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CHINADAYS

blogging from china 2003

 

explainer:

I stayed in China for an entire year, a year, which seemed to me never ending.
While in Beijing I studied at Beida, where most of China's top foreign diplomats are schooled in foreign languages and diplomacy tactics to deflect barbarians. In January 2003 I moved to Shanghai, China's capital of commerce to work for Chinese magazine Vision, now defunct. Shortly after arriving in the city I joined Shanghai born Lian in teaching dance classes and helping run JazzduFunk, the dance school she had started a few months prior.
At about the same time I started to write short commentaries about life in Shanghai for a friend's website Rice Asia. Sebastien who runs the website also put together a charming movie about shanghai. he filmed it in March in awful conditions - permanent rain, no heating, overcast skies to name a few.
For a very short time I published a blog, which was meant to be interactive. You can read it below.

Wednesday June 11 2003

15 minutes of shame.
Shanghai TV came to film our dance school and now they also want to make a documentary about my life in shanghai. Not that this is my first time on Chinese TV. In 1998 I introduced my friend Hai Chen's potteries to a thrilled audience. This time around I am supposed to introduce myself (and obviously will plug the dance school in the process). They specifically wanted to introduce a Western woman living in Shanghai. The term "living" may be a bit of a hyperbole here, and during the two hour interview preceding actual shooting I barely managed to evade such questions as "What do you think of Shanghai compared to other cities in the world " or "What are some of the problems of living in China/Shanghai?" -- like, duh, China?!?!! My responses were a bit toned down and conciliatory, or at least were meant to be, because you never know what you are actually saying in Chinese. I have a suspicion that generally Westerners, including myself, have such a lack of command in Chinese that our utterances invariably come across as rude. On the other hand there seems little deductive thinking going on among the Chinese which makes speaking Chinese not just a physically challenging endeavour but a psychologically exhausting one: while the physical struggle peaks with hitting the right tone and underscoring the difference between shi and zhi and chi, the mental effort is never ending. Much of what seems implicit in some of the languages i know - ok, English, the other five languages are almost up there with Chinese in terms of pleonasms and redundancies - is excruciatingly explicit in Chinese, making it very taxing for those who love speed and efficiency. In Chinese, the semantics of context, motivation, purpose, cause and effect must be spelled out and repeated three times. The required verbalization of the obvious is such as to make the expenditure of energy required, mental or otherwise, just short of illegal.

While searching for the Japanese Ringu movie yesterday a Danish friend agreed that stating the obvious and making others state the obvious is as much of a Chinese specialty as glutinous wrapped rice. Case in point my friend brought up: you are about to leave a store, you are practically in the door frame, one foot is out in the street already, when you hear either a bystander or shop clerks, casual browsers, harried messenger boys - anything on two legs named zhang or ming or deng standing near the door - bellow out at you: zou le (prounounced couuu leeeei), meaning, you guessed it - "leaving". They also love to greet you with "hui lai le!" translating as "you came back!" when you, yes, come back from somewhere. One woman who runs around my building checking everybody's gas count, recently stormed my apartment at 8am and seeing me half asleep with cereals in hand trekked through my kitchen, paused and then stated importantly: ni mei shang ban 你没上班you are not at work. how do you say in Chinese, that's none of your business? The Chinese are obsessed with putting Westerners in front of a camera and on TV.

Tuesday, June 03, 2003

hit and run
on the same subject i would like to point ou that this is not just frivolous, unsubstantiated whining - i was almost run over twice on my way to work today, and not run over in the lightly humorous way, but in the very literal, car hitting you by a hair way. twice. saturday, walking to the dance studio i watched a kid barely escape being killed by an oncoming car. people in front of me screamed, arms shot up in the air, others turned away covering their eyes with their hands or crouched down as if in pain. i don't know if the kid was seriously hurt, his mother scooped him up and a crowd gathered immediately. There are no statistics on the number of accidents in Shanghai or in all of China, but from mere observation of the traffic here it must be worse than italy. i remember reading an article on taxi drivers in china. one of them explained earnestly that if they hit a passerby, they would be better off killing the person in the process rather than "just" injuring them. it helps avoid hospital bills or lawsuits. This advice was apparently dispensed by the driving school!?!

beiing stinks
More Beijing Bashing another nasty comment on Beijing _ according to my humble persona Beijing should be a suburb of Shanghai. It has no business being a city, let alone a country's capital. They'll tell you Beijing has more "culture" and "history" and the people are "friendlier". Pure government propaganda and complete nonsense. By culture they mean whatever has survived the 100 plus year onslaught of modern Chinese history starting with the homegrown rebels - one of them back in the 19th century claiming to be the son or brother of Jesus? Was it the Taiping rebellion? - by way of the Japanese (Nanjing), the British (burning down the original Summer palace), the French (deconstructing architecture in the French concession) and the Americans (proselytizing with zeal in the countryside). But most of all the Chinese themselves, or rather their inept leadership, starting with Cixi and the megalomaniac bosses of 1949. So what has survived? A paltry few dilapitated relics and dusty alleys. Whatever is not dilapitated was burnt or destroyed or self destructed with decay and rot to be haphazardly rebuilt not too long ago. The Forbidden City, the Summer Palace, the Bell Tower, even the Great Wall - none have escaped this trend. The Great Wall as it stands today is a monument to modern Chinese construction hysteria; disco lighting floods the wall, hills, and every errant mosquito. And i have to sneak this in: It's is no surprise that China's best known monument served the lofty purpose of keeping foreigners where they belong - abroad. Ah yes ignorance and xenophobia go nicely together. But back to the relics. I am sad to report that to our dismay the Temple of Heaven, that truly unique and impressive ceremonial site / architectural feat is a complete fake as well. As fake as the adidas sneakers i wear to the gym.

The authentic temple of heaven dated back to the 14th century or even earlier, and featured the heavenly hall, a soaring structure held in place by wood beams and nothing else except the usual green, yellow, blue and red paint. (see here) Our enthusiasm about standing in front of the real thing evaporated when we discovered the structure had been burnt down, i forgot by whom or what, and was rebuilt from scratch in the late 19th century ( i may have some dates confused, but you get the general drift). Nothing you look at is older than 200 years, yet everyone keeps pontificating about beijing being the repository of middle kingdom history and culture and so forth, despite glaring evidence to the contrary. Beyond the few patches of hutong surviving crammed between buildings that look like a cheap set blade runner set, and the sparse cultural leftovers which invariably have had a lifting and in some cases a complete makeover, there is really nothing cultural nor historical in beijing. Unless you count the sandstorms from the Gobi desert, but even those are diminishing due to government interference (planting trees to the north of beijing to stop the gusts).

The Beijing cultural scene is equally dreary and how could it be otherwise, the place reeks of politics. The few chinese punks wearing black and looking oppressed do not exactly alleviate the mood. I can't yet exactly assess if Beijingese really have more of an affinity for cultural entertainment than shanghaiese do, but i would guess if they do that is about to change as shanghai plays catch up after years of having its revenue diverted to - you guessed it - helping fuel the growth of Beijing. Is it any wonder the shanghaiese can't stand the beijingese?! They have been feeding the capital for years without seeing any of the wealth generated rub off on their city and now that the shanghai clique is running the country - Jiang and Zhu to name only two - they do so with a vengeance.

the most i can say for the capital really, is that it has an interesting or at least controversial architectural project running, generally referred to as the "egg", the building of a new opera house next to tian an men, in the shape of a - what else? - egg. But it's a transparent, high tech egg, with an underwater glass tunnel leading into it. this womb analogy, not surprisingly, is the brain child of a french architect whose name i forgot, and whose plans were widely protested against by chinese architects - their subtle argument being that foreigners should not be in charge of building chinese opera houses. hm. where's the great wall when you need one? but if you want to read more why don't you google "beijing egg". And that's enough about Beijing for one year, I'll dissect the shanghaiese next. Or rather i will grossly generalize as i usually do. for more on the egg click here

Tuesday, May 27, 2003

take me home
Shanghai is supposed to be hot or tropical even, but so far i can't say i've noticed any excess chaleur - on the contrary, we're still wearing jackets and the shanghaiese keep gabbing about shufu (comfortable) and that it will get hot in one or two months, ah. They ve'been saying this since January of course, and always with the same conviction. Perhaps this is the Chinese idea of cracking a joke. For instance. Recently on my way home, just at the intersection to Hunan Lu, the cabdriver asked me whether he should make a right. this sounded strange, and so i distractedly looked out to my right to see what was there because i had forgotten, even though i pass the spot every day. the street i live in, the famous Huuuuuuuuuuuunan Lu is to the left of that intersection - but on the right i could only see one of those government subsidized parks with carefully arranged people and trees, the sort of thing the TCG sets up in two months - a park! We need a park! now! and then drumrolls into life as Prosperity Park or Park of the Great Way forward and some such thing.

Nonetheless, people stroll obediently while the traffic roars alongside it. I was really tired that day so i barely managed to say anything in Chinese let alone express aggravation - i just indicated the park, waved my hand and raised my eyebrows - what, you want to take me for a ride in the park?!. I wasn't even surprised that he would want to drive into the park, because generally cabdrivers in Shanghai are a) insane and b) incompetent. The cabdriver chap was cracking up, he was barely breathing. Haha! he was gasping, it's a joke. it's a joke. Haha. Insane. Incompetent. Indeed. By the way they never understand Hunan Lu either. It takes 5 minutes every day to explain where i want to go. Hunan Lu. Funan lu? No, Hunan lu. Henan lu? No. No listen, HUNAN LU. Hunan Lu? Hunan Lu? Ah HUUUNAN Lu. ok! ok! no ploblem. At least cabdrivers in shanghai are no smelly.

In fact, it's great progress compared to Beijing. The Shanghaiese hate Beijing and i completely agree with them on this. The Shanghaiese think Beijingers only have themselves to blame for the SARS epidemic there. When four Beijingers escaped from quarantine to Shanghai, spreading infection fear across the city, there was general indignation here. One Chinese guy I talked to about the low number of cases in Shanghai told me it wasn't surprising at all if Beijing was riddled with SARS cases. It's dirty, he said, it's dirty and there is no hygiene. The people all smell badly, dress badly and have no manners. Peasants, he snorted. I told him i completely agreed. Then I asked him if he had ever been to Beijing. No, of course not, he said. Then how would he know about Beijng being dirty and disgusting I asked him. He gave me a look of contempt. You can see it! You can see it when Beijing people come to Shanghai! You can smell people from Beijing. Makes sense to me.

Friday, May 23, 2003

almost famous
I worked as an extra in chinese low low loooooow budget made for TV soap opera. so low budget they used the same soup bowl (including soup) two days in a row, serving it up to poor "character actor" at about 6am and he promptly threw a tantrum - talk about saving face. soup flying, bowl smashing, yelling and cursing, and near fist fight with whoever came up with this brilliant & tres draconian cost saving measure. our character actor then disappeared, presumably on his way to the restroom to relieve serious la duzi (diarrhea) and only resurfaced a good half hour later. the perils of film making.

Wednesday, May 21, 2003

the state of censorship
So many thanks for the books N+J, and i am always surprised they don't tamper with the reading material everyone is sending me - "they" being TCG (the chinese government), especially after witnessing the ravaging incurred by innocent danish marzipan which arrived in shanghai battered and beaten and greatly reduced in number. Much more politically sensitive fare seems to make it unscathed: So far there has been no effort at blocking German news magazine Spiegel from arriving at Hunan Lu, and many thanks to one Paris based Publicis employee (PBPE) who sends them to me with - do i dare say german? - regularity. c'est une joke. may have news on the dance school, DL called saying she may have found a new place for us to use as a studio! and i almost forgot, tomorrow i am working as an extra in a chinese movie. what's the news in switzerland? cow in quarantine in ueber unter allgaeu?