Drawer #3.1: Units of Air Conditioning

Back in June, just before I left for the States & the blog went into radio silence, we moved out of our Shanghai lane house, where, somehow, 10 years had passed by. And we moved into an apartment in the “small” (pop 3 million) Chinese city of Kunshan. Which is to say, we moved into my idea of a nightmare: a classic Chinese tower block compound in the [empty] suburbs. 

You may remember this from Drawer 3.6, the one about White Tile Buildings with Blue Glass Windows: me, in my first week of Shanghai living, in a taxi on the elevated highway, with the weather a simulacra of the atmosphere of Venus, in a state of near-suicidal despair at the prospect of living amidst the dismal grimy brutalist architecture of this ugly place.

And now, the view from our new flat:

That, you may well ask, is a sports arena/indoor stadium/theater/cinema/bowling alley complex. It's where the World Badminton Championships take place. It also contains a Starbucks. For which I am deeply grateful. Tell me, why would an architect, with such a choice commission, design something in metal that so closely resembles dated & dirty white tile?

As for today’s drawer, the companion to #3.6, well, because if brutalist bathroom tile buildings are #1 for ugliness, a/c units helter skelter over every face & nook & cranny of brutalist buildings are #2.

According to a recent article in NYTimes: “During the 1990's, 5 percent of urban residents in China owned air-conditioners. A decade later, it was nearly 100 percent.” Two decades later, even the pigeons have a/c:

Since the tower blocks hardly ever have central cooling systems, each occupant solves the question of where to put their personal a/c unit in their own inimitable way.

To start, you need a hole. Right hru the concrete facade of your building. No safety code or building inspector need be involved; only one of the hole driller dudes. They can generally be found in posses on busy intersections near new construction, smoking Double Happiness or Zhonghua cigarettes, hanging on electric bikes with a wire bin on the back full up with giganto-size hole saw bits. I think of these guys as kin to Harry Tuttle, the guerrilla plumber in Brazil. 

Once you've got a hole thru which to run the lines between in the interior unit & the compressor outside, you call the a/c installer guy; if he's lucky, there's a ledge or even a pre-built a/c shelf...

but often enough he’s just launching himself out over space at a terrifying angle to secure an L-bracket to the facade. 

Once he has one bracket in, he in his faux-leather-soled slip-on shoes steps out on to it, & sets in the second bracket further out of reach. No pics: I can’t even watch this procedure much less document it.  

Once it’s all in place, you'll have to insist that the hole, thru which you can see daylight, be filled to keep the weather out. He'll look at you like you are a real pain & then he'll go out to the corner hardware store for a can of spray foam. Which he'll squirt into the hole until foam oozes out of the wall into your bedroom. He is not interested in the aesthetics of the problem.

But I digress. What it means is that all those randomly installed units absolutely litter the building facades adding an amazing amount of visual chaos to the city scape.

But apparently it wasn’t just my pet peeve. When the city began gearing up for the World Expo in 2010, its “Better City Better Life” campaign (apparently) decreed that all the a/cs on any building that might be in an any area that a visitor might pass through en route to the Expo needed to be hidden behind a screen. 

Think about this. In 2010, it was estimated that there were 22 million people living in SH. In the lane house across from us, there were 4 adults & plus at certain times 2 children.  In 2006, they had 4 a/c units; I watched them put in at least 2 more. People to a/cs: 1:1 ratio. 

But they’re middle class so let's say only 75% of the population was represented by an a/c: that’s still 16,500,000 units to cover. Even if they did only 50% of those, the logistics boggle the mind.  Inventorying them all,  hiring who knows how many thousands of fab shops (as ubiquitous here as hair salons & massage joints) to make and installing them all…. And what’s more they even individualized designs & painted them to suit the building...

And it worked! It made a HUGE difference to the city’s appearance: like a kid with brutal acne suddenly having normal skin. To say beautiful would be overstating the effect.

But back to our view. Redeemed by night:

Drawer #3.1: From top: Box 1, 3 & 4: Cardboard, milk paint, glass, straws; Box 2: Empty tin for  Traditional Chinese Medicine Photo credit for drawer: Bruno David; all others, Christina Shmigel

Drawer #7.8: The Lotus Pond

The Japanese writer Mishima begins his tale The Priest of Shiga Temple and His Love with a vividly detailed description of  "the joys of the [Buddhist] Pure Land." Its "fifty million halls and towers are wrought of gold, silver, lapis lazuli, crystal, coral, agate and pearls." There, great bands of heavenly angels are singing and playing sacred music and, in emerald ponds, the myriads of faithful are performing ablutions. The skies are filled with every known species of bird plus "hundred-jeweled" ones, "all raising their melodious voices in praise of Buddha." There are treasure bells suspended on jeweled cords in the air and exotic musical instruments "which play themselves without being touched." But, writes Mishima, the "uninitiated sightseerer cannot hope to penetrate deep into the Pure Land."

We live near Lu Xun Gong Yuan, a large & leafy public park, that for all the visual & aural stimulation it provides, might be the terrestrial counter part of the Pure Land. Should the sightseer, uninitiated or otherwise, have a mere 24 hours in Shanghai, and spend the hours when the park is open (6 a.m. to 6 p.m.) wandering within, the sightseer could witness nearly everything that amazes tourists about public behavior in China. At any given moment, within feet of each other, there might be an 8-person harmonica orchestra with ampilifiers; a goodly number of middle-aged couples ballroom dancing in a style more military than romantic; a huge gathering, sometimes easily over a hundred seniors, belting out "red" favorites with revolutionary/nostaglic fervor; a dozen chinese opera singers, a few western opera singers and several dozen players of traditional instruments; practitioners from every school of tai-chi & fan dancers & qi-gong-ers who are walking backwards & slapping themselves; water calligraphy writers and fan painters; serious badminton players; miscellaneous characters on vehicles for the disabled with boom boxes broadcasting latin beats...besame, besame mucho; people strolling in their pajamas or swimming past the gigantic no swimming sign in their underwear. (I'll leave the phlegm hackers & spitters out of it for now.) The sound level... well, it is just as Mishima has to acknowledge in an aside about the birds in Pure Land: "However sweet their voices may sound, so immense a collection...must be extremely noisy." Only on Weds mornings is the park both packed & quiet: it is the morning when the deaf community gathers, a great racket of fluttering hands, utterly, disconcertingly, silent.

Just as in the Pure Land, in the center of all this activity, in the months of June, July & August, deeply silent in its own way, is the lotus pond. Nelumbo nucifera. It doesn't take a thing of explanation to appreciate why the lotus is symbolic of Buddha in his enlightened state. Out of a pond that is usually non-descript & mucky, in the summer, arises the great beauty of the lotus, each flower opening in the morning & closing at night for a mere three days. All stages of the lotus are visible at all times: its closed bud rising on its tall stalk (the potential for the enlightened state rising from the mud of suffering), its glorious flowering, a translucent bowl of petals that holds light (the state of full enlightenment & self-awareness,) its green seed pod with its edible seeds that in Chinese medicine "clear heat",  and the beautiful brown husk the seeds leave behind once they have dropped down into the muddy murk to begin next year's cycle (rebirth/reincarnation.)

 From the official website of the Taiwan Gov't:

The flower opens at 5-6 o’clock in the morning on the first day and closes at 7-8 o’clock at night. The size of the closed flower bud is not big. On the second day, the flower opens at 5-6 o’clock in the morning and closes at 10-11 o’clock at night. The size of the flower bud at this stage is double the size compared to the first day. The flower will open again at 5-6 o’clock in the morning on the third day and begin to close at 3-4 o’clock in the afternoon. The lotus will slowly wither on the fourth day as the seed in the lotus seed pod matures and can be harvested at about three weeks. 

                                                                   

I visit the lotus quite frequently & always there are many other admirers circling, photographing, contemplating, maybe taking solace. The other day a fellow lotus stalker, filled with wonder, tried & tried to point something out to me but I just couldn't see it. Finally, he brought his camera over & showed me the close-up: a dragonfly harbored inside the curl of a lotus leaf.

Not far from our old house in St Louis, there's also a lotus pond, at the Missouri Botanical Garden. I  loved that lotus pond too, wished that I could step out on to one of the great waxy viridian leaves & curl myself into the spot at its center where the water bead forms. But in StL, the lotus was an exotic stranger. In Shanghai, nearly every park has a lotus pond in summer; they are as common as pigeons in New York City. And that's what makes me love the lotus pond here most: such spectacular serenity & beauty, a refuge from "the clamors of the world," entirely commonplace.

Imaginative power can provide a short cut for escaping from the trammels of our mundane life...If we are endowed with a rich turbulent imagination, we can focus our attention on a single lotus flower and from there can spread out to infinite horizons.

                                                            -The Priest of Shiga & His Love
                                                            from Death in Midsummer & Other Stories by Yukio Mishima
                                                                        ,

Drawer 7.8: From the top 1. Artificial lotus bud & red light bulbs from the Buddhist  Supply shop on Bao'an lu, now closed 2. Tin & glass container, Traditional Chinese Medicines; in the large photo, the container is missing 7 the liner is made from a box of a popular juice drink 3. Lotus flower w/ Chinese knot, macrame 4. Small lotus flower lamp w red light bulb from a shop in the street of the Jade Buddha Temple
Photo credit of drawer: Bruno David; all others are mine

Drawer # 3.6: White Tile Buildings with Blue Glass

    

I cried nearly the entire 12 hours of my first return flight from Shanghai.

Now, nine years and several weeks later, when I think of that great outpouring, what comes to mind is a moment on the elevated highway: I’m in a taxi, stuck in traffic on the elevated highway, heading north of the city to the university office of He-Whom-I’m-Trailing.

Surrounding the highway, as far as the eye can see, there are apartment complexes, high rises of 20 stories or more, grim & grim. Reinforced concrete faced in bathroom tile. With blue glass windows in white aluminum frames set into unadorned concrete window openings. Elsewhere, that blue glass is a beautiful cobalt blue but here it seems an affront, a charade, a cynical masquerade to deny the entirely blueless, denatured sky which hangs above & all around. A hazy of grey that we now recognize as Plum Rain Season and which HWIT likens to the atmosphere of Venus. 

The tile of the buildings is glazed white porcelain, with the occasional embellishing trim of powder blue; or there’s a kind of pepto pink or a beige that I hate on principle or mauve, all equally ravaged by rust stains and layers of greasy black dust. One might think that glazed porcelain tile would wash off in the Plum Rain but it does not.

I look at the tile buildings for hours from many nerve-jangling Shanghai taxis, sitting in the blare of the radio (“Sex Bomb! Sex Bomb!” one memorable day), windows opened by the driver who is saving himself the expense of the a/c (should it be working at all), bus exhaust streaming in on the hot humid outside air. 

The tile has the rectangular proportions of a brickface but it is not laid like brick. It is laid all in a row with its long side standing up vertically. The grout in that row, between the long sides, is laid in thin lines; the grout between those rows is laid in a wider line, which together results in a kind of stripeyness. It is my very first moment of …not exactly affection… but some kind of positive regard for these buildings when I notice this pattern. 

To me, up until that moment when the stripes reveal themselves, those tile buildings are the very incarnation of the dystopic city. It is those tile buildings that make me cry. How will I, with all my craving for beauty, ever survive in a place so ugly.

                            

Years later. In the studio, the milk paint surface of a piece of cardboard recalls perfectly the surface of the tile in its element-beaten state. I draw the stripey pattern. I score it. And suddenly, a new body of work opens up. Suddenly the aesthetic that rises out of reinforced concrete, with its cantilevers and curves, is endlessly inspiring; elevated highway rides an opportunity for research.

The constructions as they sit on the studio table breathe so happily…and choke off as they are put in place inside the deep (& deeply restricting) boxes of the cabinet drawers. On a whim, I place one into a glass vitrine bought some weeks earlier for its own loveliness…and the two together sing out with the autonomy that marks for me a work’s “success.”  There in begins a new installation, the companion work to the cabinet. If the cabinet holds all its archived treasures hidden, the vitrines set their contents on display, marking them as precious, no matter how mundane they might actually be. 

The other day a student in a safety-yellow t-shirt walked towards me. His chest proclaimed:

   EVERY    
   CLOUD   
   HAS A     
   SILVER   

I need the final beat. I let him pass me. I hope that the word that is stuck in my throat is emblazoned across his back. It isn't.

So there you have it: every cloud has a silver.

                                                           

                                      Drawer # 3.6: Cardboard, milk paint, graphite, blue glass. 

                                      On the right, the original version; on the left, as it is in the cabinet today

                                      Credits: Drawer photo: Bruno David; Vitrines: Hugo; Gif by Picasion

 all others c.shmigel