I Wonder If It Will Still Be There

Home again.  Waking up on a Saturday morning in my own house.  I’ve one call at eight.  It leads to another call at immediately thereafter.  By the time it’s done, it’s starting to feel like any other day of the week.  But my little one is sitting out in what we call the Queen of Sheba chair, as it sits below the Claude Lorrain painting, which depicts her majesty’s embarkation.  And I know she’s been there a while fiddling with her computer, growing hungry.

I propose we head over to the gym on our bikes.  Do you want to go to the gym first and then go get breakfast or the other way around?  Dumb question.  Breakfast it is then.  It really is a lovely day out, sunny, not too hot, not too cold.  Mrs. Shanen’s, there behind the makeover billboards on Tianbei Road, is our destination.  Every time I go I confess I wonder if it will still be there.  Everything around it has been destroyed.

Mrs. Shanen’s has a good western breakfast that you pencil into the menus they provide.  I don’t believe the smiling bespectacled proprietress who is always there serving things up is necessarily Mrs. Shanen herself, as the owner apparently hails from Brooklyn and this lady has explained that no, she not from Taiwan, as I suspected, but rather from Ningbo.

Bagels are the specialty, but I try to avoid a big starch-fest and stick to fruit and yoghurt.  The espresso is good.  My little one and I try to reckon with what the enormous painting to our side is all about.  A giant green comet appears to be snaking through space, bleeding out of a dozen forked puncture holes.  As we settle-up, I mention how glad I am to see that she’s still there.  She mentions that they have a long lease and so they’ll be staying, even though the entire village surrounding them has been flattened.  Another villa compound, she mentions, as if we need another such thing.  She’s right.  The ones that are here are not full and they are not well maintained.  Before we leave I head to the back bathroom and consider the devastation and see what I can capture of it with my iPhone.

Saturday, 06/03/17

Gate 40 Confirmed

I hate this shit.  Delayed again.  “The plane will be delayed due to air traffic delay.” I can’t absolutely verify if the announcement sounds quite as Kafkaesque in Chinese. I’m staring up at Gate 40.  The plane is right outside, sitting there, empty.  Stewards walk up and down the ramp out to the vessel.  The surly little squirrel-faced fellow who unenviably man’s Gate 40 confirmed, that the flight is delayed.  There is no other news.

                                     

I always ask when I check in, automatically now, “is the flight on time?”  It’s a dumb question because it doesn’t really matter how it is she or he answers.  Today I was told, with confidence that I should expect an on-time departure.  Walking over here to Gate 40 I had errant epiphany: “I’m flying China Eastern today.  China Eastern’s home airport is here in Shanghai.  If I were flying Air China today, like I usually do, I bet the flight would be delayed.  Perhaps I should take China Eastern more often if they are better about delays.”

This naïve loop is now on repeat in my head, mocking me.  I get a text that suggests we might get out of here three hours later.  I’m getting more irritable.  The young woman next to me begins to play her TV on her phone audibly.  I look at her once.  And then again.  She is oblivious.  I don’t care: “Hey?” I ask in Chinese: “do you have earphones?”  “Oh yeah, there out of battery.” “Huh.  Well, it’s kind of loud.” My face certainly looks rather unpleasant.  She turns it down.  Later she moves.

Squirrelly man makes an announcement in Chinese which I can’t quite discern.  It’s about the departure of our flight and people are now mobbing the counter.  I walk up and see that they are now handing out boxes of rice and meatballs.  I stand in line for moment and the stewardess asks me in English if I would like food. I bark back in Beijing-brogue Chinese: “Of course I do.  Why does this guy only make the announcement in Chinese?  How are other people supposed to figure out what you’re talking about?”  I’m showing off.  I’m being an asshole, on purpose.  The other people around me laugh at my insult.

Me and my plastic box return back to where I’d been sitting.  I concede in my mind, that were this to happen in the US, no one would ever think to make any secondary announcement in any other language, ever.  The rubber band shoots off as I open the food box.  The young guy next to me, as if on cue, begins to watch a comedy show with canned laughter on his phone.  “Don’t you have ear phones?”  “Oh. No.”  “Can you turn it off?”

The meatballs aren’t bad.  I don’t want the canned corn.  I take a walk over to the bathroom.  As I urinate the short little cleaning man, begins to yell at the sort of volumes that should otherwise be saved for life threatening situations.  He’s yelling in Shanghaihua at someone back in cleaning people’s galley.  I try on for size how to yell tart Chinese phrases at him: “what the hell are you yelling for?”  Zipping my fly, I continue in my mind: “your cultural level is so low.” Just like how the Chinese love to say it.  But I don’t.  I wash my hands and head back to Gate 40.

Friday 06/02/17

Sealed Shut and You Must Eat

Lunch at a home office is easy enough.  You stock the fridge with the things you want and some time after noon and hopefully before three you head out pop open a can of tuna, add some olive oil and balsamic vinegar, chop up some veggies and sit down with a big salad.   It’s the one time in the work day I allow myself to separate from the computer and try to read something on a printed page that has absolutely nothing to do with work.

In Shanghai, working near the People’s Park, I need to choose each day how it is I’ll feed myself.  It rarely turns out to be an especially healthy choice.  The Starbucks salads aren’t bad.  But if I grab one I’ll usually get eye-candied into the Caesar chicken wrap as well.  There is a sandwich place that I went to yesterday, which plays on a similar logic called “Seewant.”   This must be a broadly recognized hip way to serve sandwiches nowadays, as all four sides of the sandwich square have been sealed shut and you must eat it open.  The insides are tasty but I didn’t want all that bread.

We used to have a salad place down across the street. It seemed popular with all the students and I’d end up chatting with them there.  But they always took so long to make the damn bowl of greens I’d often think twice. Apparently it was a bit too slapdash and folky for this surging neighborhood and its gone now, replaced by a sharp countered milk tea place where everything is red, including the hats and the blouses all the young people who work there have to wear.

I’ve had my eyes on this new salad place not much further up the road.  You get to pick all your ingredients, once by one from a rather extensive menu.  I have the memory of such a place in San Francisco from a decade ago where you always walked out paying much more then you bargained for.  But today I didn’t have a salad.  I had a mere twenty minutes or so to eat by the time I met two friends who were also in town and were kind enough to make their way over to my neighborhood.  Carl’s Jnr in the basement of a mall was clearly not a healthy choice.  But it was quick.  And we had unlimited refills of zero coke, which was good as the young lady took my glass away more than once. The “Portobello Mushroom Burger” didn’t look like it did in the neon picture.  But it went down after a few bites and fries and the ketchup all seemed familiar if nothing else.  And then I dashed back to campus, with another lunch under my belt.

Thursday 06/01/17

Continuing to Blend

Went to a mall for dinner.   I’m in Shanghai by myself.  When I dine by myself I don’t make any great effort to walk beyond a five-block radius in search of a place.  Dining with friends is different and this usually means heading over to the somewhere over near Xujiahui.  When I get in a cab and head over that direction I generally have no idea where I’m heading but I certainly imagine a sultry, plane-treed side street drenched in crepuscular cool.

I hopped out of cab, oblivious to where I was, finishing an animated phone chat as quickly as I could so that I could notify my friends that I’d arrived at the relevant corner.  No need for this.  My friend noticed me on her way from here to there and walked right up to me just as I’d managed my “got-to-go” with the man on the other end of the line.

We exchanged greetings.  It was lovely to see here and she lead the way to a mall.  These guys know where the best places are and we darted along up one and then another escalator.  I can’t imagine how they found this place, up on the third floor away from any windows.  But I supposed tis like Tokyo where you don’t necessarily make your choice at street level but rather reviews and “likes” on mobile apps.

The place we settled down in was billed as “Korean Barbeque.”  Certainly every table had a grill and a characteristic aluminum nozzle dangling down, ready to whisk away all the smoke.  But instead of filling your plate with a dozen small appetizers, they way they might in Seoul, this was set up like a shuang yang rou place might be in Beijing.  Head over to the counter and get as much lettuce and garlic and pickled radish and kimchi and sauces as you like and bring them back to your table.  Your meat choices are traditionally kept limited in Seoul but this menu was unbridled with bacons and chickens to go with our beef.  I didn’t have to worry about any smiling shots of sweet soju, but they didn’t have any wine neither.  Rather it was like Tokyo as they were serving Suntory highballs that tasted grand and hit the spot a little too well.

We closed out the place as the food went on and the conversation was rich, but as we packed it up and let the staff finally close up the register for the final account, I considered the way in which all these North Asian elements were continuing to blend together and become indistinguishable from whatever they had been.

Wednesday, 05/31/17

Too Assertively

The Shanghai night traffic is prancing around outside.  It’s a particular type of Shanghai street traffic.  It is not the hipper-than-than though, plane tree shrouded, darkness of Ruijin Road in the old French Concession’s evening time. This is Huanghe Road between Dingxing Road and Feng Yang Road, not far from the People’s Park.  It’s Shanghai, so there are plenty of Shanghainese.  If I take off the Menahan Street band and listen I can here people ending their interrogatives in “vah?” instead of “ma?”  But the wait staff area all probably from Anhui.  And the people on the street seem to a mix of locals in their bathrobes and waidi tourists and a smattering of ‘heading somewhere else’ foreigners.

I’ve been residing in this neighborhood when I come to teach here for four years or so.  This place isn’t bad.  I’ve sat here and written before.  It’s not as good as the place I ate last night.  But I ate there last night.  I ate too much there.  They should give me paltry Shanghai portions, instead of heaping Shandong portions.  That place is better managed.  The wait staff is all busy and look labored, serious.  This place has a twelve, young people in brown shirts standing around.  When I signalled to one that I was ready to order, he elbowed another kid, who went to the wrong table.  They all laughed as he asked the table that wasn’t yet ready what they wanted for dinner.  “So why don’t one of you three come over then, and take my order, since he went to the wrong table?” I offered, just a bit too assertively.  They laughed nervously and gestured to a girl, out of sight who was also equipped with a food-input-phone and hence allowed to take an order.

I tried to order bean sprout leaves, dou miao, but the young lady, whom I’d yet to really look at told me they didn’t have any dou miao.  Is that right?  What’s good?  She began with an ill-fated sentence: “well, you foreigners tend to like . . . “  “What foreigner?”  I interrupted.  “Stop there.  I’ve been ordering food in this country since before you were born”, I offered, a bit too assertively.  I looked at her face.  I considered her humanity.  I tried to order more slowly.

One of the kids whose job it is to bring things over to table, it would appear, an order taker in training, brought me over my rather more appetizing shizitou than the shizitou they offered me yesterday on the China Eastern flight down here.   “So where are you all from?” I asked, presumptuously, assuming he was less an individual and rather the member of a group.  “We’re all from Guizhou” he said, confirming the collectivity if not the geography of what I’d asserted.  “Oh really?  Guizhou?  That’ great.”

An employee who is allowed to wear a white dress shirt, rather than a brown uniform has just taken a brown shirt clad young fellow outside, just before me here at the windwo, to smoke a cigarette.  The brown shirt kid looks unsure of himself.  Seven of his brown shirt colleagues can see him out there, luxuriating.  There is a story here.  Why there are eight or nine young people from Guizhou manning this restaurant, when two or three would do. There’s a story that goes back to a village in Guizhou I suspect, that has nothing to do with running a profitable restaurant, and everything to do with returning favors.   Then again, perhaps I make my case too assertively.

Tuesday, 5/30/17

I Liked This Guy

Off to the gym.  I marvelled that after a few attempts to get my lah-dee-da blue tooth head set to work with my daughter’s computer she managed to figure it out.  You have to hold it till the blue button turns grey.  Ahh.  OK.  This morning at the gym I couldn’t get the damn things to play.  I was on the stair master cursing like a fool.  It was connected or in the colorful parlance of the industry, ’mounted’ but when I tried to play more Allman Brothers as part of my continuing tribute to Gregg, the sound came out of the phone itself, not in my ears.

I stepped away and tried to figure it out.  I restarted my phone and held the buttons down for minutes on end.  No dice.  I considered just playing the tunes out loud.  There weren’t many people in the gym.  I could hear faint sounds wafting over rom somebodies device.  But in the end I decided against this.  Then a lady of Chinese persuasion came and mounted the stair master beside me and started playing some Chinese pod cast.  I wouldn’t have cared in the least I my headphones were drowning out music.

What a kind doctor we found at one of the European embassies whom we were introduced to.  Thank you and thank you once again.  The receptionist almost scared me off when I called.  “You’re not from the EU?  Oh.  Then we can’t help you.”  But I’d been hipped to the fact that the Dr. was apparently welcoming to North Americans. I suspected we might have to wait in a long line but as promised it was simply a matter of presenting one’s passport and waltzing in.

The unfortunate things, which my regular doctor hadn’t informed me of was that because we had secured the Measles Mumps Rubella shots just the other day and this had live bacteria, we were not allowed to get the Yellow Fever shots for another four weeks.  The kids could but the Mrs. and I would need to return, approximately one day before when we were planning to depart.  Ahh but this was a creative Dr. and he confirmed that because I had had the Yellow Fever shot twenty-five years ago, I was basically OK and it was unnecessary to top it up.  “I don’t have proof of the shot, though Doc.”  “Oh.  It’s OK.  I trust you.”  Man, I liked this guy.

In the end the girls got what they needed and the Mrs. and I will need to return for the Tetanus, Whooping Cough and God-knows-what cocktail for twenty-eight days from now and at the at time the Mrs. can finally have her Yellow Fever shot so we can pass in an out of countries unencumbered after visiting Ethiopia.

Now down in Shanghai.  These super doper minivans are great.  Except or the fact that the air-con doesn’t make it to the back of the vehicle.  It’s hot outside and I‘m sweating.  It’s sweltering back here and the driver thinks I’m crazy because he’s freezing up in his plastic protected cage in the front of the cab.

Monday, 5/29/17