Mom and Dad and Shanghai

I’m spending most of the Chinese New Year holidays riding around town on my rickety bike taking pics. And I’ve finally gotten around to posting some pics of my apartment (before, during and after renovation): here.

My parents said something interesting about my apartment when they stayed with me for about two months, towards the end of last year. They said that even though I live on a historic street, in the old French Concession, in a lane built in the 1930s, surrounded by local Shanghainese families, they didn’t feel like they were living in China. Maybe it’s the way I did my place -- I didn’t follow the Old-Shanghai-full-of-teak-and-a-Thai-Buddha-head school of decorating lane houses, and kept things fairly neutral. Anyway, now the pics are up.

Speaking of my parents and their recent visit, I found out that they each have some childhood history with Shanghai.

My grandfather on my mother's side was born in Nanjing but grew up in Shanghai. My mom still remembers their old home near what is now known as Yuyuan Garden, and has vivid memories of climbing up narrow wooden stairs to their third floor flat. During my parents' recent stay here, my mom actually found the place -- it's now occupied by migrant workers and will probably be torn down soon. The current occupants were nice enough to let my mom walk through the building, and sure enough, that narrow staircase is still there.

After going to Taiwan with her family as a six year-old, my mom continued to live in Shanghai's shadow. Her father told her about his favorite Shanghai sweets, taught her how to make Shanghainese dishes, and took her to stores opened by Shanghainese emigres in Taipei. When she was here a few months ago, she had great fun going to the local markets every morning and buying all the produce from her childhood memories and cooking way too much food (and contributing to my current midriff largess).

My father also has some brief but significant personal history in Shanghai. He grew up in Anhui Province with a dozen brothers and sisters. His family owned land, but they were dirt poor, and my father studied his way out of the village. When he was seventeen, the Communists were about to overrun the country, and his father (a military judge in the Kuomintang at the time) decided to move most of the family to Taiwan. (A few of my father’s siblings stayed behind in China, mostly kids from my grandfather’s first wife. The ones that stayed behind really suffered during the Cultural Revolution, being landowners. And yeah, a guy could have a couple of wives back then!) My father wanted to follow the family to Taiwan, and the best way to do that was to join the KMT -- he got in primarily because he was a decent student.

On the escape route to Taiwan, he stopped in Shanghai for a week, and as luck would have it he ran into a schoolmate from Anhui while walking around Shanghai. My father had no idea what he was going to do once he landed in Taiwan, and asked his friend about his plans. His friend told him that he planned to enter the military university to study medicine. My father thought being a physician would be cool, and sure enough, after he landed in Taiwan, he took the entrance exam and got in. From there on, he became a doctor, met my mom, then a 20 year-old nurse, and they got married after he beat out a couple of other suitors.

("Your dad never said much", according to my mom, and "wore pointy shoes, had a weird haircut and played strange music too loudly." This was the product of my father studying in the U.S. for a bit, where he picked up fashion, shoes and opera. Despite these fey tendencies (and now I know where I get my fey tendencies), my mom married him. "I was a pretty gal", my mom says, "and there were more boys than girls in those days in Taiwan, and a surgeon was also chasing me, so your dad was lucky to have me!", as she likes to remind him from time to time.)

I didn’t know much about my parents' pasts in Shanghai until some dinner conversations during their recent stay. I don’t know why they didn’t talk about this stuff before. I think it has to do with being locked in to familiar familial roles. The last time I lived with my parents, I was in high school, a know-nothing pimply faced teenager. And I think that’s the way my parents kept thinking of me for the past 20 some years until they came to Shanghai last year when, maybe for the first time ever, they saw me as an adult. They lived in an apartment that I bought and own (well, not really, I'm enslaved to HSBC and that scary mortgage), they came to my company Christmas party and saw me in my role as a working stiff (my mom said to me after the party, slightly surprised, "I think your company people actually like you", well gee thanks mom why is it a surprise that I’m somewhat well-adjusted?), and they saw me come home after some late nights out with my friends (and beer on my breath). In their eyes, this time around, I was no longer the snot-nosed kid that they have to look after, but (somewhat of) a responsible adult who does his own dishes and laundry. (Well, ok, figuratively speaking, since my ayi actually does my dishes and laundry.)

And I in turn saw my parents as more than parents, for the first time. They were no longer just mom and dad who constantly nagged about cleaning my room and taking vitamins and getting flu shots and why I don’t come back to California and get a steady 9-5 job with an hour for lunch, maybe with the gub-ment cos it comes with a nice pension. I saw my mom as not just a mom, but a friendly, out-going, talk-to-anyone and try-anything-once woman with a joy for life that won over my Shanghai neighbors. I saw my father as not just a father, but a man somewhat insecure in retirement and so damn cheap that he prefers to walk than to pay 2 Kuai/US$0.25 to ride the bus, until he found out that he can ride for free as a senior citizen, and then he took buses everywhere but still complained every time he had to take a 11 Kuai/ US$1.30 taxi!

I guess it took both me and my parents looking at each other as adults across the dinner table to have our first adult conversations. Kind of silly how it took 20 some years and me moving all the way to Shanghai to get to this point. But hey, life is funny, what can you do.

The Talking Sheep Lunar New Year Entry

My (non-denominational) god it’s been a long time since I’ve posted anything. So much has happened in my normally unhappening life in the past few months that I don’t know where to start. And things kept happening, so my no blogging hole got deeper and deeper as time went on. The bleeding gots to stop. So here is a quick update in an attempt to catch you up.

Ok, after I moved in to my renovated apartment with my favorite butt cleaning water spraying toilet seat, my parents (pic above left) came to visit for two months from San Diego, we had a great time living together for the first time since my high school days (I was a band nerd in high school by the way, I played the french horn, which was one step above the tuba in the instrument glamor hierarchy, way below the violin and trumpet and saxophone and even the cello, those guys got all the girls, well ok all the band girls that is), and my parents living here basically acted as an industrial strength stress test of my newly renovated apartment, what with my mom cooking up a storm and thus stress testing the kitchen, and my subsequent eating like 2 pigs and thus stress testing the sewage system, my dad playing his new er-hu and thus stress testing my new neighbors' patience, me sleeping in the study and thus stress testing the guest day bed (a fake Mies Van Der Rohe), multiple showers a day and thus stress testing the water softener and filters as well as the guest bathroom, the cold Shanghai weather and thus stress testing the floor heating system, and my apartment came through the stress testing pretty well except for the room thermostat for floor heating not working properly and gaps appearing in certain areas of the wood flooring, oh and most disappointing was the way the butt cleaning water spraying toilet seat not always functioning well, so these things need to get fixed (note to self), and after my parents left, right after Christmas, I decided to take a week long trip to Chiang Mai and Hanoi, discovered Air Asia, a discount airline that flies all over SE Asia, had a great time flying around the mountain roads in Chiang Mai in search of temples on a scooter held together with duct tape, no helmet, and had an equally great time in chaotic Hanoi eating unbelievably good beef and chicken pho noodles and drinking unbelievably good sweet black strong Vietnamese coffee, took about 1,000 pics on this trip, most of them crap, finally coming back to Shanghai after New Years, but then the weather got nasty in Shanghai … [ok, taking a deep breath now]… it actually snowed for like 8 straight days, with taxi drivers telling me that they haven’t seen this much snow since they were kids, like 30 years ago, but that’s only when I did manage to hail a cab with this bad weather, and I wore my winter boots from Michigan for the first time in about 15 years, good thing one’s feet do not get fat like the rest of one’s body, my boots still fit, and with this friggin cold weather my floor heating held up ok, after I plugged up a ventilation hole above my washer/dryer unit, damn I hate cold weather, and in the middle of it all I took a business trip back to the U.S. for a few days, during which, for the first time since I left California 5 years ago, I felt like a foreigner in the U.S., like, shit, what the hell am I doing here among all these weird people, I thought to myself, and can I ever come back and live this kind of life, I thought to myself some more, but maybe it was because I spent the whole time in Orange County, anyway when I got back to Shanghai, I finally went to kendo practice for the 1^st time in about 4 months, and almost had a cardiac arrest cos I’m so out of shape, but damn it felt good to be wielding my mighty powerful bamboo stick and getting in touch with my bad ass samurai self, well less bad ass and more big ass these days, and don’t look now, Lunar New Year is upon us, so here I am, on the second day of the Lunar New Year, with the city about 1/3 full, with everyone else traveling back to their homes visiting their families, and me sitting at Boona Café with a roomful of Europeans also left behind in Shanghai, getting kind of bored after spending the last 2 days watching cock fighting, Taiwanese variety shows and Jamie Oliver cooking shows on Discovery Channel, hey I think Jamie Oliver is all made up and fake, a product of Food Network marketing, he's like the Wizard of Oz of cook-ery and chef-ery, damn I gotta stop smoking, but ok, I’ll give myself until the end of the holidays next week, hmm how the hell am I going to amuse myself until my friends get back to town.

Ok ok, now that I’m all caught up, I’m going to spend my next few posts going into more detail on what has happened in my life over the past few months, namely my parents' visit, so don’t worry too much if you weren’t able to follow everything in that mess above (or didn’t feel like reading it, or gave up 1/2 way through), which by the way was inspired by one of my favorite Haruki Murakmi books where a talking sheep from Hokkaido spoke with no punctuation, but at least I was kind enough to punctuate, and, and, ok ok, I stop...

Sleeper Cell Contractors

It’s amazing how some things are the same, regardless of location or culture or even the space-time continuum. Like pyramids built by both ancient Egyptians and Mayans (both undoubtedly under the influence of extraterrestrials). So, too, as I’ve learned in the last 3 months renovating my new apartment, are evil contractors -- they live in every corner of the world, sharing the common trait of unscrupulousness wherever you find them. (Maybe evil contractors are sleeper extraterrestrials living in our midst?)

Ok, to be fair, the contractors that are working on my apartment are very professional, and pay attention to every detail thought up by my architect extraordinaire, Joy Hou. I’m talking about the contractors attached to the vendors here in Shanghai.

The way it usually works, when you buy something for home improvement here, is that the vendor will send out their guys to deliver and install. And the general rule is that they suck.

My most recent experience in how much they suck was getting my new kitchen installed. I spent about Rmb14,000 on a new kitchen, which was installed a few days ago. It turns out that the sons-of-worms managed to scratch the hell out of my new wood flooring, hung the upper portion of the cabinetry too low, used cheap screws to attach the cabinets (making them unstable), got the alignment wrong so that the height of the handles don’t match, and used the wrong color trim on the cabinetry.

I’ve screamed bloody murder twice now to the kitchen vendor. The only thing I got out of these calls was finding out that my Chinese gets really bad when I get angry -- I start to stutter and forget words and so I keep saying “that that that that thing” / 那个那个那个东西, as in “I’m going to beat you with that that that that thing if you don’t fix that that that that other thing tomorrow."

Ok ok, some contractors are evil and this whole renovation process almost killed me. But in the end, property ownership has turned out to be incredibly rewarding (never thought I’d agree with John Locke on anything), and I’ve found a new indicator for China economic well-being: the amount of activity in the home improvement centers.

Home improvement is aspirational: you dream of a more beautiful life for you and your family through new flooring or new bathroom tiles or a new closet. (Or, in my case, a new Japanese toilet with temperature-controlled seat and water spray with an automatic deodorizer option. What can I say, I’ve got a bit of the hyper antiseptic Japanese in me.) (But a spraying toilet seat is better than using wet baby wipes, as my favorite actor Terrence Howard suggests.) (While I’m on the subject of favorites and buttock hygiene, here’s my favorite Confucius quote: “Confucius say, man who goes to sleep with itchy butt wakes with smelly hand.”) (Ok, I get side tracked, no more parentheticals.)

And home improvement is an expression of belief in a better tomorrow. You don't sink a big chunk of disposable income on home improvement as opposed to basic rice and beans unless you have confidence in not only a secure economic future but also a better one. (Although this probably does not apply to me: I went way over my budget not because of confidence in my ability to earn; it was more a matter of unstoppable inertia -- if I want floor heating, I have to get new floors, which means a change in the color scheme/palette of the entire apartment, which means the previous kitchen and closets have to go, which means an opportunity to install a state-of-the-art water filter system, which means new pipes, which means digging up walls, and so on and so forth, although I'm not sure this explains why I have to re-do the bathrooms... In other words, my home improvement was driven by an inability to stop taking one simple assumption to its logical end.) (Well, ok, I mean it now, that was the last of the tangential parentheticals.)

If home improvement is indeed a leading indicator at the grass roots lao bai xing level, then there is no bubble here in China. In fact, we're just now getting started on the elevator ride.

I went to Ikea here in Shanghai yesterday, to buy a few necessities and a ton of other things that I don't need and didn't want to buy but could not help myself, and was overwhelmed by the thousands of people buying Ivar shelves and Svalov side tables. There were so many people stuffed into this ginormous Ikea and sucking air that I could feel oxygen availability dipping well below safe levels.

And I love it. I love seeing young Chinese couples snapping up bright red plastic hangers and faux brass candle holders. I love the 50,000 people getting off diesel-fume-spewing public buses everyday at the Shanghai light textile market in Putuo District haggling over prices of roman shades and rattan rugs. I love walking through the hundreds of stalls in the home improvement malls off of Yishan Lu with their 10,000 varieties of bath & shower fixtures. I just love it.

I'm usually a pretty cynical dude, but I get slightly emotional when I see people here going gaga over home improvement, taking pride in their homes, confident in a brighter future, aspiring to a life more beautiful (and in some cases a butt more clean).

Next time, I will post pictures of my new home, with magic toilet.

Working for The Man

My friends, sorry I haven’t written for awhile. I’ve been overwhelmed with work. Not so much by the volume of work, but rather by the stressful nature of work.

There's much that I want to tell you about, from how I wish the 90's hi-top Gumby fade haircut makes a comeback (hence Bobby Brown’s pic to the left) (you know, I used to want to be Bobby Brown), to Shanghai taxis, to my friend Stan’s rules for Samurai Dating (the honorable way for a man to flirt while he is in a serious relationship), but I just have not been able to find time to write.

Instead, I give you insights on how to decode and prioritize work requests, from my 13 years of experience working in the Large American Corporation:

(1) "Urgent"(as in, "I need this to be done on an urgent basis"): this typically means that the end product is actually not needed for awhile, probably 2 weeks, but it has been marked urgent so you won't ignore it. I tend to ignore these for at least 48 hours. That's probably why, lately, people have been sending me requests of a "very urgent" nature.

(2) "Very Urgent" (as in, "I need this right away, it's very urgent that you review this by COB today") (COB means close-of-business, for those of you unfamiliar with the lingo of the Large American Corporation): these types of requests typically have little to do with how urgent the task actually is. Rather, they tend to come from the ranks of managers (or below) who copy their supervisor on these very urgent requests, mainly to show their supervisor that they are working on something important. Of course, these tend to be not all that important, so I will not look at these until I get a second reminder (which comes invariably, like, about 5 days later, in spite of the whole COB thing).

(3) "When you get a chance" (as in, "No worries, I know you're busy, so take a look at this when you get a chance"): I always look at these right away. Because I know people don't want me to look at something and find that it doesn't smell right. They don't want me slowing things down and so they try to throw me off their scent. But they can't fool me, cos I'm the super crime fighting dog of compliance, Ooof Ooof, Bark Bark, Aaaaoooooooooww!

While we're on the subject of work requests. I've been thinking about ways to improve my level of service to my clients at the office. I want to be able to anticipate what they need, before they ask. Because The Customer is king. The Customer is always right. So I think my first response to any work request should be: "Do you want fries with that?"

The Man: "I need this right away, it's very urgent that you review this by COB today"

Me: "Do you want fries with that?"

I end with (who else) Bobby Brown and his Gumby fade. And check out those tight lycra shorts.

Talk to the hand

Don’t talk to me about leaded paint on toys. Or tainted pet food or fish fed on antibiotics or antifreeze toothpaste. Whatever you, farang, are getting out there, we’re getting it 100 times worse here, where there is probably zero testing (or whatever testing there is ends up being wiped out by corruption) and zero collective consumer activism (or whatever activism there is meets with brutal repression). You worried about pet food? Here, we worry about our pets ending up as food. I feel bad for you about the crap lining your Wal-Mart shelves, but that shite is a daily reality here from the moment we turn on the faucet in the morning.

If there is any benefit to this media attention on poisons from China, it is this: it sows the seed for the revolution. The Party has long abandoned Socialism, and thus lost its idealist core as its reason for being. So now it must rely on improving the lives of the people that it has fucked for the last 50 years, to justify its extended shelf life. But its ineptitude in dealing with the degradation of the environment and food supply is getting the 老百姓 Chinese folk more and more up in arms. And, based on what I have seen of college grads not being able to find jobs while more and more big German sedans crowd the streets, I suspect that the wealth being created in China is driven by liquidity rather than fundamentals. So in spite of attempts to medicate the masses with things like the Olympics, the World Fair, exploding (and bubble-like) A Share prices, or glorious (but mostly inbound investment-driven) GDP growth, the seeds of discontent are taking root. And beware when the unruly masses here get done playing World of Warcraft and come out from cybercafés and start to smell the shite, cos it will surely hit the fan.

Ok ok, excuse me while I wipe the spit from my computer screen. (And log off, in case the local authorities want to track me down and Jack Bauer my ass....)

What is he doing?

Saw this man at 7 a.m. on Sunday morning (Xingzha Lu, Shanghai). Weird place to take a phone call...

Taipei Weekend

I spent last weekend in Taipei, eating nonstop and taking pics. Having not lived there for such a long time, I find that I've lost my Taiwanese accent and, having lived elsewhere for the last 30 odd years, people in Taiwan (my own homies!) think I'm from Hong Kong or Japan.

When I'm in Shanghai and people ask me where I'm from, I usually say that I'm from Taiwan -- this is accurate in the sense that I was born in Taiwan, but inaccurate in the sense that my family is not native Taiwanese （外 省人）(oy vey, the Taiwan cultural politics...) and that I still consider L.A. my home town. So, sometimes when I'm as confused as you are now, I tell people that I'm from outer space (太空人).