Nathalie Bouffe

Non-Update II

 

Non-Update

 

Hong Kong

Hong Kong is crazy.

I thought Tokyo was the future. But no, my friends. Tokyo was just the future of Japan. 

Hong Kong is the universal future.  What follows may sound like a paranoid's delusions, but really, coming from rural China, I think it's just the culture shock talking.  Also, I’m writing really fast and don’t have time to make it pretty, sorry. I’m dead tired and just want to go to bed but will have acclimatized tomorrow and become Comfortable-in-Cities Nathalie again.

I’d read somewhere that  Hong Kong's airport was rated as being the best in the world.  Keeping in mind my previous riff about airports, Hong Kong typifies a functional-but-stylized, aesthetic-but-sterile environs that’s supposed to be just pleasant enough to ignore.

Random Disorganization

And now, some thoughts for a change.  (Ha.)

1. Speaking of modernization. It’s good and all that, but I am wondering what the hell people are going to do once farm technology reaches China’s rural areas. Right now people still sow, transplant, and cut rice by hand. Road workers (recall the ones between Kunming and Da Li) pick ax rock, hoe dust, pass cement buckets hand-to-hand. All of which takes forever and is very hard work. Modern machines and ideas would probably require 90% less people to do the same amount of work.  The vast majority of Chinese people live in rural areas, hundreds of millions. When machines replace them, what will they do?
2. Speaking of tourism. The other day an old woman came up to us selling umbrellas. “Hello,” she said, waving the umbrellas. “US Dollar!” Meaning she’d accept them. Only it came out, “Hello, US Dollar!” There is a large hole being dug, and it’s unclear who are the diggers, but I think a lot of people are holding shovels, including me.
3. Speaking of photography. Most of the tourists we’ve seen have been Chinese, and it’s not just a stereotype: take pictures of themselves in front of absolutely everything. I don’t think I’ve seen a single Chinese tourist take a picture of some monument without their friend in front of it—much less a picture of a local or a market or whatever Western tourists love to put in their photo albums. (They stare at us like we’re half-wits, in fact, if they catch us taking a picture of a flower or an old lady or whatever.) But I digress. What I was going to say is that I finally realized why I so much prefer writing about things than taking pictures of them. Two reasons: (A) because I always feel really invasive when I take someone’s picture, and (B) because when I write about something I’m in control of the memory, whereas photography’s “objectivity” makes things much less personal to me.
4. Speaking of airports, does anyone have recommendations for MCM-type readings on airports? They’re really weird places, what with transit, acclimation, security, national borders, etc. all coming together. Recently I read an article about the latest (I think) Tom Hanks movie (could be wrong on that), in which the most expensive set ever created was made, and it’s an airport, an incredible simulation. I read in another article that the top five international airports were: 1.Hong Kong; 2.Singapore; 3.Amsterdam; 4. Kuala Lumpur; 5.Seoul Incheon. Four out of five in Asia. I need to think about this further.
5. Speaking of public art, I saw two different ones today and had two different thoughts. The first was a series of metal palm trees of different outlandish colors (red, orange, purple, etc.) decorating a street. It made me reflect on how much of our world is manmade (and how public art looks different and is different in diff. places), and how I had to come halfway around the world to have that thought. The second was a larger-than-life sculpture of a couple holding shopping bags. New deities for China!

The Travails of our Travel

Today everything went wrong.

Guilin’s curse on us began as soon as we stepped out of the airport. On the way to the hotel, the taxi driver passed my dad his cell phone and said, “It’s for you.” Jerry was on the line.

Panorama Whore Waxes Lyrical

Sorry about the delays, I am having a lot of trouble accessing the page in the rural areas.

I think I can say, with some assurance, that I’d be hard-pressed to find myself more comfortable than I am right now. It’s raining over Lijian—has been ever since we got here last night—and my sister is still sleeping, so I’ve taken my laptop outside to a wicker chair in the hotel's small courtyard. Bathing in rust-colored red from the elegantly carved wooden balconies, depicting a wild morass of fantastical cranes and peacocks, and the silk hanging lanterns, I try to decipher the inscriptions in Chinese script winding their gold way from the tops of columns to the bottom. A big, gurgling stone dragon waters a pebble-lined pond, and I’m filled with admiration for this distinct aesthetic style so unfamiliar yet so stately and serene. On my other side I’m flanked by a big window through which I can see Lijian hurrying about under umbrellas or plastic sheets. A man  under a shop awning is hammering out engravings on a bell, so backing the beat of my headphones is the sound of his hammer on the anvil.

Kunming Inspires a Meditation on Yin, Yang, and Traffic

We’d flown into Kunming and spent just a night there, but the changes in the anthropological landscape were immediately striking: this was now quite obviously Central Asia. The people were swarthier and spoke less (no) English, and architecturally buildings were still very communist, concrete apartment cubes hung with window boxes sporting plastic flowers. The music was  different, less stereotypically Chinese (fluty, reedy, high-pitched) and more braying, chanting, drumming: braaaooooooh, not wee-wee-wee. (I’m sure I'll regret that turn of phrase later).

In Shanghai Pat had remarked that while on the seaboard China was metamorphosing at breakneck speed, it would take much longer for the newest revolution to reach the provinces, and I noted that  here.  Nevertheless, the seeds of change had been planted. The gigantic, hundred-foot billboards lining the highways who previously functioned to broadcast Maoist messages now issued the twenty-first-century’s incarnation of propaganda: A woman in a pink dress lounging before a plum-blossom background proclaimed “Yue Sai: The Best the World has to offer Asian Women!” A lipstick ad.

In the morning we went to the park at six to watch the city wake up.  The gravel paths were filled with people massaging their elbows and faces, slapping at their chests, braying, humming, singing and shouting. To the unprepared, it might look like the garden of a large asylum. But it was wonderful. What I saw, I think, was a community keeping healthy together.

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.

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.

Xi'an

Déjà vu today.

In period-piece movies there’s always a scene where the camera follows a character as he strides through a town in his armor/dusty chaps/waistcoat/toga, weaving a path between horses getting shoed/drunkards getting tossed out of swinging saloon doors/matchstick girls huddled over vents/centurions on their way to war. In this sequence, epoch notwithstanding, there’s always some footage of smoke rising from foodstalls, voices arguing loudly off-camera, jostling, smells of rotting food, maybe some street musicians. I’d never given a thought to the Chinese Muslim community, but Xi’an harbors one thriving enclave, and today it was my turn to be the character strolling through its market.