I worked two years as a paralegal before coming to law school. I survived partners, unreasonable clients, overtaxed coworkers and 70 hour weeks. I missed Nine Inch Nails’ only appearance in China because I had to edit some document so that a client could build a mammoth new manufacturing facility. Joy. Still, it wasn’t all bad, and I saw the impact that the transactions I was quasi-involved in had on the real world, and a number of the people I worked with are still my friends.

The first year law curriculum is nearly identical everywhere: Contracts, Civil Procedure, Property, Criminal Law, Constitutional Law, and Torts. One can never be over-prepared for exams, or for class, because the number of potential legal issues in any complex fact pattern is frustratingly endless. There’s two parts to the curriculum. What You Are Meant to Learn and What You Might Learn Along the Way. The first is fairly narrow. This case is known because it’s a good example of…specific performance, assumption of risk, premeditated murder, whatever. The second is infinite and anyone daring to delve into it during class is usually rewarded with a barrage of rolled eyes and exasperated professors. I should add that I think that law school has successfully proven that I am one of the worst ‘academic’ minds on earth. I’m interested in issues for about five minutes, until they cease to be coherent or apply to anything else I’m interested in. Economic theories of tort remedies? Tell me more. Wait, no, stop. That’s enough.

Next year I’ll be trying some new and more specific coursework, including tax, business law, real estate, and, as a random experiment, ‘Intellectual Property in China’. I cannot wait for my 2L tax courses. Either I will love them or hate them. I dabbled in international law this year but can’t see myself writing bench opinions on genocide or other crimes against humanity, even if they make fascinating and horrifying reading. I reviewed some opinions on the Rwandan genocide, and there’s simply no way that I could come close to comporting myself with the necessary impartiality and gravitas to handle trials like that, especially when the defendant is so, so, guilty. On the other hand, I’ll also be taking Immigration Law, which I have a personal stake in (my wife is Chinese) and may change my mind about doing something international. I’d also love to get involved with cross-border transactions and investment, because I have a feeling that before long, countries are going to be eager to invest in the US for manufacturing just as this past decade belonged to the Chinese. Perhaps they’ll learn from Japan and build more local manufacturing if they’re serious about selling us cars and other big ticket items. I’m typing this on a Lenovo, by the way…and my coffee cup was made in China, too…

My dream job is 10-15 years in a regional/national law firm involved in international business transactions/arbitration, and then a solo/small practice based on whatever I’ve enjoyed most to that point. I suspect the ‘dream job’ will change within 3-6 months, but who knows?

I learned a lot this year, including that I’ve declined in my ability to instantly absorb large quantities of information. You don’t really feel the loss until you’re under the gun and realize that you have no earthly idea, beyond what someone else has written, what the issues are in the case you’re dealing with. Much like my early paralegal experience, it has been a process of educated trial and error, except I have grades to memorialize the ‘error’ part. Am I better prepared to be a lawyer? Marginally so. But I’m actually less convinced, if that was even possible, that law school is a smart idea for very many people.

Even I, who had a pretty thorough look into the belly of the beast before coming here, was hesitant to actually go through with it. I envy people with the ability to dive right in to a life-changing, finance-destroying experience, but I was very nearly scared away by the awful employment numbers and prohibitive cost of opportunity. The JD is a great degree to have, and I’ll join the overeducated, overworked of America proudly, but I’m not sure that the inflation in the number of law students and the cost of education is justified. I’m certainly not going to land some plum position in NYC after graduation and live like a king, how could I justify dropping a quarter mil on school + living expenses? And yes, someone really spent more on living expenses than they did paying full price for law school. That must be one hell of a morning after…I did what? I owe them how much? Oh, Christ. At least I had a good time. Basically, if you don’t get a scholarship or participate in a public service/government LRAP (loan repayment/forgiveness program), you need to make around $65,000 a year to just hammer away at the debt accumulated by an average three year cost for law school. Tier 1 and Tier 2 Schools may report their ‘median’ salaries around 80-120k, but that’s just the people who actually answered the survey…you can bet the ones who didn’t answer aren’t making bank and drinking too many mojitos to bother checking the mail.

But there is reason to be guardedly optimistic, as well. Cleveland’s economy, long thought to be among the worst in the nation, is now outperforming many others. Unemployment has fallen by almost 2% since last year, and manufacturing, long the foundation of the region, is leading the recovery. The medical sector here remains abnormally strong and will soon be bolstered by the nation’s first dedicated ‘medical mart’ for product shows and exhibitions, the latest in a long parade of purported panaceas for the ills of downtown Cleveland.

If the terrible trio stays together and there’s no falling-out or severe injury to ruin things, they’ll probably get a ring together, but I don’t see them dominating the game. But what do I know?

I hope this isn’t the end of Cleveland’s efforts to bring Chinese business to the shores of Lake Erie. Cleveland needs a reboot in its thinking, but making a bad deal for the sake of making a deal isn’t the way to go after this. The thing is, will we ever really know if this was a bad or good deal? Sunpu didn’t even show up to the meeting where council debated the issue, nor has it sent anyone to Cleveland (to my knowledge) despite signing an MOU, and much of the Chinese-language material remained untranslated. Mayor Jackson, if you ever need someone to do some due diligence for you, look me up. Really. I’m happy to help.

Home sweet home.

The latest scheme to be hatched in hopes of bringing some innovation or at least some new jobs to Cleveland is Mayor Frank Jackson’s plan to award a 10-year no-bid contract for LED lighting to the Ningbo Shengpu Lighting Company, known in English as Sunpu-Opto. The reaction of most Clevelanders was predictable: “WHO? Why award an exclusive, no-bid, ten-year contract on a relatively new product to a relatively, no, completely unknown Chinese company, when General Electric has a lighting-focused industrial park with historic ties to the city, which, by the way, employs 1,200 people? You’re selling our city to the Chinese!”

I can understand the anti-China sentiment. This is a city that knows China chiefly as a destination for what may have once been their jobs or the jobs of their family and friends. There is only a small Asian population and I have no idea how active actual ties are between them and China. In the legal community, two of the major downtown law firms are heavily involved in China, and at least one of the smaller firms is as well, but blue-collar workers, which Cleveland has historically been built upon, have little love in their hearts for China, nor for seemingly ‘unfair’ foreign investment schemes that leave American companies out in the cold. Even given all that background, I think attracting foreign investment to Cleveland is an absolute imperative if the city is ever going to experience growth, let alone arrest its slow and steady decline. Cities in transition need shocks to their system.

However, is this move by the mayor and city council (which apparently supports the mayor, who is the former council president) the best way to advertise Cleveland as open for FDI? Jackson has said he’s advancing a new paradigm of city development: If you want Cleveland to make an investment in you, you need to make an investment in Cleveland. From a purely pragmatic standpoint, that’s not a bad idea. But no-bid contracts have a funny way of hurting people’s feelings, and Cleveland has had such a lovely history with hurt feelings and major benefactors packing their bags and leaving: Rockefeller (yes, 30 Rock could have been in Cleveland, but where would Liz Lemon have gone in the ‘Cleveland’ episode? Milwaukee?), Art Modell and the Browns, LeBron (not yet, but…)…do we want to add GE to that list? Is that even a real risk, or is GE just blowing smoke?

I wonder what Dan Gilbert thinks of this. Where will the HQ be located? Is there a master plan, a way to bring more business in, or are we really just grasping at any opportunity that presents itself? I really want to see more foreign business in Cleveland, and I’m not going to shy away from throwing some serious incentives at companies to invest in Cleveland, but how in the world is Sunpu-Opto suddenly the best or even the only option for this sort of agreement? Another company, Fawoo, has indicated it could relocate its US operations from Akron to Cleveland in Sunpu’s place. Cleveland’s government says they looked at Fawoo but weren’t satisfied. Company officials reject Cleveland’s reasons. Who’s telling the truth? Who stands to gain?

In my experience as a foreigner, foreigners adapt to the constant use of mei banfa in several stages. First, surprise. Really? There’s NOTHING you can do? Second, anger. Give me a break! If only you’d do such-and-such-and-such, this would be EASY! You’re not trying hard enough! Arrrgh! Third, begrudging acceptance. Alright, I’ll relax. This isn’t my country; things are different; deep breath; okay. Personally, I’m perpetually in a rage-filled limbo between stages two and three. On a good day, I’m happy to abide by the ways and mores of my host country. On a bad or merely average day, I’ll pay you any amount of money to give me your spot in line or suggest re-routing traffic through the Gates of Hell if it means I get to the office a few minutes faster. I do not suggest I am a tolerant individual. God willing, I will do better.

I envy the tolerance of Chinese people for frustrating situations. There are too many difficulties in life to face head-on; this is true everywhere. The tolerance that Chinese people exude in all aspects of life, towards politics, traffic congestion, pollution, or whatever – is exceptional. I firmly believe that down to the cellular level, Chinese people are better prepared to face any survival-level challenge than almost anyone on earth. Yes, China convulses with panic anytime someone sneezes and their snot is an interesting new color, fearing that this is the big one, the epidemic that will ravage their dense proto-metropolises, but I still don’t fear the plague. In this respect, I think China is probably helping the world more than it’s hurting it. All these people with their white cells constantly overworked, desperate to deal with new threats and, until the last few generations, starved of the nutrients necessary to mount an effective defense, are probably the ones who will remain after the bird flu kills the rest of us. They’ve had practice. The rest of us have built little bio-domes and lost our ability to deal with any damn thing, be it a new disease or a paperwork snafu.

A hope that I cling to, other than the futile hope that I may become a Zen master, is that in my years here in China I have picked up some of this ability to cope, rather than simply reinforcing my existing tendencies to be impatient and selfish. Certainly there is no shortage of the petty and mean here, but there is also a surprisingly abundance of tolerance and a sort of dogged determination to move forward that I identify with. There was a survey done not long ago by Gallup that essentially aggregated a large number of smaller polls done all around the world to determine which countries were the most optimistic. China ranked staggeringly low – falling below Iraq by several percentage points. Why? Surely China is developing so rapidly that some of its people must feel good about things. And yet this seeming discrepancy does not overly surprise me. Many Chinese have come to expect the worst while still striving for the best, and I like this mindset. Optimism and fatalism together. Yes, sometimes there’s simply nothing for it, but tomorrow will be better.

Reader’s has another useful feature: the ability to give full-text previews of blog posts hosted on domains or servers that are blocked by the Great Firewall. A multitude of useful and interesting sites, such as Danwei and China Digital Times are thus readable, if not accessible. It’s also a faster way of reading WordPress, which while not blocked, is terribly slow and unresponsive when I’m not using my VPN. Updating the blog is still a pain and will remain so until I return stateside this summer. If you’re not using Reader, give it a try.

One concern I have going into what is sure to be an intense academic experience is the persistent feeling that I’ve become mentally complacent and allowed my wits to dull. I don’t feel slow, but I feel slowed. Too many video games? Too many years juggling multiple languages? Who knows? In any case, I have begun to consider how I might clear my mind out a bit – spring cleaning for the soul, if you will. Ideas so far include more Chinese reading and more blogging, and a moratorium on gaming. I find games are easily the most insidious agent of change in mental function in my life. Not long ago, I read an article that made me wonder just how much a gaming habit can alter one’s thinking. In fact, the more I read, the more I began to worry that my meaningless little hobby was guilty of more than just discouraging me from blogging.

I sleep normal hours; I don’t take drugs. These are two key differences between me and Tom Bissell, the guy who found himself in a sideways spiral of coke-fueled gaming binges. Nor can I relate to the obsession with ‘sandbox’ games like Grand Theft Auto IV that have no particular focus and instead reward the random and pointless acts of – well, whatever. Not just violence. In some games, the reward mechanism is so well honed that doing almost anything gives you a little twinge of happiness. Oh, I blew up a truck? That’s kind of cool. Wait, what’s this I found over here? Does this do anything? No? What about this? And this? Ad infinitum. Literally. Games are now advanced enough that the permutations are far beyond the ability of most players to reach in a reasonable amount of time. More games are published than anyone can hope to play to completion. Sequels are fast-tracked by massive development studios working young programmers in near-constant ‘crunchtime‘ to minimize the distance between A – the moment the first game begins to lose its shine – and B, where a newly revamped, enhanced version of the game is made available to a prepared audience. There is never a lack of games, only a lack of time to play them all.

Bissell writes,

…the pleasures of literary connection seem leftover and familiar. Today the most consistently pleasurable pursuit in my life is playing video games. Unfortunately, the least useful and financially solvent pursuit in my life is also playing video games. For instance, I woke up this morning at 8am fully intending to write this article. Instead, I played Left 4 Dead until 5pm. The rest of the day went up in a blaze of intermittent catnaps. It is now 10pm and I have only just started to work. I know how I will spend the late, frayed moments before I go to sleep tonight, because they are how I spent last night and the night before that: walking the perimeter of my empty bed and carpet-bombing the equally empty bedroom with promises that tomorrow will not be squandered. I will fall asleep in a futureless, strangely peaceful panic, not really knowing what I will do the next morning and having no firm memory of who, or what, I once was.

This is the far extreme of the hardcore gamer’s consciousness. Even sharing a bit of Bissell’s experience with games (“…ocular spasms…fuse-blown reflexes…ballistic impatience to play…”) and reading his descriptions with a knowing dread, I have never managed to play for thirty hours straight, and if I did, I hope I would realize something was wrong. I tend to gravitate towards story-driven games such as RPGs, games that essentially reward a time investment with a story of some sort and possibly some challenging gameplay elements. More recently, I’ve started playing simpler games like tower defense, DOTA, or Settlers of Catan online. With the exception of Catan (where everyone is quite polite), online gaming is a cesspool. I try to ignore the half-literate insults carelessly hurled during such games, but given that I enjoy winning, and cannot always do so, I too become angry and find myself tempted to reply with similar vitriol. Pointless; destructive; stressful. Online hate: a huge emerging market! Perhaps it’s better to have such destructive urges channeled into the relatively harmless world of online gaming, but at what point do we cross over from distracting ourselves temporarily to distracting ourselves permanently?

Most games are about attacking a childlike world with an adult mind.

The adult world is already juvenile enough, I think. Bissell recollects and notes that entire chapters of his life have been devoured (pleasurably) by gaming. I recollect and my strongest memories have little or nothing to do with them. But I find that I cannot, in my wildest dreams, reconcile a gamer’s habit with the world of law school. No longer can I pretend to exist in a childlike world, even in my limited free time. Besides, my brain will soon be occupied juggling the details of the Rule in Shelley’s Case and other crucial issues…alas, gaming, our days are numbered.

The arrival of spring (if you can call the pathetic Beijing weather ‘spring’) usually lifts me a bit, and I am sure that once the hazy mixture of pollution, sand, fog and volcanic ash (maybe?) clears out of the Beijing sky, I’ll be closer to 100%. Of course, if I’m concerned with the weather, why did I decide to go to law school in Cleveland? Ah well. At least there is football to dull the pain.

The Internet in China is slow when you want to access something outside its approved network. That is mostly unavoidable. But one can get varying degrees of ‘sucks’ depending on your service provider, subscription plan and, most curiously, location in the city. Having lived in six different places in Beijing, I can say with confidence that Internet performance varies drastically from place to place, but has gradually improved over time. Previously, I lived in a fairly old but still modern building in the city center (inside the Second Ring Road, near Andingmen) and got better Internet performance than I have ever had before. It’s not even close. Latency was down, download was faster – it was super, super, shuang. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, finally, someone has gotten it completely right – a reasonably fast, dependable Internet provider. Thank you, China Unicom.

Now I live in a more modern, hip neighborhood nearer to the central busines district. Surely I’ve at least kept pace with the building inhabited by most older couples in Andingmen, right? Wrong. My Internet is atrocious. This is the first time I’ve been able to get to this page without a VPN (thank you Chinese censors!) in quite awhile, and I confess I’d mostly given up on this blog because I could not even log onto my VPN from home without everything crawling to a halt. At Andingmen, my access was so good I did everything through the VPN. At Shuangjing? Forget it. Write it down: Pingod Apartments (苹果社区) has some of the worst 2MB Internet I’ve ever experienced in developed parts of China. Why? Too many people, not enough Internets! Everyone is drawing from the same well, and the well tends to run dry around 8PM every night. Thanks a lot, China Telecom. I never thought I’d be comparing Liantong (Unicom) to anyone favorably, but even the engineer Dianxin (Telecom) sent out to make sure nothing was physically wrong with my connections admitted that Unicom has better equipment and a newer and faster network overall. But because our apartment lacks the hardware for Unicom’s ADSL…no dice! We’re stuck with Dianxin.

So it goes. I’ll try not to use my terrible Internet as an excuse for not posting more. Anyone out there know a place near Guomao with really awesome Internet?

“If we do this test, we aren’t supposed to let you leave the hospital,” said the doctor, waggling the plastic-wrapped syringe holding a long cotton swab. I muttered my assent, having already been told that I was a textbook example of a potential case – recent international travel, high fever, persistent and dangerously elevated heart rate, headache, wet coughing. He continued, explaining that some others had basically decided to check themselves out anyway, and that the hospital simply wrote “Patient refused advice” on their report to the authorities, ostensibly covering their legal bases. I took this to mean that if I wasn’t falling down and vomiting, I could leave after I felt better, and they would call me at home, where I would remain self-quarantined until I was cleared. I had him go ahead with the test, and then laid back and let the IV fluids slowly bring me back to life. For awhile, the treatment didn’t work – fever remained, my heart continued booming away and I began to worry. Just as concern for my life began to overcome my reckless attitude, I did start feeling better – much better. My fever vanished, my headache stopped, and my heart resumed beating at a normal, healthy pace. This took several hours, during which time the ER doc swapped with the new shift. He came in and said, well, glad you’re feeling better, but we have to admit you. Do you have insurance?

I did, or so I thought – but as it turned out, it hadn’t been activated yet. Great. The hospital cashier came and told me what it would cost to be admitted – over two thousand dollars. I refused and informed them I would be leaving in a ‘polite-but-firm’ manner that probably erred too strongly towards the firm. The doctor returned and said, please don’t leave. You need to stay. I wondered at just how far he would push this, but still tired and weak, I didn’t feel like fighting much and let him make his various calls here and there. My girlfriend, who had convinced me that lying at home burning up delirious was not the best way to recover, informed me at some point that she had overheard them calling the special office on H1N1, at which point I realized no matter how many calls he made, well-intentioned or not, the hospital would be counselled to keep the both of us quarantined. Out of fear of liability or official sanction, the doctor would never sign off on me leaving, and poor Chen, who had been drawn only half-willingly into my weekend of plague detainment, would be forced to stay as well.

I briefly pondered exiting out the first-floor bathroom window, which was carelessly left open (what kind of second-rate forced quarantine was this?) before amending my desires to free food and a free doctor visit the next day. They considered this for awhile and agreed, proving that one can bargain away one’s rights in exchange for free healthcare. I suppose I had some other alternatives – calling the embassy and making a fuss (would they be able to do anything, though?), simply walking out the door and daring them to use force to stop me, or throwing a fit, breaking various pieces of medical equipment, referring to the doctor only as ‘Mengele’ while holding the nurses at bay with an IV pole brandished as a spear. Demanding my consular rights seemed silly given that I wasn’t being accused of anything, storming out seemed like it would probably provoke a very stupid confrontation of some sort (the doctor seemed very nervous about the prospect of my leaving, far more than the previous doctor), and while with the amount of drugs in my system I might have been able to overpower the entire ER staff and the underfed security guards, shooting up the place just seemed rude. So, the bargain was struck, and I spent the next 20 hours or so trapped in a relatively luxurious hospital suite, quarantined with my girlfriend on the most interesting date night in history. Given that I potentially had the horrible, evil and deadly swine flu, it wasn’t very gentlemanly of the hospital to force her to stay with me, but it was better than facing certain death and a limited selection of satellite TV channels alone. Of course, I did not have H1N1, although it’s taken me this long to start feeling normal again. And in the end, I am grateful to the hospital – they were professional despite a difficult situation and a less than happy and very woozy patient – and to Chen, who sacrificed her weekend to be trapped with me in a Beijing hospital. And as for my ‘no big deal’ argument, how about settling it with some nice, cold numbers? China – 1,800 confirmed cases, 0 deaths. Compare to: United States – 43,000 confirmed, 336 deaths.

In a recent column, he examines what genius is and how it is cultivated, both by circumstance and by conscious effort. The effort part is what interests me most. For a long time, I’ve struggled, not just with Chinese, but with actually improving my overall abilities in writing, communication, time management, and other areas, both mundane (but necessary) and artistic. The tipping point between frustrated abandonment of a difficult task and slow but steady success is always focus, or a lack thereof. Focus is a problem for nearly everyone. Too many things demand our attention, and we are often all too happy, elated even when we are offered a chance for distraction. My brain shoots between topics and activities almost as fast as Firefox can open a new web page. There is so much information available and always something new happening somewhere that it becomes easier and easier to lose oneself in the flood of information and, in doing so, lose out on many opportunities to grow. Without focused effort over a long period of time, no meaningful ability can properly develop. If ability or talent do seem to spontaneously emerge, it is because we have not fully understood how some activity or circumstance in the past contributed to the growth of the ability in question. Why, for instance, was I particularly good at reading as a young child? Clearly because my mother read to me, pointing at each word as she did so, for hours every night. I was tutored rigorously when my brain was most ready to receive – the benefits will last forever.

Brooks writes,

By practicing in this way, performers delay the automatizing process. The mind wants to turn deliberate, newly learned skills into unconscious, automatically performed skills. But the mind is sloppy and will settle for good enough. By practicing slowly, by breaking skills down into tiny parts and repeating, the strenuous student forces the brain to internalize a better pattern of performance.

The key is rigor and repetition. I have never been good at this as a student because I once thought I didn’t have to put in the same amount of time to get the same, or even superior, results. Often, this was true – thanks to my parents forcing or tricking me into doing things that made me smarter as a kid, I had a head start. This led me to be lazy and carry an almost entitled, superior view of myself into any academic situation. But the idea that someone is inherently ‘gifted’ with knowledge or technique is ridiculous. Talent is not a gift, it is a product, a result. Even LeBron James, whose physical gifts alone would make him at least a journeyman in the NBA, routinely outworks his peers in the weight room, in terms of hours spent practicing, etc. There’s no throne without the thorns, as William Penn said. Without that repeated, brain-numbing effort, there will be no notable results, nothing to write home about. Too often it’s made learning Chinese a real chore, but it IS a chore. One of the most epic, difficult chores in the world. I’ve done passably well so far, but I can’t calculate the amount of time I’ve wasted and the words/sentence patterns I’ve forgotten simply through lack of review and daily usage. The same is true of my English – when I do actually buckle down and spend lots of time on my Chinese, and don’t post to the blog or write emails, I find myself committing vast amounts of typos and wantonly dangling participles hither and tither. Given that I style myself a candidate for law school, I should be more mindful of what would otherwise be trivial errors, and yet they recur again and again. Why? Lack of practice. Even a keyboard will trip up someone who hasn’t spent much time in front of it recently.

Some people do New Year’s resolutions, so how about a (belated) May Day resolution? If I’m going to lead a charmed life as a student and faux-知识分子 , one may as well put in the hours and the time to make that knowledge a reality, an arsenal that can be called upon reflexively and immediately, without lots of hemming and hawing and “I’ll get back to you on that.” Knowledge, language, politics – they all have vocabularies that can be learned and concepts that can be mastered. Without that, talent is just an empty word, and the ‘big picture’ thinking I fancy myself as being good at will be impossible.

Just as an aside, WordPress is wonderful. This is so much better than any other interface I’ve used, and it even lets me publish from my desktop, although I’m still wrangling with XAMPP and trying to coach myself up in various aspects of it. I used to be ‘good’ at computers, now I’m merely another user. Practice, practice…I’m hoping to divide the blog (or just use tags?) to move my Chinese language content/ranting about Cleveland sports over here as well. It’ll be a busy month, but I’ll get it done somehow.