A Triumph of Packaging

Last week was India – 3 days in New Delhi, 2 days in Hyderabad. I traveled with my colleague Elaine, who was delighted to find a road in Delhi named after renowned Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy. Elaine and I share an erstwhile passion for 19th century Russian novels, and we both found it odd yet characteristic of India to have a road named after a man who lived thousands of miles away, never visited Delhi, and most likely never gave the place much thought.

India is that kind of hodgepodge. A melting pot that puts the United States to shame. It has 22 official local languages (Hindi, Marathi, Gujarati, Bengali, Kannada, and so on), yet the lingua franca is the imported language of English. People from different parts of India – close enough to travel back and forth in an hour – can’t communicate in their own languages, but can often get by in English. Although it’s not uncommon for an Indian to speak 5-6 languages as a matter of course, either (another way that India puts the United States to shame).

India is all cultures at once, and yet quintessentially Indian. It absorbs cultures, absorbs religions, languages, art, and whole peoples like a sponge absorbs liquid, and yet, like a sponge, doesn’t really change as a result. It stubbornly, admirably, retains its own distinctive form and function. Wring all of those external influences out of it and there, still, is India, incredible India (as the motto goes), baking under a sweltering sun and deliquescing under torrential monsoons and bedazzling you with the sheer, titanic, interminable hammer-hammer-hammering of its colors, and chaos, and cacophony. It can be exhausting, to say the least.

But today is not about making sense of India. Better men than me have tried. No, today is about trying to make sense out of something even more crazy and unbelievable than India: the insanity of product packaging.

Tough Times

There are many hard things about living in Shanghai.  These, however, are not two of those things.

My first pedicure in Shanghai.  Electric blue.

OMG.  It's a dumpling.  Then they fry it.  Until it carmalizes on the bottom.  And cover it with toasted sesame seeds.  It does spew boiling hot pork juice on you when you bite into it.  But whatever, there's ointment for that.

First day of school pics coming soon...

Walking in the Neighborhood

I thought some of you might be sick of pictures of my children.  Instead, here are some pics of my walk through the neighborhood this morning on my way home from taking Eli to school.  It is downright cool out -- in the 70s.  Heavenly.


Every morning, there are 3-4 women chopping the crap out of giant bags of vegetables.  Here's the aftermath. 

The End of Summer Vacation

I've always found the last week before school starts is filled with random activities.  Maybe eating that last Dairy Queen sundae (don't tell Matthew and Eli that we did this), watching a jazz concert on a hot summer's night, buying a new electronic keyboard, shopping for pig shaped red bean buns, or really just killing time before the structure of school starts.  So, here are some random photos from the last few weeks:

Eli made a self portrait at school. 

Typhoon Days and Inflatables

There's humid.  And then there's the humid that comes from 36 hours of typhoon.  Whoa.  Let's just say that it takes several hair ties to control Townes' hair in this weather.

School and work were closed for two days due to Typhoon Haikui.  Totally understood why we needed to stay inside on Wednesday.  It was just ridiculous out.  Thursday was actually fine, but we enjoyed some more quality time together nonetheless.  Really.

There were lots of tree limbs down, signs blown over, giant pieces of metal clanging loosely from the 26th floor of the building down the street (yikes), but overall things look good in the neighborhood.

Bamboo down.

Oops.

Marriage and The Wrath of God

Is there any other kind?

In China, there’s no such thing as a joint bank account. Allison and I can’t have an account we share, and we can’t have an account with more than one debit or credit card attached to it. For practical purposes, this means we have one bank account in my name (since I’m drawing more income presently) – and one banking card, that we end up having to pass back and forth to each other all the time. It’s a minor inconvenience but a nagging one, since the solution seems so obvious – let us merge our finances, just as we’ve done comfortably for the last 15 years.

Chinese law and banking practice seem designed to keep people separate, individual, divided, at least from a fiscal standpoint. Since the country has a communist political system, this is counterintuitive. If the political ideal is that everyone owns everything equally, then everything is shared by everybody already. After all, you don’t own land in China, or houses, or apartments, you just buy the use of them for 99 years or so. Nobody knows quite what happens after that, but the principle is clear: everything ultimately belongs to the people (as embodied by the State), not to any individual person.

So why not extend that principle to married couples? Why can’t they share their money and assets – a kind of subset of “the people,” if you will?