Pat, Meiling and Johnny

So I just got back from spending time with an old friend's roommate for last summer, his girlfriend and his cousin—fantastic. I'd never met any of them before, but my friend had given me his info, so I took a deep breath and called Pat anyway, figuring I can't talk shit about how much of our meals we eat at the hotel (too many) and then not call up a local if I’ve got a phone number. We small-talked for a few minutes, tried to figure out what we were going to do tonight (it's a Monday, and he'd mentioned the club scene was pretty dead.) It turns out, coincidence of all coincidences, that in of all of Shanghai, his building's the next one over.

So I went over, and the smallness of the world continued: when I showed up, i noticed that his girlfriend's handbag (out of all the handbags in shanghai) was my first purchase in this city. They're also both on friendster, too, but that may be less surprising. What follows is extraordinarily long and painfully descriptive, but I had a feeling this was a conversation I wanted to take down in detail. Skip down if it’s is too exhaustive.

Pat's half Vietamese and half Minessotan, born in Seoul and raised in Taipei, attended the University of Wisconsin in Madison and moved out to Shanghai two years ago because China’s on the cusp, the next big thing, where it’s all about to happen. He speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, English and Vietnamese, and works for a headhunting company that lends its services out to big corporations with bases in China, like Heineken, who don't have the resources to search for executives internally. He's 23 and just got promoted—now he oversees four people whose jobs consist of trying to get through competitors' secretaries in order woo away their bosses.

On the side he's a DJ trying to get the trance scene launched in China.  His new turntables sit on the table in the living room, but they spin CDs instead of records. It makes DJing much cheaper because instead of having to buy a library of records you can just rip music for free, burn it onto CDs and spin with them.

Juggling his day job and his hobby is getting to Pat. At the beginning he was stoked for the day job, but now it's too much trying to do it all—he'll be at the office thinking about the flyers he has to copy or stressing over how many people will come to the party they’re throwing, and then Karen asks him for the PSC report. Today he stayed home and slept till five because he couldn't bear the thought of going to work.

Meiling, Pat’s girlfriend, is half Belgian, half Hong Kongese. When she was young her parents divorced and her mom went back to Flanders, so Meiling was raised in both on the Flemish-Dutch border and in Hong Kong, but not really, she says, by her parents, since she went to school abroad her whole life. It's unclear what Meiling's dad does for a living. His wife lives in Hong Kong, but his home is the world, she says—he's always traveling. When she was little her dad asked her to go get a file in his office, and the closet was filled with magazines: gun magazines, ammunition magazines, flyers for clips, information on helicopters. She thinks he was an arms dealer, and I didn’t press her on the past tense. “When I graduated from college,” she remembers, “My dad offered me the standard Hong Kong graduation choice: a Rolex, or a Montblanc pen. But I was like, I want an ipod.”

A dragon tattoo that Meiling got in Malaysia undulates across her back, which stands for (and gives her) strength, endurance. Originally she wanted one for good luck, but according to her astrological sign it would have been a flower that "looked like it had been carved out of a potato and stamped on,” so she got the dragon. She went to college in Beijing and studied art, but it was exhausting, too critical, and ultimately stifling—all they liked was realistic landscape, and she prefers abstraction. Now she works as a freelance graphic designer; her last project was to create the Flash for a freight-forwarding company's promotional DVD, but she also designs the flyers for the trance parties Pat and Johnny throw. In the morning she exercises, then works at the computer for a few hours, and paints at night. This type of job isn’t like a typical 9-6, she relates—sometimes it’ll be 10 o'clock at night and she can’t stop thinking she should be doing something. The element of self-control is difficult, but she tries to stick to a strict ‘No bong hits on the weekdays’ policy. She speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, Flemish and English, and when she paints her canvases are vivid, swirling red and fuschia cityscapes overlaid with thick black skyscrapers made of mottled paint.

Johnny isn't really Pat's cousin, but as he's the only Vietnamese person Pat knows in Shanghai, he’s earned him the classification. He grew up all over the States—New York, Minnesota, Texas, California—went to a few months of college in San Antonio to escape his evil stepmother in New York, then moved to China to detox and has been partying ever since; it’s been six years now. 
He's never had a job in his life, and if the money's not running out, why get one? Before he came to  Shanghai he spent time in Beijing, in Guangzhou and in the West, but he’s been here for a few months now because the day he came he fell asleep on a bus and when he woke up, six thousand USD, his "lappie,” his passport and his ipod (my ipod was my everything, he says) had been stolen. So he sticks around, but it’s okay. He likes it here.

Tonight he barged in to bitch about female taxi drivers. I'm never up during daylight hours, he says. Call me before noon and it may induce a heart attack. But this morning he was actually  up at nine, in a cab no less. Lady got so lost it cost 60 yuen instead of 30. Insane! You can speak Cantonese perfectly, you can have lived in Shanghai forever, but the taxis will still gyp you left and right. He speaks English, Mandarin, Cantonese, and Vietnamese. He'd stopped over, it turned out, because he'd thought I was a friend not of CC's but of Fifi's, the one with the crazy weed. I was sorry to disappoint, but we got along great anyway.

Pat, Meiling and Johnny mostly hang out with other expats, of which there are a lot in Shanghai: teaching English, here to study, here to work. The turnover rate for friends is high, but they went to international schools, so they’re used to that, they explain, although it doesn’t suck any less when your friends leave.

Finding friends when you move here is easy if you join a group with a common interest—there are enough expats in Shanghai for each age group to contain many distinct (though overlapping) circles. You can, for instance, get in with the Ultimate Frisbee kids, but according to Meiling, they take their Frisbee way too seriously, or the Investment Bankers, although that also isn’t quite their  scene. The flame that draws these particular expat moths together is trance, nightclubs their candles. But Shanghai’s e-heads subdivide, defining distinctions through drink specials and décor, each nightclub having established its own niche appeal. We’re not like those kids who are like, oh, look at me, I go to Pegasus on Thursday nights for 55-yuan gin and tonics, Pat clarifies. That’s the Prada crowd. We’re more like, let’s get some ten-yuan Bacardi on the rocks at Guandii! I’ll go out dressed like this, Johnny says, pointing to his t-shirt and mesh shorts. Only expats go to the trance clubs, says Pat, because the local scene hasn’t yet evolved past house, let alone spun off into jungle or drum ‘n bass.

Pat’s poised to change that, but it’s slow going, he says, and he’s not willing to quit his day job yet, although he’d love to produce some day. Electronic music is all over Southeast Asia, although most of it comes from Europe. Johnny suggested I check out the Full Moon beach parties in Thailand. Picture heaven, he said. Full Moon is that, times a hundred: sand, salt water, girls, drugs, and bumpin’ bass. And everybody’s single.

I listened hard and asked for more, because in some sense it felt like they were describing my fast-approaching future. My own time as a young, working expat is about to begin, and in one or two years I might have much of the same stories. They eat mostly Vietnamese, at Zentral’s (healthy fusion food/juice bar), or pizza. What’s good to eat in Hong Kong? I asked them, and they reminisced about their childhood favorites, simultaneously swirling English and Chinese. Try the char siu rice, enthused Meiling, or the curry fish balls, or the meatsticks Xiangdongese men sell on the corner. Oh, and egg tarts. Even the Prime Minister loves them. Pick up a goose leg at a street stall, urged Johnny, and just gnaw on it—nothing beats gnawing on a roasted goose leg with plum sauce as you do your shopping. Hong Kong’s food, they said, took the best of China and improved it. Cantonese food was too greasy, Sichuan was too spicy, but Hong Kong took the cream of the crop. It was essential, they all agreed, for us to find a little diner that serves Hong Kong-style  French toast and doughnuts, and Meiling drew me a picture and wrote down the Chinese characters for it, so we could ask around. In return I made them a list, bulleted, of what they should eat when they go to Amsterdam in September: stroopwafeln, pear juice or bottled banana, little gray shrimp from that sea between the Benelux and Scandinavia. Is that called North Sea? we wondered collectively. We weren’t sure.

No one does drugs recreationally in China, said Pat. Either you're a gangster, a gangster's girlfriend, or insane—otherwise you just drink. If you get caught in China with drugs, especially if there are a lot of  them and you're a nobody, you are fucked. They've executed for it before. Of course, if you're rich or you know people, you can get out of it. Are you guys gangsters? I asked jokingly. No, we’re internationals, they clarified. It's different.

The club scene sees a lot of K, a ton of Ecstasy, and little ways across the spectrum there’s a lot of heroin, which comes from Thailand. I remarked on how good the shopping is in Shanghai. Just wait till you get to Hong Kong, they said. There, the designer brands are just as cheap, but they’re the real deal. I wondered how that was possible. They just steal trucks and sell the stolen merchandise in Hong Kong, Johnny told me. You mean, like highway robbery? Yeah. How do you know? Well, my brother…

It was Johnny’s brother who told Johnny that the gangsters control the entertainment industry, that if you want Kelly Chang [HK pop star] for a night, she’s yours if you can pay for it. My brother once pointed out this guy to me, recounts Johnny, and said See that guy? He decides what plays in Hong Kong’s movie theaters.

Johnny’s brother may go around with a sketchy crowd, but he doesn’t fuck with fate—this is a man who takes his feng shui seriously. He had, says Johnny, a fishtank brought into his apartment with a crane because there was too much ‘fire’ in one corner. Meiling chimes in, remembering that once when they went home to Johnny’s brother’s she kept stumbling over the judiciously placed bowls of water all over the apartment. Hong Kong, is indeed known for its fortune tellers, who either read your palm or your birth date to predict your life—quite accurately, according to the trio, who definitely ‘believe.’ Meiling is a Buddhist, but Johnny was raised Catholic, and told Pat about his plan for when they go to Brazil. “The first day we get there, we’re going to the big Jesus statue in Rio,” he said. “We’re going to pray for a whole day, to prep Jesus for all the shit we’re going to do.  We’re going to tell him, ‘Brother, here are my plans, but remember, I came to you and told you first.’ And then we’re going to party.”

I asked them the question that had been burning in my mind all week: how does one text-message in Chinese? Johnny opened his phone to show me the little pad he on which he can draw characters with a stylus, Palm-Pilot style. Otherwise you can type words out phonetically (Xin-tian-di, for instance), or break down characters into their component strokes (of which there are seven: vertical line, horizontal line, upturned curve, etc.) and key them in; the characters auto-complete  midway through. Johnny’s phone was amazing, light years ahead of what I’ve seen in the States. Even the tiny little phones of the Asian kids I see at my school, said Johnny, were probably second-hand. In Hong Kong people switch their phones every two or three months to stay on top of the latest models. They’re so materialistic, complained Meiling. They’ll be like, your phone doesn’t have a camera? Oh my God—get with the times!

This statement seemed symbolic of a larger trend in China. What Beijing is like now, remembered Pat, reminds him of what Taipei was like when he was growing up—he can’t imagine what Beijing will be like in fifteen years. Out of all of the big cities Hong Kong is the most modern, China’s Manhattan, with Shanghai its New York City and Beijing its L.A. Hong Kong never sleeps, they said,  churning day and night like New York but small enough to walk all around. The island is so small they put the nightclubs in the office buildings, because that way they can make use of the buildings both day and night. You’ll walk into a building at eleven p.m., they said, and take an elevator up to the twenty-fourth floor as the bass gets louder and louder. Then the doors slide open and you're on the dance floor. Anywhere you go after living in Hong Kong is kind of tame, Meiling found, and gets boring pretty quickly. The smog? You get used to it. I glanced at Meiling’s latest painting, where the stubby black skyline seemed to struggle under the weight of a viscous hot-pink sky and shocking yellow sun. You do?

Pat noted that eating Ecstasy in Shanghai was crazy—the pills aren’t as clean as they are in the States, and the neon and activity and people, he said, made for a really intense trip, maybe like tripping in Las Vegas. Meiling countered: living in Shanghai means feeling like you’re tripping—even when you’re sober. 

The rate at which buildings go up and down in Shanghai, they unanimously accorded, was dizzying. I remembered reading that in the mid-nineties fully one-fifth of all the world’s high cranes could be found in Shanghai. In the short time we’ve been here I’ve noticed the noises of a city under construction following us around; as I write I hear drilling on the door side of our hotel room and jackhammering outside the window. Yeah, China’s the next great superpower, they all agreed. For  sure.

Pat referred to something I'd learned in the book I'd just finished: that the Chinese actually own most of Southeast Asia. In less developed countries like Thailand, Cambodia and Burma, expat Chinese make up only a small percentage (like 2% of the population), but control something like 70% of the country's money. But even though economically China’s taking shape very quickly, culturally it’ll need a while to catch up. The coast, typical of seaboards, is more progressive, but in rural areas change will need several generations to arrive—as Meiling reminded us, people are still starving on the west side of the country.  Current administrators are still old-guard types, according to Pat, but just conservative, not stupid. They're being cautious, allowing only joint ventures with other countries, so that the foreign investments stay under Chinese control. But the next generation will explode all that, he thinks. China is poised for superstardom, and Pat, for one, is optimistic about it.

But there’s a price for life on fast-forward. In Hong Kong they’ve had to put cages around the subway stations to keep people from jumping onto the rails. Every time that happened, it screwed up the subway times, and people lost money, a problem the city moved swiftly to fix. (Indeed, in Japan and HK the government fines the families of those who commit suicide to detract them from doing so).  "The 80s were the golden years," Meiling remembers. "Everyone was getting rich really fast. But when the British lease ended and Hong Kong became Chinese again, things got really bad for a few years.” She thinks it's getting steadily better now, although people’s stress level and unhappiness haven’t improved. Just goes to show, she pointed out, that money doesn't bring happiness—a sentiment that I’ve noticed echoed verbatim four times since we’ve been in China. In people whose behavior evidences money as the primary goal, why does this platitude keep emerging?

It was a fun night—overall I liked them a lot, mostly for reestablishing my faith in humanity, keeping me optimistic about the future. Meeting young people from different parts of the world reassures me, because most of the time they remind me that we’re really much the same all over. I I forget that when all I’m dealing with are incessantly gloomy abstractions about globalization, global homogenization, our alienating postmodern pop culture, et al, which plunge me into despair—until I realize that as long as we’ve still gotpeople running the world I think we’ll be okay in it.