[Originally written for Sticky's Electronic Sporadic Correspondence: January].

December was my fourth and final month in Shanghai, so short of asking my uncle’s wife’s second cousin Yao (who is a city official and can park his car on sidewalks) if I could set up a distro in an aisle of the nearest 7-Eleven or on the back of a tangerine truck, I decided to do what little I could for Shanghai’s zine culture by making one of my own. But publishing things in foreign countries poses its own difficulties, chief among them being the language factor. I wanted my zine to be bilingual, and decided some kind of dictionary or phrasebook would be the most obvious format. And so after several weeks bent over my laptop in front of the TV trying to ignore the national news broadcast and its frequent footage of people setting themselves on fire, I created the Extremely Essentialized Chinese Pocket Phrasebook for Foreign Interlopers, a must-have guide for Western tourists in China — complete with sections on shopping, accommodation, camel hire, extra-marital affairs, running for public office and how to get deported from China without paying a cent. Now all I had to do was get my zine to the people.

Materials.

After finding a wad of beige copy paper in the drawer of my desk under a bunch expired lollies from Halloween, I went to the local stationery store to buy some Doraemon-themed glue, but was too stingy to shell out for a long armed stapler. Who needs binding, anyway?

Translation.

Possibly the most time-consuming part of the process was translating every phrase and vocabulary word in the zine into Chinese, from food poisoning to gerbils, liposuction to Lady Gaga. I did all the translations myself first (albeit with the constant guidance of Google), and then persuaded my nearest Chinese-speaking minion to edit my half-baked grammar. Translating “the abdominal wounds were caused by several stab wounds delivered by a mystery attacker dressed as Hello Kitty” isn’t exactly the easiest way to start the day, but I think we got there in the end.

Printing.

It took a surprisingly long time for me to remember I didn’t have free access to a printer or photocopier, then I remembered the local print shop and decided I could probably get away with a 30 copy run with the amount of change I’d managed to accumulate in the last half hour. But somewhere between spending most of my last days in Shanghai in a karaoke parlour while single-handedly supporting China’s GFC-afflicted bootleg DVD market, I got lazy and decided to reduce my print run to one copy and got a friend to print it at work.

The Planting.

With no apparent distros or zine-friendly bookshops in Shanghai, I was going to have to use guerilla tactics to get my lone copy of the Phrasebook out there (guerilla tactics that would involve dumping my zine in a bookstore and running in the other direction before a security guard could tackle me and demonstrate some not-so-fictional deportation).

I wound up planting my zine in Shanghai Shu Cheng (“Shanghai Book City”), a bookstore with seven Borders-sized floors and an inevitable in-store Starbucks. Tempted as I was to leave the Phrasebook in the computer programming section, I wound up putting it among a stack of bilingual books, where it might at least find an appreciative audience. That was a week ago, and though I doubt I’ll ever hear about or see that copy of my zine again, I can only hope someone who desperately wanted to know how to say “you have abnormal taste in mittens” has found it and given it a good home.