What I Brought Back With Me

After a long trip to the US, I think I'm mostly re-acquainted with being back in Shanghai - and I'll admit, seeing the same old streets brought a big smile to my face!

For all my incessant whining about how poorly Shanghai interprets foreign food, the selection of things American in Shanghai is pretty good. One easily could live the California lifestyle: shopping at the mall all weekend, only popping out for the occasional Big Mac or Cold Stone Creamery Sundae. So going to the US isn't a supply run for me. I did pick up a few things, here's a quick list:

Top Shelf Booze:

Top-shelf tequila, rye whiskey, and brown rum, are my favorites, but basically not available in Shanghai - Havana Club 7 is great but a growing boy needs more variety. Painfully enough, I had to leave behind a bottle of Pyrat XO!

Hot Sauce:

A friend of mine claims Huy Fong Sriracha Sauce is just spicy ketchup, another tells me it makes cardboard taste good. Personally, I tend towards the second opinion. It can't be found in China - sometimes a Thai Sriracha can be found but it's not nearly as good. I brought back a few bottles of it. And I'm guessing this green salsa is sorry but I'm a huge fan in general, it'll probably fall into the "better than nothing" category.


Li Hing Mui:

I grabbed these Hawaiian-style snacks right before getting on the airplane. There's a lot of similar Chinese variations of spiced dried fruit, but the Hawaiian ones are better, or at least different. I brought a few different bags, all of which I either gave away or consumed immediately upon arrival.


Long Rice:

In the coals-to-Newcastle department, I brought a small bag of long rice aka long kou mian aka mung bean noodles - it's a Hawaiian food. I know this package works for making decent long rice, so my quest is to find the Chinese long rice that matches it the closest! It seems like a basic thing, but the long rice I've made so far in Shanghai has the wrong texture, or something...

Clothes:

I'm tall, and definitely what's hardest to find in Shanghai is clothes that actually fit me. When I was first in Shanghai I wore the same beaten-up pair of shoes every single day. I've slowly gotten a basic wardrobe together, so I just quickly stocked up on a few basics while I was back around.

Ear Plugs:

Although I live in the center of town, I don't think my apartment's neighborhood is all that loud. Still a pair of these is pretty much necessary anywhere in Shanghai, where for example the garbage truck sometimes comes at around one in the morning. Surprisingly enough, ear plugs are impossible to find in the drug stores or foreigner shops. I pop them in at night and take them out in the morning.

Books:

While Shanghai bookstores have decent-enough selections, they're often at 25% over the cover price, and used books are few and far between. Recently I've decided I want to read up on Chinese culture, and I'm not about to read Classical Chinese, so I took the chance to pick up a few translations when I was around.

Indie Press:

A friend's underground comics, 'zines (about being a hipster in the Tenderloin - I recommend to check it out!), and a book by a friend of a friend, I love that sort of stuff.

A Camera Lens:

Specifically, a Canon FD mount (meaning film only), F2.8 28mm lens. I accidentally left behind the F1.4 50mm, and the F2.5 135mm, it's a real bummer. I need to pick up a new FD mount camera - if any of my gentle readers have tips, it'd be much appreciated. Anyway I'm looking forward to getting back with film and with a camera that can actually take decent-quality pictures without direct sunlight - I just hope I'm not throwing good money after bad!

Hawai'i Calls

I haven't updated my blog in a while purely because I am in the alien environment of Honolulu! I'll have wise words to say soon, in the meantime check out which Chinese chain has made its way halfway across the Pacific:



For those not in the know, it's a clothing chain store that is all around the trendy areas of Shanghai. I looked around the Honolulu location and it didn't look so great, but I'm no fashionista and I'll have to return with someone who is. Also interesting is the backwards Chinese, reading Tang Hai Shang - it doesn't go along with Shanghai's Shanghai Tang, and Chinese signs in Honolulu go forwards, but signs in Scenes of City Life did often read right to left. I wish there was somebody I could ask about that.

There's a little more of Shanghai over here, but in general even the things that are brand-named Shanghai don't have so much of a connection. This restaurant offered xiaolongbao, but aside from that was some kind of Asian fusion.

Buddha Box

A friend from America recently asked me to get him a Buddha Box. What a cool name, in Chinese it's called a prayer reading machine, and that's just what it is: a cheap plastic device that plays out one of several Buddist chants through an internal speaker or headphone jack. Here's a ten second video of the song one of them plays:



The Buddha boxes are for sale alongside Changde Lu, a little north of Beijing Lu, they cost from one to four dollars. There's a Buddhist Monastery there, although it's generally closed for visitors.



I remember there's also a lot of religious shops near the Jade Buddha Temple. There aren't these kind of shops right near Jing'an Si, though, maybe it just doesn't fit the image. Plastic Buddha icons take up most of the store, the Buddha Boxes are in a shelf on the right.



There's other stores nearby that have cooler Buddha Boxes. But I did like this other blue Buddha Box, mostly because it's cheap and about the size of a pager (remember those?).



It all sounds pretty inoffensive and maybe even interesting, until one realizes these walkman-like machines only have a few loops that are only about a minute long, or even a few seconds! To wit, the lady who lives upstairs from me used to just blast the music out. It was definitely annoying, but she would quit it after fifteen minutes or so, and I just laughed it off.

Then one fateful day she had been listening for a long time, and I was having a lingo teacher come over to my apartment. I went up to complain, it was an old lady, she only spoke Shanghai dialect - Shangainese is about as related to Mandarin as Spanish is to French. While I'm an incredibly kind person, I think the experience intimidated her a little, and I haven't heard her play the chanting since then. I feel kind of bad, it's probably not doing her karma any good.

Scenes of City Life: Shanghai in the Movies

I bought the movie "Scenes of City Life" (Dushi Fengguang) mostly because I thought it an interesting title for a movie, and because I saw from the box that it was a 1935 movie set in Shanghai. Beyond that I knew little and so my expectations weren't particularly high, but perhaps luck is going my way! This movie turned out to be a classic. I'll wait a while and re-watch it later, but right now I have to say this is both one of the best Chinese movies ever made, and also one of the best movies from the 30s worldwide.

I'll concentrate on what the movie has to say about Shanghai, but those interested and located in Shanghai may want to pick up the DVD from, say, one of the Fuzhou Lu bookstores (bootleg shops and piracy sites won't have a copy). Additionally, the movie is in the public domain, I put up a very low-quality rip on tuduo, part 1 part 2. The movie unfortunately does not have English subtitles available! But for those who follow the lingo, I recommend watching the movie before reading this.

The movie starts with an interesting dialogue-free sequence that even if it resembles stock footage (although I'm guessing it wasn't), still gives interesting quick looks at historic scenic spots of Shanghai. There's scenes from Nanjing Lu, Fuxing Park, and the Bund.



It's a whimsical way to start the movie, and the movie initially feels something like Charlie Chaplin - a poor boy who loves a girl, trying to make it in the big city of Shanghai. This plays off as a series of gags, some deriving from silly sight and sound jokes, for instance the male romantic lead is so poor, his shoe has a gaping hole in the sole.



The lead character is mostly concerned with going on dates. Here he's shown going out to the Nanking Theater, now known as the Shanghai Concert Hall, near People's Square. It's most famous as the building Shanghai moved down the block, because the nearby freeway and subway of Yan'an Lu were too loud.

Interestingly enough, the movie they go out to see is something like Steamboat Willy-era Mickey Mouse! The characters are quick to identify themselves with the cartoon characters, and the girlfriend's caddish other boyfriend in particular is later shown to have purchased a cigarette lighter with the villian's picture on it.



As the movie progresses, it increasingly turns into a mad-house version of the familiar conventions. There's no dignity to the poverty, as there is to movies of the American Depression. Characters are obsessed with money, but purely as a means to prolong their empty lives for as long as possible. It's frequently pathetic, and the main character's prized pocket-watch is pawned without a moment's hesitation:



Which is about enough money to go on a date with the girl in an upscale club, where she immediately ignores him for her other boyfriend's rich manservant. Here's a four minute sequence:



The characters are intentionally shallow, but not one-dimensional - the characters who seem noblest are quick to compromise their ideals, and even the most unlikable characters are themselves victimized and exploited. The one character who seems to have a chance of happiness obtains it through a sudden, cruel act of theft, and with a man who flippantly tosses her pet dog away, for no other reason than a mild annoyance:



The movie is clearly a critique of the shallow values and basic moral failures of 30s-era Shanghai - a popular sub-genre of the time, which "The Goddess" also falls into. It was directed by Yuan Muzhi, most famous as an actor who frequently showed intelligentsia abandoning Western influences to fight for Nationalistic causes. That's another popular sub-genre of the time, one that resulted in some seriously boring films. He had very strong Communist ties, and was one of the two singers for the soundtrack song "March of the Volunteers," that went on to become the National Anthem of the PRC.

Also, I should probably fit in here that this movie was China's first "talkie," and frequently made visual miscue-ing jokes, had actors act in a definite silent-movie acting style, had hilariously bad background noise effects, and had two characters who talked to each other like the adults from Peanuts!

Wujiang Lu, Redux

Shutter (shŭt'ər) tr.v. - To cause to cease operations; close down

This is a quick second take at Wujiang Lu, which I blogged about late last year.

This second look is because I said the street was recently shuttered to make way for the construction of a ghost mall, which was an exaggeration. The street is still going strong and is still one of the funner places to stroll in Shanghai, particularly for hungry ghosts!

What did get changed is that the small booths in the middle of the road were removed. They sold books, clothes, and a large variety of street foods, look at the previous update to see more info on this. Before you could barely make your way through all the people, now it's a lot less crowded:



But to be honest it's hard to say how much is due to there being a smaller amount of people, and how much is because there's no longer the constant bottlenecks. I'd guess it's about midway between the two. There's still a lot of restaurants, many of which sell directly from the storefront. And the more popular ones still have people lining up:



And a lot of the same snacks can be found. So I'd love to say the street is different, but not much worse - unfortunately while I think that's currently true, it won't be for long. There's hotels and shopping centers going up nearby, word on the street is the small restaurants will be closing down to make way for fashion shops! The process hasn't started yet,though, and people gotta eat, so hopefully it won't go through. It's hard to photograph speculations, so here's a funny new bronze statue I saw:



I'm not sure where all the small food stalls went. A very few of them apparently moved to Beijing Lu's Fashion Mall, which has a few new sellers - I'll talk about that in the near future. I've heard they went to Yunnan Lu, but I was there recently and it didn't look any different - anyway with narrow sidewalks and roads open to traffic, that would be difficult to arrange.

Cloud 9 Ghost Mall

Shanghai is in a construction bubble, fueled by anticipation of a continued meteoric growth in city population and wealth. The flip side to the incredible amount of construction going on is a very high vacancy rate, particularly with upper-end apartments and shopping malls.

This update will look at Zhongshan Park's Cloud 9 mall, although there's plenty of other examples. It's actually got a much better location than many of the other ghost malls, being located in what's a fairly crowded, fairly recent district of large apartment buildings. It's built directly over a busy subway station, and actually the basement level is fairly crowded. There's clothes stalls, an unpopular electronics chain, a popular Pizza Hut, and in the far corner is a Japanese-esque noodle chain that is so terrible and overpriced, I don't know how it has chains all over the city.



The basement level also has a Carrefour. It's a French megastore, something like Target or Wal-Mart, and is always spectacularly crowded.



The mall is only about a year old, and the insides are clean and brightly lit. It's full of shops, mostly clothing brands. Maybe this picture gives the idea: most of the brands in the mall are international, well-known, solid brands, although perhaps not the most elite or upscale.



It's a hard thing to show, but each floor is very large. They're not entirely centered around the big escalators, there's also long hallways that go off in two directions, with shops lining each hallway:



I hope the angled photograph gives the unsettling "28 Days Later" feeling - looking at the above two pictures there's not a person in sight, well aside from a cleaning lady. There's a definite eeriness to being in a well-lit mall with shops on all sides and not having a single non-salesperson around - particularly when it takes place in a city of twenty million people. No trick photography was involved, I didn't sneak in right before closing, etc. It really always looks like this!



There's a little more activity to be seen. On the top two floors are some restaurants, many of them serving Korean or Japanese food. A few of them do get very crowded.



The sad part of the story is, Shanghai has ghost-mall after ghost-mall, and more continue to be built. If they were off in places I don't care about, I suppose that wouldn't mean much to me, but recently Wujiang Lu Food Street was shuttered, to make room for the development of a new ghost mall. I guess it's meant to match the ghost mall across the street, or perhaps the ghost malls a mile down the road!