So I'm standing in the Maury River in Lexington, Virginia on Saturday, retrieving a C.P. Swing spinner cross-stream, and my cell phone rings. It's Hamei, calling from China. I only answered thinking I'd tell whoever it was that I'd have to call them back. But I was afraid I wouldn't be able to return Hamei's call so I let the spinner trail downstream, where it twisted thirty feet of my brand-new copolymer line into a pile of knots while I stood on slippery rocks with the current rushing past and talked for a half-hour while my legs turned blue.
Anyway, Hamei is doing fine, still training his gorgeous little "assistant" whom I met in NYC last year, and trying to get big gear shapers into the US for making windmill gears. He says the Chinese have quit belittling the US for running such an indulgent and sluggish economy once they realized that it means *their* factories are shutting down because they don't have a market. And he says the 6.7% official growth rate in China is a pile of crap, that the real number is more like 2%. Also, he's revised upwards his estimate of the number of Chinese workers it takes to do the work of one US worker. He used to say it takes 10. Now he says the number is more like 30.
He sounded great, his usual cynical self, but he doesn't sound like he's coming home soon. I think he's gone completely native. He says "hi" to the group and I expect to hear from him again.
-- Ed Huntress