I got my hair Mao'ed down

There’s been a good reason I’ve neglected my blog, which is that my stupid web-hosting company (it’s called 1t3.com) is a total sham, and have left sushipanda.com hanging out to dry in no-server land. I’ve done a some subsequent research on the web and it turns out that no one likes these guys, so if you ever decide to actually get your own website, stay away from 1t3, they’ll take you up the river, strip your clothes off, make you dance around the smoldering pit of your own expectations, and then eat moldy tree bark. I’ve been there, it’s not fun.

Anyway, for that one person out there who reads these entries and is actually interested in my happenings here in Shanghai…one day I will find out who you are. I will also say that the past week and a half has been incredibly eventful. Let me give you the rundown:

1. I got a haircut
2. I ate some food.
3. I scratched my head a few times
4. I ate some more food.
5. I turned on some music and danced for a good 8 minutes one morning in my room when no one was looking. I was with no one. (“No One,” of course, is the name I lovingly gave my blow-up Whoopi Goldberg doll, but you guys knew that already)

Exciting stuff, huh? In actuality, one of my big fears before I came here was getting a haircut. As all of you know, my head is of unwieldy ballast, and I take great care in making sure that, with so much surface area to cover, the hair is evenly trimmed and takes on a semblance of symmetry. Being in a foreign land forced understandable trepidation upon me, and so it was with great anxiety that I entered a neighborhood hair salon one morning a few days ago to get inaugurated into the Chinese Wacked-out Hair Club for Men.

So let me tell you something about salons here in Shanghai: you don’t just come here to get your hair cut. Usually, patrons lie back and get a nice shampoo-down, followed by a neck massage and a full back massage, with the haircut as the grand finale. On a day prior to my trip to the salon, Mike Wong, wallowing in all the glory of his latent homophobia, strictly instructed me never to have someone of the male persuasion do all these things to me. I looked at his own goofy haircut (sorry Mike), and thought I’d take a chance and go another direction.

One valuable lesson I’ve learned since coming here to Shanghai, which I should have learned a long time ago in the States: If you have corrected vision and have contact lenses, make sure you wear them when you get your hair cut by a strange man with crazy orange skunky hair. I had to remove my glasses, and all I ended up seeing was a big blurry mess in the mirror. Of course, that’s how it usually looks when I have my glasses on, too, but at least I could make out my hair. I was floating and lost at sea, with nothing but the dude’s big-ass hands to guide me towards looking Shanghai-chic.

Did I say Shanghai-chic? I meant Shanghai-chic…ken, because that’s how I looked leaving the place. In fact, I decided to get into the spirit and clucked all the way home. Yup, I did the whole “arms under armpits” thing as well. No one really paid me any attention except that crazy old lady who came after me with a huge butcher knife and saying something about “kung pao,” but I waddled way too fast for her.

Apparently, the hair thing is a big rite of passage. I guess some people try to fit into new environments by changing things like the clothes that they wear or their patterns of speech. I ended up choosing, not by my own volition, to get a really stupid looking haircut so I could fit in with the rest of the people here. Some of my other attempts at assimilation have met with more disastrous results. No joke, the current fashion statement here in Shanghai is for people to walk out on the street in their fucking pajamas. I’ve heard a number of theories about why they do this, all of them surround the concept of “status.” People ostensibly feel that by showing others that they don’t care about how they look in public, somehow that fact alone will convince the public that they have just enough personal wealth to be that indifferent.

I looked at the person telling me this story, and said, “Wait, by ‘wealth’ you mean ‘crazy as shit,’ right?”

“No, that’s really the fashion here.”

Well, when in China, do as the crazy. I thought maybe I could fit in a little more than I have been by wearing my nightly attire out into public as well. It was a Tuesday, so I put on my zircona-studded green alligator thong, my Nikes, and my baby-blue baby-tee and hit the biggest shopping street in Shanghai to show off just how wealthy I was.

I really didn’t get why they had to call in the military. Shit, now THAT was embarrassing!

I’m actually a little sick and downed a couple of NyQuil a few moments ago, so it’s getting harder and harder for me to lift up my fingers to type this. I wanted to write some more about this epic battle of the cab-drivers that I was involved in, and also about the half-bottle of scotch I took and gave right back in the most biologically violent of ways on Saturday night, but I think I’m going to crawl into my bed, curl up, and dream about Donald Rumsfeld in a Jacuzzi with a big tub of Hershey’s chocolate syrup. I know you guys know the dream! *wink*

Ok, too much NyQuil. This kicks ass.

Chineseezy f'sheezy!

So Buddha came down last night in my sleep and whacked me in the head.
Crowned in a Boston Red Sox cap he looked down at me and said:
"I've been reading your online journal and it is a bore,
Thus I command thee: thou shalt blog about Dido no more."

Ok, so I've been a little melodramatically arbitrary in my last 1 or 2 journal entries; I still reserve the right to use it since all of you are back home and sleeping when I need some loving armchair psychiatry. But now, after my last reality check, it's back to writing about my Shanghai mis-adventures.

About a week and a half ago, my extended family and I crammed into a big red van and drove about 1.5 hours either north, south, or west of Shanghai to a famous city named Suzhou. Suzhou is particularly famous for its enclosed gardens. These gardens usually have man-made ponds and streams inside, with little white walking bridges and teahouses completing the picture.

My great-grandfather is buried out in an old cemetery on the farmland surrounding downtown Suzhou. The kind of poverty you see the farther you are from Shanghai is truly thunderous. Most of the farmers and village-folk have lived their type of lifestyle for hundreds of years. Street vendors were selling things like roasted chestnuts, home-made buns, and cans of Pepsi. After paying respects to my great-grandfather Hu, we were surrounded by three little ladies who must have been in their late 60's or early seventies, trying to peddle little home-made trinkets and snacks. My dad ended up handing them the equivalent of $6.25 for them to split evenly between themselves. I can't adequately paint the picture of how happy they looked, but let me just say that it made me smile.

Driving back through the countryside, the driver was able to pick up the major Shanghainese radio stations. I guess that once a week, one of the stations does a little countdown of popular English music in the U.S. and the U.K.. Listening to the DJ's staccato through Chinese that I couldn't understand, and then pause to say things like "P. Diddy" in thick Chinese accents, is priceless.

Justin Timberlake came on the radio as we were driving through the crowded streets of Suzhou, and as I started bobbing my head to the music, the following two questions popped into my head:

1) Isn't it a trip that I'm driving through this really poor part of the country and we're all listening to Justin Tiberlake on the radio?
2) Does the fact that I'm bobbing my head to this music mean that I should be attracted to men?

Indeed, the first question is reflective of how this ancient country is changing so fast, is becoming so modernized and westernized everywhere you look, even outside the city.

I'm still working on the second one.

I've decided that I need to write a will, partly because I've accumulated enough material things of value that I have something to offer my friends and loved ones, but mainly because every time I get into a cab here, I'm almost certain I'm going to die. Road signs, lane dividers, and pedestrians are usually dismissed by the drivers as roadkill-worthy impediments to their ultimate goal: getting YOUR ass to your destination as soon as possible so that they can get another fare. It's all about inventory turnover, after all. In any case, I have about 30 stuffed panda bears and a kick-ass Edward Hopper print that are up for grabs. I want to be buried with my Calvin and Hobbes collection, though. And my old Intel badge. Yeah right.

So today marks my third full week of being Shanghai-nese. While there has been much excitement, I also have many concerns here. For instance, everyone here smokes. It's not really the seondhand smoke, but in a city this large, the twenty-fifthhand smoke can get a little bothersome. Also, beer can be cheaper than bottled water here, which is initially a great thing, but after stumbling home night after night with nothing but beer in your belly, you tend to get a little tired of alcohol. And oddly enough, my belly has become more rotund and enlarged of late. I wonder if there is a term for one's belly becoming bigger as a result of drinking an excessive amount of beer. I'll have to Google that one...

Fighting or Surrendering

I realize that I have not used this journal much to really talk about things that I'm feeling. This is primarily because I wanted to treat this as a method of storytelling rather than as an actual diary. At the same time, I can't help but feel that I should be putting some of the more robust emotions that I am experiencing down on paper, at the very least so that I can read it and try to make some sense out of it for myself. So here goes...

There was a time in my life where I felt everything on an exaggerated scale, where each emotion was amplified and rendered me incapable of reacting to things in an appropriate manner. Then I "grew up" and became more and more tempered, more mellow in the way that I dealt with my feelings. There were times recently when I've been criticized for being emotionless, which is a far cry from the over-sensitive reactionary that I had been when I was younger.

Sometimes, however, I will be floored by a wave of feeling and emotion, and at these moments there are no antidotes, and there is no part of me that is mellow. So the brain shoots out in 50 million directions and I am consumed by the very fact that I am consumed.

It is at these moments of complete honesty that the music I listen to inserts itself into my supernova of emotion and passion and becomes forever imprinted and identified with all the chaos. I know this does not happen just to me.

Here are lyrics to Dido's beautiful "White Flag", to be referenced later:

I know you think that I shouldn't still love you,
I'll tell you that.
But if I didn't say it, well I'd still have felt it
where's the sense in that?

I promise I'm not trying to make your life harder
Or return to where we were

Well I will go down with this ship
And I won't put my hands up and surrender
There will be no white flag above my door
I'm in love and always will be

I know I left too much mess and
destruction to come back again
And I caused nothing but trouble
I understand if you can't talk to me again
And if you live by the rules of "it's over"
then I'm sure that that makes sense

Well I will go down with this ship
And I won't put my hands up and surrender
There will be no white flag above my door
I'm in love and always will be

And when we meet
Which I'm sure we will
All that was then
Will be there still
I'll let it pass
And hold my tongue
And you will think
That I've moved on....

Well I will go down with this ship
And I won't put my hands up and surrender
There will be no white flag above my door
I'm in love and always will be

-----------------------------

Much of my life has been a series of delayed reactions. Most people think about the consequences and ramifications of their major decisions prior to making those choices; I plow ahead and am forced to look back at what I've left behind, somehow always with a tinge of copper-tasting regret. I left my home in San Francisco, both figuratively and literally, nearly 2 months ago, and while the time leading up to my departure was fraught with anxiety, excitement, and most of all, pain, I was always moving forward, always preparing myself for what was going to happen next. Why did I want so much more when I had so much already?

One long delayed reaction. I look back now and can't help but wonder if, like Dido, I will one day meet the past...and let it pass. "And all that was then, will be there still." I am paying a huge price for coming out here, because I know I may have left too much mess and destruction to go back again.

"And I caused nothing but trouble
I understand if you can't talk to me again
And if you live by the rules of "it's over"
then I'm sure that that makes sense"

*I love using my own words, but sometimes, someone can do it so much better*

I've been too greedy. I want it all and so much more. And here I stand, looking at the price I have to pay for wanting so much, and more and more it looks like I have to lose so much instead. Maybe that's why it's so hard to say goodbye, to let go, because it means that I really have lost it, and there's no going back. Whether I fight or put up the White Flag and surrender; I'm going down with this ship anyway.

I hope I can be forgiven for everything, and I hope that my happiness and I can be together once again.

The Zen and Joy of Bao

Today I’d like to talk about the little nuances about the Chinese language, specifically the fact that it’s impenetrable and bewildering in every single way. Not only are these hieroglyphics plastered across all that is meaningful here, but speaking it poses a greater threat to the novice tongue. You see, almost every word here has multiple meanings that need to be placed within the context of the entire phrase and spoken with the right intonation in order to be understood. There are four main intonations, and here are how they sound…ok, I just spoke them out loud to the computer, and I realize you probably didn’t get that, so you kids will have to buckle down and use those imaginations of yours.

Basically, one word uttered from your lips can mean up to a dozen or two different meanings, even if you use the correct intonation. While the Chinese government has tried to be helpful and to move into the world of computers and hence, typing, through establishing a system of words based on the Latin alphabet (pinying), it still doesn’t have the correct intonations listed on maps, menus, et al. Let me give you an analogous example using English.

Say you walk into a Krispy Kreme. “Hi, can I please have a glazed donut?”

The donut engineer hands you a chocolate covered donut.

You respond, “No, I’m sorry, not that glazed donut, but THAT glazed donut.”

“Oh, you mean a glazed donut.”

“Yes, thanks.”

She hands you a maple cake donut.

“No, I’m sorry, I don’t want that glazed donut, I want that glazed donut.”

She hands you an apple fritter.

“No no, that’s not what I wanted. I wanted a GLAZED donut.”

She hands you a Bud Lite.

“Yes, thank you very much,” you say.

“What? What did you say about my mom?” She gets indignant.

“No, I meant “THANK YOU VERY MUCH.”

“Yes, I can’t believe Arnold won, either.”

You see what I mean? That is how the interchange is here if you aren’t sure which intonation to use and with which words to use the words you intend to use. Got it?

Sometimes, you come across a few words that serve as all-purpose good-time words.

Bao.

Say it out loud and let it dangle in the roof of your mouth. That means “bun,” and makes me think about biting into a plump Chinese bun on a cold morning, letting the juices from the meet run down your throat, and all the steam that comes out of your mouth because the “bao” is just a little too hot.

Bao.

Say it like your belching. That means “full,” as in after a huge meal, and it makes me think about leaning back in a chair at a table full of laughing and satisfied friends, the wine and pasta still fresh in my mouth. There’s nothing like feeling “bao” in the presence of good food and friends, places like North Beach in San Francisco, the North End in Boston, and any street in Paris.

Bao.

Say it like you’re spitting something out. That means “hug,” as in the biggest bear hug you could probably get from someone you haven’t seen in too long of a time, whether it be 30 minutes or a year. For me, I miss the “bao” that I left behind when I came here to Shanghai, the kind that is only reserved for soothing aches.

What a perfect note to segue into Dido. On Monday I finally met up with Mike, who had returned from his vacation from Hong Kong the night before. It was good to see another familiar face, and I think he was relieved to have another good friend from back home here with whom to play video games. The next night, at my prodding, he took me and Judy out to one of the shadiest operations I have ever seen. I had been desperate to buy the new Dido CD “Life for Rent,” which was released in the U.S. on the 1st of October. Sadly enough, my Dido missions were failures and always ended with me sobbing into my hands on the corner and Judy trying valiantly to console me.

This time was different. We turned into a small and dark alley and to an even smaller and darker establishment with a small flickering sign that read “Coffee Club” above the doorway. Inside, two young girls sat at two small tables counting money. Mike stormed past them and into the back of the “restaurant,” where he opened a door into a room and subsequently opened the door to my great Shanghai happiness (thus far). The room contained stacks and stacks of DVDs and CDs, neatly arranged in boxes and on the disc shelves wallpapered over each wall. The room was not large, but my eyes were as I gasped at the sheer magnificence of such an efficiently-run bootlegging operation. And what did I see leaning on the third shelf from the bottom on the CD wall but Dido, irrepressibly smiling on the front of her album cover.

Could this be it? At that moment I realized what Coronado must have felt staring at those massive chambers of gold. As I picked up the CD, I was afraid that it would evaporate in my hands, that the whole thing was some sort of apparition and I would turn around and see Ashton Kuchter saunter in and smugly claim that I had once again been “Punk’d!” Alas, I dreamt a dream, and that dream came true. In my hand I held a $1.20 copy of “Life For Rent.” The heavens opened up, the angels sang, and God himself came down and kicked me around a bit for buying illegal contraband, but it didn’t matter to me. No Angel could stop me from “Life for Rent.”
The album is splendid. I think that only Sarah McLachlan can sing about longing and heartache the way Dido can. “White Flag” is the crème de la crème of the album, when she sings about the fiancé that she left behind to pursue her career.

“And when we meet, and I’m sure we will”

It’s emotionally rejuvenating to hear someone sing about the faith that you want to feel in your body as well. The song “Life For Rent” is about all of us who have felt afraid of being owned, of committing to something, of always being on the run. Maybe those of aren’t so alone after all.

OK, I know there are a lot of people who aren’t into Dido and won’t find any of this interesting, so I’ll stop being a cheese-puff and tell you guys that if you have yahoo messenger, all it takes is a webcam or even just a microphone and we can see and talk to each other online for free. Roger was just telling me in real-time about how he voted for Gary Coleman in the California Recall because everyone was telling him to vote for Arnold, and he thought they meant Arnold from “Different Strokes.” That’s the kind of shit you want to HEAR from your friends and not get over e-mail.

Hope to see you online soon.

-Eric-

Puerto Rican in Casablanca

People here in Shanghai say things like “Shanghai is the Hong Kong of 10 years ago” the way that InStyle magazine says this or that is always the “new black.” Such a contrite and tidy little sentence doesn’t do the remarkable growth of this city (and this entire country, for that matter) the necessary justice. Indeed, there is an apparent rush of people from Hong Kong looking to land a successful business venture here in the “New Hong Kong,” which ironically was once the “New Shanghai.” I hope that people never refer to me as “The New Eric” unless they’re talking about my kid, whom I never intend to name Eric, which would make my previous condition completely useless.

But seriously folks, there is a tremendous amount of entrepreneurial spirit here for those who can afford to think about things above and beyond survival. My relatives from Shenzhen, who were born and raised in Shanghai, returned this past weekend to visit and I had a chance to talk with them a bit the past couple of days. They were eager and glad to impart their wisdom on life in China and Shanghai on me, and I was equally happy to receive it. Our talks, excuse me, their lectures revolved completely around the idea of making money. How to dress to impress clients, the proper etiquette at the dinner table when dining with business partners, the way to speak to underlings to reinforce your authority; the evening was a veritable all-you-can-digest of how to maintain an air of financial success in order to success financially. There was never any question why I was there in Shanghai: pursuit of wealth. My aunt, a self-made businesswoman and speculator, didn’t seem to understand the concept of non-monetary happiness. When I mentioned to her that I was always interested in filmmaking and screenwriting, she told me that people who write soap operas make a lot of money. When we visited my great-grandfather’s gravesite and I was told to make a wish in the presence of his tomb, she told me to wish for over 50,000RMB ($6000 US) a month. When I told her that I needed to go to the bathroom, she told me that I should get a job at the Shanghai Stock Exchange instead.

It all comes down to money here: those who have it, those who don’t, and those who think they can make it really quick by selling bootlegged copies of “The Hot Chick.”

My dad had this piece of wisdom for me. “If you live in Shanghai and live like the Shanghai-nese, then it will be very inexpensive for you. If you want to live in Shanghai and live like an American, then it will be very very expensive.”

So I asked him: “So, what if I wanted to live in Morocco and live like a Puerto Rican?” I swore I heard that he said I was being a “smart lass,” but that’s funny because I’m more of a lad than a lass, although I’m beginning to question that myself with all the “Sex and the City” I’ve been watching. By the way, Stanford Blatch has got to be the best character on the show. Who else can say “Judgy Wudgy was a bear” and get away with it? I tried saying that to the Chinese lady selling $10 Louis Vutton bags, but she just stared back at me blankly and said “You’re an arse.” I heard that one pretty clearly.

So I went to a dinner party last night. Alice had decided to make chili and invited a few of us over to help her:

a) make the chili
b) make other dishes
c) eat the chili and the other dishes

Somehow, Judy and I were the only ones the ended up in groups A and B, where I promptly fucked up the buffalo wings by using two sticks of butter for every 2 tablespoons of Tabasco sauce. Apparently, it’s the other way around. So we ended up with delicious chili and some really buttery-ass chicken wings. It didn’t matter, because with the amount of wine that I was drinking, I could have been eating linoleum and thought it was filet mignon. The great thing for me here in Shanghai is that I no longer am the only guy that turns red after some alcohol. In a sea of Chinese people who are all missing that mysterious enzyme that keeps other folks from turning red, it’s easy to understand why they call this place Red China.

Well, I’m meeting cool people, learning about the culture, seeing new things, and definitely doing a lot of drinking and overall partying. So what’s next? I have to start studying for the LSATs, since they’re only two months away (the difference between ‘3 months away’ and ‘2 months away’ is unbelievably tangible). I have to start making some money: this prostituting myself thing is just not working. Apparently, and this is complete news to me, there are A LOT of young Chinese guys out there to be had. Damn, and I came here to be special! I’ll just have to go to Plan B and differentiate myself from everyone else by starting my own buffalo wing shack here. Oh damn, wait a minute…

Convergence

On Monday night we sat down at an outside patio table at "Red," a popular and upscale fusion restaurant in the Luwan district of Shanghai that happens to belong to one of Tina's friends I had met a few days prior. Judy and I were just coming from dinner at an Indian restaurant in the same district. At this dinner I was introduced to a Turkish graphic designer who had grown up in Australia and had her future correctly told to her years before by someone reading her leftover Turkish coffee grains. Then there was the New York-based auditor who had just arrived in Shanghai for four months. Apparently, his job is to travel from one country to another for a period of four months each time.

"Just enough to really dig in and get to know a place," I said to him.

"Exactly," he responded.

Then there was the petite ABC (American Born Chinese), a fireball of a Northern Californian who had a penchant for hunting white males in Shanghai nightclubs and bars and had lost eleven cell-phones in a little under 2 years here in Shanghai. Our conversations meandered through the spiritually creepy (ouija boards, talking to the dead), the physically impossible (light as a feather), and the genuinely haunting (the Lachaise cemetery in Paris). All of this over Punjabi food (Murgh RaRa) and Japanese and German Beer.

So here we were at "Red," sitting down to another group of people, 1 Brit and 2 Aussies. The Brit was a recent transplant from Hong Kong, where she had spent 10 years working as an architect. She had a fabulous British accent and an even more fabulous gap in her front teeth to go with it. She had recently won a sausage-eating contest. One of the Aussies had been at his seat since 2 pm that afternoon (it was now 10pm), and he was painfully nursing his 12th pint of inevitably Western European brew. Next to him was a 44 year old Australian bar manager who used the term "Sarcky" instead of "sarcastic" and always seemed to be a little sarcky himself.

The 44 year old Aussie raised his mug in a toast. We accordingly raised our wine glasses, which were filled with Italian chianti.

"To convergence," he toasted.

To convergence.