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episteme_sundays
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Name: Austin S. Lin
Gender: Male
Interests: energy, contemporary art, acting, filmmaking, fencing, jazz saxophone, classical piano, poetry, travel, languages, oceans, carnivorous plants.
Occupation: Engineering
Industry: Consumer Goods
Message: message meEmail: email me
Website: visit my website
AIM:  LinAustinS
Member Since:
8/30/2004
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| Night on Wall Street.
The sentinel bull of Wall Street.
Spent the evening at a function sponsored by my alma mater's Carey School of Business. Even on my international travels, there is no doubt that even perhaps more than London, the term "Wall Street" summons up all that is possible in the economic aspirations of growing into what could be. That holds true whether you are a developing country who has just joined the WTO or a two person energy startup working out of a Starbucks and a PO Box.
Surreal to get to walk the old wooden floors of the trading floor while holding a champagne flute---a landscape which during the day is rife with all flavors of Greenspan's "creative destruction" personified in shouts and the digital christmas lights of a Thomas Reuters terminal display. This evening it was relatively calm, running into alumni, running into the Dean, to benefactors and other architects of the Carey school and the global financial world it aims to send out into the universe.
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Life after, after, after 4:00pm on the stock floor.
Front.
Wall Street entrance.
The kiosk that trades P&G (which closed at $57.49/ share tonight, by the way)
Trinity Church overseeing the non-tangible aspects of Wall Street.
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| Double Dirty Rice.
It's not as immoral or scandalous as it sounds. And it's perfectly legal in all states.
All states that have a Bojangles Chicken and Biscuits in them, that is.
I do not condone irresponsible gorging of one-self on fast food, particularly fried foods, but I myself am an occassional diligent practitioner of eating such things (for some foods, more occasionally than others...).
I have an entire caategory of "good things that are bad" with regards to types of food that are delicious, but not exatly what your nutritionist would push on you for a weekly eating plan. Certain strains of fried chicken fall into this category.
As a Dixieland born and bred Southerner, fried chicken has been part of my culinary life from the time my mother and I would crave Kentucky Fried Chicken (at the time, still bearing its full, multi-syllabic moniker, before the finger lickin' mouthful was reduced to just three letters K.F.C.). I would go to a southern-style chain called Po'Folks (later renamed Folks Country Kitchen) whose decor conjured up a picnic in a barn in some Tennessee countryside.
But there was another phenomenon across town---numbering just one store relative to abundant Kentucky Fried Chicken locations.
It was called Bojangles.
There were only two in the town I grew up in and eventually, only one of them survived. Perhaps it was due to economic forces of supply, but I found myself preferring to drive across town as a high schooler, passing several Kentucky Fried Chickens along the way, not just for Bojangles chicken, not just for its crusty biscuit the size of a Waffle House hashbrown, but for a particular side dish it featured that made the cajun zest of its chicken that much zestier: its cajun style rice, known in the Bojangle's world as "dirty rice."
On a recent trip to Charlotte, I finally learned that Bojangles was founded right there in the Queen City in 1977. I saw a photo of the original store design that I grew up eating biscuits and chicken legs and, of course, dirty rice, in. Here I was, at the origins of one of my childhood cravings, feeling strangely at home. There may be cajun-styled spicy rice in all incarnations in the cajun eateries of the world, but in my heart of hearts, I will forever refer to all such rice as "dirty rice" even though I know there can be only one. And perhaps even more modern than the fact that Kentucky Fried Chicken is now KFC, Bojangles now has its own Facebook fan page (which of course, I signed up to support without a second thought). Thankfully, tastiness has not disappeared with progression of other changes.
The Bojangles franchise seems to be doing quite well in the Carolinas these days as I find myself having to drive less and less far whenever I pass through town on business and am on the prowl for one. Mind you, one visit per busienss trip is typically plenty for me and my cholesterol levels. But that one trip is just enough to get those stomach-warming childhood memories re-seeded. And to discover that I have unknowingly had a particular freedom all along, the freedom to order dirty rice as *both* of my side dishes: double dirty rice.
That's advanced. History is tastier with options.
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| The Financial District of the Moon.
I'm at the end of a long stint of travel throughout Asia that started June 19 and, aside from a few days of meetings in Connecticut, I have been going through hotel branded soap and shampoo as I change from place to place. Now in my last week, I'm taking a few days off to enjoy my missed "July 4th" and "Labor Day" holidays as my Asia work wraps up.
According to dopplr.com, so far in 2009, I've traveled around 40% of the distance between the earth to the moon, but for now, although I've never personally been to the moon, this busy intersection during rush hour in a financial center in a large Asian metropolitan city seems like there'd be more to do (collecting cool geological samples notwithstanding).
Traveling throughout earth though isn't necessarily less foreign than going to the moon, I'd imagine (especially if Marriott opens up a Renaissance East Crater or something there, because then I'd at least get Reward points). If the moon were to become the next financial center of the universe (London and Wall Street surrendering their spot), I would picture these same businessmen in white shirts, black slacks, clutching dark suitcases or Louis Vuitton man-bags. There would be jsut as many coffee houses scattered throughout the side streets. Crossing the street would still be kinda dangerous unless you were in fact, faster than a speeding bus.
But the people I'd meet there, moon men or otherwise, would doubtlessly be just as interesting, career climbing, transaction pushing, delivering to themselves and their customer base the same aspirations of a quality life as much as any other creature. You'd meet people you could learn endlessly from, some that you befriend over seafood dinners, some that annoy you from Powerpoint Slide #1. But the good and bad would even out and when the lights in the offices got turned off at night, some averaged sense of accomplishment would still pervade us, satisfaction tempered only slightly by corporate stresses. Work more now, stress less later.
As such, thermodynamics is as much as philosophy or way of life as it is a science, I reckon.
Even enjoying a gorgeous afternoon at the breezy cusp between summer and autumn takes some energy.
And the world and its people will become wiser and more light hearted for it.
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| The Sound of Progress.
I'm on the seventh floor of a hotel that over the past year, has
undergone renovations. Specifically to this floor. The bathroom was
re-tiled, the bed was replaced by a king sized waterbed (really),
there is even video on demand. Upstairs on the 8th floor, similar
renovations are currently being carried out as well. Every few
minutes a drill pounds against the ceiling above me. Wooden posts or
steel pipe clanks to the ground. A few hundred feet in the opposite
direction, although still clearly audible, a carpenter is hard at
work, the pangs of his hammer matching the beat of my own heart. The
sounds of construction, progress, renovation, continuous improvement.
It also happens to be 2:00am.
I can't believe this is happening and as the thumping of metal
continues above me I'm not sure what will crack first from the
pressure---the ceiling or my skull.
I'm not in the US, or I'd march right down to the front desk and fill
out a comment card and demand that the dusty bottle of $5 Evian in my
room be comp'd. I won't say what country I'm in, but let's face it,
this blog site is censored and blocked there anyway so who's counting?
So I take a deep breath, smile in my sleep, and dream I'm in a
construction site.
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| 9 People, 7 Countries, 5 languages. One dinner table.
Not quite the G8, but instead, a group of battery engineers, paper engineers, machinists, and electrical technologists gathered around a dinner table in a mountainous, southeast corner of China, in a city that gets few western foreigners to begin with.
Another indication of the highly Western presence was that on one singular lazy susan, there were three orders of the Chinese version of Americanized Chinese Food icon: kung pao chicken.
As much as I may gripe about humidity and getting stranded at the Fuzhou airport in the summers because of typhoons, the Fujian Province has really started to grow on me. I suppose most places have that way about them when on any given month, I may be sleeping in the hotel bed far more often than my own (recently purchased, rarely used Simmons Beautyrest Cushion-top).
That's my hotel and third (or fourth home), the Starlight Motel (really, that's what it's called: 星光). Less because of its tendencies to remind on of the Las Vegas strip or a seedy corner of downtown Baltimore, but because it's owned by the Xingguan Paper Company, another major industrial presence in this otherwise remote town.
But the hills here remind me much of the Tennessee of my childhood oddly enough. Unlike other Chinese factory towns that have to suffer a wide turnover of workers, most of the workers here are homegrown, well-rooted here, and rarely have a reason to need the comforts of what my Frankfurt colleague called an idyllic simple life. The people here become friends, the friends become family.
If the promise of this city is any indication of the continued growth of China as an ever evolving corporate and business powerhouse, then the best of our hopes can be realized, and the less popular side-effects of globalization can be better understood and completely revised by a country that has continued to walk prudently and diligently on its path of impressive economic growth.
That day will come. But for now, it's a table of representatives of Finland, Germany, the US, China, New Zealand, France, Belgium, trading stories of jet lag, international foods, how a Tsingtao and a heaping pile of hearty food can be a grand model of unilateral cooperation, even if in the seemingly smallest mountain regions of southeast China.
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