Today, my son is three weeks old.
Writing that makes me proud, scared, exhilarated, anxious, full to bursting with love, and back to proud again, with plenty of other emotions jumbled up in there as well.
His birth was about as textbook perfect as births go - had my "one week overdue" midwife appointment on Wednesday, at which I complained that my friend K had just had her baby the day before. However, by 6am Thursday morning, I was having the occasional contraction. At 2:50, my water broke, and at 6:50, my son was born.
All of my philosophy on life, being as close to what naturally occurs as possible, is exemplified in my son. During my pregnancy, I hardly ate any sweets or simple carbs and focused on eating tons and tons of grains and protein - even though eating fried eggs, boiled eggs, scrambled eggs, omelettes.... got really boring - until the last month, when I just got miserable and started eating maple bars. So far, there have been almost no pesticides or processed foods going into him either in utero or via breastmilk. I am hoping that this will give him what he needs to grow up healthy, and reduce the risks of autism or ADD/ADHD.
Having a child is the most scary thing I have ever experienced. Everything I do is focused on making sure this little person is taken care of. When L came into my life, she needed supervision and care, but she was already two years old, mobile, eating regular food and sleeping (mostly) through the night. My son is completely dependent on me for food, although with pumping my husband can help, for comfort and care during the day, and he sleeps with me at night. It's an awesome responsibility, being so important to him, and knowing all the dangers there are to children that run over and over in my head - one of the hazards of working in product safety.
For now, I'm content just to stare at his face and tickle his toes and sigh over how amazing he is. I'm glad I'm good at compartmentalizing my fears and locking them away or I'd be a neurotic mess after just three weeks with my perfect, tiny, wonderful son, much less the many years to come.
Thursday, November 17, 2011
Tuesday, September 21, 2010
Final Impressions
If I have on overriding feeling about the trip to China, it is that it would be a great place to live and work if it weren’t so horribly polluted. Living there is basically asking for respiratory problems at a minimum, and almost guaranteed cancer, not to mention the sheer amount of waste one would produce from all the bottled water to avoid the contaminated water there. But, the food was a amazing, the opportunities are amazing, and I find Chinese language, culture and history fascinating. It’s really too bad that they have failed to keep their natural environment sustainable for human life in the long-term – here’s to hoping they can actually turn that around.
There are a few places and things we saw in China that make me more hopeful for China’s future. Young people seem to be more concerned with sustainability and less waste, rather than embracing the insanity of Western consumer culture. Given the huge population and somewhat limited natural resources of China, they don’t have the time to waste before even more harm occurs than 30% of water being contaminated, or entire cities being evacuated due to chemical spill.
There is a lot to be worried about though. There are a lot of cars in China, and most of them are like ours, which is to say dirty polluters of both particulate matter and CO2. What’s worse is that to achieve the same percentage of GDP we do, China expends 10 times or so the energy. Every bit they grow, they exponentially increase their levels of pollution, fossil fuel usage, and resource usage. If the Earth had infinite resources, that would be just fine, but it doesn’t. So, I have to admit that China’s growth really worries me, because we can’t tell them they shouldn’t do what we did in good faith, especially since we’re not taking significant steps ourselves to reduce our own levels of pollution.
The key takeaways:
-There is a lot of opportunity in China at this moment in terms of growth and a consumer minded middle class
-China is incredibly polluted from trying to grow so fast and from having a growing consumer minded middle class of consumers
-It is really hard to be vegetarian in China
Monday, September 20, 2010
Shanghai Expo and Leavetaking
The morning of the Shanghai Expo, we left fairly late in
the morning. I think many of us are, while not looking forward to the actual
flight, looking forward to slowing down a bit. The weather was incredibly hot.
The kind of hot that made it difficult to function in Singapore, Miami,
everywhere I’ve been too far south of Seattle. I loved Alaska, though,
especially when it was raining and gray… in any case, it was very, very hot.
We all split up after taking the first few group shots, and made our way around the Expo. The lines were incredibly long at some of the pavilions, and we heard that you had to have reservations for the Taiwan exhibit. Some of us eventually made our way over to the Europe pavilions, as our resident architecture expert Juli told us they were worth seeing – and she was right. The UK exhibit was like a giant metal porcupine, and the Germany exhibit was a really neat angular thing. Definitely enjoyed viewing them, but the lines…. Not gonna happen.
I wanted to see the Austria exhibit, and Claudia wanted to see the Sweden exhibit, so we continued on through the Expo park after some of the others took off. Even the Austria exhibit had an hour long line. We finally felt like we hit pay dirt when we reached the shared European pavilion that contained San Marino, Liechtenstein, Cyprus, and a few other small European countries – no lines! It was like getting free candy, but better.
The final going away dinner was the best dinner we’d had in China, which is saying a lot. The food here has been really amazing. There was an orange fish that was so perfectly cut and prepared that you could just take the breaded and sauce covered chunk directly off of the fish, no bones. Highly impressive – but not as impressive as the house specialty, their roast pork. It was a slow roast pork that just about melted off of the rib that was dipped in sweet and sour sauce, then in panko bread crumbs, and then wrapped in a piece of lettuce and eaten like a spring roll. I cannot go into enough raptures about how amazing the flavors and textures of that particular dish were.
Our evening entertainment was a karaoke parlor, Chinese style. Normally, there’s a professional running the karaoke machine, and you just submit a piece of paper and sing awkwardly in front of strangers. This was a private booth type place, where you run the machine (which is in Chinese) yourself, and then sing awkwardly in front people you actually know. Much more awkward. But, I do love to sing, so it was fun. All in all, a great ending to a great trip.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Seattle day: Expeditors & PMI
Today is our “Seattle” day – both company visits today are to businesses headquartered in Seattle. Expeditors is a logistics solutions company, and PMI is a beverage solutions company. I find that this “solutions” term has become ubiquitous in business parlance of the past decade or two. In any case, I think these visits were the most interesting for us this trip.
The answers at Expeditors were frustratingly vague on the big questions we asked, although they were perfectly happy to answer detail questions about their operations. We were wondering if perhaps they were trying to put a perfect face on their operations. Regardless, it was very frustrating to keep asking the same questions over and over again and getting the same non-answers from the regional manager.
PMI makes the cups you see at Starbucks, in addition to other private label items. The visit to PMI was brilliant, and really my favorite company visit. We were lucky to have Qin Chen at our lunch table prior to the visit, and had a detailed discussion about the employment of expatriates in Chinese firms. He said that the kind of problem solving and managerial skills they needed when they first went to Shanghai simply didn’t exist in China in the numbers that they needed to be able to find local hires, since every other foreign company was looking for a person with the same sort of experience. He said that they’ve been able to build up a number of their employees internally, and so they have those skills now, but that it is still worthwhile to hire expatriates. This could be very concerning for a company, because that’s a huge amount of time and invested effort into these Chinese employees just to make them the kind of employee that can do the necessary work. Replacing someone would be quite difficult in those circumstances.
Friday, September 17, 2010
China Study Tour: Shanghai - Paris of the East
Our trip from Xi’an was entirely uneventful, as are the best plane trips. The airline food was minimally edible, although the Sprite was nice. We took the Maglev from the airport, and it reached 431kph, which is pretty darn fast.
From the plane upon arrival in each of the cities I’ve visited in the developing world, one could see the slums on the outskirts of the city. I think Chinese slums must look different than I’m used to, because all I saw were very cramped looking brick houses. India breaks your heart with the obvious human suffering surrounding the visitor every step, every day in India. One must eventually learn to ignore it, or else go slightly insane. Maybe China’s heartbreak is primarily rural and can’t be seen on a Study Tour encompassing only the urban centers of Beijing, Xi’an, and Shanghai.
Upon initial arrival in Shanghai, it struck me that I was reminded of Mumbai. There are so many people in the streets, there is a ripe scent to the air that I suspect is the combined odor of millions of sweaty bodies from the muggy, humid heat, and a certain late 19th/early 20th century European flair to many of the old buildings along the waterfront. However, this is where the comparison must end, as Shanghai is an amazing city, full of diverse, innovative architecture, it boasts a Maglev airport train, and is currently hosting the World Expo. No offense to Mumbai, but there really is no comparison after the initial superficial similarities are set aside.
After checking in and getting mostly settled in, we took a walk down to the river to see the Pudong and the Shanghai skyline. This resulted in much picture-taking before we settled on heading across the river to the Pearl Tower.
After a long stroll to reach the ferry, then a ferry ride (2 yuan!) and then a long stroll to the Pearl Tower, it was discovered that the cost for dinner was 280RMB, or 140 times the cost of the ferry ride. That price is completely ridiculous, so half of us settled on Subway, as we were starving, and others went to a nearby mall for other fare.
The view was mostly worth the price of admission (100RMB), although having my personal bubble invaded about every two seconds is honestly getting annoying. Having my alone time helps me get back my equilibrium to face the seas of humanity about me each day, but I have to admit it will be nice to go home, back to a place where an elevator with five occupants is considered full.
From the plane upon arrival in each of the cities I’ve visited in the developing world, one could see the slums on the outskirts of the city. I think Chinese slums must look different than I’m used to, because all I saw were very cramped looking brick houses. India breaks your heart with the obvious human suffering surrounding the visitor every step, every day in India. One must eventually learn to ignore it, or else go slightly insane. Maybe China’s heartbreak is primarily rural and can’t be seen on a Study Tour encompassing only the urban centers of Beijing, Xi’an, and Shanghai.
Upon initial arrival in Shanghai, it struck me that I was reminded of Mumbai. There are so many people in the streets, there is a ripe scent to the air that I suspect is the combined odor of millions of sweaty bodies from the muggy, humid heat, and a certain late 19th/early 20th century European flair to many of the old buildings along the waterfront. However, this is where the comparison must end, as Shanghai is an amazing city, full of diverse, innovative architecture, it boasts a Maglev airport train, and is currently hosting the World Expo. No offense to Mumbai, but there really is no comparison after the initial superficial similarities are set aside.
After checking in and getting mostly settled in, we took a walk down to the river to see the Pudong and the Shanghai skyline. This resulted in much picture-taking before we settled on heading across the river to the Pearl Tower.
After a long stroll to reach the ferry, then a ferry ride (2 yuan!) and then a long stroll to the Pearl Tower, it was discovered that the cost for dinner was 280RMB, or 140 times the cost of the ferry ride. That price is completely ridiculous, so half of us settled on Subway, as we were starving, and others went to a nearby mall for other fare.
The view was mostly worth the price of admission (100RMB), although having my personal bubble invaded about every two seconds is honestly getting annoying. Having my alone time helps me get back my equilibrium to face the seas of humanity about me each day, but I have to admit it will be nice to go home, back to a place where an elevator with five occupants is considered full.
China Study Tour: Brother Machinery Co. Xi’an
Brother is a Japanese company that initially began a joint venture with a Chinese firm in Xi’an in 1993. In this location, they make low-end to high-end industrial sewing machines as well as machine parts for large machinery primarily located in the south of China.
Our presentation was made by a Japanese employee who was fluent in Chinese, and reasonably good at English, although he kept distrusting himself and switching to Mandarin and one of the Mandarin speakers in our group would translate, usually Derek. He said that there were 11 Japanese employees at the plant, and only one of them spoke Mandarin. Their upper level plant managerial staff all spoke Japanese, and workers could attend Japanese courses if they wished. We found this very interesting – this is something seen in France and Japan, I would say most, this sense of national pride and an unwillingness to compromise national culture in a multinational venture. This is in reality too broad an indictment of all Japanese and French firms. However, I do believe that firms in China will either wish to speak their own language, or expect to conduct business in English. I feel that the Chinese have not yet attained a level of status in the world that would force those who wish to do business here to learn their language. Until then, I will be pleased that my language is now the language of the world, making my life much easier when traveling.
Our presenter wasn’t actually prepared for us when we arrived. He said that Chinese people are usually 1-2 hours late, and thus he didn’t expect us to be on time (we were five minutes early). Thus, some of the charts weren’t in English, and he seemed very flustered and unsure of how to structure what he had to say.
The most surprising part of visiting Brother was in hearing how not lean the processes at the plant were. Brother is headquartered in Nagoya, the same city as Toyota, and they ascribe to lean principles and the Toyota manufacturing method, and yet the volume of work in process inventory just sitting on the factory floor was staggering. The workers also weren’t wearing hard hats or safety equipment, but that is probably beside the point. The company’s core values, dress code, and team metrics were posted in prominent places in the factory. But, I just couldn’t get over the volume of inventory lying about – it was clearly not a just in time sort of operation.
The most interesting part of the presentation to me was the discussion of profit, or lack thereof, in the operation. Brother already makes virtually no profit on their lower-end sewing machine, which retails for $300, and is primarily intended for markets such as Bangladesh. They do quite well on their high end machines, but the presenter was saying that wage increases and logistics difficulties in transporting parts and finished goods were seriously eating into the potential profits of the business.
I really appreciate the time that Brother gave us in Xi’an. This was a real business tour, not a sanitized version for public consumption. We got a real picture into difficulties running an outsourced manufacturing business in China, something China is famous for in business worldwide, and the ways in which it wasn’t a successful venture, and the ways in which it was.
Our presentation was made by a Japanese employee who was fluent in Chinese, and reasonably good at English, although he kept distrusting himself and switching to Mandarin and one of the Mandarin speakers in our group would translate, usually Derek. He said that there were 11 Japanese employees at the plant, and only one of them spoke Mandarin. Their upper level plant managerial staff all spoke Japanese, and workers could attend Japanese courses if they wished. We found this very interesting – this is something seen in France and Japan, I would say most, this sense of national pride and an unwillingness to compromise national culture in a multinational venture. This is in reality too broad an indictment of all Japanese and French firms. However, I do believe that firms in China will either wish to speak their own language, or expect to conduct business in English. I feel that the Chinese have not yet attained a level of status in the world that would force those who wish to do business here to learn their language. Until then, I will be pleased that my language is now the language of the world, making my life much easier when traveling.
Our presenter wasn’t actually prepared for us when we arrived. He said that Chinese people are usually 1-2 hours late, and thus he didn’t expect us to be on time (we were five minutes early). Thus, some of the charts weren’t in English, and he seemed very flustered and unsure of how to structure what he had to say.
The most surprising part of visiting Brother was in hearing how not lean the processes at the plant were. Brother is headquartered in Nagoya, the same city as Toyota, and they ascribe to lean principles and the Toyota manufacturing method, and yet the volume of work in process inventory just sitting on the factory floor was staggering. The workers also weren’t wearing hard hats or safety equipment, but that is probably beside the point. The company’s core values, dress code, and team metrics were posted in prominent places in the factory. But, I just couldn’t get over the volume of inventory lying about – it was clearly not a just in time sort of operation.
The most interesting part of the presentation to me was the discussion of profit, or lack thereof, in the operation. Brother already makes virtually no profit on their lower-end sewing machine, which retails for $300, and is primarily intended for markets such as Bangladesh. They do quite well on their high end machines, but the presenter was saying that wage increases and logistics difficulties in transporting parts and finished goods were seriously eating into the potential profits of the business.
I really appreciate the time that Brother gave us in Xi’an. This was a real business tour, not a sanitized version for public consumption. We got a real picture into difficulties running an outsourced manufacturing business in China, something China is famous for in business worldwide, and the ways in which it wasn’t a successful venture, and the ways in which it was.
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