Something About the Consistency

Rows and rows of bikes strewn along the side of Jing Mi Lu down here south of Bei Gao.  Taxis are parked oddly on the road’s shoulder, between trees, a place where cabbies know to rendezvous like pods of whales.  A few workers, dressed in prisonoresque orange are up the ledge beneath the elevated highway, with weed whackers, passively swinging their machines.  Orange, I consider, will protect them, perhaps, from oncoming cars. 

It’s a lovely summer day, I’d say.  I don’t usually care much about currency but the RMB is slipping against the dollar.  We’re up to 6.8 or so.  Back in the early one could trade one hundred dollars for more than eight hundred Renminbi.  Perhaps we’ll find our way back to rates like that again.  I might not sigh so deeply when I leave the grocery.

I was asked by some younger gents over a meal, about what has been the most dramatic change here in China and I answered something about the consistency of Chinese culture is the rather than the change is perhaps the most interesting.  Chinese people and perhaps my interactions with them remain the same.  Chinese people are warm and ironic and practical and other.  People are civil.  People can be frustrating.  In much the same way, they’ve always been.  The culture itself is durable and the mutations of human software are slow. 

It’s great to deal with smart young people who are taking on China.  They keep you fresh and push you to consider everything anew.  And in the same breath it is tiring to have to reckon with yet another new technological disruption.  This one bigger than the other one that was bigger than the other one that preceded it.  It’s all part of a larger transition, but in the world of technology sales, one must frame these things as discrete pieces to.  “Allow me to explain to you why this solution is part of an epic transformation.” 

Repetitive, but it really is a remarkably nice day out there.  It would be a nice day for Central Park or Golden Gate Park.  I consider it but I don’t think that Ritan Park would serve the same purpose.  Elevated highways and high speed rail networks have all sprouted with remarkable rapidity, but like human software the evolution of Chinese urban parkland is a rather more gradual process.

Friday, 8/17/18