REVIEW: Between Confidantes: Two Novellas by Chen Danyan

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On my second attempt at book hoarding during the tailend of the Big Bad Wolf book sale, I found that I didn’t have much to choose from anymore. It took me some time before I could pick some books which I thought were just ok. One of those is Between Confidantes: Two Novellas by Chen Danyan.

The little pocketbook is part of a collection of modern Chinese literature for English readers. The authors were either immigrants to Shanghai or were born in Shanghai who had their works published in the 1970s to 1980s. I was intrigued with the collection since China to me during those decades was a blank slate. I do not know how the country fared after Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Deng’s market economy reform. The social construction I had of China was a mish-mash of Jackie Chan, the Chinese period dramas (the flying kung-fu heroes and heroines) shown by Channel 13 and Channel 5 when I was a kid, Zhang Yimou, HK movies, and history books. The first time I visited China–Shanghai and Hanzhou to be exact–was in 2003 at the height of SARS (and the experience was a bit terrifying and funny but that’s for another blog entry). I remember the eight-lane highways and huge suspended bridges. The manicured lawns of expat communities of Pudong. The Bund.  I was back in 2014 and I couldn’t recognize the places except for The Bund. China is rapidly changing but I couldn’t fathom what was it like during the transition from being the ravaged China post-Cultural Revolution to the economic powerhouse that it is today.

I picked up Two Confidantes with low expectations. Now that I’ve read it, I should have picked up another pocketbook from that collection because it turned out to be decent.

The first of the two novellas is about two bestfriends working as nurses in a Shanghai hospital during the late 1980s or early 1990s, I think, because there was reference to VHS tapes. The story was told from the point of view of Xiaomin, who moonlights as a bar girl after her shift at the hospital so she could meet a potential rich husband since the bar where she works is frequented by businessmen. Her motivation for being a nurse was to meet a future husband as well. However, it was her meek but pretty bestfriend An’an who managed to snag a civil servant husband who had been a patient in their hospital. While An’an was sent to a field mission, Xiaomin and An’an’s husband, Little Chen, had a short-time affair. Xiaomin decided to cut her association with Little Chen right before An’an came back. Unfortunately, Little Chen lost his head and became obsessed with Xiaomin and was determined to ditch An’an and continue his affair with his wife’s bestfriend. That’s when things started to go downhill. Xiaomin was such a hateful character that the ending was satisfying.

The second story was about Yao Yao and her mother and how they were shaped by the transformation of China from the 1940s to the 1970s. This story left a lasting impression on me as it let me peek into what happened to the bourgeois set and the intellectuals during the Cultural Revolution. I knew that the Cultural Revolution was not for the faint-hearted but I had no idea of how they lived through it. The story was raw and excruciating especially as it was written by a native Chinese who may have first-hand experience of that horrible episode. The description of the squalid living conditions of the zealous urban youth who were sent to the rural areas was palpable. I could taste the desperation of those who could not accept the rapid changes and of those who were unjustly accused that they had to die by their own hands. And Yao yao’s end is like a punch to the stomach that took the wind out of me. I couldn’t decide whether I’d rather have it that way to end Yao yao’s misery or I’d like to scream at the author for not giving her some kind of reprieve.

I blame the horrid translation for not giving Chen Danyan’s stories the elegance of prose they deserve.

I give it four stars.

REVIEW: The Private Papers of Eastern Jewel

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This is one of my random picks at the recent Big Bad Wolf book sale. I judge the book by its cover and I am not apologizing for it. I have this inexplicable desire to read Asian authors or Asian themes nowadays after finding myself getting tired of YA novels (of course I should get tired of it, I’m almost 40 years old!). I had been reading YA literature for a while because I always thought I will graduate as a YA novelist. I am also now taking a pause from my fantasy reads because Tamora Pierce gave me headaches (for a different reason, not because her writing was subpar).

Anyway, I was duped by that one line that says, “‘Breathtaking’–Adeline Yen Mah” on the cover

Because I liked Adeline Yen Mah’s Falling Leaves: The Memoir of an Unwanted Chinese Daughter since 1) her prose is not that difficult to read and; 2) I liked how she described the political and social milieu, the context, and how that shaped the story. So I was thinking Eastern Jewel was indeed good.

It’s supposed to be good. How can it not be when the subject is a real-life Manchu princess who was banished to Japan, married off to a Mongol prince, escaped Mongolia, then came back to China as a Japanese spy?

But Maureen Lindley bungled it. She really bungled it big time. It could have been a fascinating fictionalized story of a real-life adventuress if it had been handled well but all it had was the sexual exploits of a really baaaaaaaaaaaaaad person. I am having a hard time finishing this novel but I have to so I can move on to my other new books. And I’m no prude, so that says a lot.

As a writer, Lindley was passable in the sense that she is not as horrible as the creators of the Twilight Series and Fifty Shades (I never got past the first chapter of Fifty Shades, it was like a mangled fanfic). However, I have issues with her storytelling. Good writers show, they just don’t tell. (This is the same mantra for us journalists as well). Lindley doesn’t need to tell her readers in plain language that Yoshiko Kawashima was a horrible person (“I am bad.” LOL). Her thought process and description of her deeds were enough to show readers that her moral compass was off. The writer lacks that sophistication that allows a reader to peel layers upon layers of this complex person. In the hands of a master storyteller, Yoshiko could have been much more than the caricature that Lindley had painted.

In addition, Lindley’s writing–about the cultures (Japanese and Chinese) she hasn’t lived or experienced first-hand–feels contrived. Her description of Shanghai, the rooms she had lived in, and the life Yoshiko supposed to have lived in Tokyo made me feel like the author just wanted to paint the story as a really exotic one. Like it was meant for clueless Westerners. But these were just merely descriptions, without rhyme nor reason. I could feel in her prose that she doesn’t have a good grasp of the culture, the milieu, of the people she was writing about. She merely relied on rhetoric, which can easily be picked up from historical texts. Another giveaway was how Yoshiko observed, as Lindley wrote, that Empress Wan Jung called Manchukuo (the Japanese puppet state located in the Northeast now part of the Three Northeast provinces/Dongbei) as Manchuria, the alleged Chinese name. But according to historical texts, the Chinese never called it Manchuria, only the Westerners did since Manchuria was a Western/Japanese construct. Yes, there are Manchus (a Japanese construct/translation of Manshu/Manzhou) but no Manchuria.

According to Nakami Tatsuo, Philip Franz von Siebold was the one who brought the usage of the term Manchuria to Europeans after borrowing it from the Japanese, who were the first to use it in a geographic manner in the eighteenth century although neither the Manchu nor Chinese languages had a term in their own language equivalent to “Manchuria” as a geographic place name.[12] The Manchu and Chinese languages had no such word as “Manchuria” and the word has imperialist connotations.[13]

In contrast, Pearl S. Buck (The Good Earth), who is another Westerner writing about another culture not her own, had a better handle of the subject. She wrote about Wang Lung from a third-person point of view. Her writing captivated me, her prose clear and uncomplicated. She had the ability to transport me to China, to the middle of that devastating flood, to make me weep for O-Lan, to imprint in my mind the line that says Wang Lung cannot divorce O-Lan because it was like cutting a part of him, like his hand, but he cannot help being addicted to his favorite concubine. She made me feel the gravity of the earth, the preciousness of it, the beauty and madness of it. Buck had knowledge of the culture, of the people she wrote about–albeit as a spectator and not part of it–because she grew up in China as a child of missionaries and spent a good part of her adult life back in China.

So back to Lindley. I hate her for wallowing in so much BDSM like that was the only essence of Yoshiko. Yeah, the subject is probably hypersexualized than normal Chinese/Japanese but really, that is all you can write about this fascinating character?

Three stars for effort and lucid prose.

Short review: MiniSo portable screen cleaning kit

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First off, this is not a paid review. I just wanted to share this happy discovery because I am so obsessive-compulsive when it comes to my gadgets’ screens.

I was just supposed to check out the wireless mini keyboard and mouse combo at MiniSo but this thing called out to me. I just had to. Because I am very unhappy with CRKing’s LCD screen cleaner.

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I tell you, for PHP 99 you can have your sanity back getting back my sanity may not be so expensive.

After almost cutting my finger with MiniSo’s freaking-hard-to-open packaging, I took out the grey  microfiber towelette found inside the cleaning solution’s lid.

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Then followed the directions written on the back of the bottle. Wiped my smartphone’s screen with the DRY microfiber…

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..spritzed the microfiber with the cleaning solution…

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…wiped the screen with the wet side of the towelette. Then wiped the screen using the dry side of the fabric…

Voila! My screen is no longer the object of my OC-ness. I slid my finger across my phone’s screen and it didn’t leave a mark!

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Hallelujiah!

Fingerprints and oily screens drive me nuts. I must be rubbing my phone’s screen against any kind of cloth I can get my hands on 100x a day just to get rid of fingerprints.

I should have bought five of these.

MASS MEDIA MOGUL ON PRESS FREEDOM IN AN ERA OF DISINFORMATION

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“And Katharine Graham made a very risky decision without knowing what the newspaper really stands for…The concept of standing up for the principles of press freedom. She made a very momentous choice by saying, ‘Publish’.”

And quoting from the movie, “The Post”, Pangilinan said, ‘News is the first draft of history.”

PLDT Inc chairman Manuel V. Pangilinan (or MVP, as popularly known in business circles) was our guest speaker during the Economic Journalists Association of the Philippines (EJAP) induction of officers on 2 February. We were told he will not give a keynote address and would just induct the incoming officers for 2018.

He surprised us with an impromptu speech, starting with the story of The Post, the Tom Hanks-Meryl Streep movie about the Pentagon Papers and the Washington Post. I think he was inspired by the movie that he was prompted to give a short speech about mass media. (He watches at least two movies a month, he said).

And as the owner of two newspapers, The Philippine Star and Businessworld, and broadcasting company TV5 Network Inc, PLDT should know the pitfalls and difficult decisions a media outfit needs to make, especially during a time when press freedom is under heavy attack.

By telling the story of The Post to us business journos, Pangilinan was relaying to us his reflections on the repercussions or the rewards of bringing out the truth…and the snowballing of the Pentagon papers and later on, the Watergate scandal.

“So it just points out to the very valuable role that media plays in a democracy like ours,” he said.

“And everyone, including the leadership, must accept that is important. It is not a weakness but it is actually a source of strength.”

REFLECTIONS OF A FORMER SMALL BUSINESS OWNER

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I tried selling on Carousell yesterday and received some inquiries today (“Last price na po ba?”). While I don’t blame buyers for asking that (it is well within their right as customers), I can’t help but feel sorry for some small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) who deal with similar customers who ask for discounts that cut to the bone. And they’re not even ordering/buying in bulk.

You see, we SMEs deal with high operating expenditures (opex), taxes, and damaged goods regularly. We carry those on our books without the benefit of economies of scale. At the same time, we try to price our products and services reasonably so we can retain customers while paying salaries/opex and struggle to keep afloat.

Yes, we give discounts if it is within our means but please don’t ask unreasonable rates that they cut so deep. If you do, that means you don’t want our business.

That said, I rarely ask for deep discounts because I know how SMEs bleed, especially with the kind of business environment that we have = red tape in getting business permits, crazy tax system, and high tax rates. Really unfriendly.

Selling on Carousell triggered this within me.

You see, I was thinking of going back to selling online now that LBC Express will be launching a service that would help SMEs with their logistics. (I had drinks with their key people last week so that’s how I know). I won’t preempt them but it was something that made me think whether I can go back  to it again.

In the early 2000, we used to sell items on eBay even before they thought of putting up an Ebay Philippines branch. There was no online selling platform yet at that time and Sulit.ph was just starting out. We used eBay US and had to go through the hoops of being an early adopter/user. Had to open several bank accounts due to the unfriendliness of the payment system available then (Xoom.com, Western Union, etc.) because Paypal was hard to use at that time because we needed a US bank account. I was able to set up our Paypal when the company started accepting EON by Union Bank–the first pure online/branchless banking entity (I had to give props to them on this one). Another problem with the old system before is that some of our customers do not have credit cards since we have buyers coming from Eastern Europe or Latin America or somewhere in Southeast Asia. I had to physically cut my lunch breaks to physically queue in these banks/remittance centers to get payments and go to the Post Office to ship the items.

And oh dear, the fees! The fees really do bite! We had to price them in or else we won’t have any profit at all. Ebay selling fees, listing fees, Paypal fees, etc. But those make our products expensive, on top of the expensive shipping fees.

And don’t get me started on logistics. It was (and still is) a huge headache.

Our customers complained that our local Express Mail System (EMS) is freaking expensive but that’s the only system available to us that time (tracking numbers) that ensure that our items really do arrive. Otherwise we were blind and we don’t have any assurance that our customers are not really duping us, claiming that the items did not arrive so we had to refund so the negative feedback wouldn’t gnaw out our feet. When I became a public finance reporter, I had to ask Customs/Philpost why is that our postal service is so expensive compared to Japan and the US (we bought stuff from Japan/China and their shipping costs with tracking numbers are half of ours). No one could give me a clear answer.

It was simply exhausting to the point that doing eBay was no longer an option when they changed their feedback system and increased their cuts from profits. Then there’s the logistics headache.

Then we opened our brick-and-mortar business within the fringes of the Maginhawa food hub. Half of our business was comprised of walk-in customers and being in a busy center is good. But that comes with the predatory rent rates as well so we were priced out of the area. The opex couldn’t be justified anymore.

Fast-forward, e-commerce is booming like crazy here (but we’re still lagging compared to our neighbors in ASEAN) and SMEs have all sorts of options now, from friendlier payment systems to increased online selling platforms. Websites now are easier to make too (WordPress has become friendlier to SMEs, with all sorts of widgets available).

I remember I had to deal with a cheap domain and hosting provider then but in return i got crap security so in the end I got hacked. I abandoned all ye hope for an online store at that time. Plus I had to deal with Joomla, and that one is such a pain to use since I am no computer genius. It’s not easy setting up a shopping cart and linking my Paypal account there. I had sleepless nights trying to do it by myself.

I tried Multiply (remember that one?), the blog-social-media-cum-online selling platform of the 2000s. I ordered my Lomography stuff from a girl on Multiply and a handbag from a fashionista that only lasted me three months. I tried selling on Multiply too but it had limited reach and couldn’t make money out of it since our customers are mostly international. Multiply was ahead of its time but they couldn’t figure out how to best monetize what they had. They were like the Friendster = good concept, but slow in figuring out how to make money out of something that good.

Anyway, back to being an SME. I remember somebody telling me that SMEs in the Philippines normally have a 3-year lifespan. Well, on our third year, we went bust. So much has changed, like rent rates have gotten crazier and the proprietor’s interest has waned. Keeping afloat in this environment is a struggle. You don’t have a 9-6 day. You can’t just walk away from your shop and have a two-week Christmas vacation because that is the busiest season for SMEs. Then SSS, Pag-Ibig, Philhealth…

Then you had to deal with an employee who destroys you or steals from you. And robbers taking our cellphones and other stuff. Then BIR suddenly orders a change in receipts…so we had to order PHP 3,000 worth of new receipts and ditch the old ones. Money down the drain. Then QC government came out with an order that all brick-and-mortar stores should have CCTVs installed for security or else they would not be able tos secure business permits. How come it is the SMEs who bear the burden of maintaining peace, order and security? Isn’t that what our taxes supposed to do for us? What if we couldn’t afford a PHP 6,000 CCTV system?

It was all too much to take.

So please, if you deal with SMEs, especially those who make their own products to sell, be considerate. You can ask for discounts if you order in bulk (so that way we can offset given the small economies of scale that we can have in wholesale). But not retail. Please be kind. Especially to farmers and wet market vendors. They make so little.

Remember, SMEs provide 99% of the employment in this country.

YEP, AN INITIAL COIN OFFERING IS ILLEGAL IF YOU DON’T REGISTER IT WITH THE SEC

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The Philippine Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) finally said it: initial coin offerings (ICOs) are illegal if the issuers don’t register the coins with the regulators.

That was the thing I had asked them way back in November last year when Joseph Calata declared on national TV that he will offer Calata Corp minority shareholders coins in exchange for their shares as an exit in the wake of the company’s delisting and ban from the Philippine Stock Exchange (PSE). At that time, the SEC Commissioners were very careful with their response to my query. They said they are closely watching what their counterparts in Singapore and Malaysia are going to do in light of the increase in ICOs being conducted in the region.

So last week, the SEC finally issued the cease and desist order (CDO) on the Krops ICO by companies headed by Calata.

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The idiot Calata reminds me of Pharma Bro. Seems like he doesn’t have any conscience at all. As I told a friend over on Facebook, para syang ipis na binato mo na ng tsinelas pero buhay pa rin. Lumipad pa papunta sa yo! Anyway, that’s a different topic for another blog entry.

So in November, I asked the SEC what they thought of cryptocurrencies and ICOs. Commissioner Emiliano Aquino said ICOs are risky and their Malaysian counterparts have issued that warning to the public. He said the Malaysian authorities will be coming out with their own set of rules governing ICOs and cryptocurrencies soon and the Philippines will be watching out for that. As it is, there are no black and white rules on ICOs yet anywhere in the world, except for the bans imposed by China and South Korea.

Aquino had said then they he personally thought that coins, in the context of ICOs, are securities,  just as what the Hong Kong and Thai regulators have declared.

“They can be considered as investment contracts so the SEC can invoke its authority over such fundraising activities. But this is a new territory and we cannot just quickly swoop in with new rules. This has to be thought carefully because we don’t want to stifle the potential of these new instruments,” he said.

I asked Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas (BSP, the central bank) Governor Nestor Espenilla what does he think coins are, since the BSP has recognized two local coin exchangers who use these instruments in remittance services. He said:

“If it looks like a security, smells like a security, quacks like a security, then it is a security.”

There you go.

Fast forward to 29 January  2018. The SEC called for a press conference to discuss the Krop coins and ICOs in general.

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So Comm. Aquino has formally declared ICOs illegal if these coins are not registered with the SEC. Because essentially these coins are securities because they are instruments used to raise funds from other people. All securities are under the purview of the SEC.

So what are securities? Securities = they secure an investment. As mentioned above, these are contracts that ensure an investor will get something back for the amount he/she injected into a company. It can be in the form of debt (bonds, notes, commercial papers) or shares (as in equities = common shares or preferred shares) or a hybrid of that.

So no argument there, coins are securities and under the Securities Regulation Code, the SEC is the authority on that.

But why would start-ups register their coins with regulators and go through the hoops like in a regular initial public offering when the main reason why they would like to launch an ICO is they want to evade regulation and raise money fast? There is little incentive for them to do that when they could do an ICO somewhere else since we live now in a borderless world.

If we go back to the origins of digital currencies, specifically bitcoins, this quote from the creator of bitcoin is very telling: “a system for electronic transactions without relying on trust” (based on the paper Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System by Satoshi Nakamoto). Essentially, the creators, users, and investors want a currency system that is beyond the reach of central banks. No regulators, just algorithms.

I have interviewed some foreign start-ups about their fundraising plans and one of them said they want to launch an ICO this year in Hong Kong alongside their Series B fundraise because 1) it’s faster than venture capital fundraise since VC requirements are stringent (but of course they should be, they’re plunking money on unproven businesses!); and 2) there will be no or minimal dilution of existing/angel investors.

And mind you, there is an active market in Southeast Asia now for ICOs. Crowd Genie, the licensed Singapore-based peer-to-peer (P2P) lending platform, is currently conducting its ICO to raise USD 5m. I think I read somewhere that the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) is closely watching this ICO to make this it’s test case.

So, if ICOs can be conducted anywhere in the world and can offer the coins to whoever, how can the Philippine SEC keep Filipinos and OFWs (they seem to be the prime target of ICOs by shady companies being tracked now by the SEC) from being victimized by dodgy coin issuers? Can they physically run after the operations of these companies like what they did with “boiler rooms” ten years ago?

Comm Aquino said they can. They are now also enlisting the help of HK authorities to verify the registration of Calata’s Krop company (because he claimed the ICO will be done in HK). Aquino said, the HK authorities have also declared unregistered ICOs illegal while those in mainland China have altogether banned the exercise.

This is just the beginning of the ICO saga.

I’ve read somewhere that VCs are now beginning to feel the competition as start-ups now turn to ICOs for fundraising. Will VC’s role in growth capital raising be dimished? We’ll see.