2011 INVESTMENT BANKING ASSOCIATE BONUSES

Farmer, Luoping County, Yunnan Province.

With precious little soil, flat land and no running water, the hundreds of hollows that form the interior of Luoping's karst limestone mountain "forest" were settled relatively late by Chinese standards with Han Chinese overspill flowing in from the north during the Qing Dynasty. These villages are off the map, geographically and metaphorically. While the people who remain here may have satellite TV aerials and solar power panels, the nearest schools, food markets, mains water supply, health care, not to mention heavily censored internet access, are still a two hour motorbike ride away along bumpy dirt tracks.

Passing through a different unmarked village for every one of the seven hours it took me to hike between the two roadends that penetrate this apparently blank wilderness, I didn't meet a single person between the ages of ten and thirty. Though the elderly with memories of war and famine within their lifetime might have been smiling, the parents I spoke to were bleak about their children's prospects. The ethnic minority villages 15 km away on the other side of the mountains at least had the prospect of expanding tourism to sustain a local non-farming economy and thus attract the government investment necessary to sustain communities, but for these villages migration to the city is the only hope.

When reflected upon from the bustle, modernity and comfort of life on the eastern seaboard, it seems almost impossible that this could be the same country I currently inhabit. As an English teacher at a private training school in a wealthy coastal city, I prepare students for Ivy League education n the US, advise bosses on language unlikely to offend their foreign clients, and flatter rich housewives who wait for loved ones to return from new lives in new countries.

The Long Island Solar Farm, being constructed by BP Solar and the Long Island Power Authority on Brookhaven Lab's campus, will produce 32 megawatts of power when complete. More than 200 workers are on the solar farm construction site, adding thousands of panels each day and installing the power inverters and cabling that will carry electricity from the panels to the electric grid.