Monthly Archives: January 2013

Risen Again

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Just before Christmas I spent a couple of weekends hitting various markets around Shanghai looking for gifts. One of these was in a warren of old lane houses near central Shanghai whose residents have decided to reinvent as an atmospheric tourist trinket bazaar.  It can be a fun place to walk around in, though it’s often overwhelmed with people taking photos with bulky SLRs and shopkeepers and patrons crowding the narrow alleys to haggle over mass-produced junk.

Anyway, I saw these festive items for sale at the entrance of one boutique. I get the Santa figure and the NOEL sign, but where on earth does the Confederate flag star fit in?

Counter-revolutionary faxes

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A few days ago I got to the office early and cleared all the night’s junk faxes off of the printer.  Having never worked a real job in the US, I’m not sure if you are familiar with junk faxes.  In our  Shanghai office our printer-fax machine hybrid occasionally comes to life on its own and spits out a faxed sheet containing fabulous offers for products that no one in our department asked for. Like junk mail or spam, but coming out of a fax machine.   Usually the offers are for low-cost plane tickets or package tours. What a cruel joke to play on office-dwellers who are months away from their next vacation.

Anyway, on this morning a few days ago I pulled out the stack of faxes and was surprised to find several that did not obviously look like lists of tourist sites paired with price tags. As it turned out they were densely worded political diatribes with headlines calling for the firing of Jiang Zemin (China’s former paramount leader and current power behind the throne) and voicing support for the Falun Gong.  Not the kind of stuff you expect to see printed on paper in the People’s Republic.

I have no idea where the faxes came from or what cause their senders realistically hoped to achieve. I’m sure multitudes of similar documents got thrown out with the rest of the fax spam in other offices.

This isn’t the first time I’ve encountered underground-railroad-esque voices of revolutionary activity in China.  While back in the US over Christmas, I was surprised to get an unsolicited call over Skype that turned out to be a recording in which a male Chinese voice argued that the Chinese Communist Party was not dissimilar from Fascists.  The voice then asked me to add them as a friend to help support the cause of overthrowing the CCP.

Writing about this also takes me back to summer 2010, when i was living in southwest Yunnan Province and took a weekend trip to a small city called Qujing. Just after arriving I used the filthy bus station toilet and found this message scrawled on the stall wall, next to the phone numbers advertising prostitutes and fake medicine:

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“Smash the Communist Party!  Join this [social media group]! We want fairness, justice, democracy, and we oppose dictatorship and official corruption!”

You know, one time one of China’s former leaders got tired of being lectured about human rights and democracy from the prime minister of Britain, and decided to get clever: he said the prime minister could never understand the “real China” and hoped one day he could ride a bus through the countryside to experience the country for himself, knowing full well that the Briton would never get farther than the shiny facades of Beijing and Shanghai and thus could never possibly prove firsthand that China’s backwater yokels were not actually delighted to be living without so-called universal rights and democracy.  I wish I could have been in the room to show him this picture right then and there.  Game, set, and match.

Regardless, I don’t think any of this adds up to a groundswell of popular opposition or actual stirrings of revolution.  Its just a dedicated minority getting its message out in a number of creative ways.

King Cake

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Today I made it back to work, where I blew my nose and coughed all day long, giving most of my colleagues the impression that I really should have stayed home to recuperate another day. That’s not really an option this week, though, with tons of deadlines coming up for projects that I’m coordinating.  

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Last week I brought to the Research snack table a King Cake that I had stored in my suitcase all the way from Shreveport.  It did not go over well.  I suppose the problems started with buying a cake from Brookshire’s rather than one of the bakery champions like Dough Basket or Julianne’s.  Don’t get me wrong, in past years I have thoroughly enjoyed Brookshire’s take on the King Cake, but chain supermarket pastries are not the way to go when engaging in international culinary diplomacy.  

Brookshire’s basic King Cake gets most of its flavor from its liberal covering of icing. This was always destined to go down poorly in China, where people generally have a lower tolerance for sweet foods (though for some reason they do only eat candied popcorn in movie theaters – but that’s another story).   I opted for a cinnamon filling instead of cream cheese or strawberry (!) in hopes that it would help balance out the sugar rush.  Unfortunately the cinnamon filling was actually a mix of cinnamon and more sugar, and it also got kind of gross during the plane ride.  By the time I got the cake on the snack table the inside of the cake was a sticky, soggy mess.  I ate a piece early in the morning before the others arrived and found it tasted like both sugary and stale, the pastry too dry and the filling suspiciously gelatinous. I considered throwing it away and mentioning it to no one. But instead I left it there and had a go at encouraging people to try it.  A few did (“too sweet”) but most steered clear.  After the weekend and my sick day, two-thirds of it was still there uneaten.  I brought it home today and gave it a mercy killing in the dumpster next to the subway station.   I’ll take some See’s Candies to the snack table tomorrow by way of apology. Everyone love’s See’s Candies. 

Out Sick

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I’ve been out sick the past few days, a combination of overwork, jetlag-induced sleepless nights, record-breaking smog, bone-chilling cold, and that “something” that infects half of China every winter and is currently going around the office. In past winters in China I’ve managed to fight off the worst of the winter cold and make it through with just a case of the sniffles, but last week I was brought low and only just managed to crawl home to bed at 9 PM on Friday night and sleep for a good ten hours.  I slept even longer on Saturday night and by Sunday was on the road to recovery.  I set my alarm for an early day’s work on Monday and felt terrible again that morning, so I finally asked for a day off and spent the day working from home at a (relatively) leisurely pace.  Still only wrapped things up at 8 PM.  I worked from home all day Sunday too.  This is what passes for taking some time off to recuperate.  I suppose I made the cold worse than it needed to be in the early going by working thirteen hour days, and continuing to work overtime even after I should have gone home early to fight off the infection with a good night’s sleep.

I’m sure that my apartment is making me sicker.  It seemed like a good value when I first found it, but the poor heating and worse insulation in the middle of a damp and colder than usual winter is beginning to sap my life force.  I’ve decided to try to move to a new place as soon as my lease is up in a couple of months.

For Your Consideration

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Skyfall

January is always the best time for watching pirated American films in China.  Most of the year, little DVD shops and sidewalk hawkers start selling DVDs of new Hollywood releases weeks or even days after they hit theaters back home.  Slide them into your home theater though, and it quickly becomes apparent the copies were made from a camcorder placed in the back of the theater. One’s heart sinks as all the telltale signs become apparent – a blurry picture at a slightly skewed angle; audience members’ heads in the bottom of the frame; muffled soundtrack further compromised by the audiences’ laughter, gasps, and whispers.  This is the price you pay for buying a disc for 70 cents a week after the film is released.

I began to eschew the latest films entirely and focus instead on bootleg versions of television shows and older films – ones where the pirates could copy high-quality transfers from existing DVDs. I got used to not seeing new American films until the DVD release made it easier to get a watchable version. The one exception is January, in the middle of Oscar season, when China’s pirated DVD racks overflow with copies of awards screeners.  Awards screeners are DVDs of high-profile pictures that the studios send to Academy members in hopes of winning votes for their films.  Screeners are sent out long before the consumer version of the DVD is released to the public.   The discs usually lack extras or bonus content, but the movies themselves are crystal clear and distinguished by messages that appear on the screen at regular intervals throughout:  “For your consideration” and “For Academy screening purposes only”.  I am not sure who allows screeners to fall off the truck and make their way to China, but I want to thank them for making January such a pleasurable month for imbibing American culture in China.

I scored a copy of “Skyfall” this afternoon and cheered when “For your consideration” appeared on the screen – more than makes up for the Skyfall disc I bought in December, which was so blurry it felt like someone had smeared Vaseline on the lens and the voices were dubbed into Russian.