PANDA, PANDA, BURNING BRIGHT. IN THE FORESTS OF THE NIGHT.

When I was waitressing at the Queen Mary I enjoyed seeing the faint traces of stamps from last night’s rock shows on my upturned wrist as I delivered trays of afternoon delicacies and tea in fine bone china. It was for similar reasons that I enjoyed going through the motions of conducting research this week while recalling that in the wee hours of Monday morning I was pole dancing in a panda suit at a Russian nightclub. Allow me to explain.

On Sunday afternoon I met up with Anna, a fellow Fulbrighter working on divination in the Han dynasty.

We attended an indie short film festival at Dos Kolegas (featuring the mural above), where the contributions ranged from uninspiring to painfully awkward, leaving early to meet Dan at my tailor Wu Lin’s. Dan was in the states last month and took the opportunity to appropriate and remove to the motherland a panda costume owned, for reasons not entirely clear, by his father. The panda suit was in good shape but for a large seam rip in the butt. The limp costume slung over his shoulder, Dan entered the tailor’s shop with Anna and I behind him and announced in Chinese that he had just slain a panda and needed to repair its pelt. Wu Lin and her assistants chuckled and stitched the suit up in minutes, refusing to charge us.

We strode triumphantly to the north end of Ritan Park to buy supplies for the evening and seek out dinner. At the restaurant, Aaron and Christine joined us and we shared a delicious meal. Spirits were high. Leaving the restaurant we wandered around the park enjoying the retirees pair-dancing by electric lamp while waiting for an important call. Just after nine the call came and we headed to the north gate to meet the pieman, who delivered into our greedy arms the apple pie he had baked us that afternoon.

All the elements were finally in place. We staked out a low stone table that looked made for a sacrifice and the fixing of drinks commenced. Dan played his trumpet, and we took turns trying on the suit. It was still rather hot outside so we often went only half in.

The park “closed” at 9:30, the cue for a guard with a bullhorn to broadcast this fact and for all the lights to go off. Undaunted, we went south, moving by business district light pollution up the rocky paths to the pagoda at the parks’ highest point. There the pie was cut, served, and devoured, with some assistance from a nearby Chinese couple gazing at the full moon. Christine, who plays in a popular bluegrass band in town and possesses an angelic voice, sang a few tunes for us as we licked our forks. She was accompanied at times by an older Chinese man lying flat on his back on the pagoda’s thick bench seats.

As we descended hours later, Anna and Christine duetted on a song from The Little Mermaid. We made a brief foray to the Stone Boat, a nearby bar, delighting and perplexing the patrons and generally being hammy.

Around midnight we said goodbye to Christine and made our way to a decadent Russian nightclub called Chocolate at the north of the park. Our bags were searched (I stashed the pie knife in shrubbery beforehand) before we descended the escalator into the subterranean club, an enormous space with dozens of tables peopled with puffy Russian oligarchs and the occasional lavishly dressed lady or scantily-clad prostitute keeping them company.

We sat in high-backed velvet chairs and stared at the empty stage, waiting for the show to began. I couldn’t take it. Commandeering the panda suit slung pleadingly on the back of my chair, I took off my shoes, pulled it on, and asked for guidance to the stage (the eyeholes in the panda suit are tiny so the wearer is practically blind). Once there I terrified patrons (or so I was told) danced to Lady Gaga, and tried (mostly without success) to climb a pole with my furry paws. I fully expected to get kicked out but apparently the audience thought it was part of the show. And dear god it was fun.

Finally, disoriented, I fumbled around for my friend and was led back through the tables to my chair (in the picture below, I appear to be a celebrity panda being escorted by bodyguard Dan), where my performance was praised by my comrades and I removed the hot fursuit.

Triumphant, I leaned back, sipped my beer, and beamed with delight at my co-conspirators. No matter where I go I somehow find the most extraordinary people.

The floor show started not long after, a few numbers featuring sexy dancing ladies in skimpy dresses and lingerie.

It concluded with the women moving about the tables, gyrating their g-strings at our eye level in an unsubtle request for tips. That was our cue to leave. Aaron and Anna headed homewards and Dan and I shared a taxi to the treehouse to hydrate and calm down a bit before attempting to sleep. Sophie was off to bed so we helped ourselves to water and went up to the roof, once there, finding it pleasant to lie in the white sand (a friend of Sophie and Wu Jie’s who ran the place for a week while they were out of town had plans to give the rooftop a beach theme) with pillows under our heads. And there, looking up at the tree stretching high above us into the star-less sky, we fell asleep, waking at dawn to brush the sand off our clothes and make our ways home. “You got home late last night, didn’t you?” Auntie Zhang asked me this afternoon over lunch. “Yes”, I said, “quite late”. And I left it at that, knowing that elsewhere in the city, there were four more with visions of a night of childish glee keeping them company as they went about their day.

COMING HOME

I love it here so very much; honestly, it still makes me swoon-y sometimes, and yet, I am counting the days till I'm home and my happiness increases as the numbers diminish. Here, my friends, are the dates you may be interested in:

July 30th - August 5th = Seattle

August 6th - August 11th = Colorado Springs

August 12th - August 23rd = Seattle (and a little PDX in there somewhere)

August 24th - December 21st = Beijing

I'm working on making plans with everyone I know in the locations above. If I haven't contacted you yet it may be coming (but feel free to e-mail me all the same!). I can't wait to see you. There is so much to tell, so much to hear, so much time to be spent looking at trees and water and loving the place that made me.

NO FUN CHINA BLOCK INTERNETS

If you are reading this it means that I am in China and can't get into my blog to post anything. My proxy server is periodically blocked here and my usual tactic has been to write up a few posts and schedule them to be posted in the future, so just because I'm putting up fresh posts doesn't mean I currently have access.

Hopefully I'll be back soon. Thanks for checking in! I'm truly honored that so many of you keep reading...

I HAVEN'T BOUNCED THIS MUCH IN YEARS, or, ROCK N' ROLL WILL SAVE YOUR SOUL

I held my first focus group last Saturday morning and spent the rest of the day in a sort of fog. It was successful in some ways, a fiasco in others, but mostly I was just burned out on preparations and excessive thinking. I was entertaining this malaise at the Treehouse when my friend Xiangzi called. He had a free ticket to a show that night, M, and did I want to go?

I've loved M since Alessandra, one of my roommates in London, introduced me to his album Je Dis Aime. Alex used to play the record on repeat, and the scratchy guitars, sleazy bass, and melodious French vocals won me over rapidly. I've tried finding other albums of his but have had little luck, though I was delighted to find his song (and video) in the film The Triplets of Belleville several years ago. I had heard he was playing in Beijing, part of a tour for his new album Mister Mystere, but didn't take the initiative to go out and buy an expensive ticket, even though I knew I would probably regret it.

But an unexpected free ticket! What a glorious thing! Xiangzi and I arrived at the venue early to discover most of Beijing's French community drinking Tsingdaos and gesticulating excitedly with their cigarettes. Some were costumed: I saw wigs of many colors, a bridal veil over geisha make-up, high pigtails and sunglasses, and one man wearing a silk kimono and a wrestling mask.

The crowd went wild for the opening band, 新裤子 (New Pants) who emerged from a cloud of dry ice wearing skinny Mao suits and cute haircuts. Here is a picture of the band's founding members that I found on the internet:

On my part, I discovered that the something that had been missing from my life was apparently Chinese stadium rock at the exact moment that the cure was at hand.

But I am at a loss to describe what happened next when M took to the stage. I considered linking to youtube videos or wikis or music reviews, all of which I have turned to in the last few days to supplement the pleasure of the live performance, but I hate substituting a simulation and pretending it will give anyone a sense of the reality.

My own brief introduction is this: M, the stage name of the performer Matthieu Chedid, put on one of the best shows I have ever seen. In the photo below, his hair is shaped like his titular M, a style he favors and which makes him look like a cross between a Japanese anime character and Eddie Munster.

At the show, he wore a feathered hat in this exact shape, but with even more exaggerated peaks which you can sort of make out on the right of the crappy phone photo below.

M is apparently also known for his costumes, shiny tailored monochrome suits with vampiric collars. He seems to have enormous amounts of fun on stage. At times during the show, members of his band would disappear and re-emerge wearing ridiculous costumes that may or may not have had anything to do with the song they were playing. Below, a guitar player in a padded superhero suit holds aloft a giant cereal box during Le Complex Du Corn Flakes. Later he stripped down to cape and underoos.

At other points, almost everyone in the band would briefly march or dance in formation, huge smiles on their face. We, the audience, were entirely in their thrall. We bounced, we sang along, we murmured excitedly and craned for a look as M entered the pit and ran madly around the elevated VIP area, playing his guitar on the guardrail. I haven't bounced up and down that much in years, if ever.

I don't speak a word of French and so didn't understand M's lyrics or flirtatious asides to the audience, though I could grasp the essential idea of songs like Je Dis Aime. Still, between the insane costumes, songs sung like ecstatic poetry with dirty electric guitar riffs, and brief band member performance art that seemed to refer to violence and consumerism, I got quite enough to keep my hungry mind busy. I also just loved being in the same room as M, someone who clearly enjoys playing with exaggerated ideas of himself. As David Byrne, who M reminds me of in many ways, has said, "I'm just an advertisement for a version of myself".

The band played for almost two and a half rapturous hours, by the end of which I had completely lost track of Xiangzi and merely wandered about, sometimes holding my place near the stage, sometimes wandering around the edge of the crowd, complimenting one of the guys from New Pants and at one point realizing that I was standing four feet away from Cui Jian, the father of Chinese rock.

It was a fantastic night, healing even. I spent the next day, from 8:30 in the morning until 11pm at night, at a conference on Chinese anthropology at my university here, meeting two famous American anthropologists, suffering through hours of presentations and comments, and marveling that even at the "Chinese Harvard", karaoke was a vital part of the evening banquet.

It was a little boring in comparison to what had come before but oh my what a weekend.

GETTING INSIDE

My two best non-Chinese friends here, Aaron and Dan, are brilliant wunderkinds with amazing language skills, lovers of rooftops, unexplored restaurants, and fine whiskies. They are also both journalists. And while I delight in their company and learn much from their conversation, I rather wish I had stories to write too. Yes, there is that whole ethnography thing I’m supposed to produce after this is all over, but it just isn’t the same. As convenient as it would be to have a tidy narrative that combined penetrating socio-political insights with revealing glimpses into personal moral worlds, human life doesn’t tend to organize itself so neatly, and that, for better or worse, is what I have chosen to devote myself to studying.

Shit.

If anyone wonders why I mention my research only in passing, it isn’t just because of my IRB (the university committee that presides over the safety and anonymity of human research subjects) paranoia, and it isn’t because I don’t care; it’s because I hardly think about anything else. I spend hours every day writing up fieldnotes: scribbling down tv news reports, advertisements on the bus, and fragments of conversations or thoughts; in addition to everything that goes on at my "office" and what is discussed in meetings and conversations there.

I have to write everything down, or as much as I can remember, largely because I don’t know what will turn out to be important. Culture and societies are complicated and humans are mysterious beasts, and I am regularly told by people who have done fieldwork before that I may not even know what the focus of my research is until I start writing up. This is irritating, to say the least. If you are like most people, you probably like to feel like you understand what you are doing and that that thing is useful and/or meaningful, and you might even expect to produce something tangible every so often: I wrote this/made this/put on this show/ran this project. If you are like this, you probably shouldn’t go into anthropology where your raison d’etre is simply to drift about, trying to get the sense of a place and a people through immersion and flaneurie: watching, listening, interacting. I’m not a journalist; I’m not writing a story about the who what where why and how, I’m aiming at something more nebulous and abstract. As the wonderful French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson once said:

Looking and seeing is not about identifying, it’s about getting inside.

I couldn't agree more.

Still, I get discouraged. I go out with Aaron and Dan and they talk about current world events and political history. I talk about the article I just read in a Chinese tabloid about a college student who pushed her friends into prostitution. Aaron is working on a series of articles remembering the Long March of the CCP, and Dan just finished pieces on desertification and the life of a mayor in an up-and-coming southern Chinese city. I have absolutely nothing to show for the past nine months but a stack of fieldnotes and a brain all tied up in knots.

It isn’t that I regret for a second taking this path: I think ethnography is fascinating stuff and that anthropology provides a vital perspective for living in this modern world. While the general field of consumer rights and advocacy interests me little, the way the ideas are playing out in China is intensely compelling; while I may not understand it well, not one of my countrymen understands it better.

But I do have to remember the high-minded ideas that brought me here when I feel like I’m just going through the motions and I must remember too that awesome people like Dan and Aaron wouldn’t hang out with me if they didn’t think that on some far off day I, too, will have something concrete and meaningful to contribute.

I have more to say on this topic but must get back to planning focus groups, bitching about the heat, reading articles that may have nothing to do with anything, and daydreaming about my next visit to the tailor. It is both a challenge and a privilege to live this life. I really can’t complain.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, The Great Leap Forward, Tiananmen Square, Beijing (1959)

GOODBYE FEIFEI / 再见狒狒

Having spent the last 20+ human years of her life in this one single apartment, Feifei the trouble cat is about to go on the adventure of her life. This weekend she is moving to the countryside, to live with Uncle Mu in his newfound rural idyll, joining chickens, crops, and (horrors!) a dog. For the last few months, Auntie Zhang, who still works during the week, has been spending weekends at the country home, 2 hours south of Beijing. This weekend she intends to take “Lao Feifei” (which translates to "old baboon") with her. Auntie Zhang says it is because the cat is too loud and is alone during the day but we both know the real reason: Feifei is enormously attached to gruff old Uncle Mu and misses him tremendously. Her lamentations have only increased since his departure.

I have grown fond of the "old baboon" over the last nine months and in turn she has grown to tolerate me. She still howls the moment I enter the house or when she notices me in a room but I don't think it is out of loathing. Almost completely blind and deaf and moving unsteadily on her old bones, she seems to look at me with reproach (what are YOU doing here? how come YOU get to go outside? why can’t YOU chop up my food as well as Uncle Mu?), but it’s really just confusion. I suspect there is a tad of bitterness as well. I am told that in her prime Feifei was temperamental and prone to violent outbursts, never the cuddly type. Two of Auntie Zhang’s nieces told me once that they were never able to pet or hold Feifei until the last few years when she lost the energy to run away from or scratch new people. When I heard that it all made sense: Feifei once ruled the house but now she is forced to endure the indignities of petting, unable to attack foreign intruders, and must howl for assistance to get up on the couch.

But I’ll miss the old girl, and the churlish personification I have bestowed upon her. I hope she likes the countryside, that she lives out the rest of her days happily, and that her dreams are filled with all her past glories.

Feifei and the feeble protest from Le Kougre on Vimeo.

SON OF A CRACKAJACK MAN

I had been thinking for a while about exploring a new research direction involving China's independent "fake fighters", who work outside of the state's consumer protection organizations to expose poor quality goods, false advertising, and other scandals; or act as legal advocates for consumers who don't understand their rights. Last week it occurred to me that the obvious place to start was with someone affiliated with the institution I am embedded in. I contacted him and found out he lived near Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, below.

I booked a train ticket and was aboard a sleeper train the very next day. The trip took about 16 hours, most of which I spent sleeping, some of which I spent planning out my interview questions, and much of which I spent berating myself for forgetting to bring my passport and wondering how I would find a hotel that would accept me (the policies are strict here: foreigners must register with the local police station wherever they are staying and hotels won't accept foreign guests without the necessary documents).

In the morning I made two cups of black tea from the hot water machine at one end of the carriage then brushed my teeth at a sink on the other end of the carriage while a woman next to me held her baby up to piss (at least I hope so) in the next sink over.

When I arrived in Changsha I texted my contact but he was still at his regular job and told me to walk around on my own for a while. And so I did.

I found colorful fruits, peace-loving personal fans shaped like robots, and pedestrian overpasses hovering over intersections like giant mint-colored spiders.

View from the above overpass:

The city made no extraordinary impression on me, although I was surprised at all the lush, flowered greenery. It was not hot, but the air was heavy with moisture and cotton garments were a necessity. The jumble of architectural styles, profusion of cigarette/tea/liquor stores, broad boulevards, and sidewalks with lines of bricks with raised tiles (to guide the blind) were all very familiar.

My contact, who I'll call Mr. Tang, picked me up just after noon and we went to a nondescript place for a local specialty, 堡仔饭 (rice, meat, and vegetables cooked in a clay bowl - a little like Korean Bibimbaap, but don't tell any Hunanese that).

The rest of the day was spent at a lovely teahouse on the river, where Mr. Tang got us a private room with two grey velvet couches, an internet console, and a flat screen TV. The amiable owner stopped by several times to chat, smoke, and chew betel nuts and insisted on paying for our tea and dinner. It was a fascinating afternoon and I learned a great deal from Mr. Tang, who was very open with me about the politicization of many of China's independent consumer advocates. Hark! The IRB is listening! I shall say no more.

That evening, Mr. Tang insisted on taking me to Changsha's bar street, where we visited an unbelievably bumping club called Margarita, with a metal detector at the door, several go-go dancers atop some of the tables, and a whole lot of top-shelf whiskey on the menu. We had hardly sat down when a wiry Chinese guy with glasses edged on to the stool next to me, thighs pressed against mine, and said something completely drowned out by the pounding beats. I looked at him with confusion, and then to Mr. Tang. My new friend then got up to speak to (or rather shout in the ear of) Mr. Tang and much back-slapping and glass-clinking ensued. When he walked away I asked Mr. Tang what he had said and he explained that he told him I had just arrived in China and didn't speak a word of the language. "Good work!" I told him, and laughed. A few minutes later, our new friend was back, and now he wanted us to join us at his table. My opinion was not consulted, I merely followed them to a raised section where a glass of whiskey and sweetened black tea was poured for me by one of three middle-aged nouveau riche guys who were on their feet, dancing to the throbbing music as only middle-aged nouveau riche can. I sat down. "Remember," Mr. Tang leaned over to tell me, "you don't speak a word of Chinese!"

From the bar, Mr. Tang (who had not had a drop of alcohol - China's drunk driving laws are extremely strict) drove the 45 minutes or so to his hometown and installed me at a hotel in the city center. To my surprise, they didn't seem to care in the least that I was foreign. Mr. Tang used his identity card to book the room and explained to me that no one enforced the rules about registering foreigners where there rarely were any.

I tucked in after scribbling down some notes and woke to this view from my seventh floor window.

"The red point shows [my] excellency seat"

In the morning I dropped off the room key at the front desk nervously, still not quite trusting that no one was going to turn me in, and went to the nearby McDonald's to wait for Mr. Tang over a cup of tea.

We ate breakfast at a nearby hole in the wall with fantastically random wall decorations. I ate my spicy rice noodles (米粉) while thinking about how much I wanted to cut out the picture of the naked baby and place him horizontal in the beach scene. Perhaps I have been making too many postcards lately.

I can't think of the last time I saw a picture of Mao in a little restaurant like this and I don't doubt that this one had something to do with the fact that the Chairman was born and raised (and formed the local Communist Party) in a village only a half-hour drive away. That, of course, was our next stop.

Although Mr. Tang has probably made a few dozen trips out to Mao's hometown of Shaoshan in his life on behalf of guests he isn't the Chairman's biggest fan. So while he napped in the car, I waited 25 minutes in the line to enter the Mao family compound (my recommended soundtrack for the activity = the album Amnesiac).

Although the house was apparently ransacked by the KMT at some point in the 1930's, it retained some of its original furnishings and has been carefully reconstructed. Below, his parents' bedroom, and the place where Mao himself was born in the late 1890s.

Something you may not have known: Mao Zedong's father was not only thrifty and smart, but a "crackajack man" (CLICK ON PHOTO TO MAKE IT BIGGER).

Chairman Mao's bedroom was almost identical to those of his two younger brothers, both of whom died in the decade of fighting that preceded the founding of the republic.

Outside, no posing possibility was overlooked.

Returning to the car after my visit I woke Mr. Tang gently so as not to surprise him but he kept sleeping so I pulled out a Chinese magazine to read, looked out the window, and thought for the ten-thousandth time how strange my life is.

Our next stop (or my next stop, Mr. Tang once again remaining in the car) was to visit a memorial statue.

The statue was in a park of sorts at the end of a long, broad walkway bordered by nicely groomed grass, flowers, and shrubs which tourists were implored to feel deeply for (CLICK FOR BIGGER).

Indeed. It also creates scaffolding, guard offices, and choreographed performances of nationalism (see below).

Small speakers, camouflaged as rocks, played rousing music which grew in volume during the procession.

On my way back to the car I stopped at the Mao Zedong memorial hall, which opened onto a statue with a not insignificant resemblance to that of honest Abe at the Lincoln memorial.

In the souvenir store, alongside fake antiques, gold heart-shaped necklaces with Mao's face on them, posters, watches, fans, and statues of all sizes, there was a booth where you could have your picture taken and inserted into the scene of your choice for a buck-fifty. I chose Mao in front of his boyhood home. And I shall cherish it forever.

I took a bus back into Changsha later that afternoon and had planned to explore the city for a few hours before my train was due to leave but when I pulled out my ticket to check the time I realized to my dismay that the ticket was for the night before.

So it was back to the hateful ticket office, where I stood sulking in the horrible mug, watching the digital screen showing trains and available seats/sleepers/seatless tickets flip by. I furrowed my sweaty brow as I watched the last tickets disappear for the train I wanted and wondered if I would be standing my way home to Beijing.

But in the end I was able to buy a new ticket for that evening that gave me a few more hours to walk around the city, which led to me witnessing a performance by adorable little girls in front of a local shopping center.

I skipped the dance of the pink fur clad 3-year olds to catch my train at the fantastically Soviet-style station.

And the story ended, as it always should, in sleep, sweet rumbling-through-the-countryside sleep.