{click on images to enlarge}
i’m putting together a visual notebook about my time in china.
i live with my wife wu wing yee in dali,yunnan province which is in western china above laos and burma.
pompadour paradise
sadly my ‘stylist’ just moved from his cozy wooden housed barbershop to a new brightly lit cement storefront. his old digs was a cultural anthropologist cornucopia, walls plastered with juicy personal and historical ephemera, including the two images above, the one on the left is an old shop sign that advertised ‘electric’ ( yes electric ! ) permanents. the one on the right is a pre-photoshop , photo retouched portrait of my stylist giving himself a pompadour.
inedible pooches
dali dogs are a breed apart from your average domesticated lab or collie. they’re small & compact, ugly and often viscous, usually in dire need of braces and a mussel, one of the reasons people here favor small rat like dogs over large handsome couch hogs is that the big ones are more appetizing roasted, and tend to get stolen if left unattended.
i was told by a dog connoisseur that there is a hierarchy of dog delectability which runs something like this:
#1 yellow dog ( not a pure breed, and it must have long legs.)
#2 black dog.
#3 brown spotted dog.
pedigree hounds are only eaten in a pinch, because they are said to leave a bad after taste, short mussolini sidekicks mutts with underbites, like you see in the drawing above, are completely off the menu because they taste nasty and their short legs aren’t worth the trouble .
meat scooter
this tricycle from hell sends off a ghoulish vibe. i’m not really sure what exactly goes on with it, but its always seen around town filled with the fresh skin of dead cows and assorted viscera.
flirting festival
every year in ‘xi zhou’, 20 kilometers north of dali they hold a flirting festival, the basic idea is that couples take turns serenading each other in a kind of rap / story telling / rhythmic rant… trouble is that all the teenage lovebirds are too busy texting each other post modern love bleeps from internet dungeons to bother singing the silly sentimental love songs of their grandparents generation…leaving their grandparents to do the job instead.
aside from flirting, the usual types of fun & games of a country fair are on offer at the festival, including the opportunity to be photographed astride a camel (or is that a dromedary).
egg-straction
farm fresh eggs are abundant here in dali, it is wise however to chose eggs laid by corn fed rather than fish eating chickens,because the fishy kind are smelly and taste fishy.
some unscrupulous egg hawkers make a few extra pennys by passing factory eggs off as free range by dressing them with a bit of chicken poop. ( at least i hope its chicken poop !)
even worse there is talk of some egg gangsters in the big eastern cities making fake eggs , these supposedly cost very little to manufacture and look like the real chicken little deal. in china you learn to never let your guard down!
brand new antiques
dali use to be old until the town fathers decided to replace the old houses with new old looking malls, there are still some lovely traditional houses left, but i fear for them.
pre-rooster alarm clocks
every morning we are awoken by the farm hands making their way to the fields behind our home, their chatter can be heard 2 blocks away as they approach and pass our house in the morning darkness.
they seem completely unbothered by the fact that its 6.30 am, i love this about living here, the rhythm of life the purpose and dedication of the people here is so strong.
at 7.00 am after the field workers have passed and we’ve sunk back into our pillow wilderness, we are again woken, this time by the steamed bun guy who with a screechy cheap pre-recorded bullhorn broadcasts: ‘MAAAAN_TOUU!-MAAAAN_TOUU!’… if were lucky we can catch another hours shut eye before the rice noodle lady passes and with her foghorn lungs screams so loud that her face warps into a pumpkin-from-hell while screeching ‘MIIIIII-CHEEEEN’! – ‘MIIIIII-CHEEEEN’!
and with that the roosters and mongrels and the rest of the street are roused from their slumber, and the day officially begins.
poppy seed wars
yunnan province borders the notorious ( but not so significant anymore) opium triangle.
i’ve never been there, but i hear that ruli (bordering burma) is the narcotics carnival of china, as a consequence, the governments anti drug policies are draconian, to the extent that even poppy seeds are banned in the P.R.C. we are forced to lead the smugglers life when we bring the forbidden seeds across the border from Hong Kong, for without them we’d have to suffer the consequences of poppy seed cake cold turkey.
horse contemplating the work of maurizio cattalan.
after the initial ‘wow’ factor of dali wears off, inspirations is found in the subtlety and detail of this place,like this horse cart for instance.
hot springs
there are some hot springs north of dali about an hours travel trough landscape that reminded me of tuscany in the autumn.
the one pictured in the above drawing is called xia shan kou, which roughly translates to the ‘mouth of the mountain’.
it’s an interesting place with the forlorn ghost town vibe to it.
incomplete construction is the central theme, it seems that the people who currently rent and run it are in it only for the money; they inherited it from someone with a grander vision, the grounds are scattered with unfinished pagodas, grass huts and balinese looking private spa dwellings.
around the grounds are a half dozen out door baths, some filled with steaming mineral water others empty and strewn with cigarette butts, beer cans and used condoms.
a contrast to the funky but interesting neglect of xia shan kou is de re guo which lies an hour north in the town of er yuan, this place is humongous even by chinese standards, after checking in we walked for a half kilometer (!) to our rooms. its clean and efficiently run, the pools are large and fantasy resort themed. the sulfurous pools are just the right temperature to incubate the streptococcus virus.
crime + punishment
the image above is based on a metal enamel sign that i spotted nailed to an electric pole, it warns potential hooligans of the consequences if they attempt to run off with some of the high tension electric cables strung above.
i love this kind of signage, it has the feel of having been copied and traced 50 times each time losing a bit of detail. like a photocopy of a photocopy of a photocopy.
for those of you that dont believe that anyone would actually go to the trouble of stealing electric cables hooked up to the high tension feed, i remember reading a few years back, that the grand opening of the subway station in shen zhen (near hong kong) had to be postponed because thieves had stolen 3 of the brand new escalators. after tying up the night guards they hoisted the things onto semi trailers and drove off into the night, presumably towards another building site.
study or you’ll end up like your uncle…
There’s an cyclical flow and rhythm to life here in the west, most of the population are peasants, which means they’re at the bottom of the social ladder, for them the days are all about staying afloat, which is a hard and relentless task, for others is more about business and networking.
Families are cemented together with the sticky mix of Confucianism & left over Mao Tse Dong thought and reality tv, that combined with modern ideas about individualism and personal ambition makes for a stratified crazy quilt that’s beginning to look more and more like a normal dysfunctional western family unit (…in a straight jacket).
Most families strive for their kids to ‘du shu’ (study), schooling is a relentless boot-camp experience performed en-mass in uniform, with lots of rote learning and exams. some students begin their day at 6 am and come home after 9 pm 6 days a week, the stakes are high, so is the competition.
If asked, most students will say that the hardship of education is necessary to elevate the country and their family…its hard to imagine a kid from santa monica uttering those words.
the suckhole
tv in china is as depressing as everywhere else on the planet.theres nothing worth seeing but everyone is busy watching…tubes glow 24-7 from most restaurants, bars and homes, programming is a mind numbing coctail of stupid game shows, corn-ball kung fu soap operas and ‘historic’ dramas-usually about the great struggle against the nationalist and/or the Japanese (who seem to be the perennial favorite whipping boy), music revues are also a favorite mainstay, these are often massive stadium events of a militaristic nature, thearmy opera co. the navy comedians (!) etc etc.
hong kong tv, in spite of it’s ‘press freedom’ isn’t much of an improvement, their programming is as bone headed as cctv’s minus the military opera aspect… canto-pop tripe is served instead. it can be seen from guangzhou. but when ever a contentious topic is aired, the censors magically insert footage of cherry blossoms in the spring accompanied by eine-kleine military opera interlude.
proportion
These times will be remembered for the automobile, everyone with the means are buying cars and hitting the road, 1950’s U.S. style.
boulevards would be an inadequate description of the road system that slices up modern Chinese cities, many are 8 lanes wide, bisecting old intimate neighborhoods, after buying tomatoes on one side of the street you then hike a half mile to foot bridge to get your onions on the other side of the ‘street’, actually this is not completely true; the urban trend is to wipe out the small intimate neighborhoods, replacing them with massive apartment complexes built around shopping malls the size of Luxemburg.
in china’s cities, the trick is to find the places between the malls and highways, it’s in these cracks and forgotten spaces that the remnants of old interesting neighborhoods survive on borrowed time; noodle shops , laundry lines drying underwear and leafy cabbage, parks with tai chi groups and cozy tea parlors can be found behind the mall walls and serpentine highways.
