Native Repair #2: Wheels

There's a truism that runs something along the lines that once you've been an ex-pat for over 10 years, you can't go "home." I doubt that He-Whom-I'm-Trailing & I have acculturated here in any way that would make "home" tricky for us but I do occasionally ponder what it is from this China life that  I'll some day miss. Like this situation today...

Having done a heroic job thru twelve years of hard riding & living outdoors, the foot pedal on Little Pink, my trusty bicycle, finally gave out. From anywhere that I've lived in the States - NYC, NC, StL - just finding the local bike guy would be an issue but here, he's just a 5 min ride away, over in what a Chinese Gov't friend of ours designates as a "not-so-well organized" neighborhood, adjacent to our  organized (& infinitely duller) one.

I can be count on finding his little caravan cart of a repair shop parked just past the entrance gate to the "not-so-well organized" wet market. Everything he needs is all there: cart festooned with #type-in-the-wild electrical tape graphics; giant umbrella to protect him from the elements; low wooden stool, whacked together from wood scraps, for work close to the ground; sling-back lounge chair for between customers.

Used to be, first few times he did things for me, he was kind of gruff. But today, he greets me with a big grin of familiarity & quits assembling a brand-new-outa-the-box fluro orange bike to see what it is I need.

Yup, we agree, pedal's broken. Digging around in the cart of all repair wares, uhn, there's a pedal but none to match. Do I care? I do not. Old pedal comes off, new pedal goes on. No getting him to change the other one because it's not broken [yet.] Transaction time: under 10 mins. Cost: 10 Kuai...that's maybe USD1.50. Which tells me that I now have lao pengyou/old friend status as the first time I came, he charged me 2 kuai just to put air in my tires.

I love doing business with the bike repair guy: I love the smallness of scale of the set-up, of the interaction, a scale you hardly find Stateside anymore. I'll definitely miss that.

And, speaking of rides, these rather rarely-seen-but-much-delighted-in strollers...

                         

        

Click here for earlier adventures with Little Pink...

Drawer # 6.6 : Auspicious Phone Numbers

These days we pre-pay minutes by plugging our phone numbers into a credit card processing type of widget at our local convenience store. But it used to be that we needed to buy phone cards and so we’d head to the shops festooned with hand-painted lists of phone numbers. My preferred shop was not much more than a hole in the wall, its assortment of local & international (IP) phone cards displayed in a glass case, out front, on the sidewalk. The phone cards listed long strings of numbers, all of which had to be entered into the phone, with various press 1’s & press 2’s, instructions all in chinese. I relied heavily on the kindness of the phone card seller to get me thru this task; while he plugged away on my phone, I pondered the aesthetics of the painted lists.

Across the street from my shop was another, also covered in phone number paintings and a street or two further away was “phone number street,” its every facade bedecked in phone number paintings: long lists of cell phone numbers, the occasional number crossed out or checked, always drawn by brush in red paint with blue, sometimes black, embellishment, always arranged schematically in rows & columns in accordance with some established convention.  

Besides phone card sales, the business of these shops was a bit of a mystery to me. Why you would buy your phone number there rather than at one of the two phone companies, I didn’t know. Why were only one or two numbers crossed out or checked? Who actually knew what those few marks recorded: the signs never changed over time, no additional checks or crossings out from one visit to the next. And why would you make 150 0085 8588 your entryway number? (Though, admittedly, it's rather magical with its rhymes & symmetries.)

I never thought to ask; I just worked up an explanation to suit myself. Tying the Chinese penchant for numerology to the signs’ wealth of auspicious 8's & 9’s & 5’s and dearth of foreboding 4’s - go ahead, count ‘em - I concluded that they must be… Auspicious Phone Numbers! Since I never asked, no one told me different: Auspicious Phone Number Paintings they were & shall remain. Sometimes the imaginative flight is so much more satisfying than the plain truth.

I studied the patterns & the scripts endlessly, admired the fluidity of the vernacular Jasper Johns’ brushwork, pondered their organizational systems. The signs as paintings were a wonder to me, each individual sign on the verge of revealing something of its painter’s character. But what really sent me was what the paintings did to disorient the spaces they occupied. A different artist than me, one of greater energy & audacity perhaps, might have dismantled the best display (the one where they also made keys?) & simply re-installed it somewhere to great acclaim. 

Alas, not being that artist, I, instead, shrunk those spaces into the drawers of the cabinet. And then later, expanded them again, into glass vitrines. By virtue of which mimicry, I came to admire the signmakers yet more.

"The View in Fragments: Auspicious Numbers"  Cardboard, milk paint, glass vitrine, 13.5 x 14.25 x 9" Collection of
M-Restaurant Group, Shanghai. On view at Glam, Shanghai.

*

The newly arrived often say to me how much change I must have seen in SH in my time here. Now I get the dazed look that I saw on the faces of the “old china hands" to whom I had made the comment on my arrival. The changes have been huge, of course, but also, so continuous, so incremental that one can be hard pressed to quantify them. 

Back when my archiving began, locals, Chinese and foreigners alike, easily recognized the contents of the drawers and laughed at their nostalgic familiarity. Now, ten years later, there are things in the drawers that the newbies can’t recognize because those things don’t exist in the Shanghai anymore. 

The auspicious phone number shops are now all gone.

Before: My IP man.* (see below.)          After: The Q that replaced the auspicious numbers shop. 

I don’t know what my phone seller thinks of having moved in from the curb to the antiseptic, climate-controlled environment of the Q. Probably he’s glad to be part of the great Chinese accomplishment of pulling millions out of poverty into, at the very least, a modest middle class-ness. There’s no arguing with that. But me, I miss the liveliness of the street, the paintings with their telling scripts, the quirky spaces that evolved out of their owners’ needs & ingenuity, all those small moments of individual expression.

A Chinese friend describes spaces as "organized' & "not so organized." On the left,  the corner of the fruit & phone card sellers on Shan Yin Lu back in the days of  "not so organized"; on the right, same corner post-organizing. Better or worse?

In the end, I don’t think my miniature versions really capture much of what I loved about the Auspicious Phone Number shops. It turned out that the dizzying spatial effect of the number paintings requires a full-bodied scale and that the combination of chaos & order that is the street eluded me. What’s left in the drawers is maybe like the transcription of a lost language as rendered by the last remaining non-native speaker but, if only for me, it gives a bit of immortality to the anonymous sign painters & display constructors, recording & preserving just a trace of the endeavors that once gave me so much to admire.

*Re the IP man:

 Inside the shop , maybe 5x7',  were sodas for sale & a tiny side room in which the man's wife cooked. Their little boy sat on a small chair inside the shop at tiny card table that served as his desk & their dining table. A ladder led from the tiny room up to a sleeping space. We were almost the only foreigners in the 'hood then: the man, off to somewhere on his electric bike, gleefully waved if he buzzed by me like he'd spotted a favorite stray cat. One day, just back from the States,  I found the small shop transformed into a Q, a chain convenience store. When I went in & congratulated the IP man, he didn't much respond. Apparently, there's still some market for phone cards, as his old case is now just inside the doorway (you can see the IP behind the bike wheel in the photo.) The pitched roof above the Q sign is the space that was the bedroom for the old shop; perhaps it still is...

From the top: 1. Collection of IP cards for international calling 2-4. Variations on a theme...

Photo credits: Vitrine & full drawer: Bruno David; all others are mine. 

Related posts: Things that Don't Fit in a Drawer #12 ; Drawer #3.3: White Tile Buildings

Drawer #3.4: Our Founder or the Laoban Brand

A miasma, according to the dictionary, is "a poisonous atmosphere formerly thought to rise from swamps and putrid matter and cause disease" and today Shanghai is wrapped in one. My lungs hurt and my head is thick. I’m hacking like a local. 

I duck into the closest Family Mart to pick up some lozenges & there's the Ricola right next to the cash register. But no, I think, what I really need is “Golden Throat.” A box of which I find in the rack of chinese remedies across the way. I’m a little shocked, a little stricken even, to realize that my preferred brand of throat lozenge is a local one. It might be a sign that I have been here too long, that I’ve actually acculturated.

At least I think it’s the Golden Throat Dule Lozenge [sic] but the little portrait photo on the box is All Wrong. 

Who’s this woman? What’s become of the black & white guy, the one with the comb-over, whom I've come to trust as the almighty reliever of cold misery? My suspicion-wrought-by-fakes meter kicks in: maybe it’s not Golden Throat at all but an imitation, an ineffective pirated version. But, on close inspection, the colors of the box, the [entirely un-soothing] moire striping of green & yellow & blue & white, seem exactly familiar & so I purchase the box. Inside the box, in the gold foil wrapper, the lozenges are in hermetically-sealed packaging rather than in their former sticky glob but the old soothing vapor is still the same & my hacking subsides…

Once, in my first months in Shanghai, I bought some vials of lord-knows-what for their stripy packaging & the grainy pokerface portrait that graced them. “Who’s this guy?” I asked a friend, thinking I’d learn of some cultural icon, some Chinese Betty Crocker or Quaker Oats guy.  But no, after scrutinizing the portrait, the friend handed back the container & shrugged, “Lao ban." (老板.) 

Lao ban is the Chinese word for boss and/or proprietor and also the title by which you address said person. It's a word you learn early on & use all the time: is the laoban here? Laoban, how much does this cost? Lao 老 is the word for old but in an honorific sense: if you, in your transaction with the laoban, are the lao pengyou (老朋友／the old friend), you get a sweeter deal. 

If it’s a woman boss, like our new Golden Throat chickie, she’s a lao ban niang／老板娘. Sometimes - it comes with another twinge of shock - I overhear our driver referring to me as the lao ban niang.

There’s a portrait of another lao ban niang on the awning of a restaurant that's on my bike route.

  

                      Before                                             After

I think of her as the Lao ban niang of Pig Sty Alley before she let herself go, maybe when she was just beginning the training that transformed her into the ferocious Kung Fu Mistress of Steven Chow’s hilarious send-up, KungFu Hustle. 

The force of that lao ban niang’s “lion’s roar” can bring her whole neighborhood to a stand still & she’s hell on her meek little husband.  [Spoiler alert: she's secretly one of the Good Guys.]

My chest’s feeling a little clearer after a few dule (?) lozenges but my stomach’s a little queazy. Maybe it's just Pig Sty Alley on my mind, but what’s the Golden Throat lao ban niang done with the lao ban? A hostile takeover? Or something even more nefarious?  And this, ladies & germs, is how the Cabinet turns into Historical Record: for soon maybe no one will even remember the Lao ban with his big forehead & his aviator glasses. Soon even I might think I made him up. But here he’ll be in the drawer of Lao ban Brands, preserved for however long plastic foil might last… (oh but why ever didn't I save the box?!?)

Drawer 3.4 from the top: 

1. You know, I still have no idea what these are: shreds of something jerky-like that tastes vaguely licorice-y, vaguely sweet, vaguely salty...The large character on black background is tian meaning heaven which these are not exactly. Yo! Late breaking news! I just read/translated the characters for the very first time in 12 years (I am sooo slow!!) : wu hua guo gan. Dry fig!! 

2. Also no idea but it's here for the poetic look of the laoban with his classic chinese round eyeglass frames (known at our house as "PuYi style" after the ones worn by the last emperor of China.) The back of the box is graced with little "putti," a very un-Chinese image. Manufactured in Hong Kong so the characters are written in traditional Chinese characters, not the simplified ones used on the Mainland. 

3. My man, Laoban Golden Throat, may he rest in peace. 

4. Close-up of the portrait in #1: why would something that looks like a mug shot of the Cambodians done away by Pol-Pot seem like a enticing sales pitch?        

Photos: Full drawer, Bruno David; all others are mine.

Related posts: Drawer 1.2: Hell Meds, Drawer 8.1: Traditional Chinese Meds

Cabinet on the Move

Another long hiatus here on the blog as the Cabinet of Curiosities made the Big Move from Saint Louis, Missouri to Bakersville, North Carolina...along with all the stuff we've had in storage for the past 10 years (!!)

All this time that I have been posting about it, the Cabinet has been quietly minding its own business in the beautiful downtown StL loft of my friend, architect and professor, Peter MacKeith.

Former Associate Dean at the Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Art at Washington University in  St Louis and now in Fayetteville as Dean of the Fay Jones School of Architecture at the University of Arkansas,  Peter wrote a wonderful thoughtful essay, This Phenomenal City: Christina Shmigel's Shanghai, in St Louis 2011, for the catalogue of my show at Bruno David Gallery.

The journey of the Cabinet from Shanghai to StL was quite the travail. First stuck in customs in NYC, then caught in blizzards, it finally arrived two weeks late for the actual opening of my show.  On the night of the second opening, it nearly got snowed out again. So I'm very grateful to Peter for offering post-show to give it safe harbor & for all the years it has had in the good company of John Watson's sculpture (far right of photo above) and Peter's collection of blue shirts...

Now the Cabinet is in my new studio, buried under boxes of all the other work from that St Louis show - plus boxing bags & golf clubs & dozens of other things for which we can't believe we paid storage fees...it's like having the Goodwill truck deliver donations... 

The Cabinet of Curiosities goes on the road again (oh the weight) in the spring for my show in Washington, D.C. at the Hillyer Art Space. Opening 4/1/16: come open drawers, live and in person!

What Do You Love Most About Shanghai...

...is the question I most dread while Stateside (where I have been these past few months.)

What, if anything even, do I love about Shanghai?

Do I love the food? Not especially & sometimes not at all.
The people? Only a statistically insignificant percentage of the population.
The air quality? Like Rick about the waters in Casablanca: I was misinformed.

Makes me feel like a complete curmudgeon.

So, in the face of The Question, it was a very good thing that, yesterday, I went for a walk.

(Actually it was a few days ago but technology has stymied me: the photos below are meant to be the slide show found here.) 

Because, as I walked, I was reminded that there really is a thing I love most about Shanghai & it's also the thing that the Cabinet of Curiosities is about.

The walk that I walked was mapped by the artist Petra Johnson for her multi-city project Walk with Me. Accompanied by another walker, usually a stranger to her, Petra walks a predetermined route. At 15 fixed points or "islands," her companion is given a small slip of paper with a prompt that frames the next section of the route: "observe a moment of kindness" makes the street a very different place from "identify a moment of tension" (which was marked on my walk by two parked bicycles suddenly falling over of their own accord.) The responses to the prompts are noted down & kept in an archive called the Composition of the Ordinary.

Starting at a kiosk on Shaoxing Lu, a very sweet street, well known to me as the street where Petra lived when I first came to Shanghai (& she was among the very first people I met here & was often a guide in those early years as well...) we wended our way thru streets unknown to me until, finally, we arrived, several hours later, at the Power Station of Art, the former power station that now houses the Shanghai Biennale & other mega-sized shows of contemporary art. Skirting new high rises, flashy commercial developments and broad traffic-filled roadways, the route ran like a hidden river, along streets & lanes seemly unchanged since I first encountered Shanghai 10 (!?!) years ago.

I walked with Petra (top photo) and sinologist & curator Anja Goette in real time but while I walked in Shanghai, they walked in Berlin. Anja opened the prompts in Berlin, & by way of WeChat, we overlaid the two cities with moments of surprising synchronicity. This world is a strange and mysterious place.

What startled He-Whom-I'm-Trailing & me the most, and constantly, when we were newly here was the intimacy with our co-inhabitants that the city imposed upon us: a man scrubbing inside his boxer shorts at a fire hydrant, a woman at the curb washing her hair, a child testing the aerodynamics of scrap of  paper in the sprawling sidewalk chaos of his family's fruit stand, sleepers of all genders & ages sprawled on cots & lounge chairs, escaping airless rooms for the slightly cooler air of the street... The line that divided private space from public space seemed hardly to exist.

But with the modernization of Shanghai, that feeling of intimacy subsided. The sense of a being one in a "school of fish" that I loved in the daily swarm of bicycles (see post re: Little Pink) disappeared with the advent of metro lines & automobiles; the open-air street life shuttered up into glass-fronted shops & air-conditioned mega-malls. Mobs of trendy(ish) young couples trawling for international brands replaced the small posses of card-players with their undershirts rolled to air their bellies in the summer heat.

And so it came upon me with a rush of feeling when I found that curious and disconcerting intimacy in tact & thriving on the streets of Petra's walk. It raised in me a revery of tenderness towards the city & its details, toward particular individual lives. It returned to me the sense of wonder & amused affection with which I began the Cabinet of Curiosities, the desire to preserve various small moments of extreme & delightful ordinariness, to build a collection of physical objects that would trigger this extraordinary mundane of which I already anticipated losing track. 

As seen on WeChat, Berlin, a vibrant place in my imagination, seemed quiet, historical, spare of objects & beings, almost stunningly so. Helsinki, on my first visit there recently, with its calm & order & the purity of its design sensibility, had me nursing a secret nagging wonder: wouldn't I, over time, feel lulled into boredom there? 

                                                                        

But Shanghai: the sheer busy-ness of what a Chinese friend calls "the not-so-organized" space, the unpredictability, the constant (or incessant & unremitting) stimulation. To walk out the door & see: a plastic basin of eels tip over, eels slithering by the dozen down into the sewer drain; slightly dated dresses catching the breeze on a laundry line, perhaps those of one of the park's ballroom dancers, a woman trying to retrieve the opportunity lost for lipstick & high heels during the androgynous monotony of the Cultural Revolution; a family on low stools, shelling peas, their son fully concentrated on his homework at a card table, the scrawny cat at his feet working over a fish head; a net sack full of bullfrogs 3 times the size of my hand. So many very particular details so very close, so available to one in a flood of strangers.

Petra's walk returned to me the opportunity here for ceaselessly just plain noticing. The crazy density of textures - not necessarily of beauty or culture or history - just of everyday life. The closeness of all these individual souls living out their individual days as part of a huge anonymous blob of 22 million beings living all together in this one spot. 

So now next time someone asks the dread question I've got the answer...

(Much thanks to Petra for designing the opportunity & to Anja for the company! That really was a great walk!)