Posted 5:35 PM by Blah blah

Parties. Mainland Chinese. Yoga.

Party party party! Tomorrow night I'm going to this big Asian American party in SF, sponsored by my college dormmate Huang and friends like this Taiwanese girl Annie. Over 150 people responded to this invitation right away! Annie planned a dinner at a sushi place beforehand for people to get acquainted, but that guest list filled up within hours! She had to set up another dinner at a Thai place. I'll be there. Just got invited to a couple more parties through my mainland Chinese friends---this Valentine's party by this group SyPA and a mid-February party, the Spring Festival gala set up by my friend June, one of the officers of the CNetwork. These are two groups to be in if you want to meet mainland Chinese around here. A bunch of people I met from yoga are CNetwork officers.

For single people, Valentine's Day is the ultimate way of rubbing it in. Ehem---I think I'll pass. Also, I went to that place one year ago with N, who's from Nanjing. Given my past tendency to date mainland Chinese girls, I really need a change.

June is a tiny dynamo. A product analyst for Oracle, she just got her MBA about a year ago and is very active in the executive committee of the CNetwork, one of the main people planning their annual China Tour. I know Christine will love this:

"Our aspiration of initiating CNetwork Annual China Tours is to promote communication, collaboration and entrepreneurship between Silicon Valley and China, and to enhance the impact of CNetwork both in the US and in China. CNetwork is dedicated to creating an exciting and effective conduit for overseas Chinese professionals to develop winning projects in China.

CNetwork China Tour 2000: a great success

The 2000 China Tour Team represented 12 high tech projects, attended the Second Annual China High Tech Fair in Shenzhen, visited Shanghai, and made substantial achievements in October 2000.

- $45 million letters of intent signed
- Met with high profile governmental officials and business decision makers
- At least three companies on the team obtained funding and opened offices in China as of Spring 2001"

I met June and Wei when we had this yoga fundraiser for Sept. 11th last year. June is always going to the Women in Business meetings. Wei, a chemist from New York, is also really active. She practices Chinese traditional dancing with this small group and also sings in a chorus. Last November Wei invited me to watch her and these other girls practice for the big party they ended up having. They invited me to practice with them, but I was like "no way am I gonna be the only guy here, looking like a clutz." I ended up playing peekaboo with the six-year-old daughter of one of the dancers.

One of my old classmates, Sally, from Wuhan, invited me to do yoga with her on Saturdays, so we checked out this place last weekend. After I had already tried Ashtanga Yoga last year, which is supposed to be the most physically demanding style, last weekend's version---Iyengar---was a piece of cake! At first I kinda looked down on yoga as wimpy, but the Ashtanga style would get very strenuous and tiring after the first fifteen minutes. We would flex and contract muscle groups we didn't know existed, and we'd end the class sweating and be sore the next day, but very relaxed and stress-free. Peggy wrote me how much she appreciates an exercise that you can do without a lot of jumping and competition, something I'll bet she relied on when she was pregnant. Anyhow, last Saturday's class turned out too easy for me, so I'll check out the intermediate class this weekend.

Yoga is kinda sexy, you know, and the teacher (an Asian lady) told us to do this unusual move that made my mind wander...heheh. We each got a chair and put our mat on its seat. Then we took a couple of small folded rugs and stacked them beneath the chair. We sat backwards in our chairs, legs facing the back, and dangled them over the backrest. Then we had to fully lean back so we were hanging upside down. Next we extended our arms beneath our chairs towards our legs. What's gonna happen next, I kept thinking?

Our teacher made us ease our shoulders down slowly until they rested on the rugs and our necks were bent flat on the floor in an "L." Then with our back and arms still braced against our chairs, we raised our legs vertically and held them. So she made us go through this whole ritual to have us do a shoulder stand. I could have just done it right away, and I don't need no chair to brace me either---just my elbows!

But it was sexy!...*wink* I also felt I had been plopped into the middle of Mel Gibson's movie What Women Want when the teacher would, before each move, keep saying: "If you are into your menstrual cycle, ladies, make sure you do this carefully. Tuck your butt in....blah blah blah."

Ah well, I had not wanted to tell my guy friends about this, but...but...YOU won't tell anybody, won't you?