Cornell Business

Issue date: 2/12/10 Section: Features

It ends on a boat motoring from Cheung Chau Island back to Hong Kong. After a hike up and down Lamma Island and lunch at the harbor with seafood you can visit before it's cooked and beer-beer-beer, the G-Force speeds us away from the sunset and into the wake of turbo jet ferries. Then someone wants to be photographed in a Titanic pose, straddling the bow arms stretched out to the sea, and someone else crawls under the net surrounding the deck to get a front angle shot. There are no life preservers visible and no one knows how to say "man overboard" in Cantonese, but no matter. The JGSM China/Hong Kong trip ends on gales of laughter whipped away by the wind. Of course, that's not how it begins.
Yo-Yo ma-ma-ma-ma!!!
We meet up in Shanghai on January 5th and are immediately taken under the wing of Yo-Yo, our tour guide for the week. Rumor has it that after last year's trip 90% of the participants wanted to marry the woman, and I suspect 2010 is no different. As we drive from point A to point B, she provides a never-ending stream of information: the rent per square meter in Yao Ming's luxury apartment building and the emperor's visits to Hang Zhou to find the most beautiful concubines; the new metro lines being dug for the Shanghai Expo in May and a joke about what the gods said to the Korean, Japanese, and Chinese soccer coaches asking when their countries would win the World Cup; a brief history of the Opium Wars and the eight reasons why Chinese women are skinny (genes, rice, green tea, no dessert, bicycles, tai chi, chopsticks, and squatting toilets); the myth of the Western Lake - something about a woman who gets reincarnated as a snake who does a good deed and marries … "Okay, we're here."
We visited multinational and Chinese firms, meeting with executives who had their own interesting stories of how they ended up in Shanghai. We watch the march of earnings and market share across Power point slides. In between we eat "special" meat (don't ask), toast alums, and greet prospective JGSM applicants. We run the gauntlet of hawkers on the Nanjing Road with their good-fake Rolexes and Louis Vuitton and cruise aisles of unrecognizable produce in Wal-Mart. Then it's back on the bus, to Yo-Yo with her tidbits served up like a Chinese banquet Lazy Susan-style.
What will probably stick best is her illustration of how intonation changes the meaning of words so that ma-ma-ma-ma could mean "I get into trouble when I curse my mother and tell her she looks like a horse," depending on how you sing that song.

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