Thursday, June 19, 2014

Walking To and Fro




Up since two.  Had so much stuff.  Piles and piles of stuff, endlessly accreting.  The thought was to go back to bed but time, like the Last Poet’s song says, kept “running out.”  There was the call with California at 7:00AM.  Cool.  Positive result.  Follow-up call with all the relevant people afterwards.  Get some breakfast downstairs at this establishment before it shuts down at ten.  Get a proper double espresso for good measure from the Starbucks around the corner as the coffee downstairs is shit. And then all the rest of the work there was to get done before twelve.  This must get done.  I must send it out and yet I am nodding off, again, and then again. Calls and emails and texts and keep them all at bay as best you can.  And with no minutes to spare, finally press send. 

Then, as John Lennon once said, “you’re on your own, you’re in n the street.”  It’s jarring.  Real people to contend with jostling, operating at a different rhythmic sensibility than you, yourself. Multi-task time.  Knock off one call.  “Hey yeah, its me, (in Chin ese) terribly sorry to bother you and that thing, we need it, yeah, now, and so can you please make sure to bother your “team” and get sent it to us?  Yeah?  OK.  Thanks.”  “Hey, yeah, it’s me.  We’ve got someone at an event.  Looks like you guys are also at the event.  Can you put us in touch with someone from your team to meet someone from our team? Yeah, there at the event.  Yeah? Great.  So it’s like that.  Good.  Thanks.”  “Hey, hi, it’s me.  Is it convenient for you to talk for a second?  Yeah?  Great . . .”



Still waiting for the “after a while you start to smile, now you feel cool” bit.  Regardless, as always, unwittingly, invariably, perennially, “watching the skirts . . .”  Elevator up, without me.  Wait.  Wait.  It’s back.  Up we go.  Fashionably one minute late and it is now show time.   And not too long after I remember and check and am happy to report my fancy headphones were right where I left them last night.  I can cease to talk myself into the new purchase I was fretting would be necessary. 

The walk home is different.  Passing Nanjing Road, I am confronted, again, by someone who wants to offer me a massage.  “Valesseh!” I bark, in local dialect.  “Not cool” or “absolutely not.”  This is the thirty-third time in eight days that some man or woman has approached me this way.  Shanghai was not always like this. 

Shanghai was like this, of course, in the days when there were 100,000 opium addicts and untold orphans and destitute peasants and heartless entitled extra-teritorials all swarming about the Paris of the Orient.  And then, after things became worse, there was none of this.  All drug trade, all prostitution, all entitled extra teritorials and most inequality were done away with.  I first arrived some fifty-two years later and things were in transition.  But as I recall, active solicitation in the street was rarity.  To this day in Beijing, this is not as confrontational, in your face, concern, as you walk around, say San Li Tun.  Why is Shanghai so contaminated this way?

For many things Shanghai’s police seem more active with enforcement.  Outside of the hallowed holy-ground of all sensitivity in and around Tiananmen Square, Beijing is comparatively lax, at least until something goes wrong or someone violates something egregiously.  Traffic rules, and cop cars, and traffic mavens are all more serious here.  You ride your bike where your not supposed to, they’re going to impound it.  But they have obviously given up or been paid off to focus elsewhere, as it concerns these touts to and their open, operation en masse. 

And oddly, stupidly, self-servingly, latter-day imperialistically, I feel it is my appointed duty to lecture the male touts about what it is they’re doing.  My ability to 戒骄戒躁[1] vanishes, in a second. Flipping off my headphones, and proceeding in Chinese:  “so you want to rent me a young Chinese woman for the evening?  Is that correct?  That’s your job?  Do you have a maternal grandmother?  Do you have paternal grandmother?  Do you have a mother?  I think your job evidences a low degree of cultural sophistication.  Yes.  I do.  I think you’re work is a national embarrassment.  You should consider changing your work young man.” 



Usually they smile or frown and spin away mid-diatribe, to make their next buck.  I’d never do that anywhere else in the world.  I wouldn’t have the language ability to do it most places.  And I can’t imagine spontaneously conducting that conversation in English.  I’d just blow it off.  But I have a wife and two daughters here and I must say I just hate being accosted that way.  Everyone can and will do what they want privately.  Go for it.  But in my face?  Leave me alone.   This city that is so proud of itself, should demand much more of itself.

Later, after a late, late dinner I listen Rio’s “messenger of truth.”  Another suggestion from my friend who is the font of all things Tropicalia.  The title song sets it off nicely, “Monstrao.”  He has the Keak de Snaek deepness of voice.  He could be talking about social justice or robbing nursing homes and I’d be clueless listening to the Portuguese.   But his flow works across language.  Horizontal now, at last.    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MV_Bill

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      




[1] jièjiāojièzào: to guard against pride and impatience (idiom); to remain modest and keep cool

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