Drawer # 7.5: Pink String

Drawer 7.5 celebrates the hardest-working & most humble member of the Shanghai Material Goods Society, one of my very favorite Shanghai things: the ubiquitous Pink Plastic String. To be found for sale everywhere, in every hardware, stationary, housewares, you-name-it shop.

But, apparently, so much a part of the texture of the city that in my entire archive of photos, there's only the above two records of its existence. But, trust me, it's everywhere and it's used for everything.

Bundling up parcels, precious & scrap...

Stringing things up ...

(Cheating a bit re: pink on the far right but it's such an inspired use of plastic string!)

Repairs... 

For additional "native" chair repairs, check out Photographer Michael Wolf's "Bastard Chairs."

The pink is sometimes coral (as in the drawer) which marks its quality as a bit dicer than that of the purer translucent pink. It can also, sometimes, just very, very occasionally, be found in delightfully bright green...

(No doubt this, my favorite product, is made of recycled plastic in some ferociously polluting/health-damaging way. Check out Journalist Adam Minter's Shanghai Scrap blog for a fascinating & horrifying look at the Chinese recycling industry: shredded reds here & fields of grey there. But it really is just about the only packing string you can buy...)

I hated pink, as a child, especially pastel-ly girl pink; I thought it a totally sissy color...maybe it was on principle, or maybe, it was early aesthetics as I thought pale blue was pretty yucky too. It wasn't until deep adulthood, when I became fast friends with a two year old who wouldn't wear anything but, that I really started to appreciate pink's special glow. Here in China, pink matches everything & itself in all its own varieties, doesn't have any gender connotations, & men wear it freely...but still, I kinda love that it's girly pink that's doing the yeomen's job of tethering Shanghai to itself.

Photo credit above: Bruno David; all others: Christina Shmigel

From the top: 1. Coral Pink string with that other hard Shanghai worker, the blue plastic hose  2. Coral pink string        3. Pink string: you can never have too much  4. Random bits of plastic string collected on the street. All the compartments are lined with Chinese brocades: this was the  first drawer in which I understood how to use them in a more collaged sort of way...