I have officially lived in Los Angeles for one year. Hold your applause. And despite the perceptions of fake books, bad smog and cluster#*& traffic, I like this city. Those who come to LA unable to find what they’re looking for, most likely don’t know what they want. LA is a huge, sprawling metropolis with pockets of culture and niches. It’s the home of hipsters, hippies, moral deviants, celebrities, straight-laced families, computer nerds, Armenians, Orthodox Jews, and Chinese-Americans. You name it, and you can find it here in LA.
That's me with Nicky Hilton at her birthday party.
A Conversation with Los Angeles Me: I moved in with you a year ago. How does it feel? LA: (texting a friend) What did you say? Me: Can’t we celebrate our anniversary? LA: Sure! Check with my secretary. Me: I really like you. LA: What’s not to like? I have beautiful weather, sandy beaches, diverse cultures and famous people live with me. Me: My friends in San Francisco think you’re hard to get to know. LA: I love SF. I love everyone. Me: What should I do with my life? LA: You can write TV shows, movies, novels, memoirs, marketing copy. You can work for an international company, a studio, become an agent, take acting and improv classes. Go back to school and get your Ph.D in literature or an International MBA. You can do whatever you want. Me: Could you narrow down that search for me? LA: Sure! Check with my secretary. Me: I’m sorry that you’ve had a bad year. Every time I saw a moving truck, I worried about your unemployment rate. LA: Have you driven the 10 between 2-7pm? People love me. Me: How are you so confident? LA: Listen, you’re a sweet girl. I would love to sit here and chat, but I’m on the verge of something big. Like really really big. Me: No worries, but I’m just gonna hang out here for a bit. Maybe learn the ropes for writing for TV? What do you think? Could you call me if you have any openings? LA: (Lady Hollywood throws her head back and releases a dramatic laugh.) Me call you? Now that’s funny. With humor like maybe you could make it here after all.
When I first came to China, as a foreign exchange student in Harbin in 1999, I witnessed China’s 50-year birthday of Communism. I was a bright-eyed, 20-year-old academic back then, cynical of the government’s lock down on Tienanmen and a believer that socialism was merely a rouge for China’s true desire for Democracy. Now, as China celebrated its 60th anniversary of Communism, I am no longer the idealistic Liberal, who believes that the more Western the Chinese government becomes, the better the place will be. In the last ten years, Bush was re-elected for a 2nd term and our economy turned to shambles. Do we really have the right to act superior?
(Check out this October 1st, 2009 parade of tanks, missile launchers and soldiers marching in perfect unison!)
The main criticism in the Chinese workforce is that they lack ingenuity. When Apple goes to China to mass-produce IPods, Chinese people are able to execute the manufacturing flawlessly, but are unable to create a product with Apples’ sophistication. This myth is what helps American businessmen sleep at night feeling unthreatened by China’s rise to power. We are American. Nobody beats us in creativity.
But I beg to differ. I will be the first to admit that when working with editors in Chinese publishing, I was the biggest eye roller. I met heads of publishing houses in the English departments, who didn’t have a clue on what it meant to create a book. They overlooked covers with typos, gave French-Canadians jobs for being white, and shoved propaganda so unsubtly down a readers’ throat that the final product was comical. But then I met young editors, who couldn’t express their ideas to their superiors due to China’s strict rules of hierarchy. They were ambitious, diligent and filled with new ideas, and once their bosses retire they’ll be unstoppable. Think about this current generation running the country. They were educated during the Cultural Revolution, tending the crops instead of attending universities. Once this “forgotten generation” retires, China’s massive creative class will rise as the country’s leaders.
Now look at the US, where creativity is being dictated by capitalism. This year, Transformers 2 made the most money for a movie with the worse critic reviews. Lauren Conrad’s best selling novel is being turned into a movie. Pre-sales of Sarah Palin’s 400-page memoir is sold out on Amazon. We all know that publishers approached Palin and Conrad with ghostwriters and Transformers 2 pulled in an audience because of Megan Fox and explosions. Yet, we, the American people, support this cultural diarrhea, through our obsession in becoming famous. (ie. “Sarah Palin is just like me!”) In a market where talent is being overshadowed by celebrities with no merits, how do writers/actors/fashion designers stay in business?
I could easily spend the next few hours/days/months comparing the differences between China and the US, but it’s not my intention to prove that one place is better. In fact, my intention is to prove that, neither country is better or worse. If anything, I encourage you to see for yourself. China with its overpopulation, smoggy air, population control, inconsistent regulations, and cheeky tourism is a place worth living, and the US with its reckless overconfidence and whorish business practices are worth criticizing. Globalization is leveling the playing field.
When I asked my friend Jay what he wanted from China, he said, “Misspelled Nikes.” I asked, “What about Abidas or Pumus or Reeebok?” As a former resident and frequent traveling to China, I am familiar with the array of bootleg products. I saw a Sting CD titled “Stinc,” a sweater with an Abercrombie and JCrew tag, and a Prado purse with the famous triangular Prada logo. But that was back in the early 2000s and China’s counterfeit products now have less typos. How was I going to find misspelled Nikes, when there were so many properly spelled Nike fakes?
According to the Stratfor on China’ fakes: “Counterfeiting is ingrained in Chinese culture. In Confucianism, the notion of the ownership of ideas is nonexistent, while the imitation of what is desired, be it morals or Viagra, is seen as good. And Beijing has unofficially tolerated counterfeiting to a large extent, despite international rules and regulations against intellectual property infringement. The government and military and security bureaus often counterfeit used software and other products for themselves. It is also quite common to see shops selling pirated DVDs sitting adjacent to government offices or to see uniformed police officers shuffling through racks of counterfeit DVDs.”
Clearly if China wanted to curb it’s lucrative counterfeit market, it could do so with stricter enforcements. But that would mean fewer jobs during an economic recession, and according to the rumors, law enforcers are the ones receiving the profits off the bootleg market. As for me, less fakes is way less fun.
But I do draw a moral line with bootleg books. I wont blink twice to return home with half a suitcase of HBO and Showtime series DVDs, but fake books mean that the author is not receiving any royalties and the struggling publishing houses aren’t making a profit. While working at China Books, authors often asked me how they could get their books into China. They pictured just a fraction of 1 billion readers making them ridiculously wealthy. But the reality is, if a book becomes at all popular in China, it’ll be photocopied and printed and sold on the streets.
The streets of downtown Kunshan, my second day in China, was where I found Jay’s Nieks. (Pictured below.) The swoop is elongated and the side is painted with the words “#1 Fashion.” I worried that by finding these sneaks so early on my trip, I would find another pair of a higher hilarity value. But as expected, for the rest of my trip, which included two fake malls, I only found fake Nikes spelled correctly. These Nieks were quite a find.
I confess that I’ve eaten shark fin soup at Chinese weddings and birthday banquets, and never realized that: a.) it is a privilege among the upper class, b.) their 6 fins are cut off upon capture and unable to swim, they sink to the bottom, and c.) the Chinese demand for shark fin soup has led to a 90% decline in the shark population. 10 humans are killed a year by sharks, but 100 million sharks are killed by humans.
CNN’s Planet in Peril: Shark Finning
In the past, shark fin soup was consumed predominantly among the elite in Hong Kong and Taiwan at $30 to $200 a bowl, but due to the rising middle class in China, the demand has skyrocketed. Traditionally, shark fin soup has been regarded as a tonic in Chinese medicine (improves digestion, invigorates the kidney and lungs), but scientifically speaking, there is little nutritional value. In fact the high levels of mercury could be harmful if consumed frequently.
The real kicker here is that shark-fins have no taste. They’re cooked for a long time until the cartilage separates and looks clear like noodles. It’s served in a chicken broth with ham and mushrooms.
“Finning,” a term that refers to cutting off a shark’s fin and dropping it back into the water, is affecting the entire ecosystem of the ocean from Costa Rica to South East Asia. And what for? Because someone decided it was a delicacy.
While eating three meals a day, I rarely think about how my definition of “delicious” has been influenced by the culture around me. Somebody else decided what was exquisite, gross, tasty, immoral, expensive, inedible. For example, when I was a little girl, I loved eating chicken feet, which is a common dish in Cantonese dim sum. There is no meat on chicken feet, just the cartilage, which is chewy, and the skin, which is soft and soaked in soy sauce. One day, and I remember this too vividly for an eight-year-old, one of my Caucasian friends, who was eating dim sum with us, said, “How can you eat that stuff? I imagine little chickens with their claws crawling across the floor.” The next time my parents ordered me chicken feet, I pushed the dish away. I said, “Chicken feet are gross.” I didn’t eat chicken feet again until my mid-20s and even then, I didn’t enjoy it as much I had in my youth. I still picture them with their claws, taking baby steps across a farm floor.
“One person’s garbage is another person’s treasure” certainly holds true among Eastern and Western cuisines. Chinese people prefer their food with bones, more flavor, which is why dark meat on a chicken and fish heads are considered the more appealing part of an animal. A baked piece of dry chicken breast is a turn off to the Chinese palate, and sucking on a bone for the juice is considered an uncivilized practice to an American.
While in Kunshan, I ate hairy crab for the first time, another delicacy in Chinese cuisine that Westerners could care less about. Yangcheng Lake, near Suzhou, is the main producer of this species of crab, which have the ability to live in murky waters. At 3 oz, about 1 oz of meat, the hairy crabs are shipped to Hong Kong, Shanghai, and Taiwan, and can be marked up to $30-60 a crab. It is nearly impossible to get any crab meat out of their little legs, so consuming hairy crab is mainly about sucking out the juices, and eating the prized gooey orange roe, or crab fat, in the center.
The demand for hairy crab is so high in Asia, that importers are considering meeting this through crab populations in the West. Due to the crab’s highly invasive nature, able to rapidly produce and affect local crab species, it is illegal to import live hairy crab into the U.S. Literally, Westerners want to get rid of their hairy crab population and Chinese people can’t get enough of it.
On January 2004, China launched the "Shanghai Magnetic Levitation Demonstration Operation Line,” or the Maglev, the world’s fastest train that reaches a record speed of 501kp/m (311 mph). The train travels 30 km from the PVG Shanghai airport to the Longyang station in Pudong, which connects to subway line 2. The train can reach its maximum speed in 4 minutes of 430 kp/h, but must slow down from there since the journey is only 7 minutes and 20 seconds. Construction of the train cost 2.5 years to complete and cost $1.33 billion dollars. The only comparable airport transport is the Heathrow express in London, which is of equal distance, but takes nearly 15 minutes. The difference between 300 km/h and 431 km/h only saves 10% of the travel time, or 50 seconds, and the route isn’t considered the most efficient way to get the airport, which is why the Maglev is deemed a success purely at an experimental level.
The Maglev cost $1.33 billion dollars. The ride is only 7 minutes and 20 seconds. In 2006, it caught on fire, although nobody was hurt. But, man, it’s SO COOL!
I was immediately intrigued with the Maglev, because it’s construction is such a Chinese-thing. They wanted to make the world’s fastest train using magnets, and no budget or danger or purpose of efficiency was going to stop them.
I rode the Maglev on my way to the Pudong airport and, like my fellow passengers, had my camera out zoomed into the kp/h ticker waiting for it to reach its maximum speed. The scene outside the window zoomed by in a blur. When the train coming the other direction ran parallel to us, a man shouted “ahhh!” as the chairs shook for one second, maybe less. The novelty of traveling at such a fast speed was purely cosmetic, for if I weren’t staring at the ticker, or aware of the Maglev’s pride to China’s ingenuity, I wouldn’t have known we were going that fast.
This is just one example of China’s ability to “get a job done.” How come California can’t build a high-speed train between San Francisco and LA, sin magnets, that’s just gratuitous, which would actually serve an efficient purpose? Because we’re not China, and we don’t create things for the glory of a country. Maybe we should though. Have I mentioned that the Maglev is cool? (This photo is not of the Maglev, but was taken at the Shanghai train station, where I was waiting for the train to Kunshan. 1,600 of us had 10 minutes to make a mad dash between the waiting room, down the stairs, and into our chairs. It may sound easy, but it's quite claustrophobic, walking chest to back with strangers, like a mosh pit, while carrying your luggage. Plus, Shanghai is humid, so lots of sweating, and other people sweating on you.)
While on the subway to the Pudong airport, I sat in front of a young Shanghainese couple. The boyfriend had stylishly spiky hair; the girlfriend wore 3-inch heels and skinny-legged jeans. He was attentive, doting on her with kisses and speaking with their noses touching. This public displays of affection has become a commonplace in the chic city of Shanghai, where the young enjoy their freedoms to love who they want, wear designer clothes, and, if they choose, make out in public. But what makes Shanghai unique is that the women, while beautiful, are notoriously pouty. Somehow during the 30-minute journey, the girlfriend thought it’d be a good idea to pop the white heads on her boyfriend’s chin. The boyfriend’s eyes watered from the impromptu facial, but he remained still as his girlfriend picked and prodded at his skin.
Feminism in China took a great leap forward with the implementation of Communism, which equalized the sexes, reducing thousands of years of patriarchal suppression and Confucian rules. The days of arranged marriages are foreign to this generation of the modern Chinese lady who has the freedom to choose her lover, either foreign or local. Yet, this sexual revolution remains vastly divided. I met university students in Harbin, who were so sheltered, they didn’t know why they menstruated. And in Guangzhou, close to Hong Kong, my high school students’ tried to trick me to translate “masturbation.”
Shanghai is by far the most progressive city in China in technology, cultural diversity, finances, and fashion. Walking in high heel shoes fascinated me endlessly for even in my sneakers I found it difficult to maneuver around the potholes and construction. While fashion is a form of expression and individuality, this desire to dress to the nines is a modern paradox. Shanghainese women may be more self-aware than the generation of women before them, but their purpose is still the same: to seduce a man who can provide for them. Perhaps this is just a stepping-stone towards equal opportunities between the sexes, but for now, I can’t help but see the history of foot binding repeating itself in high heel shoes. For anybody who thinks I am exaggerating, I challenge you to walk across a flooded Shanghai street with rapidly passing scooters, bikes, pedestrians and cars in 3-inch pumps.
The reason why I love China is because each time I go my mind doesn’t stop running. There are so many things I find fascinating about the PRC that is exclusive to this moment in history—the modernity, the evolution of traditions, the political hypocrisies, the new money. I was only there for 10 days, spent most of my time in Shanghai and Kunshan, but even then, I have so much to talk about.
In lieu of China’s upcoming 60th birthday October 1, 2009, I am going to write a 6 blog countdown on 6 topics about China: 1. Modern Chinese Love: Pouty women of Shanghai 2. The Maglev: Fastest train in the world that leads to nowhere 3. Shark Fin Soup and Hairy Crabs: the ethics of Chinese Cuisine 4. Fake Purses, Bootleg DVDs, and Photocopied Books: Who runs the underground market? 5. Internet Firewall: Is it effective, and how do you break it? 6. Happy Birthday, Middle Kingdom: My thoughts on China after a decade of travel
That's me with Nicky Hilton at her birthday party.
