Metal vs. Rock

Some mook stole my bike the other night while I was in the lab. I don't know if there's an actual rule but when I tried to chain my bike to the bike hutch outside my dorm the concierge took issue and told me not to do that (at least, that was my impression given that I only understood the words 'no' and 'bicycle'). Of course it wouldn't be worth supplying enough hitching posts to accommodate the tens of thousands of bicycles there must be on campus so people make do by tying their back wheel up and mostly not buying a ride they'll grow attached to. This also allows the groundskeepers to sort stacks of bikes that become tangled or in people's way but of course it also allows mooks to carry them off. Zhang told me that two of his bikes have been stolen on this campus and there was little that one could do about it.

But I was very lucky. Early the next morning as I returned to the lab to scour the area I found my abandoned bike behind a garden wall. The thief had unsuccessfully tried to smash the lock with a nearby brick and though the housing had smushed, the inner cable had held.




Nearby there was a more unfortunate cable lock of a similar design only this one had had a plastic housing inside a thin metal shell. It had been smashed thoroughly and whatever it had protected had vanished.


While I'm pleased that my lock was sufficient to fend off the cro-magnon raiders it was not going to pose a challenge to those tribes that have discovered fire or simple metal tools. I bought a sturdier lock with a thicker braided cable to deter the more advanced homo erectus.

The Corporate Overlords

Yay Capitalism!!

Chairman Mao and his confederates never doubted that the world's most populous country would become the world's greatest economy under the guidance of history's finest social contract. With Western imperialist dogma eliminated, with farmers, workers and bureaucrats all united in their cooperatives, with schools inculcating first and foremost a revolutionary spirit, China would surely thrive. There are dozens of places that I want to visit before offering broader conclusions but the thriving Shanghaiese economy would appear to contradict many of Comrade Mao's guiding principles.
The torch relay came to the Minghan district on Saturday and I haven't experienced a larger corporate event since the 99X Stone Mountain Summer Concert of aught-two. Every T-shirt with a Chinese flag on the front had a Lenovo logo on the back at least as big. I'm still trying to find out where I can get one, I'm sure they're free as long as you give them your email address.

You can see all the pictures here

The guy next to me in the photos is Zhang who is the most cheerful of my officemates. I sort of get the feeling he's the most popular--his girlfriend is a student at another university. Our procession gathered in the lobby of the physics building and we were given as many brand-name nationalistic accouterments as we could carry. We only had to walk to the other side of campus to await the torch guard.
Our group was assigned a cheer honoring China and the ravaged Sichuan province. Zhang translated it for me as 'China refills, like you refill with oil.' Refuels? I asked. 'Yes, that's it.'
I didn't know how to even ask him to elaborate on this but I swear that later that day I actually saw a girl wearing a black T-shirt with the English words "China Refuels."
Zhang's supervising professor is Jie (no relation) Zhang who collaborates formally with my supervisor, Zheng-Ming Shen. In addition to being the head of the entire physics department, JZ is president of Jiao Tong University and as such held the honor of being one of the torch bearers that morning. Even then though I didn't lay eyes on him as my group stood further along in the route. Occasionally I would hear ZS mention that JZ wanted to meet with me but had no time. At this point I'm expecting to be tossed into a black sedan on my way home one night and spirited to this mad laser scientist's underground lair. Will let you know how that goes.

The vanguard of the torch relay was comprised of cheerleaders for CocaCola, Samsung and Lenovo. It's true that many of this year's athletes had to contend with rotted teeth, carpal tunnel and blurred vision caused by watching Rosie O'Donnell on 45" plasma displays. I was able to get one pretty good shot of the torch runner however.



So that was all pretty cool. I spent the rest of the morning playing badminton with Zhang and Junjian, the woman who works next door to us. I've been able to talk to her a little bit about the research institute in Osaka where she's spent nearly two years working. English is tough with her and neither of us are conversationally fluent in Japanese either but she is a wicked good badminton player and beat Zhang into the floor like a tent peg.

Sunday I took the train to the East Bank, or Pudong as they call it. Here autos have uncontested dominance of the roads and there were fewer crosswalks as I approached the commercial district from the south. There's an enormous park at one end of the main boulevard that I'll return to when I have more time-- it's the sort you pay a ticket to get into though there's plenty enough to see from the outside. I arrived early in the morning and saw kite peddlers set up their wares across the street. If I'd stayed on my side the vendor wouldn't have pounced on me but I wanted a good kite photo while the sky was still blue. Having a kite of my own didn't seem like such a bad thing so I haggled the vendor down to half his starting price. But no sooner had we made the exchange than another fellow came running up to sell me the kite string. Brilliant.

The walk to the other end of the boulevard, toward the skyscrapers and the river, grew uglier. There were still scores of gardeners tending the flora but the smog and traffic were thick. I had lunch at a three-star restraunt called Pizza Hut where I ate chicken pasta in a red cream sauce and a tall slushie made from fresh grapefruit. I'd pondered over the pizza menu but decided it was too expensive.

By the time I reached Lujiazui on the riverbank I had a bad sunburn on the right side of my body while the air was so thick that nothing cast a shadow. This is the Blade Runner district, the one I'd previously only seen night panoramas of. There's also a shot on the back of my guide book of the Oriental Pearl Tower as the sun is setting so the concrete looks rosy. During the daytime the place is gruesome and the main attractions loom like the spires of Mordor. I didn't go into the Pearl but I slipped my camera through the gate to capture the tower rules which are keepers.

Between the Pearl and the SuperBrand Mall is a roundabout with no stoplights or crosswalks. Pedestrians did their best to crowd their way to other side and having reached the mall I rewarded myself with a new pair of shoes.

Shopping centers are mainly divided into brand kiosks which makes me suspect that the sales force is paid on commission, though that would truly be anticommunist. The sneaker outlet I went into was big enough to get lost in and my limited language skills meant that I could comparison shop only before I started trying things on. Brands are generally as expensive here as they are in the states and even the national ones fall in the same price range. There would be no haggling at this shop but the laces would be thrown in for free, at least.

Far more treacherous than getting to the mall was pathfinding back south to the Jinmao Tower and World Financial Center. Here people actually climbed over two construction fences and dodged ten lanes of traffic to reach the far side. Though I'd tried getting back into shape before my trip it hadn't occurred to me to prepare by going rock climbing while someone swung bags of concrete at my head.



I didn't expect to see much in the observatory but I still hadn't gotten a good view of the river. It coincidentally cost the same as getting to the top of the Empire State Building and the elevator rocketed up the 250 meters in a bit less than thirty seconds. At the top one of the vendors gave me a free pearl that she plucked from a clam before my eyes. The only other thing to behold there was how truly hideous the Huangpu River is.

Once again I had to cross the street back to the side with the subway. Before crossing the river I hopped over another construction fence into a small park where I stretched my screaming hamstrings. The park hosted no fewer than three bridal photo shoots; maybe they were hoping to get better lighting as the sun went down. A truly interesting ornament was a bronze statue of three westerners holding their cameras up to marvel at the glorious works of the East.



The strip of land just on the west bank of the river is known as the Bund where feet and scooters are the preferred means of travel, where the subway stops have higher densities of westerners, peddlers and pimps. There was a foreign language bookstore here that I wanted to investigate and in the meantime I got dinner from a streetside wok. The owners offered me DVDs and a picnic table to eat my noodles at. I took them up on the latter.

The University

As of this morning, the official death toll from the earthquake in Sichuan stands at 51,151 with 29,328 still missing. This exceeds my estimate from last Tuesday afternoon when I replied to Dian that fifty thousand people were probably dead given the population of the area. Her English is better than my Chinese but she didn't quite understand what I was saying. She shook her head, "Twenty-two thousand people died." "There will be more," I said. There wasn't much else to say.
Red Cross workers and student organizations were quick to take up collections around the city although very little of daily life has been affected here. Sichuan isn't quite on the other side of the moon, but you can see from the chart below how far the truck o' love has to travel to get there.



The newspapers and TV stations are giving the disaster as much coverage as possible. Unlike Katrina there aren't any political crucifixions lined up (for the moment) and instead the government and its press are consistent in calls for unity, courage, generosity and so forth. In its defense the federal government acted very quickly and the first rescue teams were organized in something like the first half hour. And they've been doing more than a heckuva job. The news photo that I wanted to find a copy of was of an EMT worker breast feeding an orphaned infant in a crowded medical tent. These guys go all out.

There doesn't appear to be much discussion as to whether these buildings were up to proper specifications or how the slaughter might have been assuaged. There is still no designated 'earthquake season' that the Red Cross needs to be aware of, so it would seem that not only is the Party off the hook, but they can get a huge dose of global sympathy after the nasty torch relay and arms dealing spats of the past few months. I can't really tell since at the moment L.A. Times is timing out. Eighty thousand people is a small number when talking about Asia and even the Asians know it.

On Monday afternoon horns blared throughout the city at the appointed grieving time. Like the other students I rang my bicycle bell.

Apologies for the lack of specific information but I do feel almost cut off here, though it's indeed a pleasant place to be cut off. Last Tuesday I got a better idea of where I was. I was still heavily jet lagged so I went back to my room early in the afternoon and and didn't wake up until 10 pm. My professor I had met with briefly but he would be in Beijing till the end of the week and the lab was still under construction. Refusing to spend the night in my room after that grueling 15 hour flight I studied my guide book. There was an internet cafe and a metro stop not far from the campus. All I had to do was go out the east gate and head south for a couple blocks. If I got lost it was no big deal, I would just keep the campus and the highway to the north of me.

So I set off with my subway map and walked east for at least ten minutes before I got to the edge of campus and crossed the highway. The road was completely deserted, as in there was no sign of people much less a metro stop. The campus though was on the edge of my admittedly zoomed out map so perhaps if I kept walking east I would find something. About half a mile later a corporate park appeared on my right. It was on the other side of a canal and the only sounds in the night were the croaks of either frogs, marshbirds or some unpleasantly sized insects. I couldn't make out their shapes as I crossed over the culvert.

Luring me further into the corporate park were the signs on the buildings. I had wandered into the Chinese offices of Microsoft and Intel. Eventually I came to the night watch at a parking gate and decided to roll the dice. He didn't speak any English but I was hoping he could at least point me in a direction or reference the road I'd just walked down. I showed him my subway map where I circled Hongqiao Lu Station. He was eager to assist but I understood absolutely nothing of what he said.

As I was turning away, a cab pulled up to the gate, perhaps the third car I'd seen in the past forty minutes. The driver got out along with the passenger and I waited for him to finish peeing in the bushes before I approached him with my map. After a few minutes miming and using my four dozen word vocabulary in the most excruciatingly creative ways possible I just got in the passenger seat. Any place he would take me would be fine as long as it was *somewhere*. We began driving north.

It was clear by then that I was not on the map at all. SJTU had two campuses, I remembered, and no one had really informed me as to which I'd be staying at. At least I was being driven towards the downtown area where things might be open. After twenty kilometers I started getting very concerned and tried asking the driver to stop. He obliged in the middle of an exit ramp.

The problem with Shanghai traffic is neither the volume of cars nor the layout of the streets. Drivers jostle with each other like high schoolers in a crowded hallway and it's perfectly acceptable to move over the double yellow into oncoming traffic if you need to pass or if someone encroaches from your blind spot. My driver's tone though was very reassuring and looking around I recognized some features from my map. I relented and he drove the rest of the way into downtown.

I walked toward a commercial square and found I'd missed the last train at 11:15. The McDonald's though were open 24 hours so I went in and ordered McNuggets since I didn't know how to say "Hold the mayo."

Long long story short I made it back to SJTU, south campus a little after nine the next morning. All my photos may come to a Picassa album near you but here are a few in the meantime, unfortunately not compressed for bandwidth. As near as I can tell I'm the only American student here. There are some Russians and Malays in my dorm but we rarely encounter each other. Besides them I've glimpsed two other whites and a couple Nubian women. Someone I met in the cafeteria mentioned that there was an American accounting professor but he may have retired. Until this past weekend it seemed I could be the only American outside of downtown but I ran into one randomly during a bank run. An English teacher at a local high school who offered to guide me around. I'll take him up on it.

The City

I should start by describing where I am. Shanghai is thirteen time zones east of Eastern Time and twelve hours ahead on a daylight savings clock. Beijing is about three hours north by plane or perhaps five hours by train. The name Shanghai itself simply means 'on the sea' and it covers an enormous chin of land south of where the Yangtze meets the ocean. The city is divided into east and west banks by the winding Huangpu River which I crossed on my way back from the airport.



From the cab there wasn't much to see but the road. I spent the trip chatting with my new officemate Zhu and when I glanced out the window I saw only the tops of modest apartment and office buildings over the concrete barrier. On the highway side of the barrier were flower bushes and gardeners. I suppose I'd expected the city to be a mix of New York's Chinatown and the Los Angeles from Blade Runner but Shanghai is the greenest city I've ever visited. There are shade trees every ten feet in pedestrian areas. Flower bushes and hedges are maintained on every meridian and under every ramp and the overpass railings themselves are lined with troughs of plants.

I was also impressed by the paucity of autos. The only time so far I've encountered a bumper to bumper traffic jam was on a bridge during the initial taxi ride. In the oncoming lanes a non-fatal impact had stopped cars for the better portion of a mile, but so far I can't imagine stopping twice at the same red light in this city at any time of day. As Zhu informed me people were simply priced out of buying cars and even then getting a license was almost half the price of the car itself. Even the rare parking lot we drove past was mostly empty, at least of cars. Bikes are the way to travel here; with no hills gears are unnecessary and the same is almost true for brakes as I later discovered. Old folks, business people and students all get around on two wheelers. Cyclists carry passengers who ride sidesaddle on their book stands and mothers carry toddlers in the front baskets. This morning I saw a man peddling, his wife sitting behind him and their child in her lap. This was actually on my way to get my own bicycle-- the one I had borrowed, like Zhu's, didn't have functioning brakes so I was willing to pay full price for a brand new one.

I buy things here like houses on Pennsylvania Avenue. At the cafeteria I can eat breakfast, lunch and dinner for $2.50 per day. So I guess it would be more like Oriental Avenue. Most things there are a la carte so I point to something and say "Zhe ge" and someone on the other side of the counter puts it on a tray. The dishes are grouped under price tags of 2, 3 or 4 kuai and every meal I've had something different. Fried yam cakes and egg drop soup is my favorite breakfast so far and the pork and chicken stews are tasty with marinade though I can't vouch for the quality of the meat itself. The one truly bizarre thing I've had so far is duck's tongue. I was given a plate of these things shaped like large wishbones with ends curled into talons. At the joint of the bone was a chewy muscle that I scraped off with my incisors and I can't say that it wasn't magically delicious.

Having spent nearly twelve hours traveling from the north part of the West Bank to the southern reaches of the city I have seen exactly one beggar, a silent downtrodden woman who could've been in her eighties. Everyone who sits on the sidewalk is peeling vegetables, welding bedframes, assembling bicycles. Even in neighborhoods where the windows are broken in row after row of concrete tenements there is no graffiti and people leave their homes in the morning dressed for work.



The air pollution is the worst I've ever experienced and oddly it hasn't affected me much. The sea breeze is constantly refreshing but then again it hasn't had a chance to get truly hot in the city. The sky is seldom cloudy and yet it's never clear. Everything disappears after five hundred yards and the buildings in view never lend much character, featureless paper cutouts in a shoebox diorama. I hear the effects of the pollution every morning as well. The birds start squawking when the sun rises at around a quarter to five and a half hour later I can hear the traffic. Then the bicyclists come out and the hacking starts as everyone joins in a ride-by phlegming.

Things that I miss so far... there aren't any street musicians and I have yet to see a pub though plenty of restaurants serve alcohol until two in the morning. I told Zhu about the concept of bars, these places where people go to get drunk. "You can get drunk anywhere," he replied, somewhat befuddled. Most of all I miss coffee. When I ask for it on campus and in the surrounding shops they give me this sugary gunk that's half milk with the other half being something not coffee. I found some instant Nescafe in the supermarket and it's the most expensive food item I've bought by far.



The most annoying thing I've encountered though is the craps game of an internet they have here. WaPo and Slate don't work, I've had BBC load once so I get all my western news from LA Times and Foxnews. Fark works but Slashdot doesn't; LiveJournal will 404, as will any search result for Tibet, Dali Lama and Freenet. Gmail runs fine but Yahoo is very slow. Clearly they need to assist in the arrest of more bloggers to increase their bandwidth. Assuming this gets posted uncensored I'll update a couple times a week.

All in all, I'm digging it.