19 posts tagged “shanghai”
Back on the other side of the Great Firewall tomorrow, so no Vox for a few weeks. I will probably still send posts if I can, but won't be able to access it until the middle of July.
Wow, it's going to be a busy few weeks: meetings, discussions, observing, editing, writing, arguing...and that's just ONE job! I still have two other gigs I have to manage to keep up with after going into the office all day every day. But it's OK. I'm in a nice hotel in a great city...
But I hate leaving home for so long. I guess it's a good sign that after 5 years, I still miss Masa terribly when we're apart. A week is fine. Actually, a week might even be good. But three weeks sucks! We do end up talking on Skype at least once a day (usually twice) which is borderline pathetic (or maybe fully pathetic, I don't know).
But this time I feel that I have so MUCH to get back for: Masa (of course), closing on our house, getting ready to start renovating for several weeks, moving, Mags and Marie (I wonder if she'll remember me after being away for three weeks, I guess she probably will), plus all our friends who have fun stuff planned for later this summer.
It's good to have a little break from the routine, to be honest. And put in my face there to guarantee another 8-12 months of work on a new project (which means 8-12 months of INCOME). And hang out in Shanghai, a city I love (though it'd be so much better if Masa could come with me!).
I feel like getting slightly poetic here, to write about how lucky I feel at this time in my life: to be surrounded by close friends who give me so much, to have a job which though a bit dull at times, provides me with a good living and allows us to have our own place, travel, be productive. To be such an important part of Magdali's life, to feel invested here in Montreal. Leaving my life for three weeks is so good: it makes me reflect on how GREAT my life is and how very lucky I am.
*Real life starts today. And by that I mean work. Not that I haven't been working during the break but today everything ramps up again. Yet here I am laying in bed at 11.30am. True, I went to bed at 3 and woke up for two hours at 6.30 but I do need to get back onto some sort of normal-ish schedule.
Damn. I have to leave for over three weeks. And on SUNDAY. Big corporate companies: grrrrr. I've been asking for a month when I was needed back without a word or an update about it. Then yesterday: "Can you be here Tuesday?"
Obama's speech last night was solid: not loaded with specifics but rousing and forceful. I'm glad to see someone finally taking aim at the disastrous Bush presidency. Generally the Democrats have been so spineless, it was nice to see some ammo. Didn't go far enough, perhaps, in nailing McCain for being such a waffler: caving in to all the Evangelical propaganda that he doesn't even really believe. Still. I'm not optimistic about this election. Obama's "cult of personality" (toned down recently) is more than slightly annoying, though that doesn't mean he's not worlds better than same old Republican nonsense for another term. It's amazing to me that given the state of the US in terms of its economy, international reputation, embroilment in two futile wars, and general cultural malaise, Obama's not miles ahead of McCain. Again, not optimistic.
Vox is blocked in China which means no blogging while I'm there. That really sucks. Stupid Chinese government. There are ways, apparently, of getting around the filters, but it takes a bit of finagling and isn't consistently effective. So there may well be two weeks of silence followed by post after post once I'm back, all relating to being there. Or maybe nothing will happen worth blogging about since I will be working the entire time I'm there.
Finishing a huge project today that I've been working on since April. It feels good to have this OFF my (virtual) desk as it's been a lot of work and really stressful some weeks. Just about three or four more hours to do today and that's it. The best part is that since this project is done, and since I don't have HK stuff for another three weeks (just finished that stuff last week), AND since the big company in Shanghai told me to hold off on the work for them so that I am free to be worked like a dog while I'm in China in 10 days, I only have ONE COMPANY to work for next week. This is honestly the first time I've had only one job to do in probably more than two years. It's like a vacation: only 18 hours next week!
Canada seems to be fixing to have our own election in the next month. Ah, so much easier! Campaigning will be limited to a few TV channels and there will pretty much only be a few placards posted here and there on the busy streets. No two years of campaigning, thank God. Sad, but true: the US election gets far more attention than the Canadian one, even IN Canada! Since I'm not a citizen of this land, I cannot vote (yet), though I can definitely cross my fingers that the Convervatives will lose their slight majority (though the Conservatives in Canada are not like Conservatives in America, at least not in terms of many issues: the vast majority of Canadians are center left and the Conservatives have never had much a mandate but do anything except walk a fine line). The gap between mainstream Liberals and mainstream Conservatives in Canada isn't that wide (I'd be an NDP man myself, if I could vote), so as far as I'm concerned, the election isn't a nail biter.
So. Work changes. Maybe. I've been doing some work for this company that I used to work for many years ago. It's a Swedish/Swiss company but they have a big main office in Shanghai (and one in Boston); anyway, they've been asking me since July to move to Shanghai. I was seriously considering it, but told them that I couldn't until Masa's immigration was done. Even then, we'd have to investigate a Chinese visa for him (never an easy feat); they said they'd even offer him a PT job. Well, now it's crunch time and they are pressing me for an answer.
Ah...we really can't go now and I told her that I really can't say much more than that. But I offered to go to Shanghai several times a year, maybe a month or so each time. To me this would be ideal: Masa could come with me, spend a few weeks in Tokyo. We could keep our apartment and our base in Montreal. And the job is one I could easily do remotely, in fact, I do a similar job for two other companies now remotely with few problems. They seem flexible but who knows if they will go for this.
The money is slightly better than what I make now, but it's the chance to work for a much bigger company with lots of room for promotion that is appealing. They are offering me a fairly senior position, so part of me does think I should jump at it. But, again: I can't agree to it until the immigration thing is done and we can ensure Masa a visa there. And it'd mean going back to the 9 to 5 grind, sigh. And wearing a suit every day. Sigh sigh.
So...anyway. I do hope they go for my offer: three or four months a year working from Shanghai, better money, interesting work. Might be good. Or they might well say that they need someone there full-time in a few months. In which case, I told them I'd have to bow out. Anyway, in that case, I can keep my nice and easy lifestyle in our small but cute Montreal apartment heheh.
If they go for it, I'm off to Shanghai for two weeks in early September, leaving poor Masa here on his own since he still can't leave Canada. Luckily, he has a few more friends than before so he won't spend the entire time at home watching TV and playing with the cat (just most of his time).
Late spring, 1998. Paul and I both scored bikes and got out onto the chaotic streets of Shanghai, riding in every direction those iron horses would take us. Seriously, they were made of iron and heavy, and I felt like Kermit the frog on mine because it was so high.
We often rode in those days: to and from work (we lived in adjacent apartment blocks along Changning Road), back home, sightseeing on the weekends (Paul always called a newly discovered "shortcut" a Ho Chi Minh trail): it was (still is?) the best way to see a city like Shanghai. One day we rode way out by the airport (the old airport at Hongqiao, before Pudong was built) and leaned our bikes against the chain link fence in order to watch the planes land. It was so fun! These huge steel jets felt like they would graze the tops of our heads as they zoomed in, the metal gleaming off the sunlight. Soon a crowd of peasants gathered to watch us, point, laugh at the crazy laowai watching planes come in.
On the way home, we discovered this sculpture garden with an enormous stone carving of Marx and Engels. This was in the middle of nowhere -- and anyone who's spent time in a Chinese suburb knows how desolate, poor, and odd they are (totally unlike North American suburbs). This photo was taken along a dusty road full of loud blue trucks.
This statue (or a later version of it, Marx's hand is slightly different in the installed version below) is now standing in the middle of Fuxing Park in downtown Shanghai. A pic (not mine) below of what the statue looks like today.
Paul, my closest friend my first two years in China, left China in 2000, and after stints in Australia, Cambodia, Angola, and London, now lives in Jerusalem...
This statue is just a few steps from (what was once) the hippest and wildest club in Shanghai. Once I drank waayyyyy too much and woke up on the grass at 7.30am directly underneath this statue. Marx and Engels: not pleasant faces to see first thing when hungover, hungry and tired. O, youth!
Ten years ago this week, I went to China. It's difficult to imagine that so much time has passed. And being there, living and working there, changed me in ways that are impossible to undo. I quite literally wouldn't be sitting here in Montreal had I not gone to China. I wouldn't be doing the job I'm doing. I most likely would never even have met Masa (though we actually met in Tokyo). I wouldn't have known Lei or Paul or Jennifer or Lara or Kirsten. I wouldn't have traveled to Indonesia or France or Sri Lanka or Vietnam. I wouldn't have developed a love of Chinese poetry or Indian food or good white wine (well maybe I would have, but I'm being nostalgic today).
Funny to think how one decision can affect so much change. And it wasn't an easy decision: in spring of 1998 I was living in a huge cedar-built house with cathedral ceilings and 8 foot windows facing west. I was in southern Idaho, having just come from Seoul a few months earlier. The house there in Pocatello was Dutch's house and I was "housesitting" since he had just bought a condo in Palm Springs and wasn't ready to sell his place yet. My sister had lent me her Toyota Corolla for a couple of months and I was hanging out with Rupert who was in pharmacy school at the time. Those were quiet days: I'd swim in the mornings at Reed Gym, work at the university in the afternoon, and hang out with Mark or Rupert in the evenings. I would travel to Salt Lake City or Sun Valley or Jackson or Boise on the weekends and when the Shanghai job offer came across the wire in January, I hesitated. I had applied for a few jobs in Idaho Falls and my parents really wanted me to stay in the area. But I, as ever, had that restless spirit and so wanted to get out of there.
So I fobbed the job off for a few months, hemmed and hawed, debated with myself: what kind of life did I want? Was I ready to just settle down in Idaho and get a job and buy a house? Was I really ready to start a PhD degree? Or did I want adventure and a new kind of life in a place I'd never been? I knew it was a big decision, leaving, but I could never have known just how big. Finally, I came to a compromise: I told the graduate school in New Mexico that I would start in the fall and I decided to go to Shanghai just for the summer. I packed up my stuff, said goodbye to Rupert (saying goodbye to him was hard, I remember: sitting in his car outside the library at school because I knew it might be many years before I saw him again. And it was!) and hopped on a plane. Mark was mad at me because I was leaving (I haven't talked to him since, in fact). I think my parents finally accepted then that I would always be flitting around the globe my entire life.
Within a week I knew I'd stay in Shanghai. I sent New Mexico an email ("Thanks but no thanks.") and didn't look back. It was such an amazing time to be in China: there weren't so many westerners then, everything had a "cowboy" feel to it, the rules were still being established. I lived on the 18th floor on Changning Road, just up the street from the school where I worked (JiangSu and Yan'An). I loved everything: loved teaching in that classroom overlooking the street: the fact that you could open the windows and smell the rain: I could actually hear the raindrops as I taught (which was so novel since I had resigned myself to working in a big cubicle-laden office with no windows at all). The students were eager and serious. The school was a bit of a mess, but I loved the social scene: Paul and I became fast friends and suddenly there was this group of people around me that I got along well with. I loved the markets and riding my bike in the mornings. I loved the parks and the clubs and the pubs and the shops. More than that, I felt that I belonged there at that time in my life. I certainly had my "China days," but it felt like home.
I still wish I could recapture that sense of wonder I had then, that feeling that this place now is exactly where I need to be. I don't feel that in Montreal, I never did. I like it here. But it's a different kind of feeling from what I felt that first year in Shanghai. Every day was a lesson: a new word or phrase. A new fact about the Chinese that interested me. A new dish or a new way of making tofu (lol). I hung out at Always Cafe on Nanjing Road (just a few blocks from this picture here on the right). And Cotton Club. And KABB. And Henry and the Time Passage Cafe and Goya and O'Malley's. And 1931 and Le Garcon Chinois and DKD and Buddha Bar and Kathleen's. I traveled all over the world: to nearly every province in China, taking the train or flying or taking the bus or a big boat up the Yangtze River. I went to Hong Kong a few times a year to buy clothes or CDs. I went to Jakarta and London and Macau and Hanoi for work. My life feels so QUIET in comparison now!
When I think about this, I wonder if I'm just made to live in Asia. I never would have imagined that before I went to Asia. I was always the type who wanted to live in France or Spain or Italy. Now these places don't interest me that much. But WOW I miss that kind of excitement in Asia: the huge numbers of people, the food, the history.
I also think that what made that time so amazing for me was the unknowability of the future. I had no idea how long I would stay there or where I would go next. But that didn't scare me or worry me. I thrived on it. I loved the uncertainty of the future and there is no way that I would ever have believed that 10 years later I'd be sitting in Montreal reflecting back on that time. Maybe certainty for many people is a kind of security but to me it feels like a prison. I don't want economic uncertainty or to worry whether I'm going to get sick: but knowing that in 10 years from now, I could be living anywhere in the world invigorates me, makes the world seem more possible. Ten years from now: will I still be here? Or in Japan? Or in Turkey or Sweden or Chile? I have no idea. I LOVE that.
And now ten years have passed since I left my hometown and went to China. I stayed six years. So much has changed: in me, in Shanghai, in the world. I wonder what the next ten years hold...
Bugle Music from the Night Barracks
Ten o'clock at night, and I am reading a book by lamplight when the bugle in the army barracks near my home starts to play a familiar melody. A few simple musical phrases, slowly rising and then descending, with a purity of heart altogether rare in this vast crucible of a city.
I say, "They're playing the bugle again, Auntie. Didn't you hear it?" My aunt says, "I wasn't paying attention." I am afraid of hearing that bugle every night, because I am the only one who ever listens to it.
I say, "Oh, they're playing again." But for some unknown reason, this time the sound is very soft, as slight as a strand of silk, breaking off several times before once again picking up the thread. This time, I don't even ask my aunt whether she has heard it. I begin to doubt whether there is a bugle at all or if this is merely a memory of something I've heard. Above and beyond my sense of desolation, I feel frightened.
But then I hear someone outside whistling loud and clear, picking up and following the bugle's melody as he goes along. I jump suddenly to my feet, full of joy and empathy, and rush over to the window. Yet I have no desire to know who it is, whether it's coming from an apartment upstairs or down below or from a passerby on the street.
--Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing) from Written on Water
since it was raining this afternoon and i was sick of sitting in my office, i decided to head out and see "lust, caution," ang lee's new movie. anyone who reads my blog with any regularity will know of my affinity for the chinese writer, eileen chang, and this movie didn't disappoint.
based on chang's 1979 novella of the same name, the movie chronicles the struggle of a band of resistance fighters in japanese occupied shanghai during WWII. the novel has a very modern feel to it. highlights (no spoilers if anyone wants to see it so read on):
- the movie is about power: the way men get it and keep it (violence); the way women tap into it (seduction, sex).
- one should know a bit about chinese history to really appreciate it: the hatred that most chinese had towards those wanted to collaborate with the japanese occupiers figures heavily into the main characters' motivations (eileen chang's first husband, in fact, was accused of collaborating and after the war ended, he had to leave shanghai to hide out. it was here that he fell in love with another woman).
- the movie is very graphic sexually: VERY graphic. apparently, the mainland movie censors (the movie is very popular in the mainland) cut them all out which radically alters the story since it's about how power influences sex and vice versa. the movie is rated NC-17 in the US and it certainly deserves that rating (though, as i've just indicated, sex is key to the plot, i still wonder if lee had it rated this way so that it would ensure a certain audience interested not in the tale of 1940s china, but in the salacious nature of the story. maybe that's just cynical, though).
- the movie is in mandarin, cantonese, shanghainese, english and even a little japanese!
- i'm happy to say that the movie doesn't demonize the japanese, though they are very much "the enemy" in the story. they are almost an abstract enemy, though, since there are almost no japanese characters and their presence is mainly implied, except for one minor scene. still. i imagine this movie will not be shown or will not be popular in japan.
- the movie was filmed in shanghai and i could actually recognize many of the locations since i know shanghai probably better than any city i've ever lived in. extensive photoshopping ensured that all the skyscrapers that are everywhere in shanghai are not seen. i can't imagine such elaborate exterior crowd scenes have ever been shot in shanghai before -- they are amazingly detailed. the parts that take place in hong kong were actually filmed in penang, malaysia. too expensive to shut down an entire section of thoroughfare in hong kong, i imagine. plus, not that much old architecture left there as there is in shanghai (though it's disappearing quickly there, too).
- the movie is far superior to brokeback mountain which i thought was far too hyped to be anything but disappointing. lee falls in love with his characters and he is such a emotional director. he loves keeping two characters at a distance (emotionally) and letting his audience watch as they slowly allow themselves to get closer. though he is an emotional director, he is not melodramatic and there is such truth in his direction and the core of certain scenes is often very psychological. another excellent ang lee movie is the ice storm with kevin kline, sigourney weaver and christina ricci.
- the translation into english is a "catch all" and there are so many complexities that are lost in this simple, if rather cryptic title.
- there is a lot of dialogue in the movie and it moves fast. in that sense, it reflects a shanghai sensibility since anyone who has spent any time in shanghai can tell you: the shanghainese (especially women) LOVE to talk and never seem to stop!
- i haven't read chang's novella. it apparently took her thirty years to write (she was a funny writer: never feeling pressure to write or finish anything and she pretty much just did it at her leisure). but i bought it a few weeks ago in an airport and as it's still raining, i'm off to bed now with a big mug of argentine mate tea, the electric blanket (thanks, mom) turned on medium, and chang's book in hand. yee haw!
busy busy busy these days! feel like sleeping is actually luxury!
managed to crank out an entire examination today including a long reading passage, a listening passage, a couple of dialogues, a writing assignment, and 60+ questions. plus i worked two hours for another gig, did last minute tweaking for hong kong stuff, went to the gym, went to three banks, called the insurance company, hit the hardware store, and the supermarket! and i STILL have three more hours to work tonight.
and much the same for the near future. 11 more exams to go before my deadline.
masa's birthday coming soon (on sunday)! the big 33. i remember that age as being a significant one for me:
- jesus died when he was 33.
- juliette binoche's character, julie, from kieslowski's blue (one of my favorite movies), is 33 when she has her accident, leading to her liberty. because of this, blue is a significant color for masa this year! (now i see how those newspaper horoscope things work).
- 3+3 equals six. that year (2004) i was on the lookout for things equaling six. masa should take care about sixes! luckily things don't happen in sixes too much! but six is an unlucky number this until next april for m.
lei emailed me some great pics of shanghai of twenty-five years ago. it's funny when you talk to people in shanghai and they are actually nostalgic for those days. shanghai sho don't look like that no more! good times!
.
