Amiram Hayardeny's My China Experience

My First Entry

To be honest, I signed up for this blog months ago, but haven't made my first entry until today. Many excuses: I was busy, I was traveling, I was tired. But the real reason is much simpler. I was worried. Will I have interesting stuff to write? Will anyone read? And if they do, will I be able to sustain their interest? I decided to learn, and play it by ear. To learn as I go along. And since today is my birthday - 44, I thought that today will be a good day to start blogging.

I will make a short introduction. I am a Sun Microsystems employee, working in Beijing, China. I am director of Solaris X86 Engineering in Beijing. My team is responsible for the development of device drivers for Solaris, mainly in the storage, network (wired and wireless), and human interface support. My team is also responsible for HCTS, a certification program for Solaris on X86 platforms. I have been in Beijing for six months. I am slowly learning Chinese, and I can state that I can order a reasonable dinner already, and can get the average taxi driver to bring me home. Living in Beijing, you realize, this is quite an accomplishment.   My wife and kids are here as well. The kids are attending an international school. The name is BIBS - Beanstalk International Bilingual School of Beijing. I will talk about the experience (very positive) later.

I can see already that I have neglected to mention one very significant point: I came here from Israel. Indeed, I was born and raised in Tel Aviv, Israel. I spent almost 12 years in the US (mainly on the East Coast, but also one year in Arizona and a few months in California). I am Jewish. Married with four children. Three girls and one boy.

So this is my China experience. Let me start by saying that I feel privileged being here. It is a wonderful experience for me. But not only for me, for my family as well. Since we came here directly from Israel, my children did not know how to speak English and certainly not Chinese. The beginning was not very easy. Shiri, my 7 year old girl (Xi Xiang is her Chinese name, and she is very proud of it), was having a lot of difficulties. From being the class queen a year earlier, she became the "stranger", the one who can't speak. Shiri is extremely friendly, but because of communication problems, she had difficulties making friends. Thankfully, here teacher, Miss Ruth, helped a lot. Now, a few months later, Shiri is chatting freely in English, and she is already making her first steps in Chinese. Amazing.

As for Guy, my 3.5 year old boy. Let me state shortly, that he cried for about a month straight. His mother, Dorit, and I were worried sick about him. Every morning, he would get up, and start crying that he did not want to go to school. Truth is, I couldn't blame him. I can only imagine myself, in a new environment, surrounded by people who can speak almost any language except the one I understand... Thankfully, his teacher is a warm-hearted lady named Amanda. He is now happy to go to school in the morning, having fun at school, making a lot of new friends. The other day I came to pick him up and I witnessed something very funny. One of the teachers addressed him in Chinese, she said quite a few sentences. He nodded, said a few words, and went ahead to do what he was told. I was amazed.

As for the professional experience. After 9 years of experience at an IBM remote site (Haifa, Israel), six as manager, and another six month here - Sun Microsystems remote site, it occurs to me that it is the challenge that I like most. Managing people away from the main site of the company is particularly challenging - time difference, communication, culture. But that is precisely what makes it so rewarding. Sun employs here a great bunch of professional and dedicated engineers, whose contribution to Sun's flagship operating system Solaris is substantial and appreciated. I am not sure who is teaching whom more... OK, that's it for now. I hope that all my fears about writing a blog will dissipate, and that I will have what to write about. If you want to comment/criticize - feel free to do so.

Posted at 02:13PM Nov 03, 2006 by Amiram Hayardeny in Personal  |  Comments[2]