Shipped to Shanghai! Vol. 19 -- Laser Tag Showdown

It took a long time for me to play my first game of laser tag. With my love of action movies, especially the bullet-riddled masterpieces of John Woo, laser tag was a perfect fit.

My company was sponsoring a laser tag match to reward the employees and say farewell to one of the departing English teachers, Anita (shown above). At first I didn't want to go. The venue was at Hongkou Football Stadium, which way far away from where I live.

But when Anita sent me a text asking whether I would come, I gave in. I didn't want to let down a friend who's so cool.

I have this problem: I'm chronically punctual. Usually, I'm anywhere from 15-30 minutes early for every occasion. It happened again for laser tag. I got to Planet Laser at 6:30pm, while the party wasn't due to start until 7:00pm. Even worse, I was the only English-speaking person there!

I was seriously sweating when sent a text message to Marie, a fellow English teacher from Australia. She had texted, saying she wasn't coming and that she hoped I had fun. I replied: "That's Mission: Impossible, but I'll try. I'm the only non-Chinese person here! :("

After an endless stream of Chinese staff, Anita finally showed up, along with Trent, another teacher from Australia. On a side note, I'll confess my jealousy of Australians and New Zealanders. The world loves Aussies and Kiwis. They can get working holiday visas for practially any country!

I've heard it's a case of reciprocation. We don't let anyone into America, so the rest of the world keeps us from staying too long. We can only work in Australia, New Zealand, and the UK, and that's for less than 1 year. No wonder everyone else out-travels us.

An employee gathered us together and demonstrated how to play the game. Chest hits were worth 100 points, back hits were 150 points, and shoulder hits were 200 points. We wore these big flak jackets with sensors.

I was disappointed. I wanted to jump sideways, dive down, and roll across the floor shooting like I've seen in action movies. I couldn't do that when the jackets had lights the size of watermelons that could break. We only got one gun per person, so I couldn't bust out the two-fisted pistol action like in John Woo movies:

Chow Yun-Fat looking badass in John Woo's Hardboiled

We were the Red Team and our opponents were the Green Team. When the siren sounded, we stormed into the shooting area. It was a dark maze of black walls, windows, and weird flashing lights. Feeling lazy, I positioned myself in a dark corner and played sniper, picking off everyone who walked by.

That's the cheap way to play laser tag. Eventually I got bored and went hunting for real. I pulled out all the SWAT-team moves I'd picked up from watching too many action movies:

--Run low to the ground

--Stand sideways when shooting

--Use available cover

--Peak around corners

--Match my eye movements with the sweep of my gun

I was creeping around when I saw my opportunity. A guy from the Green Team was standing in the middle of the doorway, with his back to me. It was too good to be true.

I checked both ways to make sure this wasn't some trap. Nobody. I snuck up behind him until I was within point-blank range. He was busy looking for enemies in front of him. I pumped ten shots into his back before he even knew I was there!

By the time he turned around and started shooting, I was already booking it and dove behind some walls. All that time in high school I spent playing Virtua Cop 2 finally paid off.

Hard Seat to Suzhou

I've finally gotten myself out of the Stone Age and bought a digital camera. It's so great, I don't know why I kept using disposable cameras for so long!

The great thing about Shanghai is that there's loads of interesting towns and cities nearby. Trains and buses that will go to most places at very low cost. My hard seat ticket to Suzhou was less than $2 USD!



There are four classes of comfort in Chinese trains:

Soft Sleeper
Hard Sleeper
Soft Seat
Hard Seat

The names are self-explanatory. Soft sleeper cabins are hotel-quality and cost about as much as a plane ticket. Hard seat cabins on long-distance trains can be a nightmare: crowded with dirty migrant workers eating, smoking, and playing cards, with no room to sit down.

Buying a train ticket can be a test of endurance. Long lines, noise, and ticket sellers trained in the Communist style of customer service: "Better a late train that's Communist than a train on time that's Capitalist."

The guidebooks recommend bypassing train stations altogether and buying tickets through hotels and hostels instead. Most of them have an in-house travel agency with English-speaking staff. There's a small service charge, but it's worth it for the convenience. Sometimes they have special contacts that can score tickets even during high season.

In addition, there are advanced-purchase offices that sell train tickets. This is the best option, since they're more conveniently located than the main train station, and have a lower service charge than a hotel. No English though, so bringing along a Chinese friend is a must. But sometimes these ticket offices are so well-hidden that even locals don't know about them! The one closest to my apartment is buried in the back of a tobacco shop. I used to wonder why I saw long lines there all the time!

It's also a good idea to buy an onward ticket or return ticket at the same time that you buy your initial ticket. Thanks to overpopulation, tickets get sold out fast on popular routes. That goes tenfold for Chinese holidays. The government only allows three 1-week vacations during the year: National Day (October), Spring Festival a.k.a. Chinese New Year (January or February), and Labor Day (May). This is the only time Chinese people can travel. They often to choose to go back to their hometown or travel to famous tourist sites. They don't have 2-week vacations they can take whenever, like America. So in high seasons, the tourist infrastructure is pressed to the limit.

Scalpers ("piao fanzi") make a fortune by buying up as many train tickets as they can for the holidays and reselling them at ridiculously high prices. They also do this for sports events and pop music concerts too. The most heartless scalpers buy up the wait-in-line numbers at hospitals and sell them to patients needing emergency care!

Since this was my first-ever trip into another part of China, I chose Suzhou ("su joe"). It's only an hour away from Shanghai by train. One of the most famous Chinese tourist blurbs goes, "In heaven, there is paradise. On Earth, there is Suzhou and Hangzhou." Suzhou if famous for its gardens and canals. Hangzhou is famous for West Lake, a huge lake that has cool old architecture.

When I polled my foreign friends and students, they unanimously recommended Hangzhou over Suzhou. The West Lake was big and had more stuff to see. They all thought Suzhou was too small, too boring, and not that great. While I thought it wasn't that bad, I definitely wouldn't stay there longer than a day.

I did like that the sky was clear and blue. The buildings didn't tower over me and block out the sky like they do in Shanghai. A lot of them had more traditional-looking roofs.





While I was wandering through the Garden of the Master of the Nets, I met Jessie, a girl from Beijing. When I told her I'd come to China without being able to speak Chinese, she gasped.

"You are so great!" she said. "You must be very brave to come to a country where you can't speak the language."

I brightened at that. Whenever I make a radical decision, i.e. to backpack through Europe, to teach English in China, I am never sure whether I'm being incredibly brave or incredibly stupid. The only way to find out is go for it.

Shipped to Shanghai! Vol. 17 -- Going for the Dream

"To know the road ahead, ask those coming back."
--Chinese proverb

One of my great pleasures is to give advice to future travelers. It's a big boost to your confidence when you know someone who's been there and can give you the straight story. The key person in my decision to come to China was a past graduate of my university. He visited my class and talked about his exciting career in the trading business, where he made money and got to travel around the world. Shanghai was his top pick in today's global economy. If I had slacked off and skipped class that day, who knows where I would have ended up?

Actually, I do know. I was very close to surrendering my dream of traveling to give up and become a real estate agent in Hawaii. A 6-week real estate licensing class vs. 3 years of law school, it was the easy way out. If I had gone through with that, I would be going to work every day dreading the coming downturn in the housing market. Instead, I'm studying Chinese and enjoying my front-row seat watching the fastest-developing city in the world.

Through my parents and friends who follow my adventures, I get inquiries from people about how to go abroad. In travel, there is no such thing as an unimportant detail. Every tip, every website can make a huge difference in someone's life. Know where to find the right information, and the impossible becomes possible.

The daughter of one of my father's co-workers was thinking of going to Japan. Here's my e-mail to her:

Dear ____ ,

Happy to help. The good news is that the JET program isn't the only game in town. Aeon and ECC are both supposed to be reputable companies. Nova has a really bad rep on the Internet, but they hire almost anybody. Despite the bad press, I have two friends who worked for Nova and liked it. Read the latest gossip on ESL Cafe. After a year in Japan, you can change to a better job. Gaijin Pot is where to look for jobs once you're in Japan.

The general advice is to avoid Tokyo, Osaka, and Kyoto. They're the most expensive. If you work somewhere else, you'll be able to save more of your salary. Many teach English in Japan or Korea to pay off student loans. Insider tip: there are more people from Hawaii in Fukuoka than any other place in Japan. It's a medium-sized city in Kyushu.

I don't think getting a teaching credential is necessary. Most companies don't require it and will provide some training. The work itself is pretty easy once you get some experience. You'd be much better off taking a Japanese class for the summer. I wish to God I'd studied Chinese before I came over here.

Teaching English is actually only half your job. The other half is answering questions about America. Or many times, defending America. All they know is what they've seen in movies, so I have to constantly remind my Chinese students that not all Americans carry guns and take drugs.

I'm not sure how bad it is in Japan, but racism is a big problem in China and everywhere else in Asia. Most English-teaching companies in Asia require you to send a photo with your resume, a blatantly prejudiced request. Asian-Americans and Asian-Canadians get turned down for jobs all the time. It might be a good idea to send your resume without a photo. Write on your resume that you're a U.S. citizen and native English speaker. That forces the company to call you or even better, interview you. Either way, they get a chance to hear you speak English before possibly rejecting you.

The first month in any foreign country will always be the hardest. Try to stick it out. That being said, ordering food by pointing at pictures gets old fast. The 4 priorities are: job, apartment, studying the language, and making friends. Once you get those four down, everything else will fall into place.

Japan is better than other places than Asia for a first-time expat. It's clean, developed, great food, companies provide health insurance, etc. I can give you advice on finding English speakers anywhere. This sounds really ageist and sexist, but if you need someone who speaks English, go for young women under 30. They're more likely to speak English than any other group. I've asked young men so many times, and they can't. Ditto for old people. Studying English is popular among the young, and I think women are better at languages than men. I was the only boy in a lot of my English classes. Most of my professors were women, too. I majored in English Creative Writing.

You can definitely make a career out of teaching. A lot of foreigners come abroad and never leave. Easy job, saving substantial money, the glamor of living abroad, and local celebrity status (especially if you're white and in a smaller town). On the flip side, there are a lot of foreigners who don't teach for long and move on to do something else. Part of it is the snobbery they get from expats with professional jobs, i.e. "English teachers are just backpacker trash."

Some of the foreigners who enjoy the benefits above are what one of my friends call an LBH = Loser Back Home. That's the ugly, gross, overweight, geeky guy that women back home would've deemed untouchable. But in Asia, he can score a hot girlfriend and a good-paying job just for being white.

You may not have thought about this, but dating can be a challenge for Western women in Asia. Almost every foreign guy I know has a Chinese girlfriend. Some Western women complain that they can't compete with the slim, ultra-fashionable, sometimes more subservient Asian women. Asian men can find Western women too strong and independent, so they avoid them. These are broad generalities, but I know plenty of single Western women as evidence.

My route to getting a job in China is a long, twisted story. Read my blog to get all the gory details:

http://bluefox808.blogspot.com/

My adventures in China start in September 2005. Scroll to the story on the bottom, and read your way upwards.

Feel free to ask me any questions. I'm all for helping people to travel. No education is complete without it!

Marcus

Shipped to Shanghai! Vol. 16 -- English was his passport

". . . to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded."

- Ralph Waldo Emerson, writer.


"I must learn English," John said.

"Why do you want to learn English?" I asked. We were sitting opposite each other at the classroom table.

His shabby jacket and cheap pants concealed his true identity: a highly trained computer programmer for a state-owned enterprise (SOE).

"I must move my family to Canada for a better life," John said simply.

"Why not go to America?" I asked.

He shook his head sadly. "Is better, but not possible. No one can go to America now."

I winced at his dire opinion. It was right on the money. This was a recurring theme with my students. With America closing the gates, the foreign talent were skipping the States in favor of Canada and Australia.

John was on the verge of going to Canada. The papers were filed, his name was on the roster, the process was rolling.

That left the interview at the Canadian embassy. According to John, "The interview scares me the most." Like most of my students, he had solid reading, writing, and listening skills. It was his broken English that might blow this opportunity.

The responsibility on me weighed a ton. If I failed to prep him for the interview properly, it would take John a long time to get another chance. If he got another chance. Botching this would ruin someone's life. That haunted me.

So I overcompensated. Over the next few weeks, we attacked the interview materials John brought. I scripted answers to every sample question that John got from Canadian immigration. He took exhaustive notes of everything I said. We recited the answers together over and over again.

I wanted to change to simpler words, but John was convinced that my first-choice words sounded smarter. The words were great, but he couldn't say them without stumbling over the syllables. A lot of the sample questions asked the same things. I was getting confused. John's progress was slow. He was going to fail the interview and it was going to be all my fault. I started freaking out.

Then one day, John walked in.

"Hey John, how's it going?" I asked.

He looked at me and his voice broke. "Marcus, I'm going to Canada."

Time Out in Taiwan!

Note: My brand-new digital camera was stolen shortly after I returned to Shanghai. So you'll have to believe me when I say I had awesome pictures of the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial Hall, Taipei 101 (the world's tallest building), Shilin Night Market, and cool Taiwanese girls.

Normally, I keep my language clean. But when I opened my backpack and saw my camera was gone, the call of "Motherfucking bastards!" carried far and wide.

I was looking up apartments on Tealit.com and got really excited when I saw they had dryers! In China, everyone hangs their clothes on poles that stick out from their building. They look like this:

(photo courtesy of Ed at the Aidohua blog).

Holy crap, if the thought of electric dryers is exciting, then I've been in China too long.

That's why I was so glad to be taking a vacation in Taipei, Taiwan. I envisioned it has having all the good stuff about China, with few of the bad things. I felt the same way about Hong Kong. Both were more Westernized and more Chinese.

One thing that intrigued me was how friends said that Taiwan and Hong Kong felt more "Chinese" than China. Huh? The reasoning was that all the people with money, culture, art, and talent fled the motherland with the rise of Communism. Many traditions in China were destroyed by the new regime. A Chinese student actually admitted to me that it was a good thing people escaped to Taiwan and Hong Kong, or the old ways would have been totally lost.

Having done a fair bit of traveling by now, I looked through my files for people I had met from Taiwan. A regular habit of mine is to collect e-mails. Never know when I'll be in their neighborhood . . . or their country.

I came up with a few names and zapped off e-mails. These were cool girls I'd met while studying abroad in England. I was looking forward to hanging out with them again.

The first reply was a disaster. Like an idiot, I bought my plane ticket before contacting the Taiwan girls I knew. Ashley was working on her Master's degree in England. She said that she'd be back in Taipei for vacation 3 days after I returned to Shanghai. I blew it. Game over.

Then the next response came in. Jessie was actually working in China! But she'd be home for vacation at the same time as my trip. Too cool! We'd definitely have lots to talk about. She said to call her up when I got into town.

The North Korea-South Korea thing gets a lot of press. I didn't know until I got here that there's a lot of tension between China and Taiwan (a.k.a. "cross-strait relations"). The short version is that China considers Taiwan a renegade province, a part of China. Taiwan sees itself as an independent country.

The residue of this political flack is that there's no direct flights between China and Taiwan. Flights have to go through Hong Kong, sometimes through Macau (a Chinese island famous for casinos). I ended up going through Macau. It used to be a Portuguese colony, so everything in that airport is in Chinese and Portuguese! That was so weird, like I was in some parallel world.

I flew on EVA airlines. I thought it was good, but my Taiwan students preferred China Airlines (not to be confused with Air China). China Airlines is the other major Taiwan carrier, but my Lonely Planet guidebook said they had a sorry history of crashes!

Riding the bus from the airport to downtown Taipei was surreal. Green mountains rippled around the city, lush trees tipped their leaves in the wind. If it weren't for the street signs in Chinese, I would have sworn I was back in Hawaii!

Somehow, I felt comfortable right away. The weather, the scenery, the Japanese cars, it all reminded me of home. I spoke some Chinese now, so I could get around without as many problems. Compared to the culture shock of Shanghai, Taipei was a leisurely vacation.

I called Jessie as soon as I checked in. We arranged to meet at the MRT station near my hostel. I got there early and just soaked up the atmosphere, as well as the exhaust from the million scooters whizzing around. While I waited, I conjured up memories of her. When we were in England, she had dressed simply. Casual sweaters and pants.

"Marcus?"

I turned and did a double-take. This was a new Jessie. She sported a denim jacket, cowboy boots, and a black skirt so short if defied existence. This wasn't the modest, sweet girl I remembered.

"Jessie?" When I meet someone I know from a while back, it's like all the time between the past and present are gone. The intervevening years disappear and it's as if they never happened.

We talked as she took me to a restaurant she liked. Her questions came hard and fast, all business: "What's your purpose in coming here?" "Which things will you see?" "What's your plan?"

I fumbled some words out and totally failed to impress her. She eased up on the interrogation when we got to the restaurant.

It specialized in Sichuan cuisine. It's a province in China with a famous saying: "In Sichuan, their girls are like their food: hot and spicy."

I asked her about work in China. She did marketing for a Taiwan company that had a factory in Guangdong province. Her company was near Guangzhou, a city that unanimously got bad comments from all my Chinese students.

So it wasn't a surprise when Jessie said she came back to Taipei because she couldn't stand it in China.

I told her some of my problems, and she was completely sympathetic.

"You don't like it, and you live in Shanghai!" Jessie exclaimed. "Shanghai is the most Western city in China." (not counting Hong Kong)

"That's why I'm visiting Taipei," I said. "It's part vacation, partly a trip to check out what it'd be like to live here."

She brightened at that, and went into a big move-to-Taiwan sales pitch. "Many foreigners teach English for a year, and go traveling."

That was my dream! "How long does it take to go to places from here?" I asked.

"Taipei is the core!" Jessie said. "Japan, China, Thailand, they all take less than four hours."

"Whoa!" It took me longer to fly to Los Angeles when I was in college.

Everything she said made me want to relocate tommorow. The only downside she mentioned was that my classes would be bigger, 10-20 students. I was surprised, because I had expected to have big classes when I first came to China, the world's most populated country. I lucked out in that my school capped the classes to five students each. Ironic that the smaller country would have the bigger classes.

After we finished off the spicy pork and fish with rice, Jessie took me to another restaurant for dessert. We had shin ren doufu, almond-flavored tofu in a bowl of sweet soy milk. Never ate that before.

I so intent on spooning up the great food that I didn't notice the pretty Taiwanese girl that walked up to our table. I thought she was one of Jessie's friends. But she was looking at me.

"Marcus!" Jessie whispered.

"What?" I looked at her and then up at the girl.

"Excuse me," the stranger said.

"Yes?" I took another bite of tofu.

"Did you study in England at the University of East Anglia?" she asked eagerly.

I almost choked on my tofu, I was so surprised! "Yes, yes I did! Have we met?" I asked.

She pouted. "Marcus! Don't you remember me?"

Oh no! Can't ever achieve pimp status if I forget girls' names. I looked at her closely. She had a nice tan. Back in England, we all had pale skin from the lack of sunlight. Forget skin, look at her face. She started to look familiar. Then I had it, she was at the International Party at UEA.

"Lucy?" I ventured.

"Nope."

"Oh." I was sad.

She broke into a big smile. "My English name is Lianne now!"

I motioned for her to sit with us.

Lianne and Jessie spoke in rapid-fire Mandarin, laughing and catching up.

"How did you recognize me?" I asked Lianne.

"Your shirt," she said.

I was wearing a surfer shirt that said Hawaiian Style on the back. Always gotta represent the 808 state when I travel.

"When I saw the Hawaii, I thought of Marcus," she continued. "You're the only person I've met from Hawaii. I had to come and check. I thought impossible!"

"Good thing you did," I said. I was still in awe at the serendipity of it all. In a city of 6 million people, what were the chances of visiting another country and have a girl recognize me?

Ashley, Jessie, and now Liannne. Three good reasons to return to Taiwan!

Shipped to Shanghai! Vol. 14 -- Dialing for Dollars

"If you don't want anyone to know, then don't do it."
--Chinese proverb

I was in a bind. My vacation was getting closer, and I still hadn't found a way to convert my Chinese yuan into U.S. dollars. Every bank I hit said they couldn't do it. China is the roach motel of foreign exchange policy: dollars go in, but they don't come out.

I was wary of street currency traders, for reasons I detailed in an earlier story. But they seemed to be my only option.

Luckily, Xiao came to my rescue. She's one of my students, a Chinese businesswoman preparing to relocate to the United States. Part of that preparation included converting her money into dollars before the big move. Xiao offered to set me up with her money man.

So that was how I found myself in the lobby of a crumbling office building on a side street, wondering if I'd been set up to be robbed. Xiao was with me, answering her cell phone every few minutes to give the money man directions to the building. Her eyes flitted to everyone who walked in. Was she watching for cops?

Finally, a disheveled-looking man in tattered clothes walked in. Everything about him screamed "homeless bum!" except for the big, gleaming leather satchel he held under one arm. Totally shady. I felt like I was doing a drug deal.

Xiao introduced him as Yang Li. He grunted and got straight to business, opening up the satchel. Packs of cash nearly burst out of the bag. Yuan, euros, dollars, he had it all.

Through Xiao, I told him I wanted to exchange 1600 RMB. Yang Li muttered something.

"He says you pay 5 RMB for each 800 RMB you exchange," Xiao translated. "So for 1610 RMB, you get 200 dollars."

That meant his fee was like 50 cents for every 100 dollars! That was way too cheap. Now I was worried he'd pass me counterfeits.

Yang Li presented two crisp, new hundred-dollar bills to me.

Being prepared, I took out a hundred-dollar bill I'd brought from America. I held his bills and mine to the sunlight. Mine had a slightly smaller picture of Ben Franklin on the right side of the bill that appeared in the light. His also had them. I rubbed the paper between my fingers. Felt the same, too. Hard to believe such clean money could come from such a dirty man.

I nodded and gave him 1610 RMB.

Yang Li counted money the way all Chinese people do. He curled the bills around his middle finger and flipped down each bill with his other hand.

Business done, he closed up the case and left without saying goodbye. Xiao left soon after.

I was still feeling disoriented. My first foray into the dark side went entirely too fast. It was really easy too, which was frightening. I didn't want this to be the start of a trend.

Now that I had real money, I concentrated on happier things. My next destination offered 32 to the dollar, so I felt rich already!

For more on this subject, check out Lost in Transaction, an article by travel writer Rolf Potts.

Shipped to Shanghai! Vol. 13--Mandarin in Action

"He who asks is a fool for five minutes, but he who does not ask remains a fool forever."
--Chinese proverb

Although my company is an English school, they also offer Mandarin classes. As an employee, I get a cool fringe benefit: free Chinese classes!

As a foreigner, I constantly get offers of "language exchanges" from Chinese people, i.e. "I can teach you Chinese for free!" I've tried it, and it's always been a waste of time. The deal is supposed to be 1 hour of Chinese, 1 hour of English. But it usually works out to 1 hour and 59 minutes of free English practice for the Chinese person. As a result, it's usually a bad deal for a foreigner. The going rate for private English tutoring is 150-200RMB an hour ($18-$25). In contrast, private Chinese lessons can be had for 50 RMB ($6) an hour or less. The other problem is that the language partner is usually not a trained teacher, so they lack the patience and the ability to explain things clearly.

To be fair, some of my friends have been able to make language exchanges work. The key things are that the Chinese person should share time fairly and the foreigner needs to know what they want out of the exchange. I think they work better for an intermediate-level student who wants conversation practice. For a beginner, I think it's better to shell out the money and get lessons from a real teacher.

There are ulterior reasons for language exchanges, though. Some foreign men use them to meet Chinese women, and vice versa.

I've been studying Mandarin one-on-one with Miss Zhang for about 6 months. I realized right away that it's hard to study spoken Chinese and written Chinese the same way. Miss Zhang teaches them separately. With spoken Chinese, it's best to stick to pinyin, the system of writing Chinese with English letters. This allows a student to speak Chinese very quickly. When writing Chinese, start with the easiest characters to write, then increase the difficulty.

My Mandarin skills were put to the test when I went out for a job interview. An American company needed native English speakers as voice talents for their English-learning software. Part-time work. I sent in a resume and a woman named Lily e-mailed to invite me to interview. But she couldn't understand my request for directions to their office. I had the address, but they didn't tell me the cross-street. I needed both to tell the taxi driver where to go.

I got out my Shanghai Tourist Map and found the closest subway station to the address: Dongchang Road station. The road was pretty close to the station, I was hoping I could just walk to the office.

After a 15-minute walk from the station, I found the street I was looking for. The nearest building said it was 500. I checked my address: 1515 Zhangyang Road. 1515! I was miles away from the interview site!

I hailed a taxi and got in.

"Ni qu shenme difan? [You go to what place?]" the driver asked.

"Yao wu yao wu Zhangyang Lu [one five one five Zhangyang Road]," I said.

"Ah?" She scrunched her face.

Damn! Have to say it another away. "Yi qian wu bai shi wu Zhangyang Lu [one thousand five hundred fifteen Zhangyang Road]."

"Ah!" She started the taxi.

She dropped me outside a complex of apartment buildings. This was residential, not commercial property! Was I at the wrong place?

My pronunciation must have been off! There's 4 tones in Chinese. The same word said with the wrong tone changes the meaning. Say "strawberry milkshake" with the wrong tones and you say "fuck-your-sister milkshake."

The office was in building 7. I found buildings 8 and 9 easily enough. The next building was . . . 15. What?! I backtracked and found a yuppie-type reading a newspaper outside building 9.

I started to ask where building 7 was, then realized I didn't know the word for building. Need to improvise.

"Bu hao yi si [Excuse me]," I said.

The yuppie looked at me.

I pointed to the sign that said 9. "Jiu [Nine]."

"Dui [correct]." He looked at me like I was an idiot. Why would I state the obvious?

"Chi na lia? [Where is seven?]" I asked.

"Chi?" He drew a seven in the air.

I nodded.

He pointed behind me. I turned around. Building 7 was across a big-ass pond.

"Xie xie [Thanks]."

He shrugged. "Bu ker chi [You're welcome]." He went back to his newspaper.

I raced across the pond to building 7. The seconds ticked by the elevator swept me up to the 16th floor. I stepped into the office at the stroke of 10:30AM. Just in time, thanks to my brand-new Mandarin skills!

How to say an address in Chinese:

Like everything else in China, it's backwards. Say the street name first, the number (each digit), and the word that indicates a number (hao).

1515 Zhangyang Road = Zhangyang Road one five one five

Zhangyang Lu yao wu yao wu hao

"Yi" is usually the word for one, except in addresses and phone numbers, where it becomes "yao."