Shanghai Scrap

Last month I posted at length on the accelerating demolition of historic architecture in Shanghai’s Hongkou District (following on several good posts from Paul French at China Rhyming). This area, best know as the “Jewish ghetto” during World War II, has a far richer history, and architectural heritage, than that interlude might suggest. Thus, it’s been heartbreaking to watch – over the last few months – as the heart of old Hongkou has fallen to the sledgehammers (again, this post explains why I think Hongkou is worth preserving – in part).

Anyway, I spent Sunday afternoon roaming the demolished tenements with a friend. We took photos, and we chatted with hold-outs – of which there are quiet a few. Some don’t want to leave for a shiny new highrise in the suburbs; and some just want a better financial settlement. As I’ve written before – I don’t sentimentalize buildings in which I wouldn’t want to live. And, believe me, I wouldn’t want to live in a leaky, cold in the winter, sweltering in the summer, tenement. But I do believe that some of those tenements could be preserved for a fraction of the money being spent on the highrises slated to replace them (ironically, recycling crews are recovering the floors, doors, windows – basically everything but the bricks and mortar); and, actually, I do sentimentalize the century-old communities that are being broken up and relocated from those old lanes. Below, an image of one of the holdouts [UPDATED 12/1: you can find much better images (taken earlier this fall), and some details on his life, reported by the wonderful Sun Anne Tay, at her flickr site]. His mother-in-law, he told us, was asleep in the home behind him.

There’s not much that anybody can do about Hongkou at this point – nothing more than going over there and appreciating what’s left of it (take pictures, above all else) before everything is gone. If you can find the surviving pockets – and they exist! – take the time to wander them: it’s not just the buildings that’ll be gone, soon – so will the lane lifestyles that evolved in and around them.

A couple of years ago a Chinese friend who works for a large Chinese state-owned company called to ask if I could look at several pages of English that she’d translated for her superiors. I asked her to send it over, gave it a quick once-over, and sent it back. Basic marketing materials, nothing too complicated. Several weeks later I was in Beijing, and met up with my friend. Over lunch she handed me a copy of the annual report for her employer – again, a major state-owned company – and instructed me to turn to the introduction where, to my horror, I found the English-language passages that she’d asked me to check. “You had me check text for the annual report?” I asked.

“My boss asked me if I had any English-speaking friends who could help me.”

Unfortunately, this isn’t nearly so rare a situation as one might guess, and I’ve long wondered – why? That is, why do Chinese organizations with international aspirations (or, at a minimum, affectations) consistently skimp on English translations? Are they cheap? Or, perhaps – as a friend recently suggested – they believe that Chinese is hard, and English is easy (and thus easily outsourced to the secretaries and their English-speaking friends)? Perhaps they believe that only Chinese are capable of translating Chinese thoughts? Look at this way: is there any chance that a major publicly-held US company like, say, Dupont, would trust the Chinese passages in its annual report (no idea if they have any) to a secretary and her Chinese friends?

Anyway, my reason for this digression is an astonishing little volume that I found in a Shanghai bookshop over the weekend. Prepared and published by the people bringing us Expo 2010, China’s latest and greatest effort to prove to the world that it’s achieved – well, I don’t know what. But whatever the Expo is supposed to prove, the title of this officially issued handbook (ISBN# 978-7-80186-899-2) strikes me as contrary evidence:

Best as I can tell, the book was written to prepare an army of Expo volunteers to handle the expected rush of English-speaking visitors. (more…)