Entries from August 2008 ↓

This is a continuation of my family’s immigration story originally written by my dad in Chinese. For more of my dad’s narrative see the category marked Fifteen Years in America. If you can read Chinese you can read the original at my dad’s Yahoo blog. He has just finished Chapter 8. Enjoy!

Continued from Part 4

In the previous chapter I mentioned that I really wanted to bring the authentic Yangzhou Fried Rice to the school cafeteria. The reason for this is that in America Yangzhou Fried Rice is a dish in almost every Chinese restaurant. I tasted a couple and it seems that none of them are authentic.

One day at work I told Morri that I am from Yangzhou and I knew how to make authentic “Yangzhou Fried Rice”.  I said to her, “If you try my Yangzhou Fried Rice, then you would know how good the real Yangzhou Fried Rice is.”

Morri listened to what I said and sounded a bit doubtful,   “Are you sure?” She said to me.  I confidently told her that there is no doubt that I could make it.  I asked her to agree to one term, which is that I get to pick the ingredients I want and she needs to get all the ingredients for me.  Morri couldn’t agree to that so she brought the proposal to the head chef Craig.  Craig is also a Hawaiian.  He is sturdily built, not very tall, and sported a thick mustache.  He spoke pidgin and was a graduate of a famous culinary academy in New York.  He chose Kapiolani Community College after he graduated because the college has a very strong culinary program.  Craig is not only the chef of the cafeteria but also did demonstrations for culinary students.  When I was working there I often saw Craig work with a gaggle of students wearing chef hats and aprons.  Craig and another professor named Kent often had a myriad of sauces and containers and did various lessons.  At that time, I admired those classes quite a bit.  I thought to myself, if I were 15 to 20 years younger, I should also major in cooking and maybe I could have gone back to China and opened a restaurant featuring western cuisine.  Perhaps my restaurant could have been quite popular.  Recently, I received an alumni magazine from the University of Hawaii and there was an article about the Chinese Ministry of Education visiting Kapiolani’s Culinary Arts department.  The goal was to speak about educating more Chinese people in western cuisine.

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Part 6

Morri told Craig that I wanted to bring Yangzhou Fried Rice to the students and staff of Kapiolani.  Craig is a person who is very open to new ideas and suggestions.  He loves to cook food from different countries such as France, Italy, and Korea.  One particular dish I thought was quite interesting was a Hawaiian dish called Laulau.  Craig would take some  ti leaf and wrap pork in it, and then the package is roasted until the pork is so cooked that it falls apart.  After it is cooked the leaves would be removed and its aroma would flood the room.  Honestly, I thought that it tasted pretty good, but the presentation was quite ghastly.

Craig heard that I want to make some Yangzhou fried rice and he agreed heartily.  He told me to make a list of the ingredients and I thought about the things my neighbor taught me about Yangzhou Fried Rice.

Yangzhou Fried Rice is also called Yangzhou Egg Fried Rice, and legend has it that it is the favorite dish of  Yang Su of the Sui Dynasty.  It was called “Broken Gold Rice”.  When the emperor of Sui was touring Yangzhou, he brought the dish to the city, and it was further enhanced by chefs of many generations.  The Huaiyang cooking school has an emphasis on “seriousness in choosing ingredients, expertise and care in preparation, exactness in portion and color, and preservation of original taste and juices”.  Eventually, Yangzhou fried rice became one of the most famous dishes of  Huaiyang cuisine.

Authentic Yangzhou fried rice has the following main ingredients: Chinese rice and eggs from grass fed hens.  Side ingredients include sea cucumber, grass fed chicken meat, Chinese sausage, scallop, fresh water shrimp, mushrooms, fresh cooked bamboo shoots, and snow peas.  Additionally you would add diced green onions, salt, cooking wine, chicken broth, and vegetable oil.

At that time in Hawaii we didn’t have so many Chinese ingredients.So we used Thai jasmine rice and cooked it with a bit less water than usual.  That makes the rice stiff and better for frying.  We also didn’t have eggs from grass fed hens because all eggs in America were produced in large scale chicken farms and shipped in cartons.  This worked just fine and I also added chicken meat, lean pork, shrimp, and snow peas.

To be continued!

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No, I’m not looking for a job, but for some reason recruiters are still bugging me almost every week. Personally, I’ve never found a job that was referred from a recruiter so I consider most of them to be a waste of time. Today a recruiter annoyed me just a bit more than usual so I figured I would write about it here.

For some reason, these pesky recruiters find a way to find my work phone number. Honestly I don’t even know what this number is because I never use this phone. I think some people within this company is unleashing this information and it is rather annoying. My manager also hates calls from recruiters so he told me that if anyone calls for him I should tell them to contact HR. Apparently these recruiters just call random numbers and hope to be directed to some hiring manager. Today’s recruiter was named Anne and she called my phone and asked for my manager. The conversation went something like this (I’m replacing my manager’s name with BLAHBLAH):

“Hello, is this BLAHBLAH?” Without giving away my manager’s full name, I could tell you that this woman was pronouncing it like an illiterate fool. My manager’s name ends with an I, and she says it like it ends with an A. This persisted during the entire phone call.

“No, he is not in the office today. Who am I speaking to?”

“Oh, this is Anne. May I have BLAHBLAH’s extension?”

“Hmm, are you from my company?” I was getting a little suspicious here.

“Oh, no, I’m just looking for BLAHBLAH.”

“Are you a recruiter?”

“Why, are you looking for a job?”

“No, I’m not, but are you a recruiter?”

She chuckled a bit and said, “yes, I am.”

“Okay, my manager said to just tell all recruiters to contact HR. I can give you the number for HR.”

“Oh, I know HR’s number, they wouldn’t talk to me because I place so many great candidates and make them look bad. Could I have BLAHBLAH’s number?” Wow, isn’t she cocky?

“Well, that isn’t my problem. I’m a bit busy so…”

“Are you an engineer on BLAHBLAH’s team?”

“Yes”

“How did you get the job?”

“I applied”

“Oh so you didn’t go through a recruiter?”

“No.”

“How did you find out about the job?”

“I looked, and a lot of my schoolmates work here.”

“Oh cool, what school did you go to?”

“Berkeley.”

“Oh haha Berkeley, we used to call them weenies.” Well I guess this idiot went to Stanford. A dozen or so of the core people at my company’s engineering team went to Berkeley, so I don’t think it is a very good move to insult my school when you are trying to recruit for my company.

“Um, look, I don’t have time for this…”

“You are in Palo Alto right? That’s right next to Stanford!”

“No, we are in San Mateo. We moved last year.”

“Oh, I don’t know much about San Mateo, but Palo Alto has my favorite sushi restaurant!” Umm..I don’t care about your favorite sushi restaurant. Just when I was about to say that, she said, “So what do you guys do? Java or C#?”

“Why don’t you go to our website and find out? The location of the company is also on the website. Look, I have to go okay.” I hung up here as I heard her voice stream out of the phone.

So, what did Anne do wrong?

1) Didn’t know anything about my company - When you are a recruiter you are supposed to know what your client wants. Obviously this woman didn’t even do enough research to call the right number and didn’t even know the location of the company.

2) Insulted a potential client – Okay, I’m not a hiring manager, but if you are trying to get information out of someone you shouldn’t insult them by calling them a weenie. That’s just excessively stupid.

3) Was not professional enough - As I said, I don’t care where your favorite sushi restaurant is, and most other people probably don’t care either. The way she acted was just very unprofessional.

Now, Anne takes the cake for the most annoying recruiter I have ever spoken to, but the following are more characteristics of bad recruiters that annoy me.

1) The bait and switch – A lot of the times recruiters send out emails to potential candidates saying that they’re recruiting for a position that pays a certain number, and then when you do interview or get an offer the number is much lower. That is a classic bait and switch and that has happened to people I know. I think that is borderline criminal.

2) Obviously did not read my resume - I think a lot of recruiters search resumes for keywords, and never read the resume afterwards. So they end up spamming a bunch of people who do not qualify for the job they are recruiting for. It takes a bit of time and effort to screen resumes, but the results might be much better.

3) Doesn’t take no for an answer – There are a couple recruiters I keep in contact with because they were professional enough to take no for an answer when I wasn’t looking. If the candidate or client company do not need the services, I think it’s best for a recruiter learn to back off politely instead of annoying the crap out of people.

4) Don’t know jack about technology - Bad technical recruiters generally have no clue what their clients need or want in an engineer because they have very little knowledge about technology and thus do not understand the resumes and requisition orders. The best technical recruiters I have met were former engineers that know what to look for.

Anyway, I am ending this rant here. I’ve known people who had good experiences with cold calling recruiters, but most of them seem quite useless. Have you had a good experience with a random recruiter that wasn’t part of a company’s internal HR? I’d love to hear about it.

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Well, it’s finally 8/8/8 and the Olympics started in China with a grand show of fireworks, weddings, and babies.  A few months ago I wrote an article supporting the Olympics and drew a slew of mixed and highly polarized reactions.  Honestly, I was surprised that it bothered me so much that people were so against the Olympics in China since I have been so far removed from China for so long.  I guess I was swept up by what the San Jose Mercury News calls a “racial chauvinism and raw nationalism reminiscent of Italy and Germany in the 1930s“. Hah!

A couple days ago I asked a friend if he was proud that China is hosting the Olympics, but he is Taiwanese American so I expected he would say no.  He said that he identified himself as an American and he just didn’t care about the Olympics that much and he wasn’t even proud when America hosted it.  He reads my blog so he knew that I actually cared about the Olympics being in China and I consider myself Chinese.  Then he said that  I  have  a lot of  American values  and  a lot of  Chinese values and it is about 60/40.  At first  I said to him, “what American values do I have besides eating burgers and getting fat?”  He laughed at me and said that is a big part of American culture for better or worse.  Then he said that I believe a lot of things that are “American”.  For example, I think that compensation should be merit based and that I am a Christian.  I suppose I did pick up those traits in America, but it is hard to say what is truly American because this country is like a mosaic of so many ideas and cultures.  That is one thing I truly love about America.

It is hard to deny that America is a country with incredible opportunities, freedoms, and diversity.  There is really no other place like this in the world and every single day I am still amazed by this country’s creations, influence, and wealth. When I was younger I actually wished that I was born in America and I was an actual American citizen because I would be granted everything this country had to offer.  I hated that  so many Americans have had so much for so long and  they didn’t appreciate it and I envied them for being so lucky to have been born in this country.  Very few people knew how I felt because everyone thought that I was an American by the way I spoke and acted.  I am actually eligible to apply for American citizenship in a few years, but I am thinking twice about it because I no longer  want to give up my Chinese citizenship.   I have grown to see the value in being Chinese as China is becoming more free and economically developed.

The greatest problem with America now besides the ever escalating debt is that it is so very disjoint and everyone bickers all the time.  It is no longer the United States; it’s the Blue States and the Red States.   The representatives that make the laws no longer belong to the people, but to corporations with lobbyists.  There is just so much discord and dissatisfaction within United States now that it is hard to love this country that taught me so much.  At this pace, the United States’ growth  cannot match what can be accomplished by more than one billion people united in China and it makes me sad that this  brilliant country is doing so little with so much.

As I have said before in my first article about the Olympics, China still has a deluge of problems that it needs to work out, but I am definitely proud of how far it has come.  I am so glad that this event is happening in spite of so many naysayers and attacks.  Just yesterday I heard a couple coworkers say that they’re surprised that China pulled it off and the Olympics actually started despite a gigantic earthquake and years of international disapproval.  I chuckled a bit in my cube because I thought it was funny how Americans generally underestimate the Chinese.  Anyway, this Olympics will be fun to watch, and I will be rooting for China.

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Yesterday I just didn’t feel like getting dressed and after taking a teleconference at 10 am I decided to work at home.  I rarely work at home, but it is actually amazingly productive.  I did quite a bit of work, and also managed to do six loads of laundry and bake some chicken.

Today I went back work and I realized why I can’t concentrate very well there.  People are just talking constantly over each other and I hear them from my cube. Then I’m constantly distracted by people walking in the hallway because I happen to face the hallway.  Additionally, there are too many snacks and drinks in the breakroom so I find myself going there every hour or so.  You would think that an office environment lets you concentrate on work, but it is rather distracting.  Being in my home office is much more comfortable than coming to the office.  It is much quieter and much more relaxing.

Knowing this, I might ask my manager to let me work at home once a week.  Several of my coworkers actually work at home full time so it is not a huge request.  If I work at home once a week I could save a gallon of gas every week and also cook instead of going out.  I could also shave off some snack calories. We will see how this works out.

How about you?  Do you find working at home more productive?  Or do you need the human interaction at the office?

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Recently I just read this list of “recession-proof” jobs on CNN. They list the following sectors as still growing in the current economy:

1. Education
2. Energy
3. Environmental sector
4. Health care
5. Security

Looking at this, it seems that my family has the bases covered. I am in a software security firm, my mom is in education, and my dad is in the non-profit environmental sector. We all switched jobs in the last two years to our current positions and I don’t think it’s a coincidence.

I used to work for a company that focused on retail shopping and mortgage leads. Last year everyone’s bonuses were cut drastically because of the mortgage fall out and I sort of knew that it was going to get worse. So I looked for a new job, and I specifically looked for companies that I thought wouldn’t be affected by real estate very much and ended up in this software security firm last November. I think it has been a good move because this company is doing well despite the current economic atmosphere.

My mom used to be in commercial real estate, and all of the properties managed by her company were sold by the owners and her management company basically shut down completely. She was given an extremely generous severance package and after looking for a couple months she landed a lower paying job in a university this January. She complains about the bureaucracy sometimes, but she seems to be adjusting to her new job.

My dad has always worked in non-profits, and decided to take a new job after working at the same place for almost 10 years. He seems to be very enamored with his new organization’s goal of combating global warming around the world, and I think that’s pretty awesome.

The fact that we have jobs in these sectors now shows that these types of companies are still hiring in a downturn. I think if you are working in an industry that is suffering the effects of the economy now you could still move into the better sectors as long as your skills are fairly transferable. You do not have to wait for a layoff to start looking because the job seekers who have a job already usually have better bargaining power and have a better chance at landing a new job. As long as you have a job throughout a recession life should go on normally, and it doesn’t hurt to be prepared for a recession by moving into a growing sector.

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