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July 11, 2004
Sex and the City with Friends
July 9th, 2004 | Jinan, Shandong Province, China
I spent the day in Jinan, one of Shandong's major cities and my birthplace. Like the rest of China, it is a city of obvious historical and economic contrasts. Every other time I've come here, I've always been with my parents and followed them around as they met up with their old classmates, the vanguard of the first professional generation to emerge from an open China. This time, I was fortunate enough to meet one of the children of that revolution (who incidentally is nicknamed Mao). She took me to the youthful center of an increasingly vibrant urban ecosystem. The result was that I finally found a place I felt comfortable getting a haircut at.
Another note. I had lunch with her at a Korean restaurant and we were talking about her academic and career plans. She's entering her last year of college, studying industrial design. It's a relatively artistic major - think designing furniture. She wants to work for a few years in Shanghai after college. Eventually, she hopes to go to graduate school in the US, but she's a little pessimistic about getting a visa these days. I realized I had a couple of very similar conversations previously. I would have immediately extended the same offer to her that I gave to Kristel but I didn't, on account of having extended the same offer to Kristel a few days earlier. I refer to the promise about the marriage of convenience where Kristel gets a green card and I get an open bar for my friends at the wedding. Though I'm heavily tempted to renege on that previous offer - she worked at a Japanese restaurant in Shanghai for a semester and is apparently an excellent cook...
The Mao and I
Sorry Kristel, no lunatic 'Indian haircut parlors' for this Chairman.
Posted by rxu at July 11, 2004 01:51 AM