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

Things That Don't Fit # 11: Ghost Mansions

Walking home last night, I was admiring the three-story-brick paper mansion in front of the Buddhist Offerings Store on Bao An Lu, only to turn into our lane to find one set into a chalk circle, ready for fire.

There are earlier posts on silver joss paper ingots & on the addressed red envelopes that the ingots get stuffed into... (though, by the looks of it, this particular photo was taken for the "four of my favorite things" category..)

...on the ghost circles left behind after "festival" days... 

 but here in action is the making of the ash pile:

That's as far as I got with picture taking before I was told "bu yao," meaning "not wanted." So I apologized & quit & just watched as the whole structure collapsed in flames. The rectangles of white cloth (forward of the flame in the photo) were added to the house's embers & then it was the turn of the red envelopes & joss paper cubes (in the foreground) to go up in smoke.

I left the pyre then, feeling that I'd been intrusive enough already. Perhaps, the rites were for the old man whom I had seen, once or twice while he was being evacuated by ambulance, & many more times in the back lane while he took his constitutional supported by a cane & an attendant who invariably announced his age, most recently: 101 years!

The paper mansions reminded me of one that I bought years ago outside a temple in Kunming. The Chinese are very superstitious about what might invite death in so I have kept it out of sight, folded flat inside an album. Once, a westernized Chinese friend who collects beautiful things from the past, showed us some densely embroidered burial shrouds from the Republican Era that he'd unwittingly acquired in a trove of Deco furniture, but he scrambled to hide them as other, Chinese, guests arrived;  he said, "it will make them so nervous if they know these things are here in the house."

But, today, I was suddenly curious about the mansion I owned, apparently a "mod-con" one,  complete with silver Buick:

Note the 4 flower pots on the window sills on the right. They appear on the two other windows sills that frame the doors, so that's 4 again. Number 4  - si/四 - is a homophone with the word for die/death/dead - si/死. You might think, gentle reader, that I am reading too much into this but the Chinese point things like this out to me all the time.

As for the garage... best I could tell, the paper engineers intended for it to fill the rectangular space outside the front door. Which means that you'd have to go thru the garage to get to the grand [coffin-ish?] first & second floor entries. But, then again, probably that ain't no thang for ghosts.

Coda:

It suddenly occurred to me, after writing this post, how inured I've become to a certain category of experience here that was so startling to us when we were newly arrived: the weird intimacy you have/had with strangers by virtue of how much of life is/was lived not behind closed doors.

It happens much less often now as life here has gotten more familiarly middle-class but in earlier years, you'd be in a cab, stalled in traffic, look left & right there, and I mean really, just right there, would be a guy dressed only in his boxers, at an open tap, soaping himself up inside his shorts. Or, at one very busy intersection that included a fire station & its training building, which I regularly biked thru on my way to the studio, a woman squatting on the curb with her head out over the street, a mere foot or two from the tires whizzing by, rinsing shampoo out of her hair with a tranquility I can't even manage in my shower. Or, seen so often we stopped commenting, shop owners seated behind the counter of their frontless shop, brushing their teeth. Death, funerals, so often kept well out of view in American life...& here I just pop in on one, on my way home for the day. Startling...and, apparently, not.

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.