Studying Chinese at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music:
An Activity of Great Fun and Use

For anyone who is not interested in studying Chinese or living in the fascinating stinktown of Shanghai, please save yourself some time and read something else. This is just an endorsement of the teachers, administrators and environment of the Chinese department at the Shanghai Conservatory of Music (tuition details in this link).

I know. You're thinking "Study Chinese at a music conservatory? Huh?" But to anyone with basic Chinese knowledge who's looking for a rigorous Chinese course, I highly recommend the it. The Chinese language department is totally separate from the rest of the administration, yet you're right in the middle of the small campus.

The course structure is similar to Jiaotong or Fudan, but classes are smaller for the higher levels. And there are only four levels instead of eight or more at the bigger schools. A classmate who went to Jiaotong the semester before said unequivocally that the conservatory is better. The teachers are progressive by Chinese standards. The campus is garden-like by Chinese standards. And where else can you be surrounded by musicians while you study Chinese?

If you're just starting out, I recomend charting your own course of study, not going to a Chinese school. Get a private tutor. Make flash cards. Find language partners. Get a Chinese lover or two. Don't be drawn into elementary Chinese language lessons at any Chinese institution. You'll be taught like a Chinese primary school student. But what the teachers forget is that Chinese primary school kids already have a working knowledge of the language before they start learning characters. I recommend getting the basics down first, then going on to learn characters. Chinese teachers will liekly teach you pronunciation and characters without context first and limit your oral Chinese to those things you can say with your mastered characters only. Bah, says I. Get a basic working knowledge of the language first and then go to class to fill in the holes. Otherwise you'll just be wasting your time.

For more info about schools in Shanghai,, check out this -Shanghai-ed page. Seems like a pretty comprehensive summary of shanghainese options for laowai.

Hope this helps! Leave comments with your email if you have any questions.

Yeah! Shanghai:
An Intro to Shanghainese Hip-Hop

Yet another reason for your narrator to learn the Wu Dialect (Shanghainese).

From BoingBoing.net:

This bizarre sibling of American rap made up of English, Mandarin, and Shanghai- nese...just blew me away. The sound is typically rap but the lyrics and topics have a very distinctive Chinese/ Shanghai-nese spin. The lyrics are jammed with "trash" words in different languages. Topics are typically social commentaries such as the track named "Made in Shanghai" that takes a shot at the Chinese youth's blind infatuation with foreign pop cultures (Japanese, Korean) but also has a good amount of softer topics about unrequited or lost love. BBC has a good story about of the rapper named "Little Lion" -- Link. the boingboing story

Check out the site to download more of these songs:

***Yeah Shanghai: This song is kinda shit for the first minute as it cycles through samples of the various versions of "Night Shanghai," the most popular "pre-lib" Shanghainese pop song--and the first one I ever heard. First there's Zhou Xuan, the one with the golden voice. Then the post CultRev bunch. Then the musak-ish versions. Get past the first minute and that shit's gangsta--perfectly indistinguishable and, thus, great hip-hop, right?

***Lover by MCBoy has soul, but little else.

***Guandiao (close down) sounds like it was recorded on a tape recorder. It's completely incomprehensible Wu plugged with "muthafucka," "rap," and "son of a bitch". Great fun.

***I can't get "Made in Shanghai" out of my head.

***Don't Sham is not as silly as the title might suggest. It actually sounds pretty good. For a good time, download.

***McTang's No 1 has some pretty catchy hooks. It's is pretty ego-rich and full of easy-to-understand English lines "It's a gangsta shit" and "shut up motherfucker" and "AK-47 in my hands, better watch your mouth." Honestly, I can't take this very seriously. Maybe I need to see a concert. Shanghai is far too safe to support this "McTang's" lifestyle.


If I wrote a song, it would be called "Stinkcity."
Some sample interjections: "why don't y'all bitchez outlaw two-stroke engines, aight??"

and "That shit ain't no moto. yo punk ass is ridin' a muthafuckin' chainsaw on wheels"

and "that garbage truck smell nasty/but the real shit's the nasty i gonna be gettin' on with the garbage men". (OK, maybe I'm sick, I know. But at least I'm not classist.)


Here's a link to the Shanghaiist.com story.

write your own Shanghai Hip-Hop lyrics in the comments section!

Chinese Tastes Confirm "World's Most 'Other'" Status

In the break room at school yesterday, one of my top
students came in with take-out convenience store
sushi. She wanted to put it in the microwave.

"Are you crazy?" I asked, smiling? "Sushi's usually
served cold."

"Oh, I often eat this."

"But is it common to eat warm sushi in China?"

"I think it's very convenient."

"But restaurant sushi is served cold. Do other Chinese
people eat sushi hot?"

"Oh, I don't always eat this. Sometimes I bring
sandwiches."

And here we have the difference between classroom
English and real-world English. Students talk about
houses and aliens and the SDS, but they can't talk
about why they're heating sushi in the microwave.

Goodness Gayness:
Pieces to the Chinese Comrade Research Puzzle--Freely Distributed!

After work today I went to the Shanghai Public Health Education Center. The sky was blue. The wind from the typhoon off the east coast brought gusts of clean, cool air. For the first time in several months, I wasn't dripping with sweat and breathing exhaust fumes.

I was in the Jingan District looking for Mr. Gu Wenqi, a professor of public health at the Center. With the help of the security guard, I found "Young Gu," which turned out to be "wrong Gu," because the man I was looking for was in his early 70s--"Old Gu."

I found him in an office with windows facing a quaint street. I told him I was reasearching China's HIV prevention efforts and gay culture in general. He said his job never had anything to do with HIV or gays. So why had a contact suggested I go there? Was there more to him than waving jet black hair, smiles and his patient Mandarin?

Ten years earlier, he says, a Shanghainese gay was killed. Turns out, killed by another gay. Gu noticed that a lot of queers came out of the woodwork to support each other, even though they had no relationship to the killer or the victim. Hmm..the perfect chance to survey the gay population. What Mr. Gu found surprised him.

Not only was this group much larger than he thought, he even found himself having sympathy with these people! From the over 100 men and dozen or so women he surveyed, he learned about their relationships, sexual practices, and difficulties in everyday society. People who were too afraid to talk to him wrote him letters and told him even more heart-wrenching tales.

A freelancer friend of his put all of this information into an article and that article caught the attention of some of China's top sexologists. The most prominent researchers in Shanghai and Beijing turned their attention to him. They realized they had been ignoring a large portion of the Chinese population. But who never called him? Journalists and leaders. And they still don't.

Some of the people mentioned in the artilce got visitors too. Even though they used nicknames, some of the circumstances gave them away. One of the men was a singer at a hotel. Police did not have legal authority to use his homosexuality against him. All they could do was drag him to jail on trumped up tax evasion charges.

In 2000, the Chinese Psychiatric Association declared that homosexuality was no longer a mental illness. There are no laws against homosexuality. Just millenia of Confucian thought. Many Chinese think being queer is just a foreign thing. It doesn't help that most queers are too afraid to come out. As my oral Chinese teacher said last semester, "Oh, I don't know any people like that. I don't think China has any homosexuals."

With 40 million more men than women, China not only has homosexuals. It is, in the words of my best friend, home to "the inevitably gay Chinaman."

From your narrator's perspective, that's more than a breath of fresh air.

All For You, Gentle Public:
Random Thoughts and Shameless Self Aggrandizement!

Thank you Big Other! You've given me access to the Chinese public. My old website about life in Qingdao, Shandong, China is unblocked.

An old Chinese colleague and friend found the rather extensive rantings of my old reclusive self on the site. I refered to the Chinese teachers at my school as "slaves to the South Ocean" (South Ocean's the school I worked for. She took offense. But almost every Chinese I know is a slave to some job. She called me a slave to travel. How right she is...

****

Here's something I don't remember writing, but apparently did so while living in Bangladesh. I like it better now than I did when I first wrote it.

Don’t look at the word “or” too long. As a second grader or an any ager, if you forget how to spell “of”, don’t panic. Group” and “flour” and “four” and “tour” are spelled the same, but don’t share the same vowel sound—why should they? Anguish! English!

****

And here's some shameless self-aggrandizement from my days as a construction-crane-climbing columnist for the Michigan Daily.

Check out secret agent man, an "apology" we printed after I got a call from public security for getting a different perspective on the University of Michigan's Life Sciences Initiative.

*Secret Agent Man (.pdf file)

Preventing Shanghai:
A Sexual Health Update

In Chinese, "Shanghai" with falling/falling rising tones is China's largest city. Shanghai with flat/falling tones means damage, usally emotional/corpal.

In Shanghai public health news, I found out that there are two groups doing HIV prevention outreach in the local MSM (men who have sex with men) community. I've begun interviewing their leaders and doing some outreach with them.

The first group has no website. It was attacked by hackers. It's just a small office in a local women's hospital that does some condom distribution and runs a hotline to answer sexual/sexuality questions. Their most common question is, "can I change?" They answer no. Progress. They also get calls from wives who wonder why they haven't had sex with their husbands in the past year. Time for a heart to heart, they say.

The second group, the Chi Heng Foundation, does more bar-specific outreach. Fun, fun, fun. "Do you know condoms can prevent HIV?" says your winking narrator as he pins a rainbow ribbon on a charmer's chest.

Only five more weeks in Shanghai. Five more weeks to help prevent a few more comrades from getting shanghaied. And understand the situation well enough to write about it for the English speaking world (hopefully for payment).

Sunday Afternoon Pictures Taken in the Guqin Shop on Fenyang Road in Shanghai

Check out Hugo the Shanghai freelance photographer's home page. I especially recommend the Shanghai pics, portraits and the rock show last Saturday. The "my shanghai" section kicks ass. Check out the monk pic.