Reuben's China Blog

Vientiane, Laos-y

2011-09-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

Click HERE for photos.

Punning aside, I rather liked Laos and its capitol city. From what I’d read about the country, I’d expected that it would be more laid back and under-developed than Thailand. I caught glimpses of that mood, certainly, but my own travels were so condensed that my experience during ten days of traveling through both it and Thailand was speed—almost constant motion.

I rode in trains, buses, ferries, motor-boats, motor-bikes, scooters, motorized-rickshaws, truck-beds, and little carts. Countryside flashed by through windows or stretched away out the back of whatever truck-bed I was sitting in. And what a country it was: fields of rice, groves of durian, electric green hillsides, and little houses on stilts peppered along roadways.

The difference between Thailand and Laos, from my vantage, was stark. Thai towns were fairly industrialized: Multiple car and bike repair shops filled each town and the roads connecting these little hubs of activity were paved. Roads in Laos, by contrast, were dirt and, after even minor rainfall, mud. At one point on the way from Luang Prabang to Vientiane our bus found itself delayed four hours as a line of several dozen trucks and buses slowly threaded their way between several buses that, in attempting to navigate their way downhill had gone off the slippery road and into ditches on either side. At several points all of us traveling on board had to get off so that our bus could make it through a particularly sticky patch of mud. Most of this business happened well after midnight in pitch darkness.

The town I was coming from, Luang Prabang, had been the old colonial capitol. The scenic part of the city was contained on a small spit of land jutting out into the Mekong River. The buildings in this area were all done up in French colonial style –second-floor balconies, white paint. Barring the various places currently under construction or renovation, it all seemed to be decaying in a picturesque, tasteful manner. It was easy to imagine it playing muse to endless artful photos in upscale travel magazines. Add to that a large number of excellent cafes and bakeries and you had a place of overwhelming charm.

The entire spit was lined with outdoor restaurants where you could sit, drink fruit juice, and watch the river flow. Here and there were stairs leading down to the waterside. Men congregated around these points and touted boat tours to passersby. Early September was already the off-season, however, and they didn’t put much effort into their pitches. Mostly they just sat about or played football. (Even now the heat was fairly oppressive and I didn’t blame them for preferring to stay put.) With nightfall the air cooled and more well-to-do locals gathered at several restaurants to hold parties. These featured food and singing . . .Oh and the music! Especially in Laos, the music was an incredible mixture of warbling female vocals and groovy synth-beats--the sort of styles one hears in a Dengue Fever song.

Whether or not Vientiane had such little pleasures to reveal, I can’t say. I arrived in the morning and left in the evening. The ten hours I spent wandering around the town were not promising. Morning brought a monsoon rain, followed by (at least for a Seattleite) scorching heat. The city is located along the Mekong, but lacks the shady foliage-heavy vistas of Luang Prabang. Instead there is a long promenade with views of the muddy river. Turn around and you face a city “sky-line” of ugly buildings lacking in much charm. Were you actually living here, I honestly think it would be pleasant enough, but for a tourist like myself it offered little of interest.

The most striking thing about the city—or any comparable capitol city—was that this was the center of the national culture. TV, radio, printing, national theatre, movies, and so on all emanated from here. The pint-sized Bibliotheque Nacional would, doubtless, have been overseen by the “Laotian National Librarian.”

A nation this tiny gets tossed easily by the political tides—which goes towards accounting for the considerable Chinese presence. Used book stores had large Chinese sections. Several streets served Chinese food, and a far greater number of stores had bilingual signs. In some sense, Laos felt as “Chinese”-- and, perhaps, more so even--than some places within China’s own borders.

Preferring not to waste a night’s sleep and, consequently, a day’s time of conscious travel, I B-lined back to Bangkok and spent my final two days visiting different temples and eating various mystery-meats.

Generally, I hoped to snap an array of photos to show back home; one particular goal was to get some good shots of the red light district. After Chiang Mai, where I had (believe-it-or-not) accidentally stumbled onto the central brothel district within ten minutes of arrival and been shocked by its sheer, boisterous scale—bright lights, shouts, girls spilling of doorways—I expected Bangkok to be even more disarming.

My quest got largely sidetracked when I happened, equally accidentally, upon the Middle Eastern district of Bangkok; a series of interconnected side streets lined with kebab shops and nargile cafes. Wandering around here ate up all the time that I had to spare, and a ten-minute jaunt up and down Alley #3 (one of the famous red light streets, located across from a Starbucks) offered no opportunity for evocative photography.

Perhaps coming later might have presented something else, but the scene at dusk was rather bland. Girls sat about with bored looks on bar stools. Here and there groups of foreign men—mostly over fifty, with shaved bald heads—sat chatting with one another, largely ignoring the women next to them. Here and there foreigner couples sat together, their faces signaling the same apathy as the bar girls.

As I headed back to my place, it was getting dark and the neon lights were coming on. At night, Bangkok becomes its most beautiful. Lines of cars caught up in the traffic glint with reflected light, as do the murky canal waters that snake through the city.

Photos: Bangkok

2011-09-16T14:40:00.001-07:00

Click HERE for photos.

Photos: Bangkok Food

2011-09-16T14:37:00.000-07:00

Clicke HERE for photos.

Photos: Religious Buildings in SE Asia

2011-09-14T16:39:00.000-07:00

Click HERE for photos.

Photos: Thailand National Museum

2011-09-07T03:53:00.000-07:00

See photos HERE.

Bangkok, Dangerous?

2011-09-04T20:23:00.000-07:00

As we all know from having watched the opening several minutes of The Beach, Bangkok is the sort of place where you will be invited to a back room and offered a shot glass of snake blood within moments of arrival. As we learned from OngBak, its back alleys are a hot bed of street fighting. Also, for those of you who saw Bangkok Dangerous and Hangover II, Bangkok is a den of perpetually, percolating, polyamorous vice and depravity where anything goes and usually does.

I, however, went to the mall because Bangkok is also, after two months in China, the sort of place where you can buy a good book. Streets are colorful, food is light and healthy, and transportation is quick. Bus, train, and subway stations were clean and organized—the train station even employed a roving group of English speaking guides to give people advice and direct them to the proper ticket counters.

I emphasize all this because the very name “Bangkok” carries a sense of sleaze—or, to some, romance. I expected chaos and confusion, but was met with tranquility. I certainly saw hints of the less seemly side: shacks covered in tin-roofing lining the train tracks; canals radiating through the city, bearing viscous, black, foul-smelling water to the population. I have no doubt that far less savory sights can be found easily, and yet . . .

When I went to the Paragon Mall (site of the most well stocked English book store I have ever seen in Asia) there was a Japan-themed festival going on. A huge stage had been erected and all through the ground floor were (Japanese?) kids dressed in the most fantastical anime-inspired outfits. Crowds of Thais mobbed around these kids, snapping photos. All this was a far cry from China were the following question prompt, “If you had a million dollars what would you do?” had elicited the response from one eight year old, “I would go to Japan and kill many Japanese.” (He was particularly good grammatically.)

I spent most of my two days in the city wandering around to various spots with a friend who teaches ESL there. She’s a fan of architecture and the like, but I prefer just wandering streets and eating various foods—and Bangkok’s layout allows for both. However, compared to Xi’an, Bangkok was not particularly packed with excitement or with people. Whereas a typical Xianese street would be overrun with children and overseen by groups of old people, Bangkok could be relatively desolate outside the center.

There were other, more mundane surprises as well. Thai food in Thailand was the same as in Seattle—with the exception that Thai’s do not use chopsticks. Thai toilets were often of the squat variety, but raised in a manner that required you climb up on to them and perch. Cars in Thailand drive on the left side of the road—I suppose on account of British or Japanese influence—and, most shockingly, drivers observe traffic rules. Motorcyclists wore helmets! The legendary tuk tuks I’d heard of with their opposite-direction driving were prettier and no more aggressive than the Chinese sort. All in all, Thailand seemed pretty tame.

****

From Bangkok, I headed south to Ko Pha Ngan, an island off the eastern coast. To get there I took a train to the city of Surrothani. Arriving, I braced myself for an onslaught of touts and assorted shysters. There were none and, as per Lonely Planet’s advice, I took a city bus to what I understood would be the port. From the bus’ final stop I wandered around asking where Ko Pha Ngan was and getting all variety of conflicting directional gestures. An hour’s walking around in various directions led me to realize that I was still 60 km inland from the port located at Donsak. Right beside the final bus stop was a travel agent and clusters of backpackers whom I asked for directions:

“Are you going to the ferry?” I asked.

“No,” they all told me. Each group seemed to have other plans, many involving a place called Krabi that none of them knew much about. When I tried to learn what was in Krabi, I received shrugs. (NB. Krabi is the location used to film Kashyyk, so perhaps these tourists are simply all Star Wars devotees.)

The travel agent offered buses to the port and ferry tickets for 350 baht (about $15), but I figured I could do better. First I found a covered truck-cum-taxi that gave me (and a revolving assortment of locals) a ride to Donsak amid a rain storm. 50 baht. Donsak’s station was not, however, at the port either and from here I got a ride on the back of a scooter for another 7km to the ferry. Quoted price 70 baht, demanded price 100 baht. The ferry ticket was 220 baht bringing my cost to 370. Had I bothered to negotiate, I could have realistically saved at most 50 baht ($2).

Waiting at the Donsak ferry terminal, whatever part of me had set itself to be wise to all scams and wary on all fronts while in Thailand died and I resolved to stick to the cost-effective, hassle-free tourist trail for the duration.

The ferry terminal and the ride out to the islands were almost identical to the commute I’ve made hundreds of times in my life from San Juan to the mainland and back. Contemplating the small, greenery covered islands passing by from my seat on the green and white painted deck of the ferry, I wondered if I should really be spending time on a small island when I’d already spent over eighteen years doing the same, in albeit colder climates.

****

Ko Pha Ngan is known for its Full Moon Parties where huge numbers of tourists converge on the beached to get shit-faced and do like rabbits. Over the years business-savvy locals have added Half Moon Parties. I arrived in the lull between either of these. The same resourceful locals, however, were now advertising something called a “Black Moon Party” that evening. I wasn’t in the mood and set out along the road to Hat Rin at the south end of the island where there were numerous cheap accommodations. Between the ferry landing and the town lay a 10km road. I didn’t plan on trekking the whole thing, but imagined that, once outside the landing’s concentration of stores, I would find a nice little seaside walk ahead of me.

Not so. The whole way was lined with stores and shacks. Squalid little hotels and dilapidated bars. As renting a scooter was so simple, tourists went roaring up and down the road, stopping at these various spots to refresh. Tiring of this endless range of run down little places I was passing, I decided to get in a taxi I saw idling up ahead. The driver had gotten out and crossed to a small bar across the road, and, as I hopped in the back, she returned, followed by a group of four tall, handsome white guys who were, in turn, followed by a group of girls calling after them and blowing them kisses. Upon loading in, the driver explained that they still owed money to the girls. I waited while they bickered with her about prices. When, finally, we headed off, there was some awkwardness in chit chat. Two asked me where I was from and how long I was traveling. The other (who had popped some pill back at the bar) was holding his head. The forth worried aloud that he had just caught the clap and asked my advice on clinics.

This seemed more like the Thailand I had imagined.

Hello Dali! (And Lijiang)

2011-08-18T22:29:00.000-07:00

“Backpackers go where people aren’t.” This was said to me by a rather desiccated-looking Irishman as we sat in the courtyard of Dali’s Emerald Duck Hostel. A day earlier, tromping around the town of Lijiang in a pair of new shoes, I had managed to bruise my foot and was now holed up at this hostel, doing nothing more strenuous than drinking tea and playing pool. The Irishman’s koan of a response had come when I, making a stab at conversation, observed that, despite Dali’s reputation as a backpacker haven, I’d seen precious few.

I’d heard about Dali and the nearby city of Lijiang for several years now. They were reputed to be laid back little towns where travelers who liked getting “off the beaten path” congregated, toked up, and chilled out. I wasn’t sure what such places would look like, but I assumed they’d be rather small affairs. Moreover, I assumed they’d be full of “world traveler”-type westerners.

Such assumptions were woefully off base: Lijiang was the closest thing I’d ever encountered to a Chinese Cancun. The first indication came when I disgorged from the train alongside nearly a thousand Chinese. What followed was an hour-long wait in the station parking lot as the arrival of each new bus caused a scrum—crowds of Chinese chased the bus around the parking lot until it finally came to a halt and opened its doors, lone family members would dash onboard to secure seats and then pull in baggage through windows.

Finding my hostel was also difficult. I had reserved the most highly rated place on HostelWorld.com, a site which usually features the most obvious of places. Imagining Lijiang to be a small affair, I assumed the hostel would be rather prominent. Instead it was located down a half-constructed alleyway, on the outer edge of the old town. Yet even this still-developing warren of streets wasn’t rundown in the manner of many an urban Chinese neighborhood. Everything suggested careful planning—nor did it hurt that the air was exceptionally clean, meaning there was no omnipresent layer of dust to make even new buildings look aged.

Lijiang was the first Chinese city I’d visited where one sensed conscious zoning might be taking place. All the streets were freshly swept and composed of identical grey stones. All the houses were designed in “traditional” style and fitted with wooden signs displaying the name in Chinese, English, and the pictographic writing style of the local Dai people. The English was often laughably wrong, but, as with the inane English phrases plastered on most clothing in China, it was meant to be decorative. It conveyed a message that Lijiang was an international destination, not merely one suited to Chinese vacationers. As so often in China, the English was not there for foreigners, so much as it existed to send a message to other Chinese.

The streets were packed with Chinese tourists. Hundreds. Thousands. All snapping photos and sporting cowboy hats with the same enthusiasm I’d seen Americans do in Hawaii and Mexico. Endless rows of stores hawked knit-knacks to these travelers. There were large stores selling “authentic” local art and fabric; narrow shops decked out with Bob Marley posters, blasting the same Chinese pop-song, selling drums; and an equally undifferentiated array of shops selling local yak-jerky. A canal ran through the heart of the town and was entirely lined with restaurants, cafes, and bars. At night, the crowds swelled in size and the bars filled to capacity. By midnight, the bustle subsided a bit and was replaced by still large numbers of merrily drunk Chinese twenty and thirty-somethings.

This entire area was the “Old Town”—in the sense that it looked like a traditional village. In terms of historic value, it seemed to have as much authenticity as a Disneyland park. Although it was easy enough to get lost in these winding streets, it only took a several minute walk to emerge from the Old Town and find yourself on streets that resembled a typical Chinese city full of honking cars, banks, clothing stores, and scruffy, low-priced restaurants.

And that’s precisely why Lijiang must have seemed “magical” to many Chinese. There were no cars, no honking motorcycles, and no dirt; just pleasant views and evocative architecture. The Old Town buildings weren’t old physically, but they felt as if they were, and walking around in the morning and afternoon I really did feel as if I had stepped back in time.

I had been naïve to assume myself venturing into the back of beyond. I’d envisioned Yunan province to be removed from the rest of China and places like Dali and Lijiang—as being, as it were, twice removed. I felt as you would have arriving in Las Vegas expecting to fine yourself in a pure desert wilderness.

Over the following weeks, reading articles about Lijiang revealed to me what a true latecomer I was to the city. Over two decades earlier, the town had been targeted by the government as a tourist-development site. The crowds had only grown since then. Much of the academic literature now focuses on issues of sustainability and how locals acclimate themselves to new environment.

The past twenty years of development has not been led by the local Dai minority, but rather by Chinese migrants who rent property from the locals. I was informed by the President of the Dai Student Association at Chendu’s Minority People’s University—which is to say an overly-friendly twenty year old who monopolized my time for five hours on the train—that his people are “lazy” and “bad at business.” Such castigations of one’s own people are par for the course in China—and practically pro-forma in Xi’an—but I imagine it’s hard to be “good at business” when it’s the new arrivals who have all the investment capital.

The writing about Lijiang was all very earnest, reading it was like eating vegetables. The academic writing on Dali was a bit more fun in so far as it all sounded a bit grumpier. Titles included "Dialectics of Authentication: Performing "Exotic Otherness,” and could often be summed as: Foreigners come to Dali to experience other cultures, but are really just experiencing an Otherness consciously produced by the locals for their consumption (and for the locals profit.)

If one really expected Dali to be “authentically” off the beaten path, then I suppose such critiques might be dispiriting. But I’d heard of it strickly as a backpacker hangout where foreigners went to chill out and enjoy easy access to the massive amounts of pot produced in the surrounding mountains. In this respect, Dali did a fine job of meeting my expectations. What this thumbnail sketch fails to mention, however, is that Dali itself is gorgeous, located between a range of mountains and a vast lake. There’s a reason all those folks choose to chill out here and not another location.

One arrives in the “real” Dali—a typical, albeit pleasingly small and clean, Chinese city—and must take an hour long city bus ride to “Dali.” Compared to Lijiang, this Dali is still undeveloped. What development is occurring is more slapdash. Most of the streets have the same, sun-baked, dusty feel I’d seen in Mexican cities. A couple central streets have been fixed up nicely and one main street, exploding with merchandise, attracts the highest concentration of Chinese tourists. A single block running perpendicular is the focus of the foreigner-friendly cafes and bars. About halfway through the day my foot started to seriously hurt, forcing me to sit down at one of these cafes. The whole street was fairly quiet, only a few tables occupied. Here and there local women sat idly, occasionally wandering over to offer me pot.

When I ultimately limped back to the hostel, I found the majority of guests hanging out in the courtyard. The owner was a rather silent Kiwi who Chinese wife managed the place and whose mother-in-law cared for their kid while he played pool. Throughout the day, a succession of locals popped in for a game—most seemed to have lived quite some time in China and had acquired that Graham Greene-quality of dissipation one learns to expects from ex-pats.

Among these was my Irishman who claimed Dali as his home-base, but was constantly on the move traveling to Turkey, Thailand, etc. in order purchase fabric for his t-shirt business—call me a cynic, but I suspected that his flights around the Golden Triangle and Europe’s main drug entrepôt might be more than circumstantial. As for his thoughts on the nature of backpacker-ness: Lijiang and Dali are good examples of how doomed such a life-style is. Obviously, the mythic backpackers of several decades past didn’t get away from “people,” they got away from their own people, and the notion that somehow the people they did encounter were not “people,” but rather something more natural, primal, uncorrupted, and, ultimately, decorative, is the dark-side of a backpacker culture that many (myself included) tend to romanticize.

At least in this sense, the disappearance of “off the beaten path” may be a good thing: You can’t travel to Lijiang and Dali and tell yourself that you’ve transcended tourism, nor can you be too certain that’s a bad thing.

Stuff By Other People:

Ateljevic, Irena, and Stephen Doorne. "Dialectics of Authentication: Performing "exotic Otherness" in a Backpacker Enclave of Dali, China." Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change. (2005).

Su, Xiaobo, and Peggy Teo. The Politics of Heritage Tourism in China: A View from Lijiang. London: Routledge, 2009.

Bingaman, Eveline. What Is Culture in Lijiang?: Discourses and Life in a Tourism Setting in Southeast China. , 2009.

Hall, Derek R. Tourism and Transition: Governance, Transformation, and Development. Wallingford, Oxfordshire, UK: CABI Pub, 2004. Internet resource.

Wang, Yu. Naxi and Ethnic Tourism: A Study of Homestay Tourism in Lijiang Old Town. , 2002.

White, Sydney D. "The Political Economy of Ethnicity in Yunnan's Lijiang Basin." Asia Pacific Journal of Anthropology. 11.2 (2010).

Yiyi Jiang (2009): Evaluating eco-sustainability and its spatial variability in tourism areas: a case study in Lijiang County, China, International Journal of Sustainable Development & World Ecology, 16:2, 117-126

Notar, Beth E. "Producing Cosmopolitanism at the Borderlands: Lonely Planeteers and "local" Cosmopolitans in Southwest China." Anthropological Quarterly. 81.3 (2008): 615-650.

Photos: Lijiang's Old Town

2011-08-18T22:26:00.000-07:00

Click HERE for photos.

Pictures: Beijing

2011-07-04T06:01:00.001-07:00

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At Play in Xi'an's Arcades

2010-08-26T21:58:00.000-07:00

[Photos all available HERE]

If not for Street Fighter II, it is highly unlikely that I would be in China today. This is no joke. Those of you who remember the game, will distinctly remember its immersive, character-specific backgrounds. Blanka, the electrical Brazilian beast, hailed from a stage that resembled the Swiss Family Robinson tree house. Dhalsim, the Indian holy man, fought in a temple. Guile’s, the American GI, was cheered on by other soldiers—one of whom made ambiguously obscene hand gestures. Then there was Chun-Li, the high kicking Chinese. Her stage was a vibrant Chinese street scene; chickens hung downwards from shop windows, men bicycled past, vendors squat in store fronts. Of all the stages, this was the one whose fantasy I most longed to experience. It was my first real impression of China. Fifteen years later, here I am.

Street Fighter II is still available and still played in Xi’an’s videogame arcades. During the past month, me and a few other (male) teachers at my school became obsessed with playing arcade games on our breaks from class. It was here we rediscovered the magic of our old favorites and the charms of many new ones.

Videogames are a sort of art. They may lack the emotional heft of an ambitious movie or book, but compared to Iron Man or the latest Clive Cussler novel, they hold up well. Consider one shooting game in particular wherein you and a partner play X-Files-style agents investigating a haunted museum: It starts simply enough with a few mummies popping up here and there, old Greek amphora flying toward you. Then the mummies increase, then you are surrounded, then totem poles begin lobbing pumpkin-things at you, then you are flying through a mining tunnel, then you are being swarmed by bees, then you are being chased by the Sphinx. . . .the entire game has the quality of a fever dream and it’s a thoroughly entertaining experience.

There are two major arcades along Luomashi—the pedestrian promenade near Walmart—and, if shooting mummies or pummeling a multinational cast of characters isn’t your thing, there are a multitude of other options. The major draws seem to be a game where four unallied players sit around a large table-cum-tv-screen and shoot at fish. There doesn’t seem to be much more to it than that and yet it draws crowds. In addition to the players—mostly men in their twenties and thirties—there are girl-friends and large numbers of unconnected spectators.

Of the two arcades, Tom’s World is the more varied and enjoyable. Its crowd is much younger: Parents with small children, groups of young kids, and teenagers on dates all mill about. In addition to the games mentioned, it has basketball tossing games, whack-a-mole games, drum sets, Dance-Dance Revolution, skee-ball, claw crane games, and many other fun-for-all-ages games. All games require tokens and cost about 1 yuan per game—a few more complicated games cost 1.5 yuan.

The other arcade Can Lan Yang Guang (whose mouthful of a name translates to something like Happy Sunshine Fun City) is less kid friendly. It’s darker and dingier with less variety of games. Whereas Tom’s World is all bright tones and high ceilings, this place resembles a series of underground tunnels. Colors are black and muted. People are packed together at close quarters. The crowd is older—no children on the day I visited. Instead it there is an abundance of older boys with sparse growths of mustache and girls caked in make up. I made my way through the place feeling as though I might stumble into a back room with a Russian roulette game in progress of be greeted by a tout offering to sell me drugs or endangered animals. Overall, a less wholesome feel.

Clearly, my sympathies lie with Tom’s World and, during the past week, a number of my work breaks have been filled with visits. Typically I settle in at the Street Fighter IV game only to be repeatedly out-matched by a series of small children who take turns at beating me, their laowei compatriot.

The only downside of these places are the slot machine style games whereat lonely, stone faced men and women plop in coin after coin. Just like pull tabs in a bar or the Las Vegas casinos, these games seem a bit dreary and dispiriting. Avoid them, however, seek out the bright colors of other games, and you will find yourself re- experiencing a little of the youthful pleasure such places once provided.

Tattoos in China

2010-08-23T06:42:00.000-07:00

On hot summer nights, you can look around and see oceans of flesh. Tables along the street are packed with shirtless men munching away amid a clutter of empty beer bottles. A decent amount of this flesh is covered in tattoos—it’s in summertime that you truly realize the popularity of body art in modern China.

An informal survey of men sitting out on a boiling Tuesday night, shows the diversity of motives for tattooing: One man explains that the fearsome design spreading across his shoulder is Tibetan imagery guarding against demons. Another man with a small hawk on his bicep tells how his girlfriend loves such birds. A third man shows off his back, covered with a large fish design and observes that (in Chinese) “fish” and “luck” are homonyms—the former brings the latter . . .

How we relate to our bodies and how we see our bodies as relating to the world around us varies considerably from society to society. In Jewish, Christian, and Moslem tradition, the body is something divinely-formed. To defile it in ways not demanded by God himself is wrong. When European sailors first encountered Pacific Islanders to whom marks on the body symbolize power and provide a talisman against the circling forces of evil, the contrast was stark. When those sailors began returning to their homelands covered in strange symbols they were signaling their separation and difference from the society they had left. They were forever marking themselves as something apart.

Among Han Chinese, a similar distaste for body art persists. Confucianism, fundamentally based on respect for parents and ancestors, holds that the body is a gift from one’s elders and altering it is disrespectful. Added to this is the tradition of tattooing criminals. Those convicted of serious offences were subjected to ci pei (“tattooing and exile”). Warlords often dragooned farmers in their private armies and tattooed them to insure they would not escape.

Tattoos’ place in Chinese society has, thus, long been as a symbol of shame. Even the most famous instance of tattooing in Chinese history—when Song Dynasty General Yue Fei’s mother forced him to have “Serve Country Loyally” etched on his back—was born of disgrace, a punishment for his decision to resign his commission and care for her rather than his emperor. Perceptions of tattoos softened a bit in works like Shuihuzhuan (Outlaws of the Marsh) in which several of the bandit characters sport full body tattoos—yet, romantic as the idea of being an outlaw may be across cultures, few actually make the leap.

Into the 20^th century, tattoos have remained largely the province of the Chinese underworld. A permanent tattoo symbolizes that one’s involvement in organized crime is a lifetime commitment. During the 1920s and 1930s Triads were particularly strong in China, but the Communist Party worked hard to weaken them after 1949. Implying that direct connections existed between tattoos and “roguery,” the government even banned tattoos during the 1960s.

Much of this history, however, does not reflect the experiences of Chinese minority peoples. As early as 200BC Yue fishermen were marking themselves to ensure protection from sea monsters. Among some minorities, the tradition is more recent--a method to differentiate themselves from hostile neighboring groups during periods of intense strife which marked the Ming dynasty. In modern times, the Zhuang, Dai, and Li people still practice ritual tattooing. Li women, for example, receive facial markings at the age of 11 or 12 and are seldom able to find a husband without such marks.

In the last decade tattoos have exploded in popularity world-wide—in America 1 in 7 people has one. As with any trend, the popularity has snowballed. Numerous NBA players are covered in tattoos—especially Chinese characters—and the sight of role models like these showing off their body art has done a great deal to broaden acceptance among young Chinese.

Ironically, since tattoos are still associated with low-life behavior, it is the Chinese middle-class that is fueling the boom. Tattoos are not particularly cheap and the majority of people now getting them are white-collar workers and their children. Taboos against tattoos persist, however, and employers tend to discriminate against applicants with visible tattoos; police and soldiers are forbidden from having any; and, during the Olympics, there was a formal policy in place barring the obviously-tattooed from working on welcoming committees. As a result of all this, tattoos are usually hidden away on the upper arms and torso.

In a country with so many people and so much pressure to conform, one’s body is among the few things one has a final say in—and altering it the simplest way to make oneself stand out. Just like orange hair, tattoos are a way to proclaim one’s individuality. It’s a fairly safe prediction that the popularity of body art in China has not yet peaked.

Kashgar

2010-08-16T05:40:00.000-07:00

“I hate the Han, I hate the way they treat the Uighurs. They’re colonizing them. I’m so glad that I’m living in Urumqi—not “Wulumuqi”—I have all Uighur students. They’re much kinder, much friendlier. Han are rude. They spit, they cheat you. They don’t care about culture.”

The German said all this to me as we waited for our noodles. He was—perhaps unsurprisingly—tall, blond, clean-cut, and impeccably well spoken in English. We’d met at the hostel and were going over the details of an impending trip to the mountains. He’d been living in China for ten months now (two in Urumqi) studying on a scholarship. He was fantastic in speaking Chinese and Uighur and was passionate about the latter. His jeremiads against the Han struck me as extreme; his ability to zealously commit made me feel old. I felt inklings, stirrings of what he was getting at, but nothing sparked such partisanship in me.

“Well,” I put in, “I have to agree about culture. I came to China to experience the culture. I didn’t expect things to be the same now as one hundred years ago, but I also didn’t expect to see . . .well, no culture. And, because they don’t seem to care for their own culture, they have very little respect for other’s cultures. My students know little and care little about minority peoples.”

“Yes! And here you see so much culture. You feel it. I always try to use uyghurce when I speak. It’s a sign of respect. But the Han—the fucking Han—they don’t even try to learn. They don’t mix . . .”

Imperialism With Chinese Characteristics

Every large country—and most small countries—have sizeable numbers of people who exist at a remove from the national culture. Northern Canada is an Inuit autonomous zone, swaths of Russia’s southern regions are divided among various minority peoples, Brazil’s Amazon region is awash with diverse tribal groups, and the US has hundreds of reservation lands governed by special laws; even somewhere like Mexico that lacks such special regions is full of minority peoples speaking their own languages and raising their children up in cultures distinctly separate from that seen on tv and in the halls of power. And most, if not all, of these groups suffer from abuse of their human rights.

My German’s views were nothing special. Every minority has its outside spokespeople—academics and activists—who champion the uniqueness of the culture and castigate the oppressive state that rules over it. When it comes to China, Tibet gets most of the attention. In the US, it’s fashionable to sport “Free Tibet” t-shirts and stickers, but the realities of the situation, both there in Xinjiang, seem muddier: Small, weak countries with no access the sea, small populations, limited water-supplies, and huge powerful neighbors are rarely fully independent. Were a place like Xinjiang free tomorrow, it would become just another zone where the US, Russia, China, and Pakistan compete for influence. One minority group would be pitted against another. Regions with the most resources would receive money and attention. Regions with nothing would be ignored.

What China provides is stability. It builds roads and electrical grids, it establishes bank branches and doles out credit to rural areas. East coast money flows in to fund massive mining and oil ventures that offer jobs where no jobs had been. By incorporating Xinjiang in a national market it creates more opportunities for local farmers to sell their produce. Through infrastructure and security, it encourages tourism.

That’s on the one hand. With Chinese money, however, flows Chinese people. Millions. Business in China is all about connections—friends getting jobs for friends, cousins looking out for cousins. (As the saying goes, when a man becomes emperor, even his pets become ministers.) This isn’t conducive to promoting minority involvement. Newly created jobs go to Chinese. Government policies to boost wages in the region encourage settlement by Han.

A thousand years ago, deserts meant something. The Silk Road was nothing but oasis towns and wilderness connecting the Chinese in the east to Central Asia in the west. Now half the population of Xinjiang is Han Chinese—mostly concentrated in the eastern half, centered on the capital of Urumqi. The traditional names of Silk Road towns—Kashgar, Yarkand, Hotan—are unknown to Chinese who have renamed them—Kashi, Sanche, and Heitan, respectively. Thousands of years of culture is disappearing.

I’ve met a good number of Chinese by now, mostly twenty-somethings, who were born and raised in Xinjiang. By and large they have no interaction with the Uighurs; they might know how to count numbers and say “Hi,” but little else. Many are unaware of the traditional names of cities they live in.

I spent most of my time in the Uighur part of Kashgar, but it was clear that the People’s Park represents the dividing line between populations. The park is full of old Chinese doing precisely the same activities you would see in Xi’an—singing, strumming instruments, playing cards, doing various exercises. Further south the businesses and restaurants become more recognizably Chinese. The architecture is newer and the buildings—shopping malls and banks—hint at East coast money and aesthetics. In the morning, you see restaurant staffs gathered together for their morning pep-talks. There is suddenly more public spitting and urination. At night there is line-dancing and basketball. All those involved are Han, any Uighurs visible stand off to the side and watch. Policemen and soldiers patrol. You are wholly back in China.

And the locals don’t like it. There have been sporadic uprisings over the years and last year, in 2009, the most major in a generation occurred. Large-scale rioting broke out in Urumqi with gangs of Uighurs spilling out from the city’s shanty-towns and attacking Chinese. In the following week a series of pokings and stabbings led to rumors of Uighurs roaming the city, injecting Han with AIDS-laced hypodermics. Han began organizing vigilante groups to mete out vengeance in the Uighur parts of the city. The army was sent in and the city put on curfew. Facebook—thought to be used in the organizing—was banned in China.

Powerful states like the US or China seek to impose order on their territories and (if possible) on the world. Many of the problems states face is that the world is not always as they would like and many peoples do not want their lives altered so that some outside culture can “make sense” of them. Xinjiang presents China with this problem.

A thousand years ago there were “Uighurs.” They were one of many different groups (and, really, their history can be traced back twice as far), but as to what being a “Uighur” truly means in modern China, the question is more vague. The range of faces and styles is vast, suggesting that the category is rather broad—the music, the food, and the dress are all a mix of different Central Asian traditions. The only true commonality is the language, and even this has regional variations—perhaps because many other minority groups in the region, like Tajiks, use the language as a lingua franca. But the Uighur spoken today is hardly the Uighur spoken in the 11^th century.

The quest for what is authentically “Uighur” is a mirage. China claims to have dominated the region for centuries, Uighurs can point back to an ancient kingdom of their own and various periods of fleeting independence in the last century, but it’s all posturing. The connection between past and present is mutable. Much of the world is an endlessly mixing hodgepodge of tribal groupings. One group intermingles with another and becomes something new. Time passes, but the location remains the same. In the end, there is but one irreducible fact as the Uighurs see it: They are from here, the Chinese are not.

Thus, for all these signs of having dug in, there is a sense among the Han of being deep in Indian Country, of holding down the fort, of pacifying the land. It’s very uncomfortable to watch one people slowly drown out another people, but it would be foolhardy to think the process unique or even particularly bad compared to how other empires have gone about it.

Uighur Culture

In the last year, the central government has poured large amounts of money into the region and talked up its attempts to improve the economy. I flew into the city on the one year anniversary of the riots and it is no coincidence that the day’s China Daily contained a front page article discussing efforts to make Kaghar into a special economic zone, complete with quotes from approving locals.

The most apparent manifestation of this largesse, however, is the nearly complete destruction of Kashgar’s old city. Old, Islamic style building have been torn down and are set to be replaced by new apartment blocks which the government promises to construct using traditional architectural motifs. In the meantime, though, there is nothing but dusty rubble and scattered ruins. The impression is creates is of Grozny more than the Silk Road.

Such destruction from on high has not sat well with locals and on Friday, watching the crowds—hundreds upon hundreds of utterly unChinese faces—flow into the Id Kah mosque for prayer, I was reminded of how much the government fears gatherings. For centuries, leaders throughout the Middle East and Central Asia have been wary of the mosque and the marketplace. Men come together as one to pray and trade; they complain, they talk, they surge. Revolutions start here. Yet such resistance will likely produce diminishing returns.

What then is this culture that is passing away, whittled down, marginalized into nothingness?

As I’d explained to the German, I’d come to see “culture,” so I wish I could give more details—more local flavor—but I was hardly here long enough. I didn’t go to weddings or parties or visit people’s houses. Mostly I did a lot of walking, looking, listening and tasting. Much of my time was spent at little street restaurants chatting pidgin with cooks, wandering along the street, or making my way through parks and markets.

Generally, I was reminded of Turkey—well, the poorer parts of Turkey. The rhythms of speech, many of the faces, and the gestures were largely similar. Even the advertising was similar: Towering over the central square was a billboard for Ulker, a major Turkish candy company. Stores selling suits had display images featuring cast members from Kurtlar Vadesi, the Turkish mafia soap opera.

Woman dressed in the more colorful versions of the moderate Muslim style (long dresses or coats and colorful headscarves), but some covered their faces with purple-mesh, or wore heavy, brown coverings over their entire bodies. The men typically wore slacks and white shirts; usually a little hat sat a top their heads. Overall, the street life had a far more masculine flavor than in China. Women were present, but men, large groups of them, gathered together in the squares, on the streets, looking down from second-floor café balconies, and in front of shops.

The people I saw also seemed older. There were far less twenty-somethings out and about. Whether this was because they were at work, in school, or had migrated to larger cities, I can’t say. At the city’s main bookstore, I struck up a conversation with one young Uigher. He had just finished university in Korla and was now preparing to take a civil service exam. Most of our conversations revolved around salaries, electronics, and the promise of life in America. The picture he painted of Kashgar was less than enthusiastic. Opportunities were lacking.

Such chats aside, my main focus tended to be the food—something whose experience language gaps cannot diminish. Uighur food could be fairly summed up as meat and bread. It wouldn’t be totally fair, but it would be largely true. Kebabs are the heart of the Uighur cuisine and Lord are they good! Fat chunks of meat soaked and coated in a spiced-egg marinade are wood-oven baked. The result is a smoky-flavored meat with a light, crispy crust. The meat itself is juicy and flavorful; always four pieces per skewer, a combination of fat, liver, and two standard cuts.

As for bread, Uighurs produce, large disks of bread with raised edges resembling empty pizza crusts. On the flat circle are stamped and intricate designs. Sprinkled over the bread for flavor are a variety of spices—the most prominent ones being sesame seeds and thyme. Every street seems to have at least one—if not multiple—vendors. Also offered are bagel-shaped (and bagel flavored) rounds of bread that, since vendors had no ready name, I will refer to as “bagels.”

Side by side with the bread vendors are fruit vendors. Everywhere you turn there are carts and stands overflowing with fruits. The region has some of the freshest, tastiest melons I have ever eaten. A few would be recognizable in any western supermarket, but the variety extends far wider to encompass all hues and textures. Small crowds gather around, waiting for their turn as vendors dexterously carve up and hand out slices.

Off the street entrees include noodle dishes. The most famous—the one I’d learned to say on day one of my Uighur language classes in university—was laghman. This is a combination of green peppers, mutton, tomato, and onions, poured over noodles. It’s simple and satisfying. More intimidating is dapanji, a dish of spicy chicken chunks and potatoes. Rather than rice, one mixes long, flat noodles into the dish. Small game hens are also very popular. Fish, though troublingly far from any major river and ocean, is also available in battered and fried (but not de-boned!) form.

Uighur food is a mélange of different, regional cuisines. On one street, I came across a vendor selling poruska, egg rolls covered in raw sugar and filled with fatty meat and onions. The combination—to my palate—worked as well as it sounds, but the obvious Russian influence intrigued me. (Sure enough Xinjiang has long been an area for Chinese-Russian competition and the areas around the Ili Valley have modest Russian populations.)

Other borrowings include samsas—bread filled with meats and other stuffings before being oven baked—and pollao, fried rice cooked with onions, carrots, and cumin.

For drinks, a version of tea, slightly stronger than Chinese varieties is the standard, but milk too is plentiful in Kashgar. Little stands sell it by the glass and, at night, ice-cream vendors set up here and there, portioning-out fresh-made cups. In the countryside the milk is fresh and un-pasteurized—outside the city, my tea was repeatedly softened with yak’s milk.

And, during my trip, I drank a lot of yak’s milk . . .

Outside the City

Living among Han Chinese, it’s easy to forget that the People’s Republic of China is a “multi-ethnic state” with more than fifty different minority peoples “fairly” represented. It’s necessary to visit the areas where these people live to be reminded. Tourist site after site contains informational plaques attesting to the multi-ethnic character of the state and recounting the conscientious steps the Party has taken to improve or promote buildings and sites of particular importance to minority groups. The feeling such a heavy-handed message produces, of course, is the opposite—constantly shouting how stable a society is tends to the best indication something is amiss.

Going outside Kashgar, along the Karakorum Highway towards the Pakistani border, gave a very good sense of how minority life is lived in China. The region is populated by Kirghiz and Tajiks. The former are more Asian-looking while the latter, as the pattern of their speech would suggest, as more Persian. Both peoples tend to live in yurts and both have faces reddened by high altitude wind and sun. Clothing-wise people—especially far away from population centers—wear combinations of the traditional and the modern. One man will be wearing a peaked, white Kirghiz hat while his friend’s head is shielded by a baseball cap marked with a Japanese-designer’s name.

Along the roads, Kirghiz wait for passing cars to stop whereupon groups of men and children swarm. Most commonly on offer are little, polished, translucent stones that glow orange and green when held to the light. None speak much Chinese or Uighur. Their world is concentrated around their mountain valleys. In a country where social mobility is largely a product of success on the national gaokao test (administered in Chinese) the chance of escaping one’s conditions is less than hopeful.

Tajiks seemed more urbanized in so far as they concentrated around the “city” of Tashkurgan. Here arid mountain landscapes give way to a verdant expanse of valley with the town in its center. The fields around it are dotted with yurts, lowing cows, and the smoke from small fires.

In the town we—the Uighur-phile German, a Frenchman, and myself—wandered around in search of diversion. There was little. The city center consisted of three or four streets lined with dusty stores offering clothes, snacks, or farming supplies. A couple of hotels, a bar, and a pair of restaurants—little else. The most imposing building in the town (aside from police and military installations) was the local cultural center and museum. We headed over to it and entered into a small lobby where two men were busily playing a game of ping-pong.

One of the men, Kaftan, could speak English. He had studied in Beijing and now worked as the local union representative for the city. There were, he explained, something like sixty different unions in this small town. By “unions” he meant something similar to “work units”—every worker in a particular job banded together for the purpose of government oversight. He was clearly bored with the opportunities his town had to afford and peppered us with questions about how he might start a tourism business.

By nightfall the street were empty—the only noise coming from a single bar and the occasional moo from the field.

We’d chosen to stay in the cheaper of two hotels near the entrance to town. Our hotel had a main building where tour groups stayed, its concierge desk manned by an attractive Han girl with whom me and the Frenchman flirted. Our room, however, was in a newly constructed, two-story plasterboard building adjacent. The whole place smelled like cigarettes and the desk was managed by a middle age Han man with a large mole on his cheek.

That night we lay around watching Germany lose in the World Cup. The following day we visited Karakol Lake. The three of us made it halfway up a little mountain before the German grew tired and decided to head back down. He’d been grousing all day about various unanticipated inconveniences the trip had thrown in our path and, needing a break from complaints, I opted to remain where I was. The Frenchman kept going all the way up, until he was nothing more than a dot on the peak of the mountain. The wind at this altitude hit into you like fists. I found a rock that blocked me from the worst of the buffeting and gazed up at the deep blue sky above. Even from my halfway vantage, I could see the entire valley and it’s surrounding mountains spread out around me.

Some travels give you the illusion that you are venturing into untouched lands where people have seldom been; traveling into the mountains of Asia, you go were people never seem to have left. The lake below was dotted by yurts and I was overcome with the knowledge that, a thousand years ago, there had been others standing in the same place.

Not that life is static: Electrical wires run along the roads bringing power to people ensconced deep in the mountains; cars, trucks, and motorcycles bring supplies rapidly. But even directly along the roads-sides, where access to commerce is easy, life remains harsh. People live scattered in small brick houses, sheltered from the harsh winds of the open plateau. The densely packed Chinese east seems like a dream.

(Photo essays available HERE)

Movie Review: Tangshan Earthquake: Aftershock

2010-07-28T10:24:00.000-07:00

Aftershock, released on July 22 in over 4,000 Chinese movie theatres has a lot of hopes riding on it: The film cost around 100 million yuan to produce, it’s helmed by Feng Xiaogang, the nation’s most commercially successful director, and it’s the first IMAX-quality film to be produced outside the United States. The film has been heavily marketed—posters are everywhere and word of mouth campaigns have sought to hype it as an irresistibly engaging tear-jerker. With your ticket, theatres hand out little tissue packets for the unavoidable tears. With so much public interest, the film can’t wholly fail, the question is, with so much to prove, can it succeed?

Posters imply it to be a disaster movie, but it's aiming at something far more subtle—and far more ambitious. The film is set in Tangshan, a city outside Beijing which in 1972 suffered the most deadly earthquake of the 20^th century. Within a matter of minutes, 250,000 people died. The film follows the lives of a single family of four, sundered by the earthquake which forces the mother (played by Xu Fan, the director’s wife) to choose which of her two children to save.

Within the first half-hour, the earthquake has occurred and lives have been scarred forever. What follows is an examination of how people deal with such a disaster and continue on with their lives. The movie reveals itself to be a family drama, far less concerned with collapsing buildings than the with people in them and much more invested in piecing things back together than blowing them up.

The twists and turns of characters lives plays out against the backdrop of a changing China. Every event and every item in the meticulously designed sets is weighted with symbolism: A pair of married PLA soldiers in the 70s decorate their child’s room with era-appropriate propaganda posters; a family argument, taking place during the 80s, occurs as the characters are moving a refrigerator—an item just coming into coming use at the time; by the ‘90s, one character is teaching English and another is driving a car.

Such ambitions have their drawbacks. All this effort to make everything represent something larger means that nothing feels true to itself. A character goes off to work as a migrant worker, ten years later he is successful and driving his own car. Another character gets pregnant and contemplates getting an abortion. Many such actions, events, and decisions seem to occur not from the natural development of the characters, but because they serve to evoke a particular issue in Chinese society.

Likewise, those detailed sets, packed with so much significance, are often too nice. The interiors of character’s houses seem as realistic as the apartments on an episode of Friends. And, for all the attention to detail, the inclusion of blatant product placements is incredibly distracting—the audience I was in laughed when the camera paused for an extended time on a baijiu label. (The crassness of the advertising might have been lessened had the baijiu company not run the clip during the pre-movie trailers.)

The issue of product placement speaks to the current state of cinema in China. The country is on track to produce nearly 500 films this year and box office sales are up around 80% over last year. The CEO of IMAX has tripled the pace of new theatre construction and efforts are under way to develop mobile theatres to serve third and forth tier cities—China has around thirty cities of 1 million people that lack “an established multiplex structure.” Yet, despite all this, movies are still running at a loss. Easy access to bootlegs is a big reason as it depresses box office revenue, legitimate DVD sales, and the price studios can demand of tv stations for broadcast rights. The baijiu placement, however, nearly covered the cost of the movie.

The decision to hire Feng as the director was also a function of commercial calculation. His recent movies—The Banquet, If You Are the One, and The Assembly—have all been very successful and he himself is know as “pretty good at marketing films.” There is certainly much to admire: Feng and his cinematographer, Lu Yue, have created some beautiful moments—a particularly striking image is that of Tangshan on a New Year’s night, lit by the lights of a thousand burning joss paper stacks.

More generally, all those involved in the production of the movie should be commended for grappling with such a serious event. Tangshan may be the most deadly earthquake, but the film is being viewed with the memory of Sichuan’s earthquake fresh in people’s minds. (For comparison, it’s important to remember that United 93 and World Trade Center came out five years after 9/11 and met with public apathy.)

The movie is being compared to Sophie’s Choice in which Meryl Streep plays a mother, a Polish Jew forced to decide in a split second which of her children will die, but there is an important difference: Whereas Sophie’s fateful choice remained shrouded in mystery and serves as the crux of that film, the mother’s choice in Aftershock comes early, before we have much chance to care about the characters. This is, ultimately, the movie’s great flaw. Events are often too shallow, characters tend toward the two-dimensional, and a great deal of the emotion it creates comes from reminding audiences of something they really did emotionally connect with. The film itself, while good in many ways, never quite earns its tears.

Ma Nuo-ism: The Controversy Surrounding China’s Most Popular TV Show

2010-07-25T18:31:00.000-07:00

[This will also appear in China Grooves magazine]

It may come as a surprise to many living in China, but, apparently, money and material possessions are of vital importance to young Chinese. More shocking: Such things are high among the criteria used to choose romantic partners!

If such details are unknown to you, then watching Fei Cheng Wu Rao (If You Are The One) will be quite a revelation. Produced by Jiangsu Satellite TV and airing on the weekend since January, the show is not unique, but merely the most popular among a slew of reality dating shows that have been hitting Chinese airwaves of late.

This particular show features a panel of twenty-four attractive, young Chinese women. Over the course of the program, they are introduced to a series of bachelors. At the outset, the man indicates to the host, Meng Fei, which girl he prefers—or, rather, in the show’s lingo, who “arouses his heart.” Over the course of three subsequent stages, the man tells a bit about himself via video clips of his home and work life and testimonials from colleagues. If the women find him unappealing in some respect, they can turn off the lights on their podiums. If, at the end of stage three, all the lights have been extinguished, the man is sent packing; if, however, lights remain, the tables reverse and it becomes the man’s turn to eliminate the remaining women.

As the show runs its course, candidates are asked to justify the reasons why they have eliminated one another. Westerners will be familiar with the self-promoting vanity and petty viciousness that reality show stars are capable of, but the bluntness of it has captured the attention of the Chinese and caused worry among officials.

During its first six months, Fei Cheng Wu Rao focused a great deal on money. As the men were introduced, little pop-ups on the screen would detail whether they owned a car or a house. Nor did the men play down such facts—one, Liu Yunchao, has been singled out for particular scorn for his extended bragging about his nearly million dollar bank account and multiple sports cars. While it’s worth noting that Liu was voted off the show an was actually an actor playing up the part, the underlying sense remains that morality and priorities he chose to display were in keeping with the show’s style.

Another controversial moment occurred when Zhu Zhenfang refused to shake hands with a male contestant, explaining: “Only my boyfriend gets to hold my hand. Everyone else, 200,000 renminbi per shake.”

The most famous contestant, however, is Ma Nuo. The young model from Beijing gained notoriety for her sharp rejection of a suitor. Asked if she would come for bike rides with him, she replied that a BMW would be far more “cool.” Her statement spread through the internet and metamorphosized into the more dramatic and memorable: “I’d rather cry in a BMW than laugh on a bike.” While the words are not hers, the statement sums up what many see to be the skewed values of modern Chinese matchmaking.

While such attitudes are par for the course on Western shows, in China it’s a revelation. The various contestants all reflect real dilemmas facing ordinary Chinese: Concerns over money and houses, over the involvement of parents, over a man’s ability to advance himself in the workplace. It’s easy to relate to many of the biographies and become emotionally caught up in whether or not a contestant finds a good match. Statistics show that many Chinese feel this way: Throughout May and June, the show was the number one program in China. Message boards flared up in discussions, stars became famous, rights were franchised off to different countries, and Jiangu Sattelite TV was able to charge astronomical advertising rates for it’s commercial slots.

This all changed at the beginning of June when the State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) issued a statement criticizing the character of such shows, describing them as “vulgar.” It was emphasized that shows were not to allow models, actors, and “second-generation rich” free-reign to wallow in their wealth, promote unethical views of marriage, and preach “mammonism” for the whole world to see.

Joking aside, the prevalence of the attitudes seen on Fei Cheng Wu Rao is no surprise to anyone living in China and that is precisely the reason the government has decided to step in. A show of this sort, expressing the views that it does, is an affront to Socialist values and allowing it to continue without comment would imply acceptance.

To escape the cancellation that had met competitors like Wei Ai Xiang Qian Chong (Run For Love) in the weeks following the SARFT’s statement, Fei Cheng Wu Rao re-jiggered its format. Gone were specific mentions of money—though whether or not someone owned items which cost a significant amount remained permissible for discussion. A middle-aged psychiatrist named Huang Han was added to the show to dispense professional opinions, but meshed awkwardly with the youthful cast and disappeared after a few weeks. Overall, contestants began to emphasize their commitment to family and community. Passions for volunteer work suddenly came into vogue. Without a steady stream of moral corrosion to catch the public’s attention, ratings dipped.

As time goes on, more and more rumor and controversy swirls around the show and its more infamous participants. Ma Nou has, allegedly, been banned from appearing on all reality programming in China. Suspicious viewers have conducted background checks revealing that multiple contestants hail from the same Beijing university and suggesting that getting on the program is a fix. And a competitor, Hunnan Sattelite Television, has claimed the show is ripping off their program Women Yue Hui Ba (Take Me Out)— whose franchise rights they bought from an English broadcaster.

In short, uneasy lies the head that wears the crown.

Watching a recent episode, the difficulties of producing such a show were all too apparent. When the forth bachelor of the evening, a mild, bespectacled man with a squeaky voice and shy demeanor emerged, the podium lights immediately cut out by half. Then came his videos; one clip of him in a cramped officer with several other IT technicians and another showing him preparing lunch and stuffing it into a Tupperware container. Both clips were utterly depressing in their ordinariness and in their sense of routine. The man was utterly average and now found himself at the mercy of a panel of women, themselves under enormous pressure to dispense withering, memorable critiques.

What could be worse than an utterly average person to be unceremoniously booted off the stage and denied his shot at happiness. If this guy couldn’t succeed, who in modern China could have hope . . .And yet he won out! He found his match—and not just any of the women, but the one who had “aroused his heart.” Where an American show would never have included such a guy in the first place, here he was, on tv, taking home the girl. The cynics can grumble that it all seems staged, but the optimists and romantics can take heart. The show succeeds in so far as it balances the defeats and hassles of daily life with the possibility for love wining out in the end.

Photos: Kashgar

2010-07-13T02:33:00.000-07:00

For photos of Kashgar City click HERE.

For photos of Kashgar Food and Products click HERE.

For photos of Kashgar People and Fashion click HERE.

For photos of Outside Kashgar City click HERE.

Photos: Dongxin Night Market

2010-06-21T22:41:00.000-07:00

Click HERE for photos.

New Articles

2010-06-17T23:42:00.000-07:00

What’s the Matter With Chinese Football?

Type in “China football why bad” on Google and a slew of answers quickly present themselves. Among the first hits are news articles detailing sex scandals, corruption prosecutions, and lopsided game losses. There aren’t a lot mentioning victories.

The question remains why?

Message boards are full of theories—mostly ignorant or racist—that don’t hold up on close examination: If Chinese people are too short, Pele and Maradonna have some explaining to do. If China’s developing country status is to blame, then Brazil and most African countries should be doomed to failure. If a certain national apathy toward the sport were the cause, the US shouldn’t be qualifying either.

Rather the problem seems largely to be the way sport is organized in the country. Sports where China does well—swimming, hurdling, and gymnastics for example—are heavily state-directed. Students are selected early and groomed for athletic success. Football is not among the sports that received a great deal of government largess.

In many countries there exist competitive and thriving professional football associations. These teams develop players over years. China’s Super League (CSL), however, is a shambles, currently under investigation for massive corruption. So far over twenty people—including many league executives—have been arrested for game-fixing and gambling. Apparently, entire teams were co-opted by criminal organizations and induced to take dives.

And, although it may be something of a chicken or the egg question, even if these institutions were running smoothly, the society at large is not focused on the sport (and sports in general) with the same enthusiasm as elsewhere. Football remains the most broadcast sport on CCTV5, but talk to Chinese children about which sports they enjoy and the answer will typically be ping pong and basketball. The former has long been popular and the latter has an internationally famous player to look to.

Nor are sports looked on as a legitimate career path to pursue. From a young age students are pressured to focus on their academics and prepare for the grueling and decisive test that awaits. Non-academic extra-curriculars are kept to a minimum in China. Inter-school athletics are negligible. School life does not revolve around athletics as it often does in the States. A kid with a passion for football just won’t find the same degree of family and community support as he would in Europe and elsewhere.

Finally, there is the simple fact that the Chinese team just isn’t that good. It’s in the same division as Japan, North Korea, and South Korea, all of which field competitive teams. China has won against major national teams in “friendlies”—it’s only the qualifying matches where success consistently alludes them. When they last made it to the World Cup in 2002, they failed to secure a single goal in three games.

In the following years the team has not faired much better. Besides losing when it counts, they have developed a bad reputation for thugishness—Tan Wangsong kicking a Belgian player square in the crotch during the Beijing games led a fan to quip that, although the team had failed to medal in football, they’d won “a medal in martial arts.” Similarly, the thirty-man melee between the Queen’s Park Rangers and China’s under-23 team in 2007 did nothing to soften the image.

All is not lost of course. Bad as they have since performed, the Chinese did make it into the World Cup only 8 years ago and the women’s team was in the 1999 finals. In sheer numbers, China commands the world’s largest football fan base. Perhaps a great Chinese player will emerge to inspire youths to play more and encourage parents to cheer them on. Or perhaps hosting the games will become the next big national ambition now that the Olympics are past and the Expo is nearing its close; such a moment on the international stage might spur the country to finally achieve.

In the meantime, however, China lags behind the competitors and pin-pointing the precise cause will doubtless remain a topic of barroom debate for years to come.

The Gaokao

Articles by western writers about the gaokao, China’s annual college entrance examination, always lead off with anecdotes; stories of parents crowding around schools in nervous vigil, of cities enforcing two-day long construction suspensions and noise-pollution bans, of tearful late arrivals begging on their knees to be let in, of taxi drivers given special right-of-way dispensations if carrying test-takers test-centers, of criminal rings busted for selling thousand dollar cheating apparatuses, of girls taking pills to insure their physical and academic schedules do not accidentally align, of students committing suicide in desperation. In short: Collective hysteria.

To westerners—certainly an American like myself—there is something mad about the test. Our own SATs are stressful, but they are not the be all and end all. A middling score combined with obvious talent—say sporting prowess or community involvement—can open as many or more doors than mere good grades.

Yet China is not like this. Whereas social life in American school revolves in large part around extra-curricular activities, for Chinese no such thing exists. School can last over ten hours a day, five days a week. Weekends are full of English classes, music lessons, and math preparation. Evenings consist of studying, watching tv, and temporarily escaping stress through online gaming and chat.

Years of school lead up to the gaoako and amid an array of statistics—9.5 million test takers, 6 million spots, a 68% acceptance rate for university—one stark number explains it all: 70,000 of this year’s college graduates are still unemployed. Over the past decade, in addition to the boom in apartments and factories, there has been a boom in universities. Whereas 1 million Chinese graduated in 1998, 6.3 million did last year. Job creation is not quite keeping pace and the gap in quality between universities is seen as being the crucial difference. Get into a good school and a job is assured, get into a second tier university and nothing is certain. (The five year olds whom I teach English to may not realize it, but they are already fighting for their futures.)

Tests as the sole portal to advancement are a Chinese tradition dating back nearly 1500 years. The test in its current form dates to 1978 when Deng Xiaoping reintroduced it as part of his reforms. Initially controlled entirely by the Ministry of Education, its devising has been handed over to the provinces during the subsequent years. Depending on the province, students must select their universities before or after the test. This often results in a student doing better than necessary for the school he chooses or, even worse, a low score preventing a student from attending the schools he has listed.

Universities for their part set quotas of how many students will be accepted from each province, the lion’s share given to their own provinces. Test scores are the main criterion for choosing who makes the cut. Other (marginal) considerations include minority status and success in various academic competitions.

For years the exam was held in July, but for the past several years it has been administered in June as to avoid the intense summer heat that blankets China.

The test itself is nine hours long and divided into three required topics: Chinese, Math, and a foreign language. Six other topics (Chemistry, Physics, Biology, History, Politics, and Geography) are usually chosen in addition. The most head-scratching part may be the essay portion where students are required to expand on a prompt. Localities can design their own—Shaanxi’s offered an anecdote about how goldfish only grow as big as their bowls and asked students to ruminate on the connection of environment and success—or they can use the nationally provided prompts. This year’s prompts called for students to discuss light reading or to expand on the saying, “Why chase mice when there are fish to eat?”

Abstract as this many sound, it offers room for a modicum of creativity. Most of the test is directly dependent on a student’s aptitude for rote memorization. The persistent criticism of the Chinese education system is its emphasis on teacher-centered learning, the test both reflects and privileges this style of education—even essay responses are the result of endless studying of rhetoric structure.

The overall score is out of 750. Students attempting to enter the nation's best schools—like Beijing’s Tsinghua University need scores between 660 and the low 700s to even have a sliver of hope. By contrast, equivalent programs in Xi’an require scores in the high 400s. With such fierce competition, there is obvious benefit to those whose parents can pay for expensive after-school prep classes.

Yet, if the goal is to equal the playing field for students, the alternatives are not particularly satisfying. Although China’s education and test policies may not encourage outside-the-box thinking, few from western countries can argue with a straight face that their own countries do any better at helping the poor rise up or limiting the benefits that flow from wealth and position.

If China looks to rags-to-riches success stories as evidence that the system is working, many in the upper-middle class are increasingly less convinced. One last statistic is important to consider: Last year as millions of Chinese youths struggled to get into the best national universities, nearly 250,000 opted to go abroad to school instead.

Street Food

2010-05-22T08:03:00.000-07:00

[Again, this is one of my magazine articles.]

Without a doubt, my most pleasurable moments in Xi’an have come, sitting on little plastic stools at less-than-entirely-sanitary tables, savoring a plate of noodles (5 yuan) and watching the whole madcap nighttime drama of the city unfold around me. I seldom feel more connected with my fellow city-dwellers than I do crowded around a chao bing cart, rummaging amid piles of vegetables, meats, and tofus for the perfect midnight meal combination.

Xi’an is highly regarded for its variety and selection of street food. Weather (and other factors) permitting, you can find vendors at any time of day. That said, the variety of food on offer shifts over the course of the day and there are definite differences between the food one can find in the morning, afternoon and night.

Morning

As early as 7 in the morning, small carts line the streets. Most breakfast food involves either eggs, flour or a combination of the two. The most common morning treats are you bing and you tiao, fried dough. Bing is circular and tiao is long and stretched like a garlic stick; both have a taste reminiscent of a slightly salted donut and neither should cost more than 0.5 to 1 yuan. Typically Chinese will eat these with soymilk. Bing can be stuffed with shredded potato or spiced cabbage.

Another vast category of breakfast food is fried stuffed bread (bing). Unlike the simpler fried doughs, these are filled with chives (cong), eggs (jidan), or meat (niu rou) before they are cooked. Less unhealthy looking are the grilled versions of the same thing. None should cost more than 1-3 yuan.

If your preference is for something less artery-clogging first thing in the morning, options up your alley might include steamed bread (mantou) stuffed with veggies or any of the readily available spicy soups (hula tang). Also low fat is jian bing guozi—essentially a crepe filled with egg, chives, and onions.

Afternoon

Between morning and night a great many vendors either vanish or re-locate. Streets like Dongmu Toushi—at other times overflowing with food—become rather desolate save for men hawking pineapple on a stick (1-2 yuan).

There are notable exceptions. At lunchtime, along the backstreets, women pull out their large lunch carts full of meats, greens, rice, and noodles (kuai can). Most noticeable is along Luomashi Street. During midday, this main pedestrian boulevard, already crowded with shoppers, clothing sellers, and wedding planners, becomes full of food vendors as well.

Food unique to this time of day includes shredded pork sandwiches packed into steamed bread (fen zheng rou). Pancake sandwiches (tong luo shao) which can be filled with fruit jam, red beans, or the far-too-ubiquitous powdery-brown pork floss. My personal favorite are the Chinese Egg-McMuffins (like so much street food, their literal name, egg-meat, has no ring to it). These are nothing more than flour fried in something resembling a cupcake tray, filled with egg and meat. Delicious!

On many streets—especially in the Muslim Quarter—one can see fried starch tofu (chao liangfen). This and the non-fried variety are a gelatinous tofu made from water saturated with either flour, potato, or mung bean starch. This can be eaten cold, topped with sauce or it can be fried with spices. The process that creates these noodles produces excess material which is used for the common—and in my opinion rather off-putting—kao mian jin. Resembling pig-tails, these curly, spiced, barbequed doughs are, essentially, the detritus of cold noodle preparation.

Night

At night time, the streets flood with options. The most common sights are carts loaded down with a selection of vegetables, meats, eggs, mushrooms, and tofu. Choose what you want (typically .5 to 1 yuan per item) and the cook will fry it, boil it, or grill it depending on your preference. The vegetables can then be covered in a spicy chili sauce or a smoother sesame sauce. Similar to these are the fried sandwich (chao bing) carts that will cram all your selections into a fried round of bread.

Nearby are the carts serving fried noodles (chao mian). The typical cart will have a variety of noodle choices—several dry, steamed options, several moist-looking boiled varieties and probably rice to boot. To this can be added either egg (jidan), meat (rou), or, quite commonly, large in-shell shrimp and snails (tianluo). All for around 5 yuan.

Grilled meat skewers (kao rou) are often a common sight. Thin strips of finely-spiced meat are usually served up on a simple metal plate without any addition. The version sold by Uighur people from eastern China, however, will come with a special flat bread to eat in combination.

Among the cheapest options are the carts serving up dumplings (baozi) and wonton soup (huntun tang) both for about 5 yuan. To add flavor, dumplings can be dipped in a flavorful vinegar-chili sauce (tiao liao zhi).

Other choices might include duck meat sandwiches (ya rou) served in steamed bread or the regretfully all-too common stinky tofu (chou doufu) . . .

But, try as I may, this is only a partial list of the potential meals Xi’an offers up. The adventurous or ambitious ex-pat could spend a month of nights trying different dishes and still not taste them all. And herein lies the ultimate charm of Xi’an’s food scene, this superabundance of possibilities. It’s a food lover’s dream.

Photos: Street Food

2010-05-21T09:31:00.000-07:00

Click HERE for photos.

Reuben Silverman, Cub Reporter

2010-05-05T00:36:00.000-07:00

About two months ago, I saw that the local ex-pat magazine China Grooves was hiring volunteer copy editors. I wrote them and letter and set up a meeting; despite the advert, copy editing services didn't seem to interest them, but they told me they could always use some writers. The following are the four little pieces I've written so far.

They're not Mencken or Thompson, but they're not utter shit either:

Beilin Museum

Located beside the southern wall’s Heiping Gate, the Beilin Museum houses a fine little collection of steles and religious artwork from a variety of different dynasties.

The steles—large, carved stone blocks—are spread through seven rooms. The first contains classic works of Chinese philosophy and ethics. The black slabs, one lined after another, puts one in mind of the Vietnam monument in Washington, DC.

The second features family memorials, records of foreign relations, ennoblements, land-grants, and writings recounting the good deeds of various religious leaders. The third displays poetry, especially impressive calligraphy, and various inspirational accounts of filial piety.

The forth room is the most interesting, offering up a grab bag of steles. Some are portraiture and landscape, others are memorials—one, for example, commemorating a peasant rebellion leader financed paid for by his peasants followers. Another from several centuries later is a warning from the Qing to similarly rebellious peasants.

The western wing of the museum is given over to sculptures and carvings discovered in and around burial sites. These include the elaborately designed tomb of Li Shou, a cousin of the then-emperor; massive tomb guardians in the shape of lions, goats, rhinos, and mythical creatures; and “pictoral stones” showing both fantastical imagery—dragons, ghosts, and anthropomorphized animals—as well as more mundane scenes such as hunting and harvesting.

There are also a fair number of Buddhist sculptures. When the religion arrived in China, such artwork was used to educate the illiterate about the faith’s teachings. The museum’s collection ranges from small household relics to large heavenly guardian statues.

The value of the museum’s pieces lies not only in the things themselves, but in the contemplation of how much care and effort—a lifetime of knowledge and craftsmanship—went into their creation. Viewing works so full of passionate labor, one comes a bit closer to understanding lives long past lived.

Yangrou Paomo

Chances are good that, if you’re a foreigner living in Xi’an, a local has probably taken you out for yangrou paomo. If not, it’s only a matter of time. The restaurants are everywhere; lining the streets of the Muslim Quarter, glimpsed down alleyways, even operating out of swank, high-end venues. Inside many city buses, posters advertising the wonders of Xi’an culture show the terracotta army, the Big Goose Pagoda, the Tang Dynasty show and a bowl of yangrou paomo.

This is the local dish and it’s marvelously simple: Bread, noodles, mutton, spices and broth. For the north Chinese with their traditions of horse riding and long distance hunts, the dish was both simple and filling. A Muslim influenced Silk Road dish, it is said to have originated in the 11^th century, at the court of the Western Zhou emperors.

In the heavily touristed areas of the city—like Muslim Quarter—you’ll see yangrou paomo sitting in pre-made bowls (9 ¥), just waiting to have broth ladled into it. While this can be tasty, it’s not the customary way to eat it.

In the better restaurants (20 ¥), you’ll first be asked how many pieces of bread (bing) you want. One will be fine if you have a modest appetite, two will certainly fill you. Once your choice has been made, you’ll be handed the bread and an empty bowl.

What follows is a process of breaking the rounds of bread in half and ripping those halves into small pieces. Whereas a machine compresses the bread, ripping by hand keeps it soft and allows it to retain absorbency. The smaller the pieces are, the better they suck up the broth—and, as a friend insisted to me, if I didn’t tear the pieces up small, the cooks would take me for a country-bumpkin and withhold the choice meat slices.

While thorough ripping can take time, Chinese insist that the whole business can have a relaxing, almost zen-like quality. You become part of the cooking process.

Ripping done, the bowls are whisked away and returned several minutes later full of broth, vermicelli noodles, and slices of mutton. Served along with the meal is a spicy chili paste and sweet pickled garlic which can either be eaten on its own or mixed into the bowl.

This is kou tang (mouth soup); it is what you can expect to be served if you don’t specify otherwise. If this doesn’t quite appeal, several other options are available: Dan zou (walking alone) is a version where the broth, meat and noodles are served up with the bread, as yet still whole, on the side, ready to be dipped in. Gan pao (dry soaked) is the standard yangrou pao mo drained of its broth, but still soggy. And, most wonderfully named, is shui wei cheng (water besieged city) which is just your typical paomo bowl brimming with broth.

The best way to eat yangrou pao mo is to work around the outside toward the center. Since the bread is thoroughly soaked in broth, it is quite hot. Avoiding the center of the bowl bypasses the hottest portion and leaves the roof of your mouth intact, allowing you to enjoy Xi’an’s signature dish with the utmost satisfaction.

Banpo Museum

Banpo Museum is itself something of a relic. Old photos near the entrance, show the site in the early 50s, at the time of excavation. A few archeologists stand amid locals. Around them stretch empty fields. Now the place is surrounded by roads and buildings and getting there requires a long bus ride to the eastern suburbs, beyond the Chan River.

The museum displays the remnants of a 6000 year old village. Covered by a large warehouse building are the remains of numerous huts, identifiable by numerous stake holes in the ground. Wooden frames, subsequently filled in with mud and straw, were set in the holes.

Archeologists suspect that the Yangshao culture which inhabited the site was matriarchal (e.g. run by women). Female burial sites contain far more objects than male ones, leading researchers to believe that women’s position in the society was elevated.

In addition to these burial sites, archeologists have unearthed a great deal of pottery used to bury dead children. A number of storage pits have been excavated too, along with a portion of the deep moat which once surrounded the village.

Other buildings contain artifacts from the site and less obviously relevant displays such as animal fossils.

The nicest part of the museum, however, is the least historical part. Outside the main building is a large garden area full of peony flowers and reconstructions of the Neolithic huts. The whole place is in a state of quaint disrepair, but the upshot is that you find yourself able to sit in relative peace and quiet.

Chinese Calligraphy

How does one express his inner nature? How can we best judge a person’s soul? For the imperial Chinese, writing offered the window. Zhang Xu and Huai Shu, two Tang dynasty calligraphers, for example, would get liquored up and launch into shouting tirades as they performed their art. Zhang, it is said, would often use his hair in place of a paint brush. Not surprisingly, the two avoided standard writing styles in favor of freer forms.

Nowadays, when we think of Chinese script, we tend to separate it into Traditional and Standard. When confronted with the thought of learning the former, those of us unable to learn even the latter shudder. Yet both are merely a fraction of the range of characters once in common circulation among literate Chinese. What we think of as “written Chinese” is just kaishu style, the simplest of five possible scripts.

The oldest style of Chinese writing is zhuanshu, or Seal Script. Originating several thousand years ago, it conveys a sense of visual antiquity. The characters are long, narrow, insect-like, almost otherworldly. The impression is far more literal than other, more abstract scripts. It was the official writing style of the Qin dynasty.

Lishu script, or Clerical Script, followed. Much faster to write than Seal Script—and, therefore, more suited to use in bookkeeping—it retains some of the same elongated qualities as its predecessor.

The other three major scripts emerged concurrently during the Han. Two of these, caoshu (Running Script) and xingshu (Walking Script), are cursive versions of the clerical script. As the names suggest, caoshu is the more flowing and difficult of the two while xingshu moves between the two extremes of precision and wild abandon. Kai (Standard Script) is a further, squarer, less-stretched version of the clerical script.

Within a single style there are a range of techniques. Connoisseurs of calligraphy can rhapsodize about how the smallest action can alter the sense of a character. Whether one uses the edge of the brush or the tip, how long the brush is used before refreshing the ink, how much pressure is applied; the choice of both style and mode of expressing it speaks volumes about the calligrapher.

Yet, beyond reflecting the personality of the individual calligrapher, calligraphy is also a conversation between the present and the past. Great artists carefully study the examples of past masters. (Consider Wang Xizhi, the forth century scholar and “Sage of Calligraphy.” Not only was he a beautiful calligrapher in his own right, refining styles in a manner still emulated to this day, but he also labored to collect the work of many others, past and present. His most famous work is his preface to Literary Gathering at the Orchid Pavilion, a collection of poetry by artists he’d brought together.)

To appreciate and to produce calligraphy is thus both an individual and a collective act of the most surpassing subtlety and beauty.

Photo: Banpo Museum and Environs

2010-04-26T05:07:00.000-07:00

Click HERE for photos.

Photos: Beilin Museum

2010-04-17T07:12:00.000-07:00

Click HERE to view photos.

Short Takes

2010-04-07T04:16:00.000-07:00

Life, no matter where it is lived, resolves itself into routine or, otherwise, never really becomes “life.” Three months in, the contours of my routine have become fairly clear. The life of an ex-pat in Xi’an revolves around a few bars and clubs, perhaps language classes, a girlfriend or boyfriend if you have one, work and shambling about. It’s almost painfully normal. The appeal then, is not the day-to-day minutiae, but rather the thrum compressed human energy that surrounds it.

As my life has no ready-made narratives these past few months, please accept the following short takes:

Outdoor Life

I grew up in a place where, if you asked someone what she did in her free time, she’d probably say walk on the beach, see the sun set, or work in the garden. In contrast to that, the routines of city life could not but be more glaringly different. Yet, even with such caveats, free time in China can sound rather depressing. Ask a man how he fills his time and he will say videogames, movies, and nights out with his friends. As a woman and she will say shopping and hanging out with friends.

Again and again Chinese tell me that their country is restrictive, not politically (they don’t care much), but socially. They speak of the pressure from family and friends to conform. Chinese daily life—at least in the cities—is based on family, friends, and work. Often these are one and the same. Chinese people seldom seem to be alone in their free time. If a Chinese person is alone, he is often running an errand or waiting to meet someone. Few activities seem to occur outside these bounds. It’s easy to see how this weight can bear down on them—there is little respite from friends and family—from people who know you and have expectations of you. The escape to videogames seems a very logical result.

Yet the fact remains that Chinese do hang out together and, unlike in the states where activity is largely confined indoors, life in China is conducted outside. There are food stalls and clothing stalls everywhere. Numerous shops lack doors and simply open on to the street. To be out is to be surrounded by activity. I can only imagine the shock new arrivals to American cities must feel when confronted by the relative lifelessness.

The Neighborhood

My apartment block is located down a back street, only a block and half from the city center and yet, despite the small distance, you’d never know.

Our house has a gate-keeper, a shiny bald, wrinkled old man who lives in the tiny gate-room with his wife. His day often consists of watching television and separating out the apartment’s trash into to two burlap sacks. Often a girl—a granddaughter perhaps—hangs out with them.

Directly outside the gate is some sort of scrap metal collection site. During the day, men go at large pieces of aluminum or motor-part-looking contraptions with hammers, breaking them down into component parts. They operate out of a little garage and, at night, a big truck is parked in front and loaded fifteen feet high with scrap metal.

On either side of the garage are hair saloons and more further along the alley. Whereas many back alley salons are merely brothels, these are the real deal and are constantly in operation—as in Istanbul, barber shops and salons stay open until ten o’clock or later. In one direction along the alley way are more apartment blocks. In the other, in addition to the salons, are a number of little restaurants, unmarked and outwardly caked in dirt, but overflowing with customers during the lunch hour.

At all times of day, the street is busy. Children run to and fro, small dogs—the occasional collie is the only large dog I’ve yet seen—patter about in little knitted vests and men fix bikes and motorized rickshaws or play badminton with their wives.

In the morning the main road is full of vegetable vendors. Small hot peppers, bok choy, various other leafy greens, bean spouts and tomatoes are common—as are the dark-orange verging-on-red carrots that are ubiquitous in China. During the market times, the street is a chaos of vendors, buyers, bicyclists, motorcyclists, rickshaws, car drivers honkingly oblivious to the narrowed streets, and random passersby.

Head the other direction, past those other apartment blocks, and you emerge on a main street lined with shops. Here are the majority of restaurants I go to as well as a dog-groomer, a sign-carving company, more salons, the entrance to a parking garage, several repair shops and multiple videogame parlors.

In the daytime, this street and, frankly, every other in the area, is rather depressingly scruffy. But this all changes at night. In the dark, the dirt becomes invisible and what stands out are the neon lights and the activity. Most nights, I get noodles on the street and sit watching the passersby, listening to shouts from nearby mahjong tables, and lose try to let the moment last forever.

Practicalities

Then there is the issue of bathrooms. Bathrooms in China are almost all squats. The only exceptions are places which cater to western tourists. Stalls do no have toilet paper or—unlike Turkey—a bucket and tap. Stalls usually have doors, but seldom have locks. Moreover, they aren’t cleaned regularly, the surrounding floors are covered in uriny-water—the floors outside are too. Often the foot flushing mechanism breaks or goes unutilized for multiple uses; the result is a large pile of shit waiting to greet you upon entering the stall.

If any of this sounds disconcerting—and I’d imagine it does—I’d say you’re thinking about it wrong. This is simply the way it is. If any of the foregoing details sound disgusting, consider that (contrasted with the US) China at least has public bathrooms all over the place. Very seldom do you have to pay for them. The only expense that falls on you is the cost of a pack of Kleenex.

And bathrooms are representative of a more general fact about China: It is what it is and complaining get you nowhere. Time and again people whinge about the following problems:

Spitting. People spit everywhere. On the street, in the midst of vegetable markets, on buses, upon emerging from bathroom stalls, in restaurants and on the carpet of Starbuckses. Likewise, men are constantly pushing closed one nostril and rocketing out jets of snot from the other. These hygiene issues extend to person grooming including nail clipping in the middle of restaurants, cafes, offices and teachers’ rooms. When you consider that a good part of The Stranger’s “Last Days” column is given over to gripes about such things, you realize how uptight Seattle truly is . . .
Driving. Chinese are amazing drivers—though few agree with my assessment. They weave in and out of traffic, pass pedestrians and bicyclists with only inches to spare and drive on sidewalks if necessary. Someone one in America attempting such stunts would be dead within days, yet most Chinese are verifiably not dead. Pedestrians don’t help matters by walking out into traffic given the slightest opening. Unlike the US where we let lights do our thinking for us, the simple act of crossing the street in Chinese forces us to be fully aware of the surroundings.
Slow Service. In Turkey, I rather enjoyed the slow pace of service I received because it often seemed as though the staff were enjoying itself. At government offices, the officials would drinking tea, chat and, intermittently, attend to your paperwork. The might, if the mood struck them, start up a conversation with you. Chinese office slowness seems less lighthearted, but it is equally lugubrious. (And this is strange because it seems to aggravate Chinese as well. Whenever I find myself in a line with a Chinese, he or she constantly pouts and harrumphs about the pace of the clerk.)
Haggling. The price in China—in much of the world for that matter—is not the price. I vividly remember, back in Seattle, going over the cost of products I ordered for cafes and restaurants and wincing at how small our profit margin was, but in the US the idea is price competition. The price is the price and if people don’t like it, they will go elsewhere. In China, price is merely a starting point and every major purchase becomes a game of chicken. My suspicion is that, this business model helps explain why developing countries can have twenty of the exact same store lining a street. Once the choice of store becomes a matter of best deal and other considerations (such as family connections), it becomes more convenient for all the stores to group together. Were thirty plumbing supply stores spread throughout the city, people would just go to the closest one and settle for its prices. If all the plumbing stores are beside one another, the customer can make his way up and down the row, negotiating the best deal.

I don’t want to imply that I never complain about these things. Rather, I mean to say that the complaints are pointless and, if these sort of things are insurmountable difficulties, China is not the place for you. One has to ask himself what truly matters, what he can live with and without.

Entertainment

Xi’an has a good number of bars and clubs. Most teachers frequent one called the Park Qin in the basement of a hostel. The place is darkly lit—some might say cave-like. Next door is another, slightly seedier, hostel-cum-bar called the Shuyuanmen. Finally, right beside the central Bell Tower, is yet another dingy-but-popular hostel/bar. This last one gets the budget travelers and, less explicably, all of the city’s teenage lesbian population. A good night there involves an hour of pool, cheap drinks and a constant stream of girls dressed like K.D Lang passing by.

While Park Qin gouges you with its high-priced, watered down drinks, the rip off is at least muted amid the grotto-dark colors. Along neighboring Bar Street, the tourist squeeze is more blatant. And, of course, all this is relative. A beer ranges in price from ($1.50 to $4.50 at the most expensive place). A cocktail is typically ($2-$5). No worse than a dive bar in the states—except that teachers only pull in about $200 a week.

You feel the pinch more at the clubs. There are several and they are decidedly mixed affairs. Take 1 + 1, for example. The place has at least three sections; a crowed dance floor surrounded by tables and recessed rooms full of couches where you can be waited on in style. Down on the dance floor, a press of men dance, dry ice is pumped out in clouds, more exhibitionist sorts dance up on elevated blocks, and pity be to any girl who enters the dance floor not expecting to be pressed up on immediately by a half dozen Chinese guys. Especially on this floor, you see groups of men, tables covered with beer bottles and, scattered here and there, drunken People Liberation Army (PLA) officers.

More sane is the upper dance floor which, for whatever reason, is calmer. The dance floor is smaller and girls are able to dance as they please without fear of groping. This is where the foreigners seem to congregate—Saudis, Pakistanis, Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Dutch on vacation, students from assorted African countries.

(And if neither of these are not your cup of tea either, there’s a lounge area where you can sit and revel privately in your wealth. Again, I suspect this is for the truly well-heeled, those still suffering from a degree of status anxiety would be out on sight, displaying their money.)

Now, all of these places have a dark side—anywhere in the business of getting people drunk does. The Bell Tower hostel will have bottle-breaking fights between furious lesbian lovers and I have witnessed two occasions of a Chinese guy feigning to choke his girl friend at 1 + 1. Outside these places one can expect to see angry arguments, many of which are uncomfortable to watch as an American. China is one of those countries where women (not all, but these is great truth to the following generalization) expect their boyfriends to show an aggressive, frightening level of jealously and where, to do otherwise, would be considered a sign of gross indifference. The result is these mutual, public screaming fits.

And yet, for all this violence and seediness, all these places in combination have a narcotic effect. To move from one beat-pulsated bar to another is to feel as if the everyday world has been stripped away to reveal something more subterranean and magical. To know, sitting around on a given night, that people are out somewhere dancing and living it up, that there is this well of vital energy out there which you can step into if the urge strikes, is a powerful knowledge indeed.

This is the danger of travel in miniature: Knowing there is so much more out there than you can take in with your senses at one time; knowing that so much is happening at once, and knowing that you must choose between it all.

How does one keep himself down on the farm after he’s seen Xi’an?

Photos: Xi'an, Second Month

2010-04-07T04:11:00.001-07:00

Click HERE for photos.

“My American Friend"

2010-03-07T02:14:00.000-08:00

There was a noodle shop I particularly liked, nestled along a dusty side street connecting the city’s central shopping area to a cluster of art supply shops around the South Gate. It was your typical Muslim noodle place—six tables inside, a barbeque outside, a table near the door for kneading dough, and a little kitchen separated by glass. On the walls were a few posters in Arabic script and a large picture menu advertising the various noodle dishes available—and, more often, not available. The food was good enough, but I’d made it a return destination on the thinking that an expat has to have a few places that are his haunts.

One particular day when it was pouring down snow and the roadways were covered in a dirty, depressing mush, I decided to stop in. The thought of a belly full of noodles, green beans and tomato sauce seemed ideal in those conditions. As I entered in, pushing back the flaps of heavy plastic that hung over the doorway, I was greeted by clapping and someone shouting “Hello, welcome, welcome” in a very Chinese accent.

The welcoming committee was one man. He looked middle aged. Not yet gray, he had a wispy mustache and scattering of chin hairs.

“Yes, welcome, ‘huanying,’” I said back to him without his really acknowledging it. He repeated his sentence a few more times as I sat down at an opposite table. This type of thing was pretty typical and I marked him for another in a series.

“Where are you from?”

“Seattle.”

“Ah yes, I know!”

“Yeah?” I was incredulous.

“Yes! Oregon . . .no! Washington, Oregon, California. Yes . . .what do you do here?”

“I’m a teacher. At Aston School. You know?”

“”Yes, I know several Aston teachers.”

“And what is your job?”

“I am . . .it is hard to explain. I work at school. If there is electrical problem or building problem, I fix it. I clean things . . .”

“Mmm . . .okay. Custodian, maybe. And where do you learn English?”

“Ah, from helpful foreigners.”

Not wanting to not be a “helpful foreigner” I continued the conversation. His name was Lee and he was coming from the art supply street. In the chair next to him he had placed a bag of calligraphy brushes. He came to this restaurant regularly because the staff was from the same Qinghai province city as his ex-girlfriend. (Maybe I’m the asshole for thinking this should be a strike against the place in his book, but to him it was the source of connection.)

He was forty one and lived with his elder sister while his own, newly bought apartment was undergoing construction. He was from Xi’an, but his father had been in the army and they’d moved around a bit. At one point his father had been stationed in the Northeast to oversee factory production. Matter-of-factly he explained that, “during the Cultural Revolution, there were many problems between managers and workers.” In thanks for his service, his father and other officers had been personally feted by Chairman Mao. After retiring, his father had moved to Xi’an and the family now worked for a military equipment factory in the east of the city. His sister lived in factory housing.

Since I didn’t enjoy shouting to talk, I moved to his table and, while we waited for our food, he showed me two calligraphy books he had just purchased. Both were by scholars from the ninth and tenth century—there was something of a Socrates-Plato relationship between the two apparently.

Chinese calligraphy is one of those arts for which the taste must be acquired. The whole idea is to express emotional states through the way one writes—not so different from italicizing or boldfacing font, but certainly more visually pleasing. Since calligraphy examples are usually poems and not just random words the style and content can create interesting juxtapositions (or so I imagine, actually asking this question, albeit more simply, gets me blank stares). Over two thousand years different schools have come and gone. Often a new school will rise up emulating the style of some previous great—it all very insular. (The most interesting sort I ever saw was a type called seal script which predates current Chinese character system and looked far more ancient and pictorial—it’s the sort of thing you imagine seeing on cave walls. During the Qing dynasty, scholars seeking to resurrect ancient forms, began practicing it again.)

“Calligraphy is very relaxing,” he explained as he leafed through the books, “I often do it after work or at school. All my art supplies are there now and the school is closed for Spring Festival. Therefore I buy new brushes.”

I nodded.

“I have many foreign friends. A teacher, he is from Korea, he likes tea, so we always drink tea. White Peony. You know?” I shook my head, mulling my response to the inevitable question. “Near my sister’s house in East of Xi’an there is big tea market. You want to go with me?”

I said yes and the food came. He got up and said something to them which I guessed to be paying for mine—this happened enough to me that I’d developed a sixth sense about it. We ate and left together. As we walked, though, I modified things and asked if tomorrow was okay. Once we’d agreed upon a time, we parted ways.

The following day the city was hit by even more intense snows. The bus out to the eastern neighborhoods was slow going and humid with collective body heat. We’d agreed to meet in front of one of my school’s branches, a newly constructed building whose bottom floor was still just bare walls and a small trash-covered table with a space heater plunked down on top of it. A cleaning lady and doorman sat here while I waited at the drafty glass entrance doors. After a short wait and a text message, I learned that he had not yet left his house. Forty cold minutes later he arrived.

He was very apologetic, but it was clear that he had not expected me to follow through on the meeting—really, the way we’d parted could easily have been construed as giving him the brush off, so I didn’t grudge him the skepticism of a warm home.

He had his heart set on a certain restaurant that wasn’t particularly close. After initial failed attempts to flag down a taxi followed by some trudging to and fro in the snow, we finally succeeded and were whisked off a kilometer away. In the taxi Lee seemed extra animated. I can barely speak a word of Chinese, but I can pick out a lot of words and the gist of the conversation was the driver asking about me and Lee giving him the low down. He was taking on the role of my publicity agent.

The restaurant Lee picked was on a busy street across from a large, wholesale vegetable market. The place was packed with groups small and large. Customers entered bearing large shopping bags full of New Years gifts. Unlike many overstaffed Chinese restaurants, this place had only three harried girls and an older woman working the crowds.

We took a seat by the window and Lee headed off to order our food. He was set on having us order the yangrou paomo, a soup that consists of chopped up bread and a few pieces of mutton or beef. This is, apparently, the equivalent of eating lobster in Maine. Multiple Chinese who’d taken me out to eat had insisted that we order this meal because it was the traditional food. And, sure enough, it was very satisfying—if not particularly flavorful. Usually it came pre-done, but at this restaurant we were each provided with a bowl and two hard pieces of pita bread.

“Tear it into small pieces,” Lee instructed.

I set to work half-assedly until he exclaimed, “No smaller. If you tear big pieces, the cooks will think you are a farmer. From a village. The cooks will not give you a good cut of meat.”

Tearing properly took nearly ten minutes—a process Lee called “very Buddhist”—and finally, my bread acceptably torn, our plates were whisked off to the kitchen. While we waited, Lee grew ever more agitated, looking around, standing up, calling over to waitresses, exiting the building to hock a ball of snot.

When he returned he remained standing, calling out to the waitresses before sitting down and telling me, confidentially, “The waitresses are very pretty here”—he indicated a particular girl to make his point. She struck me as very plain and very young. He called her over and introduced me. Then he called over another young girl who he introduced as the owner’s daughter.

“Hi,” I said, not really sure what role I was meant to play in all of this.

“She was a pupil at our school,” Lee explained.

“Good,” I added.

The girl fidgeted for a second before rubbing her tummy and saying something in Chinese.

“She’s hungry,” Lee translated, smiling and freeing our little captive to return to her own activities.

Our food came. To our bread crumbles had been added hot broth, chunks of meat and some transparent rice noodles. Accompanying the food were little side dishes with chili paste and sweet pickled garlic. Lee had received the wrong bowl, but accepted it and started eating. I was less sanguine about the idea of eating bread some other customers hands had ripped and double checked that mine was no mix up.

Food eaten, we headed out—but not before I was introduced again to the plain young waitress or before we loitered around the outside for Lee to catch her eye and wave again. Our path led up, past the wholesale market and a couple other peripheral dry goods markets, then down some side streets until we came to a large new building. This entire property was devoted to tea merchants. Shop after prettily furnished shop contained boxes and boxes of tea. Considering that this was the height of shopping season, the place was morbidly empty.

“This building is new. Where were all these people before,” I queried.

“A different market. Now they are here, but business is bad.”

This was an understatement. Each store was manned by a solitary worker engrossed in her laptop or starring vacantly. As I’d often seen in China, the scale and presentation of the business was not equal to the actual demand. We stopped in one place where Lee introduced me and bought a few bags of tea. I asked what made this place special, but he gave no answer. We headed to the second floor and popped our heads into another shop, this one drearier than the first. It was manned by a young girl from Fujian province—all the tea shop folks seemed to be from there. After introducing me, Lee sat us down for free samples.

Once we’d left this building, we made our way along several more side streets. Here and there Lee would call out to people and point at a child who, he’d explain, had gone to his school. He seemed to know a large number of people, but, equally often, he seemed to be shouting at complete strangers or making conversation with people whose humoring of him was mere politesse.

One dingy street brought us to an even dingier wholesale market set up in a space which in most other countries would be reserved for a parking garage. Many of the shops sold bulk tea, but other sections we passed sold electronic razors, shampoos, bike wheels, portable water heaters and the like. Passing up stairway, arriving on the second floor, we came upon a tea market far larger than the previous—albeit less spic and span. Like its newer cousin, it was equally empty of customers.

Instead of customers, the place was full of visitors. Instead of a solitary clerks most places had between two and ten people sitting around, playing cards, smoking or chatting. Even the most lonesome merchants had a child running around in front of their shops. Besides tea, this place stocked large quantities of supplies—varnished sandalwood tables, animal ornaments to decorate those tables and small drainage trays for pouring off excess tea.

Commenting on how beautiful one store’s offerings were led to Lee dragging me into the place and introducing me to the owners. I was very hesitant to stick around because I didn’t want them to get their hopes up—I was not keen on buying anything they had on offer. My entrance caused a stir, however, with the owner, his wife (baby in arm) and a few hangers on standing up and coming to greet me as Lee made introductory remarks. They offered me to sit and have tea, but I begged them off. They showed me various sandalwood tables and beds and cupboards. Out of one cupboard the owner pulled a series of large scrolls decorated in red and black in ink stamps. The stamps were all in seal script and the man had carved each himself.

From there we passed several more stores. Lee, seeing a bald man he knew, shouted something and then, in English, for my benefit, shouted, “Hey egghead!” and, to me, “he is an engineer at my elder sister’s factory.” Again I was introduced.

Now we came to a tiny little place more on the scale and design of an office coffee break room. There were few teas on display and a large refrigerator which took up much of the floor space had but one bag of tea inside. At the tea table was a middle aged man and, overseeing the joint, was a rather attractive woman in her early thirties who looked a bit like Michelle Yeoh. We took seat and I was yet again introduced by Lee who now aunched into an extended spiel about something or other while the man and woman smiled and nodded. I was utterly left out of the picture. Occasionally Lee would turn to me and explain that he had just complemented the woman on her looks or he might ask me whether I liked the tea before telling me that there was nothing more pleasurable than having tea in the company of a lovely lady.

After a bit, the man and woman began asking me questions—or looking directly at me when addressing the question, then waiting for Lee. These questions would be on the order of “why did you come to China?” “Do people drink tea in America” or, more cryptically, “How is the situation of young people in America?” (The woman had, apparently, been an elementary school teacher before. Finding herself out of work, she’d opened a tea shop.) I tried to give short simple answers to these questions and each time Lee would take several minutes to relay the answer. Often he would tell me that he had added a compliment to my answer. When I tried to ask a question there was this same unevenness of translation. A question I asked about how long she had worked at this place or in what capacity the man served here would take a minute to be asked and the answer would always be abridged when returned to me.

Finally I became silent and merely watched the proceedings. The entire time I we had been here, the suspicion—always present—had steadily firmed itself in my mind that Lee was showing me off to people. We were making a tour of his usual haunts (or places he wished were his usually haunts) and I was being displayed like a trophy. Whenever he spoke of me in Chinese I was his “American friend” and everyone he spoke to asked of me with the same formulation. I was a Jaguar, a Savile Row suit, a Jacob watch; a status symbol. I didn’t exactly begrudge him this victory lap. He’d treated me well, bought me two meals and a taxi ride, but I rankled at playing the role of trained bear.

By the time we said our goodbyes, my stomach was full of tea. But we weren’t done yet. There was another attractive tea hostess to visit and then another guy to sit with and sip black tea. This last shop in particular sapped my endurance. I was already full and didn’t really care for acrid black tea, but Lee was undiminished in his ebullience and continued to hold forth on the merits of various teas. The two men chatted about tea while I sat peripheral, stony faced. It was all an odd position to be in. Here I was, Lee’s key to a bit of respect and yet, really, a pointless appendage. To prod him to hurry would be rude and yet it was from me that he was gaining reflected stature in the first place. Like I said, it grated.

The final place we entered, a spacious tea supply store full of beautiful tea sets, must have been a let down for Lee. He ambled around greeting people and making introductions, until he came to the boy who seemed to have the run of the store. Gesturing to me, he said in Chinese, “My American friend is a teacher. At Aston School.”

The boy, unimpressed by my pedigree, shrugged and said he didn’t know Aston.

Lee then gave some words of explanation, but I suppose the damage had been done. The boy had seen through me. What was I, but another foreigner? My presence gained Lee nothing in his eyes. We didn’t buy anything there.

After this store, I was finally able to get us moving out of the tea market. On are way back to the bus station—punctuated by numerous encounters with students and allegedly-former students of his school—we made a last stop to buy him a belt. (All along the streets were carts covered in knock-off leather belts. Although none was to Lee’s liking, he managed to get the vendor to punch a new hole in his old belt for free.) At the bus stop we said are goodbyes and I headed back downtown.

The whole day had left me with a bit of unease. I was none the poorer from the adventure, but it was galling, that sense of being imputed a value above one’s worth. Making friends in foreign lands is easy enough until peripheral players enter the process. You, the foreigner, come into people’s lives, tornado-like, with your eagerness to learn a bit about their culture. You throw their routines out of order, elevate them momentarily above the pack, and then disappear, leaving them right where they were. Seeing how much pleasure this guy had derived from showing around me—an absolute nobody—made me feel dirty and ashamed.

He deserved better.

Xi'an

2010-02-14T00:59:00.000-08:00

I came to Xi’an five years ago as a side trip on my way to Mongolia. I came to see the Terracotta warriors, do some laundry and move on. I have a bad memory for images and I have only two strong memories of the place. The first was a dingy little restaurant where dog was an option on the menu and another customer teased me for how I hold my chop-sticks. The other was the long line of shops along my hotel’s street; little one room beauty salons lit by pink lights, all with solitary women sitting at the front doors, calling out to me as I went by.

Xi’an was not a place I gave much thought to returning to. I decided to try it again because a friend in Istanbul recommended it. He pointed out that it was a beautiful city with a lot of universities which lent it a college-town vibe. These good words, plus the knowledge that it was neither a big industrial town nor a sleepy backwater made me gravitate toward it. It would be good, I imagined, to be in a place that was both Chinese and yet full of western amenities when necessary.

Well, Xi’an was a far cry from what I remembered. Five years had done a number on the city. When I’d stayed here before, the Lonely Planet had recommended a clean, but boring little hotel near the train station—which goes some way to explaining the concentration of brothels. Now there were swanky youth hostels with fancy expat bars lighted like Wan Kar Wai movies.

So what is Xi’an? Well, with around 7 million people, it probably qualifies as a second tier Chinese city. But that doesn’t convey much. What matters is that it’s the original capital of the country—the Qin, Han and Tang all had their palaces here—and, history aside, it’s the largest city in the northwest of the country. If you look at a map of the country, the population (marked in shades of red) is all concentrated on the coast. Outside the Great wall, the intensity fades except for a flame of color flaring out westwards to include Xi’an before petering out. Think of Xi’an like Chicago—a mecca of commerce amid vast expanses of nothing.

Living in a place, the layout and the points of interest only slowly come clear. A travel guide will tell you to visit the Big Goose Pagoda and the Bell Tower, perhaps a visit to the history museum and a few other cultural sights, but this isn’t how daily life plays out. In practice, most of my time is spent within a radius of only a few blocks.

Both my job and apartment are located only two blocks from the Bell Tower and, from this six hundred year old structure, the four main city boulevards radiate off toward the old city walls. Along the west road are numerous fancy restaurants. Along the north, shopping malls. South, more shopping malls. East? Individual clothing stores, banks, and a few hotels. Behind the Bell Tower, in the northwest section, is the “Muslim Quarter,” a recently refurbished drag of little stores selling dried fruit, noodle shops, and vendors hawking knick-knacks like wood-carved frogs.

My house is in the southeast section of the old city near the gargantuan Taiyuan Shopping center and the surrounding clothing and accessory stores. To get to it you take a few turns off the main streets. You quickly find yourself walking along a scruffy alleyway. There’s a flop motel, a few legitimate hair salons and an open air shack selling stale crackers and water before you come to my apartment block.

If you pass by my apartment, you emerge back on a small road running parallel to the main eastern thoroughfare, lined with a mixture of middle, low and basement range restaurants. Scattered along the way are a range of different shops—internet cafes, corner-groceries, bakeries, pirated electronics boutiques and sign-makers.

Not too far from all this is my school, located on the fifth floor of a building shared with a business hotel and a large bookstore. Directly next to it is an empty lot of property. Hidden from the street by a concrete wall, it has become home to a small shanty town of beat-down-looking men. Using scavenged bricks, plastic, wood and other materials, they’ve constructed little huts. There are meeting places with tables and chairs at which they play cards. The men gather together throughout the day around trash bin bonfires.

In the past month, I’ve made it east and south of the city walls repeatedly, but never penetrated in the other directions. The south of the city is chock-a-block with universities and concentrations of clothing stores and restaurants. There is also a financial district with big clean roads, but not much in the way of vitality.

The main southern draw is the Goose Pagoda. Any potential awe the view of this thirteen hundred year old temple might have stirred on my first visit was undercut by the surrounding tourist infrastructure. In my first glimpse of it on a foggy morning, the pagoda seemed dwarfed by a massive KFC built on the edge of the surrounding square. In all directions, new restaurants are going up. All along the westerly running Yanta Street are model foreign restaurants serving Korean, Maylay, Japanese and Indian cuisines. Everything is newly built and, like so much of the development, its existence seems more aspirational than anything else. On the day I visited, every restaurant was empty and the staffs sat at window tables playing cards or gazing.

Such details aside, the whole area seemed promising. There was a cute little park that I could imagine visiting in the summertime and at night the fountains around the pagoda were turned on to provide audiences with the largest light and water show in China.

One particular disappointment to me was that the university district of the city was largely devoid of interest. Nothing distinguished it from other parts of city. There was nothing special in the way of bookstores, restaurants or cafes . . .

And, really, this was the biggest problem with the city as a whole—the undifferentiated sameness of it all. Aside from the landmarks, there was little beauty on display. Life centered around shopping, work, restaurants and home—and nothing would be wrong with this except that the shopping all seemed so repetitive. On a typical day, waking up to cold weather, there was little motivating me to explore and, when I did, the explorations tended to reveal large swaths of sameness. There might be a particularly good restaurant in a given neighborhood, but the surrounding area offered little of interest.

Again and again what saves China from boring me with its alternatively drab, soulless city vistas, is the people. This isn’t to say that Chinese are more interesting than folks in other countries—that the opposite is true is a gripe of a different sort—but they are more friendly and the flow of life around them hums at some higher frequency.

Certain things that grate on one at first—the constant stares and murmurs of laowai and waiguoren—lose their annoyance when their lack of malice becomes clear. Chinese stare because they’re interested and involved. If you have a problem, people will help you. If you are in trouble, you never feel utterly alone.

Moreover, to my eye, daily life in China gives lie to the stereotype (repeated by Chinese themselves), that they are meek and easily herded. I am constantly watching shouting matches break out. Getting on a bus in a free-for-all. And traffic! There are no rules; buses don’t’ stop for pedestrians on red lights, pedestrians don’t wait for green lights (instead you just wander out into the road, lane by lane). All this—and far better examples of such collective madness—are pluses in my way of thinking. When you start considering your own life, back in the states, you realize how regimented everything is. you go when you’re told, stop when you’re told, line up here, queue there. You don’t spit on the street or drive down the sidewalk. You also don’t fall easily into friendship with strangers.

It’s all of a piece; neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so. Xi’an is lacking in a great many departments that matter to me, but it brims with life in a host of other ways.

New Year’s Eve was a perfect example. In the days leading up to the event, streets are peppered with vendors selling fire-crackers. For several days in advance, people set off sporadic blasts with no rhyme of reason. As the midnight hour approaches, the frequency rises until midnight when fireworks start shooting off in every direction. The entire sky becomes full of explosions, lights and smoke.

More quietly, along the streets, outside businesses and—occasionally—in the middle of the highway, Chinese gather in twos and threes to light small devotional fires of money and joss paper.

Amid all this activity, groups of Chinese head to and fro to restaurants or each other’s houses. Everyone out and about is in high spirits. As I walked along with a few other teachers, packs of kids called out new years greetings.

Finding ourselves shunted onto the street when the expat bar finally showed us the door at five in the morning, we teachers made our way onto the streets and began to part ways. Another teacher and I were waylaid by a group of Chinese in their late twenties: Three very drunk men and a pair of slightly tipsy women. Seasons greetings were exchanged and, after some discussion in various broken languages, we all agreed to get food together. Our new Chinese friends had no particular idea of where to go, but an hour of peripatetic wandering brought us to a busy noodle place near the Muslim Quarter.

Around seven in the morning we all said our goodbyes and started to head home. Light was flooding the city’s perpetually gray sky and fireworks were starting up again.

Photos: Xi'an, First Month

2010-02-03T09:29:00.000-08:00

Click HERE for photos.

First Impressions

2010-02-03T09:02:00.000-08:00

On the evening of my fourth and final day in Shanghai, I was sitting in a busy little hole-in-the-wall restaurant off Nanjing Street, working my way through a plate of mixed entrees—green beans, noodles, a forgettably flavored tofu, and equally non-descript meat—when a man began speaking at me from a nearby table. He was dressed in a zhongshan suit and cap; pinned to his chest were a number of red ribbons and a picture of Mao. He was middle aged and comfortably filled out his uniform.

“Good food here, yes?” he called out to me. The various other customers—all of us being closely packed together—glanced up upon hearing English. A few guys flashed grins at their girlfriends.

“Yeah, it’s good.”

“You like Chinese food?”

“Sure.”

“Do you like China?”

“Yes,” I answered a little more hesitantly, wondering how all this was tending, “I think it’s a very exciting place.”

“Exciting,” he rolled the word around in his mouth a moment, “Yes, exciting. I’m from Taiwan, you know.”

“Oh . . .so you prefer it here, I imagine.” The thought of his outfit going over well in Taipei didn’t seem likely.

“Yes, I moved here in 2000. Taiwan is in decline. China is on the rise. May I sit?” he indicated at the seat across from me.

“Sure,” I was curious to see where this went and, anyway, it seemed ridiculous to be shouting at each other across the room.

“You see Taiwan’s manufacturing base is disappearing. No one makes things there anymore. All the factories are moving to China.”

“I suppose I don’t see as many “Made in Taiwan” labels anymore . . .”

“No.”

“And what is your job?”

“I’m retired. But I was an importer-exporter. Now I teach Chinese to foreigners. Here’s my card.” He handed me a business card with a great deal of Chinese on it that I could make nothing of. The name on the card said “Nelson Mandela,” but this was crossed out and, written above it, was the name Nelson Chu.

“You know who Nelson Mandela is, yes?” he said, eyeing me.

“Sure.”

“He’s my hero. Do you like my card? Why do you come to China?”

“I’m going to teach English in Xian.”

“And why China?”

“It seems like a very interesting place. It has a unique culture . . .”

“Yes very ancient. Do you think China is overtaking America? Is America in decline?”

“People say America is declining, but I don’t know. Twenty years ago they said the same things about Japan. Japan was going to overtake America . . .well, that didn’t happen. I think China is developing, yes, but I don’t think it has to be a competition. There’s room for both . . .”

These thoughts clearly didn’t please him greatly—a dyspeptic shadow had fallen across his face. Yet, momentarily, he roused himself and resumed his odd good humor. As I casually hurried to finish my meal, he quizzed me about my education and whether I was interested in Marxism. I recommended that he read A People’s History of the United States and, my food finally finished, said my goodbyes.

Although this man was clearly unbalanced in some regards, his basic points were sound enough. In some form or another this idea of American decline had been bouncing around my head during the whole of my time in the city. Now, of course, I wouldn’t have phrased it that was at the time. In the moment, what I felt was a more generalized sense of unease and displacement. The difference between the China I had expected and that which I encountered was startling.

During my first few days, I had been to neighborhoods as nice as any I had encountered in Seattle or New York. Actually, nicer. I had wended my way down one major street that was lined with designer jewelry and fashion boutiques which gave way to mammoth shopping malls and hotels. Walking down this street were Chinese dressed in the most chic of clothes. (There were also large numbers of wealthy westerners here—mostly well-heeled-looking men, lock-armed with Chinese women.)

And undergirding all of this was a vast army of laborers. As I came to the end of this particular street (that is to say the point where any destinations accessible by foot fell away and were replaced by the sort of massive landmarks one only pulls up to in a car) I found myself alone, walking down an endless boulevard lined with trees, all lit up with white Christmas lights. The sky was now pitch black and this lifeless luminescence—lifeless because there was not a soul but me to appreciate it—was almost painfully beautiful. Standing, considering all this, I heard a clanking noise and turned my head upwards to see a man, perched in one of the trees, slowly curling lights around the branches. Here it was seven o’clock at night and this man was still toiling away, manufacturing the beauty.

Shanghai was a beautiful city, but it was a very particular sort of beauty and not one I cared for. Istanbul had been unbearably beautiful. Lining the Bosphorus were the most luxurious of houses and enclaves. All of these places had radiated a sense of wealth, but it had been a wealth in repose; the way one pictures the old plantation south. The money was there, but it was tied to a life of leisure and beauty, of fine architecture and the smell salt water.

Shanghai had the feeling of new money. The wealth was all there on display—you were always being bludgeoned by it. Every building eagerly screamed at you: This cost money! There was no subtlety and, surely, that was the point. Here was a city on the rise, on the make, eager to remind all of what it had become. This was highly effective. I was never unconscious of how robust an act of creation the city was and how pale and anemic the world I came from was in comparison. Civilization in Shanghai had the sense of passing through an heroic age where great things were possible whereas America had passed such a point. It was impossible to conceive of American cities every again experiencing the degree of change Shanghai was undergoing. The America I knew no longer had the will for such concerted displays of greatness.

But—and this is the crucial point—I would not want to live in Shanghai. The city was a wasteland. All the beauty was artificial. The closest one could come to nature was a walk along the banks of the Huangpu River. Here one could sit on benches and view the city skyline, but even from this vantage the only beauty was that of constructed things.

And away from the city center things were worse. My hostel’s neighborhood, on account of its numerous markets and small restaurants, had a more down-to-earth vibe that appealed to me, but it was also an endless sprawl of gray building and omnipresent dust. The most pleasant discovery I had while there was to wander into Lu Xun Park on Sunday and find the whole place alive with activity. In one section there was martial arts practice, in another yoga, in another salsa dancing, patriotic singing, kite flying and ballroom swing dance. Most of the crowd was older and all seemed to be thoroughly enjoying this time out and about. Yet the whole park was drab and dusty. The waterways were brown and stagnant. The only thing that redeemed it all was the humanity and the high spirits of all involved.

On my last day in the city, heading to the train station, I got off the subway a stop too early and found myself in a part of the city that looked as though it had been dreamed up by Cormac MacCarthy. All was brown and hazy with dust. No green was to be glimpsed and the various storefronts all seemed to be in the process of decay. The train out of the city revealed endless swaths of ugly apartment blocks, often pressed up again shanty-houses.

That it was no worse than what I had seen in other cities was a fact which I tried to keep at the forefront of my mind. I might have seen better vistas than Shanghai had to offer, but many residents of this city doubtlessly had not. What I viewed as depressing could easily be given a different construction: What people living in China at this particular historical moment were witnessing was a vast act of self-creation. The city was surging to life in every direction one looked. It was the speed and the scale that were amazing—not necessarily the aesthetics. To be a Chinese at this moment was to see a profound change underway of which all the dust and gray and the ugliness was a symbol. To them it might well be reason for soul swelling optimism. Someone like myself coming from a cushy background, where the dirtiness of progress had been long ago swept under the rug, perhaps lacked the requisite perspective.

It was this sense that divided my mind much of the time I was in Shanghai: Distaste for what I was personally experiencing balanced by a deep awe in the face of it all. As I made one last pass up and down Nanjing Street, beneath blaring neon signs, through surging crowds and past touts who, somewhere around ten at night, switched from hissing “watches and bags” to “girls,” I tried to ditch my qualms. It was easy to do. In the face of such vitality, such light and energy, how could one think about the downside of things. Walking down the street, the world felt young and all seemed possible.

Art in China

2010-01-28T05:30:00.000-08:00

Living in Istanbul, many of the more obvious foreigners I’d known—ruddy faced Brits, in particular—were marks for the small con. Prowling up and down the tourist crammed thoroughfares was always an assortment of well dressed, friendly, slick haired guys, all on vacation from, say, Cypress, all just wanting to know the time, all of whose initial queries led to small talk and an invite to some club they’d heard was good. The club’s prices, not touched on when ordering, always came as a shock to all. The foreigner, feeling sympathy for his newfound friends, would dutifully shell out serious cash and head back to his hostel feeling miffed at how they’d all been fooled.

Now, this never happed to me. Not because I blend in seamlessly to Turkish crowds, so much as I’m generally unfriendly and suspicious to any and all comers. The few times I’ve been in such situations, I’ve realized quickly or declined the offer to get a drink out of a pure, suspicion-free anti-sociality.

Well, my second day’s goal of museum going got sidetracked from the get-go by precisely this sort of business. Interestingly, while past examples of these cons had always come at me in the form of practiced suavité, the Shanghai version came in the form of two rather thread-bare students. Making my way toward the Museum of Chinese Art I was stopped by a brother and sister duo. The brother, Jerry, who did the stopping, asked me where I was from and how I liked the city. Honestly, this didn’t set off any alarm bells. (I’d already been stopped several times in these first few days—on several occasions, people had requested that I pose with them for a picture—so this was nothing new.) However, after ten minutes of chit chat, there was a lull, followed by the suggestion that we go to a tea tasting that was somehow, unclearly, tied to a Chinese minority people’s exposition that was taking place somewhere. They had, you see, been heading there when they met me. Would I like to come along?

Shanghai being a safe place—not the sort of burg were you walk down a back alley and find yourself kidnapped and shipped off to a faraway land—I decided to see where all this led. So we headed off in—though I chose not to point this out—the precise opposite direction from which they had been heading when we first met. After first heading down a main street we turned onto a major backstreet and headed into a shopping mall. This mall was nothing more than a few stores selling plasticy athletic shoe knock offs scattered amid an otherwise desolate environment of empty, dusty, unoccupied lots. We walked up to the third floor, past a nail salon and what appeared to be a pet store to a small office space converted into a pair of private tea rooms. I felt somewhat bad for Jerry and his largely silent sister at seeing the shabbiness of the con. They seemed nice and enough and his English was good enough. They really deserved a better infrastructure to back them up. Once I established that cups of tea were about ten dollars a pop, I politely said my goodbyes and made my way back down, past the empty glass shop fronts and scruffy howling dogs. . .

Yet if we’re speaking of deserving and getting the proper trappings, we must talk of the Shanghai Museum. The place was a knockout full of exactly the sort of high quality goods you imagine a society churning out over two thousand years of civilization. The imagery failed to pack the sheer hallucinatory punch that I remember feeling at the National Archeology Museum in Mexico City (There I remember looking at pieces of art and feeling as though I were seeing thoughts utterly alien represented. The stuff there seemed to have to referent in the western art tradition I’d grown up in. The animating minds behind those objects had journeyed down roads I’d never contemplated.) Here, though the motifs were more recognizable, it was the aesthetic experience that stuck.

About two years ago, making my way through Topkapi Palace Museum, I’d wandered into a room that displayed objects the Ottomans had received via the Silk Road trade. Prominent was a series of the most delicately painted china places, all of the most beautiful blue and white. Looking at those objects, I tried to imagine how the Ottomans must have thought of them, wondering if they sensed the Ming Dynasty to be some powerful force out there beyond their ken of which these perfect little objects was merely a mote in the eye. Did the Ottomans feel there were looking at the tip of an iceberg when they looked at these plates? Well, I when looking at them thought how marvelous a place must be that could produce such things. I thought to myself how fascinating it would be to live in such a place and breath a bit of that tradition.

And the Museum didn’t disappoint on these grounds. It had vast areas devoted to bronzes, jades, coins, and ceramics. These last were my favorite. Arranged chronologically, they moved from the most utilitarian-looking of clay containers to more finely crafted porcelains.

Initially, it was the statues that were most striking. Ducks and other animals, painted in fairly unremarkable shades, during the early Han dynasty (c.200 BC-200 AD) morphed into more odd imaginings—pots shaped like terraced houses packed with small carved figures looking off of balconies and musician figurines with smaller, assistant musicians springing of their chests and shoulders—during the subsequent Wu and Jin periods.

Then, with Tang dynasty (600-900 AD) came large, loving carved figures of camels and fierce statues of Buddhist heavenly guardians. These statues were all painted in vibrant, dripping browns, greens and oranges that seemed to fever-dreamishly melt into one another. Of all the earlier art on display these Tang pieces were the most sucessful in their ability to draw you into an utterly separate aesthetic world.

Whether the museum’s collection accurately reflected the culture’s output, I can’t say, but the sculptures definitely dropped off at this point and plates and vases took over. Initially, with the Song dynasty wares, this was not very noteworthy. The Song managed some gorgeous glazes, but that was about the whole of it. Once the Mongols (1100-1200 AD) came onto the scene, however, conquering in this direction and that, things became interesting. Persian and Islamic geometrical motifs started to appear alongside dragons. Plates started to look more like “china plates” with the soft white of the plate covered in dark-blue brush work. The Ming (1300-1600 AD) threw some red into the mix and took to painting women, families and little towns on riversides.

By the time the time the Qing entered the picture around 1600 it was clear that porcelain plates had become big business. The emperors were paying close attention to what was coming out of the kilns, appointing special envoys at the great pottery-works facilities across the empire. Since the early Qing emperors tended to live a long time and exerted such control, the ceramic designs feel as though they can truly be periodized. Each period seems to have produced something more magical than the next. The ones from the Kangxi reign take the motifs of the Ming and perfect them. Under his son, Yongzhen, there is a great deal more color thrown into the mix as well as an obsession with peaches and flowers.

The peak comes under Qianlong where each motif—be it dragons or fruit or old men carrying water buckets—achieves its perfect expression. Moreover, the colors and textures of the lacquer rise to new levels; there are imitations of marble, wood, and bamboo. New colors—pastels and subtle combinations of old choices—are introduced as well.

Ceramics aside, the most impressive display was the furniture exhibit full of richly carved sandalwood chairs, cabinets and room dividers. The rooms featuring jade and coins were also exemplary, but coming to them in the forth hour of my five hour tour, the shere abundance was daunting and too much to properly process.

The least impressive rooms were the painting and calligraphy galleries. In both cases I can only assume my boredom is largely a result of my unfamiliarity with the techniques involved. The paintings merely seemed a monotonous repetition of birds, trees, mountains, rivers and streams. Each artist’s title card would give his name, period and glaringly obvious specialty (ie. “mountains”). Occasionally an artist would paint something more interesting—demimonde paintings and parties—but no one seemed to have the eye of a Caravaggio or a Velasquez.

Now all this discussion of dinner plates, chairs and so forth might seem a bit boring and over-the-top until you start to consider the effort and skill that went into crafting these things, the lifetime of expertise that was built-up and brought to bear on these objects. To think about the attention that went into such objects is to come closer to the lives of the people who made them. To try and get near that beauty is as close as we can get to that time and that place. That’s why I have trouble with my inability to connect with any of the Chinese paintings. Here are objects that took long thought and skill to produce and I am unable to appreciate it.

This problem is even more unsettling in regards to modern Chinese art. The following day I headed to the Shanghai Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), a pretty little building in the middle of People’s Square, nestled between trees, guarded by two huge, golden, Koons-Murakami-style cartoon cat statues.

These cats are a pretty good indication of what’s on display inside. Whereas the first museum was guarded by recreations of palace beast sculptures, whose presence recalled memories of past Chinese accomplishments, these . . .well, these were just cartoons. Hell, inside everything was a cartoon. Currently on display was something called “The Animamix Biennial.”

Now, according to the New York Times, “Animamix” is a term that describes the current trend in Asian art. It’s “characteristics include the worship of youth and the pursuit of an idealized youthful beauty; strong narrative texts and images; and the use of vivid and colorful visuals derived from electronic media.” In practice this means large numbers of paintings where all the characters are drawn in cartoon form, characters recur, and everything looks like a Japanese comic book or as though it should be stitched onto the back of a child’s backpack.

The main name one associates with this sort of art is Takashi Murakami. Not only does his work feature a number of recurring characters and motifs, but Murakami goes the step further by selling his art in forms such as T-shirts and Loius Vuitton handbags. His stock characters tend to be Pokemonesque creatures whose cuteness seems always to be mutating into a fanged nightmarishness. At the Museum his influence could be seen in everything on display.

The MOCA is fairly small I spent around two confounding hours moving through it, trying to get a hold on what these artists were trying to say, trying to feel something in relation to these pieces. It was not a satisfying experience. Picture after picture and installation after installation seemed to be making the same point—namely that life has been turned into a cartoon, edges have been smoothed out, everything has been commercialized and yet, often, burbling beneath the surface of this exists an intense anger.

The best example of the overall aesthetic was a painting on the upper floor of the Seven Lucky Chinese Gods—each representing attribute, each with his own identifying item (eg a fish). This was a common motif in Chinese art and there had been several such representations at the Shanghai Museum the previous day. Here the Seven Gods were represented as manga-style characters. Now, on the one hand, there is something witty in the notion of adapting traditional motifs into modern settings, thereby questioning the relevance of their message and, equally, the certainties of a modernity that no longer admits them and can only approach such deep ideas through cartoon simulacra, but it doesn’t go beyond witty and I’m not certain it rises to the level of “art.” It seems mere kitsch. The idea is not new and the constant voicing of the same ideas by so many artists reduces its force.

The problem for me wasn’t the sentiment—in fact it’s very satisfying to know that there is a reaction to the crass commercialism that one sees everywhere in Asian media—it was the undifferentiated means of communicating this message. Even if all these artists felt the same fundamental discomfort, it seemed rather pathetic that they possessed such limited techniques for communicating it. (It’s the same reason I dislike an artist like Lichtenstien who seems to have only one idea and one way of expressing it. It’s the same reason that I only listen to the Sex Pistols once a year. It’s the reason I like artists like Bob Dylan who, finding themselves at festivals singing the same protest songs as everyone else and say, fuck it go electric.)

The sheer, tiring sameness of all this art bore down on me and I took to casting glances at other museum goers. I wondered how they felt about this and whether they were taking the same message from all this. Most of the others museum-goers were Chinese couples or groups of friends. Few seemed to be giving the pictures any sustained attention. Most strolled quickly past or took turns snapping photos of one another.

In my experience, modern art is usually intended to cause a reaction, connect you with a sensation, or intentionally avoid doing so in an attempt to criticize our modern world. Most of this art was squarely in the latter category. Whereas those ancient Chinese artists had tried to capture beauty, these artists seemed to be representing anger, despair and the need to present a plasticized front to the world. I glanced over at a nearby woman flashing a peace-sign, posing in front of a painting of a demon bear backgrounded by candy colored swirls and mulled whether she was as oblivious to the message as I was worn down by it. Though she seemed untouched by it, there was another possibility: To acknowledge and to remain indifferent. This last possibility was the more troubling.

Photos: Shanghai

2010-01-26T04:27:00.000-08:00

Click HERE for photos of Shanghai.

Shanghai, Day One

2010-01-26T01:39:00.000-08:00

I arrived in Shanghai late at night and got settled into my hostel later still. By the time I was squared away, the subways were already closed and, having no desire to deal with taxi drivers, I just made a circuit up and down the neighborhood’s main drag. It was dark, cold, and everything was closed. A few bicyclists and cars rolled along while street food vendors stood sentry on corners. And that was about it. From first impressions, Shanghai didn’t seem like much.

Morning changed this. I was up and out early. People, cars and bicyclists were everywhere and, in daylight, the first thing that hits you is the construction. It would be only minor polishing of the truth to say that, in every direction you looked, something was going up. Here a building encased in scaffolding and green tarp, there a hole in the ground where foundations are starting to take shape, and over there some ugly old building being ripped down in anticipation of a new apartment block. The sheer quantity of work going on—the manpower and material that must be brought to bare—gave me the sensation of standing at the center of an explosion, feeling the release of energy pass through me.

The negative, of course, is dust, noise and the smell of ozone. Think of the annoyance of a single project in your neighborhood. Remind yourself of the need to plug your ears, cover your nose, avoid flying welding sparks, wait for some vehicle to slowly back up across your path; now treble that.

Seeing all this makes running through the numbers inescapable. In a city of 16 million, even if every apartment housed a thousand, that still implies 16,000 blocks of apartments. So, I suppose, there was a market for all the new apartments. As to the office complexes, I was less certain. Across the Huangpu River, a vast area, only a decade removed from lying fallow, had been designated for commercial development; now it bristled with skyscrapers. Yet, no matter how much manufacturing was being done in China, and no matter how much this necessitated mustering and quartering an army of financiers, asset managers and so forth, I couldn’t see it requiring as much office space as was on offer. It was only a hunch, but a few stops into various little malls revealed swathes of unrented space. I suspected that many of those new office buildings were rising-up on faith and lacking in confirmed residents.

My first day’s goal was to go to the central People’s Square and the fashionable Xintiandi district south of there. Doing this necessitated subway navigation which led first to confusion and then to redirection by a friendly man who saw me staring dumbly at the subway map—literally everyone I have interacted with thus far has been helpful and friendly, not a single store owner, restaurateur or vendor (with the exception of those in the most heavily touristed areas) has quoted me an unreasonable price. Once reoriented, I discovered the ticket machines only accepted coins and so set off on a quest to break a large note. This took me into a series of back streets in search of a corner store. Instead I came across a sprawling marketplace.

Whereas markets in Istanbul had been rather dull affairs where every vendor seemed to have fairly similar items, and not a wide variety at that rate, this one was pleasantly varied. There were street vendors selling meat skewers, streamed dough balls filled with meat, sesame covered fried rice balls, potstickers, and a thin, flaky fried bread layered with green onion that I remembered gorging on during my last time in China.

Vegetable-wise all the usual suspects were present as well as the sort of things I’d only seen before as specially featured and highly marked up in Asian specialty markets—here it was all run of the mill. And then there were varieties of vegetable that were utterly new to me—troughs filled with things resembling, if not actually, seaweed.

Fruits and meat were fairly standard—although, as with Turkey, there were far more meat specimens on display (unlike Turkey, many of these were pork.) Chief among these were pig and chicken feet, the latter of which I have eaten and would discourage anyone who didn’t grow up enjoying them from bothering to sample.

Finally, there were the live animals; cages upon cages of live chickens and ducks, tanks full of snails, clams, eels and fish. I watched as fish were selected, snatched up flapping wildly, and unceremoniously chopped up then and there. A little ways towards the edges, where the vendors thinned out, one lady was selling giant frogs out of a burlap bag.

Now, maybe I’m just romanticizing the whole thing—perhaps its just some middle-class faux-anti-modernism that makes me love this sort of thing—but I fell such pleasure passing through markets of this nature where the blood and guts are right there to see and nothing feels hidden.

Once finished snacking and breaking bills at the market, I caught the subway down to the Xintiandi district. Emerging I was, naturally, confronted by a towering, half-constructed building encased in green tarp. Once I had turned to the left, however, I was met with a less expected sight. A long street of newly constructed, one and two story buildings all with beautiful redbrick facades. Each store housed either name-brand clothing or the sort of upper middle class boutique one might find scattered through any rich city’s more upscale neighborhoods. None of these stores had Chinese prominent and every street sign on this and surrounding streets was bilingual. I had expected Shanghai to be a fancier affair than any part of China I might have seen five years earlier, but I had not expected to be plopped down into Park Slope, Brooklyn.

I walked widely around the neighborhood, feeling extra out of place surrounded by well dressed Chinese in a pair of jeans and a worn-out Carhart jacket. The area contained such sights as the Shanghai Music conservatory—the only place I’ve ever been where good classical music cds can be bought out of street vendors’ cardboard boxes—and a wonderful park where I watched children and old men flying kites. The sky above—the whole sky, the entire time I was in the city—was a murky grey which I first took to be intense pollution, but gradually realized to be a perpetual haze of fog. The fog was so thick that, walking down a wide city street, I could not see more than four blocks on several occasions. I can only imagine the city in summer to be a nightmare of humidity.

On my way through the neighborhood, I came across a sight, utterly banal, but shocking in so far as it juxtaposed itself with the day’s earlier visions: A larger, chain-style supermarket across from which were, set up in the same red-brick-façade-style buildings, a series of food vendors hawking the same snacks I’d seen earlier. Yet, instead of operating out of carts and crumbling little holes-in-the-wall, they were ensconced in this fancy permanence. Here I could see an anthropologist’s wet dream—“the cooption of traditional market practices into new economic matrices” or some-such. Point of fact, though, it was a surprise to see what I had earlier gloried in experiencing, here reproduced in a manner more reflective of a mall food court.

I hiked north from Xintiandi to the People’s Square—not a square so much as a vast park peppered with museums, concert halls, rides, cafes, little lakes, benches for game playing, and paths for strolling. Over my time in the city I witnessed all those typical activities as well as a lone teenager practicing judo on a helpless tree and a crowd of several dozen older people, signs hung all about them, trying to find marriage partners for their unmarried children—this latter affair being, apparently, a weekly event.

The north side of the park is bounded by Nanjing Road. This is the main pedestrian street of the city and it should be ranked among the wonders of the urban world. It hits you in an explosion of neon light. Throngs upon throngs move up and down it, in and out of thousands of shops. Stores burst with customers. Snaking off it are shadowy backstreets lined with restaurants, spilling over with customers. In front of these are vendors selling food off carts.

Back on Nanjing Road the crowds continue to surge up to the park and its surrounding attractions and down toward the Bund, the embankment along the Huangpu River upon which all the old European-style commercial buildings are set. Normally pedestrians can walk along it, taking in views of the gloriously colorful skyscrapers across the way (among which is a space-ship-looking beast of a building which puts the Space Needle to shame.) At the moment, however, the entire embankment was under construction. As a result the sea of people making their way down Nanjing Road bottlenecked on the final street corner and took their pictures from there. And I, not having brought my camera along, simply stood looking out across the water thinking how ephemeral my once secure American world now felt. In all the smiling faces I saw up and down that road I felt as though I were seeing the future. I wasn’t sure I saw myself reflected.

Introduction

2010-01-26T00:57:00.001-08:00

Somewhere, buried deep within a behemoth copy of Mote’s Imperial China, 900-1800, I remember coming across the most romantic of ideas. The historian was describing the activities of some barbarian king out on the periphery of the Chinese empire. While the Chinese themselves were busy knuckling down into one of their declinatory phases, this particular king was vigorously building his own little empire. He was importing scholars, offering pay at good rates, as well as constructing a city for his once nomadic people. He was out there in the wilderness, striving, creating a new world out of thin air. I forget his name, I forget the year, all I remember is the beauty of the idea. How must it have felt for that king to have watched a new world rise up around him?

I wonder if a Chinese—at least one living in a major city—feels something approaching those same feelings. To be living in the country at the moment is to see a new world springing up at every turn.