About China blogosphere, travel, and entrepreneurship

Perfection is unattainable, as they say. So why live your life attaining the impossible? Some folks agree with the question — and end up churning out “crappy” things (if you must use that word).

Twelve years in Switzerland, however, made me a near-perfectionist. My best friend in China, Kevin, has taken me to task over this, by the way; in his eyes, I’m too much of a perfectionist. Even when alone, I find myself yearning for perfectionism; I simply am the kind who cannot afford to let even a tiny scratch get on my PowerBook G4.

It’s not that China is un-perfectionist and Switzerland is near-perfectionist; those points of views simply don’t work. However, something disturbing from the PRC come in the form of two words: hun (混) and hunong (糊弄), which all have less-than-perfectionist connotations. (They all pretty much mean to “rush through” things so that perfectionism is given little chance — if any.)

There’s a famous bit, by the way, regarding the hun bit in university:

What do you want to do when you’re in university?
Hun my way through.
And after that?
Keep on hunning.

Its hunong brethren, by the way, is all too familiar to yours truly. When I got 63% in my maths in 7th grade, mom and dad gave total vent to David Feng’s hunong practises in maths. They were of the view that I hunonged — or “rushed through” — maths (certainly without the bit of attention I would need to give in order to finish maths with flying colors).

Folks who come to China may be a bit surprised by the more-than-too-often appearances of hunonged things. All too often, road signs are banged into trucks and not replaced for ages; buildings that look they’ve been used for ten years when they only opened last year; and Beijing Subway Line 5 trains with bits and pieces of the purple livery already intertwined with holes and “eaten away bits and bobs”.

To many a Beijinger, some things are still a bit on the new side — but the good news as we close out this week’s Mind the Gap is that, to more and more people in the capital, perfectionism is become more and more familiar. We’re seeing better road signs, easier-to-read subway maps, and world-class quality airport terminals. Perfectionism is settling in here in Beijing — it may be a bit far from Swiss standards, but the gap is closing fast.