SHANGHAI: CITY OF LOST MEMORIES

the road to m50

In early June, myself and my family went to Shanghai to visit my parents. This was the third trip I had made there since 2002; you can read my travelogues from the first two here and here.

It's been five years since my last visit and not coincidentally, it's the first time I've been back since El-Boogie was born. I'm sure I would have made it back sooner but the idea of flying with a baby or even toddler for 12 hours inspired too much anxiety for us to gut it out. As it turns out, El loved the plane trip out and what's not to love? Snacks + meals + a portable DVD player (best. investment. ever) + little gifts + coloring books + binky = everything she loves crammed into half a day. All the plane needed was a bouncy house but I don't think you get those kind of perks in United Economy.

The excitement began the moment we landed...mostly because Chinese officials, still smarting from the avian flu outbreak of a few years back, were hyper-paranoid of the swine flu. Planes coming in from the U.S. had to first be cleared by China's version of the CDC, which meant a bunch of white Hazmat suited guys going around the plane and zapping everyone's forehead with an infrared thermometer. Under other circumstances, I'd say it was surreal but somehow, it seemed like the proper way to kick off the week.
More after the jump:


The most immediate change I noticed about Shanghai was...change. I thought the city was already over the top in 2004 but that was before major construction had begun for the 2010 Shanghai Expo, a city-wide event that is rumored to bear a price tag greater than even the recent Beijing Olympics. Most obviously, there are some huge venues undergoing construction right now, including this inverted pyramid pavilion that wouldn't be out of place from Blade Runner (and indeed, Shanghai, more than ever, seems to realize futuristic visions of the neo-city as seen in sci-fi and anime from the past), the other a massive dome-like venue that reminded me of one of the space ships from ID4. However, many of the changes around the city are less spectacular but no less significant. All along the major thoroughfares, high-rises are getting "face lifts" to freshen up their exteriors. In some cases, that means giving some buildings fake brick facades - they have the look and texture of brick but aren't brick at all. It has also been striking to see the extent that pseudo-European styles have been applied to apartments; you have these 20-40 story buildings with out-of-place Italian or French motifs.

However, it's not the quality of the architecture that makes the biggest impression - it's the sheer quantity. This is what also struck me in 2002 and 2004 but seems even more omnipresent (and slightly oppressive) now. It's not unusual to see rows upon rows of massive, identical apartment buildings stacked towards the horizon. It's like this everywhere in Shanghai, especially Pudong, the newer part of the city that sits east of the river. Pudong is where the most aggressive development has occurred - 20 years ago, it was mostly farmland, these days I'd wager only Dubai would exceed it for the sheer degree of transformation and (over)development. I stayed in Pudong in 2002 and was already astounded by the outrageous of the skyscrapers and the skyline has only continued to scrape upward - the main building that wasn't here 5 years ago is currently (and only temporarily) Shanghai's tallest - the "bottle opener"-shaped Shanghai World Financial Center. Ground was recently broken on what will become the new tallest building in China once completed and I wouldn't be surprised if that will quickly be supplanted.

However, what was far more striking to me in Pudong was what was at eye level. My folks live off of Nanjing Xi Lu, one of the major E-W thoroughfare in downtown Shanghai and home to countless high-end shops but Nanjing Xi Lu feels positively quaint compared to Pudong's commercial makeover. There's simply more room to build in Pudong and developers have taken full advantage - everything tries to be taller, bigger, flashier, etc. There are few better embodiments of this than Super Brand Mall, a monstrous, 10 story mall that is probably at least 3-4 times the size of, say, the Beverly Center or Glendale Galleria. It doesn't have its own rollercoaster (yet) but it still is one of the great (and by that, I don't mean "good") monoliths to Western consumerism. Everything you could possibly hate about a mall is super-sized here though even I have to admit, the kid's playground on the 7th floor was pretty damn awesome. And I can't hate on the Orange Julius in the basement that serves up a guava-lychee milkshake. But otherwise, I just found it to be an exhausting, ostentatious palace to rampant consumerism (and hell, I live in LA so imagine what it must be like to find something worse).

This all said though, with change comes opportunity and Shanghai is teeming with that as well, at least based on the conversations I had with friends there, both local guys like Gary Wang and ex-pats from the U.S. and Europe. The city is dynamic in a way that few American cities were even before the recession and by the end of the trip, I could appreciate the attraction of why people are coming to live and work here (and it's not just for the xiao long bao) (more on food later). Everything feels possible and so much of the city's energy seems to be directed towards that ideal.

I saw there's a massive complex going up next to where my folks live but even though they've demolished most of the area where some new towers will eventually get built, there's an older, stately mansion still sitting amongst the rubble and I've been told the city is going to literally move the building a few dozen yards to preserve it while still putting it somewhere more "convenient." How you would exactly move a building of this size is beyond my engineering imagination but these kinds of projects can be found throughout the city. The past here is an obstacle and either you move it or destroy it. Nostalgia is too expensive.

All around the city are posters with the slogan "Better City, Better Life." Considering how forward-looking the Expo is supposed to be, you'd think they could come up with a better tagline than something that sounds dull even by Communist propaganda standards. This is only outdone by the bland posters that go with them; I don't mean to sound too "I'm a Mac" here but the design looks straight off of something Microsoft would have done, with the exception of the Expo's mascot, Haibao, who looks like he should be shilling for Aim Toothpaste.

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At least the food is still good. At least, depending on where you can still find it. There's a popular food alley near my parents - Wujiang Lu - that houses Yang's Fry Dumplings, one of the better known spots in Shanghai to get fried xiao long bao. Unfortunately, they're going to be demolishing most of this alley to make way for new developments, a sad blow (I would think) to the rich street food culture of the city. Of course, when you compare Wujiang with Nanjing Xi Lu, it's easy to see why Wujiang is on its way out - it's like two different cities practically within a block of one another.

According to my friend Gary, who I trust in all things related to food, the main spot for all the good grub in the city is now the Jingan neighborhood, which is basically the northwest quadrant closest to where Chengdu Lu and the Ya'nan Elevated Rd. intersect. Lots of cool, unpretentious stores and restaurants, including possibly the best xiao long bao place I've tried in the city, yet (Fuchun).

Note: is it possible to overload on xiao long bao? Yes, yes it is. Delicious but man cannot live by soup dumplings alone.

There was also a really amazing DVD store in the Jingan area too. I wrote a lot about the bootleg DVD scene before but it's elevated considerably in the last five years. The packaging, especially, is astounding - if you didn't realize that all this stuff were bootleg copies, you could certainly be fooled when the complete Studio Ghibli collection is packaged nice enough to make the folks at Criterion notice. The days of thin plastic + paper covers is long gone...almost. There are still exceptions to that - I found this hilarious, the back cover for a bootleg of My Zinc Bed (I didn't even realize that was the actual title of the film...I thought for sure it was some "lost in translation" example). Clearly, whoever designed the back cover just cribbed notes off the web for it.

Culturally, I didn't get a chance to soak in as much as in previous times but I have to say: I had the best time DJing at The Shelter, a nightclub that Gary helps run that gets its name from the fact that it is built out of an old bomb shelter. Not for the claustrophobic but by far, one of the most interesting spaces I've ever spun in . Even though the headlining DJing didn't make it out (visa problems), we still had a healthy crowd (most ex-pats, quite a few Japanese trainspotters too) dancing to an evening of funk records (or, er, sound files). They're about to open a Beijing Shelter too, also built out of a bomb shelter.

S and I got the afternoon off one day to go visit the current center of Shanghai's arts scene, M50, aka 50 Monganshan Rd. Better minds than mine have already written about it but suffice to say, it's comprised of a dense series of overlapping galleries, some small, some sprawling. The thing about M50 though is that while it takes up part of the block, its integration into the surrounding buildings creates these mish-mashes of residential/commercial use that's quite familiar to anyone who's seen gentrification in motion. To wit...

I didn't take very copious notes on the art we saw (I leave that to my art critic wife) but I did enjoy the Su Jin exhibit at M97, "Memory City", which, to me, does a provocative job of capturing the chaos and cost of change in Shanghai. At first, I didn't even realize Su's work was montage; it seem plausible enough from a distance but I should have known better - like Hong Kong's bygone Kowloon, the real parts of Su's phantasmal Shanghai have largely been reduced to construction dust.

--O.W.

TWO CHINESE SEPTUAGENARIAN WOMEN SENTENCED TO RE-EDUCATION LABOR CAMPS FOR ASKING TO PROTEST

A Chinese Hoosegow

First three paragraphs from an article in today's NY Times:

Two elderly Chinese women have been sentenced to a year of “re-education through labor” after they repeatedly sought a permit to demonstrate in one of the official Olympic protest areas, according to family members and human rights advocates.

The women, Wu Dianyuan, 79, and Wang Xiuying, 77, had made five visits to the police this month in an effort to get permission to protest what they contended was inadequate compensation for the demolition of their homes in Beijing.

During their final visit on Monday, public security officials informed them that they had been given administrative sentences for “disturbing the public order,” according to Li Xuehui, Ms. Wu’s son.

Those two elderly women weren't even protesting; they were asking to protest. And now they'll be doing twelve months of physical labor, with no access to counsel, no right to a hearing, no right of habeas corpus, and no other form of due process.

That Gray Lady article further reveals that authorities have not approved any of the 77 protest applications it received, despite setting up official protest zones.

Those of you who said that Beijing's hosting of the Olympics would lead to the expansion of fundamental democratic rights in China -- at least during the Olympics -- can admit that you were wrong now.

--Junichi

THE UGLY PEKING DUCKLING

The Chinese government declared one of these girls unattractive

Given the oodles of controversies involving the Chinese government, I shouldn't be riled up about lip synching.

But I can't help but comment on the audacity of Chinese officials to hire one extremely talented 7-year-old girl to sing "Ode to the Motherland" at the Olympic opening ceremonies -- behind a curtain -- while an allegedly cuter girl mouthed the words on stage.

Was China unable to find one girl in its pool of 1.4 billion people who was both attractive and euphonious? They should have used their mountains of yuan to import Simon Cowell and launch Chinese Idol.

Instead, China replaced Yang Peiyi (the girl above, on the left) with Lin Miaoke (the girl on the right) because Peiyi has a "chubby" face and "crooked" teeth. (See video clip below.) The persons responsible for the switch continue to defend the decision.

Could there be anything worse for a 7-year-old girl's self-esteem than for her government to declare that she is too ugly to be seen by foreigners? I know I'd be in therapy for decades.

I realize less attractive vocalists get replaced by more attractive lip synchers all the time. Natalie Wood mouthing Marni Nixon's vocals in West Side Story comes to mind.

But there's something more ominous about China's pulling a Milli Vanilli.

Lin Miaoke is now a symbol of the lengths that China will go to hide its dirty business. Her deceptive lip synching leads me to suspect that China's famed Bird's Nest was built upon the mass graves of political dissidents.

On a more positive note, this story is apparently burning up the Chinese blogosphere, which suggests that the government did not censor this news. (Unfortunately, their government is censoring this blog.)

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I'm also agitated by the following quote from the BBC article about this story:

Miaoke's father has told reporters he thinks Peiyi is also cute.

"Yang Peiyi's looks are OK," Lin Hui reportedly said. "In my opinion, she's not ugly."

The first line of that passage is entirely inconsistent with the second!

Lin Hui does not even come close to suggesting that Peiyi is cute.

If somebody says, "you should date my friend Bertha - her looks are OK," that means that Bertha looks like a morbidly obese Wookie.

If somebody says, "you should go out with my roommate Garfield - he's not ugly," that means that he looks like a pus-filled wart on the sphincter of a decaying walrus.

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Finally, for the record, I think Yang Peiyi is damn cute.

--Junichi

THE GREAT FIREWALL OF CHINA

CCTV is not amused, sir.

I just spent a few days in London, where one would have to be blind not to notice the 500,000 surveillance cameras that notoriously monitor the Brits. A friend remarked that London has the world record for most cameras monitoring its citizens.

Turns out that fact will soon be history -- not because the Big Smoke is dismantling Big Brother, but because a city in China is about to quadruple that number in a few months.

On the plane ride home, I was blown away by Naomi Klein's superb piece in Rolling Stone: China's All-Seeing Eye. She reports, among other startling revelations, she reports that the city of Shenzhen will soon install two million CCTVs.

The cameras are part of China's high-tech surveillance and censorship combo that is known as "Golden Shield," which will soon use face-detection technology to monitor the every movement of billions of Chinese citizens, including its political dissidents.

Especially its political dissidents, perhaps.

The most explosive aspect of Klein's piece is her exposing the American corporations who are exporting much of the crime-control technology to China in violation of a federal law -- passed after the Tiananmen Square massacre -- that bars U.S. companies from selling products in China that involve "crime control or detection instruments or equipment."

L-1 Identity Solutions, an American company, is arguably the most guilty of laying the technological foundation to China's Golden Shield. (Read Klein's article to learn why she writes, "You have probably never heard of L-1, but there is every chance that it has heard of you.") At the moment, L-1 seems to be getting away with their exports, however, because "face prints" aren't listed in the Commerce Department's list of banned products.

But even if the federal loophole is closed, it's too late, because the technology is already there.

Klein doesn't just detail how Western investors are complicit in helping the Communist Party spend billions of dollars building Police State 2.0. She amply supports her conclusion that "This isn't an unfortunate cost of doing business in China: It's the goal of doing business in China."

In my opinion, this is yet another example of how China's warming relations with "the West" is not only doing little to curb the Chinese government's repressive regime, but in some cases, is making things worse.

The U.S. may have more people behind bars than China (despite having only a fourth of China's population), but something tells me that record is about to be broken, too.

--Junichi

GETTING HUNGRY?

surprise!
It's really interesting how, in just the last few years, there's been this surge in interest in thinking about Chinese restaurants:

Cheuk Kwan's amazing Chinese Restaurants series

Indigo Som's Chinese restaurants art project

Jennifer 8. Lee's recent Fortune Cookie Chronicles

And now there's "Have Food Will Travel" a new travelogue video that my old student from the Bay Area, Leonard Shek, is putting together. Check out the teaser video that finds Shek traveling to the Pearl River Delta to learn something about the place that turns out so many immigrants who come to the U.S. and cook our food. Looks promising:


Have Food Will Travel: Pearl River Delta from Leonard on Vimeo.

--O.W.

REPORTING DISASTER

Let me begin by saying I'm not really sure where I'm going with this so just bear with.

Like many, part of how I've been following the Sichuan quake has been through listening to NPR's All Things Considered. Several of their key staff - including two of their main co-hosts and another pair of their main producers - were all in Chengdu (Sichuan's capital) for a series of stories on "modern China." In fact, I had been asked if I wanted to contribute to any of the China coverage about a week ago. This was all before the quake hit...but when it did, NPR had some of its most experienced staff members literally at the epicenter. As a journalist, I can only imagine that such a confluence of circumstances must be both incredible and devastating.

On the one hand, they are covering the human toll of this disaster in a way that I don't think anyone could possibly envy. It's not like they went into Chengdu as war correspondents, ready for death or destruction - the Chengdu stories were meant to be human interest-related. Instead, they end up doing disaster coverage and not just any disaster, but something of a magnitude that few in the Western world (outside of the Gulf Coast, circa August 2005) could probably comprehend. Many have been and will be talking about Melissa Block's story from yesterday, where she reports on a couple in Dujiangyan suffering through an agonizing wait to find their two year old son and elderly parents buried under the rubble of their home. You can hear her breaking down at various times as she reports on what's happening.

This story must have taken hours to record and I'm trying to imagine what Block and her staff were thinking through this. Is it morally right to put a microphone on such intense suffering? What is the role of journalism in the face of this kind of personal agony?

My wife and I had the same thought, which we spoke aloud to one another: someone is probably going to earn a Pulitzer for this. And we felt ashamed for thinking it but I think we were both responding to the incredible impact of the story. I mean, this is what radio does - it dramatizes and personalizes in ways that other forms of media - not print, not even video - cannot achieve. And so, these stories, which are simultaneously horrific and incredible, raise these conflicted emotions at both the power of the reporting but also its ethical dimensions. I'm not raising this as a form of castigation; I can't say I'd be doing anything different if I were in their shoes (and I'm glad I'm not). I just don't know how to resolve that dilemma.

Last thought in this thread: the Burma cyclone disaster, in terms of death toll and general devastation, is "worse" (if you want to quantify) and it's over 10 days old yet I never got pulled into it the same way and I think part of it is because the media reports coming out of Burma lack the same kind of human dimension that's being reported on in China. It's not for lack of stories - it's lack of access. Journalists in Burma have to broadcast behind the backs of the local officials so long radio pieces are out, only cell phone reporting seems easy to do. And that difference is stark - what's happening is that two equal human dramas are playing out in real time but only one of them is getting the kind of depth and nuance it deserves. Not for lack of relevance, but lack of means.

Let me bridge me from there to something on a different note:

I firmly believe the Iraq War is the worst foreign policy decision that I've ever seen in my lifetime and frankly, there's leaders deserving of prosecution over it. That said, I'm not a hardcore anti-interventionist and as Daniel Schorr points out - it's too bad Iraq has given the idea of interventionism a bad name. With Burma, what the military government seems to be doing is beyond reprehensible. Maybe it's not as bad as gassing their own citizens, but at the very least, it's malignant neglect. Schorr suggests that, just international partners should have done in Rwanda 14 years ago (but didn't), it's time for the UN to get humanitarian aid into Burma, sovereignty be damned. Frankly, I have visions of special teams forces swooping in and abducting the entire junta leadership. Not likely to happen and I'm sure some would suggest that wouldn't be terribly constructive but seriously, when you have leadership willing to sacrifice hundreds of thousands of their citizens over a power grab, emotionally speaking, it's hard to get behind sanctions alone.

Of course, Burma seems a bit bush league compared to North Korea, whose domestic policies seem to be aspiring for Stalinist/Maoist levels of inflicting damage on its own citizenry. Ergo, maybe, it's not the idea of regime-change that's inherently bad...more like the choice of targets. *sigh*

--O.W.

SICHUAN QUAKE

The last time a quake this size hit China, about a quarter million people died. However, much of that was because China then - like Burma today - shunned foreign aid. Not this time: China seems willing to accept whatever help it can get.

NPR - whose All Things Considered staff was already in Chengdu when the quake hit - has a list of possible charities for those interested in contributing.

The story about the Dujiangyan middle school which collapsed is heartwrenching. I cannot remotely imagine the anguish running through these victims' parents.

--O.W.

WAVING THE FLAG

hell hath no fury
A question for the informed Poplicks readership:

Has anyone written anything cogent on the rise of Chinese American nationalism in the last few months? This is a phenom I've seen manifested with the debates around the Olympics in China but I have yet to find much in terms of analysis - it's not something I've found discussed in much depth on conventional political sites but I'm assuming at least someone has tried to take it on.

--O.W.

FLAMING IN SAN FRANCISCO

Torchbearers of protest?

I often waffle about the usefulness of protests. But today is one of those amazing days where it's easy to see how a massive demonstration can make a great impact.

As far as Olympic protests go, we've come a long way from "Bong Hits for Jesus."

With an international game of "Capture the Torch" forcing the flame to be alternately extinguished and vanished wherever it's gone, this fire is doing wonders to stoke the local, national, and international media to focus on Tibet, among other issues related to China.

Watching the live footage right now of a thousand SF cops protecting a torch that has come to symbolize the Chinese government's unconscionable abuse of basic human freedoms, I can't help but snicker at this quote from the Beijing Organizing Committee for the Games of the XXIX Olympiad:

"[T]he Olympic torch has received a warm welcome worldwide."

Given China's censorship of these demonstrations, I suppose that there might be a few billion people who believe this.

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As for protests in the virtual world, I enjoy this brief animation:

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Finally, is it me or are the pro-China demonstrators so nationalist that they are totally incapable of participating in any meaningful discussion about China's human rights abuses?

Most of those I've seen or heard interviewed today either adamantly deny that the Chinese government has ever done anything wrong (excuse me?) or mistakenly believe that advocates for Tibetan freedom are vilifying and hoping to imprison all 1.4 billion Chinese people.

Is it not possible to be "proud that China is hosting the Olympics" and acknowledge that China has work to do in the arena of human rights?

To be fair, there are some who are able to make rational arguments for supporting the Olympics in Beijing while acknowledging China's abuses. But Helen Zia doesn't sound anything like PRC-supporting Cuckoo McCocoaPuffs on ABC right now.

Some have asked me how I would feel if other countries were protesting the torch because the games were to be held in the United States. My response: Great! If the games were held in Bakersfield, I would be simultaneously "proud that the U.S. is hosting the Olympics" and happy to accept the criticism that the U.S. has work to do in the field of human rights.

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Related note: I guess Poplicks.com will now be officially censored in China.

--Junichi