I have to say it’s the best party I’ve been to in my life, or perhaps because I’m not a party animal. The food is nice and we were lucky to have a beautiful weather after a short heavy pouring rain at lunch time. I invited my flatmate Greg as a guest and I believe he enjoyed it more than I did, with all the free bears and Pimm’s.

Here are some of my photos from the party. Just realised there are a few Bloomberg fellow colleagues in Flickr. You can find more photos, or have a look at a group created by Dr.Max.

I went last weekend with Greg. Although I’m not a car person, but the exhibition was definitely worthy going, especially in the Ferrari area, took up quite a bit memory of my camera :)

Anyway, there is no much to describe here, I will let the photos speak. (Flickr | Flash)

Financial industry is a whole new world to me. I didn’t think of myself being in the financial sector before, but now I will start to get interested and trying my best to learn.

I’m going back home (by home, I mean my home in Shantou, China) in late August. Finally after more than 18 months, it’s about time to go home. It’s going to be a good break, I’m sure.

I went to the Fund raising event today, organised by GetActive and several other organisations (see post in Dimsum).

Me and a few other members from Dimsum joined the volunteering team and took actions to help raising funds for the Sichuan Earthquake. Only in about an hour and half, five of us raised about £150. People were very active and most of them were Chinatown residents and Chinese students. One old man brought his cheque book and wanted to donate £70 on behalf of his family. I was moved but felt very happy to see people’s active responds.

A concert-like event was held in the middle of China. Singers and committees from Chinatown were gathering together to encourage people to donate for the earthquake. They were singing in Cantonese and give speeches to audiences and people passing by. But to those who don’t know what’s going on and can’t understand Cantonese, eg. tourists, it might be a bit like a party.

While we were walking toward Leicester Square with our donation box, we saw a Buddhist group were holding a celebration for Buddha’s Birthday, which was the same day when the earthquake happened. I talked to one of the staffs there, she told me they also encouraged their community and audiences to give donation. In China, they even sent their own team to Sichuan with donated funds and human resources to help.

I think there will be candle memorial gathering today at 8PM in Chinatown. I couldn’t make it there but if there are anything worth to share, I will put them here.

Some of the photos I took today are uploaded to my Flickr, you can have a look there.

The Earthquake

Monday morning I started at 7am. As soon as I logged in, a friend sent me an IB (Bloomberg Instant Message) saying that there was an earthquake in Sichuan, magnitude 7.8! I was shocked immediately and quickly pulled up top news in Bloomberg. It’s there! Then I went to Sina and saw a brief news headline - Magnitude 7.8 earthquake in Sichuan province at 2:28PM, with a very brief content. That’s about 30 minutes after the earthquake occurred. Approximately 10 minutes later, a special report page was up in Sina, with photos and more detailed reports on what’s happening there. I called my mum immediately. She was at home safely, but didn’t know what happened until I told her. She turned on TV straight away but nothing was up yet.

After about an hour, news saying that Premier Wen Jiabao is flying to Sichuan show up. I can start to feel how serious the situation could be. Then 15 minutes later, he made a speech on the plane to the disaster zone and broadcasted in national TV. This is the probably the first time in China to have such immediate news, and a timely direct speech from the premier.

Hours after the news broke out, I was able to get more information as more news reporters reached there. But sadly, the number of death started to increase as time goes by.

It’s a challenging year for China

From the worst snow storm in past 50 years that hit the country at the beginning of this lunar new year, to the protest in Tibet and Olympics Torch relay, I feel China has been facing challenges one after another. But this one, the price is just too high!

However, one thing makes me feel encouraging is the quick reaction from the Chinese government. It seems that they are giving a clear signal to the Chinese and international citizen that they are changing. Compare to what happen in 2003 with the SARS outbreak, I can know more information about what’s happening there now. Many blogs and sites that were blocked before the earthquake are now unblocked. I’m not sure if this is temporary, but at least we can see the difference.

I was contacted by the BBC yesterday for a short interview on how I got updates on the earthquake from the Internet, you can see it here. It’s a hot topics in blogsphere that twitter became the first source to ‘report’ the earthquake. Although I didn’t get it from twitter’s updates, the Internet is still my main source of getting first hand information of what’s going in China, and the world. It might be easy to take it as granted that information on the Internet is freely available after living in the UK for several years. However every time I went back home in China, the frequent disconnection of my daily visited sites still reminded me there is a wall out there.

Things are changing in China now, good or bad, it’s changing, dramatically.

Help the victims

I sincerely feel very sorry for the victims who died or lost their families in the earthquake. I do hope the rescue team can reduce the number of death to minimum. Meanwhile, I urge whoever would like to help the victims can contribute to the China Appeal. Your contribution will make a difference! There will be fund raising event in Chinatown this Sunday (18th May), following a candle mourning which is still being organising on some Internet forum.

Thanks to my friends who contacted me after knowing the earthquake. My families and relatives are all safe in Southern China, where isn’t affected by the earthquake. But let’s pray for the victims and hope the survivals will be rescued soon!

(via bemike)

It’s scary in a way, but also reflecting how enthusiastic that people are welcoming the torch even though most of them can hardly see it that day.

For more people, click here or view the slideshow.

My first purchase was a few months ago, which was also my first time to buy flowers online. I called up their customer support number on a late Sunday afternoon, that’s a normal technique I would use before purchase anything from a website. A guy answered my call straight away, without any ‘press 1, press 2…’. After I confirmed what I want, order placed. The next morning flower was sent. I also received updates to my mobile all the way through the delivery process. It was amazing!

Last week I made my second purchase, a bunch of Rose to cheer Jenn up from the revision pressure. Again, they didn’t disappoint me. What impressed me again was when I made a mistake on my message card and contact them via email for correction, I got a reply within 4 minutes! That, was just amazing! Thumb up to them!

After more 6 months working in a customer support department and engaging with client on daily basis, I realised how important a great customer support is to any business. It’s all about credibility. What you promised your customers, what you gave, and how far you can exceed their expectation.

BT and Orange, learn from Serenata Flower!

What I want to share first is the speech given by the Chinese ambassador Fu Ying. I was expecting a formal and somewhat Chinese government style speech at the beginning. But she went straight to the point on the misunderstanding that we had recently and what happened at the Olympic torch relay in London. By pointing out the ‘Ice’ we had, she then went on to address the importance of this Icebreaker for the young generation. I was very much impressed by her speech and I’m proud that we have an ambassador like her.

Update 13/05/2008: the speech transcript

There were about 200 attendants, mostly young Chinese professionals. Beside the celebration of the Young Icebreaker launch, it was a great networking event as well. I met a lot of people from big name companies. I thought I’d bought enough name cards but they all gone within the first hour.

I’m glad to see more and more such communities established to break ices between these two cultures. As I said, what I saw in the Olympic torch relay was disheartening. I guess most protesters haven’t actually been to China and don’t know what’s the real life like there. Communication and mutual understanding are important. I do hope the Young Icebreaker group will play a significant role in breaking the ‘ice’ that we had.

Here are some photos to share.

Ambassador Fu was give a speech. Taken by my blackberry, the quality wasn’t that good.

In Shanghai Blue, event venue.

A photo with Keith, Greg and Vincent. Thanks to the journalist from SingTao Newspaper for taking this photo for us.

One month later, I attended one of their events at Asian House in Cavendish Street. With a collection of Modern Chinese Art “Beginnings”, great performance from the Eclipse String Quartet and also meeting with a bunch of interesting people, I guess all the guests had an enjoyable night as I did. I had a chat with Luke at the end of the event. I told him that they did a great job organising the event and I wondered how many people were working on it. ‘Just a couple of us’, he said. ‘If you are interested, come and joined’.

Two days later, I was in the meeting with the Dimsum team and introducing myself as a new member.

If you want to know what Dimsum is all about, read this page. To be honest, I’m still exploring the site and forum to try to know more the site and it’s ‘culture’. If you are in London, signing up for the newsletter is a good way to get yourself involved with some decent events and networking opportunities. It’s gradually taking up more of my free time, but it’s always interesting to work with interesting people on interesting things.

It’s very difficult to avoid these two issues recently when you are a Chinese living and working in London. Whether they are my Chinese friends or from different countries, discussions will inevitably come up as conversations start. I want to write what I think and feel about what happen recently in the Olympics Torch Relay. It’s not easy, but I will try to write them down.

Olympics Torch Relay in London

I went with my friends that day, to support and welcome the torch. But what came to my eye was very sad – protester pointing fingers and shouting at supporters ‘shame on you!’. On the other side supporters holding Chinese flags and shouting back ‘liars!’. What disheartened me most was to see innocent children (some of them were even infants) in both groups. Was that the impression they are going to have towards China and Olympics Game? I was standing in front of protesters pointing fingers to me and shouting very aggressively, my friends and other Chinese supporters were shouting back to them. Among them, I was speechless.

No Violence

It’s not difficult to see violent scenes on the TV news these days. After all, newspaper and news channel are all commercial bodies. They need to feed what readers and audiences want to see. Quite often violent scenes are more eyes-catching than peaceful ones when it comes to attracting people’s attentions. I respect different opinions, people can have protests as they wish, but violent behavior is something that I can never agree on. Expressing viewpoints is good, we need different opinions to make us think and communicate, but if you expressing in a violent way then regardless what a good point you are making, IT’S WRONG!

Objective vs. Subjective

As I said, it’s not difficult to see violent scenes on the news recently, but from my personal experiences, protectors and supporters were 50-50 on that day. Why our supports weren’t shown on the TV? Since the outbreak in Tibet last month, all you can see are ‘military crackdown from China’ and ‘how many people die’ in western media. On the other side, my parents in China saw a relatively peaceful image of the issue. So which one shall I believe?

Before I tend to believe Western media was more ‘objective’ and report the ‘truth’. But now I realise there were nothing like ‘truth’, Western media are just as subjective and the Chinese media. What you see in China is what the media (which are controlled by the government) want to show you - a peaceful and harmonious society. Whereas Western media is determined by income revenue. As I said, the more eyes-catching ones come first. If you take a look at anti-CNN.com, do you still think what you see is ‘the truth’? I guess what drove most people to protest are their believes which based on what they see on TV. But I hope they could think again or even make a trip to China if they haven’t been there. Seeing is believing, but try to see things from your own eyes rather than from cameraman’s focus or editor’s selection of today’s breaking news, especially when you want to make an action on what you believes.

Peace!

I’m not saying that what I think is correct, but it’s my personal feeling and point of view based on my experiences up to now. I respect other people’s opinions but I don’t like hate speech or violence. After all, peace is what we aim for, and that’s part of the Olympic spirit.