Shanghai
at night. Shanghai at a road side
café. A caffelitto where tapas
are served whether or not you've ordered any and the wine is not necessary to
request. New dripping wet cold,
dry white bottles arrive as soon as they are finished. You’re the only ones who don’t seem
intimately associated with the ownership structure and still, somehow, it
sustains and it isn’t the first time you’ve been here and been treated so
kindly.
Then duck out under the Plane trees and miss the first but
grab the second cab. Speeding
around in the back of a cab that has both the rear windows rolled down. The breeze is intense until you realize
that it is an option. You have the
power to impose your will and close them both. Considering the faces of the night people out here and then
there in Shanghai. Young Chinese
people of means, and young foreign people of ephemeral confidence. There is a man my who’s pulled back the
opening on the public garbage can and is rifling through the waste materials in
search of bottles or something of greater value. A guy, who is presumably a guard, stripped down to a white
tee, reclined in a chair on the street, beside a gate opening looking fast
asleep.
I have to fight from falling asleep. It’s a Pee Wee Herman
vs. Leon Spinx sort of bout where I, in a bow tie, have no chance. My back of the cab mind wants to just
let myself doze off, and we haven’t clarified where precisely it is I’m heading
to. “The People’s Park, my good
man”, blink too many times and I might wind up in Berkeley. It’s a big park and I’m two
blocks off it in a direction I can’t easily articulate because
north-south-east-west articulation in this city, that spins and turns like the
bows in the rivers is never as easy as the square that radiates out from the
emperors throne in Beijing.
Keep typing as the lights pass by and I regain
consciousness, again. I’ll leave
in the next thought that I typed at the precise time. “Thought” is too kind an assignation but it certainly less
objectionable than “sentence: “b thcoices to one wher We hae a me in; u . . .
” You got that?
A cough, an interjection . . . “ah, yeah just keep going
straight ahead.” “to Beijing
Street?” “Yes, indeed.” And so it returns to me, the street I
live on, and in parallel so does a memory of knowing from years ago that the
street, appropriately, north of Nanjing Lu, is Beijing Lu. Remember that.
Flying down this morning, I had music on that might have
kept me awake if I’d managed to pull it out in the cab. The driving Lyman Woodard Organization,
“Live At J.J.’s Lounge” from 1974 album reminds me of something a dorm mate
might have turned me on to in 1984.
The tune “Kimba” is surging, jazz funk, anchored, driving and not the
least bit fuzak-ian. Apparently he
was the Detroit organist, playing
with Martha and Vandellas and then made the jazz funk scene there in the Motor
City in the seventies. He
passed in Owosso Michigan; the same town he was born in, passing in 2009 at the age of
66. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyman_Woodard
Stepping on the plane, I grabbed, as I always do, the China
Daily. It’s that or the Global
Times, which the Chinese airlines always provide as free-be English language newspapers. It’s always helpful to see how the
Party wants the news framed and sometimes there is even a surprise. Front page, un-mis-able “news” today was
the headline “Actress Stuck in Nation’s Conflict.” It traced the story of the actress Yoshiko Otaka, aka, Yoshkiko Yamagushi, aka Li
Xianglan, who died on September 7 at the age of 94. During the Japanese invasion she was one of the biggest film
stars in China. http://usa.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2014-09/16/content_18603510.htm
Born of Japanese parents, she was raised in Japanese
occupied Manchuria, and given a Chinese name, taught to sing by Russian
expatriates, she answered an add for a Chinese girl who could read music and
speak Japanese, she got the part.
From then on she was known to the public by her Chinese name and became
famous as a “Chinese” actress who could speak both languages. At the end of war she was captured and
slated for execution as a collaborationist with all the other 乱臣贼子[1], but her Russian instructor somehow
managed to produce her Japanese birth certificate and she was sent back to
Japan. She continued a film career
through the fifties, and married a Japanese diplomat and then won a seat in the
Diet where she served for eighteen years.
And she was a vocal critic of official visits to the Yasakune Shrine,
speaking out for the reconciliation of her Fatherland Japan and her Motherland
China, which obviously endeared her to the folks at China Daily.
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