In three hours, the kids and I are leaving for Shanghai’s Pudong airport to catch a flight to Hong Kong. I was just in Hong Kong last week, but that was for a financial conference.

This week, it’s for vacation. It’s the second year in a row that I’m taking an actual vacation with the babies. We’re planning to spend a week at the beach, with  maybe a day trip to Ocean World, their big amusement park. Last year, we went to the Hong Kong Disneyland.

I don’t normally take vacations – until last year, I couldn’t remember a vacation I’d been on — except for one trip to Florida’s Disney World when I was in college. I got sunstroke.

When I was in Russia, my idea of using up vacation days was a week at the Afghan border visiting the Russian border guards. I guess I’ve never felt that I needed a break from work. I loved my work. If I had free time, I would use it to do more work.

So now I schedule vacations. It’s hard. I have a hard time justifying spending the money. And of taking the time away from the office.

Also, I have a hard time saying no to assignments. This week, I’m going to be working on three stories while on my vacation, totalling somewhere around 4,000 to 5,000 words.

I borrowed the nice laptop from the office to take on the road with me and it immediately crashed. So I’m going to have to take the little itty bitty one without an ethernet jack — just a wireless modem. I hope I’m going to be able to use it somewhere. I forgot to call today and check which kind of connections the hotel had.

Maybe this is the excuse I need to buy a new — or newish — laptop. If I do, I’m getting a Mac.

These are the kinds of problems foreign correspondents have these days. When I was starting out, I wouldn’t even think of going on the road and expecting to be able to work and report on and file a story from some little island somewhere. I used to carry pencils instead of pens because they were more reliable. I used to carry a camera that required no batteries of any kind except for the light meter, and even that you could fake if your eye was good — or you took pictures at every conceivable setting. (My eye wasn’t that good. I did plenty of bracketing.)

Once, in Chechnya, I got to file by fax, and that was great. I didn’t have to dictate my story into the phone, yelling at the top of my lungs so that the editor could hear me. The actual phone line was secondary — he could have probably heard me by leaning out the window.

Tomorrow I will need to pick up some IP phone cards in Hong Kong — they’re a way to make really cheap international phone calls. My entire office lives on them here in Shanghai, and the quality is usually better than AT&T.

And I’ll be all set. Except for the lack of sleep part.

Oh, another editor just droped me a line … I’m also going to be working on the pet food poison story this week.

Okay, time to go get some sleep. Only two hours left until I leave for the airport.

Signing off in Shanghai – sleepily,

Maria

For another view of working in China, by 24-year-old charlie Gidney, who writes for the China Daily, check out his blog Positive Solutions.

In Sunday’s post Boxes he talks about the various constraints that the English-language state-owned media are under.

I can’t imagine what it must be like, starting your journalism career at a censored publication.

In my 15 years as a journalist, I can’t remember a time when one of my stories was canned because of political or advertising considerations.

Though, of course, there have been plenty of instances when a story was sent back because an editor wanted me to do additional reporting or fix writing problems.

I am surprised by how often this question comes up, however — and how frequently people don’t believe my answer.

There is plenty of control in the US media, of course, but I believe it tends to have more to do with distribution of resources. Certain topics get more reporters thrown at them than others. (And I’m not talking about the television networks, but of the print media where I’ve worked — news wires, newspapers, businesss magazines.)

As a result, as far as individual reporters are concerned, they can just go out and do their job. And leave it up to the editors to argue with the publishers about how much coverage certain areas require.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

I met an interesting artist today at a private showing at a friend’s house. He was in China for just a few days, on his way home to St. Petersburg, Russia from Osaka, Japan.

Georgii Kovenchuk’s paintings have been condemned in the old Soviet Union for their “formalist” stance, show a strong, bold use of color and shape. Here is one of a white lily from the Gallery Kadieff in Helsinki. And here is “Woman on armchair.”

At the party, Georgii was joined by one of his old friends, a Chinese artist who came to St. Petersburg to study in 1955. The Chinese friend still remembered a smattering a Russian, and we had a fun time trying to communicate. Later on in the evening, one of the other guests spoke Chinese, and for a while we had a relay going – the Chinese artist would say something in Chinese, the other guest would translate it into English, and I would relay it into Russian for Georgii — and then back again for the response.

Georgii had some run-ins with the Soviet authorities because he wasn’t interested in the Soviet Socialist Realist style of art. But he told the story that when he had trouble getting into art school — his father was serving 25 years in a Gulag, accused of being a British spy because he had been a POW in a German camp that was liberated by British forces — it was a KGB official who helped him get in.

These days, he says, he can say whatever he wants, and, better still, he is able to travel overseas. He has lectured in the United States, and has had gallery showings around the world.

He had some slide shows on his laptop but his computer had crashed and he was feeling pretty down about it. Fortunately, I have magic fingers when it comes to technology. I plugged the laptop in (thus solving the “it doesn’t even turn on anymore” problem) then booted in safe mode, which allowed it to run long enough to see the pictures. The problem was viruses on the hard drive — easy enough to fix, when he gets home, by installing an anti-virus program.

To thank me for my help, he gave me a wood cut as a present, which I plan to get framed tomorrow and hang on the wall. If I had known ahead of time there was a computer with a virus problem, I would have brought an antivirus disk with me and cleaned the computer up for him. Now I feel sorry that I couldn’t do more to help.

The party itself was in an old lane house in the French Concession part of Shanghai. The hostess, Maria Laletina, shares my first name – at one point, there were four different Marias present, creating a little confusion.

The narrow house had five stories, with a room on each floor and a steep, twisty staircase. It was a beautiful, gorgeous house, the kind of place I would love to live (instead of the modern apartment in a high rise, where I actually live — I didn’t choose it, it was chosen for me).

Shanghai is starting to develop a very vibrant, multi national artistic community which I have been ignoring for the most part, sticking to business and economics instead.

I’m a little hyper-sensitive and most art makes me feel unsettled and unhappy. Kovenchuk’s – such as the bright pieces that were hanging on the walls of the apartment — had a grounded, happy feel to them with an undercurrent of depth and peace. It was a nice feeling.

I left early because I had to work. China has a funny habit of shutting down for a week at a time several times a year for government holidays — but forces its people to work on the weekends to make up for some of that time.

Also, I’m trying to clear off as much out of my plate as I can, to get ready for my own vacation next week. So for me as well, it’s a long, wearing weekend.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

Thursday night was our weekly Cotton’s Bar drinks get-together. One of  our new visitors was a man who launched twelve magazines.

Twelve magazines!

And in not a single case did a journalist make the move to publisher. I only know one man who did — Graham Earnshaw, formerly of Reuters, who’s now the successful publisher of the China Economic Review.

I need to talk to him again about how he did it.

Does anyone else know of any journalists who have made a transition to publisher?

The man who started the twelve magazines is now running an Internet-based business teleivion program in Japan and is in the process of expanding it to China and other Asian countries.

There’s a lot of that kind of thing going on over here — new channels, new publications, new everything spring up all around.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

I was in Hong Kong this week for a conference, thus no postings — for some reason, I couldn’t reach the SPJ.org website from my hotel.

I do love to travel, but traveling is a lot more fun when you only have a little work to do. Just enough work to feel useful, on some interesting assignment that gets you in to see people that you wouldn’t ordinarily see as a tourist, and to places you wouldn’t ordinarily go.

But not so much work that you feel dead afterwards.

My work-related travel used to fall into the former category.

Lately, however, more and more of it has been of the “feeling dead afterwards” variety. Yesterday, for example, I spent the day at the Four Seasons hotel in downtown Hong Kong, attending sessions about global regulatory changes in the securities industry, and then had lunch with industry experts. In the afternoon, I had back-to-back interviews with senior executives from Hewlett-Packard.

Then I checked back in with my office, handled a few minor administrative matters and gave writers advise on stories they were writing.

In the evening, I flew back to Shanghai. I got back to my house around 10 p.m. at night — and then put in another full day’s work, deadling with administrative matters and editing a big story on the Chinese securities industry. Unfortunately, the story had to be pretty much rewritten from scratch, and I didn’t finally get to call it a day until 4 a.m.

Is it worth it? Yeah, I think it is. I enjoy the work very much, I do like the travel, and I’m slowly learning to delegate more.

Someday soon I expect that I’ll be in control of my schedule, and will be able to plan my days so that I get adequate and regular sleep, and sufficient downtime to spend with my kids or at the gym.

Tonight, I’ve got meetings, more editing to do… my business manager just came into my office and told me to go home and take a nap. Do I really look that bad? I guess I do.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

I went to the Shanghaiist drinking beer thing tonight at Henry’s Bar and Grill. I took pictures. Mostly, of guys standing arounding drinking beer. And one picture of a toilet in the ladies’ room (Henry’s has one of those things with heated seats and a built-in bidet — very, very rare in Shanghai, where usually you’re lucky to just get a seat and actual toilet paper).

Note to self: in the future, I’m going to try to get some action shots. So, instead of folks standing around talking, holding beers, and a separate shot of the toilet, I’ll try to, say, combine the two.

I mean, I used to be a real photographer. I’ve got a picture of myself in Afghanistan in a photo vest wearing a bunch of camera equpment. (I carried a Nikon FM-2, which was famous for taking any kind of abuse and not requiring any batteries, and a Hi-8 the Sky TV guys loaned me.)

Anyway, I noticed that everyone at the bar had a cool name for their blog. Dan Washburn’s Shanghaiist, for example, And the ImageThief was there (Will Moss, with his wife, Olivia) and AsiaPundit‘s Chris Myrick, and Pacific Epoch‘s Sage Brennan.

“Journalism and the World” is such a prosaic name for a blog, by comparison. Maybe we can call it “JoWo.” No, you can’t really pronounce it.

I’ll have to think about it.

After a few beers, Chris mentioned that an outfit in Singapore was giving away ten free brides. Now I can’t stop thinking about it. Is it like a bride of the month club? Do you pick the bride, or is it a surprise? Do you have to pay for shipping and handling? That’s usually what gets you. They say “free bride” but when you add in the postage, whoa!

Foreign correspondents are notoriously bad at relationships. Ten free brides sounds like just the thing.

Even if 90% leave, disgusted by the fact that I’m always on the road — and go out drinking with juornalists and bloggers at least twice a week — I’ll still have one bride left.

I’m thinking, Russian. She’ll be over-educated, be willing to stay home and cook, and will teach my kids the language. The whole gender thing shouldn’t be a problem – I’m from Massachusetts.

The only downside is that I won’t be able to impress her with my guitar playing. You see, while a war correspondent, I learned a bunch of Russian war songs. Old Cossack ditties, and a WWII song or two. When I play them for non-Russians, they’re usually suitably impressed. But a Russian would immediately see that I’m getting the words wrong, and that I’m not hitting any of the notes.

The other great thing about Russian women (and yes, I’m generalizing here) is that they treat their spouses like children. I could use some of that.

My Russian bride when I’m getting dressed: “Do you call those clothes? Here, put this on instead. I’ll buy some new clothes for you while you’re at work.”

My Russian bride when I’m leaving for work: “Did you remember your lunch? Here, I’ll pack it for you. And here’s your cell phone. And don’t forget to pick up some cabbage on the way home.”

My Russian bride at dinner: “Oh, you’re looking pale and thin. Here, have some borsch. Have some more. Is that enough sour cream for you?”

I would never have to go clothes shopping or cook anything ever again. She would take it as a personal insult if I even tried.

I had friends like that while I lived in Russia. Even though they were successful career women — a couple of them were also war correspondents — they would take one look at me and their mothering instincts would kick in.

It was nice.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

Tonight at the foreign correspondents’ get-together at Cotton’s Bar on Anting Lu, I offered jobs to three people.

The first, Connie, was sharp as a tack, smart, organized, a finance student at Fudan University who’s interested in a journalism career — the perfect job candidate.  The second was an old friend who’s written for me before, Travis, now interning for the New York Times. (Do I have an eye for talent, or what?)

The third guy, I think, was named Bill. He introduced himself as a Russian spy. I think he was Canadian. It was around midnight by this time, and several Bloody Mary’s and beers later. He and his friend .. Josh? … were independent video guys.

Fons (Tuinstra, the speakers’ bureau guy and the FCC founder) and magazine publisher Edmund Chow and I had been discussing a Japanese-American Internet video project having to do with interviewing business leaders in China.

Both Bill and … Josh? … were looking for work. I think. Bill was interested in print reporting, as well. I think.

Note to self: stop offering jobs to people after the second beer.

Actually, it might still work out. If Bill remembers me after he sobers up, and finds my card, and stops by the office, and turns out to be half-way intelligent, I might take him on board after all. I’m perennially short-staffed and I saw him chatting away in French to French financial journalist Benoit Florencon, and in Russian to Denis Antipov, a database developer for magazine websites. From what I could tell, Bill’s Russian and French were both pretty damn good. And he claimed to know a bunch of other languages, as well. Hey there.

One of Bill’s friends, an Australian, was just about to start a biking trip to Tibet. Unfortunately, he arrived just after Edmund left. Edmund is always on the lookout for travel writers.

At just before midnight, I had to call it quits. Editors were waiting for rewrites. When I left, the  Australians and the Germans were still drinking with the Australian and the French guy.

Celebrity novelist Wang Lili couldn’t make it tonight — she was in Australia. But she sent me an email and Fons an SMS about her trip. She’s about to interview a mayor down there.

Fons suggested that I run for the FCC board. He’s the second person to tell me that this week. I do like the attention. But what would I do, except get people drunk? Oh, and offer entry-level jobs.

I can see my platform now: “Vote for Maria. She’ll buy you a beer. And then exploit you.”

Actually, it sounds dirty. Maybe it will work.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

Just starting out in your career? Looking for a way to go overseas?

The folks over at the Council for International Exchange of Scholars asked me to let everyone know about a Fulbright grant for young journalism professionals.

“The Fulbright Scholar Beginning Professional Journalism awards offer young American journalists at the beginning of their careers the opportunity to spend 10 months in Germany conducting research and working in German print or broadcast media.  Applications are now being accepted for the five awards available in 2008-2009. Beginning professional journalists or recent graduates in journalism or related fields are eligible to apply.  Applicants must be U.S. citizens and have a level of German sufficient for research and work in German media.  More information about this award can be found online at http://www.cies.org/award_book/award2008/award/Beg8256.htm.”

In my experience, there are never enough people applying for these things, so if you fit the criteria, you’ve got a good chance of going.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

Writing about financial technology all day and editing Asia payments stories, when I relax, I want to relax all the day. I want to vegg out in front of the TV and watch re-runs of Friends and the Simpsons. I want to watch The Office. And catch the latest police procedurals.

In China, this is all possible — but not without breaking the law. There are a few movies available legally on DVD, and I buy them when I can — they’re only a few RMB more expensive than the pirated ones, so why not?

But the bulk of what I want to watch is not available here. You’re never going to get me to admit, on the record, to buying pirated DVDs (I swear, I’m only holding them for friends). But not being able to watch TV and movies is for me one of the biggest disadvantages to living in China — right up there with the lack of decent Chinese takeout and bad air.

ImageThief recommends a novel solution to China’s IPR crisis: he things the US government should subsidize the distribution of American media as a cultural kind of Marshall Plan, in a post titled “American IPR hawks, remember the little people.”

I hope someone is reading that.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria

For a little while yesterday, there was a rumor that the gunman may have been a Chinese student who got his visa in Shanghai.

Chris O’Brien, a “language polisher” for the state-owned Xinhua News Agency dissects the reaction of the official government media on his blog, Beijing Newspeak. The comments section is also interesting, with some state TV folks weighing in as well.

(Thanks to Fons Tuinstra for pointing me to this blog.)

Danwei’s Joel Martinsen also had an excellent and detailed post on this subject: Chinese media reacts to Virginia Tech shootings. The Peking Duck and the Shanghaiist also weighed in on this on their blogs, with some interesting links and commentary.

I don’t cover politics, so I’m not going to talk about this further, just to add that the Beijing Newspeak blog is really interesting. A lot of folks who come over to China to work as aspiring journalists first get  jobs as “language polishers” for the local media. Read this blog if you want to find out what that’s like.

Signing off in Shanghai,

Maria