Getting to Know Them All… May 8, 2010

After fussing around with the exigencies of where to place and how to operate the sound recorder several times during this tour, I finally decided to seek assistance from one of the many telephone company interns that migrates from place to place with us looking for ways to be helpful. I showed him the recorder and asked him to operate it while we were singing our last two sets in the pavilion on Wednesday, May 5. He studied it for a moment and told me that unless I erased a certain large file I would run out of recording space within about six minutes. I confessed I did not know how to erase files from it, and together we experimented until we had succeeded in doing the job. This gave us both a deep sense of satisfaction, not only in conquering the technological beast, but also in cooperating across a culture and language boundary.  Here is a link to one of the recorded songs:

http://www.garageband.com/song?|pe1|S8LTM0LdsaShY1e0ams

Between the two complete sets of our music that I have recorded, I should be able to extract something representative and worthwhile for each song; anyway, that was what I intended to do, but I have not had anything like the proper amount of time to assess this possibility and don’t expect to make any judgments on recording quality until I get back home to America. By the way, it is possible to interact with some big sites from China, but not others. I can’t get onto Facebook from here, nor Youtube nor anything else Google. Blogspot is out.

Our Guide, just before telling me not to take any more photos.

WordPress is in, but very slow I think because the state operates a program that strips out all the Google Adwords content before showing you anything and it may take two minutes just to perform simple operations.   After morning singing, we went to a kind of experimental education center operated by China Telecom where they toured us through a sort of model home of the future filled with interactive electronic gizmos: you can turn on your appliances before you get there, you have the whole world of entertainment at your fingertips, etc. I had been cheerfully taking pictures of everything I usually do when we arrived at the magic mirror in the bathroom which actually turns into a real-time Bloomberg info-screen terminal, and when I snapped that the guide told me that picture taking was not permitted.

So, with the wind depleted from my sails, I went back to the hotel and prepared for some genuine human contact with young employees of China Telecom in a sort of motivational seminar. We were paired up one and one, and asked to discuss vital issues like the future of technology and the meaning of Expo 2010. I showed my partner my Kindle and told her how it works, and then we talked about possible reasons why Shanghai is so much cleaner and the public services are so much more efficient than in the New York metropolitan area. Then we all took a break and had a contest to see who could transfer glass marbles fastest from one tall glass to an empty one beside it. Go figure.

Our hosts prepare to sing at the banquet.

Some of the young employees then joined us at the Corporate Leadership Banquet held in the hotel where we were staying (the hotel, I believe, also belongs to China Telecom). I sat next to Han Bing. Han is a fearsomely efficient and charmingly cheerful intern who will graduate from college and join China Telecom officially in August. She told me that both of her parents are teachers of English, which would partly account for her excellent pronunciation. We noticed some fuzziness around the “L” sound and demonstrated for her the proper tongue placement to improve it, which she promptly did perfectly. Then I asked her to practice by repeating the tongue-twister “She sells seashells by the seashore.” My friend Douglas Rose protested that it was unfair of me to do this without offering some sort of reciprocal challenge, and has thus made it his task to collect some Chinese tongue-twisters which I will have to learn and tell you about next time…

Han Bing.

After dinner, there was solo singing, most memorably our strong mezzo, Sonia, presenting us with a beautiful and heartfelt rendition of Deep River, before the evening closed with a small male chorus of Chinese executives, led by the local managing director, singing their own arrangement of  (hello!)  Edelweiss!?!