Tian Zi Fang and Food

The other weekend, I got a traditional, curve-fitting qipao, as well as a ruffled, sheer, silk blouse based on a photo from Vogue tailor-made at Shanghai’s fabric market—all for a total of $80 or $40 each. Oh, China! Whatever you think of it, sometimes, you just gotta love it.

Wearing a qipao at Mint, a Shanghai nightclub.

Besides going to the fabric market, which is a must if you’re looking to buy inexpensive (by American standards) clothes tailor-made, I would also recommend going to Tian Zi Fang, if you’re ever in town. Upon arriving, you’ll see is an uninteresting gate that says “Tian Zi Fang” on it, and you’ll think, “That’s it?” But once you walk into the alleyway, a whole maze of brick and cobbled streets opens up before you, like a landscape expanding before you as you walk forward in a video game. The pedestrian streets within are lined on both sides with adorable little shops and restaurants, each of which made me giddy with excitement and interest. Last semester at Cornell, I created folder on my computer for all the home décor photos I see that inspire me in order to help me decorate my house, when the time comes. I already have about photos from the internet in it, but I don’t have any photos that I took myself in it. If you’re a closet domestic like me, you’d fall hard for Tian Zi Fang, the way I did. One store was filled with hand-blown glassware in a multitude of colors, all made by a local artist, another sold decorative chopsticks, shams, cushions, and delightful tea sets rendered in traditional and Asian fusion styles. From farther down the street waft the mouth-watering aromas of a summer barbecue from an American restaurant.

One art shop in Tian Zi Fang featured white figurines on which any visitor was invited to draw.

The weekend before last, Henry, Christine, Lucia, Go, Eric and I all went to a Thai restaurant in Tian Zi Fang. The atmosphere in the upstairs dining area was chic, with dim light coming from glowing red lanterns in black cages, and real orchids sitting in a vase on each table. The seating was also very different from both American and Chinese restaurants. We had to take our shoes off before stepping onto a floor cushion that covered the nearly the entire room, which was a rather large dining area with 10 or 15 tables for different parties. Next, we sat down cross-legged on seat cushions on top of this soft floor cushion the way you would in a traditional Japanese restaurant. However, unlike the usually minimalist décor and muted colors you would find in a Japanese restaurant, the cushions had lush Southeast Asian designs that matched the rich velvety colors of the rest of the décor. The restaurant also had a female dancer wearing traditional dress who danced with slow, rhythmic movements to the restaurant’s background music, which ironically was Western lounge music. The menus had pad Thai and other Thai dishes, but the wine and beers list was chock full of foreign beverages with creative and sometimes suggestive foreign names. If I had to describe Asian fusion to someone, I would tell them to go to this restaurant. It was the perfect example of the “exotic” vibe of the East juxtaposed with the “chic” atmosphere of the moneyed West. Throw in some international yuppies as the clientele and there you go.

I don’t want to misrepresent my experience here in Shanghai and China overall. The dinner at the Thai restaurant was more like a special treat than an everyday experience here. It’s so easy to get a distorted picture of a destination through a travel blog, since readers forget that what the blogger probably thinks to write about are highlights of the trip, rather than everyday drudgery.

To provide balance to the Thai description, let me briefly describe my usual dining habits in China. For breakfast, which I usually pick up on the way to class, I get shen1 jian1, which is fried xiao3 long2 bao1, which is “little dragon baozi,” which is pork in a little doughy Chinese bun, or I get guo1 tie1, which are tasty fried dumplings. Or, from street vendors in this one alley, (I heard the warnings about street food too, but it’s OK; this place is tried and true), I get chong1 you2 bin3, which is “scallion pancakes,” or jian1 bin3, which is crullers, peanuts, and fried egg wrapped in a Chinese “tortilla” with green onions in it.

Lunch in Shanghai usually involves going to a local restaurant somewhere between the apartments and class. Luckily for Alliance students, the route between class and school is full of cheap to mid-priced restaurants. Some of these restaurants have just ordinary Chinese lunch food, which consists of fried rice, chicken and eggplant, potato slices with peppers, noodles with bok choy, or dumplings, just to name a few dishes. Other restaurants specialize in Japanese, Korean, or Muslim (Western Chinese) cuisine. And, it has become a matter of course for us students here in Shanghai that there will always be two or three “American” or “Western” restaurants, wherever you go. Our main food street going to class features Ciao, an Italian restaurant with decent pizza (but at a price–¥70 for a personal pizza), the Story, an American restaurant with hamburgers and pasta (that once had a random spicy pepper that I swallowed in it), and Chartres Deli, a restaurant that is right next to the Tonghe lobby and is pretty much caters to international students at Fudan. A decent normal lunch should cost ¥10 to ¥20, which comes out to only a couple USD.

Now, dinner in Shanghai. Dinner is really a free-for-all. Dinner can be as simple as lunch in any of the aforementioned places or dinner can mean searching the city for more exquisite dining. Although I’ve not yet been, some Alliance students have been to a Mexican restaurant called Adobo, which serves decent Mexican food, but at an alarming price—up to ¥200, or nearly $30. On the lower end of the “fancy schmancy” dinners would be a restaurant like the Thai one described above. Many students also enjoy huo3 guo1 or “hot pot” at Chinese restaurants here. I’ve had this before with family and Chinese friends in the States and also in California with the bf, but for the wai3 guo3 ren2 (“foreigners”) that don’t know, “hot pot” is a style of eating in China, which involves a group of people choosing a number of raw vegetables, mushrooms, and slices of meat, and dipping it or throwing it into a shared pot of boiling broth, kind of like fondue. When the Alliance students went to Nanjing for our weekend trip two weeks ago, we had excellent “hot pot” at a restaurant there. We stuffed ourselves full with lamb, beef, mushrooms, taro, fish balls, and many other foods for ¥45 apiece, which sounded like a lot at first, but which was actually only $7.

Sometimes it’s ridiculous when I eat an excellent meal here that would cost $20 or more in the U.S. and realize it costs me less than the cost of a sandwich. I might grab between classes at school. In fact, my bf and I made the un-enchanting discovery last semester that we can’t get lunch for under $7 at school, whether it’s at a dining hall or in off campus.

I think my stay here in China will spoil me in terms of how much each item is worth. When I get back to the U.S. and a waiter tells me lunch was $12, I can imagine myself slapping the table angrily and replying, “What?! $12? That wasn’t worth ¥12!” and then proceed to try to haggle it down to no avail. In all seriousness, living in China made me realize that you can’t just put a price on how much a product is worth because the price tag varies vastly on where you go around the world. It also makes me realize how easily Americans spend greenbacks in the U.S. without realizing how much more bang they could/should be getting for their buck. Lastly, it’s made me realize that when the WTO or the UN said billions of people still live on under $2 a day, 2USD can actually go a heck of a long way in other countries, not to belittle the message about poverty or anything.

In other news, I’m currently reading Thomas L. Friendman’s Hot, Flat, and Crowded in my spare time, including during my spring break right now. Of the five parts, Part IV is titled “China” and Part V, titled “America,” consists of two subparts, “China for a Day (But Not for Two)” and “A Democratic China, or a Banana Republic.” China is truly the hot topic of the decade, a fact that makes me even more grateful to be studying here now. China’s economy has slowed down somewhat because of the world financial crisis, but it has also managed to insulate itself from the crisis’s effects somewhat because its four big banks, including my bank here, China Construction Bank, are all state-owned. With this shield in place, China is able to venture on where other countries need a breather. China is proud of its success so far, which drives it to be more enterprising, which attracts more people, both foreign and domestic, to the field, which in turn drives more of its economic success. What will happen when China is the world’s biggest economy? In what position will this put the U.S.? How will the U.S. influence China to limit its pollution and invest in expensive green technologies when China becomes more powerful than the U.S. and sees its own economic success at risk? These are the pressing questions of the day. Hopefully Friedman will discuss these issues when I get to Parts IV and V…

Underwear, Everywhere

So just to let you know if you come to China soon, there are no driers here. Our apartment is quite nice, with a spacious living room, attached dining room, kitchen, two bathrooms, and three bedrooms, each with full sized beds. Instead of having a washer and drier, however, we have a washer and—a drying room. The drying room is pretty much our balcony here on the eighth floor, except it’s more like a greenhouse, since the walls are made of glass, which helps heat it up in the sun, even if it’s cold outside. Overhead are two long metal bars, which stretch across the length of the balcony. To dry our clothes, we just hang our clothes directly on the metal bars, which can be raised and lowered with a little pulley, or, we hang our clothes on hangers, which are then hung on the bars.

Our drying room, which doubles as a balcony. Having your clothes hang where everyone inside and outside can see them is common here.

What’s interesting is that simply no one here uses driers, regardless of wealth. Lucia is quite well off and our apartment is really nothing to complain about, yet she and her friends don’t have driers and we don’t have a drier next to our washer. I think part of the reason for this lack of driers is tradition; people here like to dry their clothes in drying rooms or outside windows, just as they have been for hundreds or thousands of years. Although this seems to be how Chinese people respond when asked why they don’t have driers, this answer is hardly satisfying, at least to me. There are many things people did for hundreds and thousands of years, such as salting and burying food in the ground to keep it fresh or riding a horse and buggy, but they stopped doing those things when technology improved and their countries became wealthier.

Then there’s the “green” reason. Some Chinese people say it saves energy not to use driers because the sun works just as well and without wasting any electricity and generating any heat. Therefore, using drying rooms is good for the environment. There’s no doubt that using drying rooms is probably better for the environment, but it definitely uses a lot more manpower and human energy. After the clothes are washed, we have to hang every piece of clothing, every sock and every panty, onto the metal drying bars. I’ve had to hand-wash clothes in the past, such as sweaters or delicate tops from Anthro, but drying three or four items on a wooden rack is simply not the same as drying your whole load of laundry overhead. The clothes take about two afternoons to fully dry. With any technology that uses electricity, you have to do cost/benefit analysis. I could just move a chair to the balcony to do homework using natural light, but for most people, the hassle of moving their laptop, their books, and a chair to another room just to use natural light is not worth it. It’s so much easier just to flip on a light switch in your bedroom. So is it really worth all the manual labor just to save some electricity on driers? I think the U.S. and most other developed countries say “no.” China may be doing a good thing, but are its people so much more environmentally aware and altruistic than people of other countries? I still find this “green” explanation dubitable.

So after all this analysis, I still don’t feel like I understand why the Chinese don’t use driers. If someone has some good ideas, please feel free to let me know.

I wonder if they use them in the French concession or in very wealthy areas over by the Bund. I’d imagine that a lot of rich expats would demand them.

One last thing. I always thought it was kind of ridiculous for people to complain about doing your laundry at school, but now I feel even more strongly that doing laundry is so easy in the States. You people complaining are just being whiney and you know it.

Cancer Free in Shanghai

This morning in Chinese class, I asked for the date and almost didn’t believe my teacher, Zhu Laoshi, when she said it was already March! I can’t believe it’s been a month since I’ve gotten to China, and I can’t believe there’s only three months left of living in Shanghai! I’ve long theorized that times goes by faster and faster the older we get because each additional year adds less marginal experience to our overall life, to use economics, but in Shanghai, this phenomenon seems to have sped exponentially.

I know, I haven’t blogged since coming to China! I’ve been disappointed in myself over it too, but I also think it was the most appropriate path given the situation. I’ve been to a hospital about an hour away by taxi 5 times already and it was because of the swollen lymph node. I’ve spent 24+ hours at the hospital, which, while time well spent, was also time that I could have spent doing myriad other things, among them, blogging.

I don’t want to freak people out too much, but when I got to Shanghai, the swelling didn’t go down and in fact a new lymph node next to the other one started swelling too. I also started getting fevers again. That’s when I decided I had to go to the hospital here. I got an ultrasound that revealed that there were over 10 lymph nodes in the left side of my neck that were swollen abnormally. To make a long story short, the doctor told me it might be cancer (lymphoma) and that I had to get a biopsy. So pretty much, I haven’t been blogging because of a cancer scare. I’m glad to say, I found out I don’t have cancer. Instead, I have Kikuchi Disease, which causes fevers and headaches, but which is supposed to “resolve itself” in my doctor’s words, within 6 months. It sucks, but that’s how life works.

So I don’t feel like spending any more time talking about being sick for the first few weeks. The point is that I’m going to be fine, and I feel absolutely fine now.

Life in Shanghai is great. Obviously, part of what makes life here so enjoyable is its newness and the fact that I’m living in a city, not a small town, for the first time in my life. The first week was spent meeting new people and exploring the city through tours scheduled through the Alliance, the program through which I am attending Fudan University. I live in a very comfortable international students’ apartment with two apartment-mates, which I may refer to as roommates for convenience from now on. One is Annie, a junior from Minnesota who has a Polish boyfriend. The other is Lucia, a junior at Fudan who is taking the GRE and TOEFL in April in hopes of going to America to get her master’s. Both of them are nice, amiable people, who I am glad to be spending the semester with. However, as the weeks go by, I feel like I can tell more and more than I will be much closer to Lucia in the long run. Lucia and I have a lot in common, even though we grew up on opposite sides of the world. We both have Chinese heritage, lived away from our parents at a young age, have the unusual strict and conservative parents, are academically inclined, and feel an obscure, but deep-seated insecurity about being alone that is reflected in the way we conduct our relationships.

I feel surprisingly close to Lucia in such a short time, and if she comes to the U.S. for her master’s, we can hopefully meet up again and stay lifelong friends. This closeness is partially because my friends and family from home aren’t around for me to depend on, Lucia knows the city well, and perhaps most importantly because she was there for me when I was sick the first couple of weeks here. I never intended to exclude Annie from our roommate bond, but Lucia told me that in a conversation they had while she was helping Annie with her Chinese homework, Annie revealed that she felt excluded because Lucia and I often speak Chinese with each other, and she’s still a Level 1 Chinese student.

Thinking about this issue reaffirmed the fact that I must speak Chinese outside of class in order to become fluent. If I wanted to limit my Chinese to the classroom and just hang out with a bunch of Americans, I would not have come all the way to Shanghai. Furthermore, I have had opportunity to speak Chinese to my parents growing up, but I didn’t think it was enough because they often speak Chinglish to me and are too busy with their own lives to correct all of my mistakes. If I practice speaking Chinese to Lucia only half-assedly, then it would be no different from being at home speaking Chinese to my parents. I only have three months left, and I need to give it my all. Furthermore, I speak English to and in front of Annie whenever she’s around so as not to be rude. I ask her if she wants eat with me much more than the other way around, and she is the one turning down those opportunities. I never even realized she felt excluded because she never approached me about it. I thought she was just happy hanging out with Americans and speaking English, and that’s what she wanted to do with her semester. I don’t think I did anything wrong, and lately I have been extra careful to speak English when she’s around, even though I’d rather practice Chinese. If things don’t work out between us, at least I can with a clear conscience that it wasn’t my fault.

I have so much more to tell you, but that’s all I’ve got time for now.

WordPress Blocked in China

So I just found out that WordPress has been blocked in China since 2006! I was on Wikipedia surfing around for articles about China and got to the topic of censorship in China. I remembered hearing on NPR the other day that China is reinforcing its crackdown against websites with “vulgar” or “obscene” content by censoring and blocking fourteen new websites, such as Microsoft’s MSN, so I was interested in seeing which notable websites were blocked in China.

According to Wikipedia, websites like The New York Times and BBC News are blocked, but surprisingly I saw many more that were  blocked before but now aren’t, such as Yahoo! Taiwan and AOL news. Scrolling down, I saw a list of blogs and vlogs that are blocked, and was shocked and yet not surprised when I spotted Blogspot, Livejournal, Flickr, and WordPress on the list! Wikipedia did note that WordPress seems unblocked at times, but when I googled “WordPress blocked in China?” all of the top results said that indeed WordPress is blocked. 😦

So now I’m wondering, how am I going to disseminate my experience in Shanghai? I’ll still try to access WordPress there, but now I will be surprised if it works. Maybe I’ll have to take regular trips to the American embassy to beg for wireless access to foreign websites. Luckily, Facebook isn’t blocked in China anymore, so if I need to, I can go back to posting there instead until I get home to update everything here. Anyway, this entire situation is so infuriating!

My parents insist that the American media has a negative bias against China because it sees China as an economic competitor and a threat to the continuing status of the U.S. as the world’s only superpower. However, I’ve pointed out to them that the news they’re getting through Chinese cable is probably just as skewed towards giving the Chinese government a positive image. At least in the U.S., the government can’t filter which news is appropriate for the government’s own image and which isn’t, unless the speech goes beyond the purview of the 1st Amendment right to free speech. Ever since the FCC abolished the Fairness Doctrine, which required the “fair and balanced” (however subjective that actually turns out to be) presentation of any significant controversial news, the American media has been free, even if we have much to complain about the things that are said throught it. Whichever way things are skewed, which I’m not at all denying they are, different viewpoints can at least still get air time, regardless of the ascribed to political ideology. This is extremely different from media in China, in which the government can censor the media without justification and ensure that there are no negative portrayals of the government on TV or even foreign websites.

At least with free media here in the U.S., we can decide for ourselves what the “truth” is, after hearing both sides of a story, which happens when multiple voices all compete to tell their version of it. This echoes the adversarial system of law that we use here in America, in which lawyers from two competing sides verbally duke it out to convince the judge or jury of their “truth.” And while some minority voices are certainly underrepresented, at least Americans don’t just see and hear the only strained, filtered, and purified b.s. news that makes it through the giant sieve that is the Chinese government. The language of the PRC’s actions reveal the way in which it views the Chinese people–as children who can’t responsibly handle vulgarity or (God forbid) viewpoint diversity. It’s as if the government is a movie theater and the Chinese people can’t get into a rated R movie, no matter what ID they show.

It’s no wonder films and TV shows in China are often vapid retellings of ancient legends, the Qing dynasty, martial arts, or most commonly all three. To the government, anything else would be too dangerous for the Chinese people, too close to the present, and too “Westernized,” all of which of course they can’t have. I understand that China’s pride in its ancient history and the interrelatedness of Buddhism and the martial arts tradition (as in the case of the Shaolin monks) are also substantial reasons behind these types of movies and shows, but I can’t help but wonder cynically about alternative reasons why the Chinese film industry lacks movies about the extremely interesting topics of the rapidly changing landscape of China and the relationships and lives of the modern Chinese.

It hasn’t escaped my notice that all of my entries so far have been somewhat angry in tone, and perhaps I can’t deny that I often find a lot to complain about. But all in all, all I’m doing is exercising my right to free speech and hoping that by raising awareness about some of the problems in the world, we can make progress in fixing them. I promise that in real life I’m actually quite a nice person who does not complain most of the time.

Warmly,

Dorothy

Welcome to my blog/Happy Holidays

My Dear Readers,

Happy holidays to you all! As much as I’d like a grand first entry, I’m too sick right now to be too creative about it, so what you see is what you get.

So I’ve written several long notes on Facebook and was in the mood to write another one the other day, when I said to myself, “Why not just start a blog and actually build up readership in a more legitimate arena?” So I decided I would do just that. That, and I was rejected to be a study abroad journalist by my university :(. I was told that while I told a good story, the abroad office “felt pressured to choose people of diverse majors, backgrounds, and destinations.” I’m not sure how being an Asian American biology and society major going to Shanghai, is not diverse enough, particularly when there are still very few people who choose to study abroad in Asia at all. Maybe the office just said that to make me feel better. But in any case, I decided that it was in earnest when I had said that I wanted to document and memorialize my experiences abroad, and a personal blog would be an excellent way to do it.

So that said, let’s jump into my first story. So I went to see Benjamin Button on it’s opening day, but since that was also Christmas, I didn’t expect there to be any trouble finding good seats, much less a seat. But I was wrong. People apparently get very bored on Christmas. The theater was actually jam-packed, and had I gotten there a few minutes later, I probably would’ve been stuck in the first row, which would’ve sucked. But my brother and cousin and I were smart about it and decided the the best way would be to split up and look for single seats. I spotted one with coats on it next to an elderly, white-haired couple in the top row. I asked the couple, “Is anyone sitting there?” The thin-lipped old lady, who was heavily made-up replied with wide eyes, “Well we want something to put our coats on!” in a snobbish, dismissive tone. I was taken aback a bit by her rudeness, and maybe that was part of why I kind of just said the next thing that came to mind, which was, “But what about in the Christmas spirit?…” Looking back now, I sounded kind of dumb, and the situation could have ended embarrassingly for both parties.  The old lady rolled her eyes and said “What Christmas spirit?!” but thankfully moved her and her husband’s coats out of the way for me, thankfully.

So I got a seat, but that wasn’t the end of it. I had a fever the eve of Christmas eve, and I’ve been sick since. So I was coughing a lot, but you know, minimizing it and coughing into my hand and being generally considerate. But every time I coughed, the old lady would lean away from me and whisper something to her husband as if I had the plague. The one time I got up to go to the bathroom and get some tissues, when I came back, she and her husband had switched places, indubitably because of me. The snobby old grinch! It was for the best though. The rest of the movie went by uneventfully, except for me silently crying at a few spots (because of the movie!). If the old lady had said one more mean thing about me, it would’ve been hard to stop me from saying something to her at the end of the movie about how rude she was. *Sigh* I guess the lesson is: don’t expect people to be angels and don’t expect an empty theater just because it’s Christmas. Those lessons aren’t the most insightful, but I feel like I should leave my readers with some new wisdom.

More from my Dorothy’s vault of “amazing” stories to come…I’d best go to bed now, since I might go to NYC tomorrow.

Dorothy