我2005到2018十三年住过，工作在中国，我住过在深圳，南山，蛇口。我那时在很多城市有客户。为了跟他们讨论，帮助他们明白我的技术，用我的产品，我（老卫）学习中文（汉语）。
Dr. Wessling lived and worked 13 years in China, from 2005 to early 2018 (after that, he came to China several times during 2019 / 2020). There, he worked to introduce his Organic Metal technology into the electronics market there and in the surrounding Asian countries, as a final surface finish for Printed Circuit Boards. Over the years, this product / process achieved a market leading position. This was possible not only because of the extremely good performance of this new process, but also because he enjoyed learning Chinese. This allowed him to talk to the Chinese customers in their mother language. Moreover, he could experience China in a completely different way than a usual tourist, but also other than the average foreigner working in China who would not learn Chinese. So he had the chance to find many Chinese friends and communicated with them in Chinese, learned a lot more about China and its people than if I would not have studied Chinese.
In 2015, I was again invited by one of my customers to join their Annual Dinner which was held shortly before Chinese New Year. This is a Chinese custom, almost every company will have such an event.
At this occasion, I usually gave some funny presentation in Chinese. In 2015, I showed a selection of my bird photos which I had taken during the years since 2005 in Shenzhen. Photos and text of my presentation can be found here.
In summer 2015, I visited a local soccer tournament in Shenzhen LongGang, invited by my old friend Fan ShiFu whose son played in a youngster team. The tournament games were between adult players, but the youngsters acted as a loud fan group. This motivated the local ShenZhen TV to approach these loud boys, and suddenly first Fan ShiFu, then myself got interviewed which was later broadcast by SZ TV.
The Chinese characters (traditional form) at the wall of my home office under the roof (designed for me by some calligraphy teacher in LongGang (ShenZhen) say the following (in modern simplified characters):
塞翁失马，焉知非福。
Sài wēng shī mǎ, yān zhī fēifú (PinYin transcription) translation:
An old man in Sai looses a horse, how can you know it is not a blessing?
The story behind is explained here. It is my favorite ChengYu because it characterizes my life as well.
