One of our British friends generated an algorithm for determining the time to complete any given task in China:

“Imagine the longest possible time you think it would take to do [the given task] in [your home country] and triple it.”

Here at 凤凰山庄 we get our propane for cooking from a large canister on the balcony. (This is in accordance with the Chinese principle of maximum decentralization.) We purchased this canister when we moved in (mid August) and it’s started to run dry. So we had a Chinese colleague at the school (the supply requesitions guy, whose job it is to [among other things] run odd jobs for 老外 teachers) call our building manager and arrange for fresh propane.

First a side story: Way back in September, the building management plumbed the building for centralized natural gas. (From a city utility? That sounds suspiciously efficient. My guess is our entire building is intended to share a single propane source.) Of course, this plumbing is attached to the exterior of the building; installation of said plumbing required the construction of comically rickety bamboo scaffolding and took about two weeks to complete. And of course this plumbing was never attached to the actual stove in our actual apartment.

We pretty much forgot that ever happened. After all, we’re still getting the gas from the tank on our kitchen balcony. Which is now dry.

So this morning a guy with a gas company logo showed up, presumably to deliver our new propane tank. He came up to our apartment, looked out onto the balcony, and left. Forever. We asked the guard, Hey, where’d the gas guy go?, and asked him to call an arrange to have our gas installed. He said to expect workmen between noon and 12:30. Which apparently means “around 3:30 in the afternoon.”

So, at 3:30 in the afternoon, no fewer than four guys (and the guard) show up with about 20 feet of gas plumbing, two big bags of tools, and a gas meter. (That a task as simple as plumbing the last three feet of gas pipe takes four workers no longer passes for comment. One guy hangs off the ledge of the balcony to finish the final three feet of pipe, one guy dispenses plumber’s tape, one guy operates the drill, and one guy is an apprentice, or possibly someone’s friend with a slow Saturday afternoon. The guard is there for our “safety.”) The whole operation takes about half an hour — not bad, considering — but when they’re done we can’t help but notice: there is about 20 inches of tubing missing. The last 20 inches.

We point out that all this work has not actually produced the desired result, and whose job is it to connect those final 20 inches?

Oh, they say, that can’t happen right now, there’s no gas in the central line yet.

Well, we point out, we don’t any have gas at all. Mei you meiqi. When will someone be back to actually, you know, bring us a propane tank which is what we actually wanted in the first place?

Two months.

Hey Transplants to the Pacific Northwest! Remember your first winter in [Oregon | Washington | British Columbia | SE Alaska]? Remember how, after about 60 days or so of ceaseless drizzly gray, you woke up one morning and heard the rain outside and realized “I don’t need to think about what to wear today. I won’t need to think about what to wear ever again. Because it’s raining today for the 61st day in a row and it will rain every. Day. For the rest. Of my life.”? Remember the day, perhaps around early December, when it was sunny for most of one morning and that only made it worse because then in the afternoon it clouded over and started raining again, but now you had that one glimmer of hope that “maybe this time it won’t last 60 days?” Remember how that felt?

Now imagine all that is happening to you, but subtract:

• The rain
• The lush green foliage the rain sustains
• The velvety smell of cedars and fir-trees, emanating from the said foliage
• The just-washed clean, crisp air, through which you see the distant hillsshrouded, as if in a sumi painting, in a veil of life-sustaining moisture.

And replace it with:

• Coal soot, smog, the vapor rising off untreated sewage, yellowish steam pouring from innumerable smokestacks, tire dust, concrete dust, plain old dirt dust
• Grayish withered foliage powdered with a fine layer of all that stuff
• The pungent odor of [see ab.]
• The stagnant, icy, filthy filthy air, through which you can vaguely discern the shapes of buildings you know for a God-given fact are barely a mile away.

Sunny this morning, about 70 deg. F.

Was it only three weeks ago that Jenny twisted her ankle? Because today she went for her second run since the accident.

My wife could kick your wife’s ass.

Meanwhile: Ellen took off for Shanghai on Saturday. She spent ten days with us, not counting their trip to Wuyishan last weekend. Normally I’m fond of saying things like “guests, like fish, start to smell after three days,” but this is definitely not the case lately. First, Ellen (OK, all our families) are pretty easy to live with. Second, we are crazy for any contact with our lives back home.

The weather is now finally “cool.” Low to mid 60s (F), and gray gray gray always gray. This gray is only about 30% moisture, by the way. The rest is pollution. Dust, soot, smog...God knows what. Think on that, my First World friends: the sun never breaks the constant veil of pollution over Xiamen, China. You can smell it. Your eyes water, you have a persistent hacking cough, sneezing wakes you in the middle of the night. Picture that feeling when you marvel at how cheap all that stuff at Target is. It’s cheap because, in part, we don’t have to pay the cleanup costs.

Xiamen is pretty unanimously regarded as the cleanest city in China.

I’m given to understand culture shock comes in stages. I don’t know what those stages are and I’m kind of loathe to find out. But I think we’re in a stage now where we compare everything here to life in Portland. Barely an hour goes by when I don’t think of something else I miss. We really miss the rain for Pete’s sake. The homesickness is abetted by our job situations which, to put it politely, are not only less than ideal (which we expected) but also less than was promised (which we did not).

During my last serious jag of under- and un-employment (2001–2002) I could take some solace in a life well lived. Conversely, if our jobs were better, China would be more fun than it currently feels. From the spoiled-Westerner point of view, you pretty much need either a> happy work life or b) happy life life.

So: News:

• Jenny and I hired a Mandarin tutor, a nice-seeming guy named Mr. Yu who also tutors a few expat families with kids at the school. We’ve only had one lesson but it feels a little like we’re back in the game, language-wise. On that topic: many (most?) of the foreigners we know speak less Mandarin than we do, and I frankly don’t know how they survive. You can’t give directions or order food in English, for example. I guess you can get pretty far with pointing and grunting.
• I went bowling last week which was pretty much like bowling in the states (run-down mid-80s vibe, half-empty lanes, jokey college kids on one side, and the serious 200+ average guy with his own ball on the other), but with better service
• Thai food is worse here than in Portland. A lot worse. I don’t think this is because it’s “bad” here, but rather that it’s just so very good in Portland.
• The weather is now always exactly the same. 26C, dry and hazy. Air pollution of all kinds (smoke, haze, smog, dust) is omnipresent. This week I stepped outside during the day and was hit with an odor exactly like L.A. smog. You know the homesickness is bad when you’re homesick for L.A.

Life is slow and frustrating in Xiamen lately. Warm and dusty. I’ve about had it with nothing working right, shoddy design, and everyone basically being OK with those things. I’m also really missing autumn, my favorite season. There is no autumn here. The weather is cooling but still low 80s (mid to upper 20s C), and humid. And yet, still dusty. Everything is coated with a thick layer of fine dust. In the countryside, the dust is from the mountains and fields, which are drying from the wet season. In the city, the dust is from the construction.

Construction is really out of control. We picked our neighborhood in part because it had many single-family houses, we figured we were immune from more construction. Boy we could not have been more wrong. Every other house is being renovated, which in China means “all but demolished and then completely rebuilt.” But the really fun part is the degree of care and professionalism being invested in this construction.

For example:

There’s a switchback west of our apartment where the road climbs the hill behind us (to the south). On this switchback someone is shoe-horning a new house. The construction site is perhaps 30 m long (east to west) and 15 m wide (north to south), with an elevation change of up to maybe 10 m. Previously there was a stone retaining wall on the downslope (south) side of the switchback. The construction company literally removed this retaining wall and excavated the space inside the switchback. So now there’s an open pit inside the switchback, level with the downslope side, with a 10 m unretained loadbearing dirt wall directly under the road on the upslope side.

It gets better: To the east is the building immediately next to us. It has a two-story side-wing with no foundation, built directly against the slope to the south and west. So this pit also has an unretained loadbearing dirt wall for a six story apartment building. They did this excavation in literally two days. I’m not an engineer and I don’t know bupkiss about construction but even I can see this is a spectacularly bad idea. Maybe the dirt coheres when it’s dry (doubtful), but God help us if it rains. Oh wait, yeah, it’s typhoon season. Holy crap. The hasty nature of all this construction suggests the sort of bender a gambler takes on his last $1000, when he knows he won’t stay in another hand. “Let it ride!”

I heard that Fujian province is renowned for its shoddy construction and I hope for the safety of the Chinese people this is true. I hope that elsewhere in the country they wouldn’t remove a cliffside retaining wall which bears weight for both a road and an apartment building.