CCTV Gala Gala
23 January 2004

Well, folks, it's Chinese New Year again, and that means the usual installment of ubiquitous red lanterns, overcrowded public transit and shops, overconsumption of food and alcohol, the constant crackling of firecrackers and the distribution of hong bao. It also means time for that celebrated institution that is China Central Televisions annual Spring Festival Gala, a line-up of quality entertainment that packs all the punch of a spoonful of MSG.

The CCTV Gala is a four or so hour long variety show that airs live (I think) on Chinese New Years Eve and is filmed in a Beijing auditorium crammed with cadres, celebrities and their families. It has been staged every year since its inception sometime in the early 1980s, and is the most-watched TV program in the world, drawing some 80% of China's viewers.

The Gala's content is as low-brow, lowest common denominator as it gets. Song-and-dance routines, Peking Opera and Communist Opera are interspersed with bits of ballet and pop music, sung mostly by mistresses of officials but with a few cameos by stars like Karen Mok. Modern dance and rock music have never made it on. Slightly less likely to make me jab a knitting needle towards my eardrums are the Xiangsheng, or Crosstalk, and the short skits (although generally their humor insults even my socks' intelligence, and their actors still bust out into bad song-and-dance routines). The Crosstalk routines are the Gala's most intelligent segments, witty wordplays that madly mock Chinese politics, pop culture, and society. Unfortunately, the Mandarin is too sophisticated for this Laowai to follow very much.

Over the decades, China-watchers and Chinese alike have tracked the government-produced Gala for its glimpse into the subconscious of the country's usually secretive political elite. Who was most mentioned, and in what context, hinted at the shifting fortunes of the leadership. Mention of policies and the sort of "movements" that the Chinese government indicated swings in policy. This form of Sinology predates my time, but up until the mid-1990s the New Years Gala was as read between the lines as the front page of People's Daily.

Times have since changed: for whatever reasons, perhaps the decline in chaos and the rise in TV ownership, the content of the Gala is now much more closely monitored and sanitized. Politics is out. Plus, China's media and government have shed some of their old opaqueness, which means that the public and the analysts examine things like the Gala much less. Instead of a political indicator, it is simply bad TV.

Nonetheless, the Spring Festival Gala does provide plenty of insight into Chinese society, what the people want to see, or at least what the government wants them to see and thinks they want to see. One must conclude that the Chinese government does not have much respect for the intelligence of the citizens, although the citizens do little to demand respect, apart from the minority who find better ways to spend New Years Eve or who go online later to mock the extravaganza.

So what did the 2004 Gala say about China as it enters the Year of the Monkey? Predictably, SARS and spaceships were featured predominately. Yang Liwei, China's first astronaut, showed up at the end and gave a salute: I had been hoping they would make him do a song-and-dance routine, but I suppose he already gets treated enough like a monkey to be gawked at. There were a number of numbers praising nurses, the by now irritating "heroes of SARS", pretty much consisting of dancers and opera singers in nurse outfits. Goofy stuff.

Another thing it indicated is that Beijing, meaning both the city and the national government, is not well-disposed towards southern China, particularly Shanghai. The music and the humor were decidely northern Chinese in flavor, while Shanghai and its people were brought out only as a stereotype to be derided.

Two numbers did interest me enough to lift my head out of the mug of Huangjiu. One was a skit and dance routine about working out, a nod to what is a growingly popular practice in China. Gym going has joined the ranks of hobbies and activities that China's yuppies use to pass their time and define their identities. Partly it stems from young urbanites' obsession with looks, particularly girls wanting to be skinny, although men wanting to be not skinny are also a factor. The brisk business enjoyed by diet teas and pills attest to this, as does the growing popularity of plastic surgery. Also, ever since the SARS outbreak last year, the government has been propagandizing the importance of exercise for physical fitness, through things like this skit. I only wish that, along with the "Yay exercise!" message, they would add more detailed advice like, "Going to the gym is useless unless you actually work out while there," and "Hanging out on exercise machines watching TV or making out with your girlfriend is rude to the other patrons." Typically, the girls in the skit had zero muscle, while the guys were all bodybuilders. There was something of aesthetic discrepancy in the guys with perfect bodies and rotting, crooked teeth.

The other interesting skit featured a bride and a groom, all gussied up in wedding attire, being "interviewed" by the MC. It was revealed that it was a second marriage for both partners, and then their respective offspring from the previous marriages bounded onto the stage. This is pretty bold material for China, given the taboo surrounding divorce. There is an assumption, often repeated in the media, that divorce makes children horribly warped, even mentally unstable. Whenever a child of divorced parents commits a crime, the news reports mention and blame the divorce. (Of course, when anyone else violates the law, they don't blame the infraction on their parents staying together!) There was even an article about a woman whose husband ran off when their daughter was an infant, but the mother invented a father, sending the girl letters and presents in his name, so she wouldn't be traumatized or stigmatized for being a child of divorce. The mother kept up the pretense until the girl was in college. That, my friends, is fucked up.

So it was refreshing to see the Gala tackle the stigma, and present divorce and remarriage as normal and healthy. Granted, they handled it rather tastelessly, with the MC harassing the girl into calling her stepmother "mom" and everyone living happily ever after, but nonetheless it was a refreshing change from the usual "Divorce bad!" message.

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18 January 2004
Beemer me up

Like many in China, I've been following with interest the death by BMW scandal in Harbin. An interesting analysis of it ran today in China Daily , and a recent New York Times piece analyzed the role of the Internet in raising awareness and furor over the incident.

For those of you who don't follow Chinese news obsessively, the story is this: On 16 October 2003, a farmer couple, Dai Yiquan and Liu Zhongxia, were driving a cartload of scallions to the market. Traffic was, as usual in China, crowded and chaotic, and Dai scratched a BMW driven by Su Xiuwen. Su and her sister got out and started to beat up the hapless farmers, who did not raise a finger (or a scallion) in self-defense. Some accounts say Su yelled she would kill them. A crowd quickly gathered, and Su returned to the car. She hit the accelerator and her berserk Beemer rammed into the crowd, killing Ms. Liu and injuring 12 others before crashing into a tree. Su's husband, wealthy businessman Guan Mingbo, paid Mr. Dai US$11,000 in compensation for Liu's death; a court ruled it a traffic accident and sentenced Ms. Su to two years in prison commuted for three years.

The local media stayed clear of the story, but it was picked up on the Internet, and soon China's hot-headed chatroom netizens were raging against Su, Guan and their fleet of luxury cars. Soon it evolved into a national scandal, a symbol of the arrogance of the China's new rich. It is now all over the news, forcing a new investigation.

While most of the analysis has revolved around the growing power of the web in China, I find it fascinating for two reasons. First, it illustrates what a joke the legal system is here. The law only applies to those who get caught, and then only if they lack the money, power and connections to get themselves out of it. In Ms. Su's trial, no witnesses would testify: they'd all been paid of by Mr. Guan. One anonymous witness was quoted as saying that he wouldn't testify unless Mr. Dai could pay him more than Mr. Guan. Um, contempt of court much? If it had been the other way around, if Ms. Liu had run down Ms. Su with her scallion cart, the is no doubt the outcome would have been much, much different.

Which leads to my second point, that in China human life is cheaper than cash, and that the value of an individual is measured in monetary terms. Everyday, there are reminders of this, in the cavalier attitude towards the endless mining explosions, gas leaks, traffic accidents, and so on. The price put on a life taken is ridiculously low, even in the cities and in high-profile cases. An American friend of mine had her knee shattered when a taxi ran into her a few years ago, and she could only wrangle a couple thousand dollars in settlement. The police officers handling the negotiations kept pressuring her with, "It would be much less if you were Chinese." The formula is based upon the monthly salary of the injured, not upon the degree of injury. I've often watched dirt poor peasants, fresh off the train, boarding Shanghai's subway with their possessions crammed into brightly-colored plastic canvas sacks. Even things like bulky plastic wash basins, which cost like 2 RMB (25 cents US), they will lug thousands of miles with them to save on expense. If offered enough money, would they chop off a limb, part with an organ, sacrifice their own life or that of a family member? Sadly, probably yes.

The flip side is that wealthy Chinese are ostentatiously obnoxious. They flaunt their wealth, condescend constantly, and think they can get away with murder. Or at least with manslaughter! I always have difficulty getting along with wealthy Chinese, because, well, they're mostly assholes and I couldn't care less how much they paid for their fuck ugly "famous brand" imported clothing or whatnot. Money cannot buy taste. And they dislike me, since I'm hard to pigeon-hole: although I am a foreigner and Ivy League graduate, I am young, female, and not rich. Nor do I care much about money, having passed over many a ticket to the upper-middle class via boring jobdom in favor of low-budget Bohemian freedom. It is not the sort of choice that Chinese can understand.

Wealthy Chinese are most obnoxious when it comes to their cars. Oh, how I long for the day when cellphones were the favorite status symbol. Now, after buying the PDA digital camera cellphone (which can also double as a television, microwave, iron and washing machine), they buy their tacky, overpriced, badly decorated luxury villa - or two, one for the wife and a smaller one for the mistress, and an expensive imported purebred dog who will pass its miserably unloved days in a tiny cage. And then, the car. Owning a car is utterly pointless in Shanghai, which is dense and walkable, has great public transit, and ubiquitous taxis. In the countryside, or Beijing, which is more sprawling, it makes more sense, but then traffic becomes so insane that you'd be better off biking. It's not about practicality, it's about status.

China's wealthy take great pride in their cars, but car ownership makes them all the more insufferable. As an American, I find their car-based self-importance all the sillier: they look down on me for not having a car, but it's like, hello, had one when I was sixteen, get over it already! Two years ago, I was biking with my boyfriend on Yongjia Lu, and a private car was swerving all over the road, and into the bike lane. My boyfriend was squeezed between the car and a rail fencing off the sidewalk, and pounded the car's tinted window to keep it from crushing him. The driver stopped, rolled down the window, and started to scream at him. "How dare you touch my car! It's private property!" My boyfriend retorted, "Fuck you. My body's private property!" But, of course, the body of a biker is worth less than a cheap sedan's tinted windows.

So many stories like this, I have one for about every week I spend in China. Private car drivers' sense of wealth-derived entitlement combined with their poor driving skills (resulting, perhaps, from viewing their automobiles as ornaments rather than practical but dangerous machines) make them a hazard to life and limb. My handful of friends with private cars scare me shitless when I ride with them, they pay little attention to lights, bikes, pedestrians or rules. Ms. Su is typical: to support her claim that she meant to reverse, it was revealed that she was too bad a driver to pass an exam, and got her license only through bribery. Um, lady, you shouldn't be driving. If you must flaunt your wealth through a car, hire a fucking driver.

Needless to say, my sympathies are not with the BMW brigade. Even if Ms. Su's intentions were innocent, and she really only meant to back up, she still deserves a harsh sentence for manslaughter and reckless endangerment. I suspect she will be made an example of, but even then the point would be to placate the masses, not reign in the rich, rude and corrupt.

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27 December 2003
Second-handing

Yesterday I went to the second-hand electronics market. The ambition was to buy a new cellphone, since my old one was stolen two weeks ago, and my friends are starting to gripe at my difficulty to reach. There are a handful of second-hand electronics markets in Shanghai, I opted for the one in Lao Xi Men, by the Old City. Partly because a friend had scoped out the offerings for me previously, partly because it offered an excuse to trek to the Old City, and partly because it is the sort of run-down chaotic jumble of a place I love. Markets in the Old City are still very organic and lively, and have yet to be stifled by the antiseptic Singapore-ization that is being ever increasingly forced upon Shanghai in the name of "Modernization".

I caught the 911 bus from Huaihai Xi Lu and rode it to its terminus, marveling at how the congestion seems to get worse each and every time I go somewhere. I've said it before, and I'll say it again: private cars are evil. There's a reason I hate Southern California, but there at least they make sense, while in a city with twice the population and probably at least twice the density of New York, they're simply stupid. It's another example of "Chlogic" (Chinese logic): a private car costs far more than taxi-ing everywhere, is slower and less convenient than public transit, which runs everywhere, and with taxes and charges here cost more to buy than a decent apartment, yet people still clamor for them because they're status symbols. Keeping up with the Zhous. I long for the day when cellphones were still the primary form of wealth-flaunting.

Which brings me back to the cellphone shopping. I had long eschewed the fancy cellphones, and my first two cellphones were cheap but practical. I think people who buy new cellphones every few months to keep up with the latest trends are rather silly. My first cellphone, a Siemens, was okay, but a friend borrowed and lost it after I'd only had it a few months. My second, a Motorola, proved very useful, and served me well for almost four years until it was lifted from my pocket during a bus ride this March. I then went shopping, and was seduced by some of the fancier new models, particularly those with PDA models. I rationalized that I had gone so long with one cellphone that I could justify getting something nicer this time, besides I'd probably have it while longer. Plus, I was heading to the US in a few months, and should get a triband phone I could use there. The navy blue Motorola 388 PDA phone I splurged 2700 RMB on was stylish and functional, although it excluded more useful items like a dictionary in favor of stupid functions like drawings and animations. I later discovered, with some irritation, that an earlier, uglier model, while only dual band, had a dictionary and other practical things instead of faddish toys. But oh well, I had fun with my little 388.

The disadvantage, however, of a fancy cellphone is that it screams "Mug me, please!" And that's what happened. I headed to the market yesterday humbled, and planning to buy the cheapest cellphone possible. Avoid tempting fate. My thought was to get a tiny, cheap "night on the town" cellphone that I wouldn't mind losing, and eventually get another multifunctional daytime/work cellphone. It turned out that the cheapest model there was my old Motorola of four years, available for only 150 RMB. Aw. I was poised to buy it, but then I saw one of my recent model for sale for 1000 RMB. Quite the dilemma.

I browsed further while deciding. There's something sad about all those stolen cellphones, looking for a new lease on life. It was like a pound for lost electronics, if only these poor mutts could talk, we'd get them safely home. The array was eclectic, mostly older models, the older the cheaper, and then mid-range were things that were the height of trendy a year or two ago. In addition to cellphones, the market also sells some home appliances, things like heaters and DVD players and televisions, and to a lesser extent bulky things like washers and refrigerators. A lot of stalls sell extension chords and light fixtures and Gameboys and such, while a few sell woks and hot water bottles and mops. Others sell homemade leather goods, like shoes and belts and very ugly hats. The market is dirty and crowded, even on a weekday afternoon, and populated mostly by dandruffy migrants in cheap suits dangling two inches of ash off their carelessly-wielded cheap cigarettes.

I noticed a lot of Xinjiang people, or Uighers, China's Turkic Muslim minority group, there. Selling and buying from the vendors, not vending themselves. It reinforces the stereotype, not unfounded, that Uighers are big on crime, not so big on business. A few of them looked vaguely familiar, perhaps some of the pickpockets who hang out in the park near my house. I suspect park-based vagrants were the perpetrators of my mugging, and it's very possible that they were Uigher. Most Chinese, even migrants, fear the system enough to be violence-adverse. A friend of mine narrowly escaped mugging in broad daylight by four Uigher men recently. I don't subscribe to the stereotype, held by most Chinese as well as many Americans, sadly, that Muslims are culturally predispositioned towards violence. I do believe, though, that if you totally disfranchise economically and politically a minority group, while the surrounding majority enjoys abounding prosperity, desperation will drive them to anything. Such is the case with the Uighers, as with the poorest American blacks and Hispanics, as with terrorists. Be it blowing things up or clobbering young women with bricks, they wouldn't do it if they were invested in the system, and had something to lose in the first place.

That said, damn those Uigher muggers! Grr.

I decided to buy the 1000 RMB 388, but didn't have enough cash handy, so got the vendor's card and promised to return today for it. Since Lao Xi Men is a long haul from my place, I delivered the card and money later to a friend who lives in that area. One thing that bugged me, though, when I was checking out the phone, is that the internal address book of the previous owner had not been deleted. What if the owner's contact was in there as well, as mine had been? Should I call up him or her, explain that I had bought their stolen cellphone, and offer to let them buy it from me at cost? I'd love it if whoever had my phone did the same. But then I'd be back on the (black)market all over again, plus awkwardness of, "Hi, I really didn't steal your phone, but I have it now…"

Today, however, when my friend went back, the price had been jacked up, a different vendor was there, and he instead found the older, uglier, more useful but dual band Motorola PDA for sale, new, for 1000 RMB. No moral quandaries involved. And since it's not so popular and sexy a model, it probably isn't mug-worthy. Which is a good thing.

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24 December 2003
Christmas Letter

It is the night before Christmas, and all through Shanghai, everyone's carousing, except for Lisa. Partly because she's lazy and partied out, partly because she never understood the Shanghai approach of getting piss-faced and having a countdown at midnight on Christmas Eve, and partly she still needs to write her long-procrastinated Christmas letter.

I really, really meant to be good about Christmas this year, and early November began thinking about writing a Christmas letter, shopping for gifts and harassing you all for your mailing addresses. As in too much else in my life lately, progressing from thought to action proved the challenge. I don't even have my Christmas tree up! Apologies for that: some year I will do a proper Christmas card and send presents that arrive before April. Really.

So, Christmas. I always feel like Christmas is a bit of a letdown, even when you make the effort it never turns out as merry and memorable as you - or I, at least - somehow feel it should be. Kind of like birthdays in that regard, and also in that it serves as a reminder of time passage: another Christmas, another year scampering away before you've even gotten a good hold on it. Just when you get used to writing a certain year, being a certain age.

The other disconcerting thing about Christmas is all of its family associations. I suppose Christmas was coolest as a kid, back when I was only semi-jaded Little Lisa and still harbored hope that the parentals would eventually pick up on the "Give me books! Or at least more pets!" signs I followed them around with before the holidays. And those are rather ambiguous memories. Christmas even as an adult is supposed to be "about family", and is one of those few times when the ideal that one's friends are "like family" crumples into the reality that they still aren't exactly family. At the risk of self-pity, Christmas does make me wish I had family I wished I was with, or at least who would send me presents. My grandma sent me a card and a check, at least. My mom, no doubt, will grump that she's "too stressed out" or "too sad" to go shopping. And my brother never gave presents even before he renounced the material world. I still give them presents, but granted the motive is more bribery than affection.

I vaguely understand that Christmas letters are supposed to recap the year's events for the sake of posterity and all the friends one doesn't email enough. Overall, 2003 was an interesting year: it wasn't one of my more red letter years, sure, but it turned out pretty well on most levels, and definitely better than I initially expected. I didn't get nearly as much accomplished on the work front as I wanted to, I never do, but I had some good articles, made some good contacts, and hopefully improved as a writer. I wasted a lot of time wallowing, but eventually got over it already. I lost a lot of weight, and then gained much of it back. I boosted both my confidence and my humility. I made some good new friends, and had many good times with old friends. Mostly, and like most years, the year that was is a grab-bag of little memories, some of them bad, more of them good, but no clear theme or whatever.

My 2003 got off to a bad, bitter start, with messy non-breakup with Pangpang (boyfriend of four years, for those of you new to Lisa's Life) turning into messier actual breakup. I wish I could say I was strong and mature and practical and philosophical about it, but in truth I was a pathetic, sniveling mess and moped throughout January and February. The upshot was that heartbreak killed my appetite, and that combined with two hours a day at the gym working my bitterness out got me in very good shape. By March I started to feel better, only to be knocked down by a two week flu. My Brown classmate and former Shanghai compatriot Josh Reader visited early in the month with his friend Brian Levite in tow, and simultaneously Andrew Tseng, brother of my friend Jonathan, passed through town, making for much fun of the vicarious tourism variety. I love out-of-town guests; they give me an excuse to show off my usually useless expertise on Shanghai trivia. April was a good month, except for falling down the stairs and dislocating my arm, and having my cellphone pickpocketed. All within a week.

April also brought the wacky melodrama that was SARS, after months of speculation about the Guangzhou mystery flu. In Shanghai we generally get pretty sheltered from the worst of China's issues, and SARS was no exception. It was all unfounded panic and paranoia, which was kinda fun. You could get a seat on the subway for once, and air tickets were deliciously cheap. I loved how people wore masks outside, where there was no risk, and took them off inside, where there was. Sanitation improved dramatically, and I was glad to no longer be alone in glaring disapprovingly at the hawking of loogies onto the sidewalk. One chuckle was that the SARS scare came to Shanghai right after the Iraq war began, and the first time I looked at masks they only had two designs: the Stars and Stripes and the Union Jack.

In the early months of the year, I found myself doing article after article on music. Not a bad thing, since it's a topic I know well and enjoy. My big ongoing terror about the journalism thing is that the people I'm interviewing will think my questions are silly. With music, at least, there's no risk of that. I ended up doing four articles on the Chinese music industry, for different publications and with different angles, and it was quite fun fleshing out a topic more fully than a single article allows.

May was a great month, despite ongoing swirls of SARS. My mood changes with the weather, I guess. I was in high spirits, getting lots of work done, and at my thinnest. To celebrate my epic weight loss since I started in February 2002, I got my belly button pierced. I later learned that it was a botched job, too shallow due to their using a gun, not a needle, and I had to let it grow in before it popped out; but it was fun while it lasted, and gave me an excuse to collect new sparkly thingies.

In between moping and working, I was, as already mentioned, going the gym a lot. I go to a cheap gym where the clientele is overwhelmingly local, and Chinese gym etiquette is pretty funny. The girls, who only want to be ever more stick thin, wrap themselves in saran wrap in pursuit of localized dehydration, and both sexes are inclined to sit on machines watching TV and get unpleasant when you ask them to move. Sometimes there are even couples using the machines as make-out benches. I'm not a very social gym-goer, except with people I already know, partly because of having to regularly swat away approaches like, "Vheere ah yoo foom?" or "Wow, you lost a lot of weight! You used to be really fat!" And other intelligent pick-up lines. Plenty of eye candy there as well, sure, but I'd rather look than talk. One of the cuter beefcake boys, who I initially mistook for a trainer, would always watch me, but never come up and talk. I was at first creeped out, although grateful for the non-accosting, but eventually my female ego won out, the "Cute boy's watching me!" factor. After months of eyeballing, we gradually worked up to nods of acknowledgement, then to saying hi, and then to conversation. Very juvenile. I learned that his name is Wu Jiang, he's Shanghainese and a fashion designer. We went on a first date early June.

Meanwhile, Pangpang had moved back to Shanghai in late April, sans the new love of his life that he'd dumped me for. He wanted to be friends again and hang out; I was mad and bitter and wanted to not think about him. Then one day in May he calls in the black of early morning: his grandfather was in critical condition, and Pangpang thought my being there would cheer up Grandpa Li. So I went. Grandpa Li, a sweet mellow former chef saddled with a bitchy wife and a bunch of hyper-bickering grown children, recovered that day, and held on for a few weeks, but passed away 1 June. For hospital visits and then funerary duties, I accompanied Pangpang to the suburban family home about once a week, providing moral support as best I could in the face of whirling family psychosis. Hey, I know how it feels. The end result was that Pangpang and I started to feel close again, and we quickly slipped back into what I call "old, comfortable shoe mode". Inevitably, one night after eating, drinking and talking until dawn with a bunch of old music scene buddies post-concert, we hooked up.

Two weeks of conflicting "wheee!" and "oh, dear" followed. I liked Wu Jiang, he treated me really well, and novelty is nice. I loved Pangpang, but knew that all of our old issues remained. Fortunately, then it was July, and time for me to leave for the US. I'd told Wu Jiang, prior to hook-up with Pangpang, that I had a rather complicated relationship with my ex, and then told Pangpang I was seeing someone new en route to the airport. Ah, timing. With my house and Fritz entrusted to two subletting students, I spent the whole of July and August in the US. With the exception of family complications and regaining about 7 kg, it was a great summer. I visited San Francisco, San Diego, Los Angeles, Washington DC, Cape Cod, Boston and New York. No space or time to give the full gossip on everyone, but I met up with: Edward Boas, Erin White, Rex Huang, Brian Levite, An-lon Chen, Harumi Supit, the Buffington family, Anise K. Strong, Crystyl Mo, Molly Sweezy, Johanna Klein, Irene Chen, Emily Weirich, John Bosco, Victor Huey, Helen Hsieh, Anna Lewis, Elaine Yu, Fred Tang, Ellie Kozin, Vivian Fung, Maranatha "Hao Chong" Ivanova, and Rosalyn Chan. It was so wonderful seeing everyone, catching up, the long talks and philosophizing and everything. I've gotta say, I have wonderful friends.

Highlights of the trip included spending my birthday at the gorgeous Big Sur, paying homage to Henry Miller and enjoying the spectacular scenery; my thanks to Ed Boas for driving me there and back with scarcely a grumble. Erin White's birthday party and Martini night, plus her fabulous friends, proving that there is in fact life in San Diego, although I suspect it has all since moved to DC with her. Seeing Helen Hsieh, one of my best friends from college who I hadn't seen since, and picking up effortlessly where we left off despite the years apart. I made a couple of interesting new friends: Harumi's housemate Kjell Carlsson, and Eloisa Haudenschild and Tina Yapelli, organizers of a San Diego exhibition of Chinese art that I did a story on.

The summer included two weddings, and while I'm not a big wedding person, they do make for good parties. The first, in Cape Cod, was of Katherine Buffington, my best friend since fourth grade, to David Swain, who she met while teaching in Japan. Katherine has the coolest and closest family I know, goofy punning and all, and they have become over the years the closest thing I have to family, so it was great spending ten days with them. Particularly nice seeing Katherine's sister Anne, who I've been picking since she was five but haven't seen for five years, and she's evolved into a very cool, savvy and sassy gal. The other wedding was in San Diego, of my high school friend Anna Lewis to Josh Slater, who she met singing a cappella at Harvard. I didn't get to see very much of Anna and Josh, alas, but the wedding was like a big reunion of our high school posse, mostly people I haven't been in touch with for years.

It was rather hard coming back to Shanghai after two long, lovely months. It didn't help that most of my street had been demolished to make way for a park in my absence. I loved my street. There was some incredibly gorgeous historic architecture, including two lanes - one Art Deco, one Spanish style - that I had long lusted to live in. As they emptied pre-demolition in June, I got to wander inside them, and was wowed by the intricate wood staircases and ingenious layout of the rooms. Sad. Mostly, though, I now miss the dense, intimate neighborhood, the little mom-and-pop shops, restaurants, printers, and the familiar faces who ran them. People looked out for each other. Now there's a big black hole of half-constructed park, populated by migrant construction workers and pickpockets.

September was largely eaten by reverse-reverse-culture shock. I laid pretty low. I'd been very eager to get back to my boys, but it proved anti-climatic. A brief but nice summer fling had my affections even further divided, and flirting in English had me rather spoiled. More time with Wu Jiang made me realize that he's not much of a conversationalist, and while he makes up for it in other areas, I just need conversation. And I learned that he'd given up the fashion design thing to start a model agency, which is not the sort of industry that gets me excited. Pangpang and I muddled along, still fighting the same old fights but with less intensity than before as I cared less. In October, Pangpang and his sister opened a poster shop, Wall, and gave me a 10% stake in exchange for copying my posters. Mid-month came my five-year anniversary of living in Shanghai. Sobering, because, even though I've had a (mostly) good, interesting and productive time here, arguably more so than had I stayed in the US and followed the more standard post-college cliches, it scares me that I've been here so long. Even when think I want to leave, I don't know where I could go or what I could do without having to start over from scratch.

Otherwise, October and November were busy, social swirls, good but blurred with the busy checklist of events and work. I focused on trying to find a book agent, and now have three China-oriented agencies interested. Now I have to write a sample chapter so one of them can find a publisher, and then write the rest of the book. Ack. I also started taking Taekwondo, and officially suck at it. Bringing us to this month, which has zipped by. December in Shanghai is an endless party, which is rather bad for productivity. I was trying to focus on said sample chapter, but have gotten rather sidetracked by being mugged on the 13th. I was coming home late, late at night, it was very dark, and I remember nothing in between "Where the fuck are my keys?" to "Where the fuck am I?!" Which is probably for the best, as otherwise I'd be far more traumatized. My cellphone and money were taken. It appears I was hit in the head twice with a brick, and I'll have a very Harry Potter-esque scar on my forehead, but it's also possible I tripped, hit my head on something, and someone robbed me while I was out. I'm mostly relieved it wasn't worse, and non-fatal reminders of one's mortality are good for the larger self-preservation instinct.

This week started out with my five-year anniversary with Pangpang on Monday. The mugging has proven good for our relationship, since it makes me more clingy to familiar comfort zones, and I've been rather neglecting Wu Jiang. I had a big holiday Martini Night on Tuesday (still need to clean up), and Christmas promises to be visits-shopping-party-dinner-party. I don't know what I'm doing for New Year's yet. I'm looking forward to next year, it will be the year I finally write the damn book, plus hopefully lots of other things, and new years and clean slates are good for the momentum thing. I should travel more next year; all 2003 I only did the US trip, mostly due to laziness and inertia, and I definitely should see more of China and get down to Southeast Asia again. I also hope to hop to the US again, perhaps not for quite as disorientingly long as this year, but maybe in time for Campus Dance and to see all the folk who usually depart for the summers. We'll see.

Well, folks, I guess that's all for this year. Wherever you are, whatever you're up to, I hope this letter finds you fabulous and having a very merry Christmas or other holidays. All my love and best wishes, until our paths next cross.

30 October 2003
Biology/Destiny

Every once and a while, I take a bold step outside of the comfort zone of my usual journalistic niche to cover something new and unfamiliar. It is always scary, but always interesting. I get to assuming I know China, or at least Shanghai, so thoroughly, so intimately, but a change of angles can still surprise me. These last weeks have brought a disconcerting revelation:

Chinese people are really, really sexist.

I'm working on a story on workplace sexual discrimination in China for The New Republic, and after almost every interview I do for it have to sit for half an hour and process. I'm hearing the same arguments over and over again: women are weaker, less motivated, bad at math and leadership, don't care about their careers, and dislike responsibility; it's okay to pass up a woman for a job if she's likely to have her (one) kid in the next few years. It's not the arguments that surprise me - I know they're common enough - but rather the people making them: not greasy middle-aged men but rather young professional women and a women's issues expert and advocate!

I just concluded an interview with a sociology professor and his journalist wife. They had some very interesting things to say, most of which I concurred with, but then, "China is more equal now than under Communism because women aren't forced into professions that don't suit them." Such as? "Manufacturing. Sciences." There it was again. I'd heard the same from a young professional I interviewed yesterday, but at least she'd admitted they were societal biases, probably untrue. I couldn't resist arguing. "Okay, while it's fair to say that heavily physical work doesn't suit most women, there's no natural grounds to say that women are bad at math and science. In the US, at least," I continued, "medicine and science are pretty equal, and increasingly female-dominated, fields." I think back to my college friends, most of whom were science chicks and the bulk of whom are now in medical or graduate school. "Medicine, okay," he conceded, "but scientific research, no. How many of the famous scientists are women? None!" Yeah, but that's because they're all old, and the previous generation in the West resembled, well, the current generation in China. But it was an interview, not a debate, so I let it go.

Perhaps it's fair to say that contemporary China resembles the US in the 1960s or 1970s, with women in the workplace but unequal there, except that the proportion of women working in China is much higher even than the US now and that there is no feminist movement. No one identifies the prevailing sexism as sexism. Not like America is immune, even within my own progressive class of so-called Bobos, as most recently evidenced by the controversial NYT Magazine article The Opt-Out Revolution. I found that interesting as someone who has also "opted-out" in a way, not because of family but because of lifestyle inclination and general disinterest in the traditional American workplace and career trajectory. (Of course, most of us expatriates in Shanghai count as "opt-outers".)

It's a big question, and tempts me to abandon the arts/culture beat to write more on women's issues. It sure needs the exposure. Only I know it would be discouraging and depressing, like covering historic preservation and Mainland cinema: lost causes are bad for the spirit. Just as "typical Chinese girls" fascinate me, anthropologically, but I just can't be friends with them, I want too badly to convert them. No wonder that my Chinese female friends are all convention buckers - artists, musicians, journalists and small entrepreneurs - who don't base their math skills on their genitalia.

25 October 2003
Song Meiling, Zaijian

For those of you who didn't see the headlines (and/or aren't Chinese history junkies), the imperious Song Meiling, last of the famed Song sisters and wife of Chiang Kaishek, died Thursday at the age of 105. Good article here.

No tears here for the old girl, she wasn't particularly likeable, bitchy self-righteous power-hungry dictator she was, but it does give me pause. She's one of the more fascinating and important characters of 20th century, and I've read so much about them I feel a bit of a personal attachment. And she was such the Shanghainese girl: charming, beautiful, brutal, a master manipulator and PR master. The women who most shaped China were the Madames - Madame Chiang, Madame Sun (Meiling's older sister), Madame Mao. Song Meiling always struck me as the least complicated, least tragic, most Machiavellian of the trio. Song Qingling was probably not the saint that the Communists deified her as, but she certainly was a romantic, dedicated idealist, marrying Sun Yatsen against her parents wishes, then when he died a few years later she was essentially buried with him: claimed by both the Communists and her KMT family as his representative, a burdensome role she would bear for her remaining 60-some years. Jiang Qing, a.k.a. Madame Mao, was likewise not the demon she's made out to be; she had a horrible childhood, a desperately scrabbling young adulthood, with end result of being insecure and defensive and prone to jealousy. A woman like that falling for a man like Mao was a recipe for disaster, and disaster it came, but the decade of havoc she wrecked was a grand gesture to keep her man. She was the scapegoat to preserve Mao's image, and like a good Confucian wife she sacrificed herself for him.

So what was Meiling's excuse? Her father was a self-made man, but she was raised in the lap of privilege, and as the baby of the family did not recall their earlier times of want, thus lacked the sense of humility and perspective that some of her older siblings had. She went to the US as a child with her older sisters, and growing up in the deep South deepened the American Christianity she first got from her family. With that came the sense of predestination: that the wealthy and powerful are so because they deserve it and were given their positions by God, while the poor and destitute are only that way because they are morally lacking, slovenly, unhygienic. Hence her preposterous New Life Movement, her big project as first lady (apart from using military aid to buy dresses): teaching the starving masses to stand up straight, wash behind their ears, exercise, and ideally become good Christians. It must've been a big shock to her when God let the Commies win! Ha.

In a way, Communist China and all the horrors it has entailed are Song Meiling's fault. Chiang Kaishek's bloody purge of the urban left in 1927 started things in motion -- destroying the moderate, urban forces of reform drove the balance further and further left, into the extreme arms of the rural Communists like Mao, and even moderate to right-leaning reformers had to join either extremity -- but Chiang wouldn't have risen in power without gaining legitimacy by marrying into the Song family. And if Chiang hadn't come to power, with his corruption and his Mafia-backing, the situation in China wouldn't have gotten so bad as to make a Communist win inevitable. And the Chiang regime would have collapsed much sooner, perhaps while there was still hope for a moderate replacement, if not propped up with American aid dollars coaxed forth by Meiling and her buddy Henry Luce.

It was really a marriage of political convenience: orchestrated by Song Ailing, the oldest Song sister, a scheming money-grubber with strong Mafia ties, who saw a Chiang presidency as means to personal enrichment. Biographers surmise that Meiling was reluctant at first, and always rather despised Chiang, and there is speculation that the marriage was never consummated, as they always had separate rooms, even separate houses in most places.

I always wondered how she managed to stay alive so long. Pure stubbornness and spite? A pact with the devil? Did she ever doubt her actions, or did she remain pompously convinced until the end? And where will her spirit go now? The Christian heaven she believed in? More fairly, Christian hell? Or are our ancestral faiths less escapable, and she'll be sent to some Buddhist purgatory... perhaps reincarnated as a peasant in Hunan during the 1940s famine her government caused. Perhaps she'll join the ranks of the forlorn ghosts wandering the streets of Shanghai. Her childhood home, where Qingling returned to and lived until the 1980s, is just down the street from me. If Meiling's ghost came knocking, seeking forgiveness and reconciliation after 80 years of not speaking to her sister, would Qingling admit her? Perhaps I will spot their ghosts there, having a spot of tea. Or else a cat fight.