Street of Humane Copper

Humility is always rather difficult to stay focused on.  Especially when someone is yelling at you.  Plenty of the Shanghai cabbies are reasonable.  A few are erudite.   But sometimes man . . . I told the offending sexagenarian that I was heading to “Tong Ren Lu.”   Sufficiently well known to register with anyone whose been driving in the city for more than a week.  He turned and positively yelled “WHERE?”  I repeated in a normal voice, “tong ren lu” assuming we’d certainly settled the matter.  He turned and yelled once again, perhaps a bit louder “WHERE?”  I’ve a set of pipes and I now abandoned all trappings of humility and yelled with rather much more force that was required: TONG REN LU, TONG REN LU, go up to Xizang Lu, turn right, when you get to Beijing Lu go left, when we get there I’ll tell you.  You got it?  Where you from anyway?”

This settled the matter.  He now knew where we were going.  He now knew that his default ‘loud’ tone of inquiry, which felt fine as an interrogative was decidedly unpleasant as a pitch for dialogue.  Both of us kept quiet.  My initial meditative salve blanketed me with the idea that the Shanghainese version of Mandarin was so accented that he couldn’t recognize my perfectly reasonable Mandarin utterance.  Fortunately realism, never accessible in the moment proves to be rather irrepressible over time.  I considered that I didn’t, in fairness know, which “tong” and which “ren” it had really been.  As anyone who speaks Chinese knows the proper way to settle confusion about which character you’re talking about in a language with such a density of homophones is to say: “this ‘tong’, that’s part of this word, and that ‘ren’, that’s part of that word.”  And to be fair, I had no idea.  Were it to have been “Nan Jing Lu” this would have been easy.  That I didn’t know which ‘tong’ and which ‘ren’, was what had fed my frustration and tendency towards escalation, rather than clarification, as any reasonable Chinese person would have done.

So, it appears that in this case, the ‘tong’ in this tong and the ‘ren’ in this ‘ren’, form “Tong Ren” (铜仁), which a prefecture level city in the province of Guizhou. Most of the names of the streets in Shanghai were changed after liberation from foreign names to locations of Chinese significance.  I had a look at Tong Ren county as well, expecting to find that Mao’s Eighth Route Army fought a decisive battle there but it appears to be distinguished solely by its tobacco cultivation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tongren

What had the street been called before 1949?  I looked and Tong Ren Street used to be called Hardoon Road, named after the wealthy Iraqi Jewish businessman: Silas Aaron Hardoon, who rose as a rent collector in the Sassoon organization to become one of the cities wealthiest real estate magnates in the late nineteenth century.   https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silas_Aaron_Hardoon

Even if I’d had all this information at the ready, during my eight second exchange, I still wouldn’t have been able to perform the simple Chinese function though, of positively identifying the precise character “tong” and the precise character “ren” outside of the context of the word itself, one is seeking to explain.  This particular “tong” it turns out, means “copper.” And that particular “ren”, it appears, means “humane.”  What a different conversation it would have been if I’d have been able to say: “you know, the ‘tong’ that is used in bronze “qingtong” or brass “huangtong,” man.  And the “ren” I’m talking about is one of the wu chang ‘ren’, one of the five constant virtues of Confucianism, dude.  The street of humane copper, take me there with all speed.” Then, and only then, would a touch of haughtiness have been in order, and certainly there would have been no need to raise my voice.

Tuesday 6/6/17