Shanghai
There is nearly everything I love about cities here. It's one of the most electric places I've ever been. The contrasts between old and new start at the rivers edge. On one bank there's The Bund - the old, beautiful, traditional European waterfront. And on the other there's Pudong - the most futuristic skyline in the world. Yesterday we had lunch in an old, traditional restaurant where some of the best dumplings we've ever tasted were made by hand in the manner they've been made for hundreds of years. We sat on beautifully carved, old Chinese wooden chairs in a restored old building. And the waiter took our order with some sort of wireless cyber-device.
The streets are practically shaking with activity and commerce. It's like being in the midst of an ongoing development earthquake. The architecture isn't constrained by old-fashioned esthetic notions. Much of it is hideous, but it is playful, interesting to look at, anarchic, different. Some of it is startling, bold and excellent. It's representative of the culture of the city in a way that the typical square glass boxes - no matter how much The Donald tries to put a sheen along with his name on them - of New York aren't.
Yesterday we went to the Art Museum and the Contemporary Art Museum. At the Art Museum we saw a retrospective of work by Chen Zhen, a Shanghai artist who did most of his work in France. Some of the work was bizarre and fun - like a collection of beautifully blown glass sculptures of parts of the human digestive system. Some of it was surprisingly political: a piece called The Library was a collection of glass cubes containing the ashes of burnt books in which you could still make out some of the Chinese text.
The Contemporary Art Museum - set in a quirky glass building in the middle of People's Park - had an exhibit about the impact of cartoon, as in Japanese manga, culture on art. It was mostly by very young artists and a lot of it was rather trite. But as a whole it was an interesting, well-curated, challenging show that was a lot of fun.
I was thinking to myself that in the 11 years I lived in Hong Kong, nothing similar to either of these shows was available. We then headed out to a part of town where there are a group of new galleries in old warehouses. (That sounds familiar and very encouraging to someone from Los Angeles.)
We took the clean and fast and cheap subway to the northern train station and started walking to the gallery area. Halfway across a bridge over a stream, a woman stopped Eva and started jabbering at top speed in Mandarin and pointing at Eva's purse. The woman had seen someone steal Eva's wallet.
A talented someone. Eva's purse had been zipped shut and held close to her side. A passerby called the police who showed up in about five minutes. But then some other police showed up.
Then all the police started arguing with each other. The problem was that we didn't know exactly where we were when the wallet was stolen. We only knew where we were when we discovered the theft. And that was cause for a jurisdictional dispute because no one really wanted to deal with a couple of non-Chinese-speaking tourists and a crime that could probably never be solved. But, once the police had been called, someone had to deal with us.
We had discovered the crime on the bridge and that was one precinct's territory. The wallet had probably been stolen before we got to the bridge and that was another precinct. They argued for over an hour before one precinct gave in and agreed to take us to their station house.
There, the low woman on the totem pole, whose English name was Emily and who had graduated from the academy only two months ago, was put in charge of taking Eva's statement. Emily took us up to a dreary, dirty office with one beat up old computer in a corner. She sat us down across from her at a desk and wrote down everything Eva told her. She then handed Eva the pages of Chinese writing and asked her to write a statement on them that they were correct and accurately reflected what Eva had told her. We had no reason to believe that we were going to end up in a re-education through labor camp no matter what the paper said, so trusting Emily, Eva did what she was asked.
We were given a properly stamped copy in case Eva's credit card companies ever want proof that she reported the theft of her cards to the police. They'll have to read it in Chinese though. Back at the hotel, the Chinese phone system unfortunately reverted to its old ways and it took Eva ten tries to get through to her Visa card customer service number without getting cut off before she could make her report.
We licked our wounds over an excellent Shanghainese dinner and then strolled around what used to be the French Concession, looking at the smart new boutiques in restored houses and bright lights. We ended up with drinks at Face - part of a small, growing chain of bar/restaurants around Asia. The original was my favorite Indian restaurant in Jakarta. The one in Bangkok - a Thai and Indian restaurant on different floors of one of the most beautiful wooden houses I've ever been in - is one of the great places to eat and drink in the world. This one was pretty great too.
After that we came back to the hotel for a drink and to listen to the Peace Hotel Old Jazz Band. They're famous for being in their 80s and 90s and having played here since they were kids. Unfortunately, by the time we got back to the hotel they'd doddered off to sleep and the middle-aged jazz band was playing. They were terrible, but that's what they're supposed to be so it was okay for a little while.
In all, it was an interesting and mostly fun day. A wallet can be stolen anywhere (luckily Eva's passport was safely locked up back at the hotel) and for the most part we have the impression that Shanghai is a whole lot safer than the average U.S. city. Today we plan to head back out to the art gallery district - keeping a tighter rein on our belongings; and then over to the brave new world of Pudong.
As much though as I'm loving this place, and even mulling it over as a place to live for a year or two, it is adding to my misgivings about the future of the planet. I'll get to that in the next post.
Wednesday, March 15, 2006
Monday, March 13, 2006
Somewhere Between Hong Kong and Shanghai
9pm, Sunday 12 March 2006
This is the stuff that science fiction was once made of. Eva and I are in a very comfortable sleeper compartment in an express Chinese train speeding from Hong Kong to Shanghai, having eaten pleasantly enough in the dining car, and I’m working on a computer.
The first time I was in China was 1978. I took the train through Hong Kong, past small farms and villages in the New Territories – one of which, Sha Tin, is now a suburban city of almost two million people – to the end of the line at Lo Wu. There we got off the train and humped our luggage across a wooden bridge over the nearly dry Shenzhen Creek, to a small brick border station where we were stamped into the People’s Republic by an unsmiling official who sat under a large poster of Chairman Mao handing something – the reins of power I suppose – to Hua Guofeng.
As we boarded the Chinese train on the other side, we could see farmers toiling in the fields, some of them with oxen, none of them with machines. They were being blasted by squeaky patriotic music and the occasional quotation from the Chairman, from loudspeakers on wooden poles scattered around the countryside. There was a speaker also just above our seats on that train. We could turn it down, but not off. We only took the train as far as Guangzhou (Canton) that time. We later flew to Shanghai.
I’ve been to China many times since, but not again to Shanghai. I feel as though we are heading for what will seem like another planet.
Hong Kong always feels like another planet. But it’s one I’m familiar with.
I was reminded at dinner in the dining car of how primitive the state of mobile phones is in the U.S. A man seated across from us simply picked up his mobile phone, pushed a button to dial a number, and was happily and clearly talking with someone in Europe while our train rumbled through the dark, rural night of China. No doubt it was the same cell phone that he uses in Europe. He simply bought a sim card, slipped it into the slot and was able to call as if he had a local cell phone. In the civilized, high-tech world outside the U.S. and Canada, you simply buy whatever phone you want then you have options to sign up with a specific service or purchase local sim cards wherever you go. Why is it that we can’t do that in the U.S.? Regulation? Quasi-monopolies? What?
The Hong Kong Literary Festival was a lot of fun and had a number of events of interest, even other than my own. It was remarkably well organized, ran efficiently, was very well attended and in every way was very impressive. I’m hoping they’ll invite me back again next year.
The Festival is a great deal more international than similar festivals in the U.S. I listened to and spoke with authors from Ireland, Britain, Australia, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, China, Canada, Mexico, South Africa and I think there might have been a Frenchman or an Italian. Among the continents only Antarctica was unrepresented.
I fear that in previous posts I may have given you the impression that I harbor no fondness for Hong Kong. There are many things that I truly love about the place, the international social life being the best among them. I recall numerous dinner parties at which the 12 people around the lazy Susan in a Chinese restaurant represented anywhere from six to a full-dozen native languages and countries. Something like that is very rare, even in Los Angeles where the inhabitants speak over 150 native tongues and come from every country in the world. Most big U.S. cities actually have a much more diverse population than Hong Kong. Most mid-sized U.S. cities do too for that matter. But, the social milieu is just not the same. I miss that – a lot.
Even so, it is rare to get together with a group like that and discuss literature or art or music or film or politics. The talk is more often than not of business or consumer goods or food itself or other such topics that would not make for a particularly interesting salon. I guess you can’t have everything.
Or perhaps the conversation is often not particulary deep due to the rather massive ingestion of alcohol that is common in nearly every expatriate gathering. I was reminded of this while being interviewed by a writer for the South China Morning Post. One of his comments about my book The Living Room of the Dead was that he realized very quickly that the hero was an American, ‘because he didn’t really drink all that much.’
It’s one of those ‘eye of the beholder’ things. Readers and reviewers in the U.S. have almost all commented with horror and disapproval on how much the hero of the book does drink. My sister-in-law told me that one of the things she found unrealistic about the book was that anyone who drank that much would be incapable of functioning in a normal way and would, if deprived of booze for a day or so, be incapacitated by delirium tremors. All I could say by way of defense was that she quite obviously had not ever worked in a largely British or Australian office in Hong Kong. Perhaps I should put her in touch with the Post’s journalist.
I was also interviewed by one of the daily newspapers in Macau. I’ll see if I can get a PDF posted on my website for those of you who might want to practice your Portuguese. If you just can't wait and want to read the original on the newspapers site, here's a link: http://www.pontofinalmacau.com (You'll have to copy and paste it, sorry.)
Now I’d like to write a little about amahs – housemaids. I was wondering one day why there seemed to be a lot more Indonesian and Nepalese amahs in Hong Kong than in the past when nearly all of them were from the Philippines. The reason for it is shameful and indicative of the extremely ugly, elitist side of life in Hong Kong and its government’s utter lack of regard for protecting the underdog.
Not long after the Asian economic collapse of 1997-98, Hong Kong, for the first time in a while, found itself in recession. Amahs have always been underpaid, but Hong Kong had a minimum wage for them – around US$475 per month – that made them the highest paid in the region. (Besides their salary, amahs are usually given room and board, although a 12 hour day, six day week is considered a light schedule. By law they only have to be given two days off a month, and there are no limits on the hours they work.)
A group of wealthy and upper middle class employers of amahs, worried that their property values and stock portfolios were declining, petitioned the Hong Kong government to lower the minimum wage for amahs. It did, to something around US$340 per month. The government promised that it was temporary, only until the economy rebounded.
There was only so much that the Filipinas – coming from a society that had overthrown its longtime dictator Marcos not all that long ago – were willing to accept. Many of them protested. The government of the Philippines protested. A whole lot of amahs didn’t get their visas renewed and were sent home. They were replaced with more “docile” women from even poorer countries – Indonesia and Nepal.
The economy rebounded quite some time ago. It’s percolating at a very nice clip these days. There is, of course, no talk of reinstating the previous minimum wage, much less raising it. And, now that Hong Kong is part of the People’s Republic, a country ideologically (at least on paper) committed to creating a worker’s paradise, there is even less chance of change for the better than ever.
Perhaps if the amahs were Chinese, Han Chinese that is. In the booming cities of Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing there is an increasing demand for amahs. They’re paid even worse and protected even less than in Hong Kong. But then everything is cheaper in China. The Peoples Republic’s exploited domestics are coming from all the traditional places with young desperate women: the Philippines, Indonesia, Nepal; but also from Tibet, Xinjiang, Yunnan and the other “ethnic minority regions” of China itself.
And, speaking of the minority regions of China, Eva just got back from five days in Lijiang in Yunnan Province. She highly recommends it. It’s one of the most beautiful and interesting places she’s been. In particular she suggests: the Zen Garden Hotel and Li & Richard Travel Service for local forays to Naxi and Tibetan villages and areas of interest.
This is the stuff that science fiction was once made of. Eva and I are in a very comfortable sleeper compartment in an express Chinese train speeding from Hong Kong to Shanghai, having eaten pleasantly enough in the dining car, and I’m working on a computer.
The first time I was in China was 1978. I took the train through Hong Kong, past small farms and villages in the New Territories – one of which, Sha Tin, is now a suburban city of almost two million people – to the end of the line at Lo Wu. There we got off the train and humped our luggage across a wooden bridge over the nearly dry Shenzhen Creek, to a small brick border station where we were stamped into the People’s Republic by an unsmiling official who sat under a large poster of Chairman Mao handing something – the reins of power I suppose – to Hua Guofeng.
As we boarded the Chinese train on the other side, we could see farmers toiling in the fields, some of them with oxen, none of them with machines. They were being blasted by squeaky patriotic music and the occasional quotation from the Chairman, from loudspeakers on wooden poles scattered around the countryside. There was a speaker also just above our seats on that train. We could turn it down, but not off. We only took the train as far as Guangzhou (Canton) that time. We later flew to Shanghai.
I’ve been to China many times since, but not again to Shanghai. I feel as though we are heading for what will seem like another planet.
Hong Kong always feels like another planet. But it’s one I’m familiar with.
I was reminded at dinner in the dining car of how primitive the state of mobile phones is in the U.S. A man seated across from us simply picked up his mobile phone, pushed a button to dial a number, and was happily and clearly talking with someone in Europe while our train rumbled through the dark, rural night of China. No doubt it was the same cell phone that he uses in Europe. He simply bought a sim card, slipped it into the slot and was able to call as if he had a local cell phone. In the civilized, high-tech world outside the U.S. and Canada, you simply buy whatever phone you want then you have options to sign up with a specific service or purchase local sim cards wherever you go. Why is it that we can’t do that in the U.S.? Regulation? Quasi-monopolies? What?
The Hong Kong Literary Festival was a lot of fun and had a number of events of interest, even other than my own. It was remarkably well organized, ran efficiently, was very well attended and in every way was very impressive. I’m hoping they’ll invite me back again next year.
The Festival is a great deal more international than similar festivals in the U.S. I listened to and spoke with authors from Ireland, Britain, Australia, India, Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, China, Canada, Mexico, South Africa and I think there might have been a Frenchman or an Italian. Among the continents only Antarctica was unrepresented.
I fear that in previous posts I may have given you the impression that I harbor no fondness for Hong Kong. There are many things that I truly love about the place, the international social life being the best among them. I recall numerous dinner parties at which the 12 people around the lazy Susan in a Chinese restaurant represented anywhere from six to a full-dozen native languages and countries. Something like that is very rare, even in Los Angeles where the inhabitants speak over 150 native tongues and come from every country in the world. Most big U.S. cities actually have a much more diverse population than Hong Kong. Most mid-sized U.S. cities do too for that matter. But, the social milieu is just not the same. I miss that – a lot.
Even so, it is rare to get together with a group like that and discuss literature or art or music or film or politics. The talk is more often than not of business or consumer goods or food itself or other such topics that would not make for a particularly interesting salon. I guess you can’t have everything.
Or perhaps the conversation is often not particulary deep due to the rather massive ingestion of alcohol that is common in nearly every expatriate gathering. I was reminded of this while being interviewed by a writer for the South China Morning Post. One of his comments about my book The Living Room of the Dead was that he realized very quickly that the hero was an American, ‘because he didn’t really drink all that much.’
It’s one of those ‘eye of the beholder’ things. Readers and reviewers in the U.S. have almost all commented with horror and disapproval on how much the hero of the book does drink. My sister-in-law told me that one of the things she found unrealistic about the book was that anyone who drank that much would be incapable of functioning in a normal way and would, if deprived of booze for a day or so, be incapacitated by delirium tremors. All I could say by way of defense was that she quite obviously had not ever worked in a largely British or Australian office in Hong Kong. Perhaps I should put her in touch with the Post’s journalist.
I was also interviewed by one of the daily newspapers in Macau. I’ll see if I can get a PDF posted on my website for those of you who might want to practice your Portuguese. If you just can't wait and want to read the original on the newspapers site, here's a link: http://www.pontofinalmacau.com (You'll have to copy and paste it, sorry.)
Now I’d like to write a little about amahs – housemaids. I was wondering one day why there seemed to be a lot more Indonesian and Nepalese amahs in Hong Kong than in the past when nearly all of them were from the Philippines. The reason for it is shameful and indicative of the extremely ugly, elitist side of life in Hong Kong and its government’s utter lack of regard for protecting the underdog.
Not long after the Asian economic collapse of 1997-98, Hong Kong, for the first time in a while, found itself in recession. Amahs have always been underpaid, but Hong Kong had a minimum wage for them – around US$475 per month – that made them the highest paid in the region. (Besides their salary, amahs are usually given room and board, although a 12 hour day, six day week is considered a light schedule. By law they only have to be given two days off a month, and there are no limits on the hours they work.)
A group of wealthy and upper middle class employers of amahs, worried that their property values and stock portfolios were declining, petitioned the Hong Kong government to lower the minimum wage for amahs. It did, to something around US$340 per month. The government promised that it was temporary, only until the economy rebounded.
There was only so much that the Filipinas – coming from a society that had overthrown its longtime dictator Marcos not all that long ago – were willing to accept. Many of them protested. The government of the Philippines protested. A whole lot of amahs didn’t get their visas renewed and were sent home. They were replaced with more “docile” women from even poorer countries – Indonesia and Nepal.
The economy rebounded quite some time ago. It’s percolating at a very nice clip these days. There is, of course, no talk of reinstating the previous minimum wage, much less raising it. And, now that Hong Kong is part of the People’s Republic, a country ideologically (at least on paper) committed to creating a worker’s paradise, there is even less chance of change for the better than ever.
Perhaps if the amahs were Chinese, Han Chinese that is. In the booming cities of Guangzhou, Shanghai and Beijing there is an increasing demand for amahs. They’re paid even worse and protected even less than in Hong Kong. But then everything is cheaper in China. The Peoples Republic’s exploited domestics are coming from all the traditional places with young desperate women: the Philippines, Indonesia, Nepal; but also from Tibet, Xinjiang, Yunnan and the other “ethnic minority regions” of China itself.
And, speaking of the minority regions of China, Eva just got back from five days in Lijiang in Yunnan Province. She highly recommends it. It’s one of the most beautiful and interesting places she’s been. In particular she suggests: the Zen Garden Hotel and Li & Richard Travel Service for local forays to Naxi and Tibetan villages and areas of interest.
Wednesday, March 8, 2006
Bookstores and a Scary Chart
This is a somewhat short and rambling post. I forgot to include a chart that my friend Dave drew for me while we were tormenting our livers the other night. It is a chart that was drawn for him by an investment banker friend who does business in China. According to the investment banker - who has worked in China for a dozen or more years, everything a business person does there falls into one of two categories: "Greed," the positive factors that motivate you; and "Fear," the negative factors that motivate. Here's how the chart looks (sorry that I couldn't figure out how to format a chart on the blog):
GREED
Money
Women
Power
FEAR
Family *
Bodily Harm
Authority (government / police)
Blackmail
Capricious regulation
* Family makes you vulnerable.
I was once arrested and held overnight in China for wandering into the wrong place with my camera. And I once had to pay bribes to get a vitally important interview. I never had anything much to do with money, women or power there. I don't think I've got the stomach to do business in China.
Hong Kong is a different matter though. It can be a real pleasure to do business here. At least on the low level that I have. Yesterday I was taken around to a couple of bookstores by Claudia, a very nice, well read and interesting woman who works with Pan Macmillan Asia - the distributor of THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD in this part of the world. It was fun seeing my book for sale in shops that I used to frequent when I lived here, even if it wasn't exactly huge stacks of it. Hardbacks are a hard sell here, the distributors are anxious for a paperback to come out. So am I. I was surprised at the price - less than I would have thought. The book sells for $22.95 in the U.S. and for HK$218 (US$28 approximately) here.
There are a number of new and bigger than ever bookshops in Hong Kong, but real estate is just too expensive to allow for any of the big box stores that we have in the U.S. I imagine a Borders or a Barnes and Noble would cause havoc in the book selling marketplace here. There is a huge Borders in Singapore, but that's a roomier place - sort of.
GREED
Money
Women
Power
FEAR
Family *
Bodily Harm
Authority (government / police)
Blackmail
Capricious regulation
* Family makes you vulnerable.
I was once arrested and held overnight in China for wandering into the wrong place with my camera. And I once had to pay bribes to get a vitally important interview. I never had anything much to do with money, women or power there. I don't think I've got the stomach to do business in China.
Hong Kong is a different matter though. It can be a real pleasure to do business here. At least on the low level that I have. Yesterday I was taken around to a couple of bookstores by Claudia, a very nice, well read and interesting woman who works with Pan Macmillan Asia - the distributor of THE LIVING ROOM OF THE DEAD in this part of the world. It was fun seeing my book for sale in shops that I used to frequent when I lived here, even if it wasn't exactly huge stacks of it. Hardbacks are a hard sell here, the distributors are anxious for a paperback to come out. So am I. I was surprised at the price - less than I would have thought. The book sells for $22.95 in the U.S. and for HK$218 (US$28 approximately) here.
There are a number of new and bigger than ever bookshops in Hong Kong, but real estate is just too expensive to allow for any of the big box stores that we have in the U.S. I imagine a Borders or a Barnes and Noble would cause havoc in the book selling marketplace here. There is a huge Borders in Singapore, but that's a roomier place - sort of.
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