Hong Kong Living

¡Ole!

Ay caramba! I´m in Spain. Was sort of thinking I might make this little side trip all along, but it wasn´t until I ran across a couple books in the French and British (oddly enough) Libraries that I thought it might be worthwhile.

I´m here in Seville doing research at the Archivo General de Indias for the week. ¨Indias,¨ of course refers to the Americas (the Spanish took Columbus term ¨Indians¨ and ran with it.) I´m researching the Philippines, which is, of course, not in the Americas but Asia, the part of the world most other countries (France, Britain, Netherlands, the USA) used to call the Indies ... but the Philippine governor was subordinate to the viceroy in Mexico (he got all his money from the Acapulco silver galleons, so it makes some sense) and so by being wrong by about 50% of the globe twice, the Spanish managed to be right about calling the Philippines part of the Indies. (When they divided the world up with the Portuguese in 1493 the Spanish got everything west of what was eventually agreed upon as Portuguese Brazil (i.e. the Americas), and the Portuguese got everything east of that, ie. Africa and Asia ... if you draw a line around the rest of the globe, I´m not sure, but you might end up finding the other half of that division somewhere between the Spanish Philippines and Portuguese Macao. Or not. Anyway, I´m looking into Manila shipping records, which exist, and which are proving to be quite fruitful.

Saville is toasty. It´s 95 degrees out right now. The Archivo opens early in the day at 8 (when the sun is still just coming up) and closes at 3 for lunch and siesta time and stays shut for the rest of the day. All the stores are closed from 2 or 3 until 5 and reopen again at 5 until 8 or 9 PM, when it´s cooler. But my room is airconditioned, so I can write in there in peace. OK, back to the airconditioned room. I have a chapter to edit.

Photos!

There are photo albums up for Provence, where I am now just leaving, and also for Prague/Munich, which I toured with Jessica.

You can see them by clicking on the listings to the right (under photo albums).

Provence

Well, I've spent the last couple weeks here in Aix-en-Provence doing work in the French National Archives branch here, which is the archives of the Outre-Mer, or "overseas," but probably translates best as "empire." Algeria, Vietnam, West Africa, Mauritius, the French Caribbean, Canada, and Tahiti are all here in what, to an anglophone, seems like an incongruous mix. I was researching into material from Mauritius and from French India and I found a lot of stuff that other people don't seem to have used before, so that's good.

For the past couple weeks I've been holed up in the Hotel Caravelle, which is just on the edge of the pederstrian-zoned old town and the outer ring road. The archives are a 20 minute walk from here on the far side of the local university, and about as far from town as they could be and still be considered in Aix.

It's been sunny, clear and warm for the past couple weeks, classic weather for the south of France, I suppose, but a striking contrast to Hong Kong (where it's been sunny, but muggy).

Anyway, I'm off to Paris today, where I'll be for the next three weeks before heading on to London.

French Bread

French bread has a history. And if you don't want to read the whole 370 page book, I suggest you read the following review, which is really interesting makes me want some bread. Good think I'm about to go to dinner and have some. I must warn you though that the article is in a British magazine, and you can't trust anything the British say about the French. Or at least that's what the French say, but then again, I don't know if I trust them.

Whirlwind

I reaped the travel whirlwind. After Shanghai I went to Tianjin for a conference and then on to Peter's wedding in Jiutai, which was wonderful, though it seemed like a bit draining on the happy couple. It was such an affair it made the evening news and the next morning's paper (Jiutai's not exactly downtown Manchuria). The fact that they had a parade, and that Peter was riding a horse helped. So did the dancing troupe and the Chinese band and the palanquin and, well, I'll put up pictures in a bit. Then back to Hong Kong, packed, off to Europe for research. Am now ensconced in Aix-en-Provence, in the south of France, about 25 km from the Mediterannean. I arrived via train in Marseilles and bussed it up here. The train got in at sunrise, which was beautiful.

Aix is amazing. All the buildings in the old town are made of yellow stone, anything concrete is painted to match. So there's this pale yellow color to everything. Went to the wet market the other day, which was like a million markets in China, except it had lavender, honey, olive oil and tappenade, local organic wines and juices and a million cheeses and preserved meats, in addition to the live chickens, eggs, fish (biggest variety I've ever seen), and fruits and veggies you'd see anywhere. Lunch for the past two days has been a market-inspired sheep's cheese with bread, fresh strawberries, and lemonade. Also noticed that every person working behind the counter at the market has an espresso first, which everyone just calls "coffee." Normal filter coffee is rare here (nor in Italy, I'm told "Americano" was coined by Italians in WWII to describe the drink American GIs wanted (espresso dilluted with water).

Anyway, I'll be in Provence for the next two weeks, then Paris for three weeks and London for the second half of the summer.

Traffic Cop

I saw the wierdest altercation the other day in Shanghai. A traffic cop was standing at an intersection directing traffic and pulling over bicyclists going in the wrong lane when one of the cyclists decided to give him a hard time. The cyclist, a woman in her 40s, started arguing and shouting with him, trying to get out of her ticket. Now, I'd say that's the wrong way to go about it. You should make nice with the policeman, not shout at him. But shout she did. And she attracted a crowd of gawkers (a not-too-uncommon occurrence in China).

The argument lasted for 20 minutes, with her shouting and pointing and carrying on in an accusatory way--the sheer ridiculousness of her behavior accounted for most of the crowd. Here was an adult caught in the act turning around to accuse the person who caught her, like a child. And not getting any closer to getting out of her ticket.

I stood on the other side of the street--didn't want to discrupt the proceedings--but this meant I couldn't make out what they were saying. After about 20 minutes the policeman moved to take her bike (probably because she was swearing up and down that she wouldn't pay the ticket and that he could go to hell or maybe to hold it while they went downtown). Well, she didn't like his trying to take the bike and refused to give up her bike, and got belligerent. Meanwhile the officer was a model of restraint. Never raised his voice. Never used any force. When she said no, he called for assistance and, having already gotten her identity card number, went back to directing traffic, while she waited by the curb for another traffic cop to arrive on a motorcycle. Everytime things started to calm down or it seemed like he might be ignoring her a bit too serenely from the island in the middle of the intersection, she would hurl some more abuse at him.

When the second policeman arrived, he tried to talk to her and calm her down, but she was as hotheaded as ever. The first policeman continued pulling over cyclists, who took the opportunity offered by the angry woman to smile, apologize and accept their tickets with grace. Each one make her look crappier.

Then the woman whipped out her digital camera and started taking pictures of the two policemen with this threatening pose, as though she were saying "I've got your name and number, you're in trouble now." Had she lost the plot? Or didn't she know giving out tickets was their job?

After an hour more, and with the woman still not calming down or accepting her ticket, so the police called for more backup, this time a police van arrived with two more officers, who put her and her bike in the back and made to drive her downtown.

Just before they shut the van door, she lunged out and punched one of the policemen. A good right jab.

So let's review. A woman got pulled over for a traffic ticket. On a bicycle. And she made such a fuss it took four men to take her downtown and she thought that, faced with all this, punching a policeman was the right decision. Yeah, they shut that van and drove her downtown. I don't care what country you're in. You don't punch a cop. Not ever. But especially not when you're already in custody over a traffic ticket.

Anyway, as they drove off, I noticed her belligerently taking pictures of the backs of the heads of the guys driving her to the station. "I'll fix you!" Right. Anyway, in case you hadn't figured it out, the moral of this story is you shouldn't punch the policeman giving you your ticket. It might not end well.

Into the Labyrinth

So here in Shanghai I stayed with Noah, a friend from studying abroad. He has an apartment in, how shall I call it, an apartment block of sorts. There's 120-odd tenaments spread out around a small maze of back streets and alleys. The entire group of apartments is walled off on all sides (from the street, from other apartment blocks, from everything) except for one gate which opens out onto a main street, where a schlubby and rather lazy looking guy stands watch. It's a real gated community! And it really is a community, with a real sense of knowing (and knowing about one's neighbors).

One thing the Party is big on doing is setting up bulletin boards in various places with the day's newspaper tacked up on it, so people who can't afford a paper can still read it and so people who can't read can have it read to them. Literacy in general has always been a major issue that the mainland government has campaigned to improve. This enables people to read propaganda. But it also enables education, partisan or otherwise, for people who previously had no access to learning at all. Likewise posting the (state-run) newspapers for everyone to read serves a dual purpose. So this little gated community bas its own newspaper bulletin board, its own chalkboard with notices, its own garbage drop off point and recycling (people are paid 10 Chinese cents per bottle or can, roughly 1 US penny; recycling gets done by the poorest of the poor, often indigents, who come in from outside to sort through the trash and find the cans and bottles).

Noah's place is on the third floor, and you have to go through the first two floors to get to it, through the first floor kitchen, by their bathroom, by the sheet that stands for a curtain to block off their living area, up the stairs, by the kid on the second floor's bedroom and up to the third floor, but it's probably better to live on the third floor and have to go through everybody else's apartment to get to your own than have everybody traipsing through yours. There's a second lock on Noah's door, and it's quite a nice place, clean and well lit inside, and with a great view of the rest of the community and the communities beyond. Noah lives in the former French Concession, so the buildings were once rather nice, perhaps 60 or 70 years ago, and were only divided up into separate apartments for separate families after the Communists came to power and divided up and redistributed a lot of things.

All this, of course, leads to a situation where everyone knows everyone else's business in Noah's little community (walking through each other's kitchens and seeing into each other bedrooms and bathrooms from the windows). This is I what one would want running a Communist state, but it's also just very Chinese to be nosey, to get in other people's business, and to gossip. In earlier years, I suppose there was a Party cadre attached to the little community unit (there probably still is), perhaps these people all worked in the same factory, too, for all I know. But, again, its set up in a way that is at once Communist and at the same time serves other Chinese purposes, which is to say that, now that it's not so Maoist anymore, you can still hear your neighbors yelling and listen to them hawk and spit and know what they're taking about chat about it with your other neighbors, like in any small town, which in fact is sort what this little gated community is. And you say hello to people and you know them and the people who sit outside on stools chatting in the evening all know each other, there's a real sense of community there, as much as there once was a sense of communality. All very interesting.

Train Triumph!

Ha ha! Yesterday I had my own personal subway triumph: a seat on the subway! The train approached, and I was first "in line" to get in, pressed up against the door, then these young women started trying to push by me so they could get in first, so I did what any sane person would do: I shoved them out of my way. Rude women don't get courtesy, and there isn't any courtesy in China anyway. The doors opened, and there was a mad rush. I bolted in. Unlike the untested, I didn't dally in the train door, wondering whether to turn left or right, that wastes precious milliseconds, during which scores of people will rush by you and take all the seats. I went in hard, I turned left, and I got a seat before that young woman did and I didn't give it up. You don't give up your seat in China. Period. The seat was mine! Triumph!

(Good thing I leave for Europe in a few days, before I lose all my manners.)

Here, Kitty, Kitty!

So I'm staying here in Shanghai with my old classmate, Noah, who's been here a while and has done a lot to fill me in on the local scene. For example, in a lot of parts of China you can see Uighyr men outside restaurants grilling lamb kebabs on a charcoal brazier, a popular snack. Well, a survey of the lamb kebobs in Shanghai turned up the surprising fact that most of the kebabs are actually grilled alley cat. Well, no one really thought the dodgy Chinese products would stop with poisoned toothpaste and contaminated pet food, did they? So now, every time I see a kitty I don't say "Hi Kitty!" I say "Hi Lamb-to-be!" Meow!

In Chinar

Oi! I'm in China, just took the 21-hr train from Hong Kong to Shanghai, an interesting trip, but one that was more interesting for its meander down memory lane than anything else. Long distance Chinese train rides are things you'd think you don't forget. But I had forgotten all the most salient parts: the washcloths everyone uses to clean up with (21 hrs with no shower, mind you), and then hangs around on those special washcloth-hanging bars. The smoking sections at the ends of the cars. The overpriced food ($1.30 for a beer!). The squat toilets that unceremoniously drop your little donation all over the rail tracks (except when you're in a station and they lock the toilets so you won't stink up the whole station). The way passengers interact with one another (comrades for the duration, sharing food). The way the guy with the food cart calls out in this very hawker-like style (Ah! Come on! Congee and noodles! Le! Ah!) The special tea jars everyone has with a special filter at the top for your tea leaves. I love those! Got to get one! The way people tut and tisk and such on their teeth and have long fingernails and don't cover their mouths when they yawn and yell across the train at the top of their lungs, and so on. It's not rude, it's just different. Though I will say I was absolutely shocked when I saw people forming orderly lines for subway tickets in Shanghai.  Things got back to normal when folks started shoving each other aside to find an open seats. Plus ca change ...