Notes from a Journey South
A trip is like a dream — unreal, and yet shot through with truth. Over the past week — nine days in all — I took the family on a road trip through a handful of spots along the California coast: Carmel, Highway 1, Solvang, Santa Barbara, the Getty Center, Los Angeles, and San Diego.
(I)
I put in for the leave half a month in advance. My family all said, “You’ve barely arrived — you only switched teams internally a month ago — isn’t taking a whole week off a bit much?” I figured that when you enter a village, you follow its customs. Americans are the archetype of a people who keep work and life completely separate: halfway through a meeting, someone glances at the clock, says “I’ve got to pick up the kids,” and walks out — no hedging, no apology. However busy work gets — duang — spring break arrives and they vanish for two weeks with the children, not answering calls, not reading email. On this count, the Chinese and the Indians lag far behind. My (former) boss — yes, after a week of play I came back to find my boss had become my ex-boss — is an American, and naturally reasonable. He not only approved it cheerfully but asked me: only a week? Isn’t that too tight? You could absolutely take a few more days! I was moved to tears.
(II)
Traveling in America means, basically, the car (plus the airplane). Two guys on my team are amateur pilots, both with more than a year and a half of flying hours; one of them is working toward his advanced pilot certification — the kind that lets you fly in bad weather. I remember a post that circulated wildly on WeChat Moments about a few girls flying themselves around the East Coast. To Chinese eyes that’s an outrageous, awe-inspiring feat; to Americans it’s nothing particularly remarkable. Getting a pilot’s license takes perseverance, but mostly it takes money: find an instructor at a local flying club, set aside ten to thirty thousand dollars (hourly aircraft rental plus the instructor’s fee), spend about a year of your spare time, and you’ll have your pilot’s license. If I were ten years younger I’d certainly go get one. Not now — the family’s objections are too loud; they’re afraid the thing isn’t safe. I’ll just tuck that wish away.
Those who can’t fly themselves can buy a ticket to the destination and rent a car there. We first thought of Seattle, to see the legendary Olympic National Park, but April weather in Seattle is apparently never much good, so we dropped it. Recently I heard of a startup called FlightCar offering airport car rental, extending the sharing economy one step further: on a long trip you need a rental at the destination, while your own car sits idle in the airport lot accruing parking fees — money out either way. Use their service, and your car not only avoids parking fees; if it gets rented out, you collect rent every day. In a country like America, with a mature credit system, where a car is nothing more than a means of getting around, such a business really does have a market.
I digress. Since Seattle would be chilly, we might as well head south, down Highway 1 all the way to San Diego — that was our final choice.
(III)
I recall a passage in Founder at Work where Jessica Livingston (or someone else) tells the story of PayPal’s early battle with fraud: if they had followed the big banks’ playbook and raised a huge team to fight fraud, that expense alone would have bankrupted a startup like PayPal; and on top of that, a brutal signup flow demanding the user’s SSN, home address, and his mother’s maiden name would have driven every last user away. So the prophets of “impossible” poured cold water: with the likes of you? Save your breath, it can’t be done. PayPal’s founders took a different path: I accept the risk that fraud brings, but unlike the big banks, I assume everyone is a good person, and I’ll deal with the rare bad actor who slips in among them. So I don’t vet anyone — email registration is enough; and I don’t keep a giant team — an algorithm sifts out the serious fraud.
The way the hotels along our route served breakfast was cut from exactly the same cloth. Unlike hotels in China or Europe, where you must give your room number or show your key card to eat breakfast, here the hotels simply throw open the doors and you help yourself. At the hotel in Oxnard, a few shabbily dressed old men came in and took breakfast, and the Mexican auntie preparing the food made no move to stop them. Somehow it reminded me of that PayPal story. Risk control doesn’t have to drive risk to zero to win; risk control itself costs money. By the Pareto principle, the optimal control is to tolerate a certain level of risk that does no great harm.
(IV)
Because we had the little one with us, this trip revolved around theme parks: we went to Disneyland, Legoland, SeaWorld San Diego, the zoo, and the safari park. The American tourism economy doesn’t survive on admission tickets and outrageously priced food the way it does back home. They push the money-making power of a park’s “theme” to its limit, and Disney is the exemplar. At Disney, virtually every little girl from five to fifteen is dressed as some princess; the dress plus all the accessories won’t come in under seventy or eighty dollars, and if a family has two or three girls, that’s a major outlay before they’re even through the gate. The grown-ups eagerly join in too: a pair of Mickey ears on your head and twenty-odd dollars are gone; add a queue-jumping pass and a chance to get close to the fairy-tale characters — duang, duang, duang — and a pile of silver vanishes just like that.
This is a fine warning: there are so many ways to make money that fixating on one or two is terribly limiting. Broadening the point — both sides are burning cash, but look at the eighteen transformations of Uber’s operations and marketing, then look at the crude, blunt force of Didi and Kuaidi, and the gap is plain.
(V)
Americans have taken show culture to its limit. Never mind the various entertainments while you queue for the hot rides at Universal Studios or Disney (in one darkened holding room, Optimus Prime assigns you your next mission) — even at SeaWorld, for a sea lion show, after the audience is seated and for the ten or twenty minutes before the show begins, thoroughly professional performers put on a string of comic bits that keep you laughing; the dull waiting time becomes rich and various.
Behind this show culture lies an extreme regard for user experience. It echoes, across the distance, the money-making power I described earlier. The customer has paid and handed a whole day over to the park; the park can only earn its money standing up — with dignity — if it serves them delightfully. The worst thing about an outing is riding a three-minute attraction after an hour in an endless, shapeless queue. If the queue can’t be avoided, then find a way to delight the bored (or furious) customer.
On this point, Nexmo — a startup offering SMS services — does very well. I tried their API, found the Unicode support poor, and stopped using it. A few days later a young woman from their ops team emailed me: “Hi there, did you run into some kind of problem, blah blah blah.” I replied politely: “It seems you don’t support Chinese; I’ll try again once you do.” Her answer: “Perhaps our documentation doesn’t explain it clearly — Unicode needs to be used this way” — followed by a thoughtful snippet of code, hand-holding me through sending Chinese.
Customer acquisition is unavoidably a funnel. I’ll try Nexmo again, and maybe one day when I truly need it I’ll use their service — just as I’m almost certain to go back to Disney and SeaWorld.
(VI)
Halfway through the trip, I was startled to learn that I hadn’t been selected in the H-1B lottery. I quietly closed my inbox and went on playing, heartless as before. That’s life: nothing comes easily. Since coming to America, every month has brought some piece of bad news that concerns me directly. One lecture in Harvard’s Positive Psychology course says that information doesn’t matter; what matters is interpretation, and the perception that follows. This positive psychology, steeped in Ah Q’s spirit of self-consolation, has genuinely helped me a great deal — as Teacher Kai-Fu says, accept with an open heart the things you cannot change. Since life insists that you walk on thin ice, then count the days on your fingers and make each one a bit more interesting, a bit more sunlit.
A friend, hearing that I’d spent five days in San Diego and still hadn’t had enough, exclaimed in surprise: is that place really that much fun? I’ll have to go see it when I have time. He’s lived in America for over ten years and still asks such a question. It isn’t that he has no longing to travel — Alaska’s glaciers, Hawaii’s sea breeze, Yellowstone’s scenery are always on his lips. It’s just that for the first several years he was chained to his green card and his house, working hard; and once he had the green card (and of course the house), everywhere in North America seemed within easy reach, and so he never treasured it. Just as I lived in Beijing for over ten years, and yet the bars of Sanlitun and the boats of Houhai are less familiar to me than to some young pup who has just drifted over and calls me “uncle.”
(VII)
By now you’ll have realized that you’ve been had — this isn’t a travelogue.
