Saturday, June 18 2011

China

五星红旗: Red for revolution, big star for the Communist party leadership, smaller stars for the unity of the people

It has suddenly occurred to me that my life has turned into something that would be very difficult to describe to a stranger. Heck, it’d be impossible to describe to me, as I was fifteen years ago.

It’s not that I do anything exceptionally weird: I’m a technician and a middle manager and a medium-sized corporation. I have employees, bosses, reports, deadlines, projects, tasks and meetings. Not that I ever thought I’d have these sorts of things either: I grew up a noble member of the proletariat, predestined to be a ‘son of toil’ (most likely moving tons of soil). The fact that I’m glib and clever and can string sentences together doomed me for a life away from the end of a shovel or the handle of a deep-fry basket, but flying over the Bering strait right now, I am pretty sure I’ve gotten a better deal out of life than I had any expectations for, growing up.

It’s the stuff in between the quotidian tasks that’s kooky. Right now I’m blogging as ‘the face of Winexpert’. In three weeks I’ll be writing, producing, directing, acting in, narrating and directing post-production for a wine video. I just got back from a conference where I did seminars for hundreds of people. Yesterday I pushed the button and went live on a winemaking Wiki site that I’ve been working on for a year, and I started printing out certificates for the Winemaking Excellence Certification course that I teach through an on-line process.

(If you’ve been following my blog for a while and wondered why I dropped from previously doing eight or ten blogs a month to three or four, it may have something to do with the above paragraph. If any of my editors are reading this, they have light bulbs of 100 watts going off over their heads, ‘So that’s why the shifty beggar is always missing deadlines, he’s an over-commitment junkie!’)

Looks great to me

And the Bering Strait? I’m on my way over to Xinxiang, a special economic development zone, lying on a straight line almost exactly halfway between Beijing and Shanghai. To get there I’m flying from Vancouver through Beijing, then on to Zhengzhou, and catching a ride on to my final destination.

See what I mean? Unless you’re from there, or are an old China hand, those names conjure exotic destinations only found in storybooks, except when they make you wonder how on earth to pronounce them. Will I see pagodas? Temples? Water buffaloes churning rice paddies? Gigantic modernist architecture forged in the crucible of one of the most astonishing economic expansions Asia has ever seen? Dragons?

Of course I’ll see all of those things and none of them. The China in my mind’s eye was forged on traveller’s tales, movies (some wonderful ethnic cinema, others embarrassingly bad Kung-Fu epics), plenty of friends from China, and a long stint spent working at the corner of Main and Hastings in Vancouver, right in the heart of Chinatown.

But that was mostly Hong Kong's version of China, exported modified, atomised, and broadly spread over the fabric of a strange country. The China I’m going to is a different kind of China. I won’t be hearing the staccato Cantonese I am used to, but the softer tones of Mandarin, and I'll be travelling through country-China, not city-China.

And I’m really looking forward to it. I’ve spent a bit of time in Asia, having gone to college in Japan. The sense of dislocation and existential oddness of being very, very different from everyone around you is something I’ve handled before (you should see my class pictures—I was the tall blonde one). But Xinxiang is not Tokyo, so I’m going to try to keep my eyes open and take in what I see around me.

Mainly what I’m going to see is the operation of a Winexpert Winery that’s opening on Sunday in Xinxiang. The company has sent me to represent our brand at the grand opening, and I’m going to be doing a batch of consulting while I’m there—I’ve helped plan and set up hundreds of Wine On Premise operations in Canada, and I’ve consulted for a half-dozen wineries in British Columbia, and a few boutique wineries in the USA, but this is my first Sino-Canadian winery operation.

I’m hopeful I can point out some production efficiencies and help them to be as sharp as possible—we’ll see what kind of contribution I can make. This kind of troubleshooting and fixing is my bread and butter, but sometimes I feel a bit sheepish: as the factory guy it’s easy for me to point to stuff and say, ‘Fix that, change this and do that differently and you’ll increase throughput by 18% in the first month’. Easy to point, more work for the owner to execute and I’m not the one footing the capital costs. Of course, that's what consulting is all about.

It’s going to be a bit of a whirlwind—I’m not exactly sure when this initial blog is going to get posted, even. I’ll try to take some pictures and capture a bit of the place, if I can. In the meantime, I hope my garden gets enough rain till I get back. And if you’re trying to get hold of me, be patient and I’ll try to talk you as soon as I can.

Off to China!

Posted by Asiatic Tim AT 4:15PM

0 Comments

Post A Comment

Email