cc: file, Andrea, Tony Hafen, Sara and Des Penny, & Maxine Shirts
"In some ways I hesitate to write some of the things which happened my second week in China. I've always struggled with pride, and there is plenty of room for pride to raise it's ugly head relative to what happened during and after the CPS/SEG 2004 convention. I guess the failure of HyperMedia Corporation, the divorce, the failure of Continuum Resources, kids cutting me out of their lives, stealing, using alcohol or tobacco or drugs or having sex outside of the sacred bonds of marriage, and all of the related emotional and spiritual trials have made me hypersensitive to saying or really feeling anything good or worthwhile about myself. In many ways I have come to see myself as a failure, specifically at meeting financial requirements for my family and passing on those things most important to me to those I care the most about. When I think deeply about these things, I realize I am angry at myself for not being a better example and teacher, and I am fearful those I love will have the same type of feelings of inadequacy I feel. It wants me to take each of you in my arms and hold you and comfort you and say to you `Thanks for being who you are!'
Others see me as a failure too. On the second day of the convention, Bob Peebler stopped by the booth (../9809.html, ../9849.html, ../9932.html, ../9933.html, ../9936.html, ../9945.html, ../9950.html, ../0014.html, ../0046.html, ../0102.html, ../0203.html, ../0216.html, ../0217.html, ../0219.html, and ../0346.html). Bob always treated me very nicely. When he came to Landmark as the Marketing Vice-President we worked well together. I left Landmark in a way that resulted in him being made President, and Gene Ennis being moved out. Bob gave me the lifetime Landmark licenses, which have been one of the things which have consistently provided us with some income. And we have not talked since we talked about Dynamic Resources supporting his efforts at EVP (Energy Virtual Partners) back in 2002. He was surprised to see me. After catching up, and coming to understand that I now work with GDC, he made the passing comment, `Roice, after all you broke your pick,' accompanied with a karate chop in front of his belt buckle.
He also told Dave and Mike about the time Susie Mastoras, who is now his wife, came to China with me. She got really sick, and had to stay up in her room at the Guest Hotel at the Bureau of Geophysical Prospecting (BGP) in Zhuozhou (formerly Zhouxing). She came downstairs to give her presentation, fainted, and collapsed on the floor. A little Chinese woman came over, pinched her, and woke her up. Susie has never wanted to come back to China after that trip. I did not remember any of this. I'm getting old, and yet I am pretty good at remembering what did not go as planned. To summarize my point, it is not only Bob Peebler that sees my failures. And I do strive to not focus here. However, I do recognize failures, for only in failing do we recognize when we have have been successful.
For the most point, this week was about the successes. Mike Dunn was explaining our trip to someone else at the office, and he said, `Going with Roice to China was sort of like being with McArthur when he returned to the Philippines.' Why does everyone, including me, exaggerate so much? However, it is a fact that the second week in China was a real ego boost, and a lot of fun.
Richard Verm came into Beijing on Sunday. He joined us at the Crowne Plaza for discussions after we had eaten on Sunday night. Richard was getting his Ph.D. at the University of Houston when I was working at the Seismic Acoustics Laboratory. Most of the prototyping that become Landmark Graphics was done by Richard. I would describe what I thought needed to be done, and Richard would program it up. We wrote many of these projects up as papers for SAL Consortium Semi-Annual Reports. Those were good years, and one of the reasons I hung on to an interest in working at GDC over the three years Mike Dunn and I have been discussing it was because Richard Verm, Luh Liang, and Fred Hilterman were there. However, Luh got fired by Richard, and Fred resigned and only comes in once a week as a consultant, and Richard is completely swamped as the central point of focus for all of GDC's activities. This trip was our chance to become somewhat reacquainted. The most we have talked to each other in the last 20 years was when he introduced me to the SEG when John Mouton, Andy Hiltebrand, Bob Limbaugh, and I received the SEG Enterprise Award (../9945.html).
Monday morning we went over to Geo's office at RIPED to check out Jialin and You's work on building a 3-D model of sand thickness for the Gulf of Mexico. Dave, Mike, and Richard were each impressed. It was a good meeting, and started to really show the quality of partner Geo can become to GDC. When we got back we registered for the Convention, and checked out where all of the booths were being set up. The GDC booth was all set up. It was four panels across the back, which is what we expected, and four panels deep, which is not what we expected. We got the booth people to take out the two masonite panels at the front, which we did not have posters for, and to move the bar from the floor to waist high. The booth next to us was putting up a sign that said Petr China. I took a photo. The next day it was fixed, reading Petro China.
Monday evening we were invited to dinner by Dr. Ru-Shan Wu, a professor at the University of California at Santa Crux, and founder of SITI (Screen Imaging Technology), GDC's depth migration partner. He took us to the fanciest Chinese restaurant I've ever been to. It is in the old style Chinese, with ancient costumes, private dining areas, and one of those menus you want to bring home just to prove that people actually claim to eat all of the stuff listed. He selected several things which were definitely different. For instance, deer tendons. I remember eating them before, but I never knew what they were until this evening. Thankfully he did not order any of the mammal body parts used for procreation. I wish I would have taken my camera with me to capture this evening. Oh well! What a Family Home Evening the photos would have made.
Tuesday we sat up the booth and started to show people through our displays. It turns out that some of the best visits we had with folks were while we were setting up and then while waiting for the show to open on Wednesday morning. We had a 4 foot plasma screen in the front center part of the booth. We had a MirageTM mirror with the little pig on a table next to the projection screen. Dave and I took turns putting our computer displays on the screen. The 10 posters Mike and I created were hanging on the walls around the booth. The 4 meters x 4 meters was bigger than I though it would be. SITI did not have a computer to demonstrate their software with. GeoTech provided a Sun Workstation, which Richard used to demonstrate GDC-MOD, the Gulf of Mexico database. Tuesday evening Dave and I outvoted Mike, who wanted to go to Carabbas' for dinner, and we ate Domino Pizza. Tasted good to me, after a week of Chinese buffets.
Wednesday started off with Bob Peebler coming by the booth, as described above. Shortly after he came by, three senior executives from China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC) came by. I was so happy to see Xu Da-Kun, and he was equally happy to see me. The hug was spontaneous and sincere. It is hard to believe that a search shows I only have only mentioned Xu Da-Kun twice before in Thoughtlets (both in <../2002/0225.html">../0225.html). Xu Da-Kun is four years older than me, has two sons, and was our key technical contact at BGP when I was doing all of the work there for Landmark. Xu Da-Kun hired an artist to paint my Prime Words stanza, the tapestry that is nicely framed and in the upstairs washroom right now.
Xu Da-Kun was responsible for the turkey shoot when I came into China and found our team was not ready to give a good presentation of system capabilities. For the next four days I drove those people harder than any of them had ever worked before. Gary Jones has said several times that he never will work for me again, because he can not handle the schedule. I set out a plan of what needed to be done. I would jog about 5 km to the interpretation center, work all day, jog back and eat dinner. Then shower and jog back to the center and work all night, then jog back to the Guest House and eat breakfast. I kept doing this, simply by the jogging tricking my brain about Chinese vs US time. Three days later, when it was time for the presentation, we had a first class presentation, and we won the turkey shoot against GeoQuest. There are a lot of emotions tied up in making a sincere effort to do something worthwhile, and the hug from Mr. Xu showed that he was also touched.
When Gary Jones and 12 other Landmark employees were stranded in Zhuozhou after the Tinneman Square massacre in 1989, I was able to get hold of Xu Da-Kun by phone, and he promised me he would get our people out safely. He did. When I was the first one to go back into China after the massacre, Mr. Xu was one of the first ones I met with. He talked to me about getting his son to leave the square and taking him fishing to get his mind off of these things. I really do not have words to describe the feelings of seeing him again. It was great. He is now the President of CNPC's Drilling and Engineering Company, and they run over 100 drilling rigs at various international sites.
Xu Wenrong, former President of BGP (../0225.html and ../0241.html), who had hosted Andrea, Matt, and myself was with him (or vice-versa). Mr. Xu is now assistant to the President of CNPC. This is a big promotion for him. He was also very glad to see me.
Zhou Jiping was the third senior executive in the group. He is Vice President of Exploration and Development for CNPC, and appears was the ranking officer among them. He watched my interaction with Xu Da-Kun and Xu Wenrong, and then he reminded me of taking him of a tour of Houston after he finished a training assignment at ExxonMobil. He went on and on about how kind I was to him and how we showed him around Houston. I did not remember. I am getting old.
They were very interested in the work GDC is doing, and wanted to set up a dinner to further discuss how we could work together with CNPC. Dave was planning to leave on Sunday, and they had lots of other commitments. We finally set up a dinner meeting for the following Monday. Xu Wenrong said he would be out of town and would not be able to attend. It turned out Dave changed his flight to Tuesday so he would be at the dinner, and Xu Wenrong showed up, so he either canceled his trip or came back early so he could also be at the dinner. This meeting was the first time I realized there was something special happening at the show, and that the efforts I made years before had not been forgotten by the Chinese.
The show itself is kind of a blur in my mind. There were hundreds of people that came through. It turned out SITI had a dozen Chinese agents, and they all used our booth. Then we had folks from GeoTech always in our booth, collecting cards and getting people to sign guest lists, and talking about how they represented GDC. Lastly both Geo and GDC were showing the Gulf of Mexico sand thickness model, and there were a lot of trips back and forth between our booths. There were probably 75 booths at the show. One group in CNPC had replicated the Seismic Acoustics Lab's (SAL's) physical modeling tank, and they had a couple of complex elastic physical models in their booth that they had built. It was just like the SAL stuff I was inventing 20+ years ago. One guy named Tian spent a couple of hours in the booth, then he came back the next day with a copy of my book New Technologies in Exploration Geophysics autographed by me in 1983 and requested me to write him a note and redate it. My signature was the same.
One of the things said at some point in the show struck a chord with me. Someone said that Collin Powell has a State Department Task Force looking at alternative scenarios for the future. The energy requirements of the booming China are going to place China and the US in conflict within 20 years. Certainly the need for energy is going to be greater than the need Japan felt and which resulted in the attack on Pearl Harbor. The most logical scenario is that China will come up with a pretext to take over Indonesia and the extensive oil fields that are there. This thought that the meetings we are having could have have a significant impact on the lives of you kids and your kids, including whether or not China and the US go to war with each other, was more than sobering to me.
Wednesday night we were taken out to dinner by the Chief Geophysicist of the Nanjing Oil Field. This is the largest geophysical research institute in Sinopec, one of the two giant petroleum companies in China. He had a tie on that was seismic traces. I took a digital photo of his tie, and Dave took the photo and put it on the powerpoint that projected on the large plasma screen we had rented between a seismic section and a well log display and labeled it `A Good Seismic Tie.' We did have fun.
Dave Ridyard, now at Input/Output, the seismic equipment manufacturer (../0346.html) spent an hour with me at lunch one day catching up. Peter Duncan came by and I got him with Geo folks to talk about representing him. Xu Wenrong gave the Chinese keynote speech at the opening, and in his talk said that passive seismic would become one of the key geophysical technologies in China over the next 10 years. And they are doing none of this work now, and this is what Peter's company, Micro Seismic Technology, is all about. Peter said:
Thursday evening Dave Johnson and I had a special meeting
with Ru Shen Wu and Wang Xiaomu, Chairman of the Board of
BGP. The meeting went well, and we ended up putting an
hour presentation together for Mr. Wang and 10 of his
associates from BGP. The Chief Geophysicist is one of
the guys I worked with years ago. Dave and I were very
blunt with them. We suggested they should be in the
United States, that they would only get in the U.S. by
working with an American Company, that GDC could help
them with this work, and of course we talked about the
things GDC is selling. The presentation seemed to go
very well. They promised to send us a 3-D survey to do
a test on regarding prestack depth migration. It was
a very interesting evening. I was feeding my comments
to Dave, and he did an excellent job of presenting GDC
and himself to the Chinese. It is fun to negotiate big
deals like this and to watch where the discussions go.
Time will tell if there is anything comes from this.
Madam Fan Ya Lin came by the booth and gave me a big hug. She headed up a team of Geophysicists that spent 1 1/2 years working in Houston with Landmark. I wrote about taking her and her team to McDonalds once, and her comment in looking at Roice, Steven Jones, Clayton Law, and A.J. Swope (../0352.html): `Mr. Nelson, which one is your son? I'm sorry, but they all look the same to me.'
Friday afternoon at 3:00 Dave, Richard, and I were at the Continental Grand Hotel in the Rose Room to meet with the Yan's. The room was very fancy. They had brought a projector. Mr. Yan gave us a lecture, explaining an exploration opportunity he has identified. It is a combination of basin centered gas and lacustrine (lake) turbidite flows (sand flows washed from ancient lake beaches to the center of the giant ancient lakes like an avalanche down submarine canyons). I coached Dave on protocols for responding, and he did very good. The data Mr. Yan showed us, and the opportunities we discussed were extremely interesting from a geological and business perspective. There is definitely giant financial opportunities in China's near term oil exploration. When I asked Richard Verm what he thought about the meeting, he said, `I feel like I have been eye witness to the beginnings of a major revolution.'
On Friday night Mr. Yan Dunshi hosted Dave, Mike, Richard, and I for dinner at a Mongolian restaurant. It was really good. Beef and lamb dipped in personal bowls of boiling water, sort of like a fondue. He had his guitars, and I gave him my gift, which GDC let me put on my expense account, namely the Martin backpacking guitar. The first morning after we arrived in Beijing, I could not sleep, and I woke up early and wrote the following song, which I sang after our customary rendition of `Country Roads:'
Dave Johnson later pointed out how terrible our singing was.
I blamed it on Mr. Yan's guitar's always being out of tune.
Dave did point out his wife was a professional musician on
the organ and guitar and that she sings the praise songs
in churches all around. Oh well! Mr. Yan and I had a good
time, even if the singing and guitar tuning was terrible.
Saturday was pretty slow. Dave and Mike joined me for lunch with the Chinese at the convention lunch. It wasn't near as good as all of the banquets we had. At 3:00 some of the other booths started tearing down, and so we tore down our booth and were finished by 4:00 PM. I worked on An Open Mind for an hour or so, and then went over the the Crown Plaza to meet Peter. Kathy and his son Jeff were with him. They just returned from the Great Wall at 6:00, and so I went back over to the hotel and tried to find out where the church was. I had called the Shakespeares and had got the address, however the folks at the Hotel could not find the Golden Tower. Oh well! I went over to meet Peter and he was turning down a dinner with Wang Xiaomu, Chairman of the Board of BGP, and several others. They were not sure what to think about him going to dinner with me instead of them. Oh well! Peter and his family were excited.
It turned out to be for good reason. Mr. Yan, his three children and their wives, his grandson, his wife, and his wife's nephew (a PhD who is in charge of the monthly newsletter for CNPC) were waiting to receive us. They were going to have a picnic at the Summer Palace, but it was still a little cold, and so they hosted us at a Western China restaurant. They fly sheep in every day from Urumuchi and kill them just before the meals. They brought in a whole lamb that had been cooked on a spit. I have some nice photos, which will get put on the web someday, or you can look at them when you next visit us. It was almost an Arabian atmosphere. There were dancers with cups stacked on their heads, belly dancers, drummers using a boa constructor skin as a drum head, local musicians, etc. The three belly dancers came in and danced for and with us, bumping hips, and singing Arabic type music. I've never experienced anything quite like this. I did get some good movies of some of the singing and dancing. Matt really liked looking at them. He is definitely growing up. I think Peter was suitably impressed. He got commitments for a couple of articles in the monthly magazine. And he seemed very comfortable with the Yans. It will be interesting to watch how this all unfolds over the next few years. I was tired when we got back to the hotel.
Sunday morning I got up and called the Shakesperes to get better directions to church. They referred me to another family, who referred me to another family, who was willing to take the time to help me figure out where the church was. Even then the first cab driver took me to the wrong building, and I was about five minutes late getting to sacrament meeting. It starts at 9:30, and I arrived just as the Shakespeares arrived. They had me walk up front and sit on the front row with them.
What a change from the first time I went to church with the Beijing Twig about 20 years ago. There were about 200 folks in attendance. The church owns the forth floor of this building. There is a regular chapel and class rooms. It is still a branch, and I doubt it will be a branch for too much longer, what with regular stakes and wards and a temple in Hong Kong. It was April Conference, and the time change meant they had their regular Fast and Testimony Meeting. What a wonderful spirit was there. Maybe it is because I missed the week before, but it was so nice to be with the saints and to hear them bear such stong testimonies of the Savior and the restoration of the gospel and to sing the songs of Zion. Brother Shakespeare introduced me at the beginning of Sunday School. After Sunday School two sisters came up and introduced themselves. Sister Western was in Nottingham Country Ward when Andrea and I just got married. Sister Stoker was in the ward when I was in the Bishopric and she taught Roice in Sunday School. The Sunday School Class President is Todd Staheli's uncle. I found out because he mentioned that there was a confession by the gardener to being the murderer of his nephew and his wife. He said the gardener then recanted the confession, and it is all really hard on the family. I had just written and sent cards to the Staheli kids a couple of days earlier. When I got back to Houston, the following article was in the Houston Chronicle:
I had to leave Priesthood meeting to meet Dave and
Mike and to be picked up by Mr. Yan for a trip to
Zhuozhou. So after the introductions and opening
exercises I introduced myself to Todd's uncle, told
him Todd was one of my best friends, that I got The
Stonehenge tie I was wearing when we stayed with
Todd and Michelle in London last summer. He told me
about the news reports and about the recantation,
which was not in the newspaper report in Houston. I
told him that it appeared to me to be a Ukraine Mafia
hit, tied to the big pipeline deal Todd negotiated
away from Nafta Gas. The whole thing is really sad,
and there is nothing we can do about what unfolds.
It took a while to get back to the Continental Grand Hotel, and I was in still in plenty of time to meet everyone. Dave sat next to Mr. Yan, I sat in the front, Mike rode with Jialin, and Mrs. Yan, and Dr. Ru Shen Wu rode alone in a third car. The freeway makes the trip to Zhuozhou much quicker than when I was going there all of the time. It took us about 2 1/2 hours dodging donkey carts, big speeding trucks, tractors, and bicycles. I saw a couple of people killed along that rode, when I was traveling it fairly often for Landmark. At least they covered the bodies up with bamboo, instead of leaving them out in the sun like they did when I was in India.
We had a very interesting conversation going down to Zhuozhou, and Mr. Yan and Dave seemed to get along very well. It turns out the evening was kind of a welcome home and thank you evening for `all that Mr. Nelson did to help the Chinese oil industry.' It was quite embarrassing the number of times they referred to how famous I am in China and how much I helped the Chinese oil industry. And only I seem to know that my interest in going to China originally, and my ongoing support was largely driven by President Kimball's talk, as reported in the Ensign, to the Regional Representatives in the 1970's about taking the gospel to all of the world. Sometime in relation to reading that talk, and Aunt Marie's comments at the St. George Temple in September of 1973, the spirit bore witness to me that I had a work to do in China, and that is probably why I expected to be going back there quite regularly a couple of years ago.
We were taken right to the BGP Guest House, which I watched them build, and which I have stayed in many times. There was a conference room with name tags, nuts, fruits, and drinks. We were welcomed, and had several people talk to us about all of the things that have happened since I worked with them. Then they put us in a bus and took us to GRI, The Geophysical Research Institute. Dave Johnson was the most vocal about being shocked by the things they showed us. They had our names on a big board and they spelled David as Bavib. There was a very professional presentation in English describing all of the things GRI is involved in. Then they gave us a tour of the facilities. They have over 5,000 Linux cluster PC's for seismic processing, and expect to add about 1,000 nodes per year. They have one room with 30 rows of about 20 computers for software developers. They have a large theater with a Magic Earth 3-D visualization system in it. They gave a very nice demonstration of Magic Earth capabilities. As we walked back to the conference room, Dave said this is the best geophysical processing facility in the world, better than we had at Shell.
After the meeting and the tour we were taken back to the BGP Guest House where they hosted a banquet for us. There were a lot of toasts, specifying how much the Chinese appreciated the oil exploration results that resulted from my introduction of 3-D seismic technologies into China. Some of the Chinese were really funny, because they would toast each other one on one with the Mauti (white kerosene), since I did not drink alcohol. It reminded me of the big banquet at The Great Hall of the People many years ago where there were 1,000 people at a banquet and I was at one of the head tables. Mr. Meng Ersheng (../0205.html, ../0220.html, and ../0225.html) offered a toast and said everyone needed to toast `with the white one.' I held up my orange drink to toast him. He proceeded to walk down from the podium to me and say, `Everyone needs to toast with the white one!' I laughed and said, `Mr. Meng, you know I do not drink alcohol!' And I toasted him again with my orange drink. So during all of the toasting, I went around the table to Mr. Meng's seat and said, `I want to toast our friendship with the orange drink.' He proceeded to toast me with Mauti.
I was wearing the bead bead tie Mr. Meng gave me years ago (../0138.html). I mentioned this to Dave Johnson, who was sitting next to Mr. Meng. Mr. Meng kind of winced, and said, `This tie is very cheap.' I said, `No one knows that but you and me. And in my mind it is very expensive because we are good friends.' When Mr. Meng visited our booth at the CPS/SEG convention, he ended up talking to Sheng Li of Geotech about the Cultural Revolution, and said `Bad Mao! Very bad Mao!' I pulled up the sleeves on his coat, because I know he was chained to a wall for some time and has scars on his wrists from the experience. At the dinner he also made some comments about the pain of those days, and how much better things are now. When someone toasted him as the greatest geophysicist in China, he said, `No, I'm just the last of the first geophysicists. When modern China first started, there were only eight geophysicists, and I am the only one still alive. The others were the great geophysicists.' After the dinner they gave us a very nice gift. It was a BGP wallet, BGP keycase, BGP Monte Blanche pen, and a BGP belt in a very nice case with a brass cover. Inside the case it says `Faithful Partner Exploratory Pioneer' in English and in Chinese. This was the gift Matt chose to keep when I got home.
I do not really have words to capture the feelings of the evening. I guess the nicest part of the evening was the fact there were a couple of westerners with me this time, and they could see the genuine bonds of friendship I have developed in over 20 years of traveling to China. They put Dave, Mike, and me in the same car to drive back to Beijing. Dave made a comment about how good it was to have me on the trip and that it would probably have taken five trips to China to make the level of contacts I was providing. I smiled, and told him it would probably take a lot more than five trips, pointing out that this was my 27th trip to China. The car was possibly bugged, and Dave used the rice back to talk about all of the business opportunities that could come from the meetings we had. He later acknowledged the car could have been bugged, and I assured Dave there was nothing said that undid any of the potential opportunities.
I'm going to spill this week's thoughtlet over into Monday and Tuesday, because we left China on Tuesday afternoon to return to Houston. Although at several times in the week before we left, there were discussions about me just staying in China to follow-up on some of the opportunities that were coming up. In fact, it wasn't until after the dinner on Monday night that it was decided I would return as scheduled.
Monday morning at 7:00 Mr. Yan, Jialin, and two drivers were at the Continental Grand Hotel to pick us up. We drove through Beijing before traffic got bad, and headed for a 2 hour drive to the Northeast of Beijing to visit the Jadong Oilfield. We rode on very modern freeways, with very few cars on them. Every so often we would pass a group of Chinese who were sweeping the freeway with hand brooms. We were traveling at 120 to 140 kilometers per hour (80 to 90 miles per hour) in Audi's with leather seats. There were a lot of greenhouses, and Mr. Yan told us about his greenhouses to the south of Beijing. It was interesting to me to see the rows and rows of crops, with plastic `greenhouses' a few inches tall to protect the young plants from the cold. When I get out in the country like this, I miss the farm and farm work.
We arrived at about 10:00 and were taken to the Oil Field Headquarters, where we were met by the Vice-President of Exploration. He had a team assembled for us, and they gave us an excellent presentation about their Oilfield. It was originally part of the Hua Bei Oilfield, and was spun off because of the need for local taxes from oil. An Oilfield in China is like an Oil Company in the West. The difference is it is geographically limited. This small Oilfield produces as much hydrocarbons as a large Independent in the West. They have done some very good technical work. They were very impressed with the GDC presentation. There are good opportunities to help them with AVO (Amplitude vs Offset), the GDCMOD rock property database, and prestack depth migration and illumination. They are going to provide a data set and GDC will do a test. I am to go back and evaluate how hard it will be to get their well logs into the GDCMOD rock properties database on my next trip to China.
After the presentations they took us to their guest hotel and provided us with another feast. They are next to the coast, and we had steamed crab, lobster tails, and all kinds of good stuff. I ate so much on the trip to China I was sure I was going to come back having gained 10 pounds. However, I came back weighing the same as when I left. The Asian diet is certainly better for us than what we eat in the west. And based on my swallows counts the biggest difference is sugars, breads, and starches. I'm sure a big part of that is I passed on most of the rice dishes they put in front of us on this trip.
Before we left we were taken to see a monument to a giant earthquake that happened in the 1970's. There were tens of thousands killed and hundreds of thousands left homeless. As I read the English description of what happened, I could not help but think of the flash flood that wiped out Rexburg, Idaho. They talked about the thousands of medical and engineering people that came from all over the country to help. They described how they completely rebuilt the city in less than two years. And they ended up with a statement about how this response to this natural disaster provide the superiority of the communist system. There were tears in my eyes and in my heart as I thought of all of the suffering from that earthquake. I remembered meeting Weng Webo, one of the most famous of Chinese Geophysicists, and his description of how he had used data about changes in the activities of farm animals as well as geophysical data in his very famous prediction of a major earthquake. I think this was the earthquake he had predicted and had been credited with saving the the lives of hundreds of thousands of people. I was pretty somber and lost in my thoughts on the 2 hour drive back to Beijing.
We got back to the Continental Grand Hotel at about 5:30. We were picked up at 6:30 by drivers from CNPC (China National Petroleum Corporation) for dinner with Zhou Jiping, Xu Wenrong, Xu Da Kun, and Wang Tiejun. These four guys seem to run the Chinese oil industry. They are obviously very close friends. The meal was good, and quite moderate compared to lunch and many of the other banquets we had during our two week trip. It started with Shark Fin soup, and ended with a fruit plate.
What was interesting was what happened during the course of the meal. The discussion was very open. Of course, the meal started with my turning down tea and alcohol. Xu Da Kun explained to everyone in Chinese that I do not drink alcohol, coffee, or tea because I am Mormon. David Johnson also doesn't drink. When they went to pour wine for him he said, `No thanks, I'm like him.' Xu Da Kun said to him, `Are you Mormon?' Dave responded, `No.' Then Xu Da Kun said, `Then why do you say you are like him?' There was a bit of an awkward silence before the conversation started up again.
There was discussion about CNPC purchasing oil fields in the United States as a way to train CNPC personnel in Western ways of multidisciplinary teamwork. When I asked how much money CNPC was willing to spend for a field, Zhou Jiping looked at me and said, `Budget is not an issue. What is important is that it is a good financial and technology transfer opportunity.' Xu Da Kun explained that he no longer works in geophysics, although he was President of BGP at one point in the past. He is now responsible for 150 international drilling rigs, as well as the engineering and facilities work required to support oil fields internationally. Mr. Xu Da Kun asked if there are drilling rigs available for purchase in the United States. Dave pointed out that two of the Geokinetics Board Members are in the drilling business, and started Falcon Drilling, which is the largest drilling company in the west. After comments about the opportunity to buy seismic crews in the United States, Mr. Zhou Jiping turned to me and said, `Would you sell an interest in your seismic crews.' I looked at him and said, `We would rather work with you now that fight with you later.'
There were several times during the dinner when there was a lot of conversation in Chinese. As the dinner broke up, the four of them said to each other in English that there were very good opportunities for cooperation that had been discussed, and that they would be following up with me. They gave us each a beautiful 3-D relief picture of the Great Wall. We gave each of them a copy of Fred Hilterman's book on Seismic AVO, and a couple of Mirages with the `holographic' pig in them. Then we took photos of us as a group. The evening was a first class conclusion to a wonderful two week trip.
As we walked out of the room, and out to the car, Dave Johnson turned to me and said with real sincerity:
It doesn't make up for being gone too much when you kids
were growing up. And it felt really good, because it
sounded very sincere. They left the four of us in the
car alone for a few minutes. Mike made a comment about
how neat the two weeks had been and how proud I must
feel about how famous I am in China. I replied that my
efforts were never for the purpose of becoming famous and
that I have simply attempted to be a good representative
of someone else. Mike said, `Who?' Dave Johnson caught
my eye and it was plain to see he understood I have always
striven to represent my savior. I simply replied,
`Not me!'
We got back to the Continental Grand Hotel about 10:00. Jialin came by about 10:30 and talked with me for a while. I told him again I was working for GDC and that we would have to rework the Geo-China agreement. He was quite offended by this. And two weeks later we have not worked all of this out.
Tuesday morning I woke up early and watched the opening session of General Conference on the Internet in Beijing. The concept kind of blew me away. I went down and ate breakfast with the guys, and then came back to my room and watched the closing session of Conference. On Sunday night when we got back from Zhuozhou I called the Shakespeares to see if they wanted to come over to watch conference. However, they had to teach early each morning, and I was gone during the days and evenings. But the fact I was able to watch 4 hours of conference in my hotel room in Beijing was a strong confirmation of the book Ben and Sarah and Ethan gave me for Christmas, which I had started reading my second week in China: Bold New Worlds. It is really true that there is no longer distance and time boundaries. The world is very small. I could quote from the notes I took, but this Thoughtlet is already way too long. So I will save those thoughts for another time.
As we went through customs at the Beijing airport, there was a brief moment when there was one of those haunting images that stays with you for years. I was in a line to go through a medical control line. (I should point out that we saw numerous electronic checks for those who have temperatures, and there were professionals there to pull anyone they had any suspicion of having SARS aside for tests.) There was a Chinese family with a little girl about six in front of me. The lady that was checking forms could not take her eyes off of the little girl. She was a typical Beijing Chinese lady about 35 years old. And the sadness in her face as she looked at that little girl was what was haunting. I'm sure there are numerous scenarios that could have been playing out. However, the one that spoke to me was that she had had an abortion, and her baby would have been about the age of this little girl. Her pain was real and was very apparent. I wanted to take her in my arms and comfort her. I didn't. I just shed a tear and wished life and consequences of our choices did not have to be so hard.
Let me close by saying I hope each of you have someone in addition to me, and I do feel this way about each of you, who sincerely tells you, in a way that reaches to your very core: