scruta

I saw the following two ads on the subway in Shanghai (I apologize for the poor photography):

The ads were interesting for two reasons. First, the prominence of English in the advertisements was clearly directed at a very particular market, foreigners in Shanghai. I guess Qingdao has finally reconciled itself as the “beer of expats.” Second, the relationship between the message given in English and Chinese was markedly different.

Here’s the Chinese from the first ad:

The Chinese loosely translates: “In China, if you’re late drink three glasses [of beer]. The punishment is a form of politeness; The taste is a form of refreshment.”

The commentary on the custom in the Chinese is conspicuously absent from the English version.

Rewritten: 在中国喝酒，会说“青岛啤酒”，可能比会说“你好”更重要

The Chinese loosely translates: “When going out for drinks in China, being able to say “Qingdao Beer” could be more important than being able to say “hello.”

Here the Chinese emphasizes the importance of “Qingdao Beer,” instead of suggesting how much fun it is to learn to say “Qingdao Beer” in Chinese.

In English the ads target a market seen as wanting to learn Chinese and improve understanding of Chinese culture. In Chinese, the ads target a market where it is trying justify itself as a brand important in social interactions, especially interactions with those who might find “青岛啤酒“ more important than “你好”.

There was an old philosophy buddy of mine who I ran into several years after we had studied together in university. Someone told me he was a DJ. Someone told me he had been floating for years now, living a life of contemplation and drugs. He asked me plainly, “What is the right way to live?” I found myself speechless. I had spent so long away from that question that I didn’t know how to answer. At the time, part of me was ashamed.

Even now, I still feel like I can’t answer it, but I don’t feel ashamed. I now know why I can’t answer it. I feel I can only answer this question with another question. With many questions. How to describe them?

I think of Socrates, and I think of spelunking. Socrates instilled in his finest students a love for caves. But Socrates never gave us the light for them. He gave us a lamp, a lit lamp, but with little fuel. Socrates was weak and feeble.

These questions are the lamp, requiring other things, other questions, which occasionally produce brief, momentary bursts of light.

We hoot and holler into the darkness crying, “Where are the matches? Where is the flint? Where is the flame?”

The Ruins of St. Paul’s left me with a strange feeling:

It’s the remains of a church in Macao, burned to the ground in the 19th century, which have been tastefully adorned by several Portuguese architects and plenty of money before the Portuguese returned the city to China. I suppose it makes sense, making the last vestiges of their rule into a ruin for tourists to gawk at. This is how the legacies of all rulers and conquerors end – names on stones constantly beset by flashbulbs, peace-signing, giggling tour groups, and the endless rattle of trinket sellers.

That’s not to say that this place is no longer holy, no longer the site of interesting and varied religious rites. Of course, most people participating in this religion have no idea that they are participating in it. But such is the power of this religion.

It is most visible when you walk inside the remains of the crypt. It’s a small unattended room at the back of the complex, visited by only the most inquisitive of travelers. The once dark and damp repository of bones is now a bright room of granite, illuminated by a giant skylight from above. There are two levels to it, one more of a balcony, the other a pit. It’s like a theater. It makes you feel as if you are at a performance.

Sure, the trappings of Christianity are there, too. An emaciated, black, cast-iron cross sits in the light above, next to what appears to be a black collection box, with a cross for a handle, inlaid almost as an afterthought. They have Gregorian chants looped on loudspeakers hung overhead. The bones of Japanese martyrs lie in the walls encased in glass. They do not bear resemblance to anything human. They could be the legs of cattle or pigs. Oh, there’s still some sort of traditional reverence for them here, I suppose, but it’s stretched as thin as the cross before me.

When I walk on the balcony, I notice the spread of coins out upon the remains of the masonry, everywhere obscuring the stone that lies beneath, outshining the cross, focusing my attention away from the music. If this is a holy place, where people come to remember and pray, then they do so by throwing coins.

I throw two, chucking them like little frisbees, aiming for the flattest, best preserved parts. I miss both times, but I love it all the same.

What do I think while I throw these coins?

I don’t. I think only about the thrill of throwing, about the light of the moment, the weight of the coin in my hand.

It’s an amusement, harmless, quiet, free.

This is how I participate in the world’s newest religion, throwing money in the amphitheaters of ruins, filled with the icons and martyrs of the past.

A lot of people try to comment on my blog in an effort to inform the world about vicodin, viagra and naked women. There’s also a bunch of folks who continually leave comments in Russian. Their comments are always written something like this:

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Or something like this:

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They usually have links attached as well. I’ve received thousands of these types of comments. I delete them all.

Yesterday I received one that sounded kind of like a poem, and I feel compelled to post it:

what is better cialis or viagra
took two viagra at once
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will vicadin [sic] and viagra mix

I have the image of a drunken, wastrel playboy sitting on the edge of a hotel-room bed, uttering these words to himself. Three naked women are asleep on the bed behind him, locked together in a strange embrace from which he has just emerged – arms and legs and hands and feet all interlocked in a web of what was once lust and longing, but is now just an attempt to be comfortable and warm.

The playboy stands up suddenly, walks over to the mirror and inspects his naked body. He teases the hair on the slight paunch near his bellybutton. He recites his poem to himself again, as if it were some kind of incantation made to raise his spirit to new heights. He stumbles around the hotel-room looking for a pill box of vicodin. When he finds what he thinks is the pill box, he opens it and swallows a tablet quickly without water. He totters over to the thermostat by the bed and studies it for a minute trying to discern how it works through his stupor. When has succeeded in turning up the heat in the room several degrees, his eyes roll back in his head, and he falls to the floor. He passes out with a giant hard on after taking viagra which he thought was vicodin.

I imagined that Shanghai was a colt on the verge of becoming a stallion.

Yes, there was much talk in the past about leaving him as a gelding, a workhorse and nothing more. But this idea was soon dropped. We were all too well aware of Shanghai’s potential.

Many had tried to tame him, but nobody could do it. It’s not because he was too vicious, well, at least not at first. That was the thing that made Shanghai impossible to tame. To the rider who had never known him, he would appear to be tamed at first, calm and placid, civil in the utmost, or as civil as a stallion can be. He wore a saddle comfortably, and did not fight when his handlers threw it on his back. At the most, he would let out a casual snort; he would drag an idle hoof in the dirt, but that was all.

The most courageous of men would approach him, and hop into his saddle, wondering what the fuss was all about. They would set out at an even trot into the middle of the large pen where he was kept, grinning and stinking with an air of confidence. It was at this moment that Shanghai turned wild, as if possessed by a demon.

The powerful animal would heave his entire frame forward and backward, lurching, kicking, twisting, doing everything in its power to heave the rider from his back. Most of the time, this sudden change in behavior was so unexpected that the rider was instantly thrown from the horse, leaving his life in the hands of fate. Even if he did walk away from the pen, the rider’s confidence would be shaken, and chances were that he would refuse to ride Shanghai again.

They would mutter: “Shanghai you bastard, you beast, you hellspawn, you horse of the apocalypse. Curse the mare who gave you life. Curse these handlers who tend to you. May your hooves crack and rot. May you break your leg and fall lame with no one to put you out of your misery, except the bands of ravenous wolves already feasting on your flesh.”

Yet if you followed these men, years later when they found themselves in different pastures, at the mention of the great animal, they would only smile, look towards the sky and exhale: “Shanghai. Shanghai. Shanghai…”

I dreamed that Shanghai was a woman in a white dress, and I took her out for dinner. She wasn’t a pretty girl, but she had style, and was well built in all the right places. Sometimes she would smile strangely with a kind of tentative haughtiness as if she knew the world looked to her, but she didn’t have anything prepared to say. The dinner went well, and we laughed over a bottle of wine. I talked about my old girlfriends, women etched on the back of my brain in a giant mural, all of them holding hands and dancing in the park of an immense city that holographically defied perspective, depicting all the places I’d loved them and all the dreams that came floating out of our heads as we made love. Shanghai spoke about the one boyfriend she’d had briefly, elusively. I had the feeling the breakup was not mutual, or perhaps they hadn’t broken up officially and she was still dating him. She must have defied a great deal of expectations to come out on this dinner of seared steaks and finely boiled pastas.

Later that night we made love, and afterward I found myself immensely satisfied and suddenly thrown deep into a dream in a dream. Shanghai was a pretty girl now, and she was haughty in a way that indicated she wanted to say something. She spoke, “I don’t need you.”

[Ferret is sitting at a bar, talking shit with Hummingbird. She is at least six drinks in on the night, and as usual, engages in manic, frenetic conversation:]

Hummingbird

Do you know about the 4-2-1 model?

Ferret

The what?

Hummingbird

The 4-2-1 model. It’s an idea about China and shit, man.

Ferret

What is it?

Hummingbird

[gesticulating wildly with her hands as she speaks]

Okay, so you’ve got the Chinese grandparents here, and there’s four of them. And then they can only have one kid each, so there’s two, and they put all their money into them, getting them a good education and nice living standards and stuff. And they’re all Chinese so they save lots, you know? So then these two parents now only have one kid, and they benefit from all this wealth and stuff, you know?

Ferret

So each generation is exponentially richer than the last because all of their resources can only be poured into one kid?

Hummingbird

Yeah, basically. You see, and that’s why there’s a huge market for anything in China. There’s just such a wealth of money here. Especially in Shanghai. You can sell anything you want here. You know?

Ferret

Yeah, I guess so.

***

I wonder about this model for a society in a state where negative population growth results in a sharp rise in per capita incomes. Books like A Farewell to Alms suggest that the Black Death in 14th century Europe was a contributing factor to the advent of the Renaissance.

What? Will the policies of China’s authoritarian regime accomplish what a lethal bacterium did centuries ago? Are we at the beginning of a Chinese Renaissance?

… there’s a movie for you.

I just saw Tim Burton’s most recent movie, Alice in Wonderland. The movie has received mixed reviews, and most of the praise came for Tim Burton’s trademark art direction. The movie looks fantastic. However, a number of reviewers pointed out that this newest envisioning lacks the playful, wandering nature of Lewis Carol’s classic, relying more on a straightforward, conflict-driven narrative. I would agree with this point of view. This newest Alice in Wonderland is no longer a commentary on the absurdities in existence, but instead a bildungsroman chronicling the reconciliation of youthful fantasies and desires with the adult world. As a result, a story that once had cosmic and universal appeal now appeals to only a small section of the population concerned with the prolonged struggle of growing up, i.e. my generation, the “failure to launch” generation.

It seems to me that this is the essence of this newest Alice installment: an address to the young, capable, affluent people of my generation, still wandering the globe in the latest years of their twenties, walking into the absurdities of distant lands and strange cultures abroad, battling the absurdities of corporate, cog-in-the-wheel lifestyles at home, holding in their hearts powerful passions that they look at from afar, thinking them just long off dreams. There is a kind of quiet resignation that flows over all of us, often still stuck at home with our parents or drifting in faraway lands, that these two worlds – our passions, the world – are separate, irreconcilable. We become desperate. We find ourselves haunted by questions, as if spoken out loud: Where are you going? What are you doing? Who are you? Who… are… you?

There are, in fact, answers to these questions.

However, the resolution to them is difficult, and as the White Queens makes clear to Alice when discussing her battle with the Jabberwocky: “When you go there to do battle, you go alone.”

Indeed.

I’ve often fantasized about publishing something I’ve written in the pages of a top literary journal. The fantasies always begin with a certain swagger in front of the mirror as I imagine how proud I’d feel about it. Plus there’s all the all the cool shit I’d get along with it. Then I start to see things for what they are:

I get an agent. I get somebody who never leaves me alone and always wants to know when I’m going to finish what I’m working on, or worse still tells me what to write.

I get some money, i.e. some money, not a shitload. In fact, if I’m lucky probably just enough to live in China for a month. Unless by some strange coincidence somebody in Hollywood decides to option whatever I write for a movie. Then I might get a shit load of money, but I get to watch whatever I’ve written morph into a photo-shoot gone wrong at worst or a classic of the genre at the best. Writing the book that inspires a classic has its downsides too – nobody wants to be the author of the book that was “almost as good” as the movie that it spawned.

I get laid. It’s going to be either the intellectual ones who’ve read my work and just want to pick my brain about it and play interviewer with me all the time, or the ones who just like the idea of being with a famous writer, for bohemian cachet or what-have-you, probably don’t read all that much. I’d probably do better trying to pick up by telling people I’m an actuary…

I get to meet other famous authors. I get to do something that I’m thrilled to do, but which I’m sure a number of famous authors are not. A lot of writers are not always the most affable of people either, which would probably make the whole thing rather akin to dental work.

I get to join the literature talking circuit. I’m forced to talk about my finished, published writing, which frankly is probably the last thing I want to talk about. I’d prefer much more to talk to the doe-eyed beauties sitting in the front row, but that kind of favoritism doesn’t go down too well.

I get something impressive to say at parties. Do I really want to go to parties where I have to do that kind of shit anyway?

I get to have the satisfaction of publishing, seeing my book in print. I also have the immense specter of “Will he ever publish again?” lurking over my bookshelf, heckling my slim volume lost in the veritable sea of world literature.

I get my own page on Wikipedia which people will undoubtedly change to say that I fuck goats or got my inspiration for my work by huffing gasoline.

I get to make my parents proud. This is okay, but I have a feeling they’d be proud of me regardless. And really… have I gotten that desperate that I’m bringing them into this?

***

Despite the rather negative spin that I’ve put on all of these things, I still think that becoming a published author would be sweet. It’s madness, but I suppose most endeavors are when you think about it…

Spring is at the door here in Shanghai, and this past weekend proved to be a lovely one full of sunshine and mild temperatures. As a result, I decided to have lunch outside at Zhongshan Park, one of the biggest and most bustling parks in the city.

On a weekend like this, the air is full with the scolding of grandparents scuttling after their impish grandchildren, the stately, meandering wail of performers playing traditional Chinese music and the thump of recordings played in the far square where public dances are held. If the wind is up at all, there are always the kites. The central green is completely full of people of all ages angling for a spot to send their kite skyward, as families of three generations look on.

I was suddenly fascinated by the view of the kites in the sky. They seemed to encapsulate the excitement I felt walking around in the sudden good weather. My spirits were flying high, and so were they. As I stood near the edge of the green and looked at them, I heard the sound of a whistle trilling in short, loud bursts. It was a coming from a groundskeeper, walking through the crowds, waving his arms while blowing, trying to get them to move off the green. He had a helpless, yet determined look on his face. As if he knew that he wasn’t going to get anyone to move, but he had to keep trying. He didn’t know what else to do.

I noticed that there was a flimsy cord around the entire perimeter of the green, and several signs had been posted:

养草期间

请勿入内

Time for growing grass

Please do not enter

The Chinese weren’t phased by the sign or the groundskeeper. He didn’t have any real authority; he just had a whistle. The spring was on its way, and their spirits were high like mine, high amongst the kites.