My Chinese colleague arrived after 11 in the morning, having missed her flight out of Shēnzhèn. Qing wears Jimmy Choo and totes a Prada, and I admit I made a slight misjudgment based on her style. I assumed she was more salesy, but her technical chops are sound. She understands networking and quite a lot of RF, and this really ended up helping me.

I had pounded about a dozen little cups of coffee at the hotel’s Continental breakfast, which was more a sort of bi-continental breakfast. There was an omelet bar and a row of chafing dishes with Western and Chinese grub. I knew damn well I wasn’t going to sit at table in Shànghǎi and eat fuckin eggs and bacon. I went straight for the Specialty Fried Rice and piled at least three little dishes high with it (I later discovered there were regular sized plates). “Greengrocery” was stir-fried bok choi or ong choi… and they also had “Shanghai steamed bun:” the famous xiao long bao! I casually grabbed a couple and then skulked up later for a couple more.

We caught each other up, briefly, and headed out to the customer site. You get around Pǔdōng by taxi… it’s a huge, sprawling area that used to be the agricultural lowlands east of old Shànghǎi. Imagine an industrial park the size of Rhode Island. The local office of our customer was just a kilometer and a half away, but it took fifteen minutes at least… plus Qing didn’t know exactly where it was, so we wandered the streets for a while until we found the entrance.

Since it was lunchtime by the time we got there, our customer contact brought us to the company cafeteria for lunch… after inquiring nervously if the American could use sticks. I assured them I could. 12 years in Hawai’i had given me a lot of practice, and I still like to eat rice with chopsticks, cause otherwise I shovel it in at an obnoxious rate. I had been cool with anything in bite sized chunks, but larger pieces defeated me… by the end of the trip, though, I was devouring chicken legs and pork chops with sticks, and hunching down over my rice bowl like a local.

They were kind enough not to order Shànghǎi stink fish with lots of needle-like bones for me. I’ll eat anything once, but I made a lot of runs at Asian fish, and I don’t dig it. They were duly impressed with my chopstick skills, and I promised them I liked Chinese food, and had come with every intention of eating a lot of it.

This was the first day where I was really immersed in Chinese life. My Mandarin was still close to nonexistent… I had downloaded a podcast that I listened to on the plane to learn the courtesy words: please, thank you, may I, etc. I figure you can’t lose by being polite, and the customer contact was enormously amused every time I said duìbùqǐ for “excuse me.”

The expression nèi gè in Mandarin, meaning “that one,” gets used a lot… it seems like it’s more or less a throwaway word when you’re referring to something and the other person knows what you’re talking about. It kind of gets slurred in fast speech and it kept cracking me up, because out of the jumble of syllables and tones I kept hearing neige neige neige, and it sounds like all these Chinese people are calling each other the N-word. Felt like I never left my neighborhood.

We caught the 1:30 company shuttle to the office park where some of the gear was located. Golden Bridge was a lot like any American office park, surrounding a nice stream and landscaped carefully and well. The buildings were all new, and featured a Best Buy with architecture straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey or some other 60s vision of the future: all rounded edges and bold primary colors. I was feeling more and more like a native of some run-down broke-ass country. It was kind of a cool (and kind of a sad) feeling.

I’ll spare the tech details, but what I saw was pretty depressing. They were using our equipment in a way we’d never intended for it to be used, and I wasn’t sure if the system was going to work at all, let alone work well. We took another shuttle to the next site - think of these sites as like holes on a miniature golf course: one to the next to the next to the next. This was even more jaw-droppingly weird, and after I clambered up onto the roof of this dilapidated office building, I was wondering if I had been set up to take a major fall.

In the attic at the top of the building was the testing gear. It was probably the crappiest equipment room I had ever been in, and I had seen some serious dung.

It was impossible to tell what was connected to what, and after a few minutes in there with the local staff I was convinced none of them could figure it out either. Cables everywhere, hardly anything labeled. The day had grown hotter and more humid, and this concrete room with its one little window and stacks of whirring equipment was a sauna. I began to wither in my ridiculous long-sleeved business shirt and Italian wool suit.

The guy who had taken us to lunch showed me the problems they were having, and it was fairly obvious that they were going about some things all wrong. I made a suggestion that we simplify things down to the absolute minimum, and discovered an incompatibility with a particular piece of equipment was causing most of their trouble.

I did some tuning and adjusted some settings that just seemed odd and jacked up. They ran a test, and I was amazed. We were moving data across this clusterfuck of a network with a packet loss rate of 0.4% -  no more than four packets out of every thousand dropped. Again, won’t go into the details, but I was expecting the thing to seize up and start puking electrons all over the concrete floor and it was purring like a catnipped kitten.

The problem: they wanted 0.1% loss.

One packet out of every thousand dropped, max. Through the middle of a Chinese megacity, with probably hundreds of sources of interference blasting my poor gear. My guts turned to water.

We ran every combination of every setting available on the system. Nothing could tip that error rate down even a tenth of a percent, and most things we did made it worse. Qing came up with some off-the-wall ideas which were great (I refuse to call it “out-of-the-box” thinking… how about “inspired engineering?”) but it was no use. We were stuck in the mud.

The light was fading, and we had to go. We climbed down the steel stairs from the attic, me racking my brains to think of what we could do to improve the system. I hadn’t had anything to drink all day since the gallon of coffee I’d had at breakfast, no water with lunch, nothing. I was feeling seriously dehydrated, and was looking forward to my air-conditioned hotel room and maybe a nice Tsingtao. Then, our contact, the guy in front, started shouting something.

They had locked us in.

The equipment room was rented space at the top of this half-empty office building, it didn’t belong to our customer. There was a roll-down steel door, like you find in some stores in worse neighborhoods in the US. We were on the wrong side of that. And alone in the building.

Nobody was freaking, so I didn’t either… but I was wondering what it would be like to spend the night in this dump, and how dry I’d be in the morning. Fortunately, everyone in China has a cell phone, so a rescue call was made and we settled in. I asked Qing to translate posters on the wall, some workgroup motivational crap: part Jonathan Deming, part Chairman Mao. One poster showed the international standard graphic for an emergency exit: the Man Fleeing In Terror icon, over an arrow pointing to a doorway that was, humorously, chained and barred shut with a piece of wood that had once been a door. Having nothing to do, I poked around the door and pulled the wood away, discovering that the chain was just looped metal packing straps. The exit door fell open, revealing a totally rundown stairway filled with garbage and moisture damage.

I didn’t care. It was freedom.

We escaped down the back entrance, and all four of us piled into a taxi back to town. We dropped our contacts off at different bus stops, and returned to the hotel in the cab. Day One had kind of sucked, but I chugged a bunch of water and got Qing to take me out for some authentic food, which was actually not all that easy to find in the financial district.

We found a place in what amounted to a multistory food court on Fuxing Road. The ground floor was all sweets and pastries, but upstairs on the second level there was Chinese food, or, as they call it in China: food.

The duck blood soup was kind of cool just for the weirdness factor, but my favorite was the beef with hot pepper and mushroom stems like I had never tasted before, a northern dish apparently:

I napped, as I would for the rest of that week, rather than sleeping. I woke up in the middle of the night to catch the engineers midday in California and try and get some support on what was seeming to be, increasingly, an impossible task. They agreed to run tests in the lab to simulate our results. I went back to bed.

The rest of the week unfolded pretty much the same. Every technical trick we threw at the problem - and we did a lot of software tinkering around under the hood - failed to move the numbers at all. Thursday they took me out to the last site, a little concrete block structure - it had apparently once been either a bakery, a foundry, or a crematorium - with a fifteen-meter steel tower on the roof. Our two radios were mounted one on top of the other: they were trying to play fucking handball with the microwaves. Again, not to get lost in the technical details: this, however, is not kosher. I urged them to move the radios apart. They said no dice. The tower could only be reached by clambering up a rickety bamboo ladder to the roof of the block house. This looked like a killer.

By Thursday night, the test engineers had come up with three magic bullets that I could use to solve the problem. I was really encouraged. Each of the tweaks seemed like they’d work pretty well to move the numbers down at least a fraction, and I felt like the combo would do wonders for the test. If we couldn’t reach the 0.1% threshold, we’d get damn close.

I was shot down in flames by midmorning Friday.

We discussed our options over a lunch of hot Hunan chicken, with an interesting side dish of jellyfish:

Qing tried to sell the customer on the idea that, if we couldn’t reach their minimum threshold, that they should run the test plan anyway and see what performance was like. It seemed like we got some traction, because we were apparently returning to the site after lunch.

We dropped off the dude that was running the tests for us, which kind of surprised me, but it was cool: always better to do experiments without someone looking over our shoulder. Unfortunately, though, they’d left the cables in a really weird state, and we didn’t realize until like an hour later that we realized it wasn’t our gear that was taking a shit, it was their awful network.

We got halfway decent numbers, and Qing called it in. The customer, surprisingly, agreed to move the equipment that was crammed together on the tower out in the sticks on Monday. The catch: I’d have to do it myself.

Looked like I wouldn’t be going home on Sunday after all…