The Road to Shanghai

For to of the weeks, was on the road with colleagues from Nantong and Nanjing, visiting factories in the Ningbo and Wenzhou / Taizhou areas. We were resolving or heading off quality problems, scoping out prospective new vendors, and smoothing out initial deliveries on a big project. By the time I finished checking email in the evening, it was usually close to or beyond midnight. (I did get in a few games of xiangqi with Liu Sheng - and even won once.) For the most part, I find China’s public transportation system better than that of the United States - for travel between and well as within cities. There are frequent buses between any pair of decent-sized cities, and trains connecting most that are south of the Yangzi River. The buses are ok when they are on U.S.-style highways, but when they go through towns their horns blare annoyingly all the time. I love the trains in China. They go 30-40 miles an hour and are peaceful. Like much else in China, they remind me of the United States in the 1950s. Since Nantong is on the north side of the Yangzi, I usually have to take a bus to Shanghai to go somewhere else. That takes 3 - 4-1/2 hours, almost half of it crossing the river by ferry, depending on traffic. Buses have first priority for getting onto the ferry, though, zooming past long lines of cars. So, the first week I took a bus to Shanghai, then a train to Ningbo. The second week, I took a bus in the other direction to Nanjing, so two of us could meet two others from our Nanjing office and fly together to Wenzhou, a city along the east coast of China that is several hundred miles south of Ningbo, which itself is south of Shanghai. At work, we hired someone new this month, a woman named Ding Binbin, who has some managerial background and just returned from getting a business degree in Holland. She is helping me take on some work on “new part development” that Harlan decided to transfer from Kansas City. After two weeks largely out of town, it took me more long hours to catch up with work that had piled up. Gradually, what was a chaotic situation is becoming somewhat routine. Speaking of travel, the May Day holiday (which Chinese people are endlessly surprised to learn was started by the American labor movement in the 1880s) is coming next week. Terry and I have bought overnight train tickets from Shanghai to Wuhan, where we will visit our friends Johnny and Grace (Honggen and Xiaohong). We are looking forward to the trip. -- Norty