Noki-yeah!
I did a mental freeze-frame jump-in-the-air cheer while reading that title, I hope you all did too.
I just installed some terrible Nokia software, as a last-ditch effort, because Windows 7 can't or won't properly install drivers for my phone, which means I can't send pictures across to my PC via Bluetooth.
And as it turns out, the software actually isn't terrible. I can sync and backup all the data back and forth from my phone, and I can even compose text messages on my PC and send/receive them via my phone, which is incredibly useful, since I have very limited Chinese literacy, and MDBG's kickass PC on-screen dictionary isn't available on my phone.
And... something which is really mind-blowing for me... there's internet tethering built right in; I just plug my phone into a USB port or connect via Bluetooth, click a "Connect to the internet" in the software, and I'm surfing via a tethered connection. Suck it, Apple.
These may be fairly commonplace for PC phone software these days, but the last time I installed software on my PC for my cell phone, all it did was give me a handy new way to crash my computer. So this is kind of a revelation.
So, in celebration… pictures, still warm from my pocket:
 Ordered a cappuccino, and I got this. |
 Some kind of beverage in the supermarket. Thinking I shouldn't buy a few to take on the plane. |
 I would actually pay to see this movie. |
 Ditto this one. |
Genderalizations
There's a curious aspect to my social life in China, and it's one which has puzzled me since I first started to make friends here.
Specifically, my friends are overwhelmingly young women, generally between 20 and 27 years old. Not to look a gift horse in the mouth – I certainly don't regret any of my friendships – but I've spent some time trying to figure out the reasons why this state of affairs exists.
If I'm being completely honest, the simple fact that I find young women pleasant to look at certainly numbers among them, but I like to think I'm not that much of a pig, and that this is a fairly peripheral consideration.
Doubtless, the fact that most of my time in China has thus far been spent in youth hostels has something to do with it. These places tend to attract a younger set of people – staff ( yuan gong / 员工 ) and patrons ( ke hu / 客户 ) alike – and most establishments like to have personable young women working there. They help present the best face, set customers at ease in what is often an unfamiliar environment, and (especially at the bar) increase sales. However, simple exposure to people whose job it is to be friendly wouldn't explain why these people are now my friends. People generally don't enjoy taking their work home with them, and I've had more invitations to homes, dinners, and trips (i.e., more than none) than this would warrant.
Who else would I have been talking about?
That my passport has "United States" stamped on it makes me more of a curiosity than a target for romance or matrimony. In fact, being non-Chinese would eliminate me from consideration among most of my friends; having a relationship with a foreigner is just too much trouble, they say… and often, their parents just wouldn't approve.
As far as being a foreigner, there is also the superstar factor to consider. In many places, especially those geared towards tourists or normally devoid of them altogether, a foreigner is an automatic celebrity. Pale skin (skin whitening creams abound on the cosmetics market) and rounded eyes (eyelid surgery, first popularized in South Korea and Japan, is growing more and more widespread) affords you a certain status that is simply unavailable to people with Asian features.
The thing is, of course, over here I don't look foreign. I've been asked countless times where I'm from, and taking stabs at the answer is a popular pastime among new acquaintances. While Japan and Korea tend to be the most popular, you could name virtually any province in China and chances are someone has guessed that as my family home ( lao jia / è€å®¶ ). Only one person has ever correctly identified me as American, and that was a fellow Californian who noticed the REI labels on my clothing. Lately, I'm increasingly being pegged as local to wherever I currently am, which is unspeakably gratifying.
Returning to physical appearances, apparently here in China I'm considered… cute. Even though it's a thoroughly distasteful concept that I can entertain neither very seriously nor at length, it is something I've been exposed to fairly consistently, so it merits a mention.
Okay, okay, I get it.
My only possible conclusion is that the fat clown archetype is subject to a fairly peculiar set of emotional responses on this side of the Pacific.
Continuing with physical factors, the vast majority of young women I meet in China are non-smokers. In fact, only one of my female friends smokes regularly, and she's just started a campaign to quit. In contrast, only two of my male friends don't smoke on a regular basis. This may seem like a petty issue where friendship is concerned – after all, there's cigarette smoke hanging in the air in essentially every public place in China – until you consider the following two points:
1) There is a fairly laissez-faire attitude among many Chinese men towards dental hygiene (incidentally, something I have not often observed in women).
2) People here, particularly men, tend to be recklessly cavalier about personal space.
If you have ever carried on a conversation with a close-talking chain smoker who's neglected to brush his teeth for the last three days, you will understand how difficult it is to reach a mutual understanding of any kind, regardless how interesting the other person is.
Still, after all that, I'm not satisfied. After conversations with several friends on the subject, I've come to the following conclusion: I'm friends with so many young women because, by and large, men in China are less interesting.
That said, the only person in China with whom I've been up into the wee hours arguing politics has been male, and I have a number of male friends who I trust and can relate to just as much as anyone else. So this is certainly not universal; only a general impression based on my admittedly narrow range of experience.
However, the culture here is still steadfastly patriarchal, and the one-child policy has seen to it that the past few generations of men have been brought up in any combination of two environments: shamelessly spoiled from birth as the sole hope of a family's future, or as the unremittingly dominant force in any personal or professional relationship with a woman. Chauvinism is the norm, and even dynamic, independent women accept – if not support – statements about gender that, in the Western world, would get you icy looks of slightly incredulous scorn.
In many cases, this has resulted in a certain breed of man that has simply failed to grow up. They are accustomed to constant validation, have their every need promptly and efficiently attended to, and generally feel that money is the solution to any obstacle, or the goal of any interaction.
There are, of course, elements there that I recognize in my own upbringing and personality, which is possibly why I cannot bear to see them displayed in others. Truths about myself always seem uglier, somehow, when reflected in someone else's eyes.
So, while the man-child hordes smoke, bully, shout, push, rut, and spit their way through the upper echelons of society, the women of China keep their heads down. They work harder, are paid less, endure more hardship and condescension. They also develop tougher skin, better critical thinking, and more sophisticated senses of humour.
Or they just get really mean.
So, I take a quick inventory of some of my female friends in China, and mentally compare them to the average guys on the street or playing Counterstrike in the internet bars ( wang ba / ç½‘å§ ).
There is an artist and teacher, whose mother often had to choose between feeding herself or her child. Despite this, she has nevertheless made enough room in her dreams for an eventual visit to the poorest provinces of China, where she hopes to fund a small school or some kind of food program.
She studies Goya, Bellini, and Qi Bai Shi with as much open, brilliant pleasure as she absorbs Mr. Bean and Crayon Shin-Chan, and she's chronically short of money because she spends it all on friends and family.
There's an entrepreneur, simultaneously one of the sharpest and most scattered minds I have ever encountered, who somehow manages to successfully juggle the often conflicting demands of her husband, child, and business.
Through it all, she maintains an unrelentingly sunny disposition and a practical yet optimistic outlook on life uncluttered by undue sentimentality. She navigates street markets, contract negotiations, trade conferences, extended family, and labyrinthine local politics with aplomb. Apparently, the only thing that scares her is the inevitability of cooking dinner.
There's a young professional photographer who insists on making her own way, despite her doting father's considerable wealth. She smokes like a chimney, curses like a sailor, can drink me under the table, and strides fearlessly through Shanghai every day, roaring and invincible, armed with talent and flashing, exuberant youth.
She is also irresistibly addicted to Red Vines, just quit smoking and drinking – the cursing is still in full flow – and cleans her apartment on her hands and knees because she refuses to make the compromises in cost and effectiveness that come with buying a mop.
There's a shy, willowy English major, not long out of college and all but ignored by her family. She takes what jobs she can find, traveling wherever there's work and money to be had, waiting and saving for some indefinable future.
In the intervals between uncertain work and uneasy sleep, she spends time and money learning to play the zither ( qin / ç´ ), simply because she thinks it's beautiful.
Honestly, there's just no contest.
3/31 : Nanjing – Suzhou
This is part of a series of posts that... etc etc, I'm already getting bored with this. This post and, if I get around to writing them, the last one or two in this series are/will be pretty awful. I advise against reading them. Some of the pictures might be okay, though.
—————————————————————
This guy.
At one of the great bridges spanning the Yangtze in Nanjing, we had yet another sales bonanza sprung on us.
Not too shabby.
I actually thought about buying one; a tiny jar, with an entire poem painted on the inside with a single-horsehair brush.
—————————————————————
After a good night's sleep – I have discovered that going to bed early is key during these trips, where the normal wake-up call is 6am – I am back in a more suitable frame of mind, amused instead of irritated at the slightly preposterous notion that this is a tour.
From my perspective, it is most like a Florida timeshare deal, where you might get a free weekend in Orlando in exchange for sitting through an interminable series of sales pitches. The benefit for the salesman is obvious; their pitch is delivered to a captive audience and thinly disguised as entertainment. The benefit for the tourist, is… well… shit, you got a free weekend in Florida, what do you have to bitch about?
It was fairly clear to me at the outset what this "tour" actually was, and yet most of our fellow travelers seem thoroughly oblivious. I have yet to decide whether this is evidence of a fundamental disconnect between wealth and critical thinking, or this is actually the kind of experience these people are looking for. While an unpleasant thought, I am increasingly convinced that the latter is not an impossibility.
In all honesty, I can see how this kind of thing would appeal to a certain mindset. There is a fairly large set of people out there who are disinterested in or unable to experience China on a local level. They simply lack the necessary time, energy, empathy, or – sadly – skin color to relate to the local population on their own wavelength.
I'm not fully convinced of the value of this as a form of cultural exchange.
However, when it comes to the other factors, it doesn't take long before you can reliably identify those who have little actual interest in their surroundings or the people occupying them for more than a week at a time. Rather, their primary motivation is being able to say they've been there, ideally while having tangible evidence on display to back it up.
In the simplest possible terms, they're the suckers.
I said it, I meant it: it REALLY doesnt matter what's for sale.
Their shopping experience has been thoroughly sterilised. There are no inappropriately curious mongrels nosing at your crotch, or whiffs of rancid shit or stinky tofu ( chou dou fu / è‡è±†è… ）(it can be surprisingly difficult to tell one from the other) wafting in from the neighbours. Instead, there are simply rows upon rows of near-identical products, between a battery of buzzing lights and gleaming marble tile.
Even the sales people seem to have been sanitised for their protection; sleek young men and women sporting identical uniforms glide back and forth across the sales floor, flat black gazes mirrored in their polished buttons, following your movements around the room.
The only thing missing is a paper sash to tear off them before buying something.
Contrast this with the experience shopping on the street, where one's salesperson is just as likely to be a high schooler with Eastwood eyes smoking a cigarette, or an old woman – I hesitate to use the word "crone" however much the situation might call for it – with a decided lack of teeth, washing underwear in a dark corner and gumming a betel nut with grim determination.
That's her, far left.
I use the word "mob," but this is actually a meticulously organized sort of assault. There are entire industries built upon the steel-belted radials of these tour buses, sprung up virtually overnight especially to siphon money from overseas bank accounts into Chinese coffers.
Honesty is a wonderful thing.
In truth, I envy these people. Much like insurance companies, they have struck upon a near-perfect business model.
They have a captive audience that is mandated by law, as the local governments require any tour group of this type to stop at one shopping destination per day.
Their ventures are subsidized with taxpayer money. To put this into perspective, our week-long tour cost 99 US Dollars. One night at any one of the hotels we've stayed at would normally cost anywhere between $150 and $300. Our group numbered well above 300 members, and there are nonstop trips throughout the tourist season. Even with massive group rate discounts, you can imagine the government outlay.
There must be similar operations everywhere – if the U.S. has none, then we are irretrievably silly – but it is yet another example of how personal relationships ( guan xi / 关系 ）can make nearly anything possible. Apparently, if you are friends with the right people (or grease the right wheels), your government will pay through the nose to bring wealthy, uninformed customers to your door and trap them for hours in the same room as your top salespeople.
It is, in the barest terms, an enormous hoax. The same products sold in these outlets can be bought on the street, sometimes just next door, for a quarter of the price. But traveling in these tours, you never see the street – for much of the customer base, that's kind of the whole point.
And that's why I've four more days with people who read books with titles like "The Power of Passion: Achieve Your Own Everests".
4/2 Hanghzou : AM
This is part of a series of posts that are going to detail my time as part of a week-long, five-star-studded, guided group tour my father arranged for us. Initially I thought it would be a short trip around Shanghai, and agreed to go in the hopes that maybe… just maybe… my dad and I could spend some quality time together.
…Yeah.
In any event, the posts are going to come more or less in reverse order, since the trip is almost over and I’m writing what’s most fresh in my mind at the moment. There’s going to be more exposition in the posts to come, since explaining how these tours actually work at the business level is something I’m going to reserve for when my impressions get drier and I’m bored of writing about the whole thing anyway.
Pictures are also coming, when I get a chance.
This is a perfect illustration of how my mind is going. I feel like I've definitely written this post already, but for the life of me I can't find any trace of it… in my notebook OR on this site. I probably wrote it once, decided it was far too boring, and scrapped it in favor of the PM post. In any case here it is, reborn in the interest of my laughably incompetent brand of continuity.
—————————————————————
I didn't take any photos this time, so I just stole these from my old Hangzhou gallery.
I firmly believe that much of China's scenery is best complemented by alternating rain and sunshine. There's something about the willows that inevitably gather around lakes and rivers that is just begging to be rained on, and when sunlight – even the peculiarly sepia, withered sunlight of the more populated urban centers – deigns to play off of the jeweled branches the effect is, in a word, perfect. There aren't many things that can make me just stand around and feel happy, but that combination of mist and light is one of them.
Frustratingly, capturing that atmosphere on film (or a digital sensor) is a feat of skill which has simply proven to be beyond me, even with the $1500 in camera equipment I have lassoed to my body whenever I'm traveling.
Yup, stolen. I took these last May.
The boat ride cut across a corner of the lake and deposited us near a parking lot, lasting a charming fifteen minutes or so. We then waited for a rather less enchanting half-hour while our bus made its way through rush-hour traffic toward us. Adults leaned on nearby trees, chatting with unfounded optimism about what might await us at lunch, while their children chased each other aimlessly around the parking lot, occasionally straying into traffic.
Once the bus reached us, we piled on board for a short drive to a Longjing ( long jing / 龙井 ) tea plantation. Longjing green tea, as explained to us by a severe-looking woman in an equally severe navy skirt suit while we sat in a stark white room, is known to be one of the finest teas in the world.
She then held forth at length on the health benefits of green tea, occasionally rapping on the table to get our attention if we were insolent enough speak to each other. It seemed less a sales pitch than a stern talking-to, but sales pitch it was, right down to her trick of "proving" green tea's health benefit.
Our schoolmarm took a handful of uncooked white rice and placed it in a cup with some spirit of iodine and water. Allowing us to note the dark – and therefore quite obviously toxic – color, she then poured in some tea, which cleared the iodine almost instantly and started absorbing the color from the rice.
Despite the gasps and fumbling for credit cards that ensued from my fellow tourists, I remained skeptical – knowing that, you know, iodine is important – merely making a note that I should look up the chemistry involved.
(Nerd alert)
As it turns out… this is one of the very things that can make green tea unhealthy if used to excess. Tea – including green tea – has a high fluoride content. This is suspected to increase in the presence of water and air pollution, of which China famously has no shortage.
As fluoride is a chemical antagonist to iodine, it comes as no surprise that green tea would clear iodine from a glass of water. The thing is, despite the icky color, iodine actually helps with proper thyroid function and prevents diseases like fluorosis, which has actually been linked to heavy tea consumption – and has a curiously high incidence in China.
Not to mention green tea's unusually high concentrations of aluminum, which has been linked to Alzheimer's.
It just seems amusing that what was convincing these people to shell out $110 per pound for green tea was the very thing that might: a) help them forget – along with everything else – how they were fleeced, and b) cripple them in such a way as to prevent them from being able to take their revenge.
Snake oil salesmen haven't gone away; they've just diversified.
Then we went to lunch, which was appropriately terrible.
4/2, Hangzhou – Shanghai : PM
This is part of a series of posts that are going to detail my time as part of a week-long, five-star-studded, guided group tour my father arranged for us. Initially I thought it would be a short trip around Shanghai, and agreed to go in the hopes that maybe… just maybe… my dad and I could spend some quality time together.
…Yeah.
In any event, the posts are going to come more or less in reverse order, since the trip is almost over and I’m writing what’s most fresh in my mind at the moment. There’s going to be more exposition in the posts to come, since explaining how these tours actually work at the business level is something I’m going to reserve for when my impressions get drier and I’m bored of writing about the whole thing anyway.
Pictures are also coming, when I get a chance.
—————————————————————
Seeing the now-familiar Shanghai skyline approaching in the distance, my heart lifted. I knew it was just a matter of time before the bus would stop, the tour group would file off one by one at Cheng Huang Temple (cheng huang miao / 城éšåº™) -- a famous shopping district -- and I would be off on my own to meet up with my friend Susan (xiao ye / å°ä¹Ÿ) for dinner, which I anticipated would be the first satisfying meal of the week.
Â
She also hates having her picture taken.
I'm not exactly sure when Susan and I became friends, or how; one night I was casting a jaundiced eye over her and what I assumed to be her boyfriend, quickly dismissing them as yet more of the many spoiled offspring of Chinese nouveau-riche wandering around Shanghai. The next thing I knew we were chatting every night over beers and endless baskets of french fries, or playing Liar's Dice in fancy Shanghai nightclubs with nine or ten of her girlfriends while sleek German businessmen in Italian suits stood nearby, eyes bloodshot with alcohol and envious lust, buying us all drinks.
In a perfect illustration of how not to trust initial impressions, Susan is fascinating. She has the stellar education and multinational background that is a natural result of her father's wealth, but that she did not take for granted... a rarity among privileged youth (myself included). Somehow, Susan's father instilled in her a true appreciation for work by -- and she even admits this is strange -- letting her do whatever she wanted, frequently adding his own whimsical brand of humour to the mix.
One of her endless supply of childhood stories involves her borrowing a schoolmate's pair of coveted shoes. She then promptly buried them in the backyard, hoping they would germinate and grow into a tree that would bear more shoes as fruit. Her father stood by and watched wordlessly, cigarette in hand. As she patted the last handful of dirt down over the shoes, he called the gardening staff over to make sure they got enough water.
Now she's a photographer at a Shanghai style magazine and apparently helps manage a staff of artists and editors. Since nobody at the company has asked her age, she doesn't have to deal with people questioning her based on the somewhat astonishing fact she's only 22.
At any rate, our time now is limited to sharing rare meals and the even rarer alcoholic bender, making plans for trips that will never happen, and talking about meals we'd cook if her roommate, craving French fries the previous month, had omitted the final step of burning down the kitchen.
Tonight, we'd decided on Thai food.
My father, ever the organizer, kept asking me when and where my friends were going to meet me, and I could only shrug in response and say I didn't know. This frustrated him so much that he eventually decided to just leave well enough alone, which I think was the most prudent option.
Once we reached the shopping district, I bid goodbye to my father and walked off in a random direction, eager enough to get away from the tour group that I waited until they were out of sight before asking a stranger on the street the general route to get to People's Square. Susan hadn't gotten off work yet, so I'd decided to visit my friends at the Etour youth hostel before dinner.
It was exhilarating, in a small but significant way, to finally be able to just walk, on my own terms. I didn't have to check my stride to match the octogenarians in our group, I didn't have to constantly double back to make sure I hadn't ventured too far forward, and I didn't have to search for our tour guide's waving flag in a sea of nearly identical banners.
I went down side streets and alleys, past street stalls selling "man tou" buns (man tou / 馒头）, revealed in sudden whirling plumes of steam like gently exploding clouds as shop owners enticingly lifted the basket covers. Old men, many still dressed in pajamas, sat in the street playing cards as half-feral dogs tumbled joyfully with their grandchildren nearby. I stepped over the occasional puddle of filth, into one art gallery and two curio shops, and around more than a few beggars. After a week of forced conversation with the kind of people who enjoy guided tours through a sanitized world, it was pure joy.
Â
See?
The sun set slowly over the skyline, and I took a quick compass bearing to make sure I would stay on track to my target, the distant Sauron's tower looming over People's Square... the Shanghai J.W. Marriott. Not so much because I needed to, more because it reinforced the feeling of being out on my own rather than simply treading in the footsteps of a tour guide and 200 retirees.
Half an hour later, I reached the massive five-star hotel. Pausing briefly to avoid being run over by an impatient Ferrari, I walked past it to a side alley which led to the youth hostel, and stopped to exchange a few words with the milk-tea vendor, who was sitting on the curb with her family, braiding her daughter's hair as her twin sons chased each other around the neighbouring fruit shop.
Sipping a milk tea, I stepped over the hostel's threshold to Lang Lang's incredulous cry of "What the hell are you doing here??" and a quick hug across the counter. We chatted quietly about tours, fathers, and life in general until Susan sent word that she was on the road. I said a quick goodbye, as they all are these days -- farewells hold less and less meaning with the knowledge that I'm always within an email or text message's reach of any of my friends in China -- and hopped into a taxi.
Â
Clockwise from left: Padh See Ew, Papaya salad, red bean coconut cakes, and lettuce wraps. Top left: Susan's empty bowls of green curry.
Susan and I met at Ma Boon Krong restaurant not far from People's Square in Shanghai, where the food was just a cut above average as far as Thai food goes, but absolutely mind-blowing compared to what I'd been subjected to for the past week.
Pork padh-see-ew, slithering with oil and sweet soy sauce, basil and onions slowly wilting among fat rice noodles shot through with golden clouds of egg. Green curry, a strange nuclear-bright variety that I suspected was tailored to Chinese palates, had far more sweetness and less spice than what I'm used to, the curry's flavour almost drowning in rich coconut milk.
The green papaya salad was a joy, tossed lightly with lime juice, fiery Thai bird chilies, garlic, and fish sauce. It was meant to be wrapped in lettuce, but I soon dispensed with the unwieldy leaves and started eating the stuff plain.
A papaya milkshake and red-bean coconut jelly cakes rounded out our table. We ate until we could eat no more, defiantly took a few more bites, and finally fell back in our chairs, burping contentedly and gazing benevolently at the devastation through heavy-lidded eyes.
After the long day, and a week of 6AM wake-up calls, I'm afraid I was even more of a desperately boring dinner companion than normal. Luckily, Susan and I are comfortable enough to not have to keep a conversation going, and we were satisfied with making occasional fun of the performers on stage and appreciative mooing noises at the food.
Â
Thank God for real food.
—————————————–
Mingtown Etour International Youth Hostel
No.55, Jiangyin Road (江阴路55å·)
Huangpu District, 200003
Puxi, Shanghai, China
T: +86 02163277766
Ma Boon Krong Restaurant
Hong Kong New World Tower, 4th floor ( 香港新世界，4楼）
Huai Hai Zhong Lu #300 (淮海ä¸è·¯ 300å·ï¼‰
Puxi, Shanghai, China