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

Drawer #66: Pinwheels!

Summer breeze thru a shanghai pinwheel

A video posted by @cshmigel on Jul 21, 2015 at 11:11am PDT

The summer blew by without blogging but the Cabinet itself, in its new NC home, did not go unattended. After several years of only opening drawers digitally, it was interesting to re-install all the curiosities back in the drawers & give the whole project a good think.

There were several drawers that were empty when the cabinet shipped out in the late fall of 2010 and several small book projects that were meant to be in the drawers that never got done and a box of things in Shanghai that have been wanting to get into those empty drawers... & so that's what the next months are dedicated to as I get the Cabinet ready for a show opening April 1 in Washington D.C. at the Hillyer Art Space.

Along the bottom of the cabinet are 3 large drawers.

And  it occurred to me that one of them would be a good home for my Shanghai Daily book, seen below as installed in my first "chinese" show, Chinese Garden for the Delights of Roaming Afar, at Laumeier Sculpture Park back in 2005.

The book is a collection of articles & photos extracted from the Shanghai Daily, the government-run English language newspaper, the newspaper scraps taped into the study notebooks used here by school children. In my first years here, I loved reading the Shanghai Daily with its strange facts about things like the percentage of cookware at the market found to be faulty & the obstructive dangers of laundry displays & the doings of the Beijing Opera school (above) & moralizing editorials about visiting your elderly parents...I mean, with all that is going on the world these days, how can you not love "Chicken & Chatting prove keys for long life" from today's edition:

Gong Jingfa wipes the forehead of mother-in-law Li Suqing, 116, at the family home in the Pudong New Area yesterday. Li, who moved to the city with daughter Tian Yulan and Gong from northeast China’s Liaoning Province in 1975, is Shanghai’s oldest resident. She was named at a ceremony yesterday as one of the city’s “longevity stars.” The Chinese character on the wall means longevity. — Zhang Suoqing

I also loved the little notebooks I taped my selections into, with their retro-futuristic covers (as Shanghai's urban philosopher, Anna Greenspan, might call them) and their interior pages gridded & lined in various ways appropriate to their subject.

Eventually, I bound all the little notebooks together into a satisfyingly chunky paperback.

Traditionally, Chinese books are soft-covered with stab bindings. Their profiles are relatively slim, perhaps 1/2- 3/4" thick, which means that a long text might require several volumes. These volumes are then encased in a hard board case wrapper that leaves the top & bottom edges exposed. An example with just a single volume:

My friend Petra Johnson has been making great use of this format to document her Walk With Me project & she graciously took me along to the Chinese Art supply store on Fuzhou Lu where she has her cases made. Not only did they make a beautiful wrapper for the Shanghai Daily book - though it must have been mystifying why one would put a beautifully crafted case around such a mess of a book! - they also sold the kinds of papers I'd been looking for when I first started lining the drawers...Not being able to locate those papers then, I resorted to chinese brocades with their acidy bright colors & I suppose it was for the best...they certainly put the noise & the flash, the neon, into the cabinet in a way these papers wouldn't have.  As seen below: the original version of Drawer 66 on the left & the new drawer in progress with the encased book & new papers on the right...

But those violet sequins are going to have to go somewhere; they are just too luscious!