All the King's Men...

Ben, Suzanne, and I went to Xi’an on the last day that I was in China, and were taken around by a guide named Rainbow. Rainbow, poised, cheerful, and knowledgeable, is a member of one of the 56 Chinese minority groups who make up 3% of the population—the remaining 97% are all Han people, despite variations in languages and customs. She picked her name to indicate the bright side of life, the promise after the rain. It was raining when we arrived in Xi’an, and Rainbow delivered.

The main highlight in Xi’an is the mass of clay warriors constructed in 210 B.C. to furnish the tomb of Qin Shi Huang. He needed some serious protection in the afterlife, to the tune of 7,000 soldiers. The Chinese belief system was then aligned with the Egyptians, as the Chinese buried people with items that they would need in the Earth-like realm beyond. The number of soldiers created to serve the emperor seems indicative of the dangerous opposition to his rule among his people, as the tomb was pillaged very quickly after his demise.

The soldiers were buried in three main areas, and buildings were erected over the excavation. The main building actually looks like an airplane hangar, containing thousands of whole soldiers as well as the figures’ OR. The attraction to the warriors stems not only from their scope, but also from their craftsmanship. Each soldier has a different face. Each has details like hairdos, fingernails, weaponry, with positions in the battleground formation dictating a role, like a standard-bearer.

They're apparently modeled after actual individual soldiers of the emperor's forces.

Below is my favorite--a young bowman at the ready.

He looks the part, but it must have been a real disappointment for the emperor when he and his compatriotrs dropped the ball during the lootings.

China: The End of the (Silk) Road

I just wanted to tie up some final observations of China here, before I move on to the totally contrasting country of Japan

Bikes

Bicycles are still in force here, but Shanghai being the glitzy face of China, cars now dominate. I never saw a street packed spoke-to-handlebar like so many photos of China, but there are some innovations that make things easier for cyclists. For example, the full-bike poncho ensures that you and your cargo arrive at least dry. Safe is another matter.

Chinese Fashion

I have never been to a country that where people pay less attention to their appearance than people in the US do until…now. Unfortunately, I don’t have photos, but the vast majority of people wear ill-fitting western clothes that make them resemble potato sacks. Matching is not a priority, and hair is a nuisance. A minority actually attire themselves in pajama sets (not the shiny kind with the snap buttons--only Americans wear those). Hey, why change? But kitten heels are also the shoe of choice for women. Truly a country of contrasts.

Shanghai Expo 2010

The whole city is preparing for the upcoming showcase, which may prove more strategic than Beijing’s Olympics bid. Although the expo does not have the same amount of press as the Olympics, it also doesn’t come with the same financial burden. No new facilities are necessary in terms of show space, and the participating countries construct and pay for their own pavilions. It has also given Shanghai a development goal in terms of improving infrastructure, which is necessary in the first place, and building additional structures in Pudong to support expanding commerce. This little guy can’t wait!

Also, just a reminder: there's no English like bad English!

Wouldn't Yu (Yuan)?

Yuan are gardens in Mandarin, and these famous Yu gardens in Shanghai were built to honor the owner’s parents. They are beautiful, but the complex outside was packed with tourists, a KFC, and a DQ, and I don’t know if I’d recommend the experience.

Here we learned that it was customary to build up the threshold according to one’s social stature. I think that this is based on the age-old twin concepts of schadenfreude and slapstick slipping and tripping. I was waiting to catapult over a doorsill only to look up and find a group of socially superior people laughing heartily at my expense.

The presence of the dragon head was of particular note because the dragon historically symbolized the emperor. Its inclusion in the architecture signified that the emperor and his coterie had visited the garden housing complex and approved of the animal’s use.

This, to the right, is the third-most-famous rock in China. Don’t ask.

Women were only permitted to view the garden seated, potentially to avoid embarrassing Gone-With-the-Wind fainting sessions when confronted by the beauty.

This is the scene outside the garden. Who doesn’t like DQ?

There's No Me in Tea

We took a trip to Huangzhou, a mere 3.5 hours from Shanghai, to visit Alibaba, which is the Yahoo, Ebay, Yellow Pages, PayPal and general all-knowing higher being of the Chinese web. The building included rows and rows of young marketers, tech geniuses, and sales callers, all of whom, we were informed, could stand on their hands at the time of hiring. This talent strategy would not fly in other locales, but the Chinese are famous for both their gymnasts and their deference to power. So they stood on their hands and landed jobs. Alibaba also runs on a cult of personality of sorts, centered on founder Jack Ma, the aggressive net imperialist. The business was interesting, but we were all glad that there were other things to see in Huangzhou.

Huangzhou is actually known as a sort of “heaven on earth” in Chinese lore and travel brochures, although it’s now the site of countless cookie-cutter homes which have given it the nickname “Disneyland”(see right). The quiet lake is framed by hills of temples and willows draping over foot paths.

The old-style ferries are also popular as school trips.

We rounded out the afternoon at an area tea plantation, where they harvest only the top sprigs on the leaf three times a year.

The spring harvest is the most prized, as it’s had the longest time to grow, whereas the summer harvest is the poorest quality, and has the most caffeine. Their priorities are a little different from ours, I think. So, typically, the women picked the leaves all day while the men dried them. These days packing is an art as well, and our tour guide let us know that she was an expert, meaning that we would get as much tea as possible, should we choose to purchase there!

We were treated to a tea ceremony, which began with an expert pourer. She entreated us to first try the tea with our eyes… this is supposed to be soothing. It depends on how hot the tea is!

Much like wine tasting, you progress from smelling to sipping the tea. We were also provided with tea condiments, which looked like mushrooms and orange peels to me.

From now on, what you put in your tea is your own business. I don’t want to know.

Apparently, in China people often drink straight from the pot, which I never saw while I was there.

The piece de resistance was a flower tea ceremony, which approximated a refined, eastern version of the capsules that turn into spongy dinosaurs with hot water.

Better Write it Down

A word on Chinese: I learned very little Chinese while staying in Shanghai, but I’ll tell you what I picked up. Chinese, the written language, is understood by almost everyone in the country. The characters, originally pictorial representations, are so abstracted that most no longer signify specific concepts, although there are some exceptions. Specifically, ni hao, the Mandarin greeting, actually means “you good.” Hao, a character made of the symbol for woman and the symbol for child, signifies “good.” Cantonese (spoken in the South, in Hong Kong, Macao, etc.) and Mandarin (spoken in Shanghai and points north like Beijing) are variations on pronunciation of the written language, but have evolved so that they have almost no common ground. In addition, Shanghainese-speakers cannot understand many other Mandarin dialects, and often do not bother to try. My only sister is now speaking in Shanghainese slang. Another one bites the dust.
The evolution of “cheers”-ing shows how the culture is changing. While the common term is “gambei,” this literally means bottoms up—obligating one to drink the whole thing in one gulp. As wine bars and upscale cafés emerge, people are starting to realize that maybe this is not an ideal practice. The new term sounds something like “tschoo-ae,” which does not bind you to a specific amount. Since we were here ostensibly for corporate visits, I think we arrived right on time.

Zao Shang Hao (Good Morning!)

(Preface: I’m sorry that it’s taken me so long to post entries. In Shanghai the internet at the hotel was prohibitively expensive, and in Tokyo it’s fleeting at times. We were greeted with a booklet here explaining how to set things up, including such gems as “It becomes completion with the above process by the preparation.” The screen shots were entirely in Japanese.)

Welcome to China! The most amazing thing about the city of Shanghai to me was its dissimilarity to Mumbai. In the West, I feel like I’ve read a lot of press lumping Mumbai with Shanghai, as the glitzy faces of their respective countries, with their incredible growth and shiny new buildings, the former’s Bollywood and the latter’s French influences. But Shanghai is cleaner, better planned, more cosmopolitan and much more expensive. A lot of this is recent. In 1994, a quarter of the world’s cranes were in Shanghai, building Pudong, the skyscraper village on the east bank of the Huangpu River. (Today actually 72% of cranes are in Dubai. 72%!)

This was the only person that I saw sleeping on the street in Shanghai, and he found a bench! In Mumbai, it was common to see men sleeping in the middle of sidewalks, on medians, under store awnings…a different speed. I thought that I would spend more time in Shanghai itself, but several of our corporate visits were in satellite cities roughly the size of Chicago, so I feel like there’s a lot in Shanghai that I missed. But I did see a few things…

The Jade Buddha Temple

Our guide explained to us that over 80% of China’s population considers itself atheist, but superstition still reigns supreme in many areas.

These women have come from surrounding areas to worship the Buddha in his many forms, clutching incense sticks that send their prayers heavenwards with wispy smoke. Their bags are stamped with the symbols of temples that they have visited.
The temple itself was beautiful, with classical Chinese architectural features, such as upward-sloping corners, which mimic bird’s tails and are supposed to be lucky. The interior included a giant Buddha carved of one piece of jade, who impressed me by seeming very humble. He had a strangely submissive expression for a god to whom people are offering everything from flowers to tomatoes to…single servings of Jello? We weren’t permitted to photograph him, but downstairs there was an enormous hall of different personages of Buddha, which included the typical cheery Chinese figure and others, who may be avatars. Our guide told us that Buddhism arrived in the 6th century B.C. from India, and some of the figures had been changed into Chinese models, mostly the positive figures. The others, whom our guide termed as grotesque, “still had the Indian faces.” The Indian nationals in our group had their own ideas about this, I believe.

Here's a parting shot of Buddhist monks, who are cool enough to wear socks with sandals.

As Seen in Mumbai... Signs for 36 Million Eyes Only

The British- or mis-spelling, the economy of words when three languages figure on a painted 1'x2' plank, the bright colors always tinged with smog: signs in Mumbai tend to have a very specific look. They remind me of the car of choice, the taxi (50,000 tool around the city), manufactured solely for India by Fiat, always dented and sauntering at 30 mph, always looking like they drove out of Florence in the '60s, always with a Ganesh in swirling neon lights abutting the windshield. Classic Indian signs remind me of these taxis because they are still produced according to the same specs to this day....
This could be a 2007 model, judging by the rustless finish and gougeless facade. (It's "whizzing" past three levels of housing -- the slums, which spring up literally in the middle of sidewalks at times, often have two floors and have corrugated tin roofs, the small apartment buildings, and the larger, unpainted buildings, which tend to be more modern).

This, to the right, is a Goods Carrier truck, the kind I took on my trip to Thane to watch the Gokulashtami festival. Most have English signage, but almost all are reddish-orange and have beautifully painted cabs and bumpers. You can barely make out the medallion at the top with a guiding god or goddess here. They also get dressed up for the holidays. Most cars were wearing orange flower garlands for Dussera, the final day of Navratna, which just ended this week. Although it's a Gujurati holiday, Navratna is very festive in Mumbai, because it celebrates Mahalaxmi, the goddess of wealth, near and dear to Mumbaikars' hearts. Kids play with three sticks, holding two and manipulating the third in between. We were just grateful that it wasn't another drumming holiday--not so good for studying!




Ganesh: First in Space. This is a particularly modern example of the innards of tents that sprung up around the city for Ganesh Chaturthi, a festival honoring the god with a lucky aura and an impish flair. Ganesh may have an elephant's head, but he travels around on a mouse, because a mouse can fit anywhere. I like that.



Every traveller to Mumbai may have a picture of the sign below (it's posted in a touristy area), but I'm happy to be no exception. The most questionable part of the claim to me isn't really about magic--what do I know about magic?--but that you could actually carry out any kind of transaction in Mumbai in "Two Minutes Only." I should have taken this guy up on the offer just for the nostalgia I have for efficiency in general.

My local train station, Matunga Central, features the below offer. This is a famously sexually conservative culture. I recently read an Times of India op-ed article by an indignant resident, railing against the flagrant kissing in Shivaji Park. However, due to governmental family planning messages, the country's a lot more open about the consequences of sex than the US is. But I'm still unclear as to how computarized an abortion can be, and would like to remain ignorant.
The buzzwords for intra-India discrimination are "caste system" but, unfortunately, the practice extends to religious strife and racial inequalities. We actually saw the regulated swimming times enforced in our hotel in Pushkar, which is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of tourist envy. The love-hate relationship with the British occupiers has translated into a worshipful attitude toward white people, and a general acceptance of ripping us off at every turn. Although there's less overt worship of the US than I've found in some other countries, possibly due to the fact that the Bollywood pantheon shines stronger than American stars do as a collective, there is an attitude of deference to individual foreigners that can be harmful at times. The Indian girls in our hostel say that only when we speak up are issues remedied, and we've all caught men taking cell-phone pictures of us on the sly. Skin-lightening is a national craze, so much so that when an African-American friend in the Temple group went to the store to buy Clorox, she was given skin bleach.

In terms of religious conflict, Mumbai erupted in Hindu/Muslim riots in the mid 90s, but things have calmed down considerably since. However, the "Hindustan" nationalist party, the BJP, which has strong ties to the Shiv Sena terrorists, remains a strong presence in Maharashtra, Mumbai's state. The BJP's orange is meant to symbolize Hinduism, whereas Islam is generally represented by green, with mosques are painted that color as well. My neighborhood is next to Dadar, where the BJP is headquartered, and walking down the street, I found this scrawl:

Although I can't be certain what the writer was invoking, I doubt that he or she was declaiming against environmentalism or Kermit.

Signage in general is a big deal in a country where combatting illiteracy is a governmental priority. We're all tempted to steal this sign, but then we'd run the risk of leaving crying toilets and poop-strewn tiles!












We've also observed that there's an unfulfilled niche in India: the western-style tourism consultancy firm. India loses buckets of money on awkward inefficiencies in museums, forts, and palaces, not to mention misunderstandings at hotels and restaurants. I'm not advocating a major change in cultural scope in general, just a basic reorientation in places specifically serving outsiders. There are also efforts undertaken which represent misplaced effort, or are generally mystifying. Read bench:
We came across the bench in Goa, which does cater to mostly European tourists. Some other signs found there included this dubious claim:Daniella's remained closed during our stay in Goa, possibly serving as another example of Man misunderstanding God's best efforts to enliven small parties.

For those "no fear" types who can't get close enough to tobacco, we found the following offer:












Returning to Mumbai, there's a self-proclaimed hospital which stands across the street from our hostel. As tribute to the long tradition of Huntingtons finding non-sequitur signage while traveling, such as the beauty parlor/township museum, I present the following:

You might think it's a little odd, but I have yet to see a monobrow or mole among the mostly over-80 population. Which really says something.










These "pure for sure" signs turn up at almost every gas station, illustrating differentiation strategies for commodity retailers, and making a base-level handy joke for the rest of us. But there's more. Rachel, in blue, has lived in Brazil, where the "OK" sign is a very foul gesture, regarding the condition of purity of one's antagonist's mother.









There are all sorts of directives in India, but not a ton of respect for the law. If flattery will get you anywhere in the US, here, it's money. They pay police so little that many are reduced to taking bribes to feed their families, which is reinforced by few repurcussions. But people here love laying down the law, even if follow-through is minimal. The sign below becomes a plaintive request in a city where trashcans are tiny and infrequent (and indoors, the size of toilet-bowl cleaner stands--what am I supposed to put in that, a gum wrapper?!).

One of my favorites is "Do Not Spit". People need to be constantly reminded of this one. I have come across these signs behind the counter of the tourist assistance window in the main train station as well as inside of a church.

We can conclude the tour with the most common sign in Mumbai. My classmates and I couldn't wait to figure out what "bean bags" were. We were sure they was illegal, or at least entertainment-related. The guerilla marketing covers the city's cement scape, with fairly little competition. Well, it turns out that bean bags are just that. Cheap seating destined to bust and create an ocean of foam balls in several months. Like Mumbai--a quick fix on the fly, straining under humans' weight, and not built to last. . .