Chinese "Vintage" Design

Contemporary China is not known for its excellent design work in any field, as far as I gather. From architecture to graphic design, package design to fashion design, Western viewers tend to see the underlying concept of design in China as function over form.

And while I can certainly point to many aesthetically unpleasing examples of buildings, magazines, packages, and products in China, I have also been noticing not only an increasing number of boutiques that specialize in quality graphic T-shirts, notebooks, and trinkets, but also old-school package designs that I'm going to term Chinese "vintage." "Vintage" because to me, they look old-timey, and I do believe most of the examples I will cite are in fact well-established brands, but I deduce also that there is a growing collective yearning for nostalgia among younger generations and I wonder how much corporations play into that by creating new "vintage-look" designs.

In contrast to the graphic Ts and trinkets, I can't say that examples of this design aesthetic seems to be increasing in number; I think I've just lately been taking a closer look at the thousands and thousands of packages that I see on the shelves at supermarkets.


One such product is Bee & Flower bar soap. I was recommended these by a friend and former CHENGDOO Magazine columnist Jessie Levene, and I noticed on a trip back home that they are available at the grocery stores in L.A. Chinatown as well. I think these are a fantastic example of the type of package design I'm talking about: the printed-paper wrapping allows the fragrance of the soap to come through; a brief introduction to the soap (in Chinese, English, and Spanish) is included and attached to the package with the gold medallion sticker; each of the four fragrances comes in a different colored paper (sandalwood, brown; rose, pink; jasmine, green; bouquet, dark green) for easy recognition. The soap, by the way, is lovely as well. I've stowed a couple in my closet to ward off bugs, and I use them to wash with, too. Like the introduction claims, they do leave my skin soft and fragrant.



The iconic Shanghai bicycle brands Flying Pigeon and Phoenix offer more examples of this aesthetic. (See logos for both). I'd point you also to photos of my beloved Feige bicycle (which I bought twice, both secondhand; neither lasted more than a few months under my careless ownership), but I couldn't find any.

Much has also been already written in English about the Chinese wushu shoe brand Feiyue, whose design has been licensed to a French company that sells much pricier versions of this classic all around Europe; such shoes have been spotted on the likes of Orlando Bloom. Funnily enough, the shoes are trendy among subculturists in China as well, and they're apparently not very easy to obtain in Chengdu. Last year, I met a guy from Hangzhou who had brought several bags full of the shoes to Chengdu to sell during the Zebra Music Festival. In Shanghai, these shoes go for around RMB30 per pop. The Hangzhou roadside entrepreneur was taking in upwards of RMB100 a pair, he said.

And, of course, with the rising popularity of vintage design, here's a modern take on classic bicycle design.


Images from:
Bee & Flower soaps

Bee & Flower closeup
Phoenix bicycle ornament
Modern vintage bicycle
Flying pigeon logo

Teaching English in China

The American Citizen Services in China finally did something quasi-useful: They've put up an information page for people interested in teaching English in China. Only about 20 years after Americans started coming to China to teach English. Well, better late than never.

Here's the link.

Honestly, I haven't read the whole thing in detail, but it looks fairly thorough, and I think I'll make it my new go-to link when people ask me for advice on teaching English in China.

we wimpy westerners

Rats are an often-noted issue here in Chengdu. Especially recently--perhaps the rodents are feeling the crunch of the economic crisis as well--it seems many of my friends have been complaining about rats scurrying around their apartments.

While I've had rats in my apartment walls for quite some time, they don't seem to come inside, so I let them be. In our office, however, it's quite a different matter. They make quite regular appearances, staging late-night races with each other around the second floor, sliding up and down the Internet cables as if it's a fire station in here, and leaving presents* everywhere.

They ate a small cactus I had bought days after I brought it to the office; the other day, I arrived to find they had been nibbling on the soft foam bun-shaped (and scented) keychain my friend had given to me as a present, although I could hardly blame them as every human who passed by it also instinctively held it to his/her mouth. I confess, I also could not resist taking a bite (before the rat did).

Of the four of us who work in here on a regular basis, three of us are, to varying degrees, afraid of coming into contact withe the creatures. So far, we've managed to catch two of them, one with a glue trap (most of the glue-trap attempts failed miserably, catching only fur and feces), which we had to ask the hired cleaners to carry out, and the other after our intern spotted one scramble into the trash can and called our dear designer to come smash it with a stick.

Yesterday, we were having a coffee in a restaurant whose name I shall not mention when I swore I felt something move under the cushion I was sitting on. I decided it must have just been the cushion so I did nothing about it; but then I felt it again and again. After five or ten minutes of this, finally I stood up and proclaimed something was moving under me. One of the girls in the group chimed in, "Yeah, I hear something!"

So we turned to the waiter, who was watching the whole scene, and said, "There's a rat here!"

"有," he replied, affirming our fears.

Naturally we all jumped up and ran to another table.

Not long after, the boss, who we know quite well, came in.

"Hey, you have a rat in here!" we started yelling.

"I know. It opened the fridge the other day and nibbled on the cheese," he replied casually.

"What!? Opened the fridge?" We didn't believe it.

"Really! It did!" And then he went to the back and pulled out a piece of gnawed-on cheese to prove it.

Later I was skeptical. The boss is quite a prankster, and I wouldn't put it past him to carve out a piece of cheese to make it look like a rat had eaten it just so he could tell us that story.

The next day, we were in the office when the boss starts calling my coworker's name.

"What?" he asks.

The boss starts coming up the stairs to the second floor where we work. "Was it him you saw yesterday?" he starts asking.

Just then he comes into view. In his hand, he's got a cage, with a decent-sized rat in it. We all start yeeking and eeewwwing and heebie-jeebie-ing. "Was it him?" the boss asks again, chuckling and pointing at the rat, whose tail and claws are curling out between the bars of the cage.

I like how the boss, owner of a successful, nationwide chain of restaurants and internationally published photographer, is calmly carrying around a cage with a rat in it--even chuckling at it, or us--and planning, he says, to take it out back and drown it in a few moments while we're sitting here freaking out about the idea of a rat being in our presence.

*Thankfully, I have no idea where this photo was taken.

link time!

Came across a number of interesting posts today that I wanted to share (or, if nobody's reading, at least preserve for myself):

TIME has a couple of stories on international and transracial adoptions, a topic I generally find interesting. China is getting more selective with just who can adopt their orphans, and apparently some Americans aren't very happy about it. Too bad for them, the article reports, more or less.

The transracial adoption report I didn't find as compelling. Didn't agree with much of the sentiment expressed by the interviewees, but at least somebody's finally acknowledging that letting white people adopt non-white babies just might impact how those babies view themselves later in life, and a whole spectrum of other things.

On a completely unrelated note, this post of 45 portraits created out of typefaces is pretty much the most awesome thing I've seen in a while--and I've been lately accused of never crediting anything as awesome.

Lastly, an enjoyable post for 80s fans, Justice fans, and typography nerds--a breakdown of the fonts and logo inspirations used for Justice's DVNO video. If you read the comments, you'll find a link to the blog of the maker of the video, who writes angrily about this post. Drama battle between the French artiste and the geeky font blogger, ha.

forty years

The stories fade so fast, don’t they?

Over a lifetime, they’re forgotten. In three generations, they’re gone.

I vividly recall in my mother’s version of the story, she escaped to Hong Kong. The verb was always the key part.

My father, in his secondhand version of the same story, said that she smuggled out to Hong Kong, on the bottom of a boat.

I thought she got to the U.S. by plane. My sister, then an attorney fresh out of law school, in her write-up of the account said she sailed.

“Plane,” my mother scoffed when I asked her. But to Hong Kong was by boat, and to the port where they departed from Guangdong was by bicycle, a porter-boy transporting her mother and younger brother on the rear rack and my mother, then 8, on the frame in front of the seat. Four people and all their possessions in the world, on one bicycle. 1959.

1999. I ride a magenta bicycle, gloriously free from the weight of passengers. I remember, I arrived by plane. It was only five years ago, and it’s my own memory. If I forget I still have the e-mail from the e-ticket I booked to remind me, somewhere in my account. The early days were recorded on a Livejournal account and in numerous e-mails to friends and family. Later I kept a Word-document diary. I’ve always been one to write things down.

When I tell my first roommate, Ruiqi Aixinjueluo, royal descendent of Manchurian child emperor Puyi, the story of the journey, she frowns. Why do you say “escaped?” she wants to know. That’s what it was, I say.

It must be strange to hear. When Ruiqi studied in the U.K., she came back. And here I am.
--
That's my draft for the Joy Luck Hub/Snub contest Hyphen has posted to their blog. If anybody's reading this, let me know what you think. I think the end gets rough, so I'll probably play around with it a bit before posting it to them.

Body Image; America, China; Western, Eastern

For some reason this is a topic I come back to in my head often. Over a year ago I posted on the topic, and today I felt compelled to post again for the first time in a long time as several circumstances have led me to think about my own body image, as a woman, as a Westerner in China, and how those ideas are influenced by the media around us.

There's some back story to all this, so bear with me. A few days ago, Prince Andrew made an appearance at the Chengdu Bookworm as part of a Sichuan earthquake-sympathy visit (I guess); Chloe and I were invited but rather than joining the mismatched-suit-wearing who's who wannabes hung out on the back sofa, whispering and fidgeting with our mobile phones like bad kids at a middle-school assembly. From this perch we couldn't really see or hear much of what was going on given the apparently failing soundsystem, but we could watch the royal highness's hired security guards, evidently as engaged as we were, picking out magazines one by one from the Bookworm's stash of imported publications for sale, carefully pulling out of their plastic wraps, flipping through them, replacing them in their packagings, and returning them to the racks. At first Chloe and I were observing this phenomenon in silence, giggling at their choices (Cosmo, Us Weekly), but then I started trying to imagine viewing the magazine through the perspective of a young professional Chinese man. 

The first thing I thought was how trashily the celebrities were dressed and/or presented. I assumed the guard, probably in his late 20s to mid-30s, was hoping to get a glimpse of some skanky Western ass, and given that goal, actually, the magazines didn't yield much fruit. Sure, the featured celebrities were dressed in barely-there getups, but there wasn't anything really remotely pornographic about the images. In contrast, you can find nudie magazines and DVDs in China, with sexually explicit photos on the covers, pretty much on every street corner, it seems, between the sex-toy shops and magazine and DVD stands. So on the one hand I thought the American actresses weren't wearing enough clothing; on the other, they were merely teases. 

Then I noticed another thing happening: After he decided there wasn't much of interest to be seen in the photos of the women, the guard started more closely scrutinizing the photos of the male celebrities featured. Then he chose an issue of Men's Health to check out. The cover featured a headless buffed-out man's body. He spent what I felt a fairly good deal of time checking out the abs. He seemed to be fascinated, perhaps admiring, comparing himself. It was at that point that I started thinking about how I'm not bombarded with the images of women that I am bombarded with in the States. I'm not sure that this is true for everybody in China but I'm guessing it might be--we don't have the dozens of gossip magazines awaiting us at every checkout line at every supermarket here, or the endless hours of celebrity-gossip TV programs (that I know of; on the other hand, I don't watch TV, so I could be wrong), and so forth. 

I read, many years back, an article that cited a study that found that women who spend 30 minutes looking at a fashion/beauty magazine felt significantly worse about their bodies than they did before looking at the magazine. I guess you're going to naturally compare yourself to others, and when the images presented are idealized images of supposed perfection, you're always going to come up short.

This body-image stuff is supposed to be trivial, but I've seen countless examples of it affecting women--and men--who are intelligent, analytical individuals. Any Western woman in China who's tried to shop for clothes--unless she's considered small in the West--has probably experienced the overwhelming emotions of being confronted with the fact that she's too big to fit into anything in the entire store. 

Recently we decided to run a 'shopping guide for the Western woman in Chengdu' story for the magazine. The idea was to run the addresses of all the secret spots for clothes foreign women have discovered over the years. I put our intern on the beat, as she had just arrived in the city and said she enjoyed shopping. Perhaps it was a cruel assignment on my part, given that she probably had no idea what she was in store for, and I did, having had a traumatic shopping experience within weeks of my first arriving in China years ago that turned me off any attempt to buy clothes for the next several years. 

On that day, my roommate--a Beijinger who had studied abroad in England for two years--invited me to come shopping with her after work. I gladly accepted, eager to have a local help me navigate the stores since my one attempt at finding shoes earlier was botched, I thought, by my inability to speak Chinese (I later found out it had nothing to do with language barrier and everything to do with my size 9 feet). We went to various stores, with her trying on lots of things and looking fabulous in them, and me, just looking for a pair of jeans, not being able to pull anything all the way over my thighs or zip them up fully. Finally one of the shopkeepers handed me a larger pair, and I celebrated that I was able to get them all the way on--until I stepped out of the dressing room to look in the mirror and realized they were men's jeans. After that I realized, at a U.S. size 8 or 10, I was just too big for Chinese clothes, and I guess the epiphany was written all over my face because my roommate--who several years after we parted ways, I realized was extremely aware and perceptive--said something to the effect of, "You're upset, aren't you?"

I should have been forewarned when, the summer before I left for China, I happened to see the tag (which read XXL) on the jacket of a friend from Beijing who was studying in the States. She wasn't thin, but she definitely wasn't fat, and I couldn't imagine her wearing anything bigger than an American medium.

I remember going shopping with friends here who've had similar experiences and shown similar upset; and most foreign women I talk to seem to be of the opinion trying to shop here is a waste of time. And while this applies generally to Western women of non-Asian descent, I've heard even ABC friends say they can't fit into the clothes here. On the other hand, my white friends also seem to shrug it off as a disparity between Western and Asian sizes and body types. But those of us who are of (even partial) Asian descent can't so easily hide behind that curtain. At least I started feeling some sort of frustration along those lines.

Years later I'm perhaps a couple sizes smaller, the natural result of a more active lifestyle, daily bike riding, climbing stairs, and making a conscious decision to do some sort of more rigorous exercise regularly, and it's one of the few times in my life I feel quite OK with my body. And I can find clothes in most any shop here that fit, although usually only if they're XL or XXL--and I'm OK with that. 

My size 9 feet, on the other hand, are a different matter altogether, and no amount of exercising are going to shrink them!

boxing comes to chengdu

In what seems to be a never-ending slew of international sporting events coming to Chengdu (most notably the FIFA Women's Cup last month), last night brought the World Boxing Association 86th Conference to the Sichuan Stadium.

As we got a hold of ten free tickets, I decided to go to my first professional sporting event in China along with the rest of Team CHENGDOO and some friends.

It was actually pretty fun, although the stadium was half-empty, and the first couple of hours were spent watching ho-hum matches between mostly lightweight male boxers--China vs. France, China vs. China, China vs. Thailand.

But things heated up when the big event of the night--the female super flyweight (115 lbs.) match between China's Zhang Xi Yan and two-time champion Ha Na Kim from Korea--got underway. With fanfare involving flags and national anthems, the ladies came out to the ring, spectators rose to their feet, and the punching began.

While the previous matches--all between men--saw a grand total of one knockout, Zhang had Kim on the floor several times, much to the delight of her fellow Chinese nationals, and most everybody else in the crowd as well.

The match ended with Zhang, not surprisingly, taking the title, after having beaten Kim in every single round.

A nice start for China, who enters the international boxing arena with this groundbreaking event--the first of its kind to be held in the country.

World Carfree Day, 2007

Um, so somewhere between 100 and 108 of China's cities, including Chengdu, according to Shanghai-based Bloomberg.com reporter Irena Shen, are supposed to be participating in this event--but I didn't notice any decrease in the number of cars this afternoon while I rode my bike to work--or when I looked out the window at quarter past 6 p.m. Hmph.

Crappy China Daily article posted to Xinhua:

BEIJING, Sept. 22 -- Today's Car-Free Day is significant both for China and the rest of the world.

It is the first time that 108 Chinese cities will take part in the annual global event, which dates back to the 1950s.

China is an important participant in the campaign. The country became the world's second-largest auto market and third-largest carmaker last year.

It has also become the second-largest greenhouse gas producer in the world, and is rapidly catching up with the United States, the largest emitter.

In this sense, China's participation will greatly strengthen the Car-Free Day movement.

For Chinese, owning a car is a dream that came true only very recently. Passion for car ownership is strong and is gaining momentum all the time. The number of cars on the roads is multiplying almost by the hour.

In Beijing, about 1,000 new cars are added to the streets on an average day. In Shanghai, 8,000 license plates were issued by auction this month. The average price of nearly 50,000 yuan for a plate indicates a fervent demand for cars.

Cars certainly offer motorists plenty of freedom to move around, especially those living in remote areas.

But in many Chinese cities, this convenience has quickly turned into a nightmare, as roads become increasingly gridlocked by the rising number of cars.

An aerial view of Shanghai's elevated highway during rush hour would often look like a gigantic parking lot.

The capital, Beijing, is sometimes referred to as "shoudu" - not the capital, but the nation's most congested city.

So what was designed to offer greater freedom of movement is now inhibiting people's ability to move about freely, instead creating road blocks that slow the movement of the urban population.

This must come as a great surprise to new car owners when they discover that their newfound freedom is in fact the opposite.

More importantly, this obsession with car ownership is unfair to the many people who continue to use urban public transport, which is now also becoming clogged by the increasing number of cars.

Even worse is the environmental impact. A State Environmental Protection Administration report says that on a "smog day," 79 percent of the air pollution is caused by car fumes.

According to experts, the discharge of harmful car exhausts will be reduced by 3,000 tons on Car-Free Day. These fumes threaten people's lives by damaging the respiratory system - particularly the lungs. They also cause cancer and deteriorate heart disease.

The growing number of traffic accidents is another threat. China's annual death toll of 100,000 from traffic accidents is by far the highest in the world.

While Car-Free Day in Beijing got a lukewarm response two years ago, the keen participation of 108 cities this year shows growing public concern about the traffic and environmental problems caused by cars.

Today, all cars will be barred from selected areas in these 108 cities. People will be encouraged to walk, cycle and use public transport.

A massive week-long campaign promoting the use of public transport started in all of these cities on September 16. Many government officials have also pledged their support by vowing to use only public transport.

Compared with cars, public transport like buses and the subway network are a cleaner, more economical and safer alternative.

Cycling and walking are the healthier options. Exercise not only delays the aging of the brain, but also enhances the function of the heart and lungs, as well as strengthening muscles and increasing fitness.

But emissions from the rising number of cars on the roads are affecting the air quality of cyclists and pedestrians.

Local governments haven't helped the situation by expanding car lanes and shrinking or even eliminating bike lanes and footpaths.

That policy has clearly failed. It sends the wrong message by inviting more people to buy cars. So even with widened roads, traffic congestion has become worse than ever before in most Chinese cities.

By favoring drivers, this policy has discriminated against the vast number of cyclists and pedestrians.

Hopefully, today's Car-Free Day will be an awakening for all the local governments that are still making or carrying out these policies.

In Shanghai, the government has switched its emphasis to public transport by designating more bus lanes. Discounts are also being offered for transfers to the city's public transport system.

Some 400 kilometers of subway network is expected to be operational by 2010. This mass transit system aims to make driving a car less necessary in Shanghai.

Shanghai is also reportedly considering introducing a congestion charge in the city center to relieve both the hazards from traffic congestion and air pollution.

As excessive numbers of cars choke up cities and make them less inhabitable, the pledge by 108 Chinese cities to the world to free the streets of cars for a day is just the beginning of the battle.

With cleaner air and smoother traffic in these 108 Chinese cities for a day, more cities will hopefully want to join the campaign next year. And if that happens, it may trigger a shift in thinking; more people might share the hope that Car-Free Day is not just on Sept. 22, but a possibility 365 days of the year.

(Source: China Daily)

Editor: Du Guodong

Choice Quote on Driving

"I believe that while there are many reasons for the growth of individualism in the UK, the extreme libertarianism now beginning to take hold here begins on the road. When you drive, society becomes an obstacle. Pedestrians, bicycles, traffic calming, speed limits, the law: all become a nuisance to be wished away. The more you drive, the more bloody-minded and individualistic you become. The car is slowly turning us, like the Americans and the Australians, into a nation that recognises only the freedom to act, and not the freedom from the consequences of other people's actions. We drive on the left in Britain, but we are being driven to the right."

-- George Monbiot, "They call themselves libertarians; I think they're antisocial bastards," The Guardian, Tuesday December 20, 2005

Also, my own experience at intersections in China (a response to a discussion on the "shared space" traffic concept):

I currently live in Chengdu (pop. somewhere around 10 million) and have visited many of the nation's other large cities. For whatever reason (my conjecture is the relatively recent introduction of the automobile to the masses), traffic lights here are regularly ignored by rivers, pedestrians, and bikers. At intersections, whichever group is the greatest in number seems to just go; and it is a nice contrast to crossing the street in my former haunts of Los Angeles, where was often the lone pedestrian against a street full of cars, to feel that those great hordes of us on foot/bike are taking (back) the streets from automobiles. On the flip side, we can never assume we have the right of way; that right is almost always taken by drivers. Of course all this is changing, with increasing numbers of cars on the street every day, and more and more uniformed traffic guards at all four corners of major intersections, armed with whistles (though not much else), waving at bikers and pedestrians to stay behind the lines when their light is red. This, too, seems to be a re-engineering of social mentality to conform to cars: Those of us on foot/bike need to yield to car drivers for our own safety while they are generally free to do as they please, including driving down bike lines that are separated from the normal driving lanes by cement barriers.

And lastly, a quote oft-attributed to Margaret Thatcher, though that's disputed by at least one source:

“A man who, beyond the age of 26, finds himself on a bus can count himself a failure.”

Chinese Tea Snobs

Last Sunday was one of those very rare sunny days in Chengdu, so I decided to honor my eighth-grade language-arts teacher, who signed my yearbook "carpe diem--that's what comes to mind when I think of you" (or something to that effect) by seizing the day and taking photos.

When the sun's out, Chengdu is actually not a bad place to find interesting images. I've run through two-and-a-half rolls of 36-exposure film in the last few days, which is about as much as I've shot in my previous three years in China combined. Plus I've gotten over a lot of my initial self-consciousness holding up a camera to my face (in hopes of avoiding perpetuating the rich foreign tourist stereotype). The only question now is where I can develop and make prints of black-and-white film properly.

My goal was to get some shots of Tianfu Plaza, the downtown square which was just re-opened this past February after several years' closure. (These aren't my photos; just a representative sample from a random search.) When I moved to Chengdu two years ago, it was a giant dirt pit. That hole has now been replaced by a spectacular above-ground plaza that will be the site of the main subway station, the first line of which will open in a year or two.

Upon finishing, after detouring through the fish and flower market (of which I'd long heard but had never been) as well as a street where most of the houses are still brick and you can look between the rows into alleys where residents have strung their laundry on bamboo poles--to be disappearing shortly, I'm sure, I turned down the main road heading to my apartment. On the corner there's a tea shop where I once purchased some Chinese black tea, which, incidentally, is called red tea in Chinese.

When I bought the tea of course I was invited to have a seat and sample it, and I spent some time chatting with the two employees there. The woman is 24 and from a central/eastern province; the man is older. As they sit in the tea shop all day other than when they run errands, I'm guessing they don't have much to do other than to drink tea. So when I pass by I try to make sure to look in, and if they happen to be gazing out the window I'll wave. This time the girl didn't see me until I was almost already past, and when she realized I was waving at her, she jumped up and beckoned me to come inside a sit for a moment.

As it was a meandering Sunday, I agreed, and she immediately started preparing the tea. It's a fairly elaborate process: First she sets down a tiny tray in front of me; then, from a pot of boiling water fishes out a cup about the size of a single shot glass and sets it on the tray. Next, she pours hot water through a filter into a tiny teapot that's filled with tea leaves. This water is then poured into another tea pot, and finally poured all over the main tea tray, which has a drain in the bottom. She refills the original teapot, repeats the process, and finally my cup is filled, and I can drink this second steeping of the tea. While she goes through this I stare at the paper-wrapped bricks or cakes of tea leaves behind her head, most of which come from Yunnan province (just south of here and also China's largest coffee producer), some of which are discs about 10" in diameter and go for a few hundred RMB.

That day the other employee came back with a new supply of Oolong tea leaves, which were promptly dug into for sampling. This demanded my little tray hold two tiny cups, as we tried three different batches, each one progressively better, from what I could deduce. To me, they all tasted, to varying intensities, like artichoke. My limited knowledge of tea terminology in Chinese precluded me from catching all the details of the discussion, but there was much debate over not only the taste, but also the smell of the tea (which seems crucial), as well as the change in leaves from dry to wet and the change in the color of water over a series of steepings. The boss of the tea shop also stopped by and gave his expert opinion--I guess. At any rate, I drank so much tea I started feeling sick so eventually I excused myself because if I didn't I was going to have to keep on drinking ... .

In other news, I've got exactly 17 days until my visa expires, and no definite plan about what to do about that. Tomorrow afternoon I'll find out if I can avoid having to go to Hong Kong, which would be nice.

And I've recorded a Chinese-learning radio show with a CHENGDOO citylife editorial assistant, Annie. If you care to listen, it's on her blog here. I made one stupid and embarrassing mistake, but the rest is OK I guess.

A Tale of Two Cities

I was in a cab on the way home, thinking how I really ought to just break down and buy a bike, when I started thinking about why it is in Chengdu I've only ever been driven by one female cabbie whereas in Suzhou and Shanghai they were commonplace. Is it something about that Shanghai/Jiangsu culture of "soft men" that allows women to more easily enter traditionally male-dominated professions? Or is it simply more demand for more jobs that sends everybody--men and women--scrambling for more work?

On the other hand, female bus drivers are commonplace in both Chengdu and Suzhou--in fact, I feel like there might even be more female bus drivers than male. In Los Angeles, this might also have been true, but I never encountered a female cabbie there or elsewhere in the States, though, granted, I rarely encountered cabs, period.

It would be interesting to know what the comparison is like in other cities--thinking back, of all the cabs I remember taking in cities like Shenzhen, Guangzhou, Beijing, Wuhan, Hong Kong ... all the cabbies were men, but I took very few cabs in each of those cities.

"Oh yeah, sorry"

Last night I went out of my apartment for the first time all week save for food runs and plain old runs. I started at the 麻糖/Hemp House, where there was a hip-hop DJ show, which turned out to be pretty dry. However, I did run into one of the owners of beloved French bar 巴黎咖啡/Cafe Panam(e), who asked if I wanted to check out a bar that was opening that night with him.

The grand opening of 巴黎魔术/Paris Magic Bar had been minimally hyped and sounded from the descriptions like some sort of hokey weird gimmicky thing (alcohol + magic shows = ???), so I had skipped the show. We arrived there around 1 a.m., when most people had already left. When I started having some serious trouble understanding the French-accented slurring that was coming out of my friend's mouth, I realized he was pretty drunk; then, when a few what-appeared-to-be Northerners swaggered in, they greeted him (I guess as the owner of a bar, you're pretty high-profile), and he came back to me and said, "Hey, Chinese people talking to me in perfect English--American or Canadian, I do not distinguish accents--more fluent than mine!"

I looked at him and said, "Maybe they're not Chinese."

He looked at me and said, "Oh yeah. Sorry."

A few beers later, upon my raised-glass-toasting gesture, he says, "Hey, you're becoming Chinese."

"Dude, I am Chinese," I said.

He looked at me again. "Oh yeah. Sorry." Pause. "I'm Polish!"

At any rate, the bar was actually a cozy little spot, and it's right smack in the middle of what can only be described as a dance-club emporium featuring the ever-popular BABI II as well as Sugar and TaTa, which attract clubgoers into the whee hours of the morning, so I could see it becoming a nice chilling spot for those who are too tired to keep shaking their booties. Unfortunately, the bar owner/magician is no spring chicken, and by 4 a.m. on his first night in business he was already passing out on the couches. I hope he pays his employees well.

Gladder

I just outfitted my browser with the "Gladder" add-on. It is the sweetest thing. For those of you using Firefox in China, I highly recommend it. It's the "Great Firewall Ladder" and its purpose is to automatically redirect you via proxy sites when you're trying to browse any blocked site. No more "Page Cannot Be Found" messages for me!