Belated Bleatings from China

This with the travelator not working, a wall of intense heat, and a suitcase 

Arriving at Hong Kong Central station a passing Israeli and smoking cameraman both helped me find the gigantic restaurant where tuxedoed waiters showed me to the waiting Mara and Midori and a table piled high with roast duck and goose.  Midori generously insisted on mostly treating us and then took us up the long escalator from Chungking Express part of which was out of service, me dragging my suitcase and all of us (especially me) drenched in sweat.

Each human has his or her own private relationship with sweat the way each does with money.  In the same way you'll never really know the details unless they are particularly extravagant or you spend a long time in close proximity.

In a bar filled with Aussies and the odd Taiwanese (she really was odd) I had a pint of Stella for the first time since I was 16.  Didn’t feel like beating my wife.

The top of Victoria Mountain, aka “The Peak” is essentially a shopping center offering various ways to shed cash.  HK one of those cities where you can always physically look up at someone more successful than you.

Chungking Mansions was just how I remembered it from 2005, a huge complex of apartments, offices, shops, filthy, stinking, strangely alluring.  Corridors lined with curry stalls and electronic shops, half the city swapping currencies in black-market bureaux de change, and a mysterious cookie stall mobbed with crowds.  A sign told us you can’t actually buy biscuits there unless you purchase a ticket the previous night in a different part of the city.  We looked down at a woman stuffing 100 boxes into three large suitcases.  “Are they good?” we asked, pointlessly.

Through a clerical error we missed our 19-hour train from HK to Shanghai. Actually, it was just wild stupidity.  We fought like crazy in a sweltering corridor.  Old, wise-cracking ladies had seen it all before.  And worse.  Leaning over the side and peering into the huge open center of the complex you can see doors and doors all leading to cramped quarters where all kinds of unspeakable things must surely be going on, inhabitants oblivious to our screams of frustration and mutual blame emanating from the 8th floor.  Like an angel a Croatian emerged from a private room and acted as couples therapist and travel agent for a very productive ten minutes.  At the end of them we were 450 dollars lighter and had two flights for Shanghai leaving...  NOW!

A BAD CASE OF BEIJING BURNOUT

Guo Mao, Beijing, just one stop on a cackhanded journey to nowhere

Hazy buildings looming, endless high rises composing a spectral city.  I felt like I’d smoked 40 cigs a day for the past week—trachea closing, nose clogged, solidifying film of mucus, hacking cough.  Tried to get to the mythical art village of Song Zhuang.  Followed directions on CNN website.  Emerged in Guo Mao station to find bus terminal underpass closed off, thin light making its way down ghostly stairs and a stopped escalator behind a puddle of water and an ominous bucket.  Outside, a breathing trafficky rush of cars, smoke.  Progress.  To cross the road you have to go with faith...  Walk slowly and allow the vehicles to swarm round you.  Our balls weren't in the right place.  A team of guys with no English thought they worked out what we wanted and marched us a long way back to the metro where we boarded a long train to Songjia Zhuang station.  A busy mother with some English received us on the border of a gigantic flowing effluence of traffic.  You don't quite see across the roads.  The smog forms into cartoon movement lines as buses and juggernauts roar past.  “Wrong place,” told us a lady downstairs and how to get there—that's right, back to where we were—and a few stations later my blocked face rebelled and a cascade of snot pointed to an abandonment of our mission to the cool off-beaten art village that is way more in-the-know than 798 Art Village which is just SO commercialized these days (went the next day—not great unless you love over-produced paintings of kittens, empty warehouses, and expensive cafés).  Instead we changed course and completed the day’s ration of 3 hours in the subway by heading due northwest to the Old Summer Palace, chosen over its neighbor the (non-Old, current, new) Summer Palace because we wanted to see what is effectively a Chinese memorial to the ravages of 19th-century colonialism.  In the end during the burning midday hours we hauled ourselves around a broiling park humming deaf with cicadas and thousands of Chinese tourists.  Walking a path between marble ruins was like trying to stroll on the rush-hour subway.  

I was undergoing a process of Chinification.  Swiftly aggressive in seizing empty subway seats, I was generating huge quantities of phlegm demanding frequent hawking in public as well as coughing with no polite covering hand.  I hadn’t begun to sport the “Beijing Bikini” (rolled up t-shirt atop proud belly).  Only a matter of time.

Jumping into an ice-cold taxi to zoom to the infinitely better (second, latter) Summer Palace was one of those profligate decisions that has one weeping with joy.  A stupendous lake circuited by forest and strange towering pagodas.  Boats drifting into the distance looking lost in the magnitude of it all.  I wore Mara's riñonera (a term “liver thing” preferable to the horrendous “bum bag” and the unspeakable “fanny pack”) and she took my foldable sleeping-bag-material Muji backpack—a sign of my flailing condition.  Somehow the clumps of Chinese tourists were less suffocating here.  The sheer size of the place, the vastness of the lake, giving everything a subdued air.  Mara bartered with a charismatic old lady who taught us how to say “sugar” and “no sugar.”

The way you repeat a Chinese word back to a person causes them to repeat it back to you until you say it right which you generally do by exaggerating the tone making it sound like a deranged squawk at which point they laugh and give you the thumbs up.  You’re not sure if you got it right or you just reached a satisfactory level of comedic effectiveness.  Another time we tried the “sugar” thing at a different shop and failed miserably while the proprietor’s wife plied us with free pickled goods.  I tried it in every tone and I’m sure just by pure accident I must have said it right at least once, but was consistently met with looks of blank incomprehension.  Possibly because it was by then so far out of context as to be meaningless.  Might be like someone shouting “shoo-gay!” “shy girl!” “sham goo!” “shoo gar!”  “Why won’t this person go away?”  I would probably think.

Wheezing and limping around Beijing Mara and I tried to avoid killing each other and often failed.  It was like Twelve Angry Men except it was one angry couple and Henry Fonda smoking cigarettes was replaced with dense clouds of toxic pollution.

FAKING IT

In the beautiful colonialesque bubble of central Shanghai we took a small detour to the 3rd world in the form of the fakes market.  Wise young merchants emerge from closets to offer all manner of replica goods.  The best part is their shelving units have SECRET CATCHES that swing open walls Bond-villain style and reveal inner compartments lined with “the good stuff.”  This is either a safeguard against police raids or a sales technique—“Now I’m showing you the good stuff.”  I fought down the price of a wallet I didn't really want to 100RMB (about 10 quid) and with Engen and Mara on either side of me baying “You don't have to get it!” my zombie self kicked in.  I saw myself as if in a cracked old cinema print pulling out a crisp 100 and handing it over.  The deed was done.  The girls gaped at me.  I didn't even like the wallet.

This tragedy spurred me to put together the pieces of my life and buy another wallet.  (The second task was easier.)  A guy called “Ben” locked me in his back compartment where a combo of sales patter, bromance and heat-induced delusion induced me to pay the exorbitant sum of 35 quid for an “authentic” Mont Blanc leather wallet.  Ben even threw in a pen (the one I am currently using) “not as a business offer but as a symbol of friendship” and I emerged sheepishly to the horror and fascination of the ladies.  Not the first time I’ve elicited those reactions.

DUCK PALACE

In a south Beijing Duck Palace

Roast duck—is it that good?  Or is it the ritual that we enjoy so much?  The dipping into the gloopy sauce.  The slices of fatty meat that never seem to be worth their weight in duck.  Mara's university friend and his mother and wife and child were waiting for us in an obscure Beijing suburb in a hotel-cum-duck palace with a personal miked-up waitress in a kitchen buzzing up the food.  Turns out the spinning glass wheel gracing the tables of Chinese restaurants of my youth is actually alive and rotating in China.

Mara's friend works for the government in intellectual property.  He has his work cut out.  Apparently such duck palaces as these used to be crammed with functionaries blowing poultry-shaped holes in their expense accounts, but a unilateral decree from on high recently put paid to all that and the quacking emporia have had to slash prices.  Not a single bill joke.

He told us stories of Mao in the safe confines of the hotel room.  Like when he ordered everyone to kill sparrows one year to supposedly deal with a food shortage.  His mother occasionally smiled at us and put away a surprising number of pancakes.  A spicy mutton stir-fry dish that you stuff into fried buns was spectacular.

Then he took us for a foot massage.  The three of us lay as we were administered to.  The Yin and the Yang rule meant Mara had a burly guy and her friend and I both had petite females.  I felt the forces balance.  Our companion complained his girl wasn’t strong enough.  You want balanced energies—and a good massage?  A widescreen TV displayed a popular daily show where job candidates offer themselves to a panel of company bosses.  We had optional extras with the massage.  Mara got the hot cups on her back and I had my ears emptied with a candle.  He told me it sounds like the rain, and it did.  We became horribly ill the next day.  That’s what happens when you unleash the Yin and Yang.

SHANGALONG

Took about 6 taxis a day in Shanghai.  They were wonderful.  Stupendous architecture across the water in Pudong where we never actually set foot.  The Jewish Museum featured female university students with excellent English and astonishing knowledge about modern Jewish history.  Shanghai was refuge for tens of thousands of Jews.  Moving stories and the occasional jab at Japan.  “Germany apologized, reformed its society, and never forgot its crimes unlike other nations we could mention.”

For some reason we thought that a museum called the Urban Planning Museum was going to be good.  It’s in all the guidebooks and top tens.  Its centerpiece is a fairly fabulous scale model of the entire city which lights up occasionally. There was also a 360º tour of the city from a UFO-like observation pod.  Apart from that acreage of maps, diagrams and soporific details. We skedaddled as power rain began to pummel the city.  In the nearby Museum of Contemporary Art there was a mockery of the Urban Planning Shanghai city model made out of poker chips [pictured].  Better.

Staff formality on show at the Forbidden Palace, Beijing

Formality.  In Japan museum staff wear buttoned up jackets, trousers and black, shiny shoes.  They'll stand in their spot unmoving for the entirety of their shift.  Compare.  The museum staff were in shorts and flip flops.  They lay languidly gossiping.  Talked on their phones.  Slouched around without a care in the world leaving whole rooms unattended.  An art piece that consisted of 6 painted dartboards invited users to have a go, which we did until panicked and horrified museum staff came and told us not to touch.  I was amazed we actually managed to provoke a reaction.

In a central park some 100 parents offered their kids up for marriage in the form of classified-ad like posters stuck onto a wall.  The progenitors milled smoking and gossiping.  The kids probably didn't know they were plastered on a wall in a park as potential marriage material.  The ads were mostly hadn-written with marker pens.  A few had photos. Most didn't.  Some candidates seemed suspiciously affluent and/or good looking, hinting at some unspeakable hidden flaw.  Maybe they're gay and Ma and Pa never sussed it out.

JAPANCHINAJAPANCHINA

Using a police van for shade in Tianamen Square. Who said the cops aren't friendly?

Difficult not to go around constantly saying “In Japan this is the exact opposite.”  Pretty much everything is.  Noisy vs. quiet.  Aggressive vs. respectful.  Individualistic vs. community minded.  Dirty vs. clean.  Pushy vs. polite.  Toxic vs. clean.  Similarities: noodles and rice.  And some writing.

Your identity borne along on a torrential tidal wave of people and progress.  The rush exhilarating and monstrous.  It’s like the Total Perspective Vortex from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which drives you mad by showing how insignificant you are in the context of infinity.  In the context of 1.2 billion people my ego shrank to the size of a small packet of instant noodles.  Among hordes of Chinese tourists my mental expanse of hopes and dreams was a dust trail on a bus window.

Similar but expressed differently is the concept of FACE.  In Japan face-saving works in a roundabout way.  When a Japanese person says no to a request, you work hard to find a way in which he or she can comply help you out without directly going against the rule.  In China the face is plopped in your lap immediately like an unwanted Christmas present.  Taxi drivers go off on rants just requiring you to say they are right.

A nation with millions of only children.  Rules mean nothing.  Red lights are there to be run.

In Japan people go out their way to show you mean something.  The inclination of a head is obligatory to show you are even aware of someone else's presence.  In China you’re one of nothing.  Maybe I’m just speaking for myself.

But people in short moments were friendly, funny, helpful.  Hearts on sleeves, emotions out in the open.  Anyone who spoke English would approach in times of trouble.  In Beijing the response was muted.  Questions were typically answered with a raised hand pointing in a direction that could mean a range of things: “What you are looking for is over there.”  “In that direction is a bus stop.”  “Ask someone over there.”  “I don't know.”  “Get out my face fuckboy.”  Context is everything.

ART & FOOD

The food is another thing.  That’s opposite to Japan.  Refined, steamed, healthy are replaced by ladel-fulls of oil and garlic and chilli.  Psychotic levels of hygiene (notwithstanding radiation contamination) are replaced with a laissez-faire attitude to ingredient sourcing.  Organic food is present in China at least in the form of faecal matter.  Of course it’s bloody delicious at the same time.  One of the best a Shanghai hole-in-the-wall joint serving up soup with dumplings at negligible prices [pictured].  Another killer was a Szechuan multi-tiered restaurant in the trendy zone of Guo Mao in Beijing where we each received cauldrons full of diced fried vegetables, beef and chicken mixed with those cardboard-like red chills they like to add by the kilo.

Just as the cuisine was often better in the holes in the wall than the fancy restaurants, so was the art often better in the warehouse than the gallery.  The best of all was in the M50 art district of Shanghai, specifically an exhibition by multimedia artists group Liu Dao who put moving LED displays inside many of their works that reacted to the viewer.  One required you to pick up a light and shine it on the piece in order to elicit various sounds, others offered a video that reacted if you phoned a particular telephone number scrawled onto the screen in the form of graffiti. Little taster:

By Liu Dao, Shanghai M50