Imagethief

Tag: Resident Alien

  • Illegal baby part 1: The strange case of the sluggish passport

    Note: This combines two original posts. In the first part, I suggest something to the Singaporean embassy. In the second part, they respond.

    Illegal baby part 1: The strange case of the sluggish passport
    July 1, 2008

    Anyone within earshot will know that Imagethief welcomed his son, Zachary, into the world last March 9th. The nearly four months since have been one long sleepless adventure. Despite my fatigue induced delirium, however, the experience has been a happy one. Like parents everywhere I take the most profound pleasure in things that non-parents wouldn’t even notice. This week’s new talent: Blowing damp, drooly raspberries. I glow just thinking about it. In Imagethief’s parenthood-addled mind, it is but the merest step from a wet raspberry to a full ride at Harvard.

    Having a baby means paperwork. Last week’s trip home to Singapore was case in point, as I spent my “holiday” dealing with health insurance for Zachary, life insurance for me, a will for everyone in the family, and various other “responsible parent” stuff. It all left me feeling rather old and grown up.

    Having a baby abroad means even more paperwork, as one must go through various registrations with various consulates and embassies in order to ensure that papers are obtained and the relevant authorities (“relevant authorities” is Imagethief’s top phrase for Summer ’08) don’t think you’re some kind of flesh peddler smuggling healthy Chinese babies out of the country for resale to monied but childless Western suburbanites.

    The racial distinction in the sentence above is important because Mrs. Imagethief is Singaporean and Zachary is thus Eurasian, with his looks falling less to the “Eur” and more to the “Asian”. Dad’s nose and ears, mom’s everything else if you must know. Considering my nose, this may not be the optimum distribution of features, but so it goes. Imagethief believes that mixed races are the future of mankind and is glad to be doing his part for ethnic homogeneity and conscientious outbreeding. (“Conscientious outbreeding” is Imagethief’s number-two phrase for Summer ’08.)

    But ethnicity isn’t everything. While it hasn’t always been the case, the trump-it-all organizing political concept of the last few hundred years has been the nation-state. Imagethief has mixed feelings about nation-states, especially as a proxy for good old-fashioned tribalism, but bows to the prevailing fashion. This means that my boy is a dual citizen, and entitled to both United States and Singaporean passports.

    Some people –especially my cynical Singaporean friends– might ask why bother with the Singapore citizenship. Singapore doesn’t permit dual citizenship for adults, and assuming that policy doesn’t change Zachary will eventually have to choose a nationality. But it is important to me that he have a say in that choice. He has roots and family in Singapore, and being part Singaporean will always be part of his identity. There is also a good chance that he will go to primary and secondary school in Singapore, where he will no doubt learn the finer points of Hokkien vulgarity. Should he remain a Singapore citizen or permanent resident, national service will fill any gaps in his vocabulary and ensure that he matriculates with a truly colorful assortment of multilingual profanity. I swell with paternal pride at the thought.

    So we duly registered Zachary’s birth at both embassies. And this is where the surprise lay. Singapore has a reputation for bureaucratic efficiency. Having participated in the registration of a business in Singapore, filed taxes there for many years, and applied for both work permits and permanent residency papers, Imagethief can attest that this reputation is largely justified. Singapore’s civil service is cool, crisp, courteous and efficient, and maintains comfortable waiting rooms with widescreen televisions invariably featuring either Mr. Bean reruns or Tom & Jerry cartoons. (Both can be watched silently and neither offends any of Singapore’s established religions or creeds, although I personally find Mr. Bean rather offensive.)

    The United States’ reputation for bureaucratic efficiency is less glittering. Thanks to America’s Global War on Terror (TM) this has been especially true in matters of travel and identification, with Vietnam or Soviet Russia seeming better comparisons than Singapore. So I fully expected Singapore to produce a passport within days while the US Embassy waited for the Department of Homeland Security to grind through a months-long analysis of whether my mixed-race, China-born baby constituted a clear and present danger to national security or intellectual property.

    I was exactly wrong. The US Embassy approved our application on the spot and had a passport ready one week later. Two weeks after applying, the only thing the Singapore embassy had managed to do was to call my wife and ask her to come back and sign an oath that she had not renounced her Singaporean citizenship. Somehow it didn’t occur to them to do this during her first visit. Going on two months later we have a recently delivered Singaporean citizenship certificate, but no passport. Thus, despite the fact that we travel to Singapore far more often than to the US, Zach’s Chinese visa is in his US passport, and he just completed his first visit to Singapore as a foreigner. I can stay as long as I want, but after ninety days he is baby non grata.

    That seems a shame, because Singapore has a problem: No babies. According to the CIA World Factbook, it has the third worst fertility rate in the world, at 1.08 children per woman. Only Hong Kong and Macau (where everyone is apparently too busy gambling to have babies) fare worse.

    In fact, that 1.08 is apparently misreported. A 2007 article from Singapore’s Channel News Asia (think CNN stripped of the things that make CNN interesting) gives a figure of 1.24 as the record low, from 2004, with 1.08 being the number for ethnic Chinese women.

    But that’s still pretty bad given that the ethnic Chinese are about 75% of Singapore’s population. And it means that the Malays, the most significant minority group, are doing most of the heavy lifting when it comes to having kids. The government is unlikely to admit this publicly, but I think they’d prefer ethnic status quo rather than a growing Malay minority that may upset Singapore’s carefully nurtured political balance.

    In addition to trying to encourage the immigration of educated professionals, Singapore has trundled out the incentives for having children. These apply to everyone, not just the reproductively-indifferent Chinese, and include grants of SGD$3,000 for the first two children, with even larger sums for the next two. But judging from the figures, the incentives don’t seem to have helped much. This is not too surprising. The “baby bonus” is nice, but having kids is a complex, long-term project and SGD$3,000 in Singapore is a couple of months rent even if you live in public housing. Personally Imagethief would much rather have free local childcare and less stress about whether his kids will get into a top school or languish in some also-ran academy for mouth-breathing troglodytes.

    Anyway, the long and short of it is that Singapore needs babies. And what it really wants, it will tell you over a teary, confessional piss-up (if a nation-state could do that), are the high-potential babies of prosperous, educated people. Precisely the people who don’t have children because they’re too busy chasing the brass ring and spending SGD$150 a pop to tank up their Lexus LS400s.

    So, if I may flatter myself, you’d think they’d be going overboard to ensure that the child of an educated, long-time permanent resident who works in China (a country Singapore prioritizes) and an educated, professional, Singaporean woman becomes a Singapore citizen. You’d think they’d have sent salesmen around while we were still pregnant, with brochures explaining why Singaporean citizenship is the best choice for our child. You’d think the embassy would have called to remind us of the top notch medical care and excellent schools that await my child in the motherland. You’d think they’d have had a passport tucked into an immense fruit basket waiting for us outside the delivery room with a letter from the Minister of Babies (or whomever) thanking us for doing our bit for the country’s future prosperity.

    But no. Two months later and I’m still waiting for a passport. And no fruit basket either. Which is a shame, because Singapore has outstanding fruit (even if it’s all imported). Meanwhile, Uncle Sam, who ranks near the top of the developed world fertility league tables and has no baby shortage at all, has stolen a march.

    Which brings me to complaint two: Singapore’s policy on dual citizenship. It’s not having any, thank you. Hence my boy’s impending Big Choice. For a country that wants to be the Switzerland of Asia, the antipathy to dual citizenship seems surprising, but I understand where it comes from. Singapore’s government fosters a national sense of vulnerability as a political tool. We’re economically fragile, surrounded by Indonesians, could lose it all in a heartbeat, etc. Work harder. A conviction that national loyalties can’t be divided under such precarious circumstances fits neatly into that picture. After all, when the going gets tough, those with foreign passports might just bail and leave the rest treading water (literally, if the challenge at hand is the rising sea level).

    Aside from assuming the worst of its citizens, the problem with this approach is that any visit to Western Australia will demonstrate that educated, prosperous Singaporeans aren’t waiting for permission to leave. As always, those who are most desirable will be those with the most options. As a nation that thrives on its international connections, Singapore needs to sell itself not just to foreigners, but also to its own citizens on an ongoing basis.

    Even though I’m a foreigner I consider myself pretty invested in Singapore. That’s why I want Zachary to have the option of choosing Singapore citizenship for himself someday. I would even consider taking Singapore citizenship myself if I didn’t have to renounce US citizenship to do it. Sorry, but that trade ain’t happening (America’s stone-age expatriate tax policies notwithstanding). And perhaps that’s QED for the Singapore government. If I’m not willing to make the big commitment, why should I be taken into the fold?

    But it all comes back to that desire to grow the population and encourage successful professionals to make Singapore home. Part of that is being flexible enough to do what’s necessary to make people feel welcome in a long term, raise-my-children-here kind of way. Singapore is afraid of its citizens hedging their bets, but that’s exactly what it does. That’s why my “permanent” residency expires every five years and why Singapore won’t tolerate dual citizenship. It’s a not a big deal for me, but it’s a shame for my boy, who will be part American and part Singaporean for the rest of his life, regardless of which passports he is allowed to carry.

    Encouragingly, things change. It wasn’t that long ago that Singaporean women married to foreigners weren’t allowed to register their children for Singaporean citizenship at all. If that can change, who knows what else might come to pass in the sixteen or so years that will pass before Zachary has to choose a nationality. Perhaps he will be part of Singapore’s first generation of dual-nationals.

    In the meantime, however, just getting that passport would be a good start.

    Illegal baby part 1A: The Singapore embassy sends a fruit basket
    July 26th, 2008

    About a month ago I wrote about the long time it was taking the Singapore embassy in Beijing to produce our son’s Singaporean passport. Reflecting my frustrations about various aspects of Singaporean citizenship policy, and what I see as the conflict between Singapore’s reluctance to accept dual citizenship and desire to have more citizens, I wrote the following:

    [If] I may flatter myself, you’d think [the government of Singapore would] be going overboard to ensure that the child of an educated, long-time permanent resident who works in China (a country Singapore prioritizes) and an educated, professional, Singaporean woman becomes a Singapore citizen. You’d think they’d have sent salesmen around while we were still pregnant, with brochures explaining why Singaporean citizenship is the best choice for our child. You’d think the embassy would have called to remind us of the top notch medical care and excellent schools that await my child in the motherland. You’d think they’d have had a passport tucked into an immense fruit basket waiting for us outside the delivery room with a letter from the Minister of Babies (or whomever) thanking us for doing our bit for the country’s future prosperity.

    Well, it did indeed take three months, but last Monday the Singaporean embassy finally came up with Zachary’s passport. Not only did they come up with it, but they sent two Singaporean embassy staff (as oppose to local couriers) around to our apartment to hand deliver it along with congratulations and a personal apology for it taking so long and, yes, a fruit basket:

    fruitbasket-corrected

    Technically it was more of a biscuit basket (for giggles, say that out loud) than a fruit basket, but the idea was the same. I have no idea if this is Singapore embassy SOP, they just felt they needed to make restitution for the delay or they are (gulp) reading this blog. The latter possibility is a little worrying considering some of the less than worshipful things I have written about Singapore’s government over the years. Any Singaporean readers who’ve registered the births of their children in Beijing are invited to let me know if they received the same treatment.

    The apology and fruit biscuit basket didn’t change how I feel about Singapore’s reluctance to allow dual citizenship for adults. But they did go a long ways toward defusing my annoyance at the delay in delivering Zach’s passport. Nothing like a touch of personal service and attention to mollify a disgruntled customer. Especially a blogging customer.

    Note: The passport was not actually tucked into the fruit basket. That’s my own arrangement.

    See Also:

    Illegal baby part 2: I fought the law and the law won

  • The baby is coming next week, pinhead!

    Although his wife may disagree, Imagethief believes very deeply that Homo sapiens should have a gestational period of 241 weeks. Forty weeks is simply not long enough for first-time parents to come to grips with the reality of having a child.

    The funny thing is that thirty-nine weeks ago it seemed like plenty. Nine months of pregnancy felt like a school-year did back when I was in second grade: about ten minutes longer than eternity. But one of the curious but well-known side effects of getting older is that time compresses. When I was ten the idea of deferring anything for a year was essentially like postponing it forever, or longer. A year hence was simply too remote and exotic a concept to contemplate. Jeez, in a year we might have flying cars, domestic robots and little metal hats that let us read the minds of our alien pets. That was how far off a year was. It was 10% of my life.

    When you’re forty, and you’re planning investments with a twenty year time horizon and buying insurance products calibrated in decades, a year is a rounding error. It’s 2.5% of my life, and when it gets to 1.25%, actuarial tables suggest I’ll be dead, or at least enfeebled. Today, planning something a year off is only one step above planning my shopping. I could go pick up some ice cream tonight. Or I could go get it next year. Whatever. I’ve learned the adult magic of deferred gratification. Or even infinitely postponed gratification, where you settle for the vague intention of buying or doing something but never actually do it.

    Speaking of infinitely postponed, we got a later start on pregnancy than many of our old friends back home. It was a planned pregnancy that we’d attempted to engineer for two years. I use the term “engineer” with some deliberation. It took a little effort, and when you’re forty time may speed up but other things slow down. Still, when the good news came, the reality of the baby was a long way off. The doctor showed us some paperwork and charts and graphs, but they could have meant anything. Maybe we were having a baby. Or maybe interest rates were falling. It was hard to tell. Mrs. Imagethief looked more or less the same. She did have a bit of a glow, but in a Shanghai June one assumes that is sweat.

    Despite many typical pregnancy experiences, the baby seemed a long way off until pretty recently. I believe that denial is an important part of managing the whole pregnancy process. For first time parents, it’s probably the one thing that enables you to cope with the reality of the responsibility you are about to assume. It’s not that we ignored the pregnancy. We were thrilled, after all, and we attacked the project with some gusto. We went to pre-natal appointments and (speaking of long investment horizons) paid for a birthing package. I read all the literature and prowled the candy-striped baby-name websites. They don’t really design them with dudes in mind or they would look more like ESPN.com. I also helped Mrs. Imagethief purchase a staggering array of baby paraphernalia representing the intellectual output of some of the finest engineers on the planet. Anyone who has studied a breast pump carefully will know what I am talking about.

    Even our cohort of friends magically shifted. We didn’t mean for this to happen. We didn’t consciously seek it out. It just materialized, as if by some sort of alchemy. It helped that some of our good friends in China were pregnant a bit ahead of us. Those friends were like catalysts for a change that swept across our entire social group. The next thing we knew we were eating at “child friendly” restaurants and having dim sum with four strollers in the room and mothers queuing for breastfeeding space on the couch. It was just like I’d heard about: All our conversations were about pregnancy and parenthood and which strollers work best on Beijing’s crappy sidewalks. It was a bit like “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”, except warm and fuzzy and full of teddy bears rather than dark, spooky and McCarthyist.

    Mrs. Imagethief did get big. When we went to Italy last October she was beginning to show a little roundness, but if she wore a jacket it disappeared. Now you could throw a bedspread over The Bump and it wouldn’t disappear. Daily life is all about The Bump: Which clothes go over it, how to manage trouser waists, and the strange and terrible things happening to her navel. The Bump makes it hard for her to turn over in bed or get up from the couch. It’s put her center of gravity about a foot in front of her feet. Mrs. Imagethief now moves like a slightly drunk woman carrying around a 30-inch tube television wrapped in foam. Awkwardness has become a way of life. Baby proofing be damned. We’ve been Bump proofing. I know this sounds a bit uncharitable, and still love her, Bump and all, but it’s quite a thing.

    The other thing that changed recently is that we can actually feel the baby. First time fathers aren’t really prepared for what a presence the baby becomes even while it is still in utero. We all grow up hearing about “feeling the baby kick”, and we imagine some kind of delicate, birdlike peck. Ping! Could you feel the kick? That was true about two months ago. Now “kick” has become a polite euphemism for “full body aerobics” and feeling it isn’t an issue. When the kid moves you can see my wife’s shirt undulate. The kid sticks his feet and elbows out and her tummy ripples. It looks like someone has thrown a towel over the cat. Or, perhaps more accurately, over the baby.

    All of this may have made the baby feel more imminent to my wife, but it was still not quite real to me. Sure her tummy moved but it could have been anything in there. Maybe ants, or bad dumplings. Who are you going to believe? Some ultrasound technician you just met? Or all those movies you saw as a kid where people incubate aliens inside their bodies?

    I don’t feel bad about this. Most of my friends told me the baby wasn’t real for them either until they were actually holding it, at which point there wasn’t really any choice except to get a grip, in both senses of the phrase. I’ve been a conscientious husband during the pregnancy and the basic prep work is done. That’s pretty good for a habitual procrastinator like me. I was the kid who wrote all his papers at 3AM before they were due, a trick that got me through high school and college but wouldn’t have worked at all with the baby. Moss, have you done your homework? No? I’ll see you in detention for the next eighteen to twenty-one years!

    But the time for denial is running out and I am coming to terms with the fact that I have baby who, by the book, is due on Monday. For perspective, that’s before my next weekly issue of The Economist arrives. The thing that brought it home was when one of my wife’s friends, who had a similar official due date, had her baby last weekend. Something about that threw the switch. On Friday my wife had lunch with her. On Sunday we got the joyous SMS, which provoked the following reaction in me: Good lord! If it can happen to them, it can happen to us!

    Nine months ago I knew in the back of my head that this would happen sometime. But now, as the big day draws near, I’m switching from knowing it to believing it.

    Note: Impending parenthood will likely affect Imagethief’s posting schedule. I have every intention of continuing to post, but you’ll understand if my priorities are rearranged for a while. Also, in case you are wondering, this post was reviewed and approved by Mrs. Imagethief prior to publication.

  • I hate Secret Santa

    Imagethief likes the holiday season. He is not one of those December curmudgeons who bah-humbugs his way through Christmas. Give me trees, tinsel, candy canes and a big dinner with my friends. My dad used to roast a goose for Christmas. How traditional is that? And we’re Jewish.

    There is, however, one Christmas tradition that I dread every year, and that never gets any easier to deal with. That is the office “secret Santa” program.

    Anyone who works in a large office probably endures something similar. The way it works in our office is that the office assistant walks around with a box from which you draw the name of a colleague. You then have to buy that person a gift for under 50RMB. The gifts are all presented at a Christmas party at which Santa Clause, played by the white guy who most recently joined the company, calls each person up one-by-one to receive his or her anonymous gift. I did the Santa gig myself my first Christmas with the company, three years ago, and spent a miserable, hot, itchy two hours in the Santa suit pulling artificial whiskers out of my mouth while my colleagues, sat on my lap one by one. Someone else will be pulling those same spit-encrusted whiskers out of his mouth this year.

    I would play Santa every year if I could only get out of the gift-giving, though.

    The problem is that we are a fairly big company and I inevitably draw the name of someone I don’t know. This is a pain because if it’s a friend you have two decent options: either you have some idea of their tastes and you can get something you will be reasonably sure they will like; or you can get them a gag gift and be confident they won’t take the wrong way.

    But I never, ever draw the name of someone I know well. I always get the shy, new, Chinese girl who doesn’t talk and whom nobody knows. I have a 100% perfect track record of this. And I know most of the people in the company (although given that I just spent ten months in Shanghai there is a slightly higher proportion of unfamiliar faces than normal). It’s like they’re rigging the draw on me.

    In fact, I learned this year that some of my colleagues were re-drawing until they picked the name of someone they knew. I had no idea such a thing was allowed or I would have gamed my own draw. Some people in are office are easy to buy for, such as the company driver (baijiu). But, no, I had to play by the rules and ended up with a new girl who works way at the other end of the office and who has a spartan desk that reveals nothing about her life, loves, hopes, pets, celebrity crushes, get-even list, or anything else that might be remotely useful in picking a gift.

    Not that with 50RMB to spend I could get all that creative. Our offices are in Oriental Plaza, which features a mall where the list of things that can be purchased for under RMB50 is this long:

    • Dumplings.

    Trust me: You don’t want to leave a box of gift wrapped dumplings under the tree for too long, unless you want to deck the halls with vomit on Christmas morning.

    Thus inspired, I invariably procrastinate my purchase until the last possible minute and then end up in one of two places: Watsons or the “Ole!” supermarket. There I end up contemplating the usual range of naff or inappropriate possibilities. Doraemon shampoo? Nahh, toiletries are too personal. Who knows what fragrance this girl likes? Condoms? I don’t want to be hacked to death by her family And anyway, the Japanese ones are RMB75 and thus over the budget. Muesli? Nail polish? Stationery? A fake Rolex? (You have to go outside to buy this.) None of it seems very exciting. And the western get-out-of-Christmas-jail-free card, the gift certificate, doesn’t really seem to exist here.

    I actually thought about breaking the rules this year and spending semi-lavishly just for the hell of it. Why not buy her a real Swatch or Casio watch? Or an iPod Nano? Or a sexy mobile phone? That would rock the party. But it might also kindle jealousy, dangerous recriminations or the (wrong) assumption that a certain Santa was on the make. The program might be “anonymous”, but even a fairly retarded detective could identify the offending Santa by simple elimination. This is especially true as secret Santas tend to out themselves at the party unless they are particularly ashamed of their gifts.

    Faced with these undesirable options I elect to punt: I buy candy. At least, my theory goes, she can share it with her teammates if she doesn’t like it. Having become acquainted with the strange, Chinese fascination for a certain kind of imported candy, and mind controlled by the miles of it on display, I made the inevitable choice. Ironically, even though I have a world-beating sweet tooth inherited from my English, goose-roasting father, I hate this particular candy. How pathetic is that? I  bought this poor girl whom I don’t even know candy that I can’t stand because I was too creatively bankrupt to come up with a better choice. Merry freakin’ Christmas.

    To make this situation extra tragic, I have one-and-a-half boxes of this same candy sitting at home. They were brought over to my house by one of my colleagues when I had a team dinner recently. But these were in a distinctively shaped package, and I didn’t want to give the same configuration, lest my naked re-gifting ploy be spotted. Those candies are destined for my ahyi. She’s from Anhui. She’ll eat anything. Or, more likely, huishou it for cash.

    So bought an RMB45 box of candy I already had and put in a gift bag that cost another RMB20, thus putting me over the limit but, I figure, allowing me to squeak by on a technicality as the bag isn’t technically the gift. I probably should have given her an envelope with cash in it.

    I console myself with the thought that most of my colleagues, Chinese and foreign, aren’t much better at this than me. While buying my “gift” today I bumped into another colleague who was on the same mission. She, however, opted for default choice two, different famous candy brand. A couple of years ago one colleague of mine was so unimpressed with her secret Santa gift –which I won’t describe here for fear of driving someone to suicide– that she “forgot” it in the back of a taxi on the way home from the party. It wasn’t even worth passing to her ahyi. It was that bad.

    At least I have this burdensome task dealt with for another year. But I’ll be on a plane back from a meeting in Japan during this year’s Christmas party. That’s a shame because, secret Santa aside, I genuinely enjoy the Christmas party. But at least I won’t be there to see the look of numb indifference on my colleague’s face when she becomes the 20th person that evening to receive a box of the same candy.

    Ho, ho, ho.

    Note: Slightly edited from the original to add some deniability.

  • Hairy crabs, the hill of pain and the boulevard of a thousand massage touts

    Imagethief went for a hike with some good friends on Sunday. Hiking is one of the things that I was sorry to give up when I moved to Shanghai, and that I’ve been most eager to rediscover upon my return. In Shanghai you can drive for days through the industrial sprawl of the Yangzi delta before you find anything that looks remotely appealing for a stroll. Unless you like walking through cement plants, paint factories and valve workshops.

    This isn’t a joke. I recently went with my Shanghai colleagues to Jiangsu’s fabled Yangcheng Lake, home of the world’s most legendary hairy crabs. I was picturing someplace out of a Chinese fantasy. Limpid waters. Verdant banks shaded by drooping willow trees. Graceful pavilions on which maidens in silk gowns would pluck pipas for my pleasure (it’s not as dirty as it sounds) while I feasted on plump crab hoisted fresh from pure spring-fed pools.

    Wrong. Yangcheng lake is a suspiciously turbid expanse of water with concrete and rapple banks and ringed by cement plants, paint factories and valve workshops. It’s connected to a labyrinth of local canals that look like they supply the drinking water to Mogadishu. I’d be wary of eating of anything pulled from Yangcheng’s dubious depths, let alone a creature that lives in the heavy-metal sludge and eats the carrion of whatever couldn’t survive in the lake, died and sank to the bottom.

    So much for the hairy crabs. They’re overrated anyway. It turns out the Chinese idea of what constitutes damn good crab is something you can easily suck the innards out of. I grew up in San Francisco, eating fat Dungeness crabs. We discarded the innards so we could get to the meat. Better yet, we had the fishmonger discard the innards so we didn’t need to be reminded they ever existed. Nothing but meat and a hollow space in the middle that, as far as you know, was always full of fresh lemon slices. That’s good crab.

    A hairy crab has no meat. It’s all innards. And hair. Hence the bliss of my Chinese colleagues, who gleefully explained to me every organ they were eating. Except when the girl sitting next to me got to the testes of a male crab. “You don’t want to know what this is,” she gracefully suggested. Doing my best to ignore the gusto with which crab ‘nads were being consumed at my elbow, I was reduced to trying to squeeze miniscule fragments of meat out of legs the size of toothpick envelopes. You could starve to death doing this.

    But this has nothing to do with hiking. Or massage touts.

    Shanghai is all industrial wasteland and toxic lakes infested with carrion-eating vermin that somehow got rebranded as a delicacy, probably during one of the many famines. But in Beijing you only need an hour on clear roads and you’re back in the dongbei in all its rural, dustbowl splendor. This is fine for me because, as it happens, I like rural dustbowl splendor. There is something about Northeast China that evokes loneliness, resilience and endurance honed in an endless arid wasteland. The ghost of hard times still lingers over these lands.

    Plus there are mountains. We climbed into the remote hills somewhere north of Beijing where there are desolate stretches of unrestored Wall traversing peaks with panoramic views stretching from Beijing’s smoky basin to the Kangxi grasslands. I am told this is where the Mongols fed and watered their horses before riding through the pass at Badaling (where the famous touristy section of wall is) to assault the capital.

    I nearly didn’t manage the climb. I run three times a week when I’m being good and can go on flat ground more or less indefinitely. But hill-climbing fitness is different, and I was contemplating the pros and cons of a good vomit within about twenty minutes of setting off. It didn’t help that my hiking companion leaped up the mountain like a goat on speed. To add insult to injury, he smoked his way up and down. The road to true fitness apparently leads through Marlboro country.

    Outside of the embrace of Beijing’s heat island it was also cold enough to freeze the water in our bottles. A ripping wind peeled the skin from our lips and reminded us all why living in a porous, brick hut in the dongbei is not, perhaps, an ideal lifestyle. And why this is the land that gave birth to the kang, a traditional bed warmed by the exhaust of a fire.

    But the worst penance of the trip came the next day. Sometime during the night someone secretly replaced the fine thigh muscles I normally use with bags of broken glass soaked in vinegar and cat urine. Or that’s what it felt like when I tried to walk. This is what happens when you let moving blow up your workout schedule for a month and them climb a mountain with smoking gazelle-man. I spent the next forty-eight hours doing an extremely good impression of an eighty year old man with crippling arthritis. I also experimented with every variation of the standing up and sitting down groans.

    On Monday evening I worked a bit late. Knowing that by the time I got home it would be so late that I would blow off the gym yet again, I decided to walk from my office in Oriental Plaza back to my apartment at China Central Place. I figured this would give me some exercise while also enabling me work some of the devastating soreness out of my legs.

    I have no idea why we always think the solution to exercise pain is more exercise. This is total BS and should be resisted. Nevertheless, I enjoyed the walk. This was unexpected, because it was an hour and fifteen minute slog down Chang’an Jie and Jianguomen, past the world’s champion assortment of dour, institutional looking buildings and vaguely seedy hotels. I put it down to the odd euphoria that returning to Beijing has generated in me. This could be because I am deeply affectionate for this sprawling, funky city. Or it could be some kind of toxicological effect from all the pollutants in the air. Either way, it’s a good feeling and I’m nursing it.

    In addition to enabling me to survey at leisure what an architectural wasteland Beijing’s central artery has turned into (Wanda Plaza, anyone?), it gave me a chance to sample some of the city’s finest massage pitches. By which I mean prostitution pitches. You can always tell when you cross from an office’s or institutional building’s frontage to one of the hotels because you immediately get hit with, “Hello? Massage? Girl?” And, to up the ante, “Pretty girl?”

    In the course of my walk I got it from singles, tag-team pairs, men and women. But the all time winner was a girl who glided past me on one of those preposterous, little folding bicycles with wheels the size of salad plates. She had long, black hair and was painted unnaturally pail, so her face leaped out in the darkness. She had false eyelashes so big it looked like she could have propelled herself along by flapping them.

    “Helloooo,” she cooed in a singsong as she carved out graceful turns in front of me. “Massage?” And then, “Hellooooo! I love you!” And then, with a final flap of those absurd, batwing eyelashes, “Hellooooo! Sex?”

    On the bicycle? I wondered. But it was too late to ask. She had given up on me and was pedaling off down the sidewalk. While I was still writing down her pitch in my notebook a rough looking man in a leather jacket came up to me and said, “Hey, massage?”

    It really is great to be back in Beijing.

  • Deconstructing the White Rabbit wrapper

    Imagethief has rather a sweet tooth. Hence my long acquaintance with the gym and the pleasures of the long run. One of China’s under-appreciated pleasures is the enamel-stripping joy of a chewy White Rabbit Milk Candy. I’m not the first to be smitten, as aquick Googling will reveal. White Rabbit even has a Wikipedia entry.

    My friends are aware of my habit for the Rabbit. At a recent birthday party celebrating my 40th I received a bag containing three packages of M&Ms (which I also like), a jar of homemade peanut butter (he uses nutmeg and brown sugar – it’s really nice) and forty pieces of White Rabbit. It was a great present. I’ve been munching White Rabbit happily at work all week.

    During a lull brought on by sugar-induced bliss I had a chance to study the White Rabbit wrapper (If you want to sound like Elmer Fudd say that five times fast). It’s pretty weird:

    white-rabbit

    First, note the crazy Art Deco font in both black and red. Then there is not one but three different kinds of rabbits on the wrapper. The central rabbit doesn’t even look like a rabbit so much as it looks like an albino lemon that has sprouted a rabbit head. For reasons known only to the creators this bizarre, lumpy rabbit is seated in front of a painter’s palette with dabs of blue and red paint. The rabbit is apparently engaged in an almighty sneeze. Or perhaps those are albino lemon rabbit whiskers. Who knows?

    At the margins are rows of zombie rabbits facing each other in mirror image. They appear to be covered with grotesque lumps, like enormous, swollen zombie rabbit teats. They also have rather spooky eyes.

    Finally there are two renderings of a somewhat more contemporary rabbit that is leaping in front of what looks like an enormous mushroom that is either conspicuously magic or conspicuously toxic. Company information in Chinese and English fills the rest of the space.

    I think this is a masterpiece of psychedelic candy packaging design, right up there withLemonhead, Pixie Stix and Bazooka bubble gum. Looking at the wrapper now –there are three on my desk– I can taste milky sweetness and hear Jefferson Airplane thundering through my head. There is almost nothing in this design to suggest that what lies within is edible, and yet like a sugary prostitute it screams unwrap me and put me in your mouth!

    There are messages within messages within messages in this candy wrapper. I want an A2 size print that I can hang right next to my enormous “Dark Side of the Moon” poster. Then I can gaze at them both while I eat White Rabbit and listen to “Dark Side” through my headphones. If that isn’t a ticket to an alternate universe I don’t know what is. Pixie Stix, perhaps.

    Note: Image stolen from Speks International as I was too lazy to scan it myself. A larger image of an apparently older version is here.

  • Why aren’t you drinking the Wang Lao Ji?

    Imagethief spent a busy two days helping some representatives of a European country manage a last minute press conference. This was a sudden request that had resulted in 36 hours of breakneck work involving much frantic communication, central European languages, weird time differences and assorted ministers, agencies and secret handshakes. Ultimately all went well, but it was a weary team that schlepped its way back to the office.

    Upon getting back, I headed for the pantry to get a Diet Coke. Once upon a time I used to drink a can of real Coke a day, but I also used to be 20 kilos heavier. I have a wicked sweet tooth inherited from my father, an Englishman (no further explanation should be required), and kicking soft drinks was a big part of my weight loss program. But we keep a fridge full of the stuff in the office and for the past few months I had increasingly fallen under the seductive thrall of the Diet Coke. Wicked sweet with no caloric guilt!

    One-a-day Diet Cokes got to be such a habit that a couple of weeks ago I decided to give up on it for a while, lest I become a poster boy for the as-yet unknown effects of excessive aspartame consumption (are those antennae on your head, or are you just happy to see me?). But after today’s frantic activities, and the hot taxi ride back, I caved. As I was pulling a can from the fridge in the pantry our assistant finance manager flounced in, all floral sun dress and bright eyes, and said to me, “Why aren’t you drinking the Wang Lao Ji?”

    I really had no answer for that. I had noticed that little cartons of Wang Lao Ji had started appearing in the fridge a week or two before. They looked a bit incongruous next to the Coke and Fanta Orange that are the mainstays of our beverage selection. Wang Lao Ji is a Chinese soft drink based upon a herbal tea. It’s advertised on busses across the nation and  recognizable by its distinctive red and yellow logo. Like any Chinese food or drink with a tenuous connection to the world of Chinese herbology, it is ascribed mythical powers as a tonic, including the ability to forestall diseases you’ve never heard of and increase various vital essences. Most of this is marketing courtesy of the manufacturer, a large Guangdong-based beverage and pharmaceutical company. On a more practical level, the Black China Hand has cited Wang Lao Ji as a hangover cure.

    Despite all this, I was stumped as to how to answer my colleague’s innocent question. She rushed to take advantage of my speechlessness. “It’s very good for…I don’t know how to say it in English…It can help you to jiang huo.”

    I didn’t know what “jiang huo” was, but it didn’t sound like something I should be doing in the office. I wasn’t even sure what about my appearance suggested that I needed to jiang huo. Either way, whatever jiang huo was, it was clear that she didn’t think a Diet Coke was going to help me achieve it.

    “It’s a Chinese medicine thing,” she added helpfully. “Sometimes, you know, you eat things that make your body too hot.”

    Got it. It’s a cooling food. Jiang huo (降火) means “reduce heat”. In fact, I’ve had some exposure to this. My Singaporean mother-in-law is big on cooling, home-made liangcha(cold herbal tea). In sweaty Singapore that’s not hard buy into. But to the Chinese and their overseas kin, “heaty” foods and “cooling” ones aren’t just about spiciness or physical temperature. It’s a metaphysical concept that relates to proper balance, energy and health. Certain times and physical conditions demand certain kinds of foods. Too much heaty or cooling food can cause problems. Too much durian (a classic heaty food)? Guaranteed pimples. Of course it might also be that durians are loaded with oil. But anyone who has eaten durians would agree that “heaty” is not a bad classification for the sulfurous fruit. Herbal teas, along with bamboo shoots, crab meat, water chestnuts, egg whites, pears etc. are cooling. I gather it’s best to aim for a kind of lukewarm average over time. Balance is everything, right?

    So I cracked open a carton of Wang Lao Ji and gave it a slurp.

    The mystery cooling ingredient is sugar. Despite its olde-style patent medicine labeling and health tonic claims, Wang Lao Ji is well placed in a fridge full of soft drinks. There might the barest, most elusive hint of herbal flavor lingering somewhere behind the cloying sweetness, but you have to breathe in over the liquid like a wine connoisseur to detect it. Everything else is syrup. It’s definitely not my mother-in-law’s bitter, bracing, home-brewed liangcha. I can also report that the little cartons of Wang Lao Ji will burp sticky liquid out of the straw and all over your suit at the slightest provocation.

    So it’s back to the Diet Coke for me. It might do much for my balance or help me jiang huo, but nor will it put me on the express train to diabetes.

    However I can believe that Wang Lao Ji makes a good hangover cure. After all, is there anything heatier than a hangover? For that reason alone it might be worth keeping a carton or two in fridge, wedged between the sour plum juice and the hair of the dog that bit you.

    wang-lao-ji

  • Run

    I like to run.

    It wasn’t always this way. Eight or nine years ago I was a lot heavier, and regular exercise wasn’t really part of my routine. My girlfriend was significantly fitter and more energetic, and she took me on as something of a restoration project. It must have worked out, because she married me.

    As part of my physical reformation I discovered the joys of running. I was living in Singapore at the time, which is hot and humid, but otherwise a lovely city for runners. It has hundreds of kilometers of quiet, tree-lined streets, big parks, clear air and even trails through the tropical forest that surrounds the reservoirs in the middle of the island.

    I’ve always been a solitary runner. I like to set my own pace and direction and allow my mind to wander, and I find that’s harder to do when I run with other people. In Singapore I learned that running alone made me feel closer to the city and the pulse of local life because I paid attention to what I saw. I sometimes ran in the morning, but by far my favorite time to run was dusk, when the heat of the day started to fade and local life spilled into the streets and void-decks of the public housing blocks.

    From my little house in the expatriate haven of Holland Village I ran through the old public housing areas of Tiong Bahru, Queensway and Tanglin Halt, where the food centers and wet markets would be coming to life with the dinner rush. I ran the wide expanse of Holland Road and Napier Road, past the looming American embassy and through the far more inviting botanical gardens. I ran the quiet lanes of Bishopsgate or around Coronation Road and gazed in wonder at the sprawling mansions of Asian tycoons.

    And then I moved to Beijing.

    In Beijing, running outdoors is not enjoyable. On the rare days when the air is not abrasive the ramshackle sidewalks, impersonal boulevards and crush of pedestrians all serve to discourage. In summer the air is at its worst. In winter the icy, desiccating wind strips the lungs and burns the skin.

    So I ran on a treadmill in the gym. Running on a treadmill is the dullest recreational activity on earth. For sheer, painful tedium it ranks somewhere between hand-sorting lint and watching water evaporate. Television monitors help, but something about them dispels the seductive trance that is so vital to a satisfying run. Real scenery slipping by doesn’t have the same effect.

    Nevertheless, you do what you must. Over two and a half years I turned hundreds of kilometers of treadmill belt beneath my feet, and hated every last numbing centimeter of it.

    Then I moved to Shanghai.

    I didn’t want to leave Beijing, and it was only grudgingly that I packed bags, cats and wife and decamped the capital for the delta. But I’ve discovered that Shanghai has its compensations. One of them is that I can once again run outdoors.

    I’ve described Shanghai to friends –somewhat unfairly– as three nice neighborhoods surrounded by Wuhan. Fortunately, I live in one of those nice neighborhoods, in heart of Shanghai’s congenial French Concession. Here the streets are of a human scale, lined with shade trees, and edged with broad, roomy sidewalks. The intimacy is inviting to a runner in the way that Beijing’s sprawling avenues are not.

    Even better, Shanghai’s air is drawn from an entirely different planet than the Venusian miasma that shrouds Beijing. It’s a planet where air is still transparent and cotton-ball clouds sometimes drift by on southerly breezes. In Shanghai bad air days stand in contrast to good air days. In Beijing it’s the other way round.

    And so I’ve been running outdoors again, reveling in my liberation from the tyranny of the treadmill. I started timidly, staying on the familiar streets and lanes within a few blocks of home. As time has gone by, however, I’ve become bolder, and pushed farther into the depths of the city.

    I still like to run at dusk when, as in Singapore, Shanghai’s local life spills out onto the streets. But in Shanghai different rules apply, and they are not quite as forgiving of the runner’s trance as Singapore was.

    For one thing, the sidewalks are much more crowded, as befits a city with five times as many residents as Singapore. So are the roads and bike lanes, where bicycles, electric scooters, goods-tricycles, wheelbarrows and pedestrians all compete for space. I find myself adopting the approach of an NFL halfback: Bob, weave, break for the hole before it closes. Blind corners, alleyway gates and crosswalks are all places for extra vigilance. I also spend a lot of time weaving back and forth between sidewalks and bicycle lanes, bypassing the spots where the sidewalk is simply impassable.

    That happens a lot. Shanghai’s sidewalks support not only more pedestrians than Singapore’s, but also all the myriad fragments of Chinese commerce and life that cannot be contained within walls. The sidewalks are al fresco dining areas for neighborhood restaurants, extra workshop space for local businesses, and public parks. I find myself threading around men grinding metal, noodle stalls, xiangqi games, and ranks of aunties and uncles fanning themselves in lawn-chairs. But these scenes are the life of the city, and running past them and through them reminds of why the treadmill was so tedious.

    As I’ve become more comfortable I’ve been running further afield. If you want to know what it would be like to live in a society where everyone else knew you were slightly crazy, put on running gear and jog through a deeply local neighborhood in a Chinese city.

    In the French Concession, which is awash in expatriates and tourists, locals have developed a certain blasé attitude toward the idiosyncrasies of foreigners. But there is plenty of Shanghai where a pale, sweaty man pounding by in a singlet with glazed eyes is still an oddity. I’ve been greeted with curious stares (not just from children who haven’t learned to suppress their gawping instinct) murmured asides and occasional outright laughter. But it has never been ill-humored.

    Part of this is, of course, in my imagination. Wondering what people are thinking of me is part of the game of passing the time on a long run. That sinewy old man might have been a teenager during the privations of the post-war years. Is he bemused at the thought of someone working off  “excess calories”? Is the young woman with the chubby son pointing me out to him because he’ll be amused, or because she wants him inspired to exercise?

    One route I’ve been enjoying lately goes from my home, near where the old Xiangyang Market used to be, all the way along Fuxing Road to the Huangpu River and then back. It’s a good hour of running, plus ten minutes on the footbridge at the turnaround near the river, watching boats go by. I did it yesterday.

    The first part of the run is pure French Concession. The street is narrow and tree lined, the atmosphere congenial. The sidewalk is lined with restaurants and boutiques, with a wide bike lane I can run in. Traffic is moderate and slow. This is the comfortable warm-up.

    The elevated Chongqing Road, about a third of the way to the river, marks a distinct change in atmosphere. The street becomes down-market, with shabby storefronts occupying the first floor of tumbledown, two-story blocks. But near Huangpi Road, in the corona of Xintiandi, luxury apartments still rise on the north side.

    Slowly this stretch gives way to a more commercial district. There is the excavation for new subway stops, more stoplights, and wide cross-streets bustling with traffic. Fuxing Road widens into six lanes. The traffic that was one-way closer to home now runs both directions. There are large restaurants, office blocks, and the unmistakable chandeliers and mirrors of a large KTV center.

    I’m well settled into my groove at this point, looking for things that interest me. The road is still wide and traffic fast moving. I spend most of my time hugging the curb in a wide bike lane, separated from the main road by a reassuring concrete median. I end up behind a thin workman on his bike. He is wearing an old denim jacket liberally splashed with paint. He has one cigarette tucked behind each ear. His equally paint-splashed companion slowly passes me, pulling even long enough to look me up and down, before edging in front.

    Closer to the river Fuxing Road cuts through Shanghai’s ramshackle old town. Tar-paper second stories, rusting sheet-metal, bird-cages, and alleyways that wind past wet markets and apartment complexes that have missed out on Shanghai’s elevation into the glamorous face of the new China. There are more curious stares here, but it’s still congenial.

    The sidewalk has become one long stretch of urban life, an extended front-yard for the residents of the old city. The throng makes the sidewalk impassible at speed and I am relegated to the bike lane. A small, white dog trots in front of me, heading for the road. As I pass I can hear a woman calling out to it anxiously. I glance over my shoulder to see the dog heading into the road. One car brakes sharply to avoid it, but I can see what is coming. I like animals too much to watch, so I look away. I hear an unmistakable hollow bang. Another look over my shoulder and I see an inert, white lump in the road. The car hasn’t stopped. I wonder if I should go back to the treadmill.

    Then the character of the city changes again. The cars have all entered the tunnel under the Huangpu River and the street, though still wide, is quiet. The scruffy old town has given way to the glamorous apartment blocks and office developments that line the river. But it feels deserted. The buildings are too new to have tenants. This is the ghost of what Shanghai wants to be.

    The footbridge at Zhongshan Road rises ahead. It’s my turnaround point. I run up the ramp of the bridge and stop at the top, as I always do, to watch the boat traffic on the river. Two buxom foreign women are taking each other’s photos with the river as a backdrop. A Chinese worker in a white singlet and shorts approaches me. He tells me I must have a very healthy heart. I thank him and ask if he thinks what I’m doing is strange. It’s a leading question. “Oh, yes, very strange,” he obligingly answers. “We Chinese would ride a bike.”

    A little more chit chat. He gazes for a moment at the buxom tourists. “Are they Americans too?” he asks, perhaps wondering if we’re all a little funny in the head. I venture that they’re European. He purses his lips thoughtfully, and then shuffles along to the ferry terminal.

    The sun is getting low and the clouds are turning orange, so I turn around and head back west towards home. I pass the place where the dog was struck. It’s gone now, borne off to whatever rituals of mourning attend small dogs in Shanghai. I’m getting tired, less concerned with observing life and more focused on making it home before it gets too dark. But I still take some time to appreciate the colors of sunset.

    I cross Chongqing road again. When I cross it I am back in my own neighborhood, and on the home stretch. There are foreigners around again. Two white men come toward me on a scooter. One stretches out his hand as they pass and I slap him a vigorous high-five. I have no idea who they are, but my palm stings satisfyingly for two blocks.

    My legs are weary and my feet are beginning to drag. It’s getting harder to duck and weave around the inevitable obstacles. I’m lazier about looking into blind driveways and alleys before I dart in front of them.  Fatigue is danger if you’re running in a Chinese metropolis, and it would be good to be home. Familiar cross streets that mark out the final kilometer: Sinan, Ruijin, Maoming, Shaanxi, Jiashan. I cheer myself past them until I finally arrive safely in the courtyard of my apartment complex.

    An hour well spent. Every run in Shanghai is a journey.

  • Imagethief and the man-eating otter of Changbaishan

    I’ve posted to YouTube a video of the trip I took to Changhbaishan last summer with Mrs. Imagethief and my father. It took me the better part of a year to get around to editing it, but here it is. Changbaishan is the rugged mountain range that divides northeast China from the Korean peninsula. There is a “nature reserve” a few hours drive outside of the town of Yanji, and that’s where we went. It’s a beatiful area, but also a major tourism waystation. As always, we had a pretty good time.


    This was shot on Mrs. Imagethief’s point-and-shoot digital camera, which also has a video function. I did a few make-it-up-as-I-go standups and cut those together with other footage mostly taken by Mrs. Imagethief and some of my photographs. There was a lot of a wind noise, so I’ve subtitled a couple of spots it might otherwise be hard to make out what is being said. It’s a hair under ten minutes. Enjoy.

  • Stupidvator

    One of the fine things about moving to a new city is that you always encounter something you’ve never seen before. In Shanghai I experienced the thriving majesty of the Huangpu river, the early-morning army of huishou men and women that prowl the city with bells made of pot lids, the glittering towers of Pudong (better from a distance), and the shady intimacy of the French Concession. Less charmingly, I also experienced the most annoying elevator ever made.

    I’ve been riding elevators for many years and I like to claim a fair mastery of their use. I am not mystified by their operation, don’t think they are magic, and am pretty sure that I am not being teleported when I use one. When an elevator door closes on a car packed with people and opens to emptiness, I don’t assume the passengers have been disintegrated or dumped into a pool of crocodiles (although from time to time I have wished for that). Rather, I assume they have debarked conveniently upon the floors of their choosing. Yep, elevators and I are old and trusted friends.

    Until now. In Shanghai I stumbled upon a type of elevator I had never seen before. An elevator that rewrites fundamentals of how one summons and uses an elevator. An elevator that shifts not only people, but paradigms of elevator operation.

    It also lives in my apartment building and annoys me no end.

    The difference is deceptively simple. Instead of a call button on the outside and an array of floor selection buttons on the inside, our elevator has a single calculator-style keypad on the outside. The keypad serves two elevator shafts. To summon an elevator one presses the button or buttons for the desired floor. I live on the seventh floor, so I press “7″. If I lived on the 19th floor (I can but dream) I would press “1″ then “9″. The LCD panel acknowledges my input and flashes an arrow to show which shaft I should wait by. If I enter an invalid floor number like 968 (don’t think I haven’t tried), I get a demure “?” in return.

    When the elevator arrives, an LED panel inside the inner door frame shows which floors the car will be stopping so you can verify that you have in fact waited by the correct shaft as directed.

    Simple, no?

    No. This is a perfect example of taking an elegant, robust, time-tested system and over-engineering it into finicky obnoxiousness. Thank you, Schindler Elevator Corp, for gifting this upon the world.

    First of all, no elevator should need an A4-sized plaque of directions explaining how to use it, but that’s what our elevator has. Apparently it confuses enough old people and children that the instructions were necessary. Perhaps people were just piling up in the lobby. I can explain normal elevator usage in four bullet points, just in case I happen to run into a Shipibo tribal elder in the lobby of a building:

    1. Press the call button
    2. When the elevator arrives, step inside
    3. Press the button for the desired floor
    4. When you arrive at the desired floor, as indicated by the display, get out

    But this elevator needs illustrations and arrows to make clear its method of operation.

    Imagethief presumes the select-floor-first method of elevator operation is supposed to speed things up. If everyone waiting for an elevator has selected a floor already, a mighty electronic brain somewhere in the bowels of the building can super-compute an elevator routing solution of maximum efficiency. But our buildings supercomputing brain must have blown a tube because our elevators take forever to show up. I think, freed from the simple linear order of normal elevator operation, the brain gets hung up on some kind of neurosis. Sure I could get the kids in the lobby now, but that auntie on twelve is only going two floors…What do I do? Confronted with this strategic calculation, it elects to punt. It’s just one more example of how much a single bad algorithm can fuck up your day.

    And there are some other disadvantages to the system.

    First, let’s say you’re running for a normal elevator. As long as you make it through the door, you’re home free. You can press the button for your desired floor at leisure. You can even set down your groceries to do it. But with our elevator that doesn’t work. You’ve got to get your floor entered before you step on, which means speedy key work before the doors close, or jamming a hand in to open the doors and then entering the floor outside while everyone else waits. Trust me, when you’re all flustered from your run and have ten pounds of cat litter hanging from one wrist and thirty eggs from the other, a fast floor-entry isn’t as easy as it seems.

    This situation is aggravated if there are several people scrambling because each person has to enter his or her floor outside as well. Unlike a traditional elevator where as many people can press buttons as can simultaneously get their grubby little fingers near the panel, this system is strictly one-at-a-time. We have more than twenty floors, so at peak period this can take a while. Queue up.

    Of course, when you’re in a hurry you sometimes sacrifice some accuracy. Thus when going down I have entered “11″ or “12″ instead of “1″ on a couple of occasions. Tough luck. I’m committed. And if you step inside the car before you notice, there is no bailout option. You can’t press the button for the next floor along and make a graceful exit. It’s the round-trip.

    Furthermore, I have been conditioned for the past 39 years to press a floor button after I get on the elevator. I just can’t shake this habit. After I step into my building’s elevator I have to suppress the desire to jam my index finger into the bare, stainless steel repeatedly. People in my building already think I am wierd enough and anything more is likely to scare them. I suppose I could stab the “close door” button, but I have already conditioned myself to avoid that because nothing annoys me more than passengers who want to “drive” the elevator, and spend their time working the “open door” and “close door” buttons repeatedly.

    There is also a social aspect to the process as well. We all get in; we all enter our floors; and we all enjoy the cameraderie of the elevator. Everybody knows who is going where. None of this cryptic skulking by the panel outside.

    This is all just one more sign that I am getting old and increasingly reject newfangled “conveniences” that disrupt my entrenched habits. You say “iPod”. I say radioactive brain-scrambler. So be it. I welcome crankiness, and you can expect more of it as I confront my inevitable 40th birthday and propulsion into actual adulthood (I’ve been procrastinating it successfully so far).

    In that spirit I’d like to go beyond criticizing my apartment’s elevators and say that I reject the idea of electronic controls for elevators completely. I’ve had it with blinking lights and fabulous electro-conductive buttons with ethereal, blue lighting like the elevators at my office (they light up for nothing; don’t even look at the button for a floor you don’t want to stop on). I want my elevators controlled by a person. And not one of those sullen girls who operate the elevators in old apartment buildings in Beijing. They can’t be bothered to look up from their books, and they knock off at midnight forcing you to walk down ungodly flights of stairs on your way home from late-night beer-swilling sessions with Chinese friends. I want no part of that. I want my elevator operated by a height-impaired man named “Rudy” who wears a velvet waistcoat and a fez and who salutes when I enter the car. This is China; shouldn’t be too hard to arrange.

    And as long as I am complaining, what is it with bathroom icons in bars? I’ve been seeing a lot of “pipes” and “high-heeled shoes” to indicate men’s and ladies’ rooms these days. This is totally unsatisfactory. What are you supposed to do if you’re a pipe-smoking woman? Or a drag queen in heels? What about if you are pipe-smoking drag queen? You might simply give up in confused frustration and take a leak in the hallway. I don’t know about you, but stumbling across a pipe-smoking drag queen taking a leak in the hallway throws me off my game. And I grew up in San Francisco’s Castro district in the seventies. Let’s not encourage it in Xintiandi.

  • The devil wears Prada and won’t rent me an apartment

    Imagethief hates looking for an apartment. Once I am comfortable someplace, I’ll tend to stick with it unless there is some external factor that forces me to move. That could be a raise that lets me upgrade, the relocation of my office, a crack house opening downstairs (if it was noisy) or, just for example, moving to another city.

    A few months ago I briefly looked at apartments in Beijing before ultimately bargaining my rent down and staying put. After that experience, I wrote a post (rant, really) that summed up my feelings about apartment hunting in China. My major complaint was that Chinese landlords are unchallenged in their ability to select the worst, tackiest, ugliest possible furniture for any given apartment.

    So I was understandably staggered when just a bit over a week ago I walked into a rental apartment in Shanghai that had some of the nicest furniture I had ever seen. The apartment was gorgeous, with a tasteful paint job, reasonable lighting (another rarity in a country obsessed with colored fluorescent tubes and baroque chandeliers), simple moldings and truly elegant and comfortable furniture. It was on Julu Rd., a ten minute walk from my office, and near a wet market and several pleasant restaurants and cafes. It was quiet and had a big balcony. To top it off, the rent was reasonable. Its only drawback was a microscopic, Hong Kong-style kitchen. But Mrs. Imagethief and I figured we could live with it if we kept our elbows in.

    There was, naturally, a complication. I have cats. I had warned the agent beforehand that I have cats. “I have cats,” I said, to minimize confusion. “I don’t want to waste time. Make sure any apartment we look at doesn’t mind cats.” This instruction, along with several others of lower importance, like my budget range, was ignored.

    As we looked at the apartment I asked the agent, “How does the owner feel about cats?”

    “There are some concerns,” he said.

    Undaunted, I said that I was interested. He said he would look further into the cat issue and let me know.

    The next day I was requested to appear at the apartment along with my cats so the landlady could evaluate them. I explained that the cats were still in Beijing and an introduction would be somewhat impractical. A compromise was struck. Could I bring photographs instead?

    I had Mrs. Imagethief send me the most cuddly, harmless, nauseatingly cute, aw-shucks photograph of the cats that she could locate (see below) and I printed it out in color. What I didn’t point out is that the reason the cats are so serene is this photo is that they are in shock from being transported from Singapore to Beijing and spending 48 hours in Chinese animal impound. In a spectacular piece of extra-credit work, Mrs. Imagethief also shot a digital video that convincingly shows that the cats will energetically scratch a scratching post but cannot be enticed to sink their claws into the sofa. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get that video into a portable format in time to take with me.

    I arrived at the apartment at the designated time and waited along with the agent. When the landlady swished in I knew I was in trouble. She was immaculate. From the perfect hairstyle down to the tiny pair of sparkly, silver shoes, she was a picture of high-fashion perfection. She also radiated a brittle arrogance that I associated immediately with one or two of my particularly fabulous ex-colleagues, a trademark of those Chinese women that have painstakingly and fastidiously elevated themselves above the long-underwear dowdiness that still pervades so much of the country.

    She did not, in short, appear to be the kind of person well-disposed to a dusting of cat hair on every surface.

    She was also not the landlady. She was the landlady’s good friend. The landlady herself was pregnant in Hong Kong, and this woman had been entrusted with the task of vetting potential tenants. It was a responsibility she took seriously. Where did I work? How long had I been in China? Was I single? Did I absolutely have to keep the cats? Wouldn’t stuffed cats do just as well?

    Still, she was supportive in her own way. “I can see that you have good taste,” she said with the deadpan sincerity with which you might compliment an extremely simple third-grader, “because you like this apartment.”

    You see, she explained, the concern is that the furniture is all imported. The bed alone, I was warned, was worth some RMB 20,000. And it was nothing against animals in general. She had a dog, after all. (I could picture it — something microscopic and high strung. A colicky cotton ball with a diamond collar, protruding eyes and an angry snarl.) Dogs stay on the floor. But cats, well, they like to jump on top of things. And her friend, I had to understand, was her colleague from Vogue, and she was very serious about the condition of her apartment.

    Vogue.

    I had watched “The Devil Wears Prada” a week or two before and had laughed off the attitude as Hollywood hyperbole. And yet here it was in front of me, big as life. They reallyare that self-consciously fabulous. I am the product of a bookishly unstylish bloodline and I have no experience dealing with this sort of person. It was like being in the presence of an extremely fashionable space alien. I mean, what common ground do you really have?

    Well, she had heard of my company. I guess that was something.

    She said she would go back and discuss it with her friend. She also suggested that they would put a list of all the furniture and its values into the contract (actually a sensible idea). Then she turned to the agent and in Mandarin laid down the bottom line on rent. It was incrementally higher than I wanted to pay, and I was slightly annoyed that she didn’t say it directly to me. But it didn’t matter. I had already written off the apartment.

    Even if her absent friend had agreed to my tenancy I had mentally abandoned it about the time I was indirectly complemented on my taste. The world is full of imperfect and obsessive landlords, but the thought of having a phalanx of neurotic fashionistas riding shotgun on my tenancy was more than I could tolerate. It wasn’t just the cats. I’m big, klutzy and drop things. I sit on the couch after sweaty workouts. Mrs. Imagethief and I cook smokey, spicy things that stink up the house, and then eat off the coffee table while we watch TV. I drop my underwear on the bedroom floor. Mrs. Imagethief and I would have made noisy, spring-rattling whoopee on that expensive, imported bed. There is a reason why leases have “normal wear and tear” clauses, and that reason is me.

    And I have enough stress in my life without having it transmitted at me by a landlady who’s going to worry if I sit on the couch in riveted Levis, let alone do any of the things above.

    The next day, even before we heard back from the landlady’s friend, I called the agent and told him to forget it. That was probably exactly what the owner was hoping for, but it spared us all the uncomfortable last dance.

    I defaulted to my second choice. It’s in an uglier building and it’s a tattier apartment. The couch looks like it was lifted from a frat house yard sale and the dining room table is so hopeless I told the agent to get rid of it. But the place is big, nicely painted, and has an enormous kitchen and an unobstructed view of the entire eastern half of the city. It’s a five minute walk from the office.

    And the landlord doesn’t care about cats. For that kind of serenity, I’ll go downmarket.

    Would you trust them on your couch?
    Would you trust them on your couch?