China 2024

The eclipse has been on my calendar for 6 years now, but I've also been gaming the system to get work to send me back to China for almost as long.  I finally got approval, but the catch was it had to be during the eclipse. I tried to push the build for months, but million$ were on the line and I decided I'd rather miss the eclipse than find a new job. Definitely considered it though.....

The flight out was pretty standard. Despite some last minute shuffling I managed to get the very last window seat (at the very back of the plain), my coworker Tyler traded for the aisle, and through sheer luck we got the last empty seat between us! We chased the sun across Canada and Siberia, both of which were blindingly bright and immensely boring, and time slowly lost all meaning as we crossed the 8 hour mark and were only halfway to Hong Kong. Eventually we arrived, got picked up and driven to Huizhou, and settled in for a week with our Contract Manufacturer.

Basically our 9-5...

"HOLY SHIT. TEA CANDLE"

The first week was pretty standard. Work 4 hours, go out for lunch, work another 4 hours, go out for dinner, work another hour or two (now that America is awake), sleep and repeat. Our CM now has a farm, so that was our lunch stop every day. Food fresh from the meal and 1km from campus, and we could have a nice stroll through the field afterwards watching the ducks/geese or trying to figure out which crops were which.  This year we didn't have anything wild as we had previously. No bugs, no brains (thank God), no pets....  I did enjoy snails for the first time in my life!  The trick is they were so small you got dozens of snails in every spoonful, it was delicious without that rubber-chewing nausea.

The drinking has ramped up, whether beer or baijiu... Baijiu is served in thimble-sized glasses and if you attempt to protect yourself with a short pour they break out the game of "China Full", where you try to fill your friends' glasses as full as you can without spilling a drop. If your meniscus arches upwards you've achieved Sifu-level mastery.  

Friday was a holiday, and we were left to our own devices all morning, so we decided to head over to the old market that I've enjoyed before. We checked the weather (cloudy!) and set off over the bridge towards the lake... and it started sprinkling. Not terrible, but not what google promised us - too late, we realized what a poor choice a banned app was for checking local conditions. But we're young and dumb and already halfway over the bridge, so we kept on.  On the other side of the lake, we cut up the old city wall and into the old fortress. Nice and dry, but ridiculously humid (All of Huizhou was ridiculously humid, indoors and out. I'd only ever visited in the winter before, but April is thoroughly the wet season - "We have maybe 3 months of winter, and 9 months of summer").  We checked out the meager exhibits and headed down, and cut through the Kande Hotel (the other fancy hotel in town). Being white is awesome, you can just walk into random hotels, and then wander through their tea-room with it's exquisite antique carvings made from root-balls 15 feet across - and nobody even challenges you. At most, they keep an eye on you at a respectful distance in case you want to spend money.

Leaving the hotel we noticed all the Chinese were using umbrellas. Even for a few steps between a car and a door, getting wet is apparently not something that's done there. We began a series of casual walks alternating with mad-dashes as we zigzagged beneath whatever shelter we could find and the rain slowly intensified. Still not a deluge, but definitely not the light misting that started on the bridge. Finally, we made it to the market and largely under cover - tarps slung over the alleys, huge umbrellas over stands, and only a few anonymous raindrenched alleys where we got bemused looks from the locals.

The market still has that old-school feel; it's clearly catered to locals, to the working class, to grandmothers doing the family shopping. Blocks of tea, bags of rice, spices in bundles on tables.... but the sheer WTF'ery of the old wet-market was gone. Sure, you had buckets of snails or turtles, but there weren't porcupines and eels, cats and frogs. Suddenly we exited a cramped alley and found ourselves on a broad avenue lined with minimalls promoting sport-leisure wear and plastic toys in a LED-lit consumer utopia. The foreign and exotic is fading into yet another generic suburb. We wandered through dozens of shops attempting to navigate back towards the bridge, but we had no luck and found ourselves a mile down river, trying to figure out a dry way back to the hotel.

We spent probably 20 minutes hiding from rain trying to hail a cab ("You can see the hotel from here. We just need to point and offer cash, how hard can it be?"), but they were infrequent and always booked. Eventually, the rain lessened, and we decided to start walking back and hope that we would come across a cab.  We passed a dozen fishing-gear shops, all the oldschool, single-room, just a dude and his stock sort of market stalls. All selling what looked to be near identical gear, and all adjacent.

Finally back to the bridge, we abandoned any pretense that we might be able to catch a ride, and committed to walking back.  Midway across the rain stopped flirting and decided to commit to the downpour, and we arrived back at our 5-star hotel looking like drowned riverrats. As always, the host smiled politely and motioned towards the elevator, as if maybe we forgot where it was in the few hours since he saw us leave the exact same elevator.

After warm showers and a change of clothes the rain stopped, and our hosts took us to the lake - where I'd been several times, but Tyler had never been (it's his first trip out of the USA). Do you want to take the boat? Sure! We rented a little 6 person boat. We tried to rent the 4-person, but they apparently aren't sized for Americans, and the deckhand wouldn't even let us try, but the 6 person was great.  We set out across the lake, under bridges, around the crane reserve, and had a great time. I of course checked all the access hatches on the boat and Tyler and I examined the battery / motor setup while our hosts laughed about engineers.

Host: "Do you want some snakes?" 

Americans: "Snakes?"

Host: "Yeah, maybe we get some snakes to eat"

Americans, simultaneously: "I don't know" "Absolutely yes!"

<They took us to a ice-cream place. They meant snacks>

Dinner was at a hipster bar... and our hosts got absolutely lost trying to figure out which anonymous back alley was ours. It looked sketchy and cyberpunk, especially with the power cables draping dangerously low over the streets, but I've never felt unsafe in China and always enjoy getting lost. These authentic glimpses of China are always some of my favorites, but the Chinese desire to be consummate hosts doesn't really vibe with "let's get lost in the ghetto and drink with locals at a random dive", so it's great when it happens anyways.  At the bar we played Liar's Dice, only with new rules (1s are wild, sometimes?) which were confusing in one language, let alone two. Not that it matters though, the goal is to drink and enjoy the company, and we did that in spades. 

On Saturday they left us on our own. Against my drunken encouragement the previous night, they did not take us out to the bar with our competitor (who they also contract for). Which is probably for the best, as my liver deserved a break.  After a few hours of reading I was desperate to get out of the building, so I went to the local museum.  There was a hall of statuary, a lackluster exhibition on bugs, but the history of Huizhou was great, with several exhibits on the prehistorical era, models of the old fortress, and life-size dioramas showing the pottery trade as it was hundreds of years ago.  I also enjoyed the ww2 section, which is wild to see from a different perspective. Much like our museums, it's full of stories of brave outnumbered men who survived firefights lasting days only to finally achieve the surrender of the enemies troops.... only with more AKs and less focus on Germany.....

Since our build had gone so well, we had nothing to do at the factory on Monday. Our hosts proposed a trip to Shenzhen, and we immediately accepted. Shenzhen has a near-legendary status in hacker culture, the exotic market where anything can be found and technologies make their first break into the market.  We had a decently boring drive down to Shenzhen and disembarked into the markets. These markets spanned across a dozen malls, and being EE nerds, we went to the component market first.

An almost infinite number of stalls, brimming with reels of electronics.... but also kinda boring? I can see how this would have been revolutionary, but in the days of Mouser and Digikey.... there's less of a need for it.  The LED floor was still amazing, but even there it became repetitive, with 4 or 5 different shops cloned into hundreds of mini-shops.  However we still got a great deal on automotive replacement bulbs ("Four of these?" "No, is bad, get this") and a handful of cheap connectors for robots. 

Other buildings had different focuses. There was an entire building of consumer electronics, where I bought a $20 drone (surprisingly decent), an entire building of automotive parts, 6 floors of security cameras.... it's certainly unique, but all in all did not live up to the legends of an electronics Mecca.

Our work with the supplier finished, it was time to head to our internal factory to make sure our new samples worked with the rest of the product line. We had to travel 900 miles, and in revenge for missing the eclipse, I decided we were going by train. If I can't see the solar winds, I'm going to see the Chinese countryside. It might not be completely rational, but I don't need much convincing to try weird shit.

Locals and coworkers told us not to take the train -  "Oh, I take it, but maybe is too confusing?" said my Chinese counterpart. But I've done far sketchier trips with far less planning, so full speed ahead! Besides, I'm white and I have a corporate credit card, and those are cheat codes in China. So for less than the price of an airline ticket, we booked firstclass train seats from Huizhou to Suzhou, an 8 hour trip.

We were picked up at 6am from the hotel, and our hosts drove us across the city to the train station.... which was the size of moderate airport and didn't even open until 7. We hung out with milling crowds of random Chinese, smoked a cig (as you do), and soon enough the doors opened and we streamed in. We never got tickets... just a brief confirmation email, but our passports unlocked the turnstile and we wandered into the station to decode signs... About 10 minutes before our train the gate to our platform opened, and we joined the stream of people heading outside and downstairs.

We found the car numbers inset in the pavement and headed up to our assigned spot, and I wandered off to grab a photo of the mists rising through the mountains. Timeless beauty and very Huizhou. As I shot, our train rolled into the station. A sleek, gorgeous highspeed train, CHR3 series (Chinese knockoff of the Shinkasen). The adventure begins.

We found our seats, and within moments we were accelerating out of the station, and we kept accelerating. Say what you will about Xi, but he made the trains run on time. A hostess came by and dropped off a small bag of snacks, and we tore northward at speed. Most of the journey was spent just over 300kmh (as helpfully pointed out by live-updating sign at the head of the cabin). The fastest I saw was 307k (confirmed 190mph by my phone's GPS) - all of it in sublime comfort. No jarring from the rails except at the occasional station when we changed tracks, smooth, quiet, and fantastic. If we had trains like this in the states I'd never fly domestic.

I spent most the journey staring out the window, watching the country flash by. Primarily that meant  rice patties. Rice everywhere, with careful damming and terraces to flood them at will. Here and there were workers ankle-deep in the rice, mostly laboring manually but we saw some walk-behind tractors occasionally mixed in. Interspersed with the rice were rapeseed and tea plantations, and various vegetable gardens - but not as pervasive as the rice, which spanned almost the entire 900 miles we traveled.

We shot past innumerable and unnameable towns, flying past too quick to even point out to each other. As soon as they appeared, they vanished behind us. It was a wild disparity of clashing times - a train from the future flying over rice fields thousands of years old.  The cities may be blending into a generic near-future, but the countryside is still China.

We settled into a comfortable pattern, stopping at a handful of cities, flying between mountains and past plantations, watching the climate change outside. We went from jungle, to pine forests, and then to riverside plains. Our course matched the Yangste, crossing it several times. Truly an impressive amount of shipping running up and down the river, it underlined how critical the river was in the historic development of china. 

The only downside to the ride was the lack of food.... without a local phone number we couldn't order food from the train-app (everything in china is an app), and the snacks ran out hours ago.

As we approached Shanghai, the industry started ramping up. Power plants began to appear, at first infrequently, before appearing in pairs and then blurring into a constant feature - there was always one in sight during our final approach to the city. The second sign was the haze. I was totally unprepared, and just thought everything was enormous. Based on how blurry things were, I thought they were twice as far away, which would mean they had to be enormous given our perspective.... in truth, it was decently close to the train, and while still a large suspension bridge, the smog was critical to the illusion. Finally, as we entered Suzhou proper canals appeared everywhere. The historical alternative to railways, they spoke to the ancient industry of the Shanghai region more fluently than a textbook ever could.

And suddenly, we were at Suzhou Station and leaving the train. After a bit of confusion due to the lack of ticketing machines, we realized we had to exit the "train station" and re-enter to get to the metro. Easy enough, but we had more pressing priorities: Food. It's been 8 hours with only fancy peanuts. A quick and wonderful stop at burger-king (which was also an app) and we were sorted.  The metro was cheap ($1 tickets), fast (maybe 5 minute between trains), clean, well signed.... everything a metro should be.  It could have been any metro in the states, except there was no shoving (even when people stood in the door, oblivious) and we were by far the tallest people on the entire train. 

So all in all, complete success. 

Suzhou did not seem that different from my last visit. You still navigate the inner city by taking bearings from Big Pants, but now we commuted via Didi (Chinese Uber), and of course an app. Definitely easier than hailing a taxi and mutely handing over business cards, but a bit less fun for it, and it explains why we couldn't find a traditional cab in Huizhou. We'd make it to the office, spend 10-12 bouncing between meetings and in the lab, and then head back to the hotel to clean up for dinner. 

Dinner was the other difference from my last trip to Suzhou. Instead of running solo, this time almost a score of us had flown in from all over the world, so the evenings often found us taking over a bar. My favorite interaction was when the owner tried to kick us out so she could shut down the bar and go home, but our VP attempted to get her to stay open for a yet another "one last round". She offered a round of tequila shots if he closed the tab first.  It was a homemade Chinese tequila-analog... tasty and only 50? proof which was a relief. Plus it's always fun to watch one of your bosses get outplayed.

I was following this robot through the hotel.
 Suddenly he was following me.

Otherwise, Suzhou was host to my typical evening wanderings (the park is pretty neat), and a last-minute blitzkrieg through a half-dozen malls looking for gifts for my cat-sitters. Interestingly, the malls were themed. You'd find an educational-mall, with dance classes, STEM activities, and craft stores.  Or you'd find a mall that was entirely clothes, or entirely home-goods (TVs, dishwashers, cleaning robots, etc...).  Fun, but not useful for a cute cat-themed gift.  There was a cat in the scarf-store, but he wasn't for sale, he just liked to sit in the door.

Our handful of days in Suzhou passed in a blink, and we were in a car headed for the flight back home. Overall, I feel a deep satisfaction from pushing myself into new experiences, anticipation for the comforts and simplicity of home, but mostly,  I'm focused on fighting off food poisoning. Two weeks of adventurous food with no issues, only to get hit by Korean BBQ at the goodbye luncheon. It'll be nice to be home.