You are at the mall and you have just seen the
proverbial girl of your dreams. The time has finally
come. The months you have spent lurking in your
house learning every form of seduction ever created
by man are at last going to pay off. Routines stacks,
you know them all. NLP, pshh it has become like your
second language. The hilarious thing is you have
even mastered natural game, so you do not even
need to rely on technique. Yes my friend, this is in
the bag! There is nothing you do not know about
flirting with girl and creating massiveattraction, this
should be a walk in the park.
You approach and a funny thing starts to happen
though. Your heart starts beating faster, you start to
sweat a little and you develop a very small nervous
twitch. You awkwardly walk up to her and quickly
spout out the best routineyou know, layered with
hypnotizing word patterns and everything you have
ever learned packed into it. You SAY it perfectly, but
you are speaking WAY to fast. Then the impossible
happens, the girl starts to get nervous and
uncomfortable like you are painful to be around.
Within moments she ejectslike you are a walking
STD. How could this happen? You literally KNOW
everything! Well, there is still one thing you have
failed to master. Understanding on how to relax when
you are talking to a girl.
This is one of the biggest stealth killers of attraction
and is getting guys devastating blows left and right
outs without them even realizing why. This is simply
because it is rarely mentioned in any form of detail in
PUA teaching. However, if you watch any great pick
up artist they all incorporate it with near perfection.
Whether you are watching Neil Strauss, Tyler Durden,
or Adam Lyon they all perfectly relaxed and
comfortable in a set. It almost seems like they have
done it a thousand times. (Oh wait they have!)
So why is this so important? The cold hard truth is
that people can sense how you are feeling by how
you are acting pure and simple. The keyword there is
HOW you are acting, not what you are saying. If you
are incredibly nervous your emotional state will
literally be pushed onto people around you and you
will not be able to perform any type of game. Girls
have to be relaxed to some extent if they are going to
be aroused. Have you ever talked to someone that
was stressed out, panicky, and nervous? Can you
remember how you wanted to get away from them as
fast as possible? This is exactly what you do to
women when overlook incorporating relaxation into
your skill set.
This seems like one of the most blatantly obvious
tips, but it is because of simplicity that is so often
overlooked. When men get into PUA they make the
fatal mistake of focusing on advanced techniques
when they should be learning the basics of simply
having a conversation of a stranger. This is like a kid
mastering how to kick flip his skateboard, while
ignoring learning how to ride it down the street. In
the end guys end up just like the kid on the
skateboard. They have a cool new trick, but they
cannot do anything with it because they can't do
something as basic as comfortably being able to say
hi to a stranger.
I am not here to tell you are doomed to a life of
rejection and awkward moments, though, far from it.
There is a way to overcome this hurdle that helped
me immensely when I first got into learning how to
flirt with a girl. Luckily, it is a pretty simple solution,
however it takes some courage. To start becoming
more relaxed in set there is an extremely common
sense solution: start doing as many sets as possible
and makes an active effort to keep them
uncomplicated. That is right, put down your PUA
books and courses for a bit! Keep it simple. You may
not know this, but this is how EVERY great pick artist
learned to be comfortable talking to women. After
thousands of approaches it becomes almost
impossible for them not to be totally at ease.
You are probably thinking duh, I know this. News
flash! Every guy knows this deep down, but 95% of
them fail to ever do it. Guys want to start winning
right away, and in PUA there is a steep learning curve
at first. You are going to have to learn to be
comfortable with the basics (and occasionally falling
on your butt) before you can become a seduction
master or the next Dos Equis guy.
So the next time you are out, do not wait to till you
see the glamour model of your sensual dreams.
Approach the first 10 girls you see, and just say hi
while carrying on a light conversation. Only then
after those 10 approaches will you be socially
comfortable enough to start practicing all the
advanced techniques you been studying for the past
year. So chill, breathe, and learn stop repulsing
women with your nervousness before anything else.
Only when you are comfortable talking to a girl will
you then be able to seduce her. Or you could simply
stick to Plenty of Fish PUA =D.
Friday, June 15, 2012
Wednesday, June 6, 2012
How to live easy in China on $475 a month - KansasCity.com
SHANGHAI -- Young consumers in today's China, while facing a constantly changing economic landscape, are reaping the benefits of their giant nation's continuing rise, and they seem well aware of it.
While average salaries remain low by Western standards - about $760 a month - they are rising quickly, and even people earning as little as $475 a month, a common wage for new workers right out of college or those going into factories, get by without much stress.
"I like to buy new clothes and shoes, and I spend about 300 to 500 yuan ($50 to $80) average on them per month," said Kong Yawen, a 25-year-old resident of the eastern coastal city of Qingdao, who works in the international sales office of a private firm that manufactures tires and sometimes goes by her adopted English name of Sophia. "I just applied for a gym card last month and it cost me 900 yuan (about $143). I can use it for a year. On the weekend I go to watch a movie or go shopping with my friends."
Not exactly the austere lifestyle that many Americans might imagine for someone who makes that $475 a month starting salary.
How Chinese consumers spend their money is a growing concern in China, where the leadership in Beijing believes that boosting the amount the average Chinese spends for goods and services is key to the continued growth of the economy. But how much consumer flexibility can there be when salaries seem so low, especially in a nation where saving seems to be a compulsion?
As it turns out, however, hundreds of millions of people live quite comfortably, if not lavishly, on so little, while actually saving money every month. Basic necessities such as housing, food and electricity are relatively inexpensive, companies and the government pick up much of the health care costs, public transportation is very cheap and reliable, and taxes are low or nonexistent for people at the bottom end of the pay scale. While China's real estate prices skyrocketed over the past decade, rents did not keep pace.
Kong, who graduated from Shandong Jianzhu University last year, shares her nearly 1,000-square-foot Qingdao apartment with two colleagues, occupying the largest bedroom in a three-bedroom flat. Her share of the rent, $95 a month, is about 20 percent of her income. Her portion of the monthly bills is just $12.50 for water, electricity and gas - an almost negligible amount for items that are major expenses for many Americans. Internet access costs her $3, riding the bus is another $8 per month, and she spends about $80 a month on food. Because she earns less than 3,500 yuan a month - about $550 - she has no tax liability.
Costs are similarly low for Xie Haoran and Wang Yongyi, a married couple who live in the Pudong section of Shanghai.
Xie, an affable 25-year-old, invited McClatchy Newspapers in for a look at the couple's modest, sixth-floor apartment crammed with their belongings in a mixed-use neighborhood. The chain-smoking Xie makes about 3,800 yuan a month, about $600. His wife earns about $875 a month. Their rent, $254, including electricity and water, consumes about a fifth of their income.
Xie toils long, difficult hours, working 24 hours straight, then resting for 48 hours before going right back at it for another 24. His job involves checking legal paperwork for cargo coming up the Huangpu River into Shanghai. It never lets up - just like the non-stop freighters that traverse the river day and night, supplying China's largest city with the raw components needed to drive its breakneck economy. Xie, who earned his bachelor's degree last year and has worked the job for nine months, never gets a week off for vacation and his schedule never changes. It amounts to working 54 hours a week, on average.
Wang, who is also 25, works for a privately owned Chinese firm in its purchasing office. She handles the couple's day-to-day family finances. Both send 1,000 yuan (almost $160) a month to their respective parents - a common practice in China. They also pay a small amount of income tax, since they earn more than the individual threshold of 3,500 yuan a month before taxes kick in.
Xie said the couple expends little on food because they get a lot of meals at work, paid for by their companies. They spend about $80 a month eating out and nearly $100 each on transportation to and from work. They do not own a car, but Xie wants one.
"That is my dream," he said, his face lighting up. "My house doesn't need to be so big but I have to have a car. I'll probably need a long time before I can get it."
Xie is also a self-described rock 'n' roll fan and occasionally shells out as much as 1,000 yuan ($160) to attend a top-notch concert when big acts come to town.
Together the couple save 2,000 yuan ($320) a month and have managed to accumulate more than $5,000 in their bank account. They do not plan to touch it unless absolutely necessary.
"We don't want to spend the money that's in the bank," Xie said. "If I want to buy a cellphone, I won't raid the bank account."
He also said he's thought about getting a credit card - now readily available to Chinese consumers - but he worries about accumulating debt. "We also know that it can make life easier," he said.
That in part is a reference to the convenience of charging items online, a practice adopted with growing fervor in China. Taobao.com, a Chinese version of eBay and Amazon.com combined, is doing huge business, with most young people expressing a clear preference for online shopping over regular stores.
Kong, who will get a bonus from her company after working there for a year, also likes buying things online.
"I have more choices and the price is cheaper than in stores," she said. "I often buy clothes and shoes online."
Like Xie, she doesn't trust herself with a credit card.
"If I have a credit card I will buy more things; then I can't save money," she said. "I think most Chinese people don't like to spend their future money. That makes us feel very worried. I prefer to save money and then buy something."
Kong, who was born in the Shandong province city of Qufu, traces her family lineage back 72 generations, to Confucius, China's great ancient sage who was born and lived most of his life in the city. Kong feels the tug of loyalty to her parents - the concept of filial piety as put forth by Confucius - and she spends as much time as she can with her family. She often buys them gifts.
"In China before the children get married, we are a whole family and we give the money to our parents," she said. "I go home every two weeks to see my parents and friends. My home is in Gaomi, which is about 80 kilometers from Qingdao. I sometimes buy some snacks for my little sister (17 years old), some clothes for my parents. They also buy some things for me such as clothes, cosmetics or an electric cooker. Our relationship is very close. I'm a little girl in my parents' eyes."
Like other young people in China, Kong appreciates what she has and sees a bright future.
"I feel very happy I can live in today's China because I have more opportunities and a more colorful life," she said. "When my parents were young, they did not have enough food and clothes, and most people couldn't choose the husband or wife themselves. Their parents decided it for them. Now I can live in a big house and drive a car. They couldn't have imagined it when they were young. The physical world and mental world are all more abundant and colorful. People can develop as they like."
"I think my economic situation will be better and better," she continued. "I have the ability to earn money and find a better job, and my boyfriend has a good family background and is capable. ... So I am very optimistic for my future."
(Melnicoe is a McClatchy Newspapers special correspondent.)
Building the American Dream in China
It was a frigid day in late February, with temperatures dropping to 15 degrees below zero, and the roof's undulating steel surface made it feel as if we were surfing on a frozen ocean wave — one that, at this height, promised a very hard landing.
"We'd never get away with this in the U.S.," Gillen said with a nervous laugh.
From the roof, Gillen and I gazed out at a vast new city that didn't exist two years ago. Row after row of 20-story apartment towers radiated out in every direction, in regimented monotony as far as we could see. There were hundreds of towers, almost all of them empty. "When I first came here two years ago, this area was just a bunch of fields covered with construction cranes," said Gillen, who is 32. Now the farmlands outside Harbin have been transformed into one of the dozens of insta-cities rising around China. "Standing here," Gillen said, "you just have to be in awe of what China can accomplish."
The building beneath Gillen's black leather boots inspired a different sort of wonder. A whimsical, torquing 660-foot-long tube sheathed in stainless steel, the Harbin Wood Sculpture Museum is the architectural fantasy of Gillen's boss, Ma Yansong, and his team at MAD Architects in Beijing. The building's design evokes the natural world — an iceberg, say, or a piece of driftwood — but given its backdrop, I couldn't help thinking that it looked like a shimmering spaceship that had touched down unexpectedly in an alien urban landscape.
In that respect, it is not so different from Gillen himself, whose shaved head, muscular build and thick silver thumb ring make him something of an oddity in this city on China's northern frontier. When Gillen was laid off in December 2008 by Asymptote Architecture, a New York firm, he hunkered down in his Brooklyn apartment, trying to stave off the "vibe of hopelessness." Six months passed. His profession had been flattened by the financial crisis that put an abrupt halt to new construction. Gillen sent out dozens of résumés, but no offers came. Then, in early summer, he spotted a job posting for MAD Architects on a design Web site. The firm's acronym seemed to sum up the outlandish proposition. "China was not on my radar at all," he told me. The starting salary at MAD was half of what he earned in New York. Desperate, Gillen jumped.
Up on the museum's sloping steel roof, his fear under control, Gillen marveled at his good fortune. "This kind of project," he said, "could not be built anywhere else in the world today." Nor could Gillen have found such an opportunity if he hadn't journeyed 6,000 miles from home.
Over the past three years, foreign architects and designers have poured into China, fleeing economic crises at home and pinning their hopes on this country's explosive growth. It is, after all, a place that McKinsey & Company predicts will build 50,000 skyscrapers in the next two decades, the equivalent of 10 New Yorks. MAD's staff consisted almost entirely of mainland Chinese when Gillen arrived in mid-2009; today, nearly half of his 50 colleagues are foreigners, with designers from Holland, Germany, Belgium, Spain, Colombia, Japan and Thailand. "The economic crisis," Gillen says, "is a heavy factor in everybody's thought process."
This is the expected global economic formula flipped on its head: instead of American workers losing out to the Chinese, China is providing jobs for foreign architects. Even more surprising is the degree of imaginative license that China offers, even demands of, its foreign building designers. With new cities materializing seemingly overnight, international architects are free to think big, to experiment with cutting-edge designs, to introduce green technologies. All at a frantic pace. In a top-down system that favors political will and connections over regulatory oversight and public debate, large-scale projects in China can be designed, built and put to use in the space of just a few years.
China, of course, is not new terrain for international architects. Many top American firms have run offices inside China for a decade or more. Nearly all of the country's iconic modern buildings have been designed by foreigners, from the National Stadium, known as the Bird's Nest, (by the Swiss firm Herzog and de Meuron) and the gravity-defying China Central Television Tower (by the Dutch architect Rem Koolhaas) to the 128-story Shanghai Tower (by San Francisco's Gensler), which will be the second-tallest building in the world when it's completed in 2014. The new arrivals, though, come not by invitation or out of curiosity but because they need work. They are, as Michael Tunkey, head of the China office for the North American firm Cannon Design, says, "refugees from the economic crisis."
The scale and speed of China's expansion is like nothing these architects experienced in their home countries. Fueled by rising prosperity and the largest rural-to-urban shift in history — some 300 million Chinese became city dwellers over the past two decades — the boom has utterly transformed the eastern seaboard around Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou. The fastest growth now is taking place deep in the country's interior or on its outer edges in cities little known in the West: Harbin, Changsha, Chengdu and dozens of others. "It's still shocking to me," says Manuel Sanchez-Vera, a 43-year-old architect who shuttered his own Madrid practice two years ago and joined a midsize Australian firm in Shanghai. "I just got out of a meeting to design a hospital for a city that will grow from 4 million to 10 million in the next few years. How do you design for an explosion like that?"
The answer to that question, in the main, is quickly and cheaply. While some marquee projects — like the Harbin museum Gillen is working on — attract a lot of attention, most foreign architects in China are designing office towers, housing developments, hospitals and shopping malls, projects in which creativity is in constant tension with the bottom line. Despite the excitement over the flow of projects — indeed, the mere existence of work — there is also a deeper concern: all those empty apartment buildings in Harbin and elsewhere suggest that China's building boom may have passed its peak.
For now, though, Gillen sees no better alternative. "I'm an architect, I like to build," he says. "And China is a place where things get built."
In December 2008, right around the time Gillen joined the ranks of the unemployed in Brooklyn, another young American architect lost his job in San Francisco. Adam Mayer, then 26, received his pink slip one year after joining Skidmore, Owings & Merrill.
The rejection stung. Mayer, a glib and gregarious University of Southern California graduate, had long aspired to work at SOM — a blue-chip firm whose San Francisco office was not far from his family's home in Silicon Valley. Unlike Gillen, though, Mayer saw no point in sending out résumés or nursing the hope of an economic recovery. "I didn't even bother looking for a job," he told me. "All my U.S.C. friends were hitting a brick wall, and the only projects on SOM's drawing boards seemed to be in China. So I just bought a ticket to Beijing. I had nothing to lose."
Mayer spoke no Mandarin. And, like many designers, he had not yet passed the arduous set of exams needed to obtain an architect's license in the states. "Legally, in the U.S., I can't call myself an architect," Mayer said. "But in China, it doesn't matter."
Four months after arriving in Beijing, Mayer landed a full-time position at a large Singaporean firm with offices around China. The one catch: Mayer had to move to Chengdu, the capital of southwestern Sichuan Province and the front line of the Chinese government's Develop the West campaign. About 300 Chinese staff members filled the large open space of the company's Chengdu office. Only a handful, mostly Chinese with overseas passports, spoke English. Besides Mayer, there was just one other Westerner, a young Argentine designer.
During his year at SOM in San Francisco, Mayer worked primarily on one building, and his role was subordinate. But his bosses in Chengdu were asking him to prepare conceptual designs for a series of huge projects: a 1.5-million-square-foot redevelopment zone in central Chengdu, a vast new residential area for China's biggest housing developer, even a new headquarters for Chengdu's urban-planning bureau. "I had a ton of creative freedom," Mayer says. "If you ask architects coming out of grad school, they all say they want to be conceptual designers. So it was great at first."
The pace was relentless. From designing one or two projects a month, Mayer was soon being pushed to produce one large-scale conceptual design every week. "The deadlines were crazy," Mayer says. "Sometimes we'd have three days to finish a 250,000-square-meter project." Even so, his Chinese colleagues churned out even more. "In terms of pure production, the local staff could work faster and more efficiently than anything I've ever seen in the U.S.," Mayer says, even if in some instances they saw no shame in "literally copying designs right out of a book."
Creativity was supposed to be Mayer's job. Like most foreign architects in China, he was hired with the expectation that he would give designs an innovative edge — along with the prestige that many Chinese still associate with a foreign name. (More than once, Mayer was invited to sit silently at client meetings, even when he knew nothing about the project under discussion.) Mayer helped create some stunning designs, including a plan for a state-owned publisher's headquarters that drew inspiration from ancient Chinese scrolls. Still, the mantra was always "Bigger, bolder, flashier." During one meeting at the urban-planning bureau, Mayer recalls an official who implored them, "Make us a landmark that will stand out and make people notice!"
The question of whether China can innovate looms over the country's quest to move beyond its role as the world's factory. In architecture, Mayer says, the problem is not simply an education system that stresses technical skills over abstract thinking but also the pressure cooker that compels developers to build as fast and as profitably as possible. For all the lip service given to creativity, he says, too often the results are cookie-cutter developments that make Chinese cities feel depressingly similar — and surpassingly ugly. "To come up with something new and creative takes time," he says, "and in China, there's not the luxury of time."
One morning in February, Gillen showed me around MAD Architects' open-plan studio in Beijing, which occupies the top two floors of a defunct printing plant in a narrow alleyway. Rows of Chinese and foreign architects were working in an almost sepulchral silence, surrounded by models of their fanciful projects: on one end of the second floor, there was a twisting, layered skyscraper designed for Chongqing, on the other a swirly cross section of an opera house and a performing-arts center whose construction Gillen was also overseeing in Harbin.
Occupying the studio's central space, however, was a common Chinese totem: a Ping-Pong table. Not long ago, Gillen, an avid player himself, organized an officewide tournament, with an iPad going to the champion. It wasn't quite Ping-Pong diplomacy, but the event served to bring the local and foreign staff members closer together.
When Gillen made his blind leap into China, he knew very little about MAD except that its founder, the 37-year-old Ma Yansong, was a rising talent. Ma, who trained at Yale and apprenticed with the British architect Zaha Hadid, is celebrated as the first Chinese architect to win a foreign competition: the Absolute Towers in Toronto. He was proof that China was coming into its own as a creative architectural force. (Further evidence came recently when the 2012 Pritzker Prize — architecture's top honor — was awarded to another Chinese architect, Wang Shu.)
Ma and Gillen sit a few feet apart, at identical workstations, but the rolls of blueprints that make a sort of miniature skyline on the American's desk show the role he has taken on. Hired as a designer, Gillen now oversees the building of Ma's architectural concoctions. "I am the executioner," he says with a grin. "I just try to get things done without making either my boss or the client unhappy."
The client, in the case of the Harbin Wood Sculpture Museum, is the local government, which occupies a glass building with a red Chinese flag next door to the construction site. "The top-down system can make things very simple," Gillen says. "The leader says, 'I want it; you make it,' and it's done." Never mind that the projected ticket sales for the museum's exhibitions, which are anchored by the collected works of a locally renowned wood sculptor, could never match the building's extravagant price tag.
Such an issue might stop a project in the United States. But in China, the primary concerns are prestige and development for its own sake, and the leaders would move heaven — and lots of earth — to get the museum built. "These projects are the Louis Vuitton bags of architecture," says one foreign architect, who has worked on several marquee buildings in China. "Every city in China wants one now."
With all the excitement over architectural possibilities in China, there is a reluctance to address the obvious question: What happens if the social, cultural and economic environment cannot support these cutting-edge designs after they are built? This is already a problem, both for prestige projects and massive urban developments. MAD, for example, has built the voluptuously curved Ordos Museum in a new planned city in Inner Mongolia. But the real estate bubble popped in Ordos last year. The museum now sits forlornly in an empty development, a symbol of architectural achievement as well as the folly of ambition. "These are like the Fields of Dreams," Gillen says. "Build it, and they will come." Sometimes, though, they don't come.
In Harbin, I met two Chinese men in thick coats wandering around the Wood Sculpture Museum. They were trying to decide if it looked more like a whale or a shimmering serpent. "It certainly is unusual," said one, who identified himself as Mr. Wang and who bought an apartment in one of the high-rises behind the museum two years ago. Did he like the design? "Well, yes," he said, "because it's already made my property nearly double in value!"
Gillen is not paid to worry about the museum's future or its development value — just to ensure that it is built. And that often requires handling shifting demands that would be almost unimaginable back home. When the pit for the wood-sculpture museum's foundation had already been dug, for instance, the government made a startling request to double the area to 66,000 square feet. The demand meant drafting a new set of designs and digging the foundation several yards larger to create a new underground gallery space. "In the U.S., the contract would've been ripped up and renegotiated," Gillen said. But MAD complied with the request without complaint. It was another lesson in the Chinese art of making guanxi, or cultivating relationships. Who knows what commissions a cooperative attitude might lead to in the future?
Walking through the museum's cathedral-like interior, with rays of morning sunshine streaming through the skylights, Gillen snapped photos of imperfections: a shattered pane of curved glass, a poorly placed water pipe. He was keenly aware of the shoddy workmanship that has plagued other modern buildings in China. It is one price of excessive speed. "I want to build a monument that lasts," he says. Even so, he couldn't get over the pace of progress. "This is a complex project, but we've gone from design to nearly finished construction in just two years!" Gillen said. "I'm not saying this system is better than ours back home. But sometimes it seems like the U.S. is sitting on the couch sipping coffee while China is Carl Lewis running as hard as it can."
It was nearly 1 a.m. on a weeknight in Chengdu, but a band was playing at China Groove, and the expatriate architects seemed in no hurry to leave. Clustered around a table on a night in mid-February were newly arrived architects from Germany, New Zealand and Britain, as well as a young Iranian construction supplier just in from Tehran. The music was blasting, and the young men (yes, a large proportion of the foreign architects in China are men) had to yell to make themselves heard.
"Have you seen the world's biggest building yet?" shouted Stephan Wurster, an affable 38-year-old Stuttgart native who moved here in December after three years in Beijing. Both he and Kamaljot Singh Panesar, a goateed British architect at the table, have offices in development zones mushrooming on the plains south of Chengdu, not far from a half-completed behemoth called Ocean Park. Under a single roof covering an area of about 25 football fields, Ocean Park is designed to include hotels, shopping malls, aquariums, amusement parks and a simulated ocean with a white-sand beach. (The ultimate "Truman Show" touch: the 660-foot-wide video screen that will allow beachgoers to enjoy brilliant digital sunsets, even when clouds and pollution block the real thing.)
Wurster takes more than a passing interest in the Chinese-designed building: it stands directly across from the site where he is overseeing construction of a contemporary art center for his bosses at Zaha Hadid Architects. The same Chinese investor behind Ocean Park, in fact, is financing the arts center as a gift to Chengdu. And what city leader wouldn't be flattered to receive a cultural icon designed by a world-famous architect? Still, Hadid's firm has had to make compromises — overhauling the sinuous design because local officials thought it looked like a snake, which is considered bad luck. "Even on status projects," Wurster said with a laugh, "there's no carte blanche in China."
The hidden rules and restrictions are felt even more strongly by the vast majority of foreign architects who are not working on high-visibility projects. Consider Panesar. The financial crisis devastated his boutique firm in London in 2009, forcing him and his partner at Urban Hybrid Architecture to lay off most of their 15-person staff and take a gamble on China. Dapper and soft-spoken, Panesar, who is 35, has spent the past 18 months scrambling to get his foot in the door with all kinds of projects in Chengdu: train stations, kindergartens, residential developments. So far, he has pulled in enough design fees to keep his firm afloat. But he's still waiting for one of the designs to actually be built. "China is not the blank canvas that you imagine," Panesar said. "We're just crawling really, but we're here for the long haul."
There was one expat missing that night at China Groove. Adam Mayer, now 29, left his job in Chengdu a few weeks earlier and flew back to California to figure out his next move. "I built up a great portfolio of designs," Mayer told me when we talked by Skype. "But I started to wonder what good it served." None of his designs were built. For all the creative freedom he enjoyed, Mayer began longing for stronger mentoring and more concrete results. In some cases, clients were using his work to impress officials in hopes of winning a bid or acquiring land for a future project. (In China, all land is owned by the state.) "I feel as though I was more in advertising or marketing than architecture," he said.
Mayer's experience is not universal. But many foreign architects in China sense that they are operating in the dark, toiling in a system they dimly understand. Real estate development in China is a murky business. There is little transparency — and lots of horse trading — in everything from the acquisition of land to the awarding of bids and competitions. In all but the highest-profile projects, foreigners are largely sidelined during the building process itself, which by law and tradition is controlled by local design institutes.
As foreign architects continue to arrive, there is also increasing competition for jobs and business. Some international firms have even started lowballing bids to try to buy their way into the market — a development that is "killing Western firms here," says the Shanghai-based Dutch architect Daan Roggeveen, who is the co-author of a book on China's new megacities. In the meantime, Chinese and foreign firms alike are moving to localize their staffs — both to cut costs and to cultivate a new generation of Chinese architects, many of whom have trained abroad.
"I'll definitely go back to China," Mayer said. For now, though, he is too busy cramming for the exams that will allow him, at last, to call himself an architect in the United States.
A few miles from the wood-sculpture museum near Harbin, a far bigger cultural landmark is rising on the banks of the frozen Songhua River. When it is finished, the Harbin Cultural Island — the MAD-designed opera house and performance center I saw modeled in the office — will look like a trio of snow-swirled mountains. Gillen was checking on the progress. "Three years ago," he admitted, "I'd never even heard of Harbin."
As we clambered to the top of this construction site — those heights again — it somehow made sense that Gillen's planned year in China had extended to almost three. In his previous job at a New York firm, he said, "I spent a year and a half doing concept designs that never got built." When I asked him how long his China sojourn might last, he smiled: "How's the New York real estate market doing?" As the winter sun hung over the horizon, Gillen walked around the half-completed opera house — "a baby being born," he called it — and added: "I'm in a lucky position. I don't know if the pace of growth in China is sustainable, but I'll ride it as long as I can."
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