Probably because I was in denial over being uni-bound the next day (and probably because I ate too much spanikopita at the Sydney Road Street Party), I didn’t check my university email or do anything vaguely preparatory before my first official day at Melbourne Uni. Not that it mattered, really, except I was late for my first lecture and everybody there seemed to actually know what the “media and communications” part of our Media and Communications course means. Huhn. Well, I still stand by my “enrol in things randomly and it will probably work out” method of life advancement.

Also, they used a lot of big words. Sure, I knew what all the words were; I’d just never heard anyone say them aloud before.

Lunch

Didn’t meet anyone from my course. Ate lunch near (not actually on) the South Lawn, trying to work out how many people gathered around the Young Liberal BBQ were actually young Liberals and how many were just there for free sausages.

Japanese Lecture

Met some nice international students from Malaysia and China while waiting for the lecturer to arrive. Determined not to f**** up my brain by speaking Mandarin minutes before I started learning Japanese, so we chatted in English. Not that it made any difference. The Chinese students sitting in the row behind me spoke Mandarin throughout the entire lecture until I could barely control myself from turning around, grabbing a fistful of their glossy salon hair and screaming 闭嘴!!!! at them and other assorted Chinese curse words, if I knew any beyond “pighead” (which made me sad I didn’t learn any swear words in Shanghainese while I had the chance). This spectacle was avoided when the lecturer announced that we were expected to have learnt all forty-something hiragana (Japanese phonetic script) by the end of the week. Shit.

Language and Power in Asian Societies

Signing up for this seemed like a no-brainer, considering I’m currently learning two Asian languages. And it actually looks good. Really good. Especially once I get over the ferris wheel-like shift of lecturers and the fact that the subject has no textbook or reader or anything resembling hardcopy background reading material.

Tuesday

Tutorials don’t start until next week, so I actually had a day off. Finished reading Turnskin. Cleaned room. Taught my ESL kids how to structure an essay for one and a half hours, at least to those that managed to resist the doubtless temptations of the school swimming carnival and actually turned up.

Got home and stared at Finder no Shinjitsu scanlations until my eyes started bleeding, both from its incredible brilliance and borderline porno-ness.

Didn’t sleep until 1am. Woke up at 2am and wrote down first line of fourth novel. Double shit.

Wednesday

First Japanese tutorial. Discovered that several of my classmates already knew hiragana from primary school. Bah. Otherwise enjoyed Japanese’s omission of pronouns and articles. It makes life easier.

Chinese 2E

Which is apparently the level I’m at, at least according to the course coordinator and the one sentence of Chinese he heard me speak during the previous week’s paltry excuse for a placement test. The problem is my level is a lot higher than the textbook, or at least my vocabulary and reading comprehension is, but then I still struggle with the use of  extremely basic grammatical particles like ‘了’ and ‘过’. Urgh. Do I stay or do I go?

Thursday

Double Chinese today. With a four hour gap in between, of course.

Wowed the listening comprehension teacher by knowing what 混血 meant (mixed blood) without having any myself. Managed to work Taiwanese idol dramas into the class conversation.

Was blown out of the water with the difficulty of our listening pre-test after half an hour of my classmates (some of whom have only been learning Mandarin for two years compared to my seven!) mumble out their names and occupations. Listening test speakers sounded like they’d had an all night bender at a sake bar.

Spent four hour lunch break eating cheap pizza and copying my scrawled lecture notes into crisp Korean cat-patterned workbooks I bought in Shanghai.

Chinese Writing Class

I got to do some translations, which were fun until one of my new “I liked Chinese in High School but what on earth possessed me to enrol for this” friends informed me that I couldn’t use my electronic dictionary on our end of semester exam. Not even a print dictionary. In fact, we are allowed NO DICTIONARIES. Hmmm. Must start practising how to write 电影 from memory again. And every other word I’m supposed to know.

Friday

Japanese writing class in the morning, which was fun and relaxing once our tutor had finished her requisite “this course is too big: if your email us, we won’t answer you” speech. She is excellent, though, in the way that all tough-but-fair teachers are. And I met a girl called Ember. Yes, Ember. I want a noun for a name too.

Had lunch with bff at Tiamo on Lygon street. Ate pumpkin pizza and bitched endlessly and cathartically about life and whatnot. As you do. Then we laughed ourselves silly in Borders’ Romance section and then I went back to Northcote High to once again expunge the benefits of good essay structure to an ESL student with impending exams.

Something tells me I’m going to start having nightmares about body paragraphs.

A quintessential Chinese neighbourhood print shop

Something that’s become increasingly clear the longer I stay in Shanghai is that there really are no absolutes. You read Western news reports about banned books and extreme internet censorship, and the next day you walk into a bookstore stocked with (albeit illegal) copies of one of these supposedly impossible-to-find-on-the-Chinese-mainland novels, or a clearly controversial website that has somehow slipped through the Great Firewall. None of this means China is a society of individual freedoms, though, and while it feels like attitudes are quietly changing in the public consciousness, events like the country’s recent 60th “birthday” are prime examples of how adept the government is at clamping down on anything and everything it perceives as a threat.

The last two years have been pretty turbulent in terms of the Chinese public’s access to information. Both the Olympics and the Sichuan earthquake meant for a brief period of time the government loosened its control over internet censorship, but other events like the more recent turmoil in Tibet have caused an opposite reaction. As I type, Facebook, Twitter, all Blogspot and Wordpress blogs, and “sensitive” articles on Wikipedia are all inaccessible from the mainland unless you use a web proxy (that is, if you can find one that itself isn’t banned). More frightening is the Chinese government’s ability to censor anything it likes on the internet in real time, which means sometimes seemingly innocuous overseas websites are blocked for no apparent reason, and other times there exists a kind of imbalance where Myspace is not blocked but other social networking sites are, and Hotmail goes down for a day or two while Gmail and Yahoo are still up.

And then there’s print media. Needless to say most newspapers and magazines are either state-owned or at least controlled, but so are most bookstores. The small handful of privately-owned bookstores in Shanghai like the Ji Feng bookstore chain have therefore been instrumental in introducing obscure and unusual publications in Chinese to the reading public, as well as foreign books that would otherwise remain unreleased in China (although there is an obvious industry in “bootleg books” produced by photocopying and binding copies of the original and selling them outside metro stations, only the most popular English books by the likes of Stephenie Meyer and Stephen King get this treatment). Shanghai does have China’s largest public library and an impressive collection of both Chinese and foreign-language publications, but before you can start reading or borrowing them, you need to purchase a reading or lending card. The cards don’t seem expensive to a foreigner like me (even one who’s used to a free library system), but one of the most important roles of libraries is to provide material to people who otherwise can’t afford books, so charging people to even look at them voids one of the library’s most important functions.

I think all of these factors contribute to how underground Shanghai’s subculture really is, but on a more practical level one of the reasons China’s largest city doesn’t have an emerging zine culture is probably because of the scarcity of photocopiers and printers outside special print shops. Most households don’t own printers and I only saw one photocopier during the month I spent on a Chinese university campus (it was also technically in a print shop). When people need something printed on their computer they’ll take a USB drive to a print shop and get it copied there (for about about 20 cents a page). But as many Shanghainese become wealthier and buy cars and enormous flatscreen TVs, I can only imagine printers aren’t far behind, and who knows — maybe an outpouring of zines will soon follow.

I’ve tried. Really. But finding Shanghai’s zine culture — or anything approaching the definition of “underground” in this city— is like looking for a four leaf clover under every pebble in a Japanese rock garden. A Japanese rock garden with a maintenance team. Still, I’ve only been here three weeks, and China’s largest city is starting to show cracks in its State-controlled facade.

Most of the Chinese Government’s current obsession with “cleaning up” Shanghai is because of the World Expo next year. I’m still not entirely sure what this Expo thing is all about; all I know is a bunch of random countries and a couple extra million people (which is just what this cosy burg of 20-something million needs) are going to converge on Shanghai, which will no doubt give the city an opportunity to show up Beijing’s obviously paltry hosting job at last year’s Olympics. The Shanghai Expo’s mascot is a blue thing called Hai Bao (“Sea Treasure”), which looks like a cross between Gumby and Towelie from South Park. Hai Bao is everywhere: statues, floral arrangements, cartoon shows and soft toys for kiddies no doubt desperate for an extra fix of Expo fever.

But what the Expo means in terms of China’s infrastructure is enormous, and serious. Main roads have been shut down for reconstruction over several months, people are getting evicted from their apartment buildings which are summarily destroyed and rebuilt to be more visually pleasing — as if tourists even care. Workers are being employed around the clock to meet crushing deadlines and the metro lines are being extended under our feet. Even for a city under constant construction, the sheer amount of resources being thrown at “beautifying” the city is pretty mind-boggling. And on a more local level, signs of civic disobedience are scarce. The only graffiti around the area I’m living in are scrawled advertisements for, unsurprisingly, builders. Online would-be graffiti artists complain about the lack of spray paint available in shops. But, inevitably, as Shanghai’s mainstream art scene grows and prices for contemporary Chinese art and photography soars overseas, things are loosening up in certain districts of Shanghai.

A prime example of this is Mo Gan Shan Road. It’s in a former industrial area and a backstreet, but is also the home of some of the best sanctioned (and unsanctioned) graffiti in Shanghai. A wrap-around wall of a couple hundred metres is the canvas for several crews of artists with aliases like “Snow” and “Storm”.  A lot of the graffiti is text-based, intermingled with pop culture references from Star Wars and video games, and several dumbstruck-looking pandas in the style of Kung Fu Panda. What I found interesting was there was very little Chinese writing in the graffiti; the few legible pronouncements on the wall were in English, for example: “One China to rule em all!!”. Just beyond the wall several cranes were in motion dismantling a gutted building, overlooked by hundreds of apartment buildings tall enough to be skyscrapers in Melbourne.

Mo Gan Shan Road is also one of Shanghai’s emerging centres for contemporary galleries and rented art space. While I was there I saw three separate groups of people posing in front of the graffiti, including two girls who looked like they’d stepped out of portal from Shanghai’s cyberpunk future, and several foreign tourists. Mo Gan Shan Road is getting known as an alternative destination for art in Shanghai, but the mere fact that it’s entrance looks a dead-end industrial street while demolition continues just metres away is part of its more obscure past. And the stencilled warning on the building opposite the long wall of graffiti speaks for a Government fixated on the Expo: “No scribble”.

—————-

See also:

• Mo Gan Shan Road photos
• That’s Shanghai article about Ting Ting, a Shanghainese graffiti artist who’s sprayed with her crew on Mo Gan Shan Road.

Please be advised that the recent spate of green popcorn-induced food poisoning amongst Japanese cartoon icons has thus far shown no indictation of decreasing. As this epidemic grows to global proportions, citizens are advised to be vigilant in watching for symptoms in others, which include: deathly pallour of the cranial region, green crow’s feet and a perpetually stunned expression shortly followed by rigour mortis (not be mistaken with cheerful waving).

Please report any information you may have to your local branch of the DPFPWETMA.

]]> http://www.avivakidd.com/blog/2009/10/14/poke-flu/feed/ 3 http://www.avivakidd.com/blog/2009/10/03/60-years-and-1-month/ http://www.avivakidd.com/blog/2009/10/03/60-years-and-1-month/#comments Sat, 03 Oct 2009 05:00:26 +0000 V in Shanghai http://www.avivakidd.com/?p=1258 It was the PRC’s 60th “birthday” on Thursday, which also happened to coincide with the clearly more earth-shattering fact that I had survived my first month in Shanghai (a feat which was in doubt owing to overconsumption of deep fried sesame balls). So at 10am Yun, her parents and I crowded around the TV to watch the celebrations from Beijing, which involved a lot of snazzily-uniformed soldiers, old Communist Party fogeys, bright-eyed flag-waving patriotic children and a couple hundred strong brass band who were obliged to play for the next three hours. Straight.

It was all quite interesting in a creepily synchronised way, and I was relieved to see neither Yun nor her parents were taking things too seriously, and were more than happy to laugh at current Chairman Hu Jin Tao after an unfortunate camera cut that showed him grinning lecherously as a squad of female soldiers in hot pink uniforms marched past.

The 60th anniversary celebrations also mark the start of a nation-wide eight day holiday period, but unlike Melbourne where national holidays virtually make the city a retail Dead Zone, all of Shanghai’s shops are still open and it seems like business as usual. This is one of the things I really do love about China: everything is open, all the time. Vacations be damned!

That night I dedicated myself to watching the last three episodes of Boston Legal, but didn’t quite get through the finale before Yun’s parents popped into view in time for the 60th Birthday night telecast. I acquiesced, and for the next two and a half hours we watched the festival of Tack that was Han Chinese dressed as ethnic minorities, line dancing cowboys (why? Why?), fireworks in the shape of smiley faces, cheerleaders in gold short shorts, some kind of hoo-ha about a pigeon, and every patriotic, nationalistic song in China’s patriotic, nationalistic song book. The scary part is I knew one or two of these songs from my Year 7 Mandarin teacher’s ill-designed attempts at bringing music into the classroom.

By the time Chairman Hu and the rest of his grizzled offsiders descended the Forbidden City’s wall to rejoice with the children (I have never seen politicians look so out of their depth as these officials did squished between rosy cheeked kiddies and pretty women in traditional clothes) it was too late to finish Boston Legal, and already past my self-imposed bedtime. Not that I paid much attention to that bedtime when I got home at 2am last night after a surprisingly boring four hours at Shanghai’s M2 club. Oh well, at least I can check “danced badly at foreign club in the few moments when there was space to move” and “watched Hu Jin Tao’s torso stuck out the skylight of an expensive car and was surprised when no one bothered him with sniper fire” off my Things to Do Before I Die list.

1st thought: yay.

2nd thought: who gives a shit?

3rd thought: I have to go near JOHN BRUMBY?

4th thought: the awards ceremony starts at 10.30? Do they mean am? WHO’S EVEN AWAKE THEN???

5th thought: what do you mean I can’t wear jeans? I wore jeans studying NatPols all year, I wore jeans during the exam, I was wearing jeans when I found out my mark (this is a lie: I was in my pyjamas), so why the f*** can’t I wear jeans to the stupid ceremony? Stupid *♣&®X!% snobby #%!X®&♣* pri**** school people. Instead they suggested I could wear my school (prison) uniform. I was going to laugh at the idea when I realised my old school uniform technically allows jeans. Yes, I do thumb my nose at youse.

All of this and the fact that the ceremony will be 8 months after my actual National Politics exam and couldn’t feel more irrelevant to my life right now doesn’t make me particularly keen on going. Plus I’m doing my best to get out of the country by then. But otherwise, count me in (in a “I’m not coming go screw yourselves hahahaha” RSVP kind of way). But here’s hoping they still send me a prize. Personally I’m holding out for a blank cheque with my name on it, or an assortment of imported cheeses. Odds on though it’ll be some plasticy medal thing or yet another book (someone seriously needs to tell these people I only read subtitles and books with big pictures with a page count under forty). Or considering our dire economic times, I’ll probably wind up with an embossed certificate care of several Tasmanian rainforests that shall otherwise be useless until the giraffe flu apocalypse at which point it can be used for kindling.

So. Anyone fancy a spot of fraud and feel like going in my place?

When I visited my grandmother in bad weather recently, we decided to stay in her house and after talking for a while, we resorted to flicking through the TV channels to find something to watch together. Channel 9 came on and in a burst of surreal green lawn and cultured accents, there was the UK version of Antiques Roadshow. My grandmother immediately switched the channel, and when I confessed a long-time and passionate ardour for Antiques Roadshow, she didn’t believe me. Apparently I had broken out of my generational mould and set the planets off-kilter or something. And in the paper just a few days ago was a piece on the timeless game of Tetris, which the 30-something writer declared would be largely unknown to people under 30 and over 50. Sure, except for the fact that there was nary a graphics calculator at my school last year that didn’t have an illicit copy of Tetris on it instead of parabola plotting software, and I have a notebook on my bookshelf devoted to my own Tetris high scores. And then there’s the fact that I know my other grandmother has a copy of Tetris on her computer. Otherwise, Kylie Northover, I’m sure you’re completely right.

(And don’t get me started on the time an almost-60 friend and I were chatting as intellectual equals on the subject of China and she suddenly declares that people my age know nothing about the Long March or the Tiananmen Square massacre. Apparenly we teenages have all been brainwashed by the Beijing Olympics into thinking China is just peachy. I was incredulous. We do history at school, you know, I told her. That and I’ve seen footage of Tiananmen Square, and it’s not like China’s human rights abuses are in its past –just look at Tibet now. I may be planning to move to China next month, but I’m under no illusions about it as a country).

All of this goes the other way too, of course. I was on the train to Geelong to visit a friend when an elderly woman hobbled into the carriage and practically crumbled into her seat with decrepitness. I watched as she reached into her bag to bring out a skein of wool and her knitting needles (I decided), only to bear witness as she pulled out a thinner mobile phone than mine and proceed to text someone. The knitting cliché as a bastion of the old is a crock too, of course. I love knitting. Lots of people who can’t legally drive around the block love knitting too.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that categorising people according to generation X, Y, baby boomers and however many other letters and alliterations sociologists use to confine us is unproductive and only leads to bigotry and reality TV shows like Talkin’ ‘Bout Your Generation (you may think this is a good thing if you also enjoy the periodic table and harbour hopes of seducing Shaun Micallef in the sultry backlot of a TV studio). But I’m sick of my mother coming home from school complaining about the young teaching graduates she has to work with as “generation Y [insert pejorative noun here]“. Because in the end we all have to live together anyway, and being part of generation X doesn’t make someone an idiot, being an idiot makes someone an idiot.

And now I wake up to the sound of the Grand Prix several kilometres away and wonder why we bothered at all.

• Calling thongs “flip-flops” deeply wounds your sense of self
• You are so caught up in Australia Day festivities you even agree with the politicians that there’s no point in reconsidering the date to include all Australians
• You cheer on any tennis players at the Australian Open even remotely connected to Our Great Nation, even going so far as to “adopt” players as “honourary Aussies”, so that these “heroes” may win and achieve sporting glory in order to fill that void of embarrassment and cultural cringing within yourself otherwise known as ‘patriotism’
• Your local burst water main becomes something akin to a white Christmas — only instead of playing in the five storey geyser of perfectly good drinking water, you take your wheelie bin to collect it for the garden

Happy January 26th, everyone. I hope your day was filled with American TV shows and sun-dried tomato ravioli, as mine was :)

*Cue excitement*

While a gargantuan number (seven) people were at first drawn to the admittedly appealing idea of conflagrating them in a self-made and probably illegal bonfire, these voters soon came to their senses and decided to encourage me to recycle them after all. What integrity!

And thus below you see a candid series of chronological photographs documenting this momentous and environmentally-friendly occasion, in which I farewell the teetering stack of processed bark that has caused my premature ageing and the decline of what little fashion sense I already had, in addition to clogging up my precious bedroom floor space as soon as I left the realm of exams for the greener pastures of doing shit all:

Step 1: Pose shamelessly.

Step 2: Heave piteously.

Step 3: Inspect abyss.

Step 4: Drop in surprise.

Step 5: Take existential recycling bin photo.

Vale, Year 12 notes. I hope you get turned into something beneficial to society, which certainly rules out cabinet minutes and anything written by Andrew Bolt.