I got the letter today: I’ve been admitted to Jiao Tong University’s Chinese language program beginning next semester. Since I applied (Prometheus-fashion) for a dual-entry visa, I now have everything I need to start studying in February. I still need to find a place to live, but if a serviced apartment doesn’t open up before I return, I can just stay at the hotel for an extra $100 above the monthly cost of my own place.
I mentioned in a previous post that Shanghai is dangerous, but that you’re not generally in danger from other people unless they are behind the wheel of a vehicle. Given the number of fistfights I’ve seen in the past week, I need to retract that statement.
On the way to the station this morning I saw a parking attendant goad a smaller scooter driver into an all-out fistfight. A middle-aged female bystander jumped in and started slugging the attendant when it looked like it was going in his favor and it ended in a stalemate. A traffic accident led to another fistfight, and an all-out brawl cleared one of the VIP booths at a nearby club called MT. The brawl continued in the street where the two shirtless guys pushed and kicked each other down the sidewalk before finally throwing their arms around each other’s shoulders and stumbling home together.
In every case, police or security just stood around and watched until the pugilists had punched themselves into weariness.
Shinjuku Station in Tokyo funnels two million people a day through its miles of tunnels and 60 exits. A Japanese urban legend says that the exits rotate every fifteen minutes and that’s why it’s so easy to get lost underground there. It took me two years to learn all the exits by heart, so that one day when I was caught in Takashimaya without an umbrella during a typhoon, I was able to figure out a completely underground route home and stay dry.
The underground complex at XuJiaHui in Shanghai has only 14 exits, so it was easy enough to memorize them in a day, but there is one challenge: instead of rotating, the exits are randomly walled up overnight.
This is a photo of Exit 11, which I have used several times, including last night:
Today it’s a dead end. It looks like no exit existed there. (A blind person following the yellow paving stones will have some trouble with this.)
Another indication of the pace of change in Shanghai is this bookstore that’s mentioned in the current-year edition of the Lonely Planet city guide. It’s also walled up with concrete:
Andrew and I took the MagLev train to Pudong Airport to pick up Joel. His plane was delayed so we killed time in the Hope Star Cafe, which advertises “Coffee and Cate”. “Who’s Cate?”, we asked the waitress, and she pointed at the display case and said, “Cake! Cake!”. Andrew said, “That’s what I love about this place, no attention to detail.”
Japanese, like Chinese, has almost exclusively “open” syllables, which means syllables ending in a vowel, like Yo-ko-ha-ma. Since the vowel represented by “u” is not strongly pronounced in Japanese, that sound is generally used as the ending to “closed” syllables in foreign languages, so “baseball” becomes be-su ba-ru. An exception is syllable-final “t”, which is pronounced “ts” when combined with “u”. In that case, Japanese uses “o” at the end of the syllable, so my name is Roba-to and a present is a gifto. (Some Japanese speakers are aware of this rule and conscientiously delete every “o” following a “t” or a “d” in English, so that a colleague once asked me if I was planning to wear my “tuxeed” [tuxedo] to the Christmas party.)
I noticed that the hotel elevator lists “Front Dest” [Front Desk] as a first-floor destination, and wonder if there is some similar transliteration rule in Chinese that makes “t” an easy mistake for word-final “k”.
We drank the dragon juice. The dried ingredients had plumped up in the alcohol and looked fresh again — after three glasses, the tail of the snake was visible over the level of alcohol, which had turned from clear to red.
When I was a teenager, we moved to a place on the Kissimmee River in Florida, which is a habitat for cottonmouths, coral snakes, and other poisonous creatures. I broke the lock off the shed in the backyard and found it was full of racks of pickled snakes. I burned them all in a big formaldehyde-fueled pit fire, in which the snakes charred and writhed like the damned souls in Dante’s Inferno. Dragon Juice tastes exactly like what that looked like — both gave me nightmares.
We went to a couple of expat hangouts on Tongren Road yesterday. Mallone’s for a burger, then Judy’s Too for a beer. It was still relatively early when we left, so we walked across the highway to Julu Lu to continue our survey. On the way, we saw a place called S-style Club, where “Club” was written in katakana.
We asked the doorman what kind of club it was and he said, “Sorry, members only.” Then we asked in Japanese what kind of place it was and he said, “Ah, you speak Japanese! Welcome, welcome!” The only membership criterion is that you speak Nihongo, apparently.
Tonight we went to Mesa for dinner. It is billed as “modern Australian”, and was as good as everyone said. Afterward we decided to try out Lounge 758, one of the dozens of karaoke clubs like S-style Club catering to Japanese staying at the New Otani Hotel in the French Concession. The hostesses were shocked when two big white guys walked in, and doubly shocked when we started speaking Japanese (they said afterward). The place was like a typical Japanese hostess/karaoke club, but only one-tenth the price, and with two girls from Shanghai, so we finally got to hear what the local dialect sounds like.
We went to XinTianDi again this evening and ended up at the bar featured on the cover of the Lonely Planet Shanghai City Guide (TMSK), where we were privileged to pay $12 for a drink. We practiced saying 555,555,555.55 and 111,111,111.11 in Chinese (not easy), and tried the following tongue-twister:
shí sì shì shí sì
sì shí shì sì shí
shí sì bú shì sì shí
sì shí bú shì shí sì(fourteen is fourteen
forty is forty
fourteen is not forty
forty is not fourteen)
For the record, the hardest tongue-twister I know in English is:
The Leith police dismisseth us.
The hardest tongue-twister I know, period, is one that Imme taught me:
Brautkleid bleibt Brautkleid und Blaukraut bleibt Blaukraut.
([A] Wedding dress remains [a] wedding dress and cabbage remains cabbage.)
As I mentioned, we ate pizza last night, and I thought this might be a good time to juxtapose the list of items that, in the short time I have been in China, have been recommended to me (sometimes with real zeal) as good for my health:
I’ll add to this list as time goes on.
Today I went to the post office and with the help of six people, including Andrew and LiYan, mailed off my taxes. Being global means filing your tax returns for Japan, the UK, the US, and two states from Shanghai.
To celebrate in a minor way (the major celebration will come when we drink the Dragon Juice), we tried to order a pizza, but couldn’t get past the automated phone menu. In a country where perhaps the cheapest thing is human labor, I had to walk down to the pizza place to place my order and carry it home myself.
I attract lost people. When I was living in London, people stopped me to ask for directions about twice a day. I made tally marks until it got to over a hundred requests in the first six weeks, then I stopped keeping track. I spent a fair amount of time quizzing friends about why it would be that people would ask me in particular. The first time I was explaining the situation to Manny was when we were waiting for friends at a crowded Picadilly Circus, and in the two minutes that I was talking about it, two people interrupted to ask for directions, nicely illustrating my point.
An acquaintance suggested that the real test would come when I was living in Asia again — would people still ask me? Last night I was sitting two flights of stairs above the entrance to the XuJiaHui metro station, and an Asian guy walked all the way up to ask me where a certain cafe was. I counted afterward and there were 57 people in the plaza, including other white guys. Why did he walk up to ask me?
We were waiting for a light today on Hauihai Road on the way to XinTianDi and this “mannequin” made a face at us, which startled us more than a little. It’s a real girl.