Chinese work harder?

As I mentioned in the previous post, recently I have been stressed over this one huge course project. Java based, student scheduling assistant. Well that's not the point. The point is, we are a four-man group..ok, three-man-one-woman group.

And out of the 4 people, one is a non-Chinese dude, who appears smart, and somewhat hardworking. I didn't know him that well before the project; since my friends picked him, I assumed he was at least OK.

The result was: for the past 4 days, he contributed to around..let's say...7.5% of the entire project. I'm being polite here.

He did appear he was trying hard: he came up with a clever idea of how to test this standard input/output intensive program by creating mocking projects so we only needed to do it in Java. ok ok. Except my another teammate built an ingenious tool for command line testing and the mocking part was entirely unnecessary. Today he finished the user manual, which we had to read over and correct the mistakes and add in the content he forgot/missed.

On the contrary, the other 2 teammates and me worked HARD. Every day we worked since the time we woke up, non-stop (and communicating via MSN) until 2am. EVERYDAY for the past 3 days. I adore how hard they could push themselves, and consequently I had to push myself a lot more too since I didn't want to let them down. We were like a bunch of perfectionists who would drain the last drop of our blood to make this project clean, beautiful, extensible, well structured, and matching industry standard. (I'm serious: we've had enough knowledge to make this happen)

At the end, I remember what the non-Chinese dude responded to a question we raised for a spec related question: "Who the fuck cares."

Well we did. And we worked harder.

I have another example to prove this cliche. CUTC - the Canadian Undergraduate Technology Conference, had a TechTeam challenge. We were given a task to design a whatever crazy-ass computer that worked in the wild. My group was consisted of 5 people: me, Dave, a Chinese girl, and 2 other non-Chinese dudes. We had 2 days to do it, and for almost 1.5 days, the 2 non-Chinese people were missing. When we met for the prototype details, a guy(deceivingly talkative, but full of bullshit) said "who the fuck cares, I don't care."

Again, we cared. In order to complete the task that met our standard, me and Dave ended up not sleeping all night to finish the presentation slides and prototype. We lost - for 2 people working for the amount of 5 people's work. I thought we did a decent job though.

One more - last semester's business software project. Group of 5, 3 Chinese, 2 non-Chinese. The 3 of us did almost all the work while the other 2 slacked or produced non-acceptable results. We all got a good mark.

I don't know what the moral of the story is. I'm not trying to be discriminative, but I do notice the difference. We have the tradition to be perfect - sometimes too rigorously following the standards. It could be the ideal we share; or the expectation of life. We ought to be more practical. Maybe this explains why the rate of education is much higher in Chinese here, why there are a lot of Chinese doctors and lawyers, and why Engineering/CS/Commerce programs are flooded by Chinese students.

I can rant about how non-Chinese groups are different, but I'm feeling weird for slacking and not doing any work. Oh well...

Remedy of the day

After a tiresome long day of programming in Java in the lab, this tranquil, understanding smile is no doubt like a refreshing breeze to my heart. Looking at my teammates who worked beside me for the entire afternoon, I am asking for no more.

Home Town

Bumped into this photo yesterday. Quite amazed how where I grew up could look so good. :)

See the "twin towers" on the up right corner? My high school is right beside them. These two buildings were supposed to be the "Chinese World Trade Center" and just finished building before 911. Sigh.

Walking Cliche

Actually it should be "driving cliche".

I rented a car for the first time in my life. Don't laugh: if you live in downtown Toronto and your parents aren't around, you will be like me too. Being under 25 and holding a G2 license, I was able to get a car for 88 bucks a day(plus whatever gas I used up by the end of the day). It's a crazy price, but I needed to practice for my coming G test as well as dealing with some errands here and there.

So here I am, an Asian woman, driving.

What's worse: the car rental place decided to give me a Toyota Corrola.

Woohoo!!

What's worst: I perfectly, 100% match this stereotype. Haven't driven for almost 2 years, my driving skills were rotten and smelt like H2S. I still feel sorry for the terrified passenger. And I had to go through unimaginable situations: closed highways; extreme cold alert weather; blowing snow storm on hwy 7, when I had to use the anti-freezing liquid on the windshield every 5 seconds; got stuck in ice and went out only after 2 guys decided to help push the car.

What a day.

On the bright side, I only got honked once and made back home alive. There wasn't much car damage, except a scrape when backing out from the ice holes and worn tires. At the end of the day I was much more confident with driving, and got a lot braver.

Did I mention I improved too?

Something interesting

This is reading week and I have been going to sleep at 5am and getting up around 3pm daily. Not a good life style at all. Slacking leads to laziness, laziness leads to less discoveries. However I still got a couple of interesting pictures to share here.

Women rule! - Taken in the medical science building




The rival

Happy Chinese New Year!

Best wishes to whoever celebrate the arrival of the year of pig! A white friend of mine -_- sent me this set of pictures and I found them extremely cute...So let them carry my greetings :)
Note the play on the words...I can only do a rough translation =(

"Happy New Year! Wish you in the new year of pig..."


"Healthy and Happy, forever young"


"In your specialty area, know what you do and do it well"


"Everybody praise you for being smart and wise"


"All your friends healthy and good looking" -_- i can't translate this


"But only you can keep your looks at its best"


"You will have so many lovers that you can barely handle it"


"Everybody desires you"


"Don't be so 'flower-hearted' and have sexy time every night ;)"


"and wish you and your entire family happy, safe and healthy. "

Beauty

So after the snow storm everything went back to tranquility. I decided to post more pictures...to show how beautiful the blue sky/white snow look.

"Digging" through my way to the library. :)


somebody shoveled the sidewalks. :)





During work's break. This is my favorite scene of the day.