While in Singapore I had the chance to visit my grandmothers, who I hadn’t seen for a long while. It was during my study of modern Chinese history last year that I realized I knew very little about my grandparents’ past. There is so much of local history that I never learned, because I had opted for a more Western-centric curriculum during A-levels. I suppose I had been more interested in the future back then, but it was partly due to the generational language barrier. After a summer in China my Mandarin has much improved, though not as much as I would have liked it to, but sufficient for most purposes. So I decided to ask about their past.

My first grandmother tells me her story in a mix of Mandarin, Berhasa and Teochew, the latter two of which I have a very limited understanding of despite years in the military and cannot speak at all. So it may be that some of what I heard may have been misunderstood. She was born in the late 20s, and like many Teochews in the great Diaspora, her family left the misery of the warlord era and came to Malaysia. When she was a teenager, her family was coerced into supporting (i.e. protection money) the Malayan communist front, which at the time was probably sending remittances to finance the civil war against the KMT, which got them in trouble with the colonial government, and she went into hiding. Being caught would have meant repatriation to the mainland.

On a side note, she was probably born around the same time as one Chin Peng a.k.a. the Plen who later became the leader of the communist front and the colonial authorities’ most wanted man. I came across his autobiography at Select bookstore and flipped through it, imagining him coming around my grandmother’s village as a young student leader calling for support for the revolution.

There were more stories from that period about some relative who had been captured by pirates, which I thought was pretty amusing. Another relative did repatriate to the mainland and served in the liberation army, and was posted to Hainan island after the war. Perhaps if I ever have the chance to visit Hainan I shall go find his descendants.

My other grandmother speaks almost no Mandarin at all, despite a steady diet of channel 8 soap operas. I tried to speak to her in Mandarin and she replied in Teochew, which I suppose is really my fault for not knowing it. Unfortunately , having been born in Singapore and marrying young she did not have stories as interesting (no pirates or communists), so I asked to see old photographs and documents. This was the first time I saw a birth certificate from the colonial era. It was written and signed in English, and I suppose they had used the services of a writer, or perhaps it was simply transcribed by the colonial clerk. Perhaps if I have more time I will look into the archives.

The nonprofit I volunteer with, Wokai microfinance, has been selected as a finalist in the Youth Social Entrepreneur Competition on Changemakers.net. The final round is decided by online voting. It takes about five minutes to register and vote, and you can do this here, but those five minutes can change the world for us. And if you could get your network to do it too, that would be AMAZING!

Read on for why you should do this:

What Wokai is about
Wokai is a nonprofit capital intermediary for microfinance in China. Our peer-to-peer fundraising model allows individual donors to finance microentrepreneurs in rural China, where hundreds of millions of Chinese people have been left behind by the reform era, helping the poorest lift themselves out of poverty to self-sufficiency and sustainable development. For more operational details, check out our website, watch our Youtube video, or better still, glance through our competition entry.

Why vote for Wokai
Wokai is projected to achieve operational sustainability over the medium term when the P2P fundraising platform has reached a critical scale (like most tech startups). Unlike most new nonprofits, which compete for the limited pool of institutional donor funds (and are thus zero-sum), Wokai’s model is bringing new revenue streams into the sector. This is compounded by Wokai’s focus on developing the microfinance industry in China (still in that early, pre-venturecap stage) which taps on capital markets rather than donors. This approach adds value.

But in the short term, it’s running on grant funding and love, and although costs are much lower in China, they do have expenses which will scale up with operations. The Ashoka fellowship brings incredible legitimacy in the social enterprise world, and that with the potential grant funding through the competition, would be a huge break for the organization.

How I am involved
I’ve volunteered for their New York chapter for the past year now, and this summer I worked with them in Beijing and Inner Mongolia developing their social impact assessment program. Based on my experience, I believe this is a cause and an organization worth supporting – the management and staff are all highly professional and extremely dedicated people.

What you can do right now
1. Vote for Wokai. You have to vote for two other finalists, which is up to you, but I personally found ‘Mideast Youth.com’ and ‘Youth and gender development program’ rather compelling entries. Just in case you don’t want to go through all the finalists.

2. Update your Facebook status to “just voted for WOKAI: http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/competition/staplesyv”.

3. Share the link “http://www.changemakers.net/en-us/competition/staplesyv” on your Facebook profile, with “I voted for Wokai microfinance” in the comment section. It’s the second tab on your wall, just after ‘update status’.

4. E-mail your network copy-pasting this post.

Thanks for your support!

My main takeaway from Hill’s speech was about the logistical difficulty of a truly ‘multilateral’ six party dialog. The opening ceremony had all six participating countries involved, and the Chinese hosts had prepared a special hexagon-shaped table instead of the usual rectangle or round table. Maybe it was good feng shui. In the center of the hexagon were lighted flowers – after one delegate spoke a few sentences, the flowers would light up while each translator worked. Only after each light went out did the delegate continue, and apparently the North Korean translator usually took the longest – which could either mean that they take extra effort at translating every nuance of what is said, or that their translation capabilities are more limited, or maybe both.

Hill’s point was also that a truly multilateral dialog would be logistically difficult, long and tiring due to simultaneous translation lag, and that each delegation broke into bilateral sessions to discuss specifics. The neocon criticism of Hill’s bilateral meetings with the North Korean delegation was thus unfounded – everyone had bilateral meetings with everyone else – but it seems like the beauty of the six party talks is that parties can claim it was both multi and bilateral depending on what suits their interests. His description of the process of the bilateral talks was also intriguing: If the US and the DPRK had some particular issue that could not come to agreement, it would get raised in other bilateral sessions with other parties who would then apply pressure on that particular issue, which sounds like a lot of horse trading.

The usual questions came up about China, Taiwan etc. The moderator ensured that all questions came from students, as the press would get their own time with Hill afterwards during the reception. I came away from it with some regret that I cannot join the State Department, at least not in the near term, and I’ve missed the boat for a fast-track foreign service job with the nationality I do possess. This means that if I do pursue IR academia (it is an option), I will not have an easy transition into policy, which is the main draw of the field and the best strategy to advance within it a la Victor Cha.

Thank you for taking the time to interview recently with a FACES executive. Your written application and experiences and opinions expressed in your interview impressed us greatly. However, we had many extremely qualified interview candidates, and had to make some very difficult decisions. We regret that we are unable to offer you a spot in the 2008 FACES conference.

Thank you again for your time and interest in FACES, and we wish you all the best in your future endeavors.

This is the second time already. I really have no idea what these Stanford people are looking for… I guess I won’t get to visit Chris anytime soon, which is a pity since I would really like to see more of the United States than the borough of Manhattan and the ten block radius around Columbia I hardly leave. So far I’ve been around the DC area and down to Indiana, but that’s it.

Geoffrey says: Don’t let these things pull you down. They are not a judge of your worth.

These days I’m not sure what the right measure of my worth is.

I really liked Carol from ViD. She’s my new hero: Huntsman with dual wharton concentrations and 2 non-IS college minors, KSG (masters in public administration/”yak studies”, she jokes), flies around the world to exotic places to cut deals and end poverty… How much more perfect can you get than that? She was invited to Columbia to speak by Microfinance Working Group and Net Impact, and I took the opportunity to have an F2F convo since I was also scheduled for a phone interview.

But when it came time to talk to her I stumbled on my mandarin and couldn’t answer basic questions about my finance/business background properly. Considering that she was really nice to me, I think this was my worst interview performance ever. Maybe I should’ve stuck with the phone interview instead. I wish I was better with people… In many ways its the perfect summer internship: Hong Kong, paid (nominally I suppose), social VC, incredible management team. Now I feel like crawling under a rock and staying there forever.

Bottom line: Since I am not a natural at interviewing. I have to invest some time in preparing an interview question and answer key, since many of the questions are fairly standard and the answers can be planned in advance and memorized. But I also need to prepare for the interview experience itself, which means going for practice interviews at the career center or asking friends to help. This will be very important for fall recruiting, which is coming up a lot faster than expected. I can only delay the inevitable for so long.

Farewell my Concubine is kind of the opposite of the First Emperor, since it’s a Western-style opera sung in mandarin by chinese people while First Emperor is a Beijing-style opera sung in English by domingo et al. I liked it a lot better. It was not as elaborate, there was no set to speak of, just the four characters in costume. It was in the same concert hall as the philharmonic (avery fisher) and not where city or met opera are, so the stage was filled with the orchestra. But I still liked it better. They projected subtitles (english and chinese) on a screen at the top, which were really useful since it was hard to tell what they were singing at times. The crowd was mostly old chinese people and mainland graduate students. One old couple near us talked throughout the opera. I guess I can’t really complain since I got free tickets. I hope they scale up the production, I think it would do pretty well.

Hansel and Gretel was very much a family affair, like the Magic Flute or Nutcracker. Lots of kids in the audience. The set was very elaborate and detailed. I especially liked the gingerbread house, with its sinister-looking oven and gingerbread children frozen in motion. It was sung in english but it would have been quite impossible to tell what the lyrics were without the subtitles. It just sounded strange, because there is this dissonance between what you hear and what you expect to hear, since you know what the words are supposed to sound like. Still, I enjoyed it much.

In order to prepare for summer 2008 in China, my Mandarin has to improve substantially in all areas: listening comprehension, advanced conversation, reading comprehension, and composition, in order of importance. Towards this objective, I have planned various activities to practice Mandarin every day, including watching the awesome New Shanghai Bund (新上海滩） and JJ Lin’s new TW-drama So I’m Not Handsome (原来我不帅).

Listening comprehension
I’ve watched years of k- and j-dramas to have simple hangukmal and nihongo vocabulary drilled into my brain, but I’ve only seen a grand total of one Chinese-language drama: It Started with a Kiss or 恶作剧之吻. Why? Because most of them just aren’t that interesting. Even ISWAK I only watched for three episodes before deciding to drop it. As a result, I haven’t been exposed to Mandarin as much as I should have been.

Xu Wenqiang watches his Shanghai princess from afar…

New Shanghai Bund has fixed that. Forty-two episodes of 1930s pre-war jazz-age Shanghai awesomeness. I just love the fashion of the era. The main character is always in this Humphrey Bogart trenchcoat and fedora with a cigarette in one hand and a pistol in the other. It’s a mainland production so its entirely in Mandarin, unlike the original TVB drama, but unlike most dramas it doesn’t have Mandarin subtitles so I’m finding it a little hard to follow the dialogue, since if I don’t catch what they say I try to figure it out from reading. It’s not as if the dialogue is too complex either.

I’ve already known this for a while.

So I’m Not Handsome is rather painful to watch for various reasons (With JJ Lin, it should really be titled 原来我很帅), but I think it’s much more interesting than ISWAK. I’ll watch this mainly for educational purposes. Unfortunately the subtitles are in traditional script rather than simplified, which confuses me at times.

Watching these without the aid of English subtitles will be a good way to retrain in listening comprehension skills, and since I find them interesting, I consider it more fun than work.

Conversation
I will make an effort to speak Mandarin every day. I do have friends and suitemates who speak, so that’s one possibility, and I am joining more mainland student clubs in order to immerse myself in that environment. Unfortunately the extent of our conversation tends to be limited.

Reading comprehension and composition
One of my mainland friends wanted me to borrow her 论语, but I declined. I will try to read something more contemporary, like a People’s Daily or Xinhua article, every couple of days. I will also make an effort to actually read the mainland chinese student club e-mails (entirely in mandarin) instead of asking my friends in the club about what is going on. Unfortunately I don’t really see much opportunity to make writing a regular thing.

Before the actual event, I camped out at the entrance because CU-Asia was giving out tickets to the Farewell my Concubine (霸王别姬） opera tomorrow. I managed to get 2 tickets left over since not everyone came to claim on time. I don’t actually have a date to go with though, and am working down the list of ‘girls I know who speak Mandarin who tolerate my presence’.

The event was also sponsored by a group called the Renwen (人文) society, and there were a lot of old Chinese people in the audience. Some of them were faculty and staff at Columbia and other colleges, but most were not. There were also plenty of mainlander graduate students i.e. GCI/CU-Asia members. And then there’s me, probably the only undergrad. This is the most Chinese people I’ve seen gathered in a single lecture hall in New York.

David Ho was born in Taizhong and moved to Cali when he was 12, went to Caltech and Harvard med school, and did his residency at UCLA where he saw the first wave of the AIDS epidemic among the gay community in the early 80s. His subsequent work on treatment got him Time man of the year in 96.

After a short video about his early life and discrimination issues in California back in the 60s and 70s, he gave a brief backgrounder on the distribution of AIDS prevalence, and a more technical explanation of the mechanics of HIV. My scientific knowledge is so limited (Columbia core’s science component is a joke, thankfully) but I’m glad to have learned a bit about reverse transcription, the CD4+ lymphocyte, how antiretroviral drugs work and what the problems are in developing a vaccine. He also touched on the origins of the HIV/AIDS epidemic and showed a statistical estimate of when the virus transferred to humans in the 30s, which I thought was a pretty interesting application of statistical methods. He emphasized that HIV/AIDS, like most modern diseases, comes from animals. Another interesting point he noted was that while ARV testing has a ready pool of test subjects, vaccine development does not, as HIV- people have little incentive to participate in a risky medical trial. There is thus an economic barrier to surmount in vaccine development that the market may not meet on its own.

That took up one and a half hours, and then he started on the topic that most people who came wanted to hear about, the epidemic in China. I suspect a lot of the older folks got really bored during the technical explanation, especially if their English listening comprehension skills were more conversational than technical-literate. So China has the HIV-1 C substrain and is projected to have 10-20m infections by 2010. That’s a lot of people, about the same size as the population of the greater NYC area. The virus was introduced in the southwestern provinces by intravenous drug users, but spread mainly by blood plasma sales practices, where desperate poverty pushed people to sell blood plasma in nightmare public health conditions. He talked about some of the projects he is involved in, providing ARVs and baby formula to HIV+ mothers to prevent mother-to-child transmission. One problem he noted was that providing a one-time ARV to the mother can reduce the chance of transmission during childbirth, but that creates drug resistance in the mother, and if the mother dies that tends to have effects that negate the benefits of preventing transmission. He also talked about HIV as a public policy issue, with antidiscrimination as an important aspect, and how campaigns with Yao Ming are helping to raise awareness of HIV/AIDS victims.

I came away from the talk with a better technical understanding of HIV/AIDS and an appreciation of the challenges, and also the opportunities for me to contribute. Even though I’m not literate in biomed, the public policy, econ-statistical aspects of the problem are things that fall within my arc of competence and I should consider investing some time in understanding those. It is a similar issue with sustainable development – I have no claim to expertise in climate science, engineering etc but can approach the problem from other disciplines. This is why I think learning how to use arcGIS will be as important as R/Stata.

In July 2007, the South Korean ministry of finance announced that it had hired the lead actor and actress from a hit television serial that aired May-July to promote their microcredit program. That television serial, “War of Money” (쩐의전쟁), was about the informal moneylending industry in South Korea, reaching an average of 32.8% of households in the greater Seoul area and 31% nationwide, and it was the top-rated serial of the season, so popular that ‘bonus’ episodes were produced – it remains one of my personal all-time favorite kdramas. Much of its storyline emphasized themes of income volatility, uncollateralized credit, innovative entrepreneurship, and good (and bad) borrowing practices – all themes relevant to microfinance. In an interview prior to the serial’s airing, the lead actor Park Shin-yang (박신양, of Lovers in Paris/파리의연인 fame) had even noted that one of the sources of inspiration that he drew from was the work of Muhammad Yunus and the Grameen Bank.

Perhaps it may be useful to take “Money’s Warfare” one step further, and consider a similar application of television serials in microfinance education, through its plot, themes, and product placement strategy.

Advantages & Disadvantages of Television Serials as educational medium
Pros:

Proven consumer education tool
No literacy requirement
Highly scalable
Advertising/product placement synergies

Cons:

Requires infrastructure/television access
Highly variable outcomes
Highly culturally-specific
Target demographic mismatch

Pros
Proven consumer education tool. First, that television is effective for consumer education is well-documented in marketing literature, and more recently studies have analyzed its role in educating viewers on such social issues as gender discrimination. (See among others, Jensen, Robert and Oster, Emily. “The Power of TV: Cable Television and Women’s Status in India.” NBER Working Paper Series No. 13305 August 2007) Television content is in an entertainment format, such as popular soap operas, that reach a broad audience. Even if soap operas are not explicitly intended to impart specific messages for social development (as the Sabido Method of socially-oriented programming performed in Latin America), they still raise viewer awareness of the alternative lifestyles and the implicit social values of those depicted. This can have a tremendous impact on rural, less-educated communities where links with the urban populace are few and far between. If the serial is very successful, the impact will be that much greater: the top 10 soap operas in India attract as many as 50 million viewers a night.

No literary requirement. Second, television as an education medium does not require any literacy on the part of the viewer, unlike newspaper advertising or pamphlets. Considering that the adult literacy rate in rural developing countries is low, the value of this should not be underestimated.

Highly scalable. Third, television serials are highly scalable, as once initial investments in public broadcast radio-wave or satellite/cable infrastructure is in place, the marginal cost of delivery per household is near zero. Serials can also be easily reproduced as VCDs or DVDs and made to suit different languages and regional dialects via dubbing and subtitles. This means that if a television serial is successful in one area, it can be spread to other areas easily via different mechanisms.

Advertising & product placement synergies. Fourth, television serials are also opportunities for marketing of microcredit services, whether overtly through advertising slots or more subtle product placements integrated into the storyline, which I will describe further below. Even with microcredit advertising, there will be space for other advertising as well, and for popular serials, advertising revenue may even cover the cost of production, which means greater sustainability.

Cons
Requires electricity infrastructure & television access. Although this may be a limiting factor to outreach in poorer rural areas, it should be noted that for many poor households, a television set is one of the most important status/aspirational goods, because of the relatively cost-effective entertainment value and escape it provides from a dreary life. Also, televisions are quasi-non-rival-goods since the marginal cost of another person watching at the same time is almost zero (up to a point).

Unfortunately, the educational impact of the serial, which depends on the its popularity, is highly dependent on exogenous factors like the timeslot it airs, the cast, etc. Impact is also highly culturally-specific, if it is intended to be accessible to the audience. Furthermore, most viewers of television serials are middle-class housewives, and not the target clients of microcredit products. Yet these can still be mitigated by an effective marketing strategy and excellent scripting, which I address below.

Possible plot, themes, and characters
Television serials need drama to be successful. I propose a serial about the development of a microfinance institution (MFI), with two overlapping love triangles (a staple of most soap operas and the standard formula in Korean serials). For my purposes I set the drama in mainland China, where audiences are very familiar with K-dramas. The serial’s plot will emphasize themes like:

Uncertainty about the future and employment security
The failure of social safety nets and the welfare system
The high cost of informal moneylenders and poor access to formal financial institutions
The power of entrepreneurs with microloans

The main characters are:

The activist. A brilliant economics student from a poor interior province studying at Tsinghua University, she is forced to drop out to support her ailing parents, whose spiraling healthcare costs are caused by a substandard and corrupt socialized healthcare bureaucracy and the breaking of the ‘iron ricebowl’ of state-owned enterprises and the danwei system. Unable to make ends meet due to the decaying economy of the interior provinces and the politicized nature of the state banks, her father passes away, and she swears vengeance against the corrupt officials and to revive the provincial economy. Will she prevail, or will her enemies destroy her MFI?

The financier down on his luck. The youngest son of a wealthy private equity dynasty, he must prove himself worthy and make his fortune, but he’s just had a string of failures partly due to his pride and hot temper (although he’s actually a nice guy deep down inside). When the activist miraculously saves his life from a triad kidnapping, their fates are entwined, and he takes a chance on her crazy idea about microfinance, which she explains to him (and the audience). Is he falling for her, or just repaying a debt of gratitude? Can he find it in his heart to understand this business, or is he just about the money?

The bureaucrat out to get her. The doctor’s most hated rival in Tsinghua, now a rising star in the state banks due to her family political connections in the Shanghai clique. Set up for an arranged marriage with the financier, she bitterly resents the doctor’s growing presence in his heart and her rise up the social ladder. How far will she go to get what she wants?

The official who loves her. The doctor’s secret admirer from her school days, now a government official in Zhongnanhai. Will he side with the system, or with her? Can he beat the financier in pursuit of her love?

You can probably tell I watch far too many soap operas, probably to make up for the lack of drama in my life. Maybe when I go to China this summer I can pitch this story at CCTV? Or maybe not. I guess television dramas about civil society activism and government corruption might be unpopular with the censors.

The romance between Jay and Xiaoyu (Kwai Lunmei) in ‘Secret/不能说的秘密’ is so perfect… it really is a simple love straight out of Jay’s 简单爱, or pretty much any of his early songs. And this MV by SY-sempai is set to my favorite piece from the OST. But my heart goes out to Qingyi’s (Alice Tseng) disappointment, and the sorrow behind her forced smile – it must be so painful to pine from afar, but even more so to keep that longing… secret (LOL).