Imagethief

Month: December 2005

  • Decadent Beijing suburbanites give me da bomb

    A current of dissolution runs through Beijing’s expatriate professional community. The city doesn’t have the loutish licentiousness of Hong Kong, the world-weary NGO clubbishness of Phnom Penh, or the dangerous-living frisson of Port Harcourt, or some other oil-drenched African hellhole.  But, with limited entertainment options and a large population of foreigners paid more money than can reasonably be spent*, there is a certain inevitable drainage toward the underlit low spots where large pools of alcohol have collected.

    Perhaps if Beijing was more family friendly and developed this would be less obvious. Or perhaps I simply run with a bad element. I am, after all, employed in an industry with a legendary, institutional fondness for adult beverages. I tend to hang out in a crowd rich in fellow flacks, journalists and Australians. If this isn’t courting danger and inebriation, I don’t know what is.

    As befits someone with my godless inclinations, I went for a full-body wallow in the soft, white underbelly of expat Beijing this holiday weekend, resulting in a positively Roman display of indulgence and self-gratification that did superb justice to the pagan roots of Christmas, and no justice at all to the rather more ascetic spiritual aspects. The first stop was a catered dinner on Saturday evening, hosted by a couple who live in a villa in suburban, northeast Beijing.

    The “villas” are to Beijing what suburban Connecticut is to New York, if only Connecticut was ringed with an apocalyptic wasteland dotted with the desolate shells of enormous, uncompleted residential developments. They’re places where wealthy people, often with families, attempt to escape the hurly-burly, in-your-face, gob-on-the-sidewalk lifestyle of downtown Beijing. In a city where the vast majority of people live in microscopic apartments, the villas really are absurdities; gated simulacra of American suburbs complete with wide sidewalks and picket fences. Fantasy re-creations of single-family, detached bliss. If you’re a foreign executive for an MNC who has just been rotated into Beijing for two years, and you have a large housing allowance, a car and driver, and no real desire to interact with the city, they’re the place to be. Many are near the airport, which increases the appeal for frequent fliers, and other people often seen getting the fuck out of Beijing.

    The slightly contemptuous description above doesn’t describe all villa residents. One very good friend of mine, an old China hand who works at home, lives in a villa house because it provides ample space for his family and his business. He’s done his downtown time and doesn’t have much else to prove. And the couple who entertained us on Saturday night probably don’t fit into my angry, stereotype box either. A mixed English-Hongkie couple, both are fluent Mandarin speakers who don’t seem to have any need to insulate themselves from China. In fact, the house belongs to the woman’s grandmother. The two of them were fine hosts once we got past the man’s enthusiasm for a wicked, electronic party game that punished the slow or anxious with nasty electric shocks. I hate electric shocks, and took care not to lose. Our hosts laid on a catered spread that was, by my math, exactly twice as much food as could possibly be consumed by the eight of us who were there. The liquor and tobacco were scarcely dented. Dessert was an all-night love-affair with pancreatic suicide. I ate. I drank. I wept for the sheer joy of it.

    For all my bitter, underprivileged sarcasm, there are certain advantages to villas. This place had a large kitchen, a roaring wood wire in an open fireplace, and a dining-room table that could comfortably seat ten. My dining room table seats four, and only if everybody exhales, we put the cat out and we don’t actually eat anything. Villas also have the advantages that houses everywhere have over apartments: you can play your music loud, and you can set off enormous, dodgy fireworks. We did both.

    When I was young lad, I, as all young lads do, went through my pyromaniac phase. Living with my father in a 100 year old, dry-as-tinder redwood Victorian, this was a particularly fraught period in my life. In a series of episodes that an enterprising therapist could mine for book material, I blew up most of my toys and set the rest on fire, along with (at various times) my hands and eyebrows. While I usually laugh it off as just another bit of juvenile, male primate risk-courting (check it out, baby, I cheat fiery death!), looking back from the cusp of forty it now seems remarkable that I didn’t end up in a burn unit, jail or minus a couple of fingers.

    In those days, fireworks –the feedstock of my reckless entertainment– were illegal in San Francisco. In the run-up to the Fourth of July (America’s holiday for independence and blowing shit up), you could drive down to Daly City, ten minutes to the south, and buy an assortment of decorously restrained sparklers, cones, Piccolo Petes, ground flowers and snakes. Or you could do what I often did and go down to Chinatown to buy black-market bricks of firecrackers sold out of the backs of cars by young Cantonese guys. If you were particularly daring, you could lay hands on cherry bombs, or even the infamous, hand-pulverizing “M-80″, reported to have the lethal kick of a quarter-stick of dynamite. Looking back on it, this may be the start of my love affair with Asia.

    The biggest things you could get that had an aerial component were bottle rockets –enormous fun to shoot at friends and pets– and, of course, the legendary and poetically named Roman Candle, the firework that made “great balls of fire” more than just a Jerry Lee Lewis riff. Neither was capable of delivering significant explosive power onto your target, however. To get any more vigorous airborne, incendiary entertainment you either had to be into actual model rockets, which I briefly was (too much work), or into throwing ground-flowers just before they ignited. I was also, very briefly, into this before being scolded mightily by my father, who could visualize the clause in his insurance policy that said, “we will not pay for your house if your idiot son burns it down with fireworks”.

    Of course, I now live in China, where any firework small enough to actually be thrown is for pussies. This was amply demonstrated outside my apartment last Chinese New Year, when I was treated several hours of nonstop detonations that gave already surreal Beijing something of a dangerous, Sarajevo atmosphere. By the sound of it, M-80s were about the light end of the scale, despite a nominal ban on fireworks inside the fourth ring road. Coming from years in Singapore, where it was considered quite the daring scene when the Prime Minister recently lit a single string of firecrackers for the television cameras (the first heard in Singapore in several years, mind you), this was a refreshing change. Glued to the window of my apartment, with the throaty booms washing over me in waves, the infantile pyromaniac, long suppressed by an adulthood replete with neckties and responsibilities, stirred restively within my breast.

    That’s why I was propelled to Olympian heights of ecstasy at the sight of the climactic firework unveiled on Saturday night by our hosts. China, as we are often told, is the country that invented fireworks. To see the kinds of damp squibs we used to get in Daly City, the sanitized dregs of the Chinese fireworks industry, you could be forgiven for wondering how anyone could be killed in a “fireworks factory explosion”. Too see what we launched on Saturday night was to see that China was keeping the best for itself, and to understand exactly how a fireworks factory explosion could wipe out not only the people in the factory, but also the unfortunates in the next village up the road. It was a gaudily-wrapped cube the size of a filing cabinet, in which were enclosed sixteen cardboard mortars, each with a two-inch diameter. 600 kuai ($75) at your finer fireworks stalls, I was told. Surround with bricks and keep back fifty meters said the ominous instructions. It scarcely needed to add, “this side toward enemy”.  A straw poll was held, and the fireworks were launched from the nearest convenient launch pad, the roof of the servants’ quarters.

    Sixteen ear-shattering booms later we had been treated to a private, Christmas-eve fireworks display of monumental proportions, all the servants were awake, and every car alarm in the neighborhood was ringing. Stupendous, incandescent blossoms, twenty meters across. The lower fringes dusted the roof of the house itself. Oh, baby, where were you when I was hunting for the perfect bottle rocket, all those decades ago? The things you and I could have done together. I used to have to go to Candlestick Park (more recently 3Com Park and Monster Park thanks to the great American rejection of all traditions that aren’t evangelical Christian ones) and stand in the parking lot for this kind of display. Here anyone with a few bucks to spare can muster a Fourth of July fireworks exhibition that would be the pride of any stadium in America. I love China.

    We got home at 3AM, deaf and stuffed, with just enough time to sleep-off our excess before trooping out to the Hyatt’s Christmas champagne brunch with a different group of friends. This was the point at which my Christmas actually descended from indulgence into obscenity. Hotel brunches are nothing more than dares; challenges to eat enough to make it pay. In a world where people are going hungry –in a country with an income per-capita of $1290; or just about 20 times the cost of one seat at this brunch– it’s the ragged threshold of karmic self-immolation, invariably followed by weeks of self-flagellating penance on the treadmill. Mrs Imagethief, the pro nutritionist, has actually diagrammed her attack for maximum value: cheeses, seafoods, meats and desserts. Stay off the breads, potatoes and noodles. Those are sucker plays; cheap filler to woo you away from the meaty, gold-plated nuggets that make the buffet worthwhile. You have to admire the dedication to gustatory suicide.

    The Hyatt brunch is mediocre by international hotel brunch standards (I am a fan of the Ritz Carlton in Singapore – nice selection of food; unparalleled cheese plate; bright, airy space), but that didn’t stop us from working it until we were the last party in the restaurant and the wait-staff were shooting us nervous “please leave” looks. Only two of us coughed up the ruinous 488 kuai for free-flow champagne, and we had a solemn pact to make it pay. Between the pair of us, we managed to bury three bottles of Moet which, on top of the previous night’s festivity, all but ensured some kind of premature organ failure.

    Drunk, waddling and incapable of speaking in anything other than belches and groans, we did the only logical thing. We staggered off to frozen Houhai where my friend, Dennis, and I rented one of the two-seat sled chairs that extended Chinese families make into sled caterpillars and pole along the ice at excruciatingly slow speeds. We did not move at excruciatingly slow speeds. We moved at recklessly fast speeds, taking turns mushing one-another along like demented, Yukon dogsled drivers crocked on shots of Jagermeister and driven half-mad by long, sunless, Arctic winters spent in the company of nothing but Alaskan huskies. You can’t steer a sled-chair in any meaningful way, and we must have scared the bejeezus out of any number of apple-cheeked, pigtailed young Chinese girls who will spend weeks thrashing under sweaty sheets dreaming of maniacal, unshaven Laowais  careening toward them and screaming, “过一下儿!!! 过一下儿!!!” It’s only by some kind of Jimmy Stewart-style Christmas miracle that we didn’t sail through one of the flimsy barriers that surround the slushier sections of the lake, ride our hell-sled into the frigid darkness and end up drowning under the ice like rats.

    Provenance smiles upon idiots. It was the best Christmas ever.

    Imagethief wishes all readers a merry Christmas, happy Hanukkah, a pious Ramadan and a happy New Year. And, because this is a properly ecumenical site, happy holidays, too.

    *Starving, idealistic English teachers are excepted from this generalization.

    A dissolute Imagethief wallows in empty, carnal indulgence on Christmas eve with a fat smoke and Finnish vodka. Jackie O. shades hide eyes full of shame.
    A dissolute Imagethief wallows in empty, carnal indulgence on Christmas eve with a fat smoke and Finnish vodka. Jackie O. shades hide eyes full of shame.

  • Beijing needs a giant monster attack

    When you are asked to name the great, metropolitan cities of the world, you will naturally consider certain factors. It’s not always size that makes the difference. If it was, then Chongqing would be the capital of the planet, a role I think we can all agree that Chongqing, for all its charms, is not quite ready for. Sure, size has its place, but it’s the more abstract qualities that really elevate certain cities to greatness, and that probably influence your choices: political influence; rich history; culture; cuisine; cosmopolitan buzz; and so on.

    Beijing has most of this –it’s working on the cosmopolitan buzz– but it conspicuously lacks the one other factor that defines many of the world’s other great metropolises: a giant monster attack.

    I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately (a sure sign that the holidays are leading to a work slowdown), and I’ve come to the conclusion that Beijing cannot be a great, global metropolis until it is attacked by its own giant monster. Thanks to the encyclopaedic reference information contained in two invaluable websites, Stomptokyo.com andGiantmonstermovies.com, I’ve been able to research some of the cities that have been on the receiving end of giant monsters. Sure, you all know that Tokyo has had a fifty yearkaiju infestation that has included Godzilla, Gamera and friends. New York got King Kong on multiple occasions plus, as a bonus, the Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (by the way, that’s 180,000 feet, or about six times deeper than the deepest part of the ocean). London was attacked by Gorgo. San Francisco got the five-armed octopus of It Came from Beneath the Sea. The list has also has some surprises, including some of Beijing’s key, regional rivals and a few cities you’d never expect:

    • Copenhagen was attacked by Reptilicus
    • Hong Kong was attacked by Mighty Peking Man in 1977, in an unintentional but apt metaphor for the city’s future
    • Rome’s Colosseum was destroyed by Ymir in 20 Million Miles to Earth
    • Los Angeles got Them
    • North Korea was attacked by Pulgasari, admittedly in ancient times
    • South Korea’s Seoul has had various monsters
    • Sweden got a monster, although it appears to have been confined to rural areas, in keeping with Scandinavian tidyness
    • Bangkok got Garuda
    • Even neutral Switzerland had a monster, although it was put there by Americans
    • Every tiny town in  the American southwest had a Gila Monster, Mantis or giant Lepus at some point, thanks to the tireless efforts of Bert I. Gordon and his contemporaries.

    As you would expect, Singapore is monster-proofed, although I think a romp by a giant merlion would do it a world of good.

    But let’s get back to Beijing. Those who like to quibble might be tempted to remind us that Mothra appeared in Beijing in Destroy All Monsters, but I am inclined to disqualify that for a couple of reasons. First, that’s a Japanese monster, and, as such, more insulting than terrifying. And, second, the climactic battle didn’t take place in Beijing.

    The problem for Beijing is, of course, that it has no skyline, and no easy monster access. If a monster was going to attack any mainland Chinese city, it would probably make a beeline (monsterline?) for Shanghai. Not only does it have the Huangpu River and the nearby Yangtze, which is more than big enough for your standard-guage kaiju, but it has the glittering Pudong skyline which has “ravage me” spelled out all over it in neon. If the Oriental Pearl Tower isn’t a secret Mysterian headquarters building just waiting to be scaled by something giant, scaly and radioactive, then I don’t know what is. And Jinmao Tower is a close number two.

    But what would a monster in Beijing attack? CCTV Tower? That’s way out west. The Great Hall of the People or the National Museum? Those low-rise, Stalinist wedding-cake buildings just aren’t all that satisfying as monster-fodder. Guomao’s twin towers are step in the right direction, but after Jianwai Soho, there’s precious little else smashable in that neighborhood. I guess a monster could kind of work it’s way down Jianwai and Chang’an Jie like a buffet line, stopping every kilometer or so to work on whatever medium-grade skyscraper or smokestack was convenient, but it seems like kind of a chore. Why waste the effort when the concentrated banquet tables of Shanghai and Hong Kong are so much more convenient?

    And that supposes that a monster could get to Beijing. But this may be easier to solve. Although we don’t have a major waterway nearby, it is conceivable that monster awakened by, say, the depletion of Beijing’s aquifer could arise from the bottom of Zhongnanhai, or perhaps tunnel up from underneath the Shougang plant (which would put it conveniently near the CCTV tower). I guess a monster could rise out of Tianjin harbor as well, and take Tianjin as a kind of hors’d’oeuvre on the way in, but it all seems very indirect. Plus any such monster could get misdirected and end up in Dalian, or, worse, Seoul (which has already had a monster, thank you very much).

    So I think Beijing has a clear mandate. If there is a better centerpiece for a giant monster attack than the 2008 Olympics, I cannot think of what it might be. Forget terrorist attack, I’m thinking giant monster attack. I think Beijing has a responsibility, a duty, to construct a monster-worthy skyline prior to the Olympics (it’s certainly working on this), and then take advantage of the games themselves to trash it utterly.

    Now that would be a spectacle worth staying for, and it would ensure Beijing’s entry into the pantheon of great World Cities far better than any measly athletic competition alone ever would.

  • Chinese restaurant calculation made easy

    A couple of days ago, Imagethief had lunch with four members of his team at a Chinese restaurant downstairs from our office. Choosing dishes was easy –I’ll eat almost anything– but, predictably, there was much debate about exactly how many dishes we should order. And, just as predictably, we ended up with twice as much food as we needed. This is the great conundrum of Chinese dining, and, indeed, most Asian-style dining.

    In the US it’s simple. You decide what entree you want and you order it. The only complexity is whether or not you share appetizers with your friends, choosing the wine (it’s fiendishly easy embarrass yourself oenologically; in college I had a buddy who wrecked a date with a rich girl by breathing the white wine) and settling the bill. In the US, settling a split restaurant bill is the most mathematically challenging task you are ever likely to undertake unless you are a high-energy physicist. And if you’re a physicist, you’ll have purpose-written computer software to help you. There is no software for sorting out restaurant checks, and by the time you and your friends are done sorting out who had how many of what beverages, and which appetizers, and I didn’t drink any goddamned wine, someone always gets screwed. Bitter, trans-generational rivalries have started this way. The Hatfields and the McCoys? That started with a restaurant check. And that was just Arby’s; think how much worse it could have been.

    Chinese dining trades the ordering simplicity and bill complexity for ordering complexity and bill simplicity. All the food goes into the middle, so you just divide the check by the number of people. Only miserly bastards will argue, “well, I had less of the duck tongue, so I shouldn’t pay so much”. You probably don’t hang out with people that anal, unless you are totally anal yourself. In which case, you probably live to dissect restaurant checks to two decimal places, so you’re wasting your time reading this. With even the beers being cheap in most Chinese restaurants, most of the time it’s not even worth adjusting for alcohol consumption. So the check is easy.

    But the ordering, ah, now that’s hard. And it’s not just hard for the obvious linguistic reasons. Yes, you have to learn some food and cooking vocabulary, but that comes quickly if you don’t want to starve. And you do need to get past the Chinese infatuation with cryptic dish names. You’ll never know that “Buddha’s glistening five-taste jewels” is braised camel testicles with sea cucumber unless you ask. But what’s really difficult is figuring out how much you should order. How many dishes should go into the center of the table in order to ensure that your party is sufficiently fed, without causing cataclysmic waste?

    Food is cheap in China, you argue, so why worry about cataclysmic waste? Well, guilt, for one reason. As a Jew, this is an inextricable part of my worldview. You can abandon kosher restrictions, but the guilt is bred in, like eye color and curly, brown hair. Remember all those years your mother told you that kids were starving in China, so you should shut up and eat the damned broccoli? That really comes back to haunt you when you’re actually in China, and you wander around some of the piss poor villages that begin on the far side of Beijing’s fifth ring road and stretch, more or less uninterrupted, all the way to Kyrgyzstan. And, really, who wants to see too much nice food thrown into the grime-blackened oil drums of the slop collectors? These are the poor souls who ply Beijing’s streets by tricycle and (illegally) xiao beng beng after dark, collecting restaurant leavings for the pig farms outside of town where they raise the pigs who will be, well, next week’s meals and, eventually, pig slop. It’s the Circle of Life, Beijing style. You won’t see Disney touching this one.

    Also, of course, when there is a vast amount of food on the table in front of you, you’ll tend to eat it. Now this isn’t necessarily bad, but Beijing cuisine isn’t of the light and heart-healthy variety. It’s of the Exxon Valdez, billions of gallons of oil and salt mixing together variety. Too much at any one sitting will put you into a coma. Too many sittings will put you into a casket. A really big, reinforced casket. And China is short of wood, so this only compounds the guilt.

    So this brings us to one of the truly great questions of our age. It’s right up there with, “is there an elegant, mathematical way to unify classical and quantum physical models?” or “who, in their right mind, thinks Paris Hilton is sexy?” That question is this: what is a truly rational ratio of Chinese dishes to people, assuming average people and an average restaurant? (I’ll assume that you’re smart enough to avoid one of those touristy “imperial” dives where they charge outrageous prices to serve you precious little niblets of bizarre organ meats that you could find being sold on sticks off the charcoal grill around the corner for a kuai a pop.)

    Think about it. You and a friend go a Chinese restaurant for lunch. You probably could survive splitting one dish and rice, but you’ll get a meat (or tofu; equivalent for this exercise) and a vegetable. If you’re aggressive, you’ll get two meats and a vegetable because you feel that you need the variety to justify a Chinese restaurant. But this is a trap, and you’ve now over-ordered. With two people, one dish per person is appropriate. Add another person and you’ll definitely add another dish. Your still at one dish per person, following a classic “one-per-head” rule often applied by Chinese people. But with four people, what do you do? Four dishes for four people might be a lot. You could probably stick with three. Five people? You’ll want four dishes. Six? Dicey…four will instinctively seem too little to you, even though it’s probably correct. Six will definitely be too much. This is touch and go. Seven or eight people? Er, uh…

    So you can see that lot of voodoo is coming to bear to here. And there is more complexity as well. When I say “dish” here, I am assuming one of the standards: a stir fried vegetable or a meat or tofu in sauce. But how do you account for the cold dishes, or veggies, which tend to be lighter? Or a duck, or even the mighty shuizhu yu, which are undoubtedly heavier? What about dumplings? Some places sell by the liang, some by orders of 10 or 12. Well, at this point you’re just guessing wildly, aren’t you?

    Of course you could turn to the waitress for help because she, of course, has a totally disinterested perspective on what represents enough food for your party. This is a variation of the deadly trap in which you ask the waitress to recommend a dish. Yes, sometimes they’ll send you to a legitimate, hidden gem, but nine times out of ten the finger goes straight to the abalone and sharks fin XO supreme in tiger-penis broth at RMB888 a bowl. And, at a restaurant where a plate of yuxiang rousi costs 12 kuai, that can be a quite a shock to the system. In truth, I’ve never felt that Chinese waiters or waitresses were really aggressively pushing more food than was appropriate, but they’ll definitely err high. I can recall dozens of times where waiters and waitresses suggested we order just one more dish, and only one instance where we were told that we might want to take one thing off the list.

    So, can this process be made easier? Can it be somehow defined in a way that will enable you to prove, mathematically, that you have ordered a correct amount of food? Who knows. But it’s Saturday morning, and I have nothing better to do, so I am going to try.

    For simplicity, let’s assume that we want a system that sticks to the Chinese rule of one dish per head. So if you have five people, you want an aggregate score of five. But we also want a system that weights dishes correctly based on their gustatory impact. For instance, there is no way that your pai huang gua or bowl of white rice has the same impact as an oil-and-chili drenched mapo doufu. Now I don’t have time to sit here and individually weight every Beijing and provincial standard that you can order in this town, for Chrissake. But I can roughly categorize dishes in a way that, I hope, makes sense. So here is my proposed weighting system for types of Chinese dishes:

    Underweighted dishes:

    • White rice: .25 in aggregate (assuming everyone orders a bowl – if less than half the party orders white rice, ignore)
    • Dumplings (shuijiao): .25 per liang of five or .5 for an order of 10 to 12
    • Dumplings (guotie): .5 per liang of five or 1 for an order of 10 to 12
    • Cold dishes (pickles, cold meats, appetizers, hua sheng, etc.): .5
    • Plain breads (no meat): .5
    • Desserts: .5 (this is counterintuitive as Chinese desserts are unparalleled calorie bombs, but I’ve always subscribed to the “separate tank” theory of dessert consumption
    • Cooked green vegetables: .75 (that’s stir-fried or steamed green vegetables; di san xian,yuxiang qiezi, or anything in sauce counts as a full dish)

    Standard weighted dishes:

    • Soups and noodles: 1 (soup is a trap; don’t assume that it’s lighter than other dishes)
    • Breads with meat (roubing, etc.): 1
    • Standards: 1 (most meats, poultry and fish; vegetables in sauce or gan bian style; and any cooked or sauced tofu; the vast majority of dishes)

    Overweighted dishes:

    • Shuizhu yu or niu rou: 1.5 (I’m inclined to double weight it, but I’ll be generous)
    • Beijing roast duck: 2 per duck and, yes, a half-duck is 1 point (the duck is greasy and there are pancakes, plum sauce, etc.)
    • “Set piece” dishes: 2 (roast suckling pig, roast mutton leg, anything that serves as a centerpiece dish or that would be served at a wedding)
    • Hot pot: .75 per person (so if you have four people, it counts as a total of 3 points)
    • Intimidation dishes: 2 (bizarre organ meats; exotic animals; anything you are served by people trying to get a rise out of the laowai or that you serve to your “just arrived in China” friends to give them a taste of “the real thing”

    So if you and five of your friends (six people total) are going out for dinner, you have an available score of six. Everyone has white rice, leaving you 4.5 available dishes. Two cold dishes leave you 3.5 remaining slots. Order two green vegetables and two standards, and it’s perfection. Or one standard, a duck and one more cold dish. Or, if this is a duck feast, six people qualifies for two ducks, a standard and two cold dishes. See how easy this is? For the sake of argument, I’ll even allow rounding.

    Global modifiers:
    Global modifiers affect the overall score of a meal. Positive modifiers are added to your available score to allow the addition of extra dishes, negative modifiers subtract from the total allowed dishes. For example, if you have four people, and, thus, a total available score of four, a global modifier of +2 allows you order dishes totaling a score of 6. Conversely, a global modifier of -2 would allow you to order only two dishes. Some global modifiers apply to specific numbers of people, and so must be modified for party size. Simple, isn’t it?

    • Auspicious occasion (wedding, deal closure): +2 for every five people
    • All just arrived in China: +2 (gotta experiment)
    • All female party: -1 for each four people
    • All teenage girls: -3 for each four people
    • Lunch: -1
    • Rugby team: x2 available score
    • In Guangdong: -2
    • In Sichuan or Hunan: +1
    • Any restaurant with a floor show: -2
    • Any restaurant with a government tourism or China Famous Brand plaque: -2
    • Any restaurant at a provincial 办事区: +1
    • Beer and other liquors: no impact

    There. Drop that all into Microsoft Excel or a handy, slide-rule style device and you’re good to go. I’ve tested it not at all and I have very little confidence that it will hold up under rigorous examination. But, in the end, it’s as good as anything else you’ve got to work with. Suggestions for other weightings or modifications can be submitted via the usual methods. The Nobel committee can contact me care of this website.

  • I am Beijing’s decadent man bitch

    When I was back in the US recently I was often asked a deceptively simple question: “What is it like living Beijing?”

    This is a trap. It’s a trap because no-one living in the United States wants to hear in any great detail what your experience of living in another country is like. Most Americans don’t actually believe in other countries, except for France, and then only because they don’t like it. I am sure that most of my friends think I am assimilated bodily into the Internet for eighteen months at a time, beaming in for the odd-week to attend barbecues and weddings.

    I went through this indifference for years  when I was living in Singapore and, despite China’s slightly higher marquee value, the situation is not much different now. It could just be that I am a crappy raconteur. But I think people really just want some short, pithy exclamation or mini-anecdote that encapsulates everything that is exotic and frightening about where you live, provides them with reassurance about their own lives, and doesn’t challenge them with too much history, culture, political analysis or other complexity. Something like, “Well, did you know that, in China, it’s acceptable to walk around without any pants on and that people rub noses to say hello?” (Although, ideally, something true.) Speak for longer than about three sentences on the topic of living abroad at your standard cocktail party and people’s eyes glaze over and their hands start fumbling for a liquor refill. There are, of course, occasional exceptions to this rule from people with a particular interest, but I feel this accurately describes most such situations.

    So I’ve been confronted with the challenge finding a way to accurately sum up the experience of living in Beijing –to transmit the raw, visceral feel of it– without dwelling too deeply upon the nitty-gritty and nuance that washes right over people who’s conception of China is built entirely on takeaway moo goo gai pan and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. And I think I’ve hit on a solution.

    Beijing is really about a mix of pleasure and pain accompanied by chronic, mild disorientation. I was reminded of this as I stepped out of my lovely, heated lobby this morning (pleasure) and the cold grabbed me by the collar and slapped me hard on both cheeks (pain). This was followed by my morning walk to the subway, amidst the smells of early-opening snack stalls (pleasure) and the open, neighborhood garbage tip (pain). A lovely Hunan meal (pleasure) is followed by the inevitable morning on the can working through an entire copy of The Economist (pain, but with a distraction). An autumn evening on the banks of Houhai (pleasure) is followed by the nasty taste of soot and pollution in one’s mouth the next morning (pain). The triumph of a successful conversation in Chinese (pleasure) is followed by the humiliation of failing utterly at some bit of communication that should be simple (pain). The pirate DVD you bought has a great picture (pleasure) but stops twenty minutes before the end of the movie (pain). You spy a lovely girl (pleasure); and she picks her nose (pain). And so on.

    So I’ve come up with an interactive method that I feel will enable my friends and family in the US to better understand the world  in which I live, without bogging them down in too much didacticism. It works like this:

    If you want to know what it’s like to live in Beijing, get yourself four shots of vodka (technically it should be baijiu, but that’s hard to get in the US), a packet of cheap cigarettes, a ball-peen hammer and a slightly dirty but beautiful, exotic-looking girl dressed in unfashionable clothes. Now,

    1. Drink all four shots of vodka.
    2. Take a drag on one of the cigarettes.
    3. Kiss the girl.
    4. Hit yourself on the hand with ball-peen hammer, really hard.
    5. Repeat.

    I think that about sums it up.

    Of course, being a completely masochistic Asiaphile, I love Beijing’s pleasure/pain duality. In a way, I guess that makes Beijing my nasty, whip-cracking mama, and me her decadent man-bitch. If you are low enough to want to think of it in such vulgar terms. Even now, a year-and-a-half later, my general complacency is often interrupted by moments of utter surprise that say, with knife-point keenness, “hey, asshole, you live in China”. I love that feeling. It was because I had long-since outgrown that feeling in Singapore that I came to China in the first place. I suppose when I no longer get that feeling here, it will be time to leave. But I think it will be a while. My cheeks still sting from the last slap.

  • Harbin aftermath: Government vows to thoroughly scape all goats

    Catastrophes are fun to watch, but not nearly so much fun as the aftermath of kicking, screaming and recriminations as blame is liberally heaped and fingers pointed. Katrina lasted only a day, after all, but the operatic fallout has reverberated for weeks, although less loudly now than it did at first. Chinese post-disaster convulsions are, perhaps, a bit more cryptic and mysterious than the American version, but interesting nonetheless. The aftermath of the Songhua River poisoning is just getting going, and, as it unfolds, the Chinese government and US government are notable for some of their similarities as well as some of their differences.

    The Chinese are following the US precedent by eagerly shoveling blame down onto lower levels of government. The better to distract people’s attention from the fact that the central government, if not directly responsible for the explosion, was apparently directly involved in the subsequent ten-day coverup. But at the same time, they are indulging in the classic central goverment pastime of erasing the inconvenient bits of the story in a way that the US government only wishes it could do.

    My attention was drawn back to this issue by an article that ran on Xinhua’s website today, hopefully titled, “China vows to “sternly” punish those responsible for river pollution“. (I’ve taken the liberty of correcting the spelling of the word “river”.) The article is interesting because it’s a classic bit of PR misdirection. Read this:

    The head of national work safety watchdog vowed Tuesday to “sternly” punish those responsible for a chemical plant explosion in northeast China’s Jilin Province, which caused toxic leakage into the Songhua River, a main water supply source in the area.

    Li Yizhong, director of the National Bureau of Production Safety Supervision Administration, pledged a thorough investigation in the explosion and the ensuing toxic spill in the river.

    Li, who headed an investigation team set up by the State Council on Tuesday to probe the accident, promised to seriously deal with those enterprises, departments and individuals held responsible for the accident.

    “Anyone, who were found guilty of dereliction of duty, will be harshly dealt with,” he said, “those who break the law will be handed over to the judicial departments.”

    “People who are found to have provided false information to investigators will also be punished severely,” the official said. “Any move trying to cover up the cause of the accident and any passive attitude toward the probe are deemed deception and a defiance of law.”

    ***

    The investigation team will probe the cause of the blast and why there were no preventative measures in place to prevent the benzene from being discharged into the Songhua River.

    An earlier report said that Yu Li, head of the Jilin branch of China National Petroleum Corporation (CNPC), was removed from his post.

    Two other officials, who allegedly held direct responsibility for the plant explosion, were also dismissed.

    Besides, Xie Zhenhua, head of the State Environmental Protection Administration (SEPA), China’s environmental watchdog, resigned after the accident, becoming the highest-ranking Chinese official to resign for an environmental incident.

    Ask yourself two questions. 1) What do you see in this article? 2) What do you not see in this article? My answers:

    What I see in this article:

    • A resolute central government taking action
    • An investigation team created by the State Council to probe the accident
    • Rolling of heads involved in the explosion (and one central government head)
    • Stern threats of punishment for those found to have caused the article through dereliction or negligence
    • Stern threats of punishment for those found to have “provided false information to investigators”
    • This last one is important: stern threats of punishment for those found to have covered up the cause of the accident (my emphasis)

    What I do not see in this article:

    • Any acknowledgment of the coverup of the release of Benzene (as opposed to the cause of the explosion)
    • Any suggestion that the central government was complicit in any way in that coverup (although the resignation of Xie Zhenhua suggests some acknowledgment of responsibility for the initial accident)
    • Any suggestion that a general climate of lax central regulation and control might have played a role creating conditions conducive to the explosion

    This is not surprising in the least, but it lets you see how the story is going to be spun. The accident was bad, and if negligence was involved, it is appropriate to punish the people involved. And this makes a handy flash-bang for catching people’s attention and making them feel that Something is Being Done. But it ignores the fact that the coverup of the benzene release was arguably an equally (or even more) serious crime to any negligence that might have precipitated the original explosion. After all, it was the coverup that exposed everyone living along the Songhua River between the chemical plant and whatever point the Benzene had reached when the coverup was blown to potential poisoning. If anything is going to be investigated, it’s the coverup and the decisions made around it that should come under scrutiny.

    But there is, of course, faint hope of that. The coverup is joining the lengthening list of catastrophic un-events in recent Chinese history.

    I realize this is a deconstruction of a translation, which is dangerous territory. But everything I see is consistent with how I would expect the government here to respond.

    In what looks like another consequence of the disaster, it was reported by the AFP today that a Jilin City vice mayor and environmental chief has died in apparently mysterious circumstances:

    The vice mayor and environment chief for China’s Jilin city has been found dead, the city’s Communist Party press office said, amid accusations he was involved in last month’s toxic disaster cover-up there.

    “He died yesterday,” a spokesman for the Jilin city party press office told AFP, without giving any details as to the cause of death.

    “The police are investigating. We don’t know any more about it. I think the police will make a public announcement after they finish their investigation.”

    Wang Wei, the vice mayor who was also in charge of environment protection, took a high-profile role after a blast at the PetroChina chemical plant in Jilin on November 13 that killed eight people and injured 60 others.

    The accident led to the spillage of 100 tonnes of the carcinogens benzene and nitrobenzene into the Songhua River, one of China’s longest waterways and a source of water for millions of people.

    However officials said nothing of the contamination of the Songhua for nearly 10 days.

    “It will not cause large scale pollution. We have decided not to have a large scale evacuation,” the China Business News quoted Wang on November 15 as saying.

    If the police are investigating, one must assume that Wang Wei did not pass away peacefully in his sleep. A Japanese-style shame suicide, perhaps? Conspiracy buffs may supply their theories in the comment space.

    Update: The Associated Press interprets the story a little differently than I did.

  • Van Nguyen died for your sins: Executions as public communication

    The Australians were doomed from the start, literally and metaphorically.

    They were doomed because they misapprehended the nature of capital punishment for drug offenses in Singapore. They thought of it as retribution, or punishment. This is wrong. Drug-offense executions in Singapore are, first and foremost, public communication. That radically affects how the Singapore government can be expected to respond to noisy pleas for clemency. Mercy is appropriate for punishment, but it is bad for deterrent communication. The louder and more passionate the public please for clemency became, the more inevitable was Van’s execution.

    The Singapore government is fairly transparent about its death penalty. Anyone entering the country by airplane is treated to “the lecture”, in the form of a standardized announcement of the stiff penalties for drug offenses, including death. Immigration entry cards carry the same warning. The country publicizes many of its executions via coverage in the local media. The reason why is that, unlike many nations that apply a death penalty, Singapore appears to have given some thought to how to wield it most effectively as a deterrent.

    In order to be effective a deterrent needs to be two things. First, it needs to be credible. In other words, people have to believe in the threat. Second, that credibility has to be communicated. A deterrent that no-one knows about or believes in is useless. Your trained rottweiler is a credible burglar deterrent. But you still put a “beware of dog” sign on your gate and scatter shredded dog toys, an enormous dog dish and a cow femur around your yard to drive the point home. That’s the communciation. It lets the thief know the penalty for hopping your fence and saves you the trouble of winnowing pieces of human flesh from between your dog’s teeth before his breath goes foul.

    In the US, a death sentence is often an abstraction for those convicted; something sinister that hovers on the horizon, but which is often delayed for a decade or longer by the legal process. In a sense, the death penalty in the US is not credible (“hang ‘em high” Texas possibly excepted). This lack of credibility is aggravated by laws that differ from state to state. Singapore, on the other hand, is very systematic and uniform about meting out the death penalty for drug crimes. It applies strict criteria for when the death penalty applies to drug offenses, and those criteria are openly published. The appeals process is limited and the time from conviction to execution, anecdotally, is generally around a year. That’s immediate enough to make the prospect of death very real and credible indeed.

    The Australian protests over Van’s execution yesterday arguably played right into Singapore’s hands on two fronts. It not only let them communicate their penalty globally, which the Singapore government has no qualms about, but it also let them publicly demonstrate the credibility of the deterrent by refusing to entertain pleas of clemency. The message was quite clear and effective: We are willing to execute a citizen of a first-world ally despite repeated, public pleas from his government and tearful mother. So you’d better believe we will damn-sure hang your narrow, friendless Burmese/Thai/Malay/Indonesian/Lao smuggler ass without a second thought.

    From the Singaporean government’s point of view, the consistent application of the death penalty is the lynchpin of the credibility that must be communicated. Any visible erosion of that credibility is dangerous. You can think of this a bit like you would think of negotiation with kidnappers or terrorists. You can never be publicly seen to give in as that sends a message to others that they might succeed at the same thing. If you do negotiate, you will do it only in quiet situations where there is little risk of public disclosure. If there was to be any hope for Van at all (and that hope was never more than gossamer), it would have come from sotto voce diplomatic communication out of the public view, accompanied by restrained and dignified public silence. Candlelight vigils make nice photo-ops and public remonstrations generate good copy for Aussie politicians. But they essentially guarantee that the Singapore government will follow-through with the execution, because to do anything else would undermine the entire communication strategy around their deterrent.

    Whether Singapore’s death penalty, credible or not, has any actual deterrent effect is, of course, nearly impossible to measure. It’s a truism amongst anti death-penalty campaigners that the deterrent effects of the death penalty are suspect. The fact is that, no matter how stiff the deterrent, Singapore is a strategic trans-shipment location. That is the unintended consequence of making yourself the modern transportation and air hub for one of the world’s most important drug production regions. And in Southeast Asia, and Australia as well, there is obviously a ready supply of people who will risk their lives for a large enough payoff.

    Speaking of public communication, after Schapelle Corby and Van Nguyen, the Australians might want to think twice about having a noisy public protest if another one of their own is booked on drug charges in the next few months. Right now they are looking like the whiny kingpins of the Southeast Asian drug trade. Unfair and untrue, but that’s the perception being created.

    Another spooky aspect of Singapore’s drug laws that is seldom remarked upon is that Singaporean citizens and (gulp) permanent residents can be prosecuted in Singapore for consumption of drugs overseas, even in places where it is legal or barely criminal. Singapore has, in effect, made its drug consumption laws extra-territorial, ensuring that its social values and legal restrictions apply to citizens and PRs no matter where they may live. Drug consumption spans a pretty wide range of activities, from the manifestly corrosive habits of a heroin junkie to the arguably pretty harmless dormitory spliff. The philosophical questions raised by this are, therefore, interesting ones.

    Following the promulgation of that law, in 1998, in another classic piece of Singapore drug-enforcement public communication, a couple returning from a rave in Malaysia a few years ago was famously arrested at the causeway and convicted for smoking marijuana. They were reportedly, and not very credibly, rumbled by sharp border guards who spotted their reddened “addicts eyes”. My Singaporean friends theorized that it was more likely informers planted at the rave who had ratted the couple out. Many Singaporeans I know take it for granted that informers are also cultivated amongst Singaporean student communities overseas. After all, if too many defenseless Singaporeans caught the bong habit in the dorm rooms of libertine Perth, London or Los Angeles, who knows what that might lead to. Reggae, perhaps.

    Disclosure: Imagethief opposes the death penalty in all applications. It is, I believe, a worthless deterrerent, prone to error and more often applied as a tool for satisfying an unworthy social lust for vengeance rather than as a gravely considered sanction of last-resort. In a societies that claim the mantle of modern civilization it is hypocrisy of the deepest level and there should be no place for it.