David's Big Adventure in China

Well it’s another Christmas in China. It’s nice that it fell on Sunday so at least it wasn’t a normal work day but we’ve been so busy at work that Bonnie and I ended up working part of the day anyway. Things have gotten crazy with this company. There has been an investigation going on regarding accounting irregularities and they have proof of some misdeeds by the former management. They haven’t finished the investigation yet so I imagine that they will find more. They had to announce that they found some things and that we will have to restate financial statements for the last 2 or 3 years and that caused Nasdaq to stop trading in the stock. We’ve also had some changes in leadership which are unrelated to the other issues. Add all that together and it makes for big challenges. These things haven’t directly affected my division (and no improprieties in my division) but they do have significant indirect consequences. Needless to say, it’s not real fun here right now. I’ve already told them that I want to cut back to part time by August and sooner would be fine with me.

Otherwise, married life is going well. Bonnie is working as hard as me as she has been doing a lot of work for our company in addition to her teaching duties. Recently that work has been translating documents related to the investigation I mentioned above.

We went to a wedding party on the 18th at the Marriott for the daughter of one of Bonnie’s colleagues. One cultural difference is that normally spouses or significant others are not invited to a wedding party here unless they personally know the bride or groom so it was a bit unusual that I was invited to go with Bonnie. I think they were curious to meet her foreigner husband and I was the only foreigner in the group. Wedding parties here only last a couple hours as they don’t have music and dancing after dinner.

We went to the Marriott for their Christmas Eve dinner. It was very expensive at more than $100 usd per person and included some entertainment and nice door prizes. Unfortunately we weren’t lucky enough to win anything. The place was packed and in another part of the hotel there was a big party put on by the local BMW dealer for BMW owners in town. There are so many rich people here and this is a relatively poor city. I don’t know where those folks get all their money. I have read that more than 50% of the rich in China want to immigrate to the west mostly because they don’t feel secure here (probably because most of their gains are ill-gotten) and because they want a better education for their children.

Well this will wrap things up for 2011. Happy New Year and best wishes for a great 2012!