Ruan Lingyu's Home

Ruan Lingyu was a silent-movie star from Shanghai's 1930 cinema - she's the most well-known actress from the era. She injected drama into roles that were honestly usually very silly and slight, and she stood up to the task when she starred in "The Goddess," generally recognized as one of the best films of early Chinese cinema. She's also well known for her sad life, which led to her eventual suicide at the age of 24 - really a lot of actresses from the era ended up as tragic figures.

I've brought up "The Goddess" before - it can be watched freely off the Internet, I think it's worth a look. Still, while I think she was a good actress and I enjoy watching older Shanghai movies, I never considered myself an obsessive fan. At the least, I'd never considered making a pilgramage to sights associated with Ruan Lingyu. Still, that's exactly what I did recently, and I'll post a few pictures.

The site was her old house at #9 Xinzha Lu, it's inside the Qinyuan Village apartments. Ruan Lingyu lived there from early on in her stardom, until her eventual suicide. The apartment is nothing spectacular now, certainly it doesn't look like the residence of a film star, or of the many other prominent artists who lives there. However, it must have been more impressive back in the day - for one, the apartment has since been sub-divided into multiple living spaces, like a lot of older Shanghai residences.



It's still an interesting, if unspectacular, place to look around, with a few architectual flourishes.



Getting there isn't too difficult: It's a five or ten minute walk north from the Plaza 66 mall, on the north side of Xinzha Lu, between Changhua Lu and Jiangning Lu. Despite being very central towards downtown development, there's a number of other older-style buildings in the area:

Holiday in Cambodia: Phnom Penh

While I live in third-world China, and had previously been visiting third-world Thailand, Phnom Penh was an immediate third-world shock. While the small airport was really quite modern, clean, and efficient, the drive to the city proper, and my hotel, took me on a bumpy garbage-lined road through a progression of small dirty shacks. It felt like being back in the shantytowns of Bombay, granted with about one tenth the population density.

That may sound superficial or ugly, but it's honest. While I ended up very much enjoying both the city and the country, it was in spite of all the garbage, the poor infrastructure, and the aggressive touts. Those negatives are at the beginning of this update, and similarly they were the first thing that stood out about the city, but really the rest of my impressions of the city were much more positive. The city center is relatively compact, and although of course the reasons are tragic, a lot of the old French colonial buildings are still standing, they're beautiful:



I'm not one to shop, and all I bought for myself was a couple travel necessities and Sinn Sisamouth CDs, but really the market bazaars of Phnom Penh are a lot of fun. There's a number about town, with a bunch of smaller competing stalls inside. Different markets sell different products, and are open at different times, and there's both outdoor and indoor markets. It doesn't seem very efficient, but they're heavily used by the local population, merchants will bargain fairly with foreigners, and some of the markets are interesting locations of their own right, like the old art deco stadium that's now the Central Market.



Phnom Penh seemed to be maybe 25% Chinese – most hotels and small businesses were Chinese-owned. Surprisingly enough, they usually spoke Mandarin Chinese – I say surprisingly, because Mandarin is a Beijing-government-invented language, Chinese emigration pre-dates its (still only partial) implementation, and I'm not aware of any other foreign Chinese communities that speak it. I used to have a Chinese-Cambodian friend, and she told me that as a child in Khmer Rouge Cambodia, she wasn't allowed to speak Chinese at all, even in private – maybe afterwards, the local Chinese re-learnt Mandarin?

Despite some misgivings, I ate Cambodian street food, and I ended up falling totally in love with it. It's better than the street food in China, or maybe even Thailand. Here's two of my favorites: barbequed pork skewers, eaten alongside French bread (sweetened with condensed milk) and lightly pickled radishes. It may sound weird, but if they had them in Shanghai, I'd eat them every day of the week!



Secondly, while I understand fruit shakes are basically a tourist thing in most of SE Asia, in Cambodia everybody drank them: fresh fruit, blended with sweetener and ice. What made Cambodia's stand out from the crowd was the fresh tropical fruit, but also the secret ingredient: raw egg! In fairness, I used to make Juliuses as a kid with raw egg white, it's basically the same thing. Many places didn't give raw eggs to foreigners, so I made a point of going to local-style places and then asking for them specifically.



Part of what contributes to Phnom Penh's strong colonial flavor is that foreign NGOs are everywhere in Cambodia, and these foreigners dominate the local economy. It can seem that what visible economy does exist, is either just a step above being a flea market, or services foreigner's various needs. That goes alongside low import taxes, and there's a huge amount of very good foreign restaurants and import grocery stores and the like, in both Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. They're far, far better and cheaper than anything available in Shanghai, and I varied between local style restaurants and foreigner restaurants. There's also similarly shoddy copyright protection, but with a looser control on the published word, and so Phnom Penh's foreigner areas have bookstores full of English novels, both second-hand and Xeroxed.

What else? There were several temples and the King's palace. Impressive, although I admit I found them to be a less-impressive take on similar structures in Bangkok – even though Phnom Penh's were often the original model.



Just walking the streets was interesting, there was a lot of activity. Motorcycle taxis and tuk-tuks were easily available for a dollar or two (literally – Cambodia uses American money) and they all spoke English, so I could just walk around until I got tired of walking or lost my way, then hail a taxi back. On the downside, in central areas people would yell “hello, taxi” at me every few seconds.

I thought the Tuol Sleng Museum, at a former school that had been converted into a processing station for the genocide of Cambodia's Cultural Revolution, was an interesting and illuminating site:



All in all Phnom Penh was a low-key but interesting and inexpensive city. I don't know if it's a destination of itself, but as part of a larger exploration of Cambodia or SE Asia, it's definitely worth having a look around.

Wu Yue Ren Jia Noodles

The foreigner shopping complex of Taikang Lu is fun, I've written about it before, and there's a few stores within which I hope to write about in the near future. At the same time, despite having a whole lot of restaurants, none of them look particularly appealing to me. I'm perfectly willing to believe there's some place I haven't been to yet that's actually really good, but a cursory look around makes it seem to be a bunch of typical foreigner restaurants, over-priced and unexceptional.

When I'm in the area, my favorite place to get food is the nearby Wu Yue Ren Jia, a branch of a local noodle chain restaurant. While in the US “chain restaurant” conjures up the image of McDonald's or Olive Garden, in Shanghai many of even the most upscale restaurants will open a few branches around the city. Wu Yue Ren Jia is not one of the most upscale restaurants – however while many of the branches are just a step up from any other cheap noodle joint, the Taikang Lu branch is pretty fancy inside, clean and spacious and generally new-looking. They even play traditional Suzhou music softly in the background, I like that.



The “Wu Yue” in the name is a reference to an ancient state in Southern Jiangsu and Northern Zhejiang, the geographical surroundings of Shanghai. While the noodles themselves are just basic Southern Chinese noodles and nothing fancy, the accompanying meat or vegetables are mostly local specialties. They're generally very good - they're served alongside the bowl in a smaller plate, and can either be eaten separately, or placed in the soup bowl. Personally, I think the soup broth is too bland without adding at least some of the sauce.



The noodle dishes are fairly cheap, but on the small side. Here's a look at their selection of noodles, although the menu is only in Chinese:



It's probably worth getting a side dish to go along with the noodles. Again, most of the dishes are local specialties, I've had about half the menu and I have to say I've enjoyed everything. They're not substantial enough to make a meal out of them alone, to my mind, but one could certainly try. My favorites are probably the si xi kaofu (spongy tofu) and the wu xiang niu rou (five fragrance cold beef). The second half of the menu is to the right of this paragraph, although there's also temporary specials and the normal assortment of drinks. Here's a picture of their cucumber. It's quite nice, although cucumber is so basic that it would be hard to do wrong:



All in all, Wu Yue Ren Jia isn't a destination restaurant, the way the other Shanghainese Restaurants I've mentioned so far are. The food just isn't as good or as ambitious. However, it's casual, it's thoroughly local-style, it's perfectly normal for a person to visit by themselves or as a group, and it's a good place to go if you find yourself nearby. The bill might come out to twenty or thirty kuai per person, the equivalent to three or four dollars. The Taikang Lu branch is at #5 Taikang Lu, right where Sinan Lu hits Taikang Lu, but there's a number of branches around town.

East of the Old West Gate

If the title of this update sounds poetic, or perhaps the name of a Kung-Fu movie, it's actually just a description of the area – the West Gate of the old city walls was torn down long ago (along with the walls, for the matter), but the name is retained, and Old West Gate Station is a subway station of line number 8, two stations south of People's Square.

I happened across the station while visiting the very touristy, very corny Dongtai Lu, and knew I had to be back! The station is on the Western edge of my favorite part of Shanghai's old town – the area of the city that existed when Shanghai was just a small walled fishing village, and foreigners hadn't yet converted it into a large port city.

Actually, most of the traces of the truly old are no longer around, what remains is generally lower-quality housing from the early twentieth century. Still, the houses have a certain beauty to them:




These traditional houses don't have much privacy to them, and in a way I feel bad walking through and taking pictures of an area that is somewhere between a public street and private home. It's still a fascinating voyeurism of people going about their lives in a style unique to Shanghai, even when it's just normal everyday kind of things, like this outdoor kitchen, with a faucet in the background.

And although of course I'm not secretly peeping into people's bedrooms, a lot of the houses have doors opening directly onto the street, I'm reminded of when I walked through my college dorms:



It's also interesting, many of the streets, particularly directly north of Fuxing Road, are thin and narrow and dart every which way, very strange!



With these smaller areas, it's mostly private homes, although there are a number of smaller stores, generally selling snack foods, cigarettes, and very basic cooking items:



And there's a lot of commerce actually on the street: fruits, vegetables, maybe a simple bowl of noodles, cloths, that sort of thing.



And I don't want to forget, people getting a haircut, out in public!



There's a lot of wooden birdcages hanging from second story balconies, in addition some people keep pigeons:



It's just a fun area to look around, and now that the subway goes right near to it, it's an easy activity for an idle afternoon. As the title says, it's East of the Old West Gate Station, just a couple minute's walk. Take the #1 exit and head east, walking past Qinglian Lu - there's currently some construction going on. The southern border to this area would be Fuxing Lu, and the eastern border would be the large ugly apartment buildings alongside Henan Lu, which jarringly enough are decorated with a very large amounts of pseudo-Grecian statues. A few blocks past this road, and a little to the north, is Yuyuan Gardens and the related tourist stalls.

There's no real northern border – there's pretty much interesting buildings all the way up to Hongkou. However, the smaller alleys pictured here are concentrated in the area just a few blocks north of Fuxing Lu, the streets get wider and more commercial as one heads north – maybe the underwhelming Taoist temple alongside Renmin Lu can be considered the northern bordern to all of this.

Sukhothai

Sukhothai is a city in Northern Thailand, which I went to after visiting Chiang Mai. While Sukhothai and Chiang Mai both have a lot of old temples, for a tourist that's about as far as the relationship goes. Chiang Mai is a large vibrant city, with a large amount of attractions – actually, for most tourists, the nearby trekking is the highlight. Sukhothai is a one-horse provincial city that happens to be built next to the ruins of the ancient Thai capital and its numerous stone temples.

But that's not to denigrate these ruins – they date back seven hundred years, and in terms of beauty, convenience, and general pleasantness, if not scale, I ended up appreciating these ruins more than those of Angkor Wat, in Cambodia. The comparison isn't specious – I can't claim anthropological expertise, but many of the temples were built in the same time frame, at a time when the Khmer culture, from its capital in Angkor, dominated South-East Asian culture.

I don't want to delve too much into Thai history, I'll just attach a few of favorite pictures:









What also made my visit interesting was that I visited during a large festival, where people from all over Thailand flooded into the city, and at night the ruins were lit up. I found all the celebrations very underwhelming, honestly, but it contributed to a festival-type atmosphere.

I ended up staying in a very nice, low-key guest house called “No. 4 Guest House,” for the grand total of about $6 per night. I grabbed the last room, and I was afterwards told by another guest that it was the only place in town with rooms left - I guess I narrowly avoided disaster! Despite being not too far off the main road, there were a number of rural Thai-style houses nearby, and it was overlooking farmland - temporarily flooded, I'd guess for the production of rice.

Guoyuan Hunanese Food

Guoyuan is a small Hunanese Restaurant, near the Hongkou football stadium. While in most regards it looks the part of a standard local restaurant, it stands out in one regard: there will almost always be a line out the front door, day or night.

It's actually a favorite restaurant of mine, and a restaurant that's very convenient for me. I don't go as often as I might like, and I'd like to take a moment to blame my friends – while it's near two subway stations, it's still not a very central location for most people. And the people I do know in the area, for the most part, can't take the spiciness. As opposed to the sweetness and even blandness of Shanghainese Foods, Hunan Food is spicy, and Guoyuan plays the part. As an extreme example, here's a plate of bamboo, covered in peppers, along with garlic, ginger, and other spices. Not to be macho, but most Shanghai residents, local or foreigners, just couldn't handle it!



The restaurant is entirely Chinese-language, and while the service is friendly, they're a bit rushed. A foreigner who doesn't speak the language and doesn't have a little familiarity with Hunan food might have a tough time. There is a list of the most popular dishes on the first page of the menu. One of the recommended dishes is found on almost everybody's table, and is really very attractive-looking, twin pepper fish head. I admit I'm not the #1 fan of fish head, so when I brought the camera I instead got fish soup. It's an interesting mélange of spices, including herbs that I usually see in a cup of tea!



How authentic is Guoyuan? There's obviously a few concessions to local tastes. For example, Shanghai people love cucumbers, and I'm guessing that spicy-oil cucumbers aren't a menu item at most restaurants in Hunan, although I quite enjoyed them:



But while I've never been to Hunan, or have any friends from Hunan, I assumed the restaurant was for the most part authentic, and I've also heard the chef is from Hunan. However when I went with a Sichuanese friend, she told me that while she enjoyed the restaurant very much, it wasn't at all what would be served in an authentic-style Hunanese restaurant in Sichuan, which borders Hunan. While obviously that could be a reflection on Sichuanese restaurants, she guessed that the restaurant adapted a lot of foods to local ingredients and tastes.

Anyway, the restaurant is on 520 Dongjiangwan Lu, a five or ten minute walk North of the Hongkou Football Stadium subway stations of both line #3 and line #8. Prices should amount to around 40-50 kuai per person, that's six or seven US dollars. The restaurant is open from 11-2 and then from 5-10, daily. There's no reservations taken, and there's usually a line, although the line isn't too bad except on weekend nights. While the restaurant is small, and patrons are often smoking, the décor inside is simple but classy.