Shanghai

Think China: pagodas and calligraphy come to mind, or dim sum and Mao. But this country’s bigger than ours is, and once you’re here you realize that checking out another city takes an airplane and a few hours, more if your flight happens get canceled for “fault of plane” as our Xi’an-Shanghai passage did (they served us dinner anyway—and eating plane food in the terminal was really bizarre). Weird that when this happened we were in a city of seven million that I’d never heard of before coming. Yes, it’s just another day in the Middle Kingdom.

Favorite things about China today:
--seeing a row of portable air-conditioners (the kind that hang outside windows) watering flowerpots with their drip. What a great way to use your resources.
--watching the Shanghai acrobats juggle little girls. The second-best act was this huge sumo-wrestler type who did tricks with an enormous, heavy-as-hell porcelain amphora. Way random.
--the tea that taxi drivers drink. They all have this glass jam jar as big as a Nalgene that they fill up halfway with flowers (dandelions?) that make the liquid piss-yellow, and they sip at it all day. This practice is so ingrained that most taxis have a sconce built into the side for jam-jar storage.
--I’m still totally loving the English translations of Chinese signs.  Recent gems: “No drugs or  nuclear weapons allowed in” to a park; seniors are allowed discounts as long as they can show the  proper “longevity papers”; and women’s clothing stores named Pretty Bride Wedding, Gealous, and Email. I saw a sign today that offered rewards to citizens who “supervise” dishonesty by making “helpful accusations,” to the government, and one publicizing free admittance for children under 1.2 meters (instead of 12 years). Yeah, something gets lost in translation. But so much is gained!

Jess Grose loves it when I tell stories about my family, so here’s some more for Jess to chew on. Basically, we have traded our former sanity and coherence in favor of turning into a goofy bunch of  mal élevés no longer vigilant to cultural transgression—at lunch yesterday my dad actually started building a tower out of chopsticks and chewed gum. (My mom, fiercely: Alex, ca suffit!) But we have a good time balancing being lost with being cheerful about it. With my sister I have definitely devolved from mature-and-sophisticated postgraduate-role-model (ha!) to wedgie-giving-armpit-proffering wet-willie-guerilla, and even though whines about it I know deep down she loves it or when she slaps me she would do it harder. You are the dumbest smart person I know, she told me tonight. I believe the term is absentminded genius, I told her. She was not amused.

Yesterday it got too much for the whole family, and they forbade me to speak for fifteen minutes. I was like, I’ll show them, and kept mum for three hours, but then it got boring for me, because they obviously didn’t give a shit.

My dad is currently reading a book about China’s imperial dynasties, which is full of fun facts about eunuchs. He loves the grisly retelling of how they’re castrated—they carve it out and plug the hole with a cork, he says gleefully. A favorite insult of T’ang-dynasty Chinese, then, was “You stink like a eunuch,” which my dad pronounces “You stink like Munich.” Care’s temporary estrangement from classy people has enabled her sense of humor to reach new lows. Yesterday’s pearl: “What does one piece of cheese say to the other as he saw a small house in the distance?” My dad, who shares this (dare I say it—cheesy) sensibility, answered in kind: “Cheese, a house!” “You shed-dar believe it!” Caroline answered, grinning ear to ear. Howls of laughter from both; horrified embarrassment from Mom and me.

Apparently I’m the family’s biggest embarrassment, though. I resolved to grow my pit hair until it was long enough to grab—which, by the way, is not that long. Whenever I lift an arm this grosses them out to no end, prompting my dad to cry, “You stink like Munich!” Today, then, I was coerced into shaving, and now they acknowledge me in public again.

But the shopping has been fabulous (although problematic. More on that later). I bought a Chairman Mao watch for $4 that has Mao waving every second. The next day, Mao had stopped waving and it was 8 am at noon. Turns out you have to wind it. My dad thought I was a total idiot for not knowing how to do it. Uh, what? Have any of YOU ever had a watch that winds?

A Shanghaiese friend of the family took us shopping in the city’s backalleys: a consumerist’s wet dream. First we visited Annie’s comrade, the illegal watch merchant. He has a perfectly above-the-board stall in the market, but if you know how to ask, he’ll whip out a suitcase stuffed with all the premium watch brands you can imagine. My mom bought a Movado, and Caroline an Hermès and a Cartier. Each for $30.

Next she led us through a narrow passageway that was obviously residential, right behind the market. A wizened old woman was plucking apart kale for a salad as laundry dried overhead. Annie knocked on a door devoid of anything but a peephole, and when it opened after the sound of three bolts unlocking, we saw that it was made of iron a foot thick. Mad sketch.  We were shuffled inside, and into what, lacking a better expression, I’ll call a temple of leather and bling. Handbags, wallets, and watches—all very self-consciously Valentino, Prada, Christian Dior, and Coach. But the bags were not so convincing, and we moved on. I had bought a few DVDs in a record store in Beijing for about $4 each, which I thought was a deal. But after the Bling Box Annie hurried us to the back office of a clothes store nearby, into which a man—another comrade—carted in shoebox after shoebox of DVDs. Every time we’d look up after shuffling through a stack of thirty he had another stack waiting for us. We probably speed-browsed through a thousand titles until the four of us had picked our favorite 68 (note: my parents got their first DVD player last month.) We paid $65 for them. In the outside bazaar (back in the legal—or at least, unlocked—marketplace) I found a lot of cute clothes, but they all fit me weird. As Caroline says, my boobs are too big for China.

I don’t know my feelings on all of this yet. The brand names were kind of a turn-off to me, for political as well as personal reasons, but my morals definitely bit the dust with the DVDs, and I am certainly complicit in many other First World-Third World tensions. My stance keeps wavering--it’s complicated stuff! Do I bargain when I know I can buy something for a third of the asking price (which begins already low), or do I reason that they need the money more than I do, and just pay up? Does playing the part of generous American—giving money to bums, for instance—help them out, or does it just perpetuate their dependence on the tourist economy? And what about on a larger scale—how about the foreign money that at first trickled in and now is positively gushing? Does it help China off its feet or do American corporations (to use an example) flood the country with Western power and culture? Starbucks, my dad pointed out, has to be 51% Chinese-owned, creates jobs for Chinese, and generally stimulates the economy. But it’s fucking Starbucks. 

In Communist China! "Communist" China, I guess I should say. I think of Annie, our friend-of-family in Shanghai, who symbolizes to me the “new” China. To her, Shangri-La means the hotel chain, and while I scoured the markets for Mao jackets and mandarin-collar shirts, she ate up the kidney-shaped Christian Dior bags, “like Carrie, from Sex and the City!” Perhaps each of us is just seeking the exotic, but from my perspective, it looks like the world is rapidly becoming one big extension of American pop culture. Tennenhouse is right when he points out my double standard: why should Asia be prevented from the privileges of modernization (for the first time in history, it’s possible that every Chinese may have enough to eat because of modernization) when we don’t hesitate to enjoy (wallow in) them? I wondered if it made a difference if I said that it wasn't so much Asia's technological/economic/governmental modernization that bothers me but rather its cultural Westernization. Clearly it makes sense that underdeveloped nations look to the West to modernize, and but why does Western culture come as part of the modernization package? Is it impossible for countries to modernize without dropping their indigenous popular culture in favor of Western pop culture? (I'm trying to make sure I'm not working with a falsely nostalgic image for a past China that never existed—but I'm reasonably sure in arguing that China's culture needed no foreign influences to make it rich and full and distinctive!) He said that what’s important isn’t that they’re Western materials, but how people were using the materials and what kind of world they are imagining (typical Tennenhouse response). And Alex has a point in saying that perhaps Sex and the City, Starbucks, etc., have ceased being Western brands and now ‘belong to the world.’ I’m not sure I buy it, though. Is globalization a threat to global cultural heterogeneity?

No answers, of course. These questions never have them. But that’s what I’m thinking about.

Comments

[Pamela]

Those "dandelions" are dried chrysanthemum flowers that make a delicious tea. The bottle you mentioned is very common in China--students, mothers, taxi drivers the like all carry them around.