armchair pundit

Monday was Tracy’s birthday, and we spent the morning wandering through the Yu Gardens and Market. It was in the Yu Gardens that we suddenly saw all the foreigners and tourists that had been conspicuously absent in our previous wanderings around the city.

As the Lonely Planet book opined, the Yu Gardens presented sort of a Disneyland version of Chinese dynastic culture, but there were lots of pretty little nooks and niches and some nice photo ops…

me & tc	“rockery”

For Tracy’s birthday dinner, we took a taxi to a Japanese restaurant called Shintori. Minimalist but somehow welcoming, it was a really beautiful place to share a meal.

The experience of Shintori begins before you enter the place. The entrance is tucked into a hard-to-find little alley. A winding path of pebbles and concrete slabs, lined with upward-pointing halogen spotlights and tall, tall bamboo, it’s unmistakeable once you spot it. The door is a huge, dark steel panel with no discernable knob or handle. As you reach out to touch it, it silently and weightlessly pivots inward.

The restaurant has a spacious, open layout – tall, three-storey concrete walls surrounding large ebony tables on the ground floor. One storey up is a a narrow mezzanine, with smaller tables along the walls, looking down.

The welcoming effect is partly thanks to the kitchen, which is in full view, in the back.

Tracy and I shared an incredibly mild and buttery filet of cod, cooked in a dark miso sauce, along with a salad and an assortment of sashimi. We sipped a delicious dry sake and a couple of beers. For dessert, we ordered a divine (to use Tracy’s word) green tea tiramisu. Before it arrived, I excused myself to go to the washroom.

What I was actually doing, however, was asking our waitress if the restaurant wouldn’t mind doing something a little special with our dessert, for Tracy’s birthday. The waitress – who was very shy – arrived a few minutes later, accompanied by two of her colleagues. They held out the tiramisu, which was adorned with a small candle, and proceeded to sing an extremely sweet and shy rendition of Happy Birthday. I wanted to hug them.

It was the perfect way to end the tourist portion of our trip to Shanghai, and it left us with a much better impression of the city overall. In my next days’ wanderings, with and without Tracy, I found myself able to look just a little deeper and really enjoy the Shanghai I was now seeing – a city known for its dumplings, sci-fi architecture and beautiful people…

flying a kite	junior fashionistas	sci-fi shanghai	dumplings

In all my experiences of international travel, I’ve been able to get by in English without too much difficulty, and where I’ve had trouble with English I’ve generally been met with very accommodating, apologetic service. And so, as a native English speaker, it’s hard to walk through the world without a little cultural arrogance.

A hundred and fifty years ago, England held a global empire achieved through its military might. More recently, as the British empire collapsed, the US was in the process of solidifying a global empire achieved through its commercial might. English is now the de facto business language of the world, and the world has pretty much resigned itself to this fact.

Except for China.

China is already big and powerful enough to begin to impress its own language and culture upon the world. It seems clear that this trend will only deepen in the forseeable future, and it’s probably a good time for the world to start learning mandarin.

It’s a really valuable experience to travel in a country where English is not only not spoken, it’s not all that relevant. It’s really interesting, and humbling, to wander in a country where my culture hardly seems to matter at all. That’s not to say American culture is absent. The Nike swoosh is ubiquitous, People’s Square is adorned with Pepsi street lamps, and there are KFC joints everywhere. In a way that’s difficult to articulate, however, these seem as invisible and foreign as I felt as I wandered the city.

As one of my commenters said many posts ago, the American heyday is past, and China is the New Black. Even as I write this, the BBC is reporting the results of a recent global poll that asked whether present-day China has a “positive influence on the world”. 49% said “yes”, compared to only 38% who said the same about the US.

We saw nothing interesting about the architecture as we walked through the French Concession district of Shanghai, and our language issues persisted.

There’s literally an English-speaking façade here in the sense that storefronts, billboards and even highway signs display messages in both English and Chinese. You might see a place called (in English) “Such-and-Such Tea House and Bakery,” for example, but once inside you find there’s no English on the menu, and the service staff are unable to understand the English word water or even the word tea. And they certainly don’t go out of their way to be helpful.

Tracy is a vegetarian. We ordered vegetable fried rice for her at a tea house and tried to confirm with our waitress that it didn’t contain meat. She absolutely did not understand the question, however, so we didn’t press the issue. When the dish arrived, it had little bits of bacon in it, and we tried to demonstrate to our waitress through ad hoc sign language that Tracy couldn’t eat it. I picked a piece of the bacon out of her rice with my spoon, pointed to it and then pointed to Tracy while shaking my head and sort of waving my hand back and forth in an apologetic but “negative” way. The waitress didn’t understand our attempts at all. She frowned and simply walked away. A minute later, we called her over again and showed her a line of Chinese from the Lonely Planet book that supposedly translated to “I am a vegetarian.” But she was having none of it. She shook her head and walked away for good.

A short walk later, we wandered into some kind of street bazaar in, where I bought a coat, and together we bought a collection of warm hats. The hawkers there were the most aggressive I’ve encountered in Asia, especially the shoeshine guy who squirted black polish on my shoes while I wasn’t looking and then demanded I pay him to wipe it off.

We spent all our cash at the bazaar, so we had to hit an ATM before we could hire a taxi back to the hotel. We joined a long queue of people at the first ATM we found, but when we tried to withdraw cash, it subtly refused us. I say “subtly” because it actually presented us with a menu labelled “Please select one of the following services:” The friendly service it offered was “Exit”. The second ATM just froze at a blue screen and threatened for several minutes to eat our cards.

Unwilling to risk a third attempt, we decided to hail a taxi, knowing we couldn’t pay the full fare back to the Westin. When we arrived at the hotel, however, we were only a few renminbi short, and the driver was nice about it.

The hotel was a welcome relief, and we even discovered a working ATM next door. We rested up a bit and then met in the lobby for our next excursion – to a gallery called Art Scene Warehouse. The business card and the magazine we were carrying told us the gallery closed at 8pm, but when we arrived at 7:25, they told us they were closing in five minutes. We hurried through the massive space, but they shut the lights off before we were able to see everything. They didn’t seem to be in a hurry to leave, though, because they engaged us for a friendly 20-minute chat at the front desk as we were on our way out. Somehow a 20-minute chat was fine with them, but they couldn’t leave the lights on for an extra 30 seconds. Whatever.

Things began to take a better turn at dinner, after we discovered a nice place called Chatea. The only “Shanghai” moment came when I asked the waitress for something with which to crack the giant lobster claw that came in my soup. She had me put the claw onto a small plate, and she wandered off to the kitchen. Tracy thought she disposed of the claw – as if it had offended me – and we had a laugh about the luck we were having in Shanghai.

The truth is, though, I was a little heartbroken about the claw, because it looked really tasty, so when the waitress actually brought it back I smiled like a five-year-old.

Shanghai has not felt warm since we arrived, in any sense of the word. It was 5° C last night, and I woke up to a bomb blast.

Well, not literally.

Just before I went to sleep last night, I was flipping through the TV channels. On one of them was some kind of hotel announcement, which I ignored. Except that the word “blasting” caught my eye. I switched back to the channel, and read that the construction site across the street would be doing some blasting at 6:30am, on each of the next four mornings.

Even with the warning, it scared the #@$*! out of me the next morning. I jerked awake, heart pounding, and my brain went through a succession of “thunderstorm… no, bomb… oh right… blasting.”

At least it got me moving early.

Today, Tracy and I visited the Shanghai Museum, a windowless and somewhat gloomy modern structure housing an amazing collection of Chinese bronze and ceramics, as well as a decent collection of jade, calligraphy, painting and textiles.

After the museum, we hailed a taxi to Frenchtown in search of good shopping and the fascinating mix of architectural styles described in the Lonely Planet book. Getting there proved to be the first bit of trouble. We showed the taxi driver our map and pointed to the neighborhood, but taxi drivers in Asia seem to have a lot of trouble with the concept of depositing you at a general location or even a specific street corner or block (as opposed to an actual building).

Eventually, he agreed to take us to a hotel in the neighborhood we were seeking, and we set off on foot from there.

“There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, “Business as usual.” But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story… These people fail to realise that it is only on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves.”

Let God defend God.

I remember spotting Yann Martel’s “Life of Pi” when it first started to appear in book shops. Its cover illustration is one of the loveliest to grace a book in recent memory and probably deserves some credit for the book’s instant popularity.

It’s a sweet book – not a lightweight story, but not life-changing one either. It tells the tale of a sixteen-year-old boy named Pi (short for Piscene, as in fish-ish) Patel who becomes the solitary human survivor of the sunk cargo ship, Tsintsum, adrift in a lonely lifeboat in the middle of the Pacific. His companions on the boat are a hyena, a zebra (with a broken leg), a female orang-utan and a 450 pound (205 kg) Bengal tiger bearing the unlikely name, Richard Parker.
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The other night a small group of us went to see a play called “godeatgod” by local playrwright, Haresh Sharma.

On our first or second day here, Tracy handed me an eye-catching post card, and ever since then I’d been spotting them around town.

post cards for godeatgod

The cards quote a review from the sold-out 2002 run and describe the show as “a layered and moving exploration of power, sexuality, spirituality and survival in the post-traumatic world”. A review in the Straits Times summed up the play as “the perfect antidote to rambling or too-glib experimental theatre pieces disconnected from the flesh-and-blood of human suffering”.

As such, we thought it might also be the perfect antidote to the painful US election results.
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Someone named Taylor Donahue, vice president of production at Timely Studios, wrote this memo to his boss. It’s pretty funny, but not nearly as funny as the pitch for the film itself.

I’ve been re-reading bits of Mishima’s Sea of Fertility tetralogy:
book 1 – Spring Snow
book 2 – Runaway Horses
book 3 – The Temple of Dawn
book 4 – The Decay of the Angel.

Basically in a Japanese phase, I guess. I’ve been devouring Murakami. Of his books, the only ones I haven’t read are his two collections of short stories (The Elephant Vanishes and After the Quake) and Underground, his nonfiction account of the Tokyo subway gas attacks.

I have a strange need to share what I so love about his books, but I find it tremendously difficult to put it into words.

Each of his books contains a central mystery – a search for a missing person, for example – and that’s certainly part of what makes them compelling, like all good mysteries. So he clearly has a love for mystery, though he’s not at all a mystery author in the genre fiction sense of the word. There’s also a touch of sci-fi in his books, which in his case is more often considered surrealism and referred to as such by his critics and scholars.

There is a kind of melancholy that pervades his plots and characters, and a familiar vulnerability. There’s also an awkwardness – mostly mechanical – which could be a function of translation. None of this, however, gets at the heart of why I love his books.

When I finished reading ‘The Wind-up Bird Chronicle” I surprised myself by suddenly bursting into tears. There was no sense of being gradually overcome by emotion, no lump in my throat. I literally burst. It is that thing I love about his books that prompted my outpouring, and I’m realizing I’m absolutely not able to put it into words.

His books have a kind of stunning clarity on a level that my soul seems to understand by my mind can’t package.

So, in the end, I’m failing once again to express what I like about his books, but I can safely say he’s my bedside table successor to Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Michael Ondaatje and Cormac McCarthy.