China - Day 51 - Machismo is Alive and Well

The theme of this week seems to be battle the laowai; I've had Chinese guys trying to show me up all week. The biggest place they've been battling me has been on the basketball court. I've started playing pick-up games 3 or 4 times a week (it's a lot more fun than running) at my apartment complex and the games are very much the same as they are in America; however, there always seem to be match-up issues, despite the fact that most of the guys here are around the same size. It seems to always end up with me guarding the other team's best player (because he will inevitably guard me, because I'm an American I must be good), which usually ends up with me (a natural 5, but I can play a 4) guarding a 2/3 and being blown past on the dribble with some frequency. Unfortunately, this match-up continues to be frustrating on offense because they abuse me inside and I usually draw a double team. I'm pretty dominant inside, especially on the boards, but battling inside gets tiring and unfortunately I can't rely on the outside shooting of my teammates. Such is the reality of pick-up games.

Elsewhere on the machismo front, drinking is treated very differently in China. My experience so far has been "Let's get the laowai drunk" every time I'm within 10 feet of a beer. The first time I experienced this, after my company's basketball practice a few weeks ago, I went with it because I wanted to give a good first impression and I ended up drinking 6 beers (600mL, 3%ABV). After that performance (and a misinterpreted claim that I could drink 12 beers over the course of an evening, which they thought I said I could drink in one sitting), Chinese guys try to force me to drink 12 bottles every time I eat with them. They don't seem to grasp the notion of drinking in moderation, despite my protests. I think they are trying to haze me, to prove that they are the drinkers that they think they are, but I am not going to play that game. Last night it got so bad that I just left the table when they wouldn't stop (I had drunk about 2L of beer and eaten 3 medium sized dishes at dinner, I felt like I was about to explode). I understand the concept of not causing them to lose face, but I'm not going to force this upon myself to save their egos.

Work has been somewhat slow lately. I've been trying to learn AutoCAD, but the program is in Chinese and I can't get it set to English, which is making it exceedingly difficult as I have to rely solely on the toolbar icons. I'm sort of getting the hang of it, but I still think I prefer Unigraphics and Pro/E. It is nice to have learned to use 3 CAD programs; however, I'm a little disappointed that I only really learned to use 1 of them in depth. Right now, Michael has me working on a project to assemble an Excel spreadsheet/database of tools used in various machining programs and the spindle speed/feedrate used for each one in each program instance. It requires a lot of data mining from machine code, which is tedious but not terribly difficult. I have conflicting opinions about this project because it's a rather basic task, but probably the most useful project I've worked on so far. I'm looking forward to the next couple of weeks when the engineers from Husky come to Allied from America/Canada to teach the company how to use the new automated machining line.