Just to expand on the atypical trip:

I know it’s a long trip when there’s a plane flight that does not involve Shanghai. To review, it’s Saturday night, but rather than being home I am in “rural” Henan province - meaning a city of 1 million that I had not heard of until this afternoon - a couple of hours north of Wuhan. Increasingly it seems that our clients are very urgent to get their projects underway, perhaps fearing rightfully that soon the government will pull back on the flood of stimulus money, and weekends are ignored.  Our presentation to the local officials is early tomorrow morning.

The reason I am involved in a presentation in a city I had not heard of before is a little complicated - no, scratch that, it’s pretty straightforward. The client specifically requested that our international firm present an international person, our boss (who fits the correct profile) has to attend another client function, so I was called in at the last minute to, you know, be white. This is not the first time this particular issue has arisen, and I am not happy about it. Aside from being distasteful on its own merits and insulting to our Chinese staff (although they seem to accept it as a fact of life and chalk it up to our uneducated clients) it is professionally dangerous to me; I don’t want even a whiff of an idea that my function is to hang around and be a caucasian frontman. Since I am hobbled at work by highly imperfect Chinese I am sensitive about this, and complained a lot when this trip came up. I was mollified by being brought into the project team, but if it comes up again I think there will be trouble.

Anyway, during the drive from the airport the rain got heavier and gradually turned to snow, and the driving conditions got quite hair-raising: as usual, there were a lot of trucks on the highway, and the client’s driver seemed to me to be going faster than conditions really permitted. As the oldest guy in the car (I think) and the only one with a young child, I suggested that we slow down a couple of times - the first time the others in the group grinned and said, “it’s all right,” but after the car gave a couple of little shivers and the snow continued to get heavier, the second time we slowed down. (I’m pretty sure I was also the only one in the car with extensive experience in winter driving.) In any event, we arrived without incident. My primary worry now is getting home tomorrow, but the snow has stopped and with any luck I will have several hours of weekend before Monday arrives again.