Huolong’s

I’ve known Mostafa Elmasry for around 6 years. We used to chat over Yahoo messenger when I worked in Harbin, Heilongjiang province.

I wanted to say sorry to him about me not contacting him just because I’ve been quite busy with life since I came to Beijing. But, being busy is always an excuse. Everybody is busy, or at least busy with doing nothing!

Things seem okay over here. Though my wife and I live in different cities: she is now in Guiyang, Guizhou province for graduate studies in medicine and I work freelance as translator in Beijing, we never feel we are not together. Good communication between us is a two-way street that keeps us connected. I’ve come to know that good communication is part of the recipe for keeping a happy marriage.

I seem to like thinking and writing big. Cut! Let me write something small.

Mmm…

Today, without notice, or without other guys in this apartment seeing that notice, my apartment building had a water outage that started after I brushed my teeth this morning. When it finally occurred to me that I hadn’t washed my hair and face, I found there was no water coming out of the faucets. So, I didn’t wash my face until water supply was restored around 6:00 pm. Today, for once in a blue moon, I didn’t wash my hair. And, I bet it was a bad hair day for me!

I met a couple the other day when they were referred to me by a friend of mine for translating a letter and a certificate to be presented to the French Embassy for visa application. The couple are Amway’s Executive Diamond distributors. One of my former colleagues later told me that Anway’s Diamond distributors hold high positions and earn a lot without having to work. It didn’t came to me as a surprise when the couple later approached me by inviting my wife and me to their home for a “simple meal”. I thought they had their own ax to grind. But, I nonetheless accepted their invitation because the meeting might give me something inspiring.

After a meal prepared by his family’s cook, Chen, the husband, introduced my wife, me and the friend to how Anway operates to benefit its members, or Independent Business Owners (IBO) in Amway’s parlance.

I was moved by his successful presentation. Before reading what its critics say about Amway and other multi-level marketing (MLM) companies, I almost thought Anmay would provide me with an opportunity to create “my own business” that benefits my “customers” and myself. I was disillusioned to find that higher-rank Amway distributors earn most of their incomes by providing books, tapes, and other “tools” to their “downlines” and maybe by conducting brainwashing “seminars” where existing and potential IBOs gather religiously. All these are paid for by the distributors’ “downlines”. I hate this. I don’t want to take advantage of my friends and Anway reminds me of pyramid selling.

“Amway (and its online incarnation, Quixtar) have been controversial for years because of allegations that these companies are pyramid schemes. Critics claim that most of the products sold by Amway are to the Independent Business Owners (IBOs) themselves for personal consumption rather than to retail consumers who aren’t enrolled as IBOs. Buying products from Amway or Quixtar gives IBOs points and they are paid back on the number of points that they generate from personal consumption. It is claimed to be a business opportunity and hence an existing IBO can help others to get an IBO number and divert their buying habit from other stores to Amway or Quixtar. Thus the business grows as a greater number of people join the group. The share of profit is based on the leverage that an IBO has.

Typically, IBOs spend a large amount of money on tapes, books, and seminars (known as “tools” in AMO parlance) which are ostensibly “required” to “hone the business skills of the IBOs”. These are not provided by Amway itself but organizations often described as Amway Motivational Organizations (AMO) in general run by people in the higher ranks of the organization. Claims regarding the support material range from “can be of help to an IBO ” to “are absolutely required” to “build a big business”. However, undercover investigations like one done by MSNBC Dateline in April 2003 suggest that most of the money being earned by these successful individuals was coming from the hidden “tools” business rather than through selling the company products. Critics also claim that the materials are specifically geared towards encouraging IBOs to continue working for a non-economic return, rather than improving their actual business skills.

Dexter Yager’s organization, the International Dreambuilders’ Association/Digital Alliance (usually simply referred to by the abbreviation IDA) is arguably the largest and best-known of the AMOs, and is probably the one most commonly associated with Amway. ”

(Source: Wikipedia.org as quoted at Answers.com, http://www.answers.com/amway, accessed on August 26, 2006)

P.S. Recently, I’ve been thinking about what I should and could do to make a better life for my family…

Because I think translation is a stupid thing to do. I would like to reserve the difficult job for someone else to do. Tie him or her to my way of wild thinking in Chinese. Make s/he crazy, curse, and feel themselves to be idiots to be translators. And even worse, make them doubtful about their abilities of using the two languages involved and about the reason for their being.

I always seem to associate a song or several songs with a period of my life in which I listen to them a lot.

Time is racing ahead. I can’t stop it. Neither can anyone else. Nostalgia.

When I listen to songs such as Le Jour s’est Lev, one of the three incomprehensible French songs I got in exchange for three songs by Luo Dayou with a Frenchman, it never fails to reminds me of those days at Brightsun in Harbin, when I just began to learn of the Internet as a new guy at the company with the brand-new status of being an employee after years of being an English student.

Wei-ai-chi-kuang (Crazy About Love) by Liu Ruoying brings me back to those days when I was beginning to learn love, yet another brand-new topic to a freewheeling, awkward, and stupid boy.

And shengxia-de-guoshi (Fruits in Midsummer) by Mo Wenwei comes to me as a reflection of those lovely summer days in Harbin.

Now, new songs, which now I’m not aware of, will serve, when I listen to them again in the future, as nostalgic ones associated with my beginning days in Beijing. Even Delta ForceⅠwill come to me as my first ever computer game I have played for years, when mom is Beijing to see me and US and Britain are invading Iraq.

Time, you don’t stop continuing and we don’t stop aging and dying.

Looking for a job in Beijing

To come here was a tough decision. I doubted my decision of giving up my long accustomed life back home. I was awed by the uncertainties of future in Beijing and the disbeliefs of my competence racked me. Nonetheless, I came here on November 10, 2002.

Life here can be real tough. Without enough money to pay for things I need, I will have to live with a poorer standard of living than at home, for example, sharing with my roommate a cold room in a one-story house without an indoor toilet in the winter.

Beijing is different from Harbin. It’s a national city, if not an international one while Harbin is just a regional city. I hear Chinese people down the street in Beijing speaking every language and dialect known in China. Sometimes I may sit in a corner on a bus and be amazed, wondering if I’m really in China because a Chinese man who presses his cellphone against his ear talks a total foreign tongue, neither English nor German, it’s an unknown Chinese dialect no other people than himself on the bus can understand.

Being in a national city means I have more opportunities than in a provincial city. The bad news is that I may have more than I can chew.

It’s the second week I’d been in Beijing that I decided the adjustment to a new invironment was enough–I needed a job desperately. I sent numerous resumes through 51job.com, chinahr.com and zhaopin.com and printed dozens of copies of my application letter and resume and sent them out to my potential employers by post.

I still remember three of those job interviews.

The first one appeared to be a success for the immediate offer of the job. My job would involve translation in the fields of communications and set-top-boxes, something attached to the top of a TV set to receive paid programs.

I balked at the second interview. I crossed from the western to the eastern part of Beijing after changing several buses. When I got there, it turned out to be a PR (Public Relations) company that had something to do with The Oracle. The first interviewer was a formidable young man wearing a dark business suit. He told me that his was a medium-sized PR company hiring dozens of people and the successful candidate would deal with translations of PR materials.

After he left the room, a woman came back to test my spoken English. I told her that I might have come to a wrong place to look for a job because I didn’t think I was good with people which were an essential part of a PR position, otherwise PR would make no sense. I did not bother to take the following written test designated for each applicant. I came out of the impressive, imposing building, sighing. A company full of sexy women and big men is not my place. I’m happier with a much smaller company with a relaxed working atmosphere or a larger one without the dressing-yourself-up routine. Let me just think. Actually, I am not sure I like a large company because I’ve never been in one and don’t have an idea of it.

The third company, a translation firm, was extremely small and amazingly young. It’s not only that it just got started, but its boss was also a burgeoning one. I am sure we were born almost the same year and we should be friends, not employees and bosses. After a short spoken test and a long written test, he decided to hire me. But I had decided I would not accept a job offer from a company with a few girls looking like university kids under a young, novice boss. I left the young company, envying the young man’s position of being am employer. I’m also young, what am I?

Things did not happen as expected. Jiang, the man who had made his immediate offer of the translating position, seemed to be reconsidering his “rash” decision when he made a follow-up phone call right after I left his office in a corner office building, telling me to do a test of translation. Later on, I did another test. I failed all of them. The translation of contracts regarding Set-Top-Boxes was more than I could chew.

There are at least two kinds of open positions in Beijing when I look for a job–one that I’m worthy of and the other that I’m not.