Let¡¯s see, I felt old. Fat. Astonished at the large congregation of paunchy, middle-aged waiguo ren who turned out Friday night to hear Bob Dylan on his first tour of China. Well maybe not, since I saw a similar group turn out in the same stadium a few years ago to hear The Rolling Stones. Seriously, who knew that there are so many of us here.
Surprised ¡ª that the growly voice that sounded like it should belong to a Wild Thing or another nightmare was really all that¡¯s left of Dylan¡¯s distinctive nasal tone.
Not amused ¡ª that the old protest singer wasn¡¯t allowed to sing The Times Are A¡¯Changin¡¯ here in China, where the times are apparently not going to change even a little bit, come hell or high water. (At least when the Rolling Stones were forbidden to sing Brown Sugar and Honky Tonk Woman, Mick Jagger had something clever to say about it at a press conference: We wouldn¡¯t want to corrupt the morals of expatriate bankers and their Chinese girlfriends, now would we?)
Ok, and a bit like a rolling stone, you know, being an expat again for seven years now.
Here¡¯s the man himself ¡ª in case you can¡¯t be sure, he¡¯s the one on the far right at the keyboard (I think it¡¯s a keyboard!).
Now I can tell my kids that I saw him. Except that they don¡¯t seem to care.
Monday morning, the Shanghai Daily reported that more than thirty 50-year-old plane trees had been removed overnight from Maoming Lu. Apparently the work was done quickly at 11 pm on Saturday night ¡ª presumably so that it would be over with before anybody had time to notice what was happening. The article said that, according to a notice, the trees had been dug up to make room for the subway and would be re-planted elsewhere.
I know, with people¡¯s homes coming down for new construction, you can¡¯t expect much protection for old trees. Still, the plane trees that line Shanghai¡¯s streets lend much to the city¡¯s character. In the summer, the trees are the only reason it¡¯s possible to walk around during the daytime, as they provide desperately needed shade.
And between December and May, when they are mere skeletons, Shanghai¡¯s historical layer comes alive, its old architecture suddenly visible.
For a year and a half now, the trees on Huaihai Lu, a main shopping avenue, have lit up the night.I¡¯ve often wondered how the tough old things survive, what with the small area of exposed soil to collect water, the pollution, and general abuse they receive.
Maddeningly, the Shanghai Daily didn¡¯t say which block of Maoming Lu lost its trees. But, because it was a nice day today, I decided to walk the length of it ¡ª a lovely hour outside. Sure enough, just south of Nanjing Lu, here¡¯s what I found.Dirty concrete plugs where trees should have been.
No doubt the neighbors across the street will find it a bit warmer this summer.As for that promise that the trees would be replanted¡ you can imagine for yourself whether the roots of a 50-year-old tree in this spot could possibly have been saved.
I¡¯ve had my eye on this stall around the corner for a few weeks now. Behind the counter, the help are wearing purple outfits and serving up something that¡¯s apparently pretty special.But what have they got that the purple-dressed workers at other snack stalls, say this one about 20 feet further along the road, don¡¯t have?I guess I could have gotten in the line to find out. But instead, I waited for the woman in the plaid coat to finish her purchase and turn toward me.¡°Excuse me, what are they selling here?¡± I asked her in my best Chinese.
She didn¡¯t hesitate. ¡°Purple blah-blah-blah,¡± I think she answered.
¡°Is it good to eat?¡± Duh, I thought. I guess that¡¯s obvious.
¡°I don¡¯t know.¡± She shrugged. ¡°This is the first time I¡¯ve tried it.¡± And then she stepped further away from the crowd, reached into her sack, and pulled up a purple box. ¡°Try it,¡± she said, opening the box.
¡°Oh no, thank you, I just wanted to know what they¡¯re selling.¡± I shook my head.
¡°Lai, lai, come on,¡± she insisted.
¡°Ni tai keqi le, you are too polite,¡± I replied, and started to back away. But she really insisted, and so I stuck my hand in and took a pinch of steamed purple yam coated in sesame seeds and popped it in my mouth. Delicious. I said so.
¡°Take more,¡± she said, gesturing. I was afraid she was going to give me the whole box.
¡°Thanks so much,¡± I said, ¡°But I will get in line.¡± And I did.
There are, of course, no photos of this exchange and that¡¯s a good thing. I¡¯m sure my face was about the color of the yam.
But every time I¡¯m nonplussed by someone pushing to get past me ¡ª last week, a woman tried to shove her way into my toilet stall before I was out of it ¡ª I¡¯m gonna have to remember that there are also people who will invite a nosy stranger to stick her grubby hand into their food and share.
Wang ayi, our housekeeper, told me this morning that you can¡¯t buyyan in Shanghai. I didn¡¯t understand. Maybe she meant potassium iodide. I knew that there was a run on this yesterday from the Shanghai Daily, which my son swears reported, in an early online edition, that people could take cyanide to protect their thyroid glands in the event that a cloud of radiation should reach Shanghai. (Yeah, if you take cyanide, I guess you won¡¯t need to worry about thyroid cancer¡.)
Yan. She reached for my salt shaker to bang into my head what she was saying. Salt? Why would there be a run on salt?
She didn¡¯t know. Maybe, she surmised, because salt comes from the sea, and the sea is now unsafe, thanks to radiation from Japan. She herself has 4 jin (half-kilos, or ¡ª roughly ¡ª pounds) of salt in her (tiny) apartment.
I have about one cup of salt in my house. Chinese people eat more salt than foreigners, she tells me. Thinking about our American diet, I find that hard to believe.
And wasn¡¯t it just a couple of days ago that we read in the Shanghai Daily about a scam whereby industrial salt was being repackaged and sold as table salt? And that industrial salt ¡°contains harmful nitrite substances which can cause dizziness, stomach pains, damage kidneys and ¨C if large quantities are consumed ¨C lead to death.¡± http://www.shanghaidaily.com/article/?id=466367&type=Metro.
Maybe it¡¯s okay that I missed the boat on salt. And who knows, maybe it will even lower our blood pressure.
I was looking forward to the Year of the Rabbit, I really was. In the last few years, we¡¯ve had a tiger, a cow, a pig, and a rat. Nothing that you could really snuggle up with.
But bunnies. In anticipation, my mind wandered back to Sugar and Spice, the pair we got as pets when I was 7 years old. Spice wore a red collar and I would put him on his leash and hop him around the block, while my friend Jan pushed Sugar and her progeny (there were, of course, lots of progeny) in her pram. Kids in the neighborhood would occasionally manage to catch rabbits in the woods and bring them ¡°home¡± to our family.
Spice was a particularly cuddly guy. He¡¯d lie back in my arms and I¡¯d scratch his neck and he¡¯d sigh and open his mouth just enough for me to see his yellowish teeth. I might get a few flea bites from Spice, but they were nothing compared to the long angry red tracks that lined my inner arms for years on end ¡ª the results of Sugar kicking me to get away. (To pet her, I¡¯d cruise the back yard with a crab net, hoping to swoop down on her and pull her out from the rosebushes.)
Anyhow, I guess I was hoping for cute little stuffed animals. Hares from marzipan, or bunny-shaped cakes.
What I got first was an article in the Shanghai Daily that there was going to be a crackdown on ordering live rabbits on taobao (a Chinese version of eBay) because too many of them were DOA.
Then Wang ayi (our housekeeper) asked me, while we were putting away groceries, ¡°Do you like rabbit(s)?¡±
¡°Yes,¡± I said, mentally stroking the length of Spice¡¯s velvet ears.
¡°Good,¡± she said. ¡°Everybody is eating them because, you know, this year is Rabbit. They¡¯re really cheap now, only about 30 RMB (less than $5). And really good for you. Not much fat at all.¡±
¡°Uh, no thanks,¡± I hurried to say. ¡°I don¡¯t think I want rabbit for dinner.¡±
* * *
The Chinese New Year holiday officially ended yesterday with the bang of Lantern Festival. Maybe the rabbits of China can rest a little easier now.
But then I went to a Korean restaurant and found this on the menu:Wah.
First it was the tour of the Kraton, the palace of the Sultan in Yogyakarta, which dates back to 1756. Our tour guide, a ¡°guardian of the palace¡± seemed to have only two points he wanted to make: ¡°This knife I am wearing on my back¡ the knife is male, goes into the sheaf, female, not porno, natural,¡± he started out.
¡°I don¡¯t understand, exactly,¡± I said to my son Alex. ¡°I don¡¯t think I want to understand, either.¡±
And ¡°Soeharto was the enemy of the people.¡±
¡°When were these buildings built?¡± I ask about the unimpressive tour we¡¯ve just taken, looking at photos of 20th century political figures.
¡°Male and female, not porno, natural,¡± came the reply.
¡°When was the script changed from Javanese script to this [Roman] alphabet?¡±
¡°Soeharto was the enemy of the people!!¡±
¡°Ok, can we go in that building, the one that you said dates from 1756?¡±
¡°No.¡± Our guard took off his glasses and glared at me reprovingly. ¡°Those are offices. You can¡¯t go in our offices.¡±
¡°Too bad,¡± I said to Alex. ¡°The carving around the doors looks interesting.¡±
Things got a bit stranger in the afternoon when the cabbie we had hired to take us around suggested we visit Mt. Merapi. We knew it was a volcano, and that it had erupted last fall. But I¡¯m not sure what we were expecting ¡ª to peer over a catwalk down into a vat of lava? Our hotel brochure promised a small town with beautiful views and ¡°an extensive forested park with trails.¡±
What we got was disaster tourism. A hillside that looked like it had been bombed.Partway up, our car ground to a halt at a roadblock and young men on scooters offered to ride us to the top. But I was nervous about hopping on, so we trudged along, no longer having any idea what to expect.
We found rocks that had come flying out in the middle of the night and roads that had cracked.The remains of villages, from which people had been unable to flee.
A fog was rolling down the mountain and we couldn¡¯t see where we were going.We turned and headed back, slipping and falling on the damp-ash-covered slippery road. We were glad when we got back down to our car.
So who were all these people wandering around in the mist ¡ª more tourists than we were seeing at temples and museums?And the ones who had set up snack bars to feed them?
Unless you were able to provide assistance, why would you want to come here? And what about relief, we asked our taxi driver.
¡°They are hoping the government will help them to re-build,¡± he said. ¡°So far, they don¡¯t know.¡± And as for the Javanese art and cultural museum located in the area, advertised by our hotel? ¡°That¡¯s closed,¡± he answered. ¡°It was destroyed by the volcano.¡±
The next day, from far away, Merapi looked incapable of such hostility.
Once again, I¡¯m breaking my I-only-write-about-China rule. The reason is Borobudur, where I have been visiting this week with my son Alex.
Not long after Charlemagne was crowned, here is what was being constructed in central Java:We spent an afternoon crawling around seven of the temple¡¯s levels, admiring its sculpturesand bas-reliefs.We retired to our hotel for dinner, where this was our view:At 4:00 am, we climbed back up and, while the Muslim call to prayer echoed round, watched the plain facing the Merapi volcano come to life.After breakfast, we climbed nearby Dagi Hill and had the view down all to ourselves.And then in the late afternoon we reluctantly walked away, leaving the Buddhas to gaze out over the valley as they have for centuries.
Just before I left town at the end of last week, I wandered around the city to see how preparations were coming for the arrival of the new lunar year.
In old town, near the City God Temple and Yu Garden, workers were feverishly installing large inflatable hares.This poor fellow took a break from work and feel asleep standing up!Across the river in Pudong at the World Financial Center, people were filling out wish cards and hanging them on trees.What were they wishing for? I could read very little of the Chinese, none of the Russian, and only caught a glimmer of the hopes in German and Spanish. But I¡¯m pretty sure I got the gist of this one, between the ¡°4.0¡å and ¡°GPA,¡± although the rest is in Korean:But here¡¯s what I collected in English. A gal¡¯s hope:A guy¡¯s wish:
Hmm, an older guy¡¯s dream, I s¡¯pose:
Then there¡¯s the one I won¡¯t show you, in which a guy wishes a certain specifically-named lady ¡°would jump off a bridge.¡± Seems a tad unchivalrous. Ultimately, the child¡¯s dream warms the heart:Thanks for that, Emma. And my best wishes for your health and happiness, everybody, in the Year of the Rabbit!
I found this postcard in my mailbox one evening this week.
Completely unintelligible, but wasn¡¯t it considerate to (attempt to) send it to me in English ?
And it really was directed to me, because I can read my address on the other side:Thank goodness that much was in Chinese.
When I received a checking card, did I check my bill? Maybe I should mosey on over to HuNan power supply division to take some concerted action, as I feel bad that maybe I broke my promise. On the other hand, since my bill have been received in full, perhaps the best thing to do is simply keep it. But somebody hand wrote in a fax number. Hey, this could be fun!
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