Yesterday morning I opened the drapes in my Guangzhou hotel room and what a surprise: I’m located directly across the street from the convention center hosting the 7th Annual Guangzhou Sex Festival. Believe it or not, this was inadvertent – I’m (still) in town for another event located in an adjacent hotel. Then again, I’m also a big believer in providence and so I did the natural thing: had some breakfast, grabbed a camera, and walked across the street.

I wasn’t sure what to expect. My brief reading suggested that it was a salacious trade show of sorts; the morning headlines – featuring a family planning official’s suggestion that the state distribute sex toys to migrant laborers – intimated a debacle. Reality, however, was a bit more bland. More shoddy than salacious, the event is a run-down trade fair attended by retirees (male), unemployed young men between the ages of 26 and 35, and a handful of migrant (male) laborers capable of affording the RMB 30 (US$4.30)  entry fee. Women were outnumbered by 50 – 1, I’d say. Here, for example, is a pretty good representation of the demographics in the form of a small sample of the large crowd that surrounded a video of a (swimming-suit-clad) couple demonstrating certain, ah, techniques.

Now you may ask, “Why spend your golden years watching swim-suit clad soft porn at run-down trade shows?” Well, take it from somebody who now knows: there’s absolutely nothing erotic – much less, titillating – about booth after booth full of condoms, vibrators, dried bull genitalia (directions not included), and “essence of kangaroo.” As a result, the only booths that attracted crowds at the Guangzhou Sex Festival were those showing video or photos of skin – including, I’m truly sorry to note – the exhibition of photos showing the rather unpleasant effects of certain STDs. But, I suppose, you take what you can get, and regardless of whether or not the images in question suggested health, somebody (often, many somebodies) was snapping furtive photos of them for latter viewing. See, for example, the photo after the jump. In it, I’ve circled all of the men taking images of the above referenced swimsuit technique video. Continue reading →

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.