There’s a saying in Chinese that goes:
花无百日红 huāwúbǎirìhóng.
It roughly means “no flower can bloom for 100 days”, and our equivalent in English would be “all good things must come to an end”.
I quite like the Chinese saying though because it reminds you that everything is seasonal. Flowers, trees, life, etc. So, it seems, my season in Shanghai has wrapped up. For now…
The last nine months living and working in Shanghai were so fascinating. I got a job working at a translation agency where I saw firsthand how people, businesses, government trade agencies — even sex toy manufacturers — interact across cultural and language differences. The projects and our clients were all so different. We translated and interpreted anything and everything (not me personally, my team that is!). Automotive factory manuals, French patisserie websites, sex toy manuals (you don’t want to be making major errors in those translations). I’ll never forget a production meeting where we were sat around a boardroom table with a sex toy manual projected onto the big screen, with explicit details and diagrams, having a serious meeting about managing the multilingual project. Everyone trying to keep deadpan and focused. It was a bizarre, memorable and educational meeting.
Working at a translation agency was a window into the global flow of trade, ideas, import, export and how so many companies and countries rely on each other. There is a lot of negativity abound about globalization and immigration and there’s a sentiment that people and things should stay put where they’re born and made, and that stuff from other countries should have their prices hiked up. Regardless of where you sit on those spectrums, you can’t disagree that many countries as a whole are pretty reliant on each other.
I’ll always be a passionate advocate that the world needs New Zealand’s apples. Mainly because this was something I missed the most while living away from New Zealand. And milk. And honey. And Vogel’s. Many things actually. While in Shanghai I made friends with some awesome Kiwis who are doing huge things for New Zealand export on the world stage. You probably won’t ever read about them in newspapers in New Zealand or see them on TV but they are the quiet achievers, many of whom were early China expats coming over in the late 80s or early 90s. They’ve seen the huge developments here and created networks the old fashioned way without social media or Wechat (China’s app that is a Facebook/Instagram/Whatsapp mashup).
I was lucky enough to help one company with a campaign for New Zealand apples and helped to come up with this concept:
I felt so proud to see my idea in print! These New Zealanders for the past few decades have been creating channels for New Zealand’s products overseas. Easier said than done when you see how incredibly competitive the market is here. Little old me thinking New Zealand apples and milk sell themselves. Do they KNOW how amazing our land and air and natural resources are that go into the making of our wares? Turns out Australia is blowing that same horn too. And much louder. As well as almost every other country that has something to sell to China. So it has been really interesting to see how New Zealand is represented in China and gain some perspective on how competitive it really is to break into markets and reach this “emerging middle class” of Chinese that apparently have more money than they know what to do with.
Ah yes. China’s “wealthy middle class”. I heard a lot about this while working at the translation agency working with the China marketing teams of foreign brands and companies. I think that the obsession and wide reporting on China’s wealthy has made it easy to forget that the vast majority of China is actually still incredibly poor. That is a whole other story though. (Side note: I could go on about the inequality and wealth disparity issues in China for a very long time. Just ask my dad, who has been the long-suffering lone audience member of my rants. “Why is China like this Dad? Why are they obsessed with developing self-driving cars when there are millions going without drinking water, Dad? For a communist country, why is there such dire poverty and eye-watering wealth, Dad? Why??” “I don’t have the answers, dear”.)
My job at the translation agency also led me to mix and mingle with the startup scene in Shanghai. I’ve mentioned before how there is a lot going on, particularly in the tech start up scene. Fintech, blockchain developers, bitcoin brokers, people working on renewable energy technologies. It was a whole new world and language. What struck me was how passionate these people are about their ideas. I guess when you’re getting something off the ground you truly have to be totally and utterly convinced about your project — to the point of being dogmatic. A lot of the time, I missed concepts or the meaning of jargon they used. It went straight over my head. I was just really into how animated and excited they were. It is a great energy to be around. A lot of the time you get the feeling they’ve exhausted their immediate group of friends with their tale of Their Next Big Idea and were just grateful to have fresh ears. I was excited to see how some startups were leveraging tech developments for good though. For example blockchain run charity and philanthropic startups which made the “giving” supply chain a lot more transparent. Or crowdfunding platforms that try to empower communities to buy into renewable energy projects. Those were pretty cool.
Finally, one person I’ll miss a lot is my neighbour Carole*. Carole is a local Shanghainese lady who’s been blind since she was three. At 66 she and her husband Peter have both retired. Before that she worked as a physical therapist at Jiao Tong university, which is incidentally the same university I did my Chinese course at. I visited Carole a couple times a week and taught her English while she taught me Mandarin and we often ate together with her husband Peter and her other neighbour (who was gravely concerned at my childless and unmarried state at the age of 31. Every time she saw me she just shook her head).
Carole taught herself English using her computer she operates by voice and a special keyboard and also by Braille. It’s incredible to see her punching the Braille card. Her hands move at the speed of light! She finds things to practice and read aloud to me. One memorable article she read aloud was this one which I read to myself whenever I can feel I’m losing perspective or worrying or dithering about stuff that doesn’t really matter:
So it’s goodbye/zai jian 再见 for now to Shanghai as I start my new job in Singapore. The funny thing is that I’m basically charting my ancestry lineage. From China to Singapore, which is right near Malaysia where my parents are from. Fortunately, Mandarin is one of the official languages here in Singapore so I’ll be able to find some poor victims to assault with my Mandarin in no time. ✌️
*Carole decided to change her name to Karen a few months ago. Just coz. I’ve encountered this a few times with my Chinese friends. They change their English names like changing their hair colour! It can be confusing.
