Into the World:
The Random Thoughts in My Mind

Khabarovsk is a city of more than half a million people, located more than twelve hours by train away from similar-sized Russian cities (Vladivostok to the south, Chita and Ulan-Ude to the east).  This very geographic fact should create a fairly big local market for consumer products that are not easily fulfilled by traveling elsewhere in the country.  People would buy locally simply because there are few choices to go buy somewhere else.  Yet, speaking to the city's Chinese merchants and a different picture emerges. 

Thee are many similarities between the Russian and the Chinese train systems. Inherited from the soviet system, both feature overnight trains marked by densely packed bunk beds that allow more than fifty people to fit into each train carriage. Ability to crisscross large distances overnight allow such sleeper trains to become a popular means of travel for common people in both countries. The communal nature of the carriages means that individual travelers must be quite OK with lack of privacy for extended period of time.

It is hard to imagine a more wilderness-filled stretch of land between two major cities.  The city of Khabarovsk, population half a million, and Komsomolsk, population 300,000, are separated by a two-lane highway running through a beautiful piece of untouched nature.  On a clear autumn drive, the eight-hour drive is an almost unbroken forest of yellow-leaved trees, with white, strong, and thick trunks as far as the eyes can see.  They are only punctuated by the occasional tributaries of the mighty Amur River.

Among one's friends, there are often a few oddballs that decide, one day seemingly out of the blue, that the careers that they have been building for years actually do not interest them anymore.  They decide to give that all up, go back to school and learn brand-new trades.  Upon graduation, they stay once again, in perhaps their late 30s or 40s, at the bottom of the hierarchy in a new industry that they have never been professionally involved before.  I, for one, admire the willingness to forego the comfort of the known and enrich one's life by plunging into the unknown even at an age when people avoid risks and instability.

Humans are social animals, and social animals have a tendency to put themselves into social groups to define who they are.  And if humans are to use social groups to define respective individual identity based on belonging to certain groups, then it becomes necessarily the case that they define what are the differences among different groups that they belong to and they do not.  By distinguishing the major contracts between the groups that they belong to vis-a-vis those that they are excluded or voluntarily exclude themselves from, humans can, in turn, make sense of who they are and who they are not.

Japan is noted for convenience for shoppers , and the focus on convenience is also very much present when its legions of salarymen go out for their lunches on any working weekday.  In major business districts are arrays of different dining options, ranging from take-out microwaved meals in convenience stores, street carts serving up quick freshly cooked meals, and various fast food options ranging from noodles to burgers.  In such a competitive market to feed hungry workers quickly, traditional sit-down restaurants should have little advantage to speak of.

A Chinese-Australian friend described his experience interacting with the local Chinese population in Malaysia.  If he mentioned that he was born but moved away from China as a child, people did not want anything to do with him.  When he tried to save money by going for cheap meals and skipping drinks, people thought he was a "cheap mainlander" trying to make trouble.  On the contrary, if he splurges on food and drinks while dissociates himself from any connection from China, he found the local population much more receptive to his attempts to communicate and befriend.