Directionless

Last weekend I suffered yet another of my occasional bouts of vexation with a Chinese educational institution that had hired me to give a lecture on 'Presentation Skills' as a promotion for some business course or other that it is offering.

I am used to these things always being thrown together at a few days' notice (I do sometimes decline invitations like this, pointing out that such last-minutism is disorganised, unprofessional, and frankly somewhat discourteous to the lecturer; but at the moment I am trying to raise the money for an airfare home, so I choked down my rage). I am used to being given no advance information about the likely composition of the audience or the exact purpose of the event. I am used to the advertised timings being very flexible - not to say wildly inaccurate. I am used to the money being crap.

I am used to it all, and I can put up with it. Usually. Just about.

I am not, however, used to the venue being miles out of town.

Nor am I used to none of the actual organisers being present (and we had three tiers of "organisation" for this: the British company that directly employs me to do these promos; the Chinese university that usually runs its courses; and this weekend's host, a small private college that's owned or managed by one of the guys in the set-up at the university).

So, after being passed on to three successive liaison contacts in the space of 24 hours, the girl I finally ended up talking to - Contact No. 4 - was a niece of one of the teachers at the college..... who had never previously been there, and so didn't really know where it was.

Not the kind of person you want to be giving you the directions for how to find the place!

Although, I tried to console myself, maybe this would work out OK, because at least she would be making the effort to find the place herself, and would thus be having to pay close attention to landmarks and road names and so on. Such was my fond hope.

Almost all Chinese, in my experience, are profoundly inept with geography. I don't think they get much if any training in the use of maps at school. They never seem to have any sense of direction (it doesn't help that many Chinese maps still follow the old convention of putting South at the top; but that alone does not explain the depths or the ubiquity of Chinese cluelessness in this regard, I don't think). If they do manage - by some fluke - to pick the right point of the compass (ah, and there's a further confusing quirk of the culture here, in that the Chinese typically give directions in relation to where you want to go to, not the point of reference where you're at - so, when they say "west from Dongsi subway", they usually mean "east from Dongsi"; i.e., that Dongsi is west of where you're going, but you'd need to head east from Dongsi to get there), they have absolutely no sense of scale: suggested times or distances between points are invariably pretty inaccurate, and can be out by an order of magnitude (I generally find it best to assume that small distances are probably underestimated by a factor of 10: '50m' probably means 500m, and '500m' probably means 5km). And then, of course, there's the complete lack of attention to the names of streets and buildings: most people can't even give the Chinese name for something accurately or consistently, and they often get even more wildly off-the-mark when the place also has an English name; and there never seems to be any awareness that the Chinese and English names might be inconsistent, or that the Chinese name/description might be ambiguous (I lamented here how, for example, "Zhongguancun bookstore" is not a very helpful address, since Zhongguancun is a large district, and has a number of major bookstores).

All this I know, and try to make allowance for. I am used to none of the Chinese institutions I work with being able to provide me with the maps I request (but, oh, I keep lobbying for this!). I am used to the Chinese addresses they provide for me being unrecognised by my taxi driver. I am used to the oral directions they try to provide to my taxi driver over the telephone dragging on for many minutes and bringing little or no enlightenment. But in the end, somehow or other, I always get where I'm supposed to be going. I could do without all the unnecessary hassle and confusion, but this is China.

Saturday's experience, however, was a shock even to a battle-hardened soldier like myself.

I have now delivered one of these lectures without ever finding out the name of the college that was hosting the event. The liaison girl didn't seem to know it; it wasn't written up anywhere that I noticed on the campus (not in English, anyway; but I suspect not in Chinese either, since it's not a purpose-built space, but a part of some old PLA premises the college is renting); and the intermediaries at the British education company never saw fit to tell me.

And I very nearly didn't find the place at all. The liaison girl was not able to give any kind of coherent directions at all, in English or Chinese: she didn't even know the name of the street the campus entrance was on, much less the name of any other road junctions or landmarks that might guide us. After she had baffled and irritated my cabbie for about 10 minutes or so, in three different phone conversations (and nearly killed the credit on my mobile phone into the bargain), I got out of my cab - at a very prominent filling-station, on a main road, next to a factory whose address I could read on its brass nameplate - and told her to come and find me. That worked, after a fashion.

The really bizarre thing is that the directions she'd sent me by text message in Chinese were more or less adequate (I assume they must have been passed on to her by someone at the college, and she had no understanding of them). The thing is, this college isn't very visible, as its entrance is down a little side lane, about 100m off the main road. The "directions", therefore, had told us to look for a conspicuous Beijing Duck restaurant. This my cabbie and I had found, but we weren't sure why we were supposed to be looking for it. Neither, alas, was the poor liaison girl. Nobody could tell us that we were supposed to be looking for a concealed entrance on the opposite side of the road.

I was, in fact, at the venue - or within a minute or two's walk of it - half an hour early; but I ended up getting to the lecture room a few minutes late. Vexing. Very, very vexing.

[And, as if that wasn't marvellous enough, I also encountered a new twist in equipment screw-ups - they gave me a computer that didn't have PowerPoint! Luckily, we managed to dig up an IT assistant who was able to install the program for us; but I had to blag my way through the first 15 minutes of the presentation without my visual aids.

Boy, am I ready for a holiday!]