David's Big Adventure in China

Wow, it’s really been quite a while since I posted an update here. I spent 2 weeks in the states in mid July going to a wedding, visiting family in Indiana and then visiting friends in Florida. I first went to my nephew’s wedding at his in laws’ backyard overlooking the Atlantic Ocean near Boston. Then I drove to Indiana with my parents for a few days before heading to Florida to visit friends and family there. I was the beneficiary of an almost random act of kindness (Thanks RL!) on my flight from Hong Kong to San Francisco as a guy I met on a flight several years ago used his airline status to get me upgraded to business class (we chatted on Facebook the night before my flight). My return trip itinerary was Tampa to Houston to San Francisco to Hong Kong to Nanning all in one day. The trip took about 29 hours and I consumed 6 airplane meals. I brought back a whole suitcase full of food items that I can’t buy here. I opened up a can of beanie weenies the other day that I brought back and Bonnie enjoyed the beans but not so much the weenies……..lol.

I’m an employee of the Chinese company here and thus pay taxes, etc. just like the Chinese staff. At first they were deducting money from my pay for medical insurance (actually more like a medical savings account) until I learned that they only place I could use that insurance was the small town where we have our pig farms. Since I am very rarely there it seemed stupid to have that so I asked them to stop withholding it. So many things here are locally oriented including many federally mandated programs such as social security. Social Security benefits are paid from the location where you worked and paid in the money so if you worked in several different counties then you’d have to go to each to collect the benefits and they would be paid separately. Many people choose to only pay into the social security system in their hometown which creates headaches for the employers and employees. I wish I could express my true frustration with these kinds of things here but it’s best I don’t take any chances on causing myself any trouble.

Bonnie has had a busy summer with all of her part time jobs and last week was doing translation/interpretation at an international meeting including translating for the former president of the Philippines (Ramos). This week she’s working in Beihai, Nanchang, Xinyu, and Shanghai. Next week she starts back to school. I worked at home 2 days last week because we didn’t have power at our office. Actually, we’ve been lucky not to have many power outages although one day we were told we couldn’t use air conditioning in the office. In the small town where we have the farms they are frequently without power for many hours. I’ll write more about the power situation next time. A couple weeks ago I was in Hechi (the county seat of the county where our pig farms are located) having a couple meetings and in both meetings someone came in and took pictures (they don’t get many foreigners in Hechi…lol).

I had a visitor from the states in my office last week. Scott Tong is a reporter on the NPR business program called “Marketplace”. We shared some emails while I was teaching as I would sometimes use his reports in my classes to help the students practice their listening and to generate discussion topics. At the time he was the China correspondent but has since been repatriated back to the states. He was born and raised in the states but is of Chinese heritage. His visit was a social visit as he was in town visiting a friend.

Be sure to check out my pictures by clicking the link on the right. Until next time…….