Shanghai Scrap

Last night Apple and China Unicom finally rolled out the Chinese version of the iPhone. So far, at least, the introduction seems to have been a low-key affair, with media attention focused – if at all – on the fact that the Chinese version of the iPhone lacks wifi capability. No doubt, that’s a key difference. Here’s another: unlike in the United States, its home market, Apple in China doesn’t offer free recycling of all those non-Apple phones about to be replaced by expensive iPhones. So, despite its image as progressive, green company, Apple is, in effect, relegating hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of Chinese phones to China’s notorious underground e-waste workshops in places like Guiyu.

Why doesn’t Apple care about the Chinese environment as much as it cares about the US environment? In September, I gave Apple numerous opportunities to answer that question while reporting “E-waste: There’s an App for that” for Foreign Policy. And, no surprise, they didn’t take the opportunity. The FP article speculates on why.

Last night I was walking south on Fenyang Road when, at the intersection with Fuxing Road, I saw a small crowd of five or six people standing around a tricycle outfitted with cages packed tight with terrified cats and a few small dogs.  In front of it, a waif-like man dashed around, mostly crouched over, stirring two stainless steel pots. As I drew closer, I noticed he was chatting with a large, unwashed woman who was busy rattling a pair of metal chopsticks against a cage full of kittens, terrifying the animals [yes, from Dickens/Hell]. This would be an unusual scene anywhere in Shanghai (in my years here, I’ve never seen anything like it), but particularly so at that intersection – the affluent heart of the French Concession. I usually carry a camera with me, but last night I only had the benefit of my camera phone. So, when I thought the waif was looking elsewhere, I snapped this rough image:

At the sound of the closing shutter, the waif (on the left side of the photo) dropped his pot and leaped at me – or, more precisely, my phone. I pulled it back and he came to a stop a hand’s distance from my face. He was taller than I thought, towering over me with eyes set so deep into his weather-beaten skull that they appeared to be in a perpetual squint. His voice was even more uncomfortable: a deep, hollow thing that reminded me of what a double-bass sounds like when a bow whispers lightly across the strings. But the metaphors came later. At that moment, my only thought was to watch for a knife or another set of metal chopsticks. I was, to put it lightly, in a bad spot.

Fortunately, there were other bystanders, and simultaneously they all began to call out: “Laowai, laowai!” ["Foreigner! Foreigner!"] It wasn’t directed at me, however, but rather at the demonic man in my face, as if to remind him that the foreigner simply doesn’t understand our ways (some truth to that), that one doesn’t take photos of this kind of thing. So he backed off, and I got out of there with a few snickers at my back, but no worse for the wear.

This afternoon, around 4:00 PM, I left a friend’s thirteenth floor apartment and paused to wait for the elevator. While I did, I gazed out the window and noticed a stunning, multicolored striped building in the near distance. Though incomplete, I think it’s an absolute stunner, and I took out a camera and snapped a couple of photos – including the one below:

Now, if you don’t live in Shanghai (or China, for that matter), you might take a look at this photo and wonder just what in the hell I was thinking. After all, the colors are drab, dulled – quite obviously – by the thick smog that hung over the city this afternoon. And, I must concede, when I pulled up the image on my laptop later in the afternoon, I thought the same thing. But that’s not what I thought as I stood at the window, staring at the building, nor, earlier, as I sat on a balcony on the opposite side of the elevator lobby, enjoying a different view of the city. Indeed, like most people in Shanghai over the last week, I’ve been praising the unseasonably good weather and clear skies that we’ve been enjoying. It’s been a treat – or so I thought.

And that has me thinking. (more…)

Say you’ve been running an Italian restaurant on a busy, crowded street in a busy, crowded part of Shanghai where Italian restaurants aren’t likely to do well. You think to yourself: “I need a change. I need a gimmick … I need a Hong Kong Gimmick.” And, just to make sure that any foreigners passing by know exactly what my new Cantonese restaurant is about, I’m going to give it the English name …

So what, you may be asking, is the Hong Kong gimmick? I wondered that, too – and so did a friend of mine. We agreed to meet for lunch there, and – as best as we could tell – the Gimmick comes down to the Hong Kong street signs hung about the restaurant. Hardly a Gimmick worthy of the name! But anyway, as Cantonese food goes – not bad. And, on the off-chance you want to see the Gimmick – you’ll find it just south of the intersection of Tianyaoqiao and Xingeng Roads in Xujiahui.

[Relevant UPDATE/omission: The finest translator I know writes: "The sign on the restaurant reads Hong Kong, then 风情【fēngqíng】 amorous feelings; flirtatious expressions. or Hong Kong Expressions of Love. How that became Hong Kong Gimmick is beyond me, yet another example of the inscrutable Oriental mind." No evidence to support this hypothesis, but Shanghai Scrap suspects that someone might have been messing with somebody.]

The other afternoon I was in a very busy part of Shanghai, on my way into the subway entrance which I use several times per week. It’s been getting harder, though. Over the last two weeks the stairway has become a crowded marketplace of sorts, and it’s followed a predictable Shanghai-style progression: somebody gets away with selling a couple of video game cartridges, and the next thing you know there’s two guys with rabbit cages, a sharp-tongued lady with a box of puppies, and an abandoned carton of bagged goldfish that inevitably gets kicked down the stairs.

Anyway, that stairway has become so crowded and narrow that it’s impossible to tell, at first glance, who’s just trying to catch a train, who’s selling caged crickets, and who’s prophesying the end times (I’ll get to that). So, the other afternoon I’m about to descend the stairs when I notice a scrawny, gender uncertain presence in an old army shirt. She – and I think she was a she – had darker skin, long features, ragged hair, and hollow, round eyes – in other words, not a Shanghainese. She also had a broad, wild smile that she flashed at passersby, and a canvas satchel stuffed with crisp, stapled photocopies that she was handing out to anyone who caught that smile. She pushed one of the packets into my hand, and just as I grabbed it, pulled it back – the text was Chinese – and handed me an English version. (more…)

In American sports broadcasting, there’s no seat more coveted than one in the broadcast booth of Monday Night Football, the thirty-nine-year old, once-per-week franchise for which ESPN pays US$1.1 billion per season. Over the years, it’s been home to some of the very best in American sports broadcasting (Al Michaels and John Madden most recently), and some of the most bizarre (Howard Cosell and Dandy Don Meredith). But no matter who occupies that booth, the job remains essentially the same: entertaining one of America’s few remaining mass audiences, while serving its varying expectations, and understandings, of American football.

That’s really hard. But I argue it’s nothing compared to what Zhang Nan, the twenty-eight-year-old play-by-play man for NFL China’s weekly live streaming simulcast of Monday Night Football on Sina.com, faces on a weekly basis [directions for watching the broadcast, here]. Sure, the NFL has a small audience in China (roughly 20,000 viewers watch the weekly simulcast), but Zhang – as the play-by-play man – has a key role in helping the NFL expand it. And in doing so, it’s partly his responsibility to figure out a way to translate this most American of sports to a Chinese audience that has almost no knowledge or experience with it. The challenge is technical, cultural, and linguistic, and on Wednesday afternoon I spoke to Zhang (to the right of his broadcast partner, Guo Aibing, in the photo below) about how he handles the responsibilities.

The conversation ranged over a number of topics, and shifted between Chinese and English. As a result, I’ve edited the transcript a bit, for clarity, and rearranged some of the questions. But the words, as best as I was able to record them, are accurate.

Our interview was arranged and joined by Michael Stokes, Managing Director of NFL China. At a couple of points he interjected some thoughts, and I’ve added those to the edited transcript. (more…)

[UPDATED 10/23: This morning I received an email from Mark Ritchie, Minnesota's Secretary of State, in regard to this post. He explained that Minnesota overseas voters are no longer required to obtain witnesses (unlike local voters). Most likely, the SLP elections officials simply gave me the wrong application, and then proceeded to send the ballot to Minnesota, anyway. He indicated that he's looking into adding some "large letters of warning" to the absentee ballot application to prevent local officials, and voters, from making similar mistakes.

Thanks Mark - there aren't too many statewide officials, anywhere, who would go through the trouble of looking into this, and getting back to me.]

I’ve spent seven years abroad, and in that time I’ve cast a ballot in every presidential and mid-term election dating back to the Fall of 2002. In one case, for sure, I cast my ballot in person, back home. But otherwise my ballots have been cast absentee, from overseas, and for that I must thank the good folks at the Hennepin County Elections Division. Despite the fact that state law requires them to send out the ballots no earlier than 30 days before an election, my ballots have made it through the notoriously slow Chinese postal system – both directions – to be counted.

Which brings me to the local elections to be held November 3 across Minnesota. (more…)

Earlier this morning I walked out of my apartment building en route to the post office when I came across the corner scrap dealers selling their inventory of home appliance scrap – ie, e-waste, as the kids now like to call it – to their preferred buyer, a roaming Shanghai motorcycle e-waste merchant.  Then and there, I slipped the camera from my pocket (I always travel with one) in hope of capturing what is – in one frame – a nearly complete inventory of the types of domestically-generated Chinese e-waste that has begun to jam the country’s informal e-waste processing sector (as described in my recent piece for Foreign Policy). Click to enlarge:

He has: a television, several printers, several DVD players, one desktop PC, several air-conditioning units (freon and circuitboards being the hazards there), a water cooler (presumably, more freon) and – for non-hazardous good measure – a stove-top and a couple of fans. Television aside, most of this material will be disassembled in the Shanghai area, with the plastics and metal (including insulated wire) recycled locally. The remaining circuit boards and the television will go south for recycling in Guiyu and other environmentally unsound e-waste recycling centers in south China. (more…)

By popular demand (you know who you are), promoted from twitpic to the blog:

[Clarification, also by popular demand: the sign hangs in a stairwell]

For the record, this fulfills Shanghai Scrap’s official allotment of exactly ONE Chinglish-related post per Blog Year. An allotment established because, really, nobody at Shanghai Scrap HQ has any business looking askance at the foreign language skills of others.

In other health and safety news: a hearty, hearty recommendation for James Fallows on the (still unclear) health effects of being an expatriate in China. This is a subject near and dear to my heart: a few years ago, during a routine physical on a visit home to the United States, I asked for a blood test to check the lead levels in my bloodstream. The attending physician was skeptical, until I told him that I live in China. Then he did it, and a few days later called back to tell me that – he’ll be damned, but – I had elevated levels of lead in my blood. Maybe it was the air; maybe the paint on my apartment walls; or maybe the water used to clean the food that I eat. Whatever it was, he assured me that I’d probably be fine so long as I wasn’t planning to get pregnant or revert to being 12, again (note to self …). Since then, I’ve heard of other expats – some capable of becoming pregnant – who’ve had the same test, and the same results. And most of us are still here, and so far at least, we’re okay (which is sort of the Fallows point).

For the record, I think it’s worth recalling that most of the Chinese who have been, and are, our friends and neighbors are still here, too – breathing and eating many of the same things as we are. But, unlike us, most of them don’t have the option to leave. So, as much fun as it is to wonder whether or not China is killing the foreigners, pondering the long-term effects of China on the Chinese, is probably a better use of everybody’s time (also a point that Fallows makes).

And on that note, I declare it Friday.

[UPDATE 10/19 - Paul French of the excellent China Rhyming blog just posted some heartbreaking history and images of the White Horse Inn, on the former Ward Road, which was taken down during the recent Hongkou demolitions. ]

[UPDATE 10/22 - Leading the pack on Hongkou-related news, Paul French just posted a very fine item on East Seward Road, which mentions my post. It's worth noting, as well, that he's going to be the first author published by Penguin's new China imprint.]

Spend time in the lanes and alleys of Shanghai’s rapidly disappearing, European-built tenements, and you’ll inevitably find tourists and well-heeled expats taking photos. It’s a legitimate exercise, I think: not only the buildings, but the ways of life that developed in those buildings, are rapidly disappearing, and somebody ought to record them before they’re gone. And yet, despite their picturesque nature, it’s worth recalling that the lanes were and are often miserable places to call home. Poorly insulated, poorly heated, and lacking in privacy – they are everything that affluent tourists who fetishize their atmospherics would refuse to call their own. I wouldn’t want to live in them, either. But does that justify their destruction? Put differently, could some other use have been found for them?

Shanghai is far from the only world city to be dotted with old tenements built for its working classes; and, I suspect, it won’t be the last to see its few remaining tenements rehabbed into expensive lofts – some day. Unfortunately, the time for that discussion is mostly past; most of these well-built structures have already disappeared, and their lots are being rapidly prepped for the anonymous highrises already over-running  China’s other rehabbed cities. Other than real estate developers and dimwitted city officials who think that they’ve just transformed their distinctive districts into something “world class,” I’m really not sure who – exactly – is supposed to be pleased by this.

Which brings me to the sad fate of East Seward Road.

The 1937 Battle of Shanghai damaged large sections of the city’s most famous streets, including the Bund and Nanking Road. But no area suffered more, both from bombs and from infantry, than Hongkou District. By the end of hostilities, entire blocks of the poor, working class district were rubble. Below, an image of East Seward Road (now, Dong Changzhi Road), in the heart of Hongkou, taken in early 1939, nearly two years after the fighting had ended (uncredited photo in the collection of YIVO). Click for an enlargement.

In 1937 Shanghai was already home to a significant population of European Jewish refugees (I wrote about this migration a few years ago, here), while many more were arriving by the week (eventually, there would be roughly 15,000 Jewish refugees in Shanghai, in addition to another 5000 who had arrived earlier, for other reasons). Some came with money, and many more came with an entrepreneurial spirit that – in the space of two-and-a-half years, transformed Hongkou’s ruins into a neighborhood that came to be known as Little Vienna. (more…)

Of the many journalistic beats that Shanghai Scrap really wishes it could cover more fully, none is more tantalizing than the sometimes – nay, often – ridiculous state of expat-oriented advertising in China. It’s a marvelous arena, both in its own right, but also for the insights that it offers into how poorly Chinese companies understand Western tastes, Western companies understand Chinese tastes, and – best of all – how China can make otherwise perfectly reasonable people lose their minds and do/write things that they’d never dare do/write back home. Don’t believe me? Then have a look, here.

So this morning I was flipping through the most recent issue of City Weekend, a popular (most popular?) expat magazine, when I came across this advertisement for an upcoming festival to celebrate the food and wines of the South of France:

So what are the elements that make this a classic? First, I think we’d be remiss is we didn’t take note of the fact that the headline font expands noticeably over the course of its three lines, from the French name of the province in question, to the all-important “for pretty ladies.” And we’d be even more remiss if we overlooked the hottie in the apron holding the heart-shaped pizza beside the headline. (more…)

On Friday, I had the pleasure and honor of speaking to a group of MA students in journalism at Fudan University’s School of Journalism in Shanghai. For those who don’t know it – Fudan’s journalism program is the oldest in China (1929, I believe), and also one of its best and most respected. In recent years, as I understand the situation, more and more government money is flowing into Chinese J-schools, including Fudan’s, for – among other reasons – the purpose of preparing a young, well-educated group of foreign correspondents to staff the state-owned media’s planned expansion of its foreign bureaus. So, without further ado, the next generation of Chinese foreign correspondents (click to enlarge):

Scary, aren’t they?

A couple of things to say about this group. First, no doubt about it, they are mostly female. This likely has to do with the fact that selection for this highly competitive program is largely based upon foreign language proficiency (they all read and speak English at a very high level), and – at least among those who apply to get into this program – foreign language proficiency correlates with being female. (more…)

This afternoon I was poking around some demolished residences in Hongkou District (more on that in a few days), when I looked up and noticed a poster hanging from the collapsed wall in the background of the photo, below. I’ve blown it up a bit, and placed it in the lower right corner of the image (click for an enlargement):

[UPDATE 10/11: Thanks to some very helpful comments, below, I've learned that the game is called 'carrom' and it's been played in Shanghai for years. My friend Micah Sittig did a bit of digging, and put together an interesting post that gives a bit of history and Asian context to the game (thanks, Micah!) More recent history in comment 5, left by Tom of the Double Handshake blog.]

Before this afternoon, I thought I’d seen just about every street corner amusement that Shanghai’s game-loving citizens enjoy playing in front of their neighbors: chess to Chinese checkers; dominoes to mahjong; poker, to that weird poker played with those creepytriangular Hunanese playing cards. Then, while walking on Zhoushan Road in Hongkou District this afternoon (just around the corner from the Jewish Refugees Museum), I came across this:

If the photo isn’t clear, these men appear to be using miniature pool cues to shoot Chinese checkers into corner pockets located on a tabletop covered in sawdust. For the few minutes I watched, no money appeared to be exchanged (though that doesn’t mean it wasn’t). There was a second table to the side of this one.

Anyway, if anybody knows anything about this game – is it a Shanghai thing? or just common to Zhoushan Road? – I’d be very grateful for the information. The gentlemen in question didn’t seem particularly keen to answer my questions.