Yes Virginia…….there is Christmas in China

A friend of mine from Virginia dropped me a note a couple of days  ago in which he suggested that Christmas was probably not too well recognized here in China.  Au contraire………. 

Xiamen has a long history of association with the west, all the way back to the Dutch, who were about the first Europeans here.  And the place is among the more prosperous of Chinese cities in the middle of the trade boom where all your dollars for all that stuff for the holidays end up in or near here, all or in part, since most of what you went and bought came from China.

So it’s entirely appropriate that these friendly folks have adopted Christmas as a big commercial event and signs of it are all over.   The Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend saw the lobby tree-lighting at the Sheraton Hotel where the unhappy angel was. 

He and a bunch of kids from a music school on the small island of Guilan Yu sang a couple of Christmas songs for the amusement of a small crowd and a large wedding party sharing the lobby.  It was a little unusual to my eyes to see the angel’s and chorus in the background and the back of the wedding couple in the foreground as they greeted wedding guests entering the hotel lobby.  But standing in back of the bridal party offered a good view of a Chinese wedding ritual where every arrival discretely hands the white-gowned bride a small red envelope stuffed with cash.  The bride, with the aplomb of an illusionist, discretely stuffed each stuffed envelope into her mothers purse, itself stuffed with a whole lot of red envelopes. 

Those two got a good start. 

The kids in my classes knew the date of Christmas better than they knew the date of the end of the school term.  Some of them think I look like Santa Claus and when I joked that I actually was Santa Claus, they hit me up for their gifts………..stupid me. 

There are a number of big, multi-storied malls downtown here, one operated by a Philippino consortium is called the SM (for Shopping Mall, not for bizarre entertainment) and there is no Chinese translation which is interesting.  City busses have SM on their name-boards and if you tell any Taxi driver “SM” they know exactly where to go.  The place has six floors, a huge Walmart in the basement and rivals the biggest ones in the States.  Whole floors are  dedicated to specialities — one for furniture and an entire floor to electronics — these guys live by cell phones. known here as “mobiles.”  There is a food court as big as a football field where you can get anything from octopus and squid to funny hotdogs they eat on long sticks, kind of a cocktail party h’ordeurve on steroids.

The malls, including the SM, like malls almost everywhere got decorated for Christmas at Thanksgiving (the latter holiday is not well-recognized).  The Sheraton advertised a Thanksgiving Dinner, but their turkey missed the plane so they moved the dinner (part of a big buffet) to Friday night.  The fellow who does guest services didn’t realize that the specific day counted that much.  I’ve been to some peoples homes for thanksgiving and the interminable delays waiting for all or part of the meal suggested they and the Sheraton guy were on the same page.

Classes are held here on Christmas Day just like any other.  The holiday is completely commercial except for the Christian community which includes no few Chinese.  The first Christian Church was established in Xiamen (when it was called Amoy) in the middle of the 19th Century.   I haven’t seen it yet, but I’ve got a book somewhere with the address.

So foreign teachers can actually take Monday and Tuesday off if they want to, but doing that screws up the sequence of all the class sections for the week so it’s better to keep it just another day.   January 1st is a regular holiday though, no classes at all.

So, yup Virginia, there is Christmas here………..they’re only a couple of years ahead of the States…….the whole thing is already totally commercial.

Cultural Selfishness

A friend of mine who taught here at Jimei University gave me a good idea for solving a grading problem with team projects.  He’s working in Kunming now, but before he left he passed on his idea.  Most U.S. business schools use projects or case studies to illustrate business problems and form student teams to work on them.  This approach gets students used to working together, helps them understand the strengths and weaknesses of individuals and simulates most workplace environments where people are supposed to work together.

With a team project it’s often difficult for the teacher to know the individual contributions of each team member.  Projects are usually presented by one speaker or submitted in written form where you really don’t know who wrote what.  One way to grade the project is to give the team a single grade and have each team member get the same grade.  My friend suggested that you give a single team grade, but that the teams multiply the team grade by the number of team members and then have the teams figure out how to allocate their budget among team members.  So if a team has six members and the grade is eighty, the team has a budget of 480 which the team, by consensus, divvies up among the team.

Some of my students had a problem with my friend’s idea.  Some teams wanted to keep grade distribution more “Chinese” and give everyone the same grade.  Others thought those who contributed more ought to get the better grades.  Some complained that allocating grades based on contribution was selfish – not the Chinese way.  These kids were friends.  Some had lived together in the same dormitory for four years.  So keeping friends was important.  And some kids actually argued that the smarter kids should do the hard work anyway since they were more capable which left added time for the less capable kids to play video games.

I’m not sure any of this has anything to do with being Chinese.  Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) wrote of a fictional character, Tom Sawyer, who made a habit of tricking friends into doing his work.  Tom Sawyer pulled his trick in Misouri or something.

I promised my students at the beginning of the term that I would teach them how business really works, so I explained merit systems and differential pay.  That’s how business works……sometimes.

A difficult problem for new managers is being fair and equitable in evaluating individual contributions particularly when some of the people he or she is evaluating are old friends.   Many new managers come from the ranks and have friends they’ve known for as long as or longer than my college seniors.  And some new managers sometimes choose friends over the business.

I think when one becomes a manager; he or she leaves one club and joins another.  While they can go to the old clubhouse and the meetings from time-to-time, they have to remember they are now in a different club. They left the worker-bee club and joined the management club.

There is kind of a rule in business that one can’t hold membership in both clubs at the same time. Of course they can keep their friends, but they can never compromise their position as a neutral, objective judge of performance – in reality or in perception.  In their new club, being a dispassionate judge of performance is what they are paid to do.  Sometimes they’ll lose a friend or two, but I think the one’s they lose, probably weren’t the friends they thought they were. 

Managers get performance budgets to divvy up too, whether it’s the skew of performance evaluations, the salary budget or the bonus pool.  They’re expected to allocate rewards and sanctions according to contribution.

That’s the way business works.