August, 2009

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From Newton to Hollywood

Saturday, August 29th, 2009
I always get excited about people from my hometown (Newton, Massachusetts) making it big in Hollywood.  There are more of them than you would think.  Anyway, today I saw mention of my great city in a New Yorker magazine article about the famous horror film director Eli Roth.
As a party trick, when he was growing up in Newton, Massachusetts, his mother once hired a magician to cut him in half with a chainsaw. “What other mother would do that?” Roth asked the other day at a West Hollywood café. “My parents have always been supportive.”
Eli Roth is famous for his “torture porn” films (no porn involved, just ghastly, bloody torture), such as “Cabin Fever” and ”Hostel” (parts one and two).  These days you can see him in Quentin Tarantino’s new film “Inglorious Basterds,” Mr. Tarantino also produced both “Hostel”s, where Mr. Roth plays a baseball-bat-wielding Nazi killer called the the Bear Jew.  It’s great to see a Newton Jew – the city’s population is roughly 50% Jewish – involved in a project like “Inglorious Basterds” where American Jews brutally torture and kill Nazi officers in occupied France.  I like to think that Newton would be really proud.  Looks like a Newton Passover Seder even helped Tarantino with the film:
[Eli Roth] served as Tarantino’s unofficial “Jewish fact-checker.” (His mother even appears as a Nazi collaborator.) “Quentin asked me, ‘Would a Jew offer absolution if it meant ending the war?’” Roth recalled. “I told him, ‘The Jews are more angry now about shit from seven thousand years ago than we were seven thousand years ago. We never forget, and we do not forgive. But if you want a good picture of Jewish psychology you should come to my Passover Seder.’ ” Tarantino went to the Seder, and he told Roth that all the talk of Jewish traditions gave him the confidence to finish the script.
Woah!  I just realized that another Newton native, B.J. Novak, is also a star in “Inglorious Basterds.”  He’s famous for his role in The Office tv show, which he also helps write.  And, lets not forget, The Office also stars the devilishly handsome John Krasinski, another fabulous Newton native.  Give it up for Newton!

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Shanghai Spruce Up

Wednesday, August 26th, 2009

(Via Bunmun’s Flickr account)

These days my life has become more regimented than it was as a carefree teacher back in Hunan.  I’m living the workingman’s life in a city full of workers.  When I take my commute every day along with hundreds of thousands of other Shanghaiers I can’t help but be reminded of Leonardo Dicaprio’s commute in the movie Revolutionary Road, all those well-dressed working men and women rushing to the office.  Of course, today’s Shanghaiers look far more fabulous then the martini swilling men of the 1950’s, but a group commute mentality is still there.  Anyway, since I’m working all day I’m not being much of tourist in this city, just living and working.  One thing you can’t help but notice, even if you spend most of your day at the office or in the kitchen cooking dinner, is that everything is under construction behind colorful wall-sized posters telling passersby how wonderful and modern the city will be for the upcoming Shanghai World Expo.  The catchphrase is “Better City, Better Life” and there are a lot of changes coming and you can really see that.  But what are they forgetting?

The China Beat blog, a really good read run by the University of California Irvine (sadly, it seems recent budget cuts in California may be taking much needed funding from this blog and other useful China media projects coming from UC), recently did a post on what this city clean up spectacular is forgetting when they say “Better City, Better Life.”  Here are the 8 items the author Anna Greenspan mentions (please check out the full post!):

1. Strict enforcement of traffic rules. In particular, pedestrians should have the right of way on a green light and cars should be forbidden from driving on the sidewalk. Enforcement should not be that hard. Under the principle ‘kill the chicken to scare the monkeys,’ a very public wave of overly harsh fines should do the trick. In general the rule of ‘survival of the fastest,’ in which cars take priority over cyclists, which take priority over pedestrians, must be reversed.

2. More pools and water parks. In my hometown in Canada, where it is freezing most of the year, every neighborhood has a public pool and a park with sprinklers and splash pads. My two kids and I can go swimming for Cdn $7.25 (46 RMB). In Shanghai, where summers are sweltering, it is common for pools to charge 100 RMB per person and the cheapest I’ve found nearby is 100 RMB for the three of us.

3. A celebration of street vendors. The harassment–occasionally to the point of criminality–of the ‘illegal’ street peddlers is the most disturbing aspect of Shanghai’s development (and the greatest impediment to the hope of establishing of a harmonious society). Small traders (most of whom are migrants) are the most entrepreneurial and creative sector of society and bring color, convenience and most of all great food to Shanghai’s streets.

4. Allowing people to stand, play, sit, and sleep on the grass.

5. Insist that all taxis have functional seatbelts. Why the bilingual announcement asking you to buckle your seatbelt when there is almost never anything to be buckled?

6. Preservation and revival of the city’s markets (this relates directly to point 3). The past decade has seen the demolition of some of Shanghai’s great markets (e.g. the flower market on Shanxi Lu, the bird, insect and fish market on Wanping Lu etc, etc). This trend seems to show no signs of abating as all central markets are pushed further into the suburbs. There are even repeated rumors that neighborhood wet markets are under threat. This at a time when Western cities–tired of the sterile morbidity of the mall–are desperately trying to bring back farmer’s markets into the urban core.

7. Bike lanes on major thoroughfares. It is extremely difficult, when cycling downtown, to avoid streets like Huaihai Lu and Hengshan Lu. Forbidding bikes on these streets only pushes them on to the sidewalks (see point 1).

8. A convenient ferry service (like the one in Hong Kong) that provides frequent, cheap and easy crossing between Lujiazui and the Bund. (This might already be in the works but just in case . . .)

I agree with all of these.  I will say that a lot of the time street vendors bother me.  There are a million things obstructing the path of a pedestrian in China and it’s so annoying when a sidewalk is reduced to only two single lines of people because vendors with their offerings laid out on a blankets have chocked off pedestrian traffic.  That being said, the chengguan that police such vendors are really horrible and mostly generally mean and sometimes violent.  More reason for China to have a fair and developed legal system that actually helps people!

She really gets it right though.  For one thing, I’ve always wanted to sit on grass in a Chinese city!  Here’s hoping.  And I swear if the police don’t start enforcing traffic laws I will.  Unlike Beijing, Shanghai doesn’t have many well-executed bike lanes; that would be a real plus considering how many bikes and mopeds there are here.  Shanghai needs ferries!!!  It’s easy to forget the city has a major river running through the middle of it when the best way to cross it is by taking the subway.

I would have to add that the Shanghai subway system needs to double everything they have.  Especially the number of stairways and escalators that go down to the platforms.  Oh. My. God.  It’s just a complete mess during rush hour.  Even the crowded subway cars don’t seem that bad (air conditioning!) compared to waiting in a mob of over 200 people trying to take one escalator up while hundreds more are coming down in the opposite direction right next to the escalator, it’s just insane.  And if they doubled the number of subway cars, subway lines (they’ve actually done this, but it couldn’t hurt to do it again), and ticket machines/turnstiles it would make life that much easier.

Guess I should save judgement until the Expo rolls around, but with many things here it seems that change will never come.

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Water Honey Peach: The World’s Best

Tuesday, August 18th, 2009

Water Honey Peach 水蜜桃

China is a fruit lovers paradise.  On almost every city block in every Chinese city you are bound to find a few of the same shops: a noodle place, hair salon, newspaper stand, and a fruit shop.  Though China largely lacks the European pleasures of small specialized cheese shops, decent bakeries, or wine shops the country makes up for it with its own Chinese style specialized food shops.  There’s the Chinese medicine shops lined with rows and rows of small wooden drawers filled with exotic dried herbs, the tofu shop, the noodle shop, in Hong Kong there are shops that sell only dried seafood specialties like shark fin, and maybe the greatest of them all the fruit shop.  You can literally tell what time of year it is by looking at what is on sale at the fruit shops and in the wet markets.  While America has great fruit when you shop at a farmers market most people buy their fruit at supermarkets where the fruit has most likely been shipped from some far off country where they breed the flavorless fruit to survive the long journey and weeks spent on a shelf.  China has that same sad fruit but they definitely appreciate the better stuff and the fact that every block in my Shanghai neighborhood has its own large fruit shop testifies to the Chinese people’s appreciation of good fruit.  No fruit sums this up more so than the water honey peach (水蜜桃), the world’s greatest peach.

I have long known about this famous peach that comes to market in July and August but being a New England boy peaches are not always my first choice when it comes to fruit.  My past year in Hunan the fruits I regularly are were mostly watermelons, other assorted melons (especially the amazing 哈密瓜), mangosteens (illegal in America), bananas, wax berries (杨梅), apples, dragonfruit, lychees, and most importantly the great (and cheap) mandarin oranges grown all over western Hunan.  But that was Hunan.  Shanghai in the summer is the land of peaches.  The rural areas of Jiangsu province and Zhejiang province to the west of the city are where the world’s best peaches are grown.

To be honest I didn’t know this until today when when I was reading the New York Times Dining section’s blog and stumbled upon a link to a Wall Street Journal article about these amazing peaches.  All over eastern Asia fruit is highly prized for its taste and medical benefits, and the prices reflect this attitude.  My year of teaching in Hunan often meant that my throat suffered and my Chinese coworkers always told me to eat pears, since they are good for the throat.  During the dark days of Mao’s reign to buy a watermelon in China one needed a doctor’s prescription.

So after reading the article I immediately went out into Shanghai’s heat and humidity and walked half a block to the nearest fruit shop.  They had four different varieties of water honey peaches, differentiated by where they were grown.  The largest and most beautiful were from Yangshan, each individually wrapped in a thin protective sheaf of Styrofoam.  The price tag was 16.8 rmb/jin ($5/kilogram), far more than the other peaches.  I only wanted to buy one amazing peach so the price tag didn’t faze me.  My big peach cost $1.60.  Small price to pay for a peach that cannot be bought outside of eastern China (they ripen too quickly and are too thin skinned to survive the journey to America).

I rushed it back to my apartment where I got a knife and my camera and started eating.  Cutting into the flesh you see that it starts from blood red at the pit and moves out into almost translucent white flesh.  It was unlike any peach I’ve had before.  At first I thought that it was too subtly flavored to be considered the world’s greatest peach but then as I chewed the fruit opened itself to me with the most amazing flavor and fragerance.  Eating this peach elicited a strong sensory memory for me: it is like walking into a florists cooler as the multi-toned fragerances of the roses surround you and bring you to a happier place.  It also reminded me of walking into a humid greenhouse in the middle of winter and smelling the tropical flowers in all their earthly beauty or even the rose perfume shop my family and I visited in Giza Egypt.  I’ve been slowly savoring my peach as I’ve been writing this and there is now no doubt in my mind that the water honey peach is the world’s greatest.  I’m already making plans to buy some and make a batch of peach sorbet with the ice cream maker I lugged from America.  Is there anything better sounding for August in Shanghai?

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First Impressions of a Metropolis

Monday, August 17th, 2009

Shanghai

The best time to arrive in China is summer.  All the guidebooks will say I’m wrong, that the more comfortable weather of spring and autumn are the best times to come.  They may be right in some respects but ever since my first trip to China in 2004, when I arrived in the dead of winter, I have always arrived in the middle of summer and I would not have it any other way.  You see, in the summer China is at its peak in every sense.  The heat and humidity, the mosquitoes, the number of people walking on the street (summer vacation brings everyone out), the smells, the construction, the produce, and almost everything else is in abundance, even excess.  Standing on the street with thousands of people around you, the sweat beading on your forehead, the noxious smells of street food and concrete dust…. China just forces itself into you in a way that can’t happen in winter.  It’s intense for sure, but if you don’t like living an intense life what the hell are you doing here anyway?

There is an unspoken rule among westerners blogging about China not to write about first impressions one has coming to China.  The internet is strewn with the mediocre ramblings of laowai just off the boat.  The fact is we’ve heard it all before.  Still, right after you come to China you notice things that maybe a few months down the line don’t seem interesting or worth writing about anymore.  So in risk sounding like some greenhorn I thought I’d share some of my first impressions of Shanghai in the summer.

Shanghai is China’s largest city with something like 18-22 million people.  Every time you walk out the door you are reminded of this fact.  I’m pretty used to being crowded in China but here in Shanghai its an altogether different thing.  Yesterday I was trying to think of what I could compare it to in America and it struck me: it’s like going to the biggest concert or the largest sporting event you’ve ever been to every single time to step outside your house.  That same level of crowdedness and energy.  Taking the subway here is also incomparable to other cities.  Shanghai’s largest subway stop is People’s Square station and it is the interchange for lines 1, 2, and 8.  It’s just freakin’ unbelievable and makes most New York city subway stops look like the rural bus stations of New Hampshire.  I’ll soon get to navigate this interchange twice a day during rush hour.  Can’t wait.

Everything is under construction.  Yeah, I know that’s a common thing to say here in China but in Shanghai in the lead up to the 2010 World Expo almost everything is being refurbished, repainted, fixed, and torn up.  Every street seems to have sectioned off areas where workers are repaving it, every building whether old or new has scaffolding up its sides, and loud colorful billboards everywhere remind you that all of this construction is in preparation of the big event next summer.  The city’s a mess.

There are more skyscrapers here than any other city, at least that’s what it feels like.  Shanghaiist says that there are upwards of 4,000, double the 2,000 found in New York, and that by the end of the decade (that’s so soon!) there will be at least 5,000.  Not even joking there are places here where when you stand at ground level you can see 100 skyscrapers.  Its a really really cool feeling.

Walking around Shanghai looking at what people are wearing it is plainly obvious that China manufactures most of the world’s clothes.  This city has China’s most fashionable people and they really like to express themselves with their clothes.  While the looks you see may not always be as glamorous as those captured by Bill Cunningham’s camera on the streets of New York it is endlessly interesting and the sheer variety astonishes me everywhere I go.

The food options in Shanghai dazzle me.  Lately I’ve been flipping through the Sherpa’s restaurant delivery menu book and the That’s Shanghai magazine drooling over the options available to me.  To think that just two months ago I lived in what many would consider rural China far from any place calling itself a metropolis.  Products like butter, peanut butter and Italian pasta were things to cherish and bribe friends to bring me when they visited.  Now in my new neighborhood (I live in the Jing’an Temple area of Shanghai (what a bad wikipedia entry, sorry)) the local bodega stocks half a dozen types of peanut butter, Belgian beer, bacon (!), a dozen types of cheese, fresh meat neatly packaged in plastic, yellow onions (hard to find in China), and so much more on top of all the everyday Chinese food items.  My first trip to that store I must have looked a little weird since I was smiling like Charlie in Willy Wonka’s factory.  And all of this at my local bodega!  I haven’t even explored the Wal-Marts, Carrefours, and Ikeas of the city yet.

The restaurant choices amaze me to no end as well, even if most are outside of my budget.  Shanghai has every conceivable type of Asian restaurant, including ones for the cuisine of every Chinese province.  There are places that that serve the cuisines of countries I’ve never before seen in China like Indonesian, Moroccan (three of them!),  Cuban, Nepalese, Austrian and more and more.  In case you forget that Shanghai used to be a foreign treaty port for Western powers  the massive collection of European and American restaurants brings it all back.  Even the place that is a food group unto itself for all New Englanders the mighty Dunkin Donuts is here in Shanghai.  Interestingly enough the Dunkin Donuts here have a much more interesting collection of doughnuts and other snacks and all their coffee is brewed from an Italian espresso maker, no vats of iced coffee for the masses here, comfy couches and wifi make it a decent place to chill.  I could keep writing about my excitement over the food available here but I know I’ll be back to this subject in the future so I think I’ll stop here.

Shanghai has a ton of foreigners, period.  I knew this but was surprised just how many of them have Chinese girlfriends, the men that is.  Not even kidding over the weekend every other western guy I saw was holding his Chinese girlfriend’s hand.  Do they give western guys Chinese girlfriends at the airport the way people get lais when they land in Hawaii?  That’s not it but it was jarring to me at first how common it was.  In Hunan these couples really stood out and I didn’t always look kindly at them but here its so common and the differences between foreign and Chinese don’t seem so glaring, I’m already used to it.

Well that’s it for now.  I should get back to studying Chinese and drinking my iced espresso in my local Danish cafe.  Peace.

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What it takes to be an Old China Hand

Wednesday, August 12th, 2009

general stilwell burma

Vinegar Joe himself

The term China Hand or Old China Hand (always written in capital letters, thank you very much) describes a foreigner who understands China very well and it gets tossed around a lot these days.  In Chinese China Hand is 中国通 and it often doesn’t take much for a Chinese person to give you this title, much in the same way as when people applaud a simple Chinese sentence coming out of a Westerner’s mouth.  Of course, being in China one must be  modest and anyways becoming a China Hand has always seemed like an unattainable goal to me.

Right now I’m reading The China Hands by E.J. Kahn, Jr (1972).  It’s about America’s pre-1949 Foreign Service officers in China and what befell them during the crazy days under Senator McCarthy.  These men were almost all children of missionaries and had grown up in China, they were the only people who could hope to try to understand China in those days of decadence, warlords and Chiang Kai-Shek that preceded the Communist Revolution.  Before WWII China was one of the only countries whose consulate directors had to be fluent in the local language, kind of surprising.  Because of the demanding nature of the work these foreign service officers were a group unto themselves and in his book Mr. Kahn writes what it takes to be a Old China Hand:

These China specialists were extraordinarily noncompetitive.  There was no single star, no Kennan (?), among them; they considered themselves, and probably were, a collective elite, with a shared pride comparable to that often found among United States Marines, and a shared elan stemming from their shared concern for intellectual inquiry, from their deep and immersion into and understanding of Chinese enthocentricity, and from the pecuilar challenge of the problems that faced them in their work.  And, further, they had in common a shared awareness of how challenging it had been merely to get where they were; it was generally conceded that it took a minimum of about ten years in China before anyone could rightly be termed, in the nonpejorative sense, an Old China Hand.

Interesting stuff.  It means I still have several years to go before I could rightly be termed an Old China Hand, fine by me.  I should add that other than a few interesting parts I can’t really recommend this book, it’s so badly written.

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Shanghai from the American Prespective

Thursday, August 6th, 2009

I left China a month ago and it already feels like much longer than that. Odd how that happens. Lately I been living the comfortable life of the suburbs of Massachusetts. It’s been fun and the little annoyances of life in Hunan are gone, though only to be replaced with the all together new disappointments of life in America. The air is clean here and you can find yourself in green leafy surroundings free of other people, even in a city like Boston. Overall I’m just pretty bored.

More than any return from China I’ve had this feels like a visit and I am at ease knowing that I will soon be returning to Shanghai to start a new life. Of course, I’m not mentioning the long slightly annoying sludge I’ve made to get my visa. Lets just not talk about that.

I’m so excited about moving to Shanghai I’ve been reading about the city and watching the large amount that can be found on Youtube, now available to me here in the land of the free. Did you know that Commodore Matthew C. Perry stopped there on his way to Japan during his famous 1853 voyage that “opened up Japan to the West?”  Commodore Perry writes:

During the stay of the ships at Shanghai, there was a constant succession of dinners and balls, and the officers were most hospitably entertained everywhere.

Reminds me of my first visit to Shanghai, a booze-filled weekend back in the spring of 2004.

Online there’s a lot of fascinating stuff about this crazy metropolis.

Here’s a video preview of the World Expo, opening in Shanghai next spring.  The whole thing looks just like some futuristic Nintendo world.

Not only is Shanghai a cool city of the future but it also has a vibrant community of graffiti artists.

One of my favorite aspects of Shanghai is the large and healthy community of gay people that call the city home. Its truly is the gayest city in China. Who knows, I think I might just start fighting for gay rights in China. The people that made this fantastic video on gay life in Shanghai have a monthly online talk show about gay life in Shanghai and China: qafshanghai. Check it out.

Part One:

Part Two:

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