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

Things that Don't Fit # 8: Shanghai on Film & in Hackerspace

(It's a very long one but there are super fun links all the way thru...)

Way back in the spring, NYU Shanghai Instructor, Dr. Anna Greenspan, presented Episode 6 of a great series of public conversations that she has initiated. "All Tomorrow's Parties: Summoning Creativity in Shanghai" brought together a wide range of people working in a diversity of "hacker" spaces/hackerspaces in both China & in the US...oh heck, it's too hard to put in my own words so here's from the publicity...

This event probe[d] the connections between the informal networks of shanzhai production and the open innovations of DIY (do it yourself) Maker culture in order to explore the fertile zones of creativity emerging between the dense commercial webs of cheap ‘copycat’ electronics, and the back-room tinkerers playing with the latest developments in open source hardware.

To decode that a little, shanzhai, the Mandarin word for "copycat," is used to describe the small Chinese factories that create knock-off versions of well known electronic products, often with great innovation and speed, and at much lower cost. (For an abstract of Anna's paper on the subject, click here.) The DIY Maker Culture refers to a mindset of self-sufficiency that is credited to Punk culture's production of zines & private recordings but that now adds the dimension of new technologies like 3-D printing & robotics. (Sorry if I'm over explaining but I knew none of this pre-event...)

Among the speakers was Tom Igoe, the co-founder of Arduino,  a... yea, again, better I just quote... "a single-board microcontroller designed to make the process of using electronics in multidisciplinary projects more accessible."  Since even just writing a blog is a technical challenge for me, I'm a little hard pressed to explain Arduino except to say that it has opened the doors for lots of artists to bring animation of light, movement, sound & sensors into their work.

After the panel, Anna, finding me in a blaze of fascination, remarked what half of me had been thinking, "What you could have done with the Cabinet if you'd known about Arduino!" And I replied what the other half of me was thinking, "Thank god, I didn't know about Arduino."

But!

If I had known about Arduino...

I'd still be working on the bloody drawers & I would definitely want to put in microcontrollers so that  opening a drawer would trigger a video of one of the great Shanghai films to which I have just been introduced.  (Ha! Finally some visuals for those of you who hung in there thru all that tech talk!)

Like Labourer's Love from 1922, in which a fruit peddler falls for the daughter of a chinese medicine man. To win her father's approval, he must increase the father's business. His neighbors, upstairs, are driving him nuts with their carousing & their mahjong playing (an experience all too familiar from our own lane living!)  And so (spoiler alert!) he cuts thru the stair treads, the badmashers all come tumbling down, the doctor gets them as clients & the fruit peddler gets his girl...all with great sound effects!

Click here for the video.

In her recent lecture, "Shanghai on Film," Linda Johnson, the owner of Madame Mao's Dowry & a great collector of Chinese propaganda posters & High Communist era journalistic photography,

pulled together an amazing set of clips depicting Shanghai from the early days of film thru the 1990's.

Here's Linda's whole film list...(a few links to films online follow below...)

Linda did a fantastic job of illuminating a number of fascinating themes - how film stories were tied to prevailing political ideologies, how the modernity of the city was depicted in celebration and in shame, how prostitution acted as a metaphor for oppression. But the idea that really opened my eyes to Shanghai afresh was how the density & complexity of the living space in the lanes lends itself to street theater - one watching what one's neighbors are up to across the way as though a spectator at a [comedic] opera - and how cinematographers really used that theatricality of Shanghai's urban space to great advantage.

Here from "Street Angel," 1937, across the space of the lane, a romance grows by bird song. The young girl is played by Zhou Xuan, whose famous voice creates the atmosphere of yearning and nostalgia in Wong Kar Wai's great film, In the Mood for Love (or check out drawer #6.7.)  I, of course, love this scene for its dormer window... (see drawers 2.7  & 2.3)

For the whole film, with English subtitles, click here. In her research, Linda discovered that the director,Yuan Muzhi, must have been really pleased with the sequence that plays behind the opening credits in "Street Angel" as he'd already used it earlier in his "Cityscape/Scenes from a City", 1935.  Though things like the wedding procession of the cross-eyed(!) bride & magic tricks with coins of Mexican silver are no longer to be seen in Shanghai, so many other things in the film - the neon lights, the bronze lions, the ear-cleaning - are entirely familiar to anyone living here 78 years later.

One of my favorite visual tropes from these Shanghai movies is the sectioning away of the facade of a lane house to reveal the occupants of the various floors, the camera panning from top story down to bottom as though on an elevator, documenting the diversity of economic and social classes.  Zheng Junli's 1949 classic, Crows & Sparrows, begins in the posh top floor apartment, where the rich wife of a corrupt government official awaits a potential buyer for the property. The camera pans past the floorboards down to the next lower floor, into the chaotic & lively family space of a happy food peddler, who sings raucously away as his wife stacks his merchandise; meanwhile, in the room across the way, the schoolteacher & his wife are anxiously setting all his subversive radical literature on fire (a great moment in which he slides the smoldering mess under the bed to appear not-so-innocently reading with his daughter just as the prospective buyer arrives...) Finally, on the ground floor in a small backroom, is the former landlord....who, judging by the expression on prospective buyer's face, is living in stinking squalor...& the smell must be pretty bad as Mr Buyer totally missed the smoke in flat 2B...



For the whole film, click here.

Hmmm, just occurs to me that all that stacking of types of occupants, divided by floors, is conceptually not too far off from 4 Related Objects sorted out into the Compartments of a Cabinet Drawer... one can't get very far away from oneself, can one.

If you are in China, you might as well save all these links until you're back in the Lands of Unblocked Youtube.

Because, after all, who needs the movies when the neighbors are no doubt up to something easily as amusing...

Drawer # 6.7 : Opera Mops

There are not a few days when I wonder what exactly happened to my aesthetic in China, "shanghaied" by a color palette too highly & discordantly keyed for my "real" taste, by a maximalism of decoration & pattern & tacky materials not at all in keeping with my pre-China work. I mean, was there any way to even imagine ten years ago, while welding rusty steel sheet into industrial forms, that I would some day arrive at this drawer?

Sometimes, when I look at this Shanghai work from outside myself, it puzzles me: is it my real work or some crazy detour down a road somewhere between the Beijing Opera Props Shop & the peddler's cart...

There's a piece of art school advice that I sometimes hear in my head. Not a piece of advice I'd think to give, but I've heard it from students who have heard it from their teachers: that the trick to making work that's authentically yours is to make art as you did when you were a a kid. And this work I make now, without much in the way of tools or equipment, certainly is that: a return to making something simply out of what's at hand.

And then there's what I think of as the DP [displaced persons] thing. A friend here, the writer Lisa Movius, likes to point out that while we foreigners think of ourselves as "ex-pats", we're really economic migrants just as much as the "floating population" of laborers come to the city from the Chinese countryside.

Which is an ironic turn in life for me, the child of immigrants, albeit political rather than economic refugees, people who found their way to America post WWII via DP camps. The experience of which was vivid to me as a child as it dominated the conversations of the adults around me. "Oh," they'd slap each other on the back after church & say, "I haven't seen you since Camp." By which they didn't mean Summer.

It struck me one day, at the performance of an english-language theater company, that life here is in its way kind of like DP Camp: a microcosm of the world left behind recreated in a foreign place. Theater erupts as soon as any group of exiles congeals: there was a theater company in the DP camp at Bertesgarten where my mother & her family were interned and even in some of the concentration camps. There's clearly some essential human need that's satisfied by the interpretation of life thru drama. Art doesn't even need community, just materials, as witnessed by the things that made it from DP camp to my parents' house in Queens: from packages of silk stockings, scrap bits of backing board used for paintings; parachute silk for embroidery; aluminum cans for bracelets... not unlike the detritus of Shanghai that end up in the drawers.

That's what I'm thinking when I'm outside the work.

When I'm inside the work, at my best, I'm amusing myself, indulging in the over-the-topness that the material world here inspires...wondering how to turn this latest stripey mop on its head...with an assist from a willing student in an American Culture class... and into Beijing Opera headware. Taking it from functional object to gesture to object transformed... the quotidian become theater.

Last night at the Lit Fest, with this post nearly written, I got to see Chris Doyle, my favorite of all cinematographers, and, with director Wong Kar Wai, the creator of some of my favorite Chinese films, In the Mood for Love,  & Chungking Express. Doyle, his head shaved by Ai Weiwei, in a multi-media presentation called Away with Words, interviewed himself thru his Chinese incarnation, Du Kefeng, about process, motivation, meaning, language/wordlessness. It was transcendent: one of those [rare-ish] moments when you feel the glory of your calling.

I was too transfixed to take notes. What stays in mind is Doyle circling in, again and again, to the need for engagement with where you find yourself,  to revealing the things, masked by familiarity, that an outsider's eye can see and finally (the one quote I did write down) to manifesting "the bridge between what you see and how you respond to it."

So maybe it's not a detour, maybe I'm not as lost as I thought I was. Still, it's kind of a weird aesthetic...

If you happen to be in the northeast far-reaches of Shanghai, please come try on the Opera Mop & other hats made from household goods & pearls at "Shanghai Crowns & Fascinators." Opening Tues, March 19th, 3-5 pm. Thanks to the Center's director, Jenny Tarlin, for the opportunity!

American Culture Center
University of Shanghai for Science & Technology
516 Jungong Road, Yangpu
Shanghai 200093021 5512 3295 (China - Office)

From the top: 1 & 4.  Pompoms from Beijing Opera headware, fake pearls; 2 & 3 fragments from headware (metal screen, epoxy, paint, blue fabric, wire springs & fake pearls) in the pattern of "happy clouds"  See post # 16 for related images. Photo credit for drawer: Bruno David