Huolong

Views from our balcony windows include…

…a dozen of persimmon trees bearing fruits. We’ve seen the fruits turn from green to yellow to orange since we moved here.

The balcony faces a high school campus with the persimmon trees…

… that’s is beyond a wall.

And across the campus and a street, I can see people getting on and off  buses every day, when I don’t have to commute to my office.

My old neighborhood

My new neighborhood

It’s been over a month since I moved to this new two-bedroom apartment in Daxing on July 19, one day before the Olympic traffic restriction sets in.  I’d worried about whether removers could drive their van to my neighborhood if the restriction bit. It’s just two blocks away from the Bird’s Nest, which faces the Water Cube across a street. Too close to the Olympic center to be overlooked in the traffic control. So my wife and I planned a removal date to beat the restriction.

The apartment is located near an expressway and very close to downtown Daxing. It’s within walking distance to my wife’s hospital and two hours away from my office in Chaoyang.  The good news is that I don’t have to commute to and fro every day to work - I can work from home and only commute to my office when necessary.

The apartment has only one balcony, which faces south and where I can hang out quilts and pillows in the sun. This was impossible for the past four years at the Yayuncun apartment we shared with three or four other people (The tenants in the room next to mine came and went while I lived there for four solid years). The shared balcony faces north and is too crowded, neglected and therefore too dusty and dirty to accommodate large quilts.

My mother-in-law and her mother is coming to visit us tomorrow. It’s been two years and a half since they last saw my wife  at our wedding in January 2006.

Even idiots could see Tiger Zhou (周老虎)’s photos didn’t look right. But experts and witnesses bet their heads that the photos showed a  real South China tiger.

The fuss started on October 12, 2007  when Shaanxi’s forestry bureau published digital and film photos of what it believed was a South China tiger taken by hunter Zhou Zhenglong ("Tiger Zhou"). The cyberworld, South China tiger experts and China Academy of Sciences (CAS) experts were quick to identify something wrong with the photos.

Zhou now says everything was false. But you can be sure some heads will get rolling because they were bet.

Looking for a job in Beijing

To come here was a tough decision. I doubted my decision of giving up my long accustomed life back home. I was awed by the uncertainties of future in Beijing and the disbeliefs of my competence racked me. Nonetheless, I came here on November 10, 2002.

Life here could be real tough. Without enough money to pay for things I need, I would have to live with a poorer standard of living than at home, for example, sharing with my roommate a cold room in a one-story house without an indoor toilet in the winter.

Beijing is different from Harbin. It’s a national city, if not an international one while Harbin is just a regional city. I could hear Chinese people down the street in Beijing speaking almost every language and dialect known in China. Sometimes, I would sit in a corner on a bus and be amazed, wondering if I was really in China because a Chinese man who pressed his cellphone against his ear talked a total foreign tongue, neither English nor others I could identify, it’s an unknown Chinese dialect no other people than himself on the bus can understand.

Being in a national city means I have more opportunities than in a provincial city. The bad news is that I may have more than I can chew.

It’s the second week I’d been in Beijing that I decided the adjustment to a new invironment was enough–I needed a job desperately. I sent numerous resumes through 51job.com, chinahr.com and zhaopin.com and printed dozens of copies of my application letter and resume and sent them out to my potential employers by post.

I still remember three of those job interviews.

The first one appeared to be a success for the immediate offer of the job. My job would involve translation in the fields of communications and set-top-boxes, something attached to the top of a TV set to receive paid programs.

I balked at the second interview. I crossed from the western to the eastern part of Beijing after changing several buses. When I got there, it turned out to be a PR (Public Relations) company that had something to do with The Oracle. The first interviewer was a formidable young man wearing a dark business suit. He told me that his was a medium-sized PR company hiring dozens of people and the successful candidate would deal with translations of PR materials.

After he left the room, a woman came back to test my spoken English. I told her that I might have come to a wrong place to look for a job because I didn’t think I was good with people, which were an essential part of a PR position, otherwise PR would make no sense. I did not bother to take the following written test designated for each applicant. I came out of the impressive, imposing building, sighing. A company full of sexy women and big men is not my place. I’m happier with a much smaller company with a relaxing working atmosphere or a larger one without the dressing-yourself-up routine. Let me just think. Actually, I am not sure I like a large company because I’ve never been in one and don’t have an idea of it.

The third company, a translation firm, was extremely small and amazingly young. It’s not only that it just got started, but its boss was also a burgeoning one. I am sure we were born almost the same year and we should be friends, not employees and bosses. After a short spoken test and a long written test, he decided to hire me. But I’d decided I would not accept a job offer from a company with a few girls looking like university kids under a young, novice boss. I left the young company, envying the young man’s position of being am employer. I’m also young, what am I?

Things did not happen as expected. Jiang, the man who’d made his immediate offer of the translating position, seemed to be reconsidering his “rash” decision. He made a follow-up phone call right after I left his office in a corner office building, telling me to do a test of translation. Later on, I did another test. I failed all of them. The translation of contracts regarding Set-Top-Boxes was more than I could chew.

There are at least two kinds of open positions in Beijing when I look for a job–one that I’m worthy of and the other that I’m not.