Shanghai Monkey Business
Climbing High, and the Peculiarities of an Insta-Job (just add noodles)

"In the twinkling of an eye, the magnificent building, situated at a diamond quarter of the First Street of China in the downtown district of Shanghai, has remained in fine Italian style of primitive simplicity and elegance. It has now become a world-famous hotel that distinguished quests[sic], businessmen and tourists from all over the world yearn for."
--From the "Pacific Hotel" Brochure.

I would not say I had done any yearning for a stay in this rather dumpy old hotel on the edge of People's Squarewhere my father is staying on business, but I did want to take a bath after my 23 hour train ride from Gaungzhou. Which I did. Then I slept three hours. Then I sunk into a net bar. Then I took another bath. My father worries about the black goop that comes out of the drain of the tub, but I told him I was just happy there weren't any leaches.

That very night, I took the elevator to the tenth floor in a bit of exploring. I was suddenly on the roof! And there, a catwalk! Up the spire we climbed, past the glass clock face and higher and out for a crow's nest view of People's Square. This is something I enjoyed in college and something for which I had to answer to the authorites for.


Going Out for Noodles, Coming Back with a Job

I settled into a little routine of web design in my Dad's hotel room while he worked. That noon, I went out for a bowl of noodles around the corner. Crowded as the place was, I soon had a young couple sharing my table with me. I made some small talk, asking them if they were students. Yes. In Shanghai? Yes. What do you study? Japanese. Business Japanese.

The boy didn't look like a "business Chinese" major. He had a skull tattoo on his arm and called himself "snake." "Like a PS2 player." I told him I, sorry, I'm a Nintendo player. He was very friendly and, like most rebel images, this seemed more just a protective veneer.

When he asked me what I was doing in Shanghai, I said that I was just traveling and visiting my dad, but mentioned that I might like to work here. Before I knew it, we were off to the school where he had been learning Japanese, I was meeting with the manager, and giving an "sample English lesson" about "Love and Marriage" in North America. Suddenly I was being offered a job with the option to sign a contract and I was making more money in one hour than my entire one-month volunteer stipend in Thailand. I start next week. We'll just see what happens as my visa nears expiration in another three weeks.

This China!

The Train:
Chapter CLVIII In Your Young Narrator's Continuing Travel Chronical

The last 23 hours had me experiencing my first ever bedless overnight train journey. Thanks to my decision to venture across China (from GuangZhou to ShangHai) during the summer high season, there were no more beds, so my arm was my pillow and my carmates were sprawling. As the night progressed, I gave up on using my arm as a pillow and trying to share the two square foot table with three others. I'd catch 10 minute cat naps and go back to something (it's mostly a blur now). Others camped out on newspapers under the seats, next to the toilets or on the shifting and bumpy area between coaches. I felt lucky enough not to have to squat the night away on a small footstool.

I noticed some curiously contradictory phenomena that the increased population density of small seats makes me feel compelled to relate. Besides, my Chinese is good enough that I can sit quietly in meditation or with a whimsical sideways glance and understand a good deal of what is being communicated, even though those around me assume that I am as deaf as I am Taoist. (For example, there's Chapter 56 of the Tao Te Ching:

Those who know do not talk.
Those who talk do not know.

Stop talking,
meditate in silence,
blunt your sharpness,
release your worries,
harmonize your inner light,
and become one with the dust.
Doing this is the called the dark and mysterious identity.

Ooh, the dark and mysterious identity.

Or, Chapter 14 ("Mystery"):

In its rising there is no light,
In its falling there is no darkness,
A continuous thread beyond description,
Lining what does not exist;
Its form formless,
Its image nothing,
Its name silence;
Follow it, it has no back,
Meet it, it has no face.

First, though the seats actually create a higher population density than the sleeping cars, I found myself having fewer painful conversations in these cheap seats than I'd had before in the more expensive beds. Maybe it was luck, maybe it was my bright yellow baseball cap, or maybe it was me, but people came at me, bounced away, and didn't really bother me.

My first thought was that this was class-related. I know the price of seats is inversely proportional to affluence. Hence, there were generally fewer English speakers in my midst, which means there were fewer people willing to engage me. I don't why that is because everyone was obviously within a distance to overhear me speaking Chinese with others. They must assume I'm speaking a different language; or they're shy; or they think I only speak with people I know. Maybe they feel like they need some English as a "backup" for my broken Chinese or maybe speaking to me in Chinese is a loss of face. Whatever the case, I am gaining a perspective into the Chinese mind that only understanding larger and large chunks of the language has yielded me. And then there's this: sitting amongst the peasants, crammed amongst the huddled masses yearning to believe, there's more chance for zaniness.

Here's something that I never expected and only realized just now: There's actually more dignity and couth in the seat passengers than amongst the berth passengers. Last night I didn't see anyone spitting on the floor, which is an epidemic in the sleeping carts. I think the seat passengers are more aware that someone has to clean up their messes, and in another context, it might be them doing the sweeping. When I learn how to say "Hello! We're going to be sharing this space for the next twenty four hours. What the fuck are you doing spitting on the floor?" in Chinese, I don't really care what loss of face it could bring my companions. I prefer my shoe souls free of mucous.

Enough Theorizing. Some Stories.

So I'm pretty proud of myself and my level of Chinese. I still needed quite a bit of help from the recent University grad across the aisle (who shares this monkey year with me) and came from the south of China, Hainan Island. Our first interaction with the woman next to him conferred to us that SiChuan was her home province. After her first shy utterances, everyone commenced to switch tones in their speech and generally take the piss out of her for her accent. The man next to me turned to me--and in his very northern accent full of "arrrrrs" and shwishi x's and such--asked me if people in America had regional variations in their speech. He was a funny man from my "home province" of Qingdao.

He was a fisherman with all sorts of funny questions, like "Where do you think people are more likely to want to have government jobs--China or America?" and "Do you have a travel book?" When I showed it to him, he wanted to know where I got it. I didn't tell him I got it from this man, but instead said Canada. In the characteristically Chinese way he asked very plainly and almost plaintively, "how does Canada know how to make a map of our China?" That "our China" gets me every time. I know Chinese are generally nationalistic, but I'm not convinced the addition of this pronoun of ownership is more than just a linguistic tick. But then again, I always underestimate people's faith in government and love of culture. Our general chatting led to me reveal a story about eating strange sea creatures fresh from the ocean. Coming from a fishing village himself, he carried on for five minutes with the advice that--"truly"--I should "never pay more than 10 kuai (RMB) for one catty of squid," but that I "would be happier if I splurged for some much tastier octopus." And so on.

The girl kept quiet through all of this, which was good, because she was not to be trusted, and here I'll give my reasons. First, she claimed to be a Chinese 20, which is a Western 19, even though she looked 27. I'll let her off for that. But then she claimed that the biscuits she was eating were salty instead of sweet, which I could tell was a flat lie because I had tasted them. When confronted with this fact, she changed her story. "Ok, they are a little sweet". Then she said she had a child. None of the three of us listeners were very amused by this, but we said nothing. Slowly, she overcame her shyness--"because I don't speak English"--(which didn't keep the fisherman from jabbering) and told a sad story about leaving a boyfriend of six months because she did not love him, even though he loved her. She seemed to want advice, and as the fellow monkey across from me teased the story out, it seemed there was no consoling the poor fool, or unravelling her lies.

The fisherman, alas, out of exasperation, told a "very ancient tale" about a man who happily marries a woman only to leave her six months later for a far-off government post. There, he advances up the ranks steadily until he meets his adversary, a man who eventually cuts off his head.

"And what did the woman do?," I asked.

"She ate rice and washed her clothes--alone!" he replied.

"And the moral of this story?" inquired your narrator.

"Don't make your loved ones cook rice alone!"

Are any of us really alone when we're only an email away?

Hope in a Green Future Renewed
Briefly, the Most Beautiful Natural Place I've Ever Seen in China

If anyone's in the neighborhood of Guangzhou (Guangdong Province, southern China), I highly recommend visiting the "South China Botanical Garden," one of the most beautiful places I've had the pleasure to visit in China.

I escaped the city for the better part of the day in the near solitude of vast gardens of magnolias, rhododendron, orchids, climbing plants, trees, deciduous and coniferous forests, and natural scenery. The best thing about it was that man had obviously laid a gentle touch on the landscape without overpowering the lay of the land. Also, there was no trash anywhere! Recycling bins, as in the city itself, were also plentiful.

I'm filled with me renewed hope that it won't take an environmental calamity beyond even Hollywood's imagination to collectivize the environmental project. A sustainable future (and green? I can only hope) is in everyone's best interest. Corporations--perhaps, I suspect, fearing the same fate as American tobacco companies who knowingly poisoned consumers--realize too that greening their processes is also good business.

Since from Chiner I can't surf the sites I'm linking to in this paragraph, take a trip back to my home state of Michigan and have a look at Ford's most famous auto plant, River Rouge, which just underwent a $2 billion environmental renovation.

How High's the Water, Papa?
They Say it's Over Their Heads and Risin'

Boy do I feel for those poor folks in Bangladesh (read: desperately impoverished human beings) now watching their meager possessions float away in the flood plains (read: most of the land area in Bangladesh). As if keeping things dry in Bangladesh weren't hard enough (read: you don't want to be in my hotel room while I continue to air out the clothes that got thoroughly humidified two weeks ago in the Bangladeshi "situation room" (read: a noisy hotel room thick with paranoia and the scent of clove cigarettes as my roommate and I assessed our proximity to a certain situation (which I was going to link to and decided against, sorry).

Bugger!
Is Yahoo! Acting Up, or is this the Work of Big Other?

I can access the Yahoo! homepage, but not the mail service. Shoutcast ain't shoutin' either.

Hmmmm...this is a puzzlement. Maybe I should just play Counter-Strike instead.

As the Chinese Pop Streams in Guangzhou...
Some Observations (Mine and Others) Upon My Unexpected Return to the Motherland

"In toe Wan"

First, surprisingly, on the net front, Big Other has blocked neither blogger.com nor this page . So whoop whooop whoop whoop! Unfortunately, livejournal, that intimate and subversive archive of many a friend's inner thoughts, has not escaped China's 30k strong army of net police. Nor has the trusty old anonymization.net, which used to provide a bridge around the censors.

Chinese net bars have only gotten better in the eight months since I was last here. Flat screens, webcams, waiters that deliver any kind of food you'd like right to your computer. This so beats anyplace in South/East Asia. Using the toilet is about the only thing I can't do at the computer terminal. (Of course, I haven't made any inquiries).

The old crowd of pale, smoking, and sickly looking online gamers is as unchanging as the clouds. Occasionally, I get an audio reminder of this group's existence as it overpowers the streaming Chinese pop in my headphones with the usual shouting and cheering swells when the action heats up.

I feel comfortable here. I pick up online pieces of neglect from too many quick minutes of exensive internet access. I can afford to take my time when this dim scene costs only $1US for three hours.

Standards, and Fashion as if my Gram Stepped Out of a Photo Album and Sat Down on the Metro

Next, I like the city of GuangZhou. Getting off the train from the New Territories in the northern portion of the Hong Kong Special Region, I got a wave of that familiar, dorky Chinese feel that comes from the uniformity of, well, just about everything.

I try not to pay attention to things such as my own hipness quotient (and I know there are better things I could spend my time doing) but I have to admit I spend too much mental energy wandering about wishing I could updaet my wardrobe. It's nice not to feel overpowered by flash and style like I did across the waters in Hong Kong. Here on the Mainland I can be my dorky self without being snubbed for wearing a "Cox Bazar" t-shirt and jeans I haven't washed in a week.

Moving Mountains

Standards of uniformity prevail all over the Mainland. The sidewalks and public spaces are the standard slabs of tile, limestone and granite, like entire mountains were sliced into inch-thick blocks and stuck down by armies of migrant workers, which is probably pretty close to what happened. The drab salmon-colored buildings, the size and style of handrails, the pointy three-inches of extra toe space in boys' elf shoes (as I call them), everywhere the same.

To my surprise, the women of Guangzhou set a different standard, and Guangzhou is my first widespread observation of much balleyhooed "China Chic" in actual practice. Women's dress here--unlike the utilitarian Hello Kitty sweatsuits I expect to see--often utilizes light, airy, frilled, bowed, printed, striped, dotted, and heeled motifs. My fashion vocabulary is more fit for Dhaka, of course, but imagine sharply pinned frizzy hair parted at a jaunty angle far to one side and shoes that would have made any pre-revolutionary Shanghainese night creature a star. Then you have something besides the stuff that wouldn't fit on the truck to Walmart, This is the kind of chic that turns my head and makes me smile. Silly, I know.

On Lanuage, and Song
(Skip this section if you need more than just a map of Chinese dialects to understand me, because I'm assuming some familiarity with Chinese Language here. Thank you Wikipedia)

How comfortable for this speaker of Mandarin to be in the heart of Cantonese territory and speak nothing but the standard northern dialect. One day I'll be able to go to Tibet and do the same, not only because the Tibetans have mostly all left, but because the Han--northern Mandarin speakers, especially--are like the Borg. Resistance is futile.

Luckily, I've never been much of a minority language preservationist. I'm all for ease of communication. As long as there are enough scholars who understand the intricacies of ancient texts, I'm happy. I would like to one day publish a book on "travel Latin," but it's a far-off and low priority goal.

The publisher I never met on Hong Kong suggests in his book that new waves of Mandarin music will overtake Cantonese pop's dominance. I don't doubt it. With the sounds coming from Taiwan and Beijing (check out this site, Niubi, for avante-garde Beijing shizba streams), I won't have to spend many more nights thinking I'll be able to understand the next song on the karaoke lineup only to be confused with more Cantonese.

And now to get my head out of the ground and on the ground...

Maoists Suppress Maoists: Revolution Versus Stability

It will be interesting to see if China honors Nepal's request to help put down the Maoist insurgency there. I remember reading this article in the Bangladeshi rag The Daily Star before I left that half submerged nation and wondering what would come from a land ossifying to Capitalism while Mao's omniexpressional painting gazes down on every primary school classroom in the Republic. The presevationists in Beijing better strap Mao down because it seems likely that, before too long, he'll be rolling in his Maosoleum.

And From A Voice We Have Not Heard

And here's something from an old colleague, Kelvin, who pretty well summed up my feelings about the Middle Kingdom when he returned here earlier this year after his Spring Festival holiday time:

"...look forward to getting back to China. I miss the dumb place, and its genuine smiles from the folk who try to rip me off when I ask "Jager, dos-e-en?"

Kelvin has his own pinyin for "Zhege duo shao qian?"

In all, it's good to be back in the Middle Kingdom and now I must move on to other more pressing things.

Roaming, The City's Got Six Million
The Youth Hostel on Mt. Davis Overlooking Hong Kong has got Six.

Have I an enviable life? This is what I wondered as I wandered up 30 minutes of Mt. Davis Path on the western side of the island, avoiding snails, dodging the occasional Mercedes and stopping to peer at the anchored vessels in near the harbors. Is my freedom to jaunt about, update my blog and look for the address of a certain pre-revolutionary Shanghainese pop music anthology author's house something I've earned, or have I just lucked out? Or do you think I'm crazy for giving up most of my possessions to live from my backpack? It doesn't matter. I'm happy and, at least some of the time, I'm helping people.

I discovered the site of the pop music anthology author/publisher's home right along the path to this Hostel from which I write. It had been demolished to make way for more skyscrapers.

The airport here is all landfill with a bit of topsoil. Disney is doing the same to build their latest theme park. Takes me back to the Development Zone.

Like in Thailand--even more than in America--people live out of disposable plastic containers. And we wonder why ocean levels are rising.

What long, pointless sentences I'm writing. My mobile phone was making the monitor flicker as it searched for its mainland connection just across the bay in GuangDong. The screen has since stopped flashing because the phone has given up. That's sorta how I feel about GuangDong Hua (Cantonese). I feel like I should be able to understand some of it, but I don't. It's like Dutch to German or--what? Finnish?--to English. Funny talk. But at least the people speak some Mandarine and almost everyone speaks English.

I too have stopped flickering for some way of understanding what's going on here and how people can live in this isle of commerce. Santorum couldn't clean the messes here. But where else in Chinese territory would I be able to find Mark Twain's Roughing It?

I'm only "free" now in Hong Kong, pursuing the unexpected--visiting my father in Shanghai--because terrible, scary things transpired in Dhaka. All is fine now (with me, anyway)--no worries--and it's the same story that I can't write publicly about what happened. My stories would put people at risk.

Oh, my minutes are up anyway. The last two days in Hong Kong (I leave tomorrow) have been, as one Bangladeshi put it when I was searching for words to describe American culture, the mechanical life. Organic me is in the pinball machine of hyper-developed capitalism, about to return to the strange and exciting world of hyper-developing capitalism (differences are theoretical, of course. Development never stops. There's no plateau. Development is a mindset). I'm ready to return to the Middle Kingdom. There's a sense of the zany in their development, a sense of new hope. Or something. I just think that somehow getting there is half the fun.

My Friend I Would Sleep in a Closet In Hong Kong
But This is Ridiculous!

Bed, foot-wide window with a view into the 17 story shaft outside. That's where I sleep tonight.

Ok, two minutes left on the 20 I got with this overpriced iced mocha. Hong Kong blows my mind. And then I eat an egg and tomatoe sandwich on white bread with the crust cut off.

Guess what? I got what I came for, the book "The Age of Shanghainese Pops". Let's just see if I can't meet the author tomorrow before I enter the Mainland.

Ok, time's up!

"And a Show With Everything But Yul Brynner"
At Long Last, I am at Peace with the City of Angels

But first...
A Small Aside (et cetera, et cetera)

And how does Murray Head know Yul Brynner isn't in some Bangkok show? Because "The King and I" was banned in the Siamese Kingdom, that's why!

And you know what else about musicals, Murray Head and Bangkok? (Pointless questions from this student of culture). Googling, we find:

"Murray Head's 'One Night in Bangkok' came from a highly unusual source for top forty songs, a musical stage show. "Chess" was written by Benny Andersson and Bjorn Ulvaeus, both of ABBA fame, and renown lyricist Tim Rice. It was a cold-war parable taking place over a chess board, as Russians battled the West for the world title."*

Visit this very interesting site here. The pictures of Murray alone are worth the click.

 
And Now...
The Main Event.
Your Narrator's Transformed Gaze of Bangkok
 
Oh, reclining river city, won't you take me back? I thought you the bane of my Thailand experience, a simple gateway from airport to bus station to indoor ice arena. But now, after living in one of the foulest of South Asia's boweltowns, your once-sickening pollution levels seem tame.

I breathe deep breaths on your busiest thoroughfares as if I were strolling through country meadows.

Eating my meals of soup, noodles and miscellaneous organic pieces beneath your expressways and skytrains, I savor the flavor with joy, knowing I'm only sampling the sweat of the chef's brow (or arm) and not the sweat of the roti rollers longkyi-clad crotch.

What once seemed dirty is clean! What once was sufferable is simply something! I cross your streets and cars slow down. I pass by vendors unnoticed. I get to my destination with a bus that actually stops to pick me up instead of rolling past at running speed and spitting me just the same. I ride your brand new subway for 25 cents--too new to be plastered with the looming glare of soft advertisement!--and my faith in society as it could be is restored.

Pruengtaep, Bangkok, oh Village of Wild Plums, (The city of angels, the great city, the residence of the Emerald Buddha, the impregnable city (of Ayutthaya) of God Indra, the grand capital of the world endowed with nine precious gems, the happy city, abounding in an enormous Royal Palace that resembles the heavenly abode where reigns the reincarnated god, a city given by Indra and built by Vishnukarn), you may not be the ultimate test of cerebral fitness, but your controlled chaos draws me to you again and again. Won't you have me back?

love,

~your narrator

PS. Um...hardy har har. Had you going there for a minute, didn't I Bangkok?

That's all. You've tuckered me plum out! And now I jet. Tonight, plum town. Tomorrow, Hong Kong!

China Rumbling
Call the Fashion Police!

I knew I was in the vicinity of the Chinese Embassy when I started seeing slickly dressed business types wearing their plastic bathroom sandals and white socks.

Oh China, except for your charging Americans $20 more for tourist visas, how could anyone not love you?

tired, in thailand picking up the pieces

i had to return to thailand unexpectedly. i'm not really sure what comes next except for picking up the pieces and finishing what i started.

if, in the future, you should see posts between this date and july 12th you'll know i've filled in some details.

i'll write what i can of what happened in the following weeks.

Roti Without End...
Amen, Amen.

As much as I think I'm going to get sick of nan roti or something rota in the tea shops, I never do! Lucky for me, because this is about the only thing I can eat on the road in Bangladesh.

Each shop serves this fried or baked creation differently. Sometimes it's salty and baked on a cushion in an oven. Other times it's fried near the entrance. Sometimes it's sweet, sometimes it's plain, sometimes flaky and other times gooey. At any rate, it goes well with shopgi (various vegetables, usually in a base of potatoes) and dal (lentils), which also vary from shop to shop.

A Nice Quiet Beach Community
And No One Intends to Keep it that Way

I feel like I'm at the end of the world. After a five hour bus ride over bumpy, rickshaw-congested roads with a beeping driver from hell, I arrived in Cox's Bazaar, pulled the tissues out of the ears, gave praise to the almighty that the one-lane train bridge turned passenger passway didn't collapse or have a train on it, and promptly replied to the babbling rickshaw drivers that I was neither their "friend" nor their "boss."

Life is cheap and easy in this beach-front town. This place has almost single-towndedly restored Bangladesh as a destination worth its weight in Lonely Planets. Could also be the weather that did it. After a week of solid rain, we had sun today.

I had forgotten the power and beauty of the ocean. The almost dangerously high waves sent me scraping along the sand at the bottom. When I walked toward land, with the water rushing back to the sea under me, I felt like I was flying. There were even Bangladesh surfers (though the women swam in the saris)

Hartal #3
An Excuse for a Holiday

In protest of everything that's not right and righteous, the third nation-wide strike of my short time in Bangladesh immobilized vast swaths of barely mobile countryside.

An excuse for a holiday?

Not a holiday for this narrator, because every shop--including the post office--was closed for twenty four hours.

I'm talking about the locals having a holiday. With their six-day work weeks and 12 hour days, what self-respecting person wouldn't participate in an economically crippling country-wide strike every time a grievance needs addressing?

Sit on!

See You Later, Dhaka
Off to the Countryside

Whether it was the leeches from the showers, pollution, population density, or the many other issues that finally did it, I'm outta Dhaka for a while. Off to see the countryside. Last night I took an economy class train ride out of the city. Rode in the prayer car. It was absolutely surreal. Prayers and "wanna be your friend" conversations competing for my ears chattering along the tracks as the inky night streamed past.

More to come...

There's Mud in the Water
Some Advice From a Friend

When messages like this appear in the ol' inbox, it's time to...I don't know what it's time to do. What would you do?

Be careful strongly on supply water in your office, which is not clean and impure right now due to heavy rain. The extra water from drainage infiltrate into supply water pipe line.In my house the water is dirty and impure with mud color. Let me advice you should use the mineral water including drinking.

Keeping the Fun out of Fundamentalism
Women's Wrestling Latest Target

Dhaka's first ever women's wrestling competition was cancelled today due to threats from fundamentalist groups. Not that I would have gone to see it, but I was looking forward to pictures in the sports section.

When will radicals start putting the fun back into life instead of blowing it up? Won't people evolve already?

Hartal #2
And Then Dhaka Was Quiet

Yesterday was Hartal strike number two (for me, that is) in the shitty of Dhaka. The opposition party called the Hartal in protest of the last Hartal. Or something like that. All I cared about was how quiet the city was. No tinkling rickshaw bells, no honking buses, no movement whatsoever for fear of being beaten up. Last time a double decker bus went up in flames and nine people died. This time the violence was confined to "stray incidents." I should think so. The dogs were out in force last night. By that I mean, I actually saw stray dogs last night. Usually they hide from the cars.

Hartals are the only time I find this city bearable. The rest of the time I feel like a tortured lizard, wandering from the shower to the computer to the roof to get some sort of relief from the heat and noise. After watching The Godfather part one in memorium (read this article about Marlon Brando to learn about his activist history--I learned something new here) I wandered up onto the roof to survey the rainy city. In the quiet that only a Hartal can offer, Dhaka actually felt like other cities. There was noise, but it wasn't a lot. There were lights flashing for some reason. Must have been a wedding. Usually Dhaka's lights are confined to garment factories.

Hartals were used in Bangladesh's Liberation War to change the government. Now that Bangladesh is a parliamentary democrazy, they're just a silly excuse for some war and quiet.