You Say Mangos, I Say Mangoes And still others say 芒果. Whatever your term, we got 'em. It's that time of year again, probably my favorite. Mangoes are all over the place, right now, and a drive through Chennai streets will reveal roadside stand after roadside stand selling the exact same identical fruit, all for a song. We're lucky enough to have two fruit-producing trees in our yard. One of them produces the round mangoes, the other oblong. Last year we moved here from another consulate property, right at the tail end of the season. Someone had already picked our trees clean, apparently in the middle of the night, so we could not enjoy their bounty. This year we're on top of things. We had a guy come over and harvest the tree for us, an intriguing enterprise, consisting of one man, a small stepladder and a long pole with a burlap sack tied to the end of it: 15 feet off the ground in mango heaven What we missed, the crows did not And now, a Prince Roy exclusive contest: guess the number of mangoes we got from those trees. Spicygirl sits there with what represents our entire morning harvest. I'll post the answer next week. The person who guesses closest without going over gets mangoes if they want them (I'm sure we'll be positively sick of them by then), or another appropriate Madras memento, to be determined by the judging committee...
- posted by Prince Roy @ 5/29/2005 03:00:00 PM| |

 
Moving On Up On May 15 I received my first and last administrative promotion in the Foreign Service. When a successful candidate receives an initial offer for a position, State determines the starting salary by evaluating education and work experience. You can see how it does so here. Some of you considering diplomatic careers may wonder how the promotion process works. I'll do my best here to give a brief introduction, but it's not at all easy for outsiders to fathom. Here's a link to the current pay scale. Opening that in a separate window may make all this easier to follow. Almost every new hire comes in at one of three classes, FP6-4, FP-4 being the highest. In addition, each grade contains what are called 'steps', 14 in total. I came in at FP-5, Step 9 because I had a JD and four years of work experience. Although there are 9 classes, I've never seen anyone come in lower than FP-6. I'm not quite sure how step increases work, but I think we move up one step a year for each year we remain in that class---before my promotion I was at Step 10. Each officer receives administrative promotion through FP-4. If you come in at FP-6, you get promoted to FP-5 after 12 months. FP-5 to FP-4 takes an additional 18 months. Promotion to FP-3 and beyond is entirely merit based, done through selection boards. So people who come in at FP-4 go up to 30 months before they become eligible for a class promotion. This becomes an issue for people coming out of lucrative professions. For instance, the guy who passed the Foreign Service Oral Assessment (FSOA) with me was an associate attorney in a biglaw firm in Manhattan. He must have been earning well more than 200K a year. For people like him, State maxes them out at the highest possible step in FP-4 ($70,023 in 2005), but he still ended up taking a massive pay cut, and will not even be eligible for promotion until 30 months have passed. Plus, he misses out on the annual step increase since he's already maxed out. An interesting aside: his wife also took the exams and she was in my orientation class. She was an attorney in the same firm. Here's a couple that was probably making close to 500K combined, coming in earning about 1/4 of their previous income. Not only that, State assigned them to two different regions; he is in East Asia and she's in Europe. You have to respect their commitment to service. So anyway, I'm now an FP-4. I'm not quite sure which step they put me at---I think how it works is you find the step in the new class that is higher than your current salary and go to the next step after that. Administrative promotions are conditioned on 'satisfactory performance'. I couldn't find a definition for that, but I think it means that if you have to pick up the President, Secretary of State or whomever at the airport, try and remember to wear clothes. If you're interested in navigating the labyrinth that is State Department personnel procedure (god help you), you'll find all you need to know here. To celebrate, I bought a round of drinks for my fellow junior colleagues. I consider that I got off easy. In the Army, not only did we have to buy drinks, but we had to walk the gauntlet. The platoon would form two lines facing each other, and the promoted soldier would have to walk between them, slowly. As s/he passed through, we would whack them in the upper arms, and I mean really tee off. I'd be sore for days. But maybe they don't do that anymore.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 5/28/2005 01:35:00 AM| |

 
Are there any Telugu film buffs out there? I need some expert advice. Click here to see what I mean.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 5/23/2005 10:50:00 PM| |

 
The term 老外, good or bad? After a dormant period, much like a volcano, debate has recently erupted again in the China blog circles. See here, here, and here. Or maybe it’s more like a cicada, normally hidden just beneath the surface, but every few years it bursts out of the cocoon, with a deafening cacophony. I remember going over the same arguments years ago when I first began studying Chinese. We never reached a definite conclusion then, either. I do remember it sorely pissed me off at times when people called me that, but other times I couldn’t care less. While it’s not a positive word, I don’t agree with those who argue it is a neutral term, but I also don’t concur with those who think it is necessarily a slur. My position is that pejoratives are in the ear of the beholder. That’s why I avoid using terms that I know will cause offence. An example I used in one of the comments is the word ‘oriental’. Most Asians I know, in the US at least, find this word derogatory. Why, I’m really not sure. If someone were to call me an ‘occidental’, it wouldn’t raise my hackles in the slightest. But I try to respect their wishes, and I rarely use the word now (not that I ever did much in the first place). So maybe laowai is in that category as well. I’d like to expand on this debate. Oftentimes, in Chinese movies and TV, you’ll see a foreign character. A lot of times, they will dub the lines so that a Chinese is doing a voiceover. Invariably, it will be in the most stilted, laborious, gut-wrenching (‘gut-retching’?) ‘foreigner Chinese’. I still cringe when I hear this. Just last night, I started watching one of the Chinese channels we get here. It was showing a movie: 聖战风云. One of the main characters is a German woman who speaks Chinese. Right when I first tuned in, she was speaking in Chinese, but with an obvious accent. At first, I thought it was another one of those atrocious dub-overs, but as I listened more closely, I realized it was probably actually her doing the voicing, because while you could tell it was a foreigner, the accent wasn’t so exaggerated. I realized this didn’t bother me a bit, and in fact I even enjoyed it. In any event, that is the exception, rather than the rule. I don’t know why film studios in China don’t find: a) more Chinese-speaking Western actors, or b) those who speak decent Chinese and can do voiceovers for those who do not. Certainly that can’t be hard to do nowadays, when Chinese-speaking foreigners are a dime-a-dozen. It is unrealistic to expect a foreigner to have completely accent-free Chinese, so dubbing over a foreign voice into native Chinese is not the answer. At the same time, having a native Chinese do the ‘foreigner speaking Chinese’ accent is almost always incredibly offensive. It is on par with how Westerners used to perform grossly exaggerated Asian roles in the movies and on TV. Anyone ever see the episode of Gilligan’s Island where some white guy played a Japanese sailor who didn’t know WWII ended? I wrote about that once here. Even up to 1985 you could find examples of Hollywood doing this (Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins). Or how white actors used to portray blacks on the radio in the days before TV. In fact, I consider what the Chinese do nothing more than ‘aural blackface’. This to me is far more problematic than use of the word laowai, because it not only perpetuates an old stereotype that foreigners can’t learn Chinese, but it caricatures Westerners in an insulting, buffoonish manner.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 5/21/2005 07:45:00 PM| |

 
What Am I Missing? George Galloway vs. the US Senate Full disclosure: I had never even heard of George Galloway until a few days ago. I knew nothing about the man or his politics. I now realize he’s quite a controversial UK political figure, but regardless of that, this post is more of a response to the legal tactics used by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, chaired by Senator Norm Coleman and ranking member Senator Carl Levin. This committee is holding hearings on the UN Oil for Food Program, and it has charged that Galloway, among others, personally profited from illegal oil sales. On May 17 Galloway directly refuted these charges before the committee. In what has now become a notorious rebuttal, Galloway unequivocally denied ever having received any money from any such deals. Not only that, he alleges that the documents used by the committee to impugn him were obtained from the same sources that provided similar documents to several newspapers, some of which then ran stories based on the contents of those materials, most notably the Christian Science Monitor of the US. That newspaper has since revealed the documents it acquired were in fact forgeries, and settled with Galloway out of court. In December 2004, the UK Daily Telegraph lost a libel trial over stories it printed reporting that Galloway had taken money from Saddam’s regime, and he received a judgment of £150,000 plus legal fees (now under appeal). It must be noted that Norm Coleman did not dispute Galloway’s version of the documents’ sources. All in all, an abysmal cross-examination by Senator Coleman, whose entire case against Galloway apparently rests on documents provided by sources that are known forgers. Senator Levin performed just as badly. In a classic bait and switch, he attempted to refocus the entire testimony towards Fawazz Zuraiqat, an associate of Galloway. Zuraiqat has already admitted to trading in oil, a fact that is not in dispute, though Galloway claims not to have known that until 2003, and even then, there is no evidence whatsoever that Galloway received any of that money. Levin’s tactic was to insist on enquiring whether Galloway ‘was concerned’ with Zuraiqat’s business dealings. I have no idea where he was going with this line of questioning. Is he trying to cast doubt on Zuraiqat? If so, what’s the point? The guy’s already admitted his company traded in oil, as have numerous others, some of them located in Houston, Texas. What does that have to do with the Senate committee’s accusation: that Galloway personally profited from Iraqi oil deals? Perhaps he was trying to point out that Galloway mixes with a disagreeable crowd. Well, stop the presses: Politicians (and lawyers) sometimes associate with unsavory people for the purposes of raising funds for campaigns, charity (in Galloway’s case), business, whatever, and they rarely ask where the money comes from. I would imagine Senators Levin and Coleman should think twice about throwing those stones, considering their own glass houses. And an initial investigation in the UK has concluded that none of Zuraiqat’s oil money found its way into Galloway’s charity drive, undertaken for an Iraqi girl stricken with leukemia. That investigation may be re-opened, however. The point is, if the committee has a beef with Zuraiqat, it should subpoena him. Levin’s questions were totally irrelevant regarding whether or not Galloway personally received any illicit oil money. That is the classic (bad) attorney fall-back: when you don’t have a case, try to make the defendant look as bad as possible through guilt by association. Good enough for the gossip rags, perhaps, but not for a court of law. Maybe that’s why the media, while unanimous that Coleman got his head handed to him on a platter, inexplicably came away thinking that Levin scored a draw. Senators Coleman and Levin, both attorneys, should know better. Especially Levin, a Harvard Law grad. Now is Galloway guilty of any crime? I have no idea---they’ve been trying to hang the guy on this for years, and have failed every time. Maybe a genuine criminal investigation will eventually find out. But from a legal perspective, what happened in the Senate was an utter embarrassment. Don’t take my word for it, though. Watch Galloway’s testimony in its entirety here, courtesy of the BBC.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 5/21/2005 04:45:00 PM| |

 
The Oriental Angels: Ma Xianghua, Li Jia, Li Xiaojie, Wang Long, and Chang JingIn November 2004 I wrote this post about Chinese girl bands. What I found interesting about them is their gimmick of using ancient Chinese instruments to perform old and new easy listening standards with a traditional, yet modern twist. They don't sing or dance, and they stay away from the puerile, bubblegum formula embraced by their Chinese boy band counterparts and so many other Asian pop stars. Still, they didn't strike me as very original or worthy of much attention, and so I was somewhat bemused by their strong reception in Japan, and even in parts of the US with large Chinese communities. Still, it was probably just a momentary fad, I thought. For a time, evidence seemed to bear that out, as I did not see anymore of these groups on the Chinese stations we receive here in Chennai. That is, until today. CCTV-9 is back pimping the latest version, this time "The Oriental Angels". Is this all just the smoke and mirrors of corporate packaging and product placement, or do people in China really enjoy this kind of music? I honestly don't get it; like I wrote in the other post, it is all so Liberace and Zamfir. And what's with that name? The Chinese one makes sense: 东方天使, but I thought "Oriental" is a bad word now. If they ever tour the States, will the Asia-Pacific student groups picket the auditoriums? Somehow, I can see the hand of frequent Sinosplice commentator Da Xiangchang behind all of this...
- posted by Prince Roy @ 5/15/2005 06:15:00 PM| |

 
Scared Straight One of our primary functions as US diplomats is to assist US citizens abroad. In most cases, that involves mundane things like replacing a lost or soon-to-expire passport, informing travelers of any potentially dangerous areas, things like that. Sometimes it’s far more serious: death (mostly due to illness or injury), international parental abductions, or imprisonment. That last example is fairly rare, in India at least, but it does happen. Before starting this job, I never imagined what kinds of messes people could/do get themselves into overseas. I recently made my first prison visit to a US citizen. A word to the wise: most people are probably unaware of just how little we are able to do for them if they get thrown in a foreign hoosegow. I think far too many Americans are under the impression that the Constitution hovers over them like some guardian angel wherever they go. Their mantra is something like: “They can’t do that to me, I’m an American!” If that’s what you’re thinking, think again. A private American citizen in a foreign country is completely subject to that country’s laws and judicial processes. This page at the State Department goes into all the details; it’s mainly concerned with drug arrests, but the advice applies to any arrest. Basically, all we can do for you is ensure you are treated no worse than any similarly situated national of that country, provide you with a list of local attorneys, contact your family (or anyone you designate) if you waive the privacy act, and bring you some magazines or newspapers to read. And maybe some food, meds, and vitamins. That’s pretty much it. You’re at the mercy of the ‘wheels of justice’ in whatever country you’re in. As bad as US jails are, they are much, much worse in developing countries, in every way imaginable. But I did learn something fascinating. In India, there are apparently different classes of prison cells. If you have the money, you can get what is called a “Class A” cell. I didn’t get the chance to see one on my last visit, but if I have to go again, I’ll try to arrange a brief tour. It reminds me of that scene in Goodfellas where they all do time in their very own private ward under quite comfortable circumstances, with gourmet food, booze, etc. I’m not saying it’s like that, but perhaps if you have enough resources you could while away your sentence with a retinue of personal servants and cases of scotch. Limited usefulness notwithstanding, one of the most important rights Americans detained abroad possess is the right to have the detaining authorities contact that person’s embassy/consulate, should s/he desire it. We obtain this right through Article 36 of the Vienna Convention on Consular Relations, (VCCR) a treaty signed by the United States and these countries (scroll down to table). Of course, the United States is also required to do the same for any foreigners it arrests, but our record on this is spotty at best. The problem comes to a head for death penalty cases, particularly since the United States is practically the only developed, industrialized nation that regularly carries out capital punishment. We often take a beating on this issue, as there are scores of capital punishment cases in which US law enforcement did not inform detained foreigners of their right to consular access at the time of arrest. Who knows how many more such cases there are of foreigners arrested for lesser crimes. International law is all about reciprocity; that is the engine that drives its machine. Countries enter into these treaties because they want to ensure their citizens abroad receive fair, humane treatment by foreign governments. An important part of that is carrying out their own end of the bargain. In the United States, Article Six of the Constitution provides that treaties entered into by the United States are the supreme law of the land, and as such, the states are bound to them. Yet in the United States, the problem of consular notification occurs primarily at the state and local levels. In response to much international criticism, the State Department has begun to implement a more proactive approach in assisting US law enforcement to fulfill its legal responsibilities to foreign detainees. See here and here. There's also this interesting streaming video. For any law school geeks reading this, the major legal controversy in the US surrounding the VCCR is whether it creates an individual right or a State (nation) right. However this plays out will affect the remedy when a country violates the treaty. This is where it all degenerates into legal sophistry of a kind which ensures the continued vilification of lawyers. United States v. Li F.3d (1st Cir. 2000) illustrates the contending positions quite nicely. For a well-argued example of the minority view in the US today, see TORRUELLA, Chief Judge (concurring in part; dissenting in part).
- posted by Prince Roy @ 5/14/2005 05:00:00 PM| |

 
UPDATE: photos and Kerala trip report up now, here. I just got back from a weekend trip to Kerala, a lovely state to the west of Tamil Nadu. We stayed at the Kadavu Ayurvedic Resort near Calicut. A colleague's wife arranged the whole getaway, and she did a fantastic job. A number of us went, including a UK diplomat and his wife. Spicygirl (and all the ladies) are staying an extra night and will return sometime tomorrow. They'll be doing the whole Ayurvedic spa thing. The lads came back today---duty calls and all that. It was a sorely needed holiday on my part, even if it was only one full day. Last week was brutal. I established a new personal best, and I'm fairly a sure, a new consulate record of 218 visa interviews one day last week. Yes, the double century mark (in the post-biometric age) has finally fallen. In cricket, that would make me a god. In what we do though, it probably only makes me eligible for a nice new home, consisting of just one room with four white padded walls. The photo here is from our sunset Chaliyar River backwater cruise. I'll have more about the trip, and plenty more photos, on my companion site shortly.
- posted by Prince Roy @ 5/08/2005 06:00:00 PM| |