Time = Money

I received the results of my health examination on Monday. I’m happy to say I got a clean bill of health. It was hand delivered to my office in the morning. The office assistant took it, my passport and some forms to the Visa/residence permit processing facility this afternoon just to wait in line for me. Since I still had to go in person to get my picture taken, she called me a little before her number was called, and I took a taxi out to meet her there. I handed over all my papers (how come we never call them “papers” in the US?) for processing. I should receive it back in a week. I feel like the availability of cheap labor in China has pushed services in opposite directions:

1. Services that think your time is worthless.
I put places like the bank in this category. You go in, take a number, wait anywhere between 30-75 minutes until your number is called. Then you can finally perform whatever simple transaction you required (like withdrawing or depositing money.) The problem here is that banks don’t segregate the time-consuming tasks from the short ones. In a US bank, if you want to open an account, or something equally involved, you don’t stand in line. You see a clerk at a desk. In China, there is one line. Unless you are a VIP (don’t know how you qualify), you wait along with everyone else for the 2 tellers that are helping everyone. If two people want to open an account, they hold up the entire line for 15-20 minutes.

Retail stores are similar. There’s no such thing as a simple transaction. Everything requires a hard sell, bargaining on price, confirmation that the product is in good condition, payment, collection of products, and finally confirmation that the products you just received are the ones that you examined earlier.

2. Services that think your time is valuable.
The assistant waited in line for me because there is a clear understanding that my time is worth "more" than hers. Delivery services here (such as the ones that delivered my furniture) work weekends and long morning and evening hours. Ayis (maids) clean your apartment because your time is worth "more" than the $2/hour they make. Is it exploitation? I think it’s efficient allocation of resources.

Chinese tourists

While at work, I came across some interesting facts about Chinese tourists.

1) Chinese outbound (international) travel is growing at 15% a year. There are now more tourists leaving from China than Japan.

2) Chinese trade-down on accommodations and transportation, but trade up in shopping. Trading-up and down are terms used to describe the behavior of buying really cheap things to be able to afford certain luxuries, for example, buying Target-brand socks to wear with $200 Nike sneakers. For example, the average American visitor to Hong Kong spends $700 on hotel stay, $200 on meals, and $300 on shopping. The typical Chinese visitor to Hong Kong spends $1,000 on shopping for luxury goods (Prada, Gucci, etc.), $120 on hotel stay and $140 on meals.

3) Most travel in with tour groups. This is because Chinese travelers typically can’t speak English, have never traveled before and don’t know what to expect, and want to be able to eat Chinese food.

4) The cost of round trip airfare from Shanghai to Beijing (~1300 RMB) is equivalent to one months’ salary for the average worker in either city.

I heart Carrefour #2

I need slippers. Across Asia, it's culturally proper to take off your shoes and put on slippers before entering someone's home. In China, it's even more important because for some reason, the street is particularly dirty. It's still a developing country in many ways, so I expected parts to be dirty. But, despite the many people sweeping streets and mopping hallway floors, there is a permanent layer of grime on every horizontal surface. Thus, I try to take off my shoes even as I enter my own apartment. However, since it's still the middle of winter, I also needed to get a pair of warm slippers. It's easy to find a cheap pair of slippers from any stall on the street. But they are typically made for tourists and not very warm. My feet are worth spending some cash, so I went to the department store in my local mall (conveniently right above Carrefour).

Let me describe it so you can get a better picture of it. It's seven stories high and yet never has any more than 5 customers on each floor (which says something about me, since I went in there to buy something). It averages a staff to customer ratio of 3:1 on any given floor. Strangely, each department in the department store is actually operated almost entirely independently of the others. Imagine the Polo section in your local Macy's not being run by the same company as the Tommy Hilfiger section, and you'll get the idea. I asked one clerk who was selling wool socks where I could find slippers. She simply said, "I don't sell slippers." I said, "I know that, where can I get some?" Her response was, "I don't know, I don't sell them. Maybe somebody else here does." I finally found slippers, and even though the biggest size was still one size smaller than my feet (I only wear a size 10 ½ in the US, but apparently, those are giant feet over here), I still bought them. I was desperate, having not seen any insulated slippers so far, and they were also half the price of ones I had seen in a US department store.

In addition to being arranged independently, the department store's departments also aren’t allowed to take payments. Instead, they write up a receipt, and you have to walk to the nearest cashier (sometimes located outside the actual department store) settle the bill there, get a receipt for your payment, bring it back to the clerk who sold you your goods, and then pick up your stuff. In any case, long story short, I paid 90 RMB for comfortable slippers.

Since the department store is right above Carrefour, I figured I’d pop down to get some food and other odds and ends. I couldn’t help but look for slippers there as well. I am kicking myself now because of course I found much cheaper slippers there; one pair actually fits my extra-large feet. They were so cheap, I bought two pairs. One for me, and one for any guests that might come over. They were 20 RMB and 13 RMB respectively. Moral of the story: Go to Carrefour first. Go to other places only if Carrefour doesn’t have what you need, because it’s likely to be more expensive and a lot more difficult to purchase anyplace else.

Where I live

Here's an aerial view of my apartment building. Well, not from very high up, and not of my actual building. It's part of a model of the entire city of Shanghai at the City Planning musuem. But you get the picture. There are seven towers (not connected - read my earlier post about rooftop crossings) that are each 25-30 stories high. I wrote earlier that I live on the 33rd floor, but I actually live on the floor numbered 33. In reality, it's only the 29th story of the building. Thanks to superstition (Chinese and Western), there are no floors numbered 4, 13, 14, 24, or 34. The number 4 sounds like death in Chinese, so those numbers are all taboo. (More to come on Chinese number preferences.)

Internet connectivity in China

The internet connection between here and the US is ridiculously slow. I’m told it’s all due to the an earthquake off the coast of Taiwan that severed most of the fiber optic links between Asia and the United States a month ago. I sure hope that’s true, because if it remains as slow after the links are fixed, my happiness and productivity will be severely diminished. I find myself unable to download files over 4 MB since the connection gets reset every so often, which makes it impossible for me to get updates for TurboTax (does this qualify me for an automatic refund extension?) or see company annual reports. It also means that I am having a really difficult time watching any TV that I am trying to stream over from the US via Slingbox. I’m getting awfully tired of watching the only English channel on Chinese broadcast television, CCTV9. CCTV9 only seems to have 4 hours of new content each day. During the other 20 hours a day, it just replays the same “expert interviews” and documentaries about rural farm workers.

However, I do have enough bandwidth to use my VOIP phone. So now, Katie can call me on a local phone number from the US, and I can call her without incurring ridiculous international long distance phone charges. The only thing I have to worry about now are wrong numbers that wake me up at 2 in the morning, since it’s 1 in the afternoon in Washington DC, where my phone number is from.

Residence permit health exam

This morning I had to get a medical examination as part of my residence permit application. This helps prove you are not carrying any contagious diseases as well as show the government that you are not moving to China to freeload off their socialized health care system. I had readied myself for the worst, but it was actually a pleasant experience. After taking a cab to the Hong Qiao area (suburb popular with expats), I paid 702 RMB ($90) and handed over 3 passport-sized pictures, a copy of my passport and a copy of my firm’s business license. They gave me a brief medical questionnaire to fill out while waiting for my number to be called. The form was in English and all the employees seemed to be able to speak English. However, almost every Caucasian in the place was accompanied by an interpreter. When my number was called, they took my form, stapled a bunch of barcode stickers to it and took a digital photo. Then I was led to the assembly line of tests that many other people were already going through.

Step 1) Take off my shirt and put on a robe top.

Step 2) Have my height and weight measured using an ultrasonic scanner (bounces off my head to measure my height).

Step 3) Have two tubes of blood drawn. No immediate results.

Step 4) Quick eye exam while still wearing my glasses. I guess it’s a good thing I am not colorblind and that my prescription is correct.

Step 5) Chest X-ray. Again, no immediate results, but the x-ray sensor was labeled “X-ray autoloader” and seemed like it was capable of taking x-rays faster than my printer can print pages.

Step 6) EKG test. Print out was stapled to my form.

Step 7) Ultrasound. Never had this done before. The technician seemed surprised when she said “You’re normal!” I don’t even know what she was looking for, but I was relieved.

Step 8) Basic exam. Blood pressure check and cursory listening via stethoscope. The doctor asked, “Do you have any health problems?” I said “No”, but was really thinking, “isn’t that what you’re supposed to tell me?”

Step 9) Get dressed and tell them if you want to come back to pick up your completed results in a week or have it hand delivered for 30 RMB. Since 30 RMB is less than $4, and the round-trip cab fare alone is 50 RMB, I took the delivered option.

All in all, it took about 45 minutes and didn’t require anything really invasive. If all Chinese medical experiences were like that, I wouldn’t be afraid to go to the doctor.

Day 1 in the office

Today was my first day in the office. Not wanting to be late, I showed up a little before 8:30. No one was in the office. There was no receptionist; the doors were locked. I went back downstairs to hide out in a convenience store for a little while. When I went up again a little before 9, the doors had been opened. I suppose the Shanghai working hours are a little closer to New York City. The receptionist kindly let me know that no one that could help me was there yet, so I could sit in a conference room until they arrived. I plopped myself down and connected to the wireless internet, until a coworker I knew from the US stopped in and offered to walk me around to my office. He gave me the brief rundown of everything. Nothing is very different from the US, other than the fact that we have a cleaner on staff to dump out our pint-size trash cans and restock the kitchen with tea. Also, paper seems to be expensive. Notebooks are no larger than 5”x 7” and there are no pads of the graph paper that I’m used to in the US.