Sloth & Gluttony in the Central Kingdom

cabbie conversatioin, 2 of N

The dude did not endear himself to me at first, because he said he doesn't like picking up foreigners and Africans.  (Racism in China is not an undercurrent, not atypical, and sometimes I wonder how some of the exchange students deal with this on a daily basis.)  But I forgot some of this as the conversation went on, because he is the first Muslim cabbie I'd met, and had a way of talking that was as Beijing as it gets. 

I liked hearing his Beijing-nese, the easy, gliding lilt of it, like he had all the time in the world to tell you about the world.  He always eats his packed lunch, and said that being Muslim in a Han world isn't so much an inconvenience, just something where you spend more time thinking about where to go for a meal.  And no, there was a time and a generation before him where people cared intensely more about these things, as in the old couples on Cow Street, born and bred before Cow Street had Han Chinese sharing the apartments.  He knows of an old man with a "dog-sharp muslim nose" -- these are his words -- who had a row when he smelled the Han couple downstairs making a pork stew.  Muslim men could often get Han wives (like he did) without feeling like a traitor to the tradition, but not so with muslim women, and hence the old maids lurking in the nooks and crannies of Cow Street.

"You can spot the purest Muslim families there," he said, "one of those old men with intense unmistakable muslim faces taking around his little granddaughter, always a beauty, and you'd know right away that the whole family will make no compromises when it comes to her marrying an outsider."

seeing double

Seen over my 'hood after coming back to Beijing after a long weekend away: a nearly complete, double-on-one-side rainbow.  Horray!

All Sages, All the Time

Ok, so there's this bookstore near Beijing/Tsinghua Universities called All Sages, which is a clever translation of its Chinese name, which means "ten thousand sages."  Even cleverer is its affiliated Thinker Cafe, which in Chinese is a transliteration of the English and means "Cafe for Awake People."  It has good tables and very soft reading lamps that reminds me of Cafe 1369 in Cambridge, and a lot of foreign students study there.  For New Yorkers this bookstore is a lot like Labyrinth, and for San Franciscans it's perhaps like a combo of City Lights and that academic press store in Berkeley (its name escapes me -- I've been too long out east!).

Anyway, every time I step into All Sages I'm struck by one very strong urge -- the urge to flee.  The selection of books has a diabolical suggestiveness that really threatens your mental equilibrium, so your pulse quickens and your parasympathetic system kinda kicks in.  I usally stay after counting to ten, because 1) I remember how crowded the bus was that got me there, and 2) I remind myself I have a membership card that gets me 10% off at the cashier!!!  Oh the woes and throes of being a reader.

So anyway, this is not a place for the faint of heart -- hard hats are required. Its selection of academic tomes is already very impressive, but  I want to write about the kind of books in translation you can find there.  There's a pretty good portion of Umberto Eco's oeuvre, including Six Walks in a Fictional Woods and Travels with a Salmon, and the complete collector's set on Italo Calvino (bless the procurers).  Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake is a recent (?) find, as is Sandra Cisnero's The House on Mango Street (a surprise, because it's not a very high-profile book).  Readers of Chinese are so lucky! I found a compact volume on the life and work of Diane Arbus (as part of a portable libary series on western photographers), and, the pride of all of my purchases today:

Platero and I, An Andalusian Elegy

by Juan Ramon Jimenez

Packaged as a children's Chinese-English edition.  The Chinese title is "Little Donkey and I," which is just adorable.  I was going to buy it as a present for a young friend, until I glanced at the English version and found it marvelously poetic.  So now it's mine.  :)

Despite the U.S-mania in movies, in places like this literature in translation is wonderfully not Amerigo-centric.   This makes me very happy.

sometimes just because you have to pee...

you end up seeing 

the most breathtaking sunrise clouds from your bedroom window:

(I agree it doesn't look like much here, but then you're happy to be awake at 5am, with no need for AC in the room, and plus you get to see the first subway train slowly pull out of the depot which is just under my window too --)

I'm spending a lot of time indoors so these things are very exciting.
I also confess this post is less for my friends than for myself.  With less than one month left in this apartment I'm having anticipatory nostalgia.

Fishermen and Monks

My little cousin asked me while we were on the beaches of Putuo Shan (off the coast of Zhejiang): "Why is it that you're so excited when you see monks?"

Why indeed?  I didn't have a good, succinct answer.  Later when we took a tricycle  ride in  a small town  and we passed by the town's redlight district, she asked me the same thing.

"Why are you excited by the redlight district?"

I had a lot of explaining to do to my 18-year-old cousin.

But here's a picture of two monks watching the sun go down in Putuo Shan, as we were.

On our way back to the mainland we passed by a fishing town, Shenjiamen, which is also near Ningbo. For a while I’d been toying with the idea of going to Ningbo just to see the boats go to sea.  The people of Ningbo have immigrated as far as Norway, where they are permitted to count their time on boats as residence time in-country. (This really says a lot about Norway, I think)  The following picture was taken at the dock, where a row of tents covering tables line the street at the dock, each tent a miniature seafood restaurant, operating under the “see food raw, eat food cooked” business model.  They're usually manned by a cook, a waitress, and a maitre d' who's not above holding you by the elbow to sit down at their tent. 

Compared to those who move about on the shore, the boatmen are bony, dark and grimy, the tempo of their motions oceanic.  The oars of their small boats (to access the bigger ones out yonder has a rope tied to one end and attached to the bottom of the boat.  They hold that rope with their left hand, and sway the dipping oar with their right.  It's mesmerizing to watch.  (I was relieved my cousin didn't ask, "Why are you so excited by fishermen?") At dusk one of them may come out and smoke a cigarette at the helm; across the water he looks directly at those of us sitting around colored tablecloths eating seafood.

After Dark, On the Water

After dark, I’m drawn to houhai like a fly is drawn to rancid meat.

My circumnavigating the water starts at Starbucks at the glitter-fied gateway known as the Lotus Market.  This is the heart of the economy meant to goad the foreign tourists into "investing" in China:

(image right: closeup of a display case outside a ritzy bar -- Absolut bottle as a kite)

From a distant shore, this stretch of bar lounges appears as if a Miyazakian apparition of the Spirited Away variety --  a ghost town, shimmering into existence only after dusk.  Promise of World Cup TV screens is meant to remind the customers of the west, or at least some kind of connection to the occident.  On these shores a decorously dressed young woman threads through the crowd and catches up to a white man, asking him quickly though fluently: “Excuse me sir, but do you want a mas-sage?” to which the single male tosses back an agitated “buyao!” before scuttling away.      

But half way around the lake the fancy-schmancy bars thin out; plastic outdoor tables replace cushy loveseats, and when you cross a bridge onto the north shore of houhai the foreigners potentially in need of massages are all but gone.  Suddenly it’s the shore of young lovers leaning on each other’s arms.  There are a few swimming heads.  Here’s my favorite stretch, because here, surrounded by jovial and relaxed Beijingers and poorly lit with effete but benign streetlamps, I can almost dissolve into the anonymous night.  At a small outdoor playground with exercise machines and a ping-pong table, a man is playing the flute against the railing by the water; other people park their bikes on the railing and gaze out toward the water; matrons chat intimately with each other.  Beyond the railings at the water’s edge, there are people in twos and threes, sitting at concrete ledge, with a fishing line in the water.  The lines either have a florescent buoy (in second photo, as a small green dot in lower left corner), or are illuminated by a spot of flashlight set next to the anglers.  What they get is usually carp.

cabbie conversatioin, 1 of N

When I stepped into the cab one muggy Saturday afternoon, I was munching messily on a "Turkish roast meat in a pita."   It's a short ride, and I didn't want to meet my friend eating.  Compared to a few years ago, Beijing cabbies don't initiate conversation as often.  But this one did.

"Haven't had lunch?"

"Well, my daily life is pretty sporadic."

"What do you do for a living?"

Short mental pause. 

"I do literature." 

In Chinese there's a convenient all-purpose word (gao) that can be used pretty much with anything -- you can gao revolutions, gao extramarital affairs.

"So you write novels?"

Well.  "Sometimes," I said, "but not for a living.  I like to collect stories from ordinary people." 

Then I said, "I bet if I rode around in your car all day I'd see a ton of stories."

So the cabbie, whose eyes lit up at this invitation to a gabbing, told me a couple of stories to add to my repertoire of "raw material" for novels. I think he imagined that I go around collecting "raw material" all day long, which would be an enviable way to make a living if I could manage it, and I liked it just fine.

Story one: he picked up a young girl who, he found out later, had just had a row with her parents.  This being an era of older car models, he hit a bump and the rear-view mirror fell astray  He tweaked with it, when the girl spoke from the backseat: "Stop looking at me, you jerk!"  He said, "I'm not looking at you! I'm trying to fix my mirror!"  The girl said, "I want to get out!"  He let her off, but she kicked his door when doing so.  He got out, said, "Why did you kick my door?"  and "you can get out, but the law says you gotta pay me the 10 kuai."  The girl refused to pay and started to leave.  He grabbed her bag ("I didn't dare grabbing her arm, either," he said).  A small crowd started to gather around the stalemate.  He asked the crowd, "which one of you guys know how to drive?" An elderly man spoke up. "Okay, then," he asks, "What's this thing for?" "It's the rearview mirror, for looking in the back of the car." "Okay, then, can you explain to her that this is what it's for, and I'm not being a pervert?" The elderly man explained, and in this way the dispute was settled.

Story 2: A lady got in from a train station with two large suitcases.  He tried to put them in the trunk, but they were heavy.  He said to her, "Can you gimme a hand?" She said, "No."  He said, "But these are YOUR suitcases; you should at least give me a hand."  She refused, and the dispatcher at the station helped instead.  Then she said she wanted to report the cabbie to the customer service hotline, and that she wanted to take another car.  "Fine," he said, and waited for her to get the suitcases out of the trunk herself. 

The upshot of both stories?  "You ride in our taxis, but you gotta respect us, you know?" 

I'm with him there, personally.  When I got out of the cab he craned his neck to speak to me across the partition.

"You go and do some editing of these raw materials, right?"

"Right," I said, thinking all of a sudden I don't take enough rides around Beijing.

English language signs

Notice the English sign on this storefront.  I don't usually notice the Engrish, so if it weren't for my friend MGH I would have completely missed this.  On a jaunt through Qianmen, the area in the southern gate of the old city wall, now an area earmarked for razing and re-raising.

Also in this area: a very famous old traditional medicine shop, where I like to oggle at the jars of ginseng with astronomical pricetags, a few large silk shops, and an age-old store of pickles, the varieties of which will astonish even a seasoned gruel-eater.

Breakfast in Beijing

Because of the biological perks of international jet-travel, I get to do something I'd never be able to do otherwise: be awake during the pre-9am hours, go out onto the streets and have a real breakfast.  7:20 am.  funkadelic essgrog! -- as Lethem's Brooklyn protagonist might ejaculate.  I pass by hot soymilk ladled into bowls, fried dough pieces rising to meet their makers, white collars sitting down at the tables stripping away the wrappings on disposable chopsticks.  The morning is soft, as soft as the night was tender when I landed in the airport 12 hours ago.  Beijing seems cleaner than I'd left it: no clinging catkins, no sand and dust, the leaves have all sprouted on the trees.  As I put my face into my own bowl of soymilk and I'm suddenly wildly in love with the city; I'm so grateful to be living here that metaphorical tears are streaming down my face.

The early daylight is part of the conspiracy, as is one shared by all the breakfast-eaters: they --  we -- are part of that brief doldrum in the day when everthing is still in equilibrium, when time is regulated by the prospect of life's demands and not by its reality, when politeness is taken for granted, when the menu doesn't have to be written out but everyone knows what he/she wants.  A woman comes with a plastic bottle to be filled with soymilk.  She protests that the store charges her two bowls for the fill-up.  The serving girl smiles apologetically but resolutely, and the woman relents.  Next to me two Korean girls finish their black-rice porridge, blending in quietly if it weren't for the Intro to Chinese textbooks they're toting.

Because I love the early morning as much as I love working late into the night, the ideal life for me in Beijing would be keeping the hours of a brothel: to be awake until 6am, then walk onto the streets for a bowl of porridge and sticky-rice pastery and maybe a tea-flavored egg, then return home when the light is too direct to be beautiful and sleep until the sun is aslant again.

(Pictured: dawn from my apartment window)

better than nutella; beijing old and new

Newly acquired from a cousin visiting from Oslo: a SQUEEABLE tube of hazelnut chocolate sauce. This is VERY exciting. She also brought with her Norweigian salmon slices, which she promptly layered over bread-toast and a layer of softly scrambled eggs to show us eating Norweigian style. Okay, so this kind of cooking isn't sophisticated, but you just can't beat the salmon.

My cousin has lived most of her adult life in Beijing. After having lived in Oslo for a few years recently, she says that, given the way Beijing has changed, after a few more years, she might not be able to say she's "been to Beijing." The truth grain of this gives me some pangs of discomfort.

If a city is like an axe whose handle and head have been replaced a few times, how would you know the difference? A recent TV program reported that outside a few hole-in-the-wall muslim eateries near Qianmen, long lines have accumulated from morning to night, because locals got word that the alley is to be torn down (not atypical here), and they wanted to get a last taste of old Beijing food (stuff like thick mutton soup and various sheep parts) before they leave. The owners of these one-hat joints were naturally overwhelmed by the crowd, and they put out a handwritten sign saying "We're not moving until June" to stave people off. Funny and sad at the same time.

Korea town in Beijing: an open question

I spent Friday in the Wangjing district, helping my friend Kwang, an anthropologist, do field research for his dissertation on Koreans in Beijing. Wangjing is supposedly the largest residential area (xiaoqu) in Asia. (Yes, I know that's saying something) Kwang wanted to interview the people in charge in the Residential Committiees of the district, to see how they feel about the high percentage of Korean residents in this white-collar, highrise neighborhood that's developing like mad quite outside Beijng's center.

Now, Residential Committees in China conjure up images of meddlesome retired women whose official job is to monitor everyone's business and sometimes "advise" people on contraceptive use. It turned out that both offices were more receptive to questions than we thought, and the staff were considerably younger than middle-age. Kwang did confess to me later that I made him a little nervous when I asked the staff why some of the numbers on display in the office about residential statistics did not add up. (It was out of numerical reflex, not any Mike-Wallace-ian aspirations on my part)

We had a very good lunch in a Korean restaurant whose owner is a good friend of Kwang's. Korean aesthetics, Korean-standard of cleanliness (i.e., higher than the average Chinese), Korean-speaking waitstaff. The baked mackerel was divine, and the small overture dishes were picture-worthy (Kwang promised to send me the photos to complete this blog). I must have enjoyed the meal a great deal more than Kwang, whose head was churning planning the busy afternoon. After the first interview, we walked around a bit waiting for his next contact, and when we discussed the conversation that just went on, Kwang whipped out his small Sony recorder -- wow, to be "doing" anthropology real-time! This was all very exciting to me.

Walking around the 'hood, you could half believe that you're in Korea (i.e., what I imagine Korea to be). Stores, services and restaurants with Korean signs abound, and though all the children play and shout in Chinese, Korean is being spoken between some adults, most likely businessmen who came to Beijing for development. Also in this mix, I learned, are Chinese nationals who are of the Korean ethnic minority ("Chinese Koreans") who serve as linguistic bridges between the Chinese and Koreans, working for Korean employees in various capacities. The world is used to bits of China transported and transplanted in unlikely corners, but maybe China isn't quite ready for others to do the same. One of Kwang's contacts, Mr. Park, had lived in China for twenty years, speaks very fluent Mandarin, and has an elder son who's grown up in Beijing. He laments the fact that his son cannot attend school like the local Beijing people (they have to pay extra fees to "borrow" attendance), even though, he says, he has paid taxes plenty and created jobs among Chinese citizens with his businesses. Among the intertwining web of tensions, there's xenophobia, eagerness for foreign investment, debates about migrant workers, views on cultural capital and other ineffables. (If I could articulate all this, *I* would be writing Kwang's dissertation...)

For me the lay anthropologist (if there is such a thing), the day is composed of snapshots I'm still digesting: the immaculate, heated floor in the Korean restaurant where we lunched; the ballroom dancing rehearsal we had to cut across to get to the first Residential Committee office, where the male-female ratio was about 1:15; the adolescently shy but intelligent expression of Mr. Park's son, who showed us what he was learning in junior high school English by reciting "The Emperor's New Clothes."

the Rolls Royce of ice cream

Although this may sound like a revised Wallace Stevens poem, I'm actually talking about Haagen-Dazs, quoting from their own blurb on the table. March 31 is the last day for their ice cream fondue, so tonight me and three lady friends went to try it out -- even if at 208 RMB ($25) for a set, its a bit of a splurge. They use dry ice under the tray to cool the balls of ice cream to be dipped into the chocolate. After they've been dipped, the chocolate forms a hardened shell on the ice cream... very good design. And afterwards, you can even play with the dry ice by dropping it into your water and watching cauldron toil and trouble, mist form in the glass, not to mention an occasional tiny smoke ring tossed up from the depth... all for free.

Sadly, this is not available in the States. Once again the Chinese transplant is culture transmorgrified -- it's a date place, made to be romantic in advertisement and design, although when we first walked in, a very pregnant woman was enjoying a sundae with a few of her friends.

the miraculous moisturizer

This is the VERBATIM English blurb on the back of my tube of hand lotion:

"The effectively soft and smooth skin and muscle of activation is got rid of the cell toxin to the cream such as the oil containing the placenta liquid and the tea tree etc, and moisture content inside the skin and muscle is locked in the deeply layer new superseding the old of activation cell, that the additional skin and muscle vacancy of the at the same time is lost natural foster piece, softens the cuticle and dispels the dead skin,"

The Chinese blurb also mentions that the product increases blood circulation and prevents frostbite.

Ah. Advertising in China.

When I watch TV late at night, I find the infomercials entertaining. I'm not talking about Jessica Simpson in dubbed Chinese telling us about ProActive Solution. I'm talking about the electromagnetic bras that *take the fat from your abdomen and relocates it to your boobs* -- for less RMB than you think. Or the gold face mask that retains youth, endorsed by Hollywood luminaries.

I will confess, though, that I did buy an elastic vest-belt designed to keep you from slouching and to (ahem) prevent myopia in youths. I wear it when I read and work. It has an infomercial though I did not see it until I bought the vest. I don't know if I have better posture now but it's black so I can wear it in NYC.

western bakeries

Western bakeries abound in Beijing, but as with anything when it's imported into China, the shapes shift. The pasteries are lighter, fluffier, and less sweet. I've spent many Columbia nights at the Hungarian Pastery Shop on the Upper West Side, where one of my fave, the Almond Bomb, is no misnomer (at least density wise). The sinified versions of cakes, in contrast, can never be weapons, not the least because they are also big on cute animal figures made from whip cream -- snowmen, pandas, smiling doll figures.

One of my favorite activities is to watch the pastery chefs work on my way home, at dusk. The bakeries usually have large lit windows for this purpose.

I buy cakes like others collect jewelry. A recent acquisition in the mulberry variety is shown here.

Old Men and why I love them

One of my all-time favorite activities is watching senior citizens in Beijing -- playing chess, dancing, writing calligraphy on the street with water and homemade brushes converted from mops. Saturday I met with a few friends to fly kites in the Temple of Heaven. The grounds are vast, and the tourist spots (where you see the altar where the emperors worshipped heaven) are relatively small in area, leaving a larger plot of space for recreation. This is old men country at its best. They go there with kites of their own fashioning, sometimes so elaborate that it's breath-taking: I once saw a hawk kite where the eyes are made out of the bottom of aluminum Coke cans affixed on an axle, so that as it spins around, the hawk seems to be blinking.

Our own kite flying failed due to the lack of sufficient strings, so my friends humored my fetish for a while, watching others fly their kites. This time there were no hawks with Coke eyes, but I did lust after a Doraimon version very much. The kite-teers fly them among the juniper trees (such bravery! such aplomb!), and the best part is that sometimes they run into air traffic jams, or at least the threat of it -- for it's disaster when kite strings get tangled.

We played Chinese hackeysack (jianzi) instead, making a small circle. To spice things up a little, I suggested that as the jianzi comes around everyone must shout out the name of a vegetable. This got expanded to produce, because it was too hard to think ONLY of veggies when you're concentrating on making contact with the jianzi. Then one of the best moments in the afternoon, when it came around to Michelle and she blurted out, "KOALA!" and we all died laughing.