Reboot

I will update the blog with my whereabouts for the past month soon, but for now I'm restarting my series of daily (that's the intent, anyway) posts on things in my life for which I'm grateful. Driving back to Pasadena from USC with CT this afternoon (I know, you don't know who CT is; I promise I'll update soon), I put the address in my phone and it told me to get on the freeway and take the 110 north. However, as I got on, the entrance didn't allow me to get over before the freeway split, and I was forced to take a different freeway through the heart of LA, one that takes much longer due to traffic. A few miles later, however, I saw an exit with a temporary sign marking a detour to the 110 north. We followed it, and after a few blocks we were headed back to the 110 without having lost much time. I'm grateful for thoughtful traffic engineers who take the time to map out detour routes and lay out the signage. They saved me time and preserved my peace of mind today.

You've had a birthday, shout hooray!

My birthday is this weekend!  Soon I will be a year older, and hopefully wiser too.  Here are some highlights from the last year:

• Found out that I did super well on the LSAT, paving the way for applying to law school
• Flew to Detroit to audition for membership in GCNA (guild of carillonneurs in north america); unfortunately, the jury was rigged (a touchy subject with me still, but it was a growing experience at least)
• Finished my coursework at BYU by taking spring and summer classes, among them a math class after having had no math for five years
• Packed up and said goodbye to Provo permanently, at least as a place to live
• Went home to Malaysia, spent a few fun days in Thailand with Eve, Hudson, and Annie, back to Malaysia, and then to China!
• Studied at Nanjing University for a semester with the Chinese Flagship program; had an awesome roommate from Dalian named Xin Qiang
• Went on an epic trip to Chongqing, Chengdu, Dazu, and Mt. Emei over National Week; slept in an airport, on a bus, on a monastery floor, in a hostel, and in a super-sweet hotel room (courtesy of Dad points)
• Went to Harbin over Christmas with Seth, Maryia, and Ming Wen, Seth's roommate - nearly froze to death and spent Christmas Eve sleeping on a train!
• Another incredible vacation: nearly a month for Chinese New Year spent taking Ben, Seth, Josef, Jonathan, and Lena around Bali, Malaysia, and Singapore - so many good times!
• Moved to Beijing, worked in a law firm there for just over 3 months
• Applied to law schools; visited Chicago and Stanford in whirlwind weekend trips and ultimately decided on Stanford
• Moved to Shanghai via Nanjing and Suzhou to do a short internship here before heading home

I am so blessed!  When I list everything I've been able to experience in the last year, the hard times and annoyances pale in comparison.  Here's hoping this year will bring more happy memories.

Oh, Shanghai

Tomorrow I will have been in Shanghai for two weeks.  And two weeks from today I'm flying back to the United States!  What an adventure this year in China has been.  I'm glad I will have this fairly comprehensive (if spotty in consistency) record of my time here.

New developments in work: I've been busier at DLA than I was at LexField.  Lots of documents to edit, and I got to sit in on and help translate a bit of a training we hosted for some startup companies here.  Some of their business models were interesting, but for the most part they had absolutely no idea how to explain themselves or present their pitches.  I went in and out of the meetings, but from the snippets I caught I wasn't terribly impressed.

My longish-term project I'm doing for Kaichen is an analysis of what might happen to private/foreign investments in China if the government collapses or undergoes a radical transformation in the near future, based on similar events in Indonesia and other places.  I haven't done much research on it yet, but it's looking interesting so far.

Ben, Seth, Jonathan, Chandler, Sisi Messick and I went clothes shopping on Saturday.  But not just to the store.  No, sir.  We went to the fabric market and got fitted and picked out styles and buttons and sleeves and the whole shebang!  Sisi was our fashion coach.  We each got several dress shirts, long and short-sleeved, Ben and Chandler got suits, and Seth got a cashmere coat made, all at ridiculously cheap prices!  My long-sleeved shirts were 100 kuai (just over $15) and short-sleeved were 90 kuai.  The suits and coat were 500 kuai, or $80!  I really liked the cashmere coat, but I couldn't justify buying one, since I already have a winter coat and a peacoat and a trench coat, and I certainly won't need any of them very often at Stanford.  But still.  I spent just over $100 on 6 fitted dress shirts!  On our way out, we bought ties - silk ties for 8 kuai ($1.25) each!  Crazy.  Then we went to the pearl market and Seth and I bought some shorts and Ben bought some shoes, again for ridiculously cheap prices.  I'm glad Hannah and Brent are moving here next year - if I ever need any dress clothes, I'll make sure to have them buy them in Shanghai.

The Shanghai Branch is really good to the YSAs here - every Sunday a member has the whole group over for dinner after church.  Yesterday was at Sister Wang's house.  She's Taiwanese and married to a man who's not a member of the church, and they're both super nice.  There were 7 of us who went, and she had more than enough food for everyone; really good angel hair pasta, green curry with rice, salad, fresh whole grain bread with butter...and decadent chocolate cake for dessert!  Sooooooo good!  Her husband worked for Singapore Airlines in marketing for 30 years, and now he lives here and studies Mandarin while she works in interior design.  I'm so grateful for people like that who open up their homes and make young singles feel welcome and at home.

Ben left this morning for Hong Kong; I won't see him again until I maybe see him in July in Utah, depending on how my plans work out.  Everyone is going their separate ways in the next few weeks; Seth finished his internship on Thursday, and Chandler is done and traveling around already.  Joel and Jonathan finish this week, I think.  I'm glad to be so nearly done with the two-year endurance race this Flagship program has turned out to be, but I'm also a little nostalgic for all the good times we had together and everything I experienced over this two years.  If I had to do it over again, I think I would choose to come, despite (maybe because of?) the hard times, because of the friends I've made and the things I've learned about China and about myself.

Life in Shanghai

I love Shanghai!

I'm sure there will be things I don't like about it eventually, but for now it's great.  Ben and Seth rent a room in a house in a cool section of town with little alleys and shops and tree-lined residential streets.  Quite the opposite of our apartment in Beijing, which was off a main street with lots of big buildings everywhere and a lot of traffic.  It's been cloudy/rainy since I got here, which can get depressing after a while, I guess, but I love the rain and had far too little of it in Beijing, so that's another plus!

With the air mattress I brought, more than half the floor space is taken up by beds now.  We have a small table in the corner and a closet and a TV, but the rest of the apartment is mattresses and bedding.  Still nowhere near as crowded as a Chinese dorm room, but we can pretend we're living in cramped squalor. :)

My commute to work is about 45 minutes - 6 stops on the subway and a good walk on either end.  I work in the Shanghai World Financial Center, the second-tallest building IN THE WORLD!!!  We're on the 36th floor, which is very cool, even though I don't have a window in my office.

So I'm working for DLA Piper for 3.5 weeks.  They're an international law firm and the largest firm in the world, with thousands of attorneys and over 70 offices in over 30 countries.  They mostly do corporate/transactional work.  I've been helping do a little research and some editing over the past few days, and my main project is coming up with a framework for understanding the changes that will happen to foreign-owned property and businesses if the Chinese government were to collapse or be radically altered in some way.  Kind of cool!

This is a super nice building.  The toilets are the Japanese kind with a multitude of buttons, water jets, seat warmers, etc etc.  Our one conference room has glass walls that can be turned opaque at the flip of a switch.  My computer monitor is huge, and the internet is lightning fast and has a built-in VPN, so it's basically like being back in the States (or heaven, take your pick)!

I get off at 6:30.  Commuting is pretty painless here, even at rush hour.  It can be crowded, but the escalators and everything else move pretty quickly.  Very efficient.  Ben and Seth tend to get home fairly late, Seth later than Ben, so unlike in Beijing where we would hang out with people most weeknights, here they only do things on the weekends.  That might get monotonous after a while, but since I'm only here for 3.5 weeks anyway, I don't think I'll mind.  I probably won't try to get to know the branch/YSA very well in any case.

Food is really expensive here.  Maybe about the same as Beijing, but there are way more foreign restaurants that charge exorbitant prices, so it seems more expensive.  Especially where I work - there are no cheap places to eat around here, so it's pay up or starve.

Trip to Shanghai

Well, now that I've covered much of my time in Beijing, it's time to wrap up this catch-up series...

Last Sunday, the day after the marathon, I still had legs!  Which was a good thing, as I needed them to get to church and back and start packing.  I didn't leave myself much time to say goodbyes to people, but I like that sometimes - goodbyes can be draining.  Besides, I'll be back in Beijing for a couple days in June before I leave.  So I got home from church and frantically packed my bags.  I left my large suitcase there for Joel to deal with, and I gave Ben a duffel bag with clothes in it to bring to Shanghai for me, and then all I had was my small suitcase, an IKEA bag stuffed with my air mattress, comforter, and pillows, and my backpack.  Ben and I headed for the Beijing South Station, and we caught our respective bullet trains south, which left within 5 minutes of each other.

I arrived in Nanjing around 8:30, met Chandler and went back to his apartment.  We stayed up talking until around 2 am, even though I should have been exhausted from walking around and dragging luggage a day after finishing a marathon.  I woke up around 7:30, though, and I wasn't terribly tired.  We got breakfast and then headed to school.  Chen Laoshi and Dong Laoshi and Hong Xia were in the office, so we talked to them for a while, which was nice.  Chen Laoshi is one of the funniest men alive; he's obsessed with Nanjing history and the Utah Jazz and BYU, and he's always great to talk to.

After that, we got lunch with Xin Qiang (who had changed his name to Vincent!), Maryia, Jason, and two of Xin Qiang's friends.  Chandler had called Xin Qiang that morning and arranged for lunch, saying 中午见, but Xin Qiang heard 周五见 and thought we were having lunch at 11 on Friday!  But we ran into him randomly anyway.  Miracles never cease.

After that, I headed back and went to the train station to catch my train to Suzhou.  It's a very short trip on the bullet train from Nanjing to Suzhou, but it was pleasant.  The weather on Monday and Tuesday was fantastic - not hot, light breeze, sunny.  I took a taxi to Jonathan's office and went up to grab his apartment keys from him, dropped my stuff off, showered, and then Jonathan, Sisi, some other YSA's in the branch and I went out to an Italian place for dinner and then to a member's house for games.  He manufactures board games, so he knows most games intimately and owns plenty of them.  Jonathan, a guy named Ben, and I played a game called Power Grid, kind of like Ticket to Ride except you're building networks of power plants and lines.  I won - Jonathan was put out, but there was no helping it.  They had a large living room with a baby grand piano in it (that's where they hold church in Suzhou), so I played some Beethoven and Rhapsody in Blue on their piano afterwards.  It was a pretty terrible piano, but at least it was mostly in tune.

The next day, I went to 虎丘 in the morning, probably the most famous sight in Suzhou.  It's an old hill with all kinds of ancient buildings and historical sites on it, including tall brick pagoda over 1000 years old.  It leans to one side, so it's off limits to climb.  I was really tired after that, so I headed back to Jonathan's to take a nap.  Then Zach, Jonathan, Sisi, Ben (new guy I met in Suzhou, not Ben Hansen) and I had lunch at a Mexican place, which was great.  After that, I had another nap (soooo tired...) and then caught my train to Shanghai.

I got to Shanghai around 5 and then took the subway to Ben and Seth's stop.  Once there, I borrowed someone's phone to call them (my sim card broke Sunday morning, so I had been without a phone for two days - I borrowed phones 6 or 7 times in total); Seth didn't answer, but Ben did.  However, he was still at work.  He tried to get a hold of Seth, but Seth continued not to answer (turns out his phone was broken as well).  So I hung around the subway station and got dinner and waited for Ben, who showed up an hour and a half later.  I made myself at home at their place and started work on Wednesday!

And thus ends the story of the Sojourn to Shanghai.

Keeping in Touch

A few weeks before I left Beijing, I had the feeling that I should email my former investigators/recent converts that I knew were living in China to see what was happening with them.  I emailed a whole bunch of them.  Two of them emailed me back right away, 李小平 and George Wang.

I taught 李小平 for nearly 9 months on my mission.  He would come to church most of the time, but he was mostly interested in learning English, not in really finding a set of beliefs.  However, we had a good relationship.  He emailed me back right away and said he was working in Beijing at a hospital and wanted to see me, so we set up a time and I met him at his hospital on a holiday and we had lunch and went to an antiques market.  We had a great conversation; he's been in Beijing for nearly a year doing research while his wife and daughter are in Changsha.  He works 6, sometimes 7 days a week and long hours and rarely gets out, and it doesn't seem like he has many friends; he was really glad to see me.  He insisted on paying for lunch.  He also asked where the church was in Beijing and sounded serious about going again.  I'm still not sure if he's allowed to attend, but I will find out and let him know.  Just before I left Beijing, he gave me a piece of framed embroidered silk art.

George and his wife Karena were baptized in my last area, Hamilton, Ontario.  They are from Wuhan.  As I emailed George, he was Skyping with my friend Weston Packard, another elder from my mission who baptized Karena just before we opened the Chinese area and taught and baptized George.  It turns out Weston was coming to China for a week!  So a week before the marathon, Weston stayed at my apartment in Beijing for a few nights and we went touring - the wall, the Forbidden City, Jingshan park, hutongs, food, the summer palace, etc etc.  It was a blast.  I had been too busy/not interested enough to do anything touristy for the 2-3 months before that, so it was a perfect incentive to get out and see things.  After that, Weston flew to Wuhan and George gave him the royal treatment there, taking him all around, feeding him, and introducing him to his family and friends.  Weston doesn't speak Chinese, so it was all very funny.  Weston came back on Thursday and left Friday morning, just as Seth and Ben were getting in for the marathon.  I need to go see George in Wuhan one of these weekends; either the 1st or the 8th of June.  But really, there are no coincidences.  Just as I felt like emailing contacts from my mission, George was Skyping with Weston, and I had no idea Weston was even coming to Beijing two weeks after that.  Little miracles.

Church

Here's a few tidbits on church while I was in Beijing:

• I had two callings, as a branch missionary and a translator.  Joel and I would translate for sacrament meetings and for district conference - I consistently feel that my Chinese isn't good enough to translate, but it always seemed go okay, if not great.  I didn't translate as often as Joel, because I was gone several times and had to play the piano a few times as well.  But I enjoyed it, particularly translating testimonies because it feels like you're sharing your own testimony as you translate.
• As a branch missionary, I was involved in teaching Leah Pickering, a friend from England, Armene Gasagara, an awesome 17-year-old guy from Rwanda, and a few other people, both the missionary lessons and in gospel principles.  It really helped me to feel the spirit of missionary work again, and I am determined to be a lifelong missionary wherever I am.  Armene just set a baptismal goal for June 15th last week, and I really hope Leah gets baptized soon, because she will be a marvelous member of the church!
• I sang in the Easter program - the branch choir put on "The Garden", an oratorio by Michael McLean that is an allegory of the Plan of Salvation and the Atonement.  I was the ram in the thicket, and the music was fairly challenging for our little choir, but we put it together well.  It was a bit Broadway for a sacrament service, but I think it was a nice change for people, and it felt good to present something as a gift of sacrifice (several hours-long practices on Saturdays) and love.  I have a recording of it I made on my iPad - not the best quality, but something.
• Institute every week at the Stratford's house was a delight.  The lessons were always insightful and made me think harder about my commitment to and understanding of the gospel.  Clara Stratford got to Beijing about a month ago, and she had us all play Just Dance on her Xbox one week, which was hilariously funny!  I will miss institute at the Stratford's house.