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 in a Drawer #12: To Give or Not to Give Up

In the days of old, when He-Whom-I'm-Trailing & I first lived in Shanghai, before Skype & pre- weChat, in order to make an international call, we needed something called an IP card.

The IP Card gave you a super long string of numbers that you had to punched in to your phone in order to access an international line. Somewhere in the course of the sequence of numbers, you inevitably screwed up which meant you had to punch that whole incredibly long set of numbers, sometimes several times, before you finally got a [crackly] line thru to the States. It could drive you nuts. If you needed help in [so-called] English, the IP card gave a number for that too. That help number gave you two options: you could "press 1" to hear...umm... something not quite intelligible... Or, you could "press 2 to give up."

Which also became the code for "having a really bad china day."

 

So, yesterday, on the street, I tried to decipher the meaning of this t-shirt ... If it's advertising a help line, then, painfully, the phone number is one digit too long.

You might as well "press 2."

Which is the gallows humor way around to the real point of this post: to say how proud I am of two "Everyday Heroes" who are putting their time in on Not Giving Up On Yourself: my nephew, Tim Shmigel, who raised $41,000AUS to date for Lifeline, an Australian crisis support and suicide prevention organization, by walking 6000 kilometers from the bottom to the top of Australia (and then biking back down to Sydney!) and my brother, Peter Shmigel, who has just taken on the challenge of growing Lifeline's outreach by becoming its CEO. Amazing beings, both of them!

Tim's goal is to raise $60,000 so, if you've the inclination to help, here's the donation link: https://give.everydayhero.com/au/tim-56 Any size contribution is deeply appreciated!

Drawer #1.3: Predatory Goldfish, on Wheels

…which, actually, with a little research, turns out to be a Predatory Carp.  

Which, according to my Chinese Motifs book, is distinguished by 1. its scales 2. “its wide mouth & two pairs of barbels attached to its upper lip” 3. its long dorsal fin. Homophone Alert: carp is (li 鲤) which, depending on its tone, can mean profit (li 利) or it can mean power (li力)…but a “carp among lotuses (lian lian you yu 莲莲有鱼)"  plays the lian 莲 of lotus against the lian 连 of again (”again and again,”  lian lian 连连 ) and the yu 鱼of fishes against the yu 余 of surplus to wish you again & again may you have an excess of wealth... or carp. 

But calling this drawer CARP wouldn’t really make you want to open it, would it…and open it you should because it’s really about Again & Again, Abundance of Delight. 

Like the pondful of fake lotuses you discover behind the Jade Buddha Temple … 

 and the troves of tassels at the Notions Market…

and the Mid-Lake Teahouse mid-Yu Garden, familiar to you on arriving in Shanghai  from the novel you are reading by Qiu Xiaolong in which policeman/poet Chief Inspector Chen has a clandestine meeting in the 1990's with his informer, Old Hunter. To reach the Teahouse, they, like you, have traversed a demon-defying ”nine-turn” (a.k.a. zigzag) bridge (see drawer 5.3) “full of tourists at every turn: People pointing at the lotus flowers swaying in the breeze, throwing bread crumbs to the golden carp swimming among the blossoms.”  And photographing each other & themselves like mad.

Not to mention the rare delight inside the cabinet of being released from the tyranny of the grid (only 4 other drawers are missing a divider: 1.5, 2.3, 3.2 & 3.5…) so that the goldfish toy, sold by the tiniest, most ancient, slip of a woman from her shop that is merely a cupboard attached to the outside wall of her lane house, can skitter about as the drawer slides open… 

A Swedish friend, just six months into her Shanghai life, asks, “Have you found that your aesthetic changed after you came to China?” How else to explain the hot fuchsia Crocs in my closet, linens on my bed the color of orange marshmallow peanut candies, window curtains covered in sequin daisies...

For other related drawers, see Drawer 5.3 & Drawer 8.3 & Drawer 8.2 to hear the  monks chanting at the Temple...

Drawer 1.3: From top: 1. Chinese Knot Tassels whose color combinations never fail to send me; 2. Carp pull toy with small carp swallowed inside; chinese brocade in water or seaweed pattern; 3. Sample of tea from the Huixinting Tea House, Yu Garden, Shanghai. Photo credits: Full drawer: Bruno David; all others: Christina Shmigel

White Monkey: The View from the Other Side

One of the very first words you learn to recognize, as a non-chinese speaker in China, is the word laowai. The two characters read as old/老 & outside/外; together, 老外, they mean "foreigner." You hear the word ...well, just ALL THE TIME. Walk into a shop & it will sound out like a public service announcement for the attention of all those in the room who might not have noticed that yes, indeedy, you are not Chinese. Politely, you'd be addressed as a waiguoren 外国人 , an "outside-country person", so laowai's maybe a little rude, a little slangy, maybe kin to a Southerner calling NYer me a Yankee.

Sometimes I hear it while I'm on my bike: stopped at a light, the rider on the back of the motorcycle next to me informs the rider in the front: "laowai." It's my favorite [obnoxious] trick to turn to that keen observer of phenomena, and ask, excitedly, in Chinese, "Really? Where?! Where?!" This almost always produces a look of total consternated embarrassment on the faces of my fellow travelers. Very satisfying.

It's the Foreigner's Cabinet of Chinese Curiosities because I'm definitely an outside person looking in, making up sense for things foreign to me. Here, from the New York Times, a  slightly cynical, very funny/cringe-inducing video of the view from the other side. In low moments, in his former position, HWI'mT would bitterly decry that all he'd been hired to do was to be the "white monkey" at various functions & now, who's to argue...

                    

We've started house hunting in the suburbs of Kunshan, a small city (only by Chinese standards: 7 million pop) an hour or so from Shanghai and exactly smack dab inside the housing bubble described in the video. Now we can swing into negotiations with the secret bargaining weapon: we can be the loss leader! The manager of one "Canadian style" (?!?) compound has already told me that he'd be so happy to have us, a better quality of tenant, professors & artists, culture people, in his compound. Extra discount if we swan about in our Royal Mountie hats?

The Smoke Flowers of Cai Guo Qiang

In Chinese, there are firecrackers, 鞭炮, bian pao, in whose name the second character gives a nice little onomatopoetic blast. And there are fireworks, 烟火, yan huo, which literally translates as "smoke fire", which I misheard early on as the very poetic 烟 花, yan hua: "smoke flowers."

But in the case of the fireworks performance of the artist Cai Guo Qiang... they really were smoke flowers. Eight minutes of colored smoke (environmentally safe food coloring) on the themes of "elegy, remembrance & consolation" that gave me that feeling one sometimes feels so powerfully, of being privileged to be right here, right now, at this very moment in time.

Here's a little gif of images shot during the opening salvo of his current exhibition, "The Ninth Wave," at Shanghai's Power Station of Art. Thru 10/26/14.

Click here for the artist's video of the full performance ('cause it's really not the same without the pao!),  here to experience Cai Guo Qiang's artistic power & charisma,  and here for Peasant da Vincis,
an early project of Cai's in Shanghai, that I also truly loved.

Drawer # 2.2: Slowly Trotting in with the Year of the Horse

I've been lost in life's sauce... finally surfacing today with the post that should have gone out for Chinese New Year's. But then again, given the state of the world these days (O Ukraine, O so many places & people & things), it's never too late to send out auspicious symbols. 

These being Chinese auspicious symbols, of course, there have to be a lot pertaining to what the street beggars call "moneymoney"...

The Laughing Buddha, Budai, is apparently laughing all the way to the bank, teetering on one gold ingot while hefting another upward. Perhaps better to share it with the God of Wealth, hovering on his own ingot, distinguished by the side flaps on his royal cap and flanked by clouds/yun/云 of
good fortune/yun/运 which are not just lined with silver but laden with gold ingots...

After money, there's food.

Fish/Yu/鱼 you may have read about before on the blog...fishes wish you abundance & prosperity. These ones in the drawer are especially special as they are paired in two: marital happiness. Though they look a lot less happy in their twosomeness out on the street,

like the fate predicted by her mother for writer Amy Tam if she didn't look both ways before crossing the street: "smashed flat two eyes one side of face."

The word for peanut contains the word for "giving birth," not to mention that the nuts in their shell bear a semblance to twins in a womb, so no surprise here: they're auspicious for fertility & abundance. Oranges are the house gift of choice at CNY. The characters of their name can read as "lucky plant," their color associates them with gold, & roundness, in general, is a good thing. Pineapples have too many homophones to mention so let's just say, riches & good fortune. I love them best collapsible.

The character fu for good fortune 福 shows up several times in the drawer as well as, to my surprise, on our front gate, stuck there, I guess, by the neighborhood committee. A good thing as I got to say "fu is upside down" which sounds exactly the same as "good luck has arrived". In this case, the homophone works in my favor but, mostly, people wonder what the hell I'm talking about when I speak chinese. 

Somehow I neglected to stick a bat in the drawer. They're also fu 蝠, good for fortune & happiness, unless they get caught in your hair.

At the top of the drawer, there'a teapot charm: Teapot/hu/壶  is homophones with the hu-s that mean "protect" & "blessing" which feels exactly right when you think of someone fixing you a soothing cup of tea. But you've probably never thought of it in this way: according to Patricia Bjaaland Welch's book, Chinese Art, the teapot signifies fertility "ostensibly because of the manner in which the spout dips into the waiting cup." And you thought I was being over the top about those baby peanuts. This interpretation does, however, shine a worrisome light on all those non-functional/sculptural teapots out there in the craft world...

And finally, at the bottom, there's those funny fish bone looking things near where the fishes tails ought to be. Those are (meaninglessly upside down) the character shou 壽 written in the ancient seal script. The shou-s are wishing you a long life. (Here they are in their rectangular form. In their round form, they'd be wishing you a natural death at the end of that long life. It's a good wish but still...)

Even if it is just full of sequins & kitschy gold hollow plastic, this drawer sings out with radiant energy. May it bring good things your way.

Drawer #2.2: Plastic charms gathered from the city's markets, disassembled & reorganized; gold sequins, square & circular, sold in huge sacks at the notions market, more coveted by me than are ingots. Photo credit for drawer: Bruno David; all others are mine. Most of the information on the symbolic meanings of things are from
Patricia Bjaaland Welch's wonderful book
Chinese Art: A Guide to Motifs & Visual Imagery.

And just for fun...a little Horse Year tune courtesy of Marybelle Hu...

                                           

The Writing on the Wall #1

One of my new jobs requires that I visit factories. (Yeah! I get paid to visit factories. How cool is that.)

The other day, in the entry of a factory's administrative building, here's what I saw:

It sent me off into a little cultural reverie.

The Chinese take a certain (justifiable) pride in their ability to "eat bitter" (chi ku/吃苦), i.e. to endure hardship, so that fit right in. But the (american?) upbeat of the "enjoy" startled me. I assumed that Enjoy/Endure somehow came out of the tradition of Chinese proverbs expressed as 4 characters, like get the moon from the bottom of the ocean = 海底捞月, but the factory's laoban, the Boss, pleased & amused when asked, credited, instead, a European playwright whose name was escaping him... (like Chinese names inevitably escape me...)
Well, it turned out (thanks to Google) to be Goethe. One of my early friends & guides-to-life here, the German artist Petra Johnson, used to often remark on the sympathy between Chinese & German philosophical positions...which, given that what I know about either fits into a teaspoon, I had to take her word on. And then, suddenly, here's that connection, 18c Weimar to 21c China, writ large on the factory wall.

The Boss says that once, unexpected words, arriving in his mailbox, saved him from despair.

There's lots that I love about the factory visits. For one thing, there's the familiarity & pleasure of being in a workshop: so far, the factories resemble not the sweatshops of one's imagination but the production studios of various artist/craftspeople back home, just greatly expanded. For another thing, there's a kind of ease of communication because, while we have no spoken language in common, the workers & I share a language of materials and processes... something a kin to what I imagine musicians experience across cultures.

But what I love most about going out to the factories is how it shakes up my consciousness. The reality  in which one lives appears so steadily & unwaveringly as Reality... & then, encountering all these lives, all these dreams & aspirations, all this endurance & hard work & ingenuity & pride out at the factories, it so vividly brings home that there are so very many Realities out there, some so dramatically different from one's own.

And yet, proves the writing on the wall, between centuries & cultures & lots in life, there's connective thread... It ain't just a job.

Drawer #1.7: The Peony & The Orchid

To talk casually
About an iris flower
Is one of the pleasures
Of the wandering journey. 

From The Record of a Travel-worn Satchel by the 17th ct. Japanese poet Basho

The peony, mu dan  牡丹花, is a much favored flower among the Chinese. It was named "male vermilion flower" in the late sixth century by the infamous concubine of the Emperor Gaozhong who later went on to rule China as the Empress Wu. When depicted in paintings & decor,  it signifies power, wealth and rank. Surprisingly, given its lushness, it is associated with yang 阳, the male principle.

The orchid,  lan hua  兰花, is associated with yin 阴, with women, beauty and virtue ( & not "sex without love" as in Proust...) It stands for refinement & elegance; for me, the orchid conjures up Shanghai's Glamour Bar where it is always on display & "hai pai," the style that defined Shanghai in the good ol'/bad ol' days. (For a taste of all those flavors, here's the podcast of Lynn Pan talking about her  book, Shanghai Style: Art & Design Between the Wars.) At the flower markets, I revel in the rush of seeing entire room-sized stalls filled solid with violet & white phalaenopsis orchids.

I put the drawer together for the colors...apparently I, too, think that violet & pink look good together...and for the fakery of the blooms...so I'm surprised to read all these associations in my favorite book on Chinese symbology, Patricia Bjaaland Welch's  Chinese Art: A Guide to Motifs & Visual Imagery. Turns out that the two flowers also both represent spring...

and then there's the serendipitous conjunction of yin & yang for the season of the birds and the bees...

Drawer 1.7: From top (1) Artificial orchid, with support post decorated in gold lame as is often seen here on the columns of buildings...the trick is to tape on long stripes of double sticky tape & then ruche the lame...(2) Artificial peony (3) Metal tin containing traditional chinese medicines (4) Orchid
Photo credit for drawer: Bruno David

Drawer # 4.4: Emptiness

I had a post ready to go for today but the bombings at the Boston Marathon have put me in a darker frame of mind.

By weird synchronicity, i.e. without my planning, Drawer 4.4 remained empty. The number 4 in Mandarin Chinese, si 四, is a homophone for the character si 死, meaning to die or to be dead. So like our number 13, it's a bad luck number...& doubled, like in this, it's super inauspicious for the superstitious. Drawer 4.4 is also, as it turns out, the dead center of the cabinet.

Although I didn't plan its position, I did plan its emptiness. In the treasure hunt of searching through the drawers I wanted moments of...maybe disappointment... or maybe stillness. Or of emptiness, in the way that I, at this moment, understand the Buddhist concept of sunyata.

Writes Buddhist psychologist and teacher, Jack Kornfield in A Path with Heart: 

True emptiness is not empty, but contains all things. The mysterious and pregnant void creates and reflects all possibilities. From it arises our individuality, which can be discovered and developed, although never possessed or fixed.

Here's the story that embodies the idea for me: He-Whom-I'm-Trailing, recently arrived from Shanghai & full of Christmas dinner, falls asleep sitting on the sofa. My aunt, whose sofa it is, is thrilled as it signals to her that he feels fully at ease in her house. My aunt's sister, my mother, is mostly keeping to herself the fact that she's a little appalled by what seems to her like anti-social behavior. For my part, I know that He-Whom-I'm-Trailing is in that state of jet lag where you can be in standing in platform heels at the Glamour Bar on a window ledge above the Huangpu River, watching the burlesque show at their tenth anniversary party & still fall asleep.

[V]oidness does not mean nothingness, but rather that all things lack intrinsic reality, intrinsic objectivity, intrinsic identity or intrinsic referentiality. Lacking such static essence or substance does not make them not exist —- it makes them thoroughly relative.

                                                                                       - Foreword of Mother of the Buddhas by Lex Hixon


So any given situation is "empty" or open & we fill it with what we will.



My heart goes out to all those hurt physically or psychically by the bombings in Boston and especially to the parents of the young Chinese student who lost her life mid-stream. May they all find strength in their recovery.

Virtual Drawer #5: The Writing on the Wall

拆/chai is the Chinese character for "tear open, take apart, dismantle, demolish." It appears graffitied onto walls overnight. The neighborhood those walls encircle will be gone within weeks, if not days.

For me, the writer who best captures the experience of living in this ever-changing China, is Peter Hessler. His first book, River Town, about his time with the Peace Corps in the city of Wuhan on the Yangtze River, served as boon companion and guide in our first years here. In Oracle Bones, written while he was a correspondent in Beijing, he describes chai:

As Beijing changed, that word gained a talismanic quality. Residents cracked 拆 jokes, and local artists riffed on the character. One shop sold baseball caps with encircled 拆 embroidered onto the front. When I hung out in Ju-er Hutong, a neighbor named Old Wang liked to make 拆 puns. "We live in chai nar," he used to say. It sounded like the English word "China," but it meant "Demolish where?"

Shanghai's an ideal place to practice the Buddhist lessons on impermanence & non-attachment: any corner of the city that you discover & come to love is imminently capable of disappearing forever. It  definitely can make one feel "tear open."

Things that Don't Fit in a Drawer # 5: 2013 Shanghai Literary Festival

Fervent reader that I am, I've always imagined illiteracy to be a terrible thing. But it's one thing to imagine it and another thing to actually live your days unable to read all the text that flows around you...

So I'm always super grateful for March when for three weeks we of the english reading world are treated by M-on-the-Bund to scads of books and writers at the Shanghai Literary Festival. Founded 11 years ago by restauranteur Michelle Garnaut & friends over Martinis, every year the Lit Fest brings an incredible mix of writers to Shanghai, some of them speaking of things China, others ranging far and wide, from breadsticks with Nick Maglieri to the Simpsons with Matt Groening to Bel Canto with Phillip Eisenbeiss. (For this year's schedule including author interviews, click here.)

Some remarkable moments from years past:

Junot Diaz in 2010 inspiring a packed house of a much-younger-than-average festival crowd: "Silence, absence is the basic idiom for artists. What we do is take silence and we make presence...The power of silence is this: when you leave something off the table, people don't even know that it's a choice. Artists give people back their choices. We give people intimate contact with themselves. There's very few professions that do that." (Podcast here.)

Amy Tan several years ago: a Chinese woman in the audience began to ask a question about her daughter's choices in life and it was as though the character of Tam's mother had materialized from the novels to suddenly sit there among us. ("You don't look, you get smash flat. [Like fish, two eyes one side of face.]") It was so universally apparent that everyone in the audience began to laugh. Amy looked up to acknowledge the laughter, and with that look, gently silenced it. She spoke with great empathy to the worried mother, whose well-educated daughter wanted to become an organic farmer, a peasant to her mother's way of thinking. It was one of the greatest moments of grace that I have ever witnessed.

John Banville, the year he won the Booker Prize for "The Sea": the Festival newish then, so on that particularly foggy, dreary day only some 30 souls in the room looking out towards the Huang Pu as Banville read. The silver grey light, the black hulks of coal barges on the working river so in keeping with the novel's voice: "What a little vessel of sadness we are sailing in, this muffled silence thru the autumn dark." When the fog horns began their warnings, Banville paused & we all sat there listening to their echoing calls with great satisfaction at the rightness of it all.

And always, the great Michelle on stage threatening to through your cellphone out the window should it go off during an author's talk...

Things that Don't Fit in a Drawer #3: Sounds like Fish

                                  

Seems just yesterday I was posting about signs of winter & here they are already, the signs of Spring. Or at least of Spring Festival as, entirely unusually, it is snowing today in Shanghai.

Gigantic fishes, splayed flat and dehydrated  - some as long as 6' - hanging in formation in the market streets, chickens & sausages & mysterious pork parts suspended outside windows & from the bamboo poles of the neighbors' clothes racks. The first winter we lived here I watch with horror as the strung-up chicken of our neighbor turned blacker & blacker over the course of several weeks, then mysterious donned a newspaper cape for several more. Now I know that chicken as the Iberico Ham of Shanghai. (Though I'm still sort of glad not to be invited for dinner given the particle pollutant count around here...)

年年有余 Nian Nian You Yu is the New Year's blessing that accompanies the fishes. In my bad Chinese, that means Year Year Have Fish. But the sound of Yu/Fish is also the sound of Yu/Abundance or Surplus. And so I wish you: May every year be abundant. May every year there be extra.