental that she found a program in Beijing certifying Chinese tutors for foreigners. Despite my nagging suspicion of having been used, I remembered how difficult it was for me when I first moved to the US, so I replied to her queries. Plus, who am I to judge if she deserves to be able to go to the US so easily (while others, like my friends and I, had to study so hard to score high on the damn TOEFL and GREs to get our student visas)?

Tonight she pinged me again on MSN. She wondered if she should apply for a green card at her lawyer's urging.

Which category?

Political asylum for being a Chinese Christine.

I didn't ask if she is a Christine. That's moot. Every immigrant has a green card story, just as every New Yorker has an apartment story (at least for the not-so-wealthy ones). Immediately after 1989, all Chinese students living in the US automatically qualified for green card because they were considered to be at risk for government persecution if sent back in China. Many later Chinese immigrants applied for green cards under political asylum for allegedly having suffered from the Chinese government's one-child policy. Two of the illegal Fujianese immigrants at the restaurant where I waited table got their green cards that way. They were no more than 22 years old then.

What does the lawyer say is the success rate? I asked her.

96%. She quickly added that she had only asked the lawyer to help change her status into a student visa. It was the lawyer who had given her the idea of the green card, and she wondered if I think she should go after it.

How much?

$4000.

I remembered my own struggle to get my green card. In my days of desperation I could have claimed any political asylum if not for the fact that I lacked the guts to make up police brutality stories. Now it's so easy for her--persecution of Chinese Christians is well reported in the Western media; likely she only needed to claim the Christian faith and the immigration would accept a reasonable likelihood of persecution if she has to return to China.

So incredibly easy, for she only needs to claim a faith she might not believe in. She had told me before that going to America this way was her only chance of escaping a commoner's boring life in China, making little money and seeing no bright future. Even God might forgive her for that.

"It seems to be worth it," I typed my comment. $4000 and 96% success rate.

Then I thought of those real Christians suffering for real in China. I thought of those really needing freedom instead of just a life better economically. Before I succumbed to my urge to pass some judgment, however, I thought of what America represented for me, once, and all those who fled there to escape a past and seek a future, however trivial to the nonchalant observers.

So I added--"But it's up to you." And your god.

"I know," she typed back.