Hi Dove,
I searched, found, printed and read your article: “Summarization of 2003”…It was written in such a candid fashion and was a collective reflection of all the endeavours of a super-achiever. Thanks for the chance to get to know you a little better. I always have high respect for people with legal background. Law has always appeared to be a rather intricate and sometimes obscure field for me, and even more so when it comes to dealing with the English legal language. This could be due to the fact that there has never been any lawyer in my family. Of the seven boys (my two younger brothers and four younger cousins and I) who came to Canada in the 70’s, we all became professional accountant, chartered financial analyst, architectural technologist, geophysicist, electrical engineer, computer software engineer and computer hardware engineer, but none of us have gone into the legal or medical field. I’ve always had difficulties dealing with the English legal language, especially when trying to decipher the ambiguous meaning of those wording in the Canadian income tax act.
Since I know so much about you, it’s only fair that I do a little self-revelation here. I graduated from college as an Accounting major some yearsago, then after stumbling through the work force for a few years with little career advancement, I went back to college for two years and received a designation in Petroleum production accounting. I then immediately enrolledin an accounting professional study program and after another three longyears, I received my Certified General Accountant designation, and gained legal rights to run my own accounting firm in public practice in my province. Although for the time being I’m not in public practice at all. I’m not in the petroleum sector either. My employment is with a large non-profit organization. I am the head of the accounting department. A few years back my professional association established subsidiaries in Hong Kong, Macao and China. From what I understand, business degree graduates from Qinghua university, Beijing university in Beijing and Jiaotong universityin Shanghai can all apply to enroll in the Canadian CGA professional study program and upon completing all required exams can be conferred the Canadian CGA designation, and practice Accounting and Taxation in China.
Everyday after work I made a point to browse the Hongen website and am very grateful to be able to read many posts with beautiful writing. Mary, Mia, Joan.blue and yourself all have very smooth writing style and I am very envious of all your superb language skills. Since I don’t have Internet access at home, I can only visit Hongen website after work, andI usually only have approximately thirty minutes everyday to read and type up a reply. Under such tight time constraint, I always have to think fast and type even faster. As a result, I rely totally on the spell checker in my Microsoft Word 2000 to correct all my typos and spelling mistakes. That’s why you may see my typos such as: ROLL instead of ROLE, CRUDE instead of CRUEL etc. Although I’ve been trained to be meticulous and precise when working with numbers, as a typical guy, I am sometimes pretty sloppy with my writing. Worse yet, I usually don’t have enough time to edit and proof read my own articles, as I have to rush home squeezing through some nasty traffic jams downtown to get home to baby-sit my kids. I know that a lot of people in China come to Hongen online to interact with foreigners (Am I a foreigner? Given that I have never set foot on Chinese soil in my life, I guess I’m, in a sense) and native English speakers (which I’m not) and learn to improve their English. I guess my concern is that due to my sloppiness and lack of time, all the flaws and mistakes in my writing may be replicated and rippled out far and wide, if people take my writing and word-usages as the gospel truth, that would be the dire consequences I don’t want to see. I suppose I can slow down and reread and rectify all my mistakes prior to posting them on the forum, but that would mean probably only posting one article per week, I love the interaction too much to do that. As a guy, I lack the psychological disposition and propensity to make everything perfect, not even my own writing. So what I’m saying is, friends, my writing is sometimes fraught with flaws, do your own triple checking, rely on the dictionary, be certain to discern the typos or misspellings in my article and take good care not to repeat my missteps in your own writing. I am here to admit I’m far from being perfect, and I am eager and keen in learning from language gurus such as Mary, Ben, Mia, David, Joan.blue, and many others.
China is a country with massive size of land (well, so is Canada), I envy your ability to freely travel to various gorgeous cities for sightseeing (i.e: going from Dalian to Hainan). In my not too distant yesteryears I used to be obsessed with the ancient Chinese history. Is your city, Dalian a large city in the north east of China somewhere? I guess the fun thing with visiting China is that everything you touch seems to have a long history and many stories behind it. Someday, I will be there to experience that fun feeling myself. For a family of four, just the airfare going from Canada to China is enough to rip my wallet apart. I’ve heard friends saying that their family trip to China costs an arm and a leg. Well, my dream may have to put onto the back burner for a few more years, until my financial situation vastly improved, I guess.
I ran out of time again. It’s been a pleasure chatting with you, Dove.
Regards,Neil
