An Opera with Chinese Characteristics (Sept 27, 03)

We often hear the word “customization” from working in a foreign-owned company in China. But what customization exactly means? Here is a vivid real case in daily life. Enjoy!

After all these long waiting weeks, we finally went to watch the opera “Aida” tonight. Without knowing what the story about and being late for 30 minutes to the show, we end up bargaining with the “yellow cow” gangs in front of the venue. When we got off the taxi, a group of “yellow cow” gangs surrounded us immediately with a bunch of oversold tickets on their hands. We looked at the tickets and tried to find a more expensive ones (better seat) to start our bargaining. Then we were approached by this guy who has 3 tickets of RMB 580 which are middle- ranged tickets, so we thought that would be nice to start with. Before we offered a price, this guy said to us RMB 100, without giving a second thought and being late for the show already, we thought this is quite an acceptable price, so we said yes to this guy. So the deal was that we will pay only if we can get in the gate with these tickets. And guess what? The tickets are real, so we entered the gate with no problem, but that the guy was blocked by the security because his ticket is not valid. We waited for a while but the guy still cannot get in and the security is urging us to move up. Without a second thought, we decided to take the tickets and move up! So we were saying to ourselves, “wow! We got in for free!!! That’s amazing!” The Workers Stadium was huge. Imagine the kind of Olympic stadium. So we finally found our seats and sat down to watch this opera. Just when we thought we can escape… someone is calling us from behide, ooops, that was the ticket guy. Haha, he is coming after us for the money! Alas, big brother is definitely watching over us. So we pulled out RMB 300 for the tickets and he left happily.
The opera indeed was an amazing carnival featuring over 1,500 performers with live tigers, lions, elephants and camels! Why would I call it a carnival? Because you can see audience at the ground running around taking pictures with these animals, props and actors while the main characters are still singing and acting on the stage! And if you move your sight slightly over, you will see a stage of Hyundai (the sponsor) cars lying in the edge of the stage to remind the audience for the newest car models! The opera was in Italian with Chinese subtitle, but the subtitles seldom follow what they are singing… Even though we enjoy it a lot with all the terrific performance, singing, music and props, we have no clue what’s going on with the story. This has taught us a lesson that we need to prepare next time before going to an opera. Then in the intermission, we heard the announcement that “ Now we will have a ten minutes break. In order to give you more pleasure, we have prepared a Xiaolin Kungfu show, please stay for this break.” Wow, a kungfu show in between of an opera?! What a new experience! While I turned around leaving my sights off the stage, I just noticed audience around me were drinking coke, eating chips, pop corns, etc, for a minute, I thought, wait, am I watching a football match? But who cares? Sometimes you just need to think out of the box. *blink* :)

Illusion (Sept 25, 03)

Last night, I watched “Vanilla Sky” at Momoe’s place till 2am. This was very rare for me as people around me know that I usually feel sleepy at around 11pm and sleep before midnight. And as you can guess, I must find something special about this movie which can keep me awake. I found this movie fascinating not because of the beautiful faces of Penelope and Tom Cruise. This movie recalls me the other 2 Cruise’s movies, namely, Minority Report and Eyes Wide Shut. Cruise’s attractiveness lies on his innocent and adventurous characters.

I don’t know if you have ever had this experience.
When I woke up and went to work this morning, I just can’t help to have the flash of the movie in my mind over and over. I feel like we live in such an illusion. And we can’t tell what’s true and what’s not. Then when I got to work, David sent me this NY Times articles telling how the Chinese version of “Living History” of Hillary Clinton being censored and edited to fit the political situation here. Having had this entire residue from “Vanilla Sky”, I suddenly feel that we all live in an illusion, being in and out of stories that are written by others. Everything is such an impression only! And so I told David, it’s like Monet’s painting… isn’t it romantic? All of a sudden I realized why Zhuangzi would put himself into the paradox of whether he transformed to be a butterfly or the butterfly transformed to be him. In the past, I always feel that he is insane, suffered from schizophrenia or similar kind of sickness. Now I must admit that I am a bit closer to his mind state, at least I start to “sense” and “experience” what he is talking about.

Expect the Unexpected (Sept 17, 03)

As an old saying says, “It takes a few minutes to destroy but years to build.” This is not quite applicable in a city like Beijing. The Beijing way is always an amazing thing to learn about. I stepped out of my apartment this morning and see a huge green park right in front of me. Why is it so special? Because a week ago, it was still a mud road, and couple weeks ago, it was a street of old houses. This is the Beijing way of “construction”. Last week, I couldn’t even walk out of my residential area because the road was too muddy, and as a result, I had to walk all the way around to go through the back gate to exit my residential area. During this period, my best friend Boss Wong who runs a fashion chain in HK was visiting. Going in and out of my place seeing this kind of construction takes place, she still can’t believe how this can be done because if this ever happen in HK, the government will get all kinds of complaints from the shops promptly. And this definitely has an adverse effect to their business. Well….. welcome to Beijing!