Absolute Relativity

Location: Road to Mt Everest Base Camp, Tibet

The mighty Mt Everest has taken the lives of 188 climbers and the number is still adding up.

Father and daughter spending evening quality time together in Summer Palace

Location: Summer Palace (Yíhé Yuán – 颐和园 ), Beijing – UNESCO World Heritage List

A group of drum musicals performing (with booze handy) in Zhong Shan Park, Shanghai. The audience appreciated the music although the beats sound foreign to most of them.

Location: Shànghǎi Bǎogāng Jítuán Gōngsī 宝山钢铁（集团）公司

Steel has always been a commodity of choice for China. Ambitions of former Chinese leaders concentrated heavily on steel production and China learned the hard way with the failure of the great leap forward, right before the cultural revolution. The government realized that steel produced by backyard furnaces were useless because the quality was so low. The call for integrated steel plant yielded Baosteel. Its location near Yang Tze river makes it easier to get the raw materials, to get water needed during the production (to cool the steel after the melting process requires lots of water), and to reach global market.

A Tibetan shepherd taking a cigarette break. Picture taken on the way to Mt Everest.

The equipment of a mobile shoe polisher in Xi Tang. She charges RMB 2 to clean your shoes but she gave up on my olive oil tainted boots.

No, the guy on the left is not Tom Cruise. He is a rickshaw peddler usually waiting just outside of the Xi Tang gate. He also buys unused entrance tickets for 30% the price. That’s how he gets his Hollywood moments.

Joking aside, MI3’s effect on Xi Tang is pretty massive and you can still feel it. It literally puts the small water village on the map. Residents are very proud of it and they display the MI3 posters everywhere.

A boat rower in Xi Tang (西塘), a town located on Jiashan County in Jiaxing City, Zhejiang Province.
The town is famous because of the filming of the movie Mission Impossible 3. Ironically, the movie was banned (or severely delayed?) in Chinese theaters because the some of the scenes in Shanghai are “tarnishing the image” of the city. The authorities were not happy with the scenes of underwear and clothings hung out on a bamboo poles, and the portrayal of Shanghai’s police as incompetent.

Drying clothes on a bamboo poles is not embarrassing, I call it one step further to a greener economy!

The boat costs RMB 100 for about half an hour ride and can be shared with 10-12 people.

Call it what you want but 99% of the students in the school share the same family name as mine! It was quite humbling to see lots of your distant relatives, from a little baby to a pre-highschool student gathered in one big room. If my grandparents had not emigrated to Indonesia, I would have been schooled here. This would have been my playground, I would have been a teacher teaching how to write Han Zi.

Strolling around in Fuqing, Fujian （福清，福建）, you will see something distinct about the houses. They defy the law of common sense that in villages, the houses should expand horizontally. Here you see towering houses that look like condominiums. Vertical expansion in a place where land is abundant does not make sense economically, but there are reasons why this is happening. I identified three things why people do this here: emigration, face, and family.

Fujian is historically one of the poorer province in China. A large numbers of people migrated abroad (including my grandparents) because the natural conditions (soil, river, weather, etc) is unsupportive, agriculture is bleak, mountains are full of stones. You will find out that most of the Chinese emigrants are either from Fujian or Guangdong (ask where the boss of the nearest Chinese Buffet restaurant in your town is from and you will know what I am talking about). These emigrants actually bring back a lot of money. A lot of infrastructures are funded by the overseas Chinese emigrated from this place. This long history of emigration augmented by the fact that face（面子） is more important than anything else is the key why people here, for their own good, have a my-house-is-higher-than-your-house mentality.

The third factor (family) closes the deal. By building the house upward, generations after generations can stay at the same house. First generation on the first floor, second generation on the second floor, etc. The size of each generation will most likely be the same because of China’s one child policy, although I have been informed that this policy does not affect small villages

I chatted with some people here and when you passed these condominiums, they will point their finger and say something in line with “That house belongs to Xiao Wang, he now works in Japan. He must be really successful there that he can afford to build it”