The PSB and Me

So it turns out I'm not a liumang. See, a liumang is a wonderful catch-all term in Chinese that refers to anyone who is rootless and actively up to no good. It's usually translated as 'hooligan,' but it shouldn't be a surprise that that's not exactly it. Hooligan conjures up a European soccer nut who goes around and gets drunk and beats up supporters of other teams. That's included in the liumang, but there's also something a bit more sinister. Liumang is also what the government called people who need dealing with.

Anyway, that's not me. Here's how I know:

Now that I think about it, every time I've come to China in the past, I've been provided housing by the folks who invited me. The school where I taught, then a couple school where I attended class, they all handled the housing bit. I never really thought much about it, but it's not too surprising that the government here is very interested in knowing where all of it's foreigners are, and beforehand, this wasn't a problem because there were offices of folks tell them where I was.

Well, that's all changed. Now that I've moved into my new digs which aren't part of any institution, I needed to register myself at the local Public Security Bureau (PSB - basically, it's the police station). No worries, should be fun - but when I get there, they ask me where I'd been staying before. Well, the guest house at Fudan. Can you prove that? Well, no. Then there might be a problem.

I want to break in here and add a little color. The guy who I had been talking to was really nice and chatted me up in a very friendly way, so there wasn't any friction there, but there was trouble brewing in the waiting room. When I came in there was a young and very pretty girl sitting on a bench. not too long after a really ratty looking guy came in and they exchanged a few sharp words in Shanghainese. loooooong pause. more snappy back and forth. loooooooonger pause. He moves over to the bench and sits next to her. She immediately moves further away and he scoots next her again. She stands up and moves away. Then they really go at it for awhile. More uniforms show up and hover, but don't intervene. One office taps his pen on the desk trying to get the ratty man's attention.

I didn't get to see the rest of the episode, because my friend suggested that if I have time, I should go upstairs and talk with another officer about my problem. He seemed a bit uncomfortable and asked me if I understood Shanghainese. I said no and he smiled slightly. I went upstairs.

The interview seemed a bit odd. The gist of things was that they needed documentation saying where I lived before coming to their neck of the woods. Without that, I would be fined based on how long I was off-grid. In my case, over thirty days and thus 500 yuan (~$73). What proof would suffice? Well, they were supposed to give me a receipt when I left the guest house. Not a receipt for money but an official one saying that I as a foreigner stayed at a hotel that is allowed to house foreigners and all was well.

Oh, that receipt.

See, They asked me if I wanted one of those and I wasn't really sure why I would. I never needed one in the past, so I said no thanks.

Whoops.

So if I could go rush back to the guest house and get them to give me a copy of that receipt and get it back to them today by the close of business, all would be hunky dory. It made for a long trip, but the reception folks remembered me and took pity. they dug through files and files and a paper bag full of files and eventually one women when upstairs to look through god-knows-what, but they found the slip of paper, and handed it over with a smile.

A much relieved thank you, a cab and a light-rail trip later and I was back at the PSB. My friend who I dealt with yesterday was there and we laughed at the absurdity of it all. We chatted about elections in the US and isn't it funny that we've got an actor as a governor and a good time was had by all.

He typed in my info and now I'm a legitimate resident in my happy little corner of Shanghai.

I asked someone what the opposite of a liumang was in order to find out what I've become and the answer was a wenmingren - a civilized person. Well, I wouldn't go that far.

你的发言很精彩

Some thoughts on coming back from a modern lit conference at ECNU.

First is that on signing in, they handed out a bag of swag. Seriously. There's a decent ECNU bag, notebook, pen, most of the papers that were to be presented printed in a booklet, a schedule, the latest issue of the Journal of Modern Chinese Studies, and here's the kicker: books! A two volume history of dangdai novels, a book on Xu Zhimo (still haven't figured out why he is so incredibly popular over here at the moment) a collection of Shu Wu's essays (?) and a hardback of Liu Shaoming. I'll be honest, aside from the dangdai novel book, I'm don't have any reason to the that excited about the content, but hey! books! And this was a relatively small conference - only one day and only a handful of speakers (at least one who didn't show up). Anyone back home want to see if we can get a publishing house to sponsor our conferences?

So here are some peanut-gallery comments from my notebook:

• Some things really are different than would be the norm in the US: People talking loudly while others are presenting, more sleepers etc...
• "Harmony" was mentioned several times.
• The same kind of rabbit-hole arguments exist everywhere. Example #1: periodization
• There was a woman wearing a coat. I kid you not. I was loosing half my body weight per hour and she was wearing a coat. Well, a jacket, but still...
• Touchy political questions cause uncomfortable pauses, but they do get answers too.
  
• Even the older profs have funky disco ringtones. And they forget to turn the phone off too.
• There's a random dude here too who's really not affiliated with anyone and takes 10 minutes to ask a 'question' that's not really a question but more of a self-introduction and a bit of blather about his own personal interest in completely unrelated topic. He doesn't seem to be the same guy I've seen at every conference I've ever been to, but he might just be wearing a disguise.
  
• That dude gave me his card. I will not investigate further.
  
• My Chinese is okay, but I need a whole lot more of this before I'm going to be okay in an actual high-register academic conversation.
• The phrase to remember is "发言很精彩"
  

Tune up Your Tiniest Violin

Shanghai is really expensive, but you are going to laugh at me for saying that.

The problem is that I've been relying on China being cheap all these years. And when I say cheap, I'm talking quick food for about 50 cents US, decent sit-down for a little over a buck and nice meal with beer for two or three dollars. Ok, granted, that was several years ago and based on Shenyang and Beijing, but that's pretty wonderful stuff, right?

The first sadness is the dollar - it's sucks. The result of the managed floating of the renminbi is that while 8 RMB bought a dollar last time I was here, now my dollar only gets me 6 RMB. On top of that, there's good old inflation going on and I'm living in a city where there are a lot of folks with actual money to spend! Sure, I could have splurged on a splashy banquet in Shenyang in '00 and spent a bucketload of cash at a 'impress the rubes' restaurant, but I hate those places. It goes without saying that there are many many restaurants in Shanghai that won't even seat riff-raff like me.

That beign said, here in Shanghai it's really easy to find a middling restaurant where we end up paying 25 RMB each. That's crazy talk! (Now is the time where you do the math and find out my nice dinner only cost a little over $4 and you rail at my whining. Go ahead. I'll wait.)

I've almost paid up to a dollar for a soda! My regular bag of 1 yuan gummy QQtang candies sometimes cost up to 2 yuan! It's highway robbery!

Ok, well, I sort of ran out of steam after doing the math and finding out my dinner was only about $4. And maybe I'm still tipsy from the wonderful Haerbin beer, so I should stop here I think.

Things are pretty darn wonderful here, and even if it is more expensive than it was, it's still a long sight better than LA.

Going to have to say goodbye to the translation workshop team and move out on Sunday. Sad to see everyone go.

I'm headed over to China East Normal University. Won't you join me? Should be a hoot.

Roof

Look Out Haibao!

Sleepy Shanghai

In the booth next to me in the cafe:

Books, Books Everywhere, but not a Volume to Read

I went to the used-book fair at the Confucian temple today. I guess I wasn't really sure what I would end up finding, but the prospect of a whole bunch of old books is too good to pass up. I would like to get a pre-1950 set of Mao Dun and maybe some other stuff like that, but hey, I know that wasn't going to happen.



The book fair happens every Sunday, so I'll probably be going back every so often even if it's probably going to always be the same folks there with the same books. So, what was at the fair? Well there were a whole lot of old magazines and newspapers, which would really be fun to leaf through, but I'm not sure I want to own any of them. There were a lot of titles like the People's Films and The Liberation Army Monthly. Fun stuff, mostly dating back a couple of decades or so. There was also a boatload of old Mao stuff. Lots of histories of the CCP and Marx-Lenin-Mao thought. Not so many little red books, but they were there, too.

They also had a dizzying number of those little literary flip books. If you haven't seen them, they're about palm-sized picture-books of all sorts of real books, so you'll get the good old revolutionary titles like Mine Warfare and The White-Haired Girl next to western novels and old movie adaptations. They're really, but again, I'm not going to start collecting them. Also on the nostalgia front, there were a few stalls selling the old Ten-Thousand Whys. I think that would be really cool to look into.

Oh yeah, heaps of kung-fu novels and romance books, but you knew that. Also a good number of picture books and a smattering of foreign language books to keep the gwei-laos looking.

So my story. I did find a supposedly 1970s version of Ziye, and it actually had a price tag (!) -Only 5 yuan. I figured at the end I'd come back and pick it up if I didn't find anything else I liked. But I did find another stall that had Ziye and another Mao Dun title, so I asked him how much for the other book. The stall owner looked at my big nose and said 20 yuan.

Now, I can't haggle. I've never been able to haggle. I loathe haggling. I can't figure out how people can actually enjoy it. I always assume I'm being cheated, but it's not really cheating, it's just the owner getting as much money for the product as he can, and there's nothing evil about that, right? I also assume that it's all part of the whole production and everyone expects it and would think it odd if it didn't happen. I saw people haggling all over and tried to get a sense of what the prices ought to be. I figured the 5 yuan sign at the other stall would be a good starting point.

I said I'd pay ten yuan for the two books - the Ziye and the other one. Clearly this was the wrong reply. He told me to put the book back on the table. I did. I walked away expecting to be called back. I wasn't called back.

So I went to the first stall, bought the 5 yuan copy of Ziye, and in a fit of pique, I got a copy of Chun for another 5 yuan. I walked back by the other stall with my copy of Ziye prominently displayed in my hands. I'm sure he couldn't care less.

I felt guilty. I don't know why. I hate haggling.

But I did get two books and got to roam the Temple for a bit, so there's that.

Anyone Hungry?

The Blue Boys

Door of Mystery

Pudong via Seagull

Fingernails

It's probably not worth mentioning, but blogs are for comments like this:

I have no idea why dudes grow out their pinky fingernail. What the hell is up with that? Is it a cocaine spoon? Are they trying to mimic pre-revolution Chinese scholars? Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Food & Workshop

Now that things are picking up and I've got a class to attend, it seems I'm neglecting my little corner on the internet, so here's a little stream of consciousness for you:

There are several bonuses to having people around, but the main one is that I can finally go to more sit-down type restaurants without feeling self-conscious. That's kind of funny, because I have no problem at all going out to eat alone when I'm back in the states. Go figure. :)

We've found a couple of good places. I mentioned the Qingzhen place in my twitter/facebook feed. It's northeastern style food - lots of lamb and such. We ate lunch there today and had the liangmian, a cold noodle dish with slices of beef, tomatoes, cucumbers and some other good stuff. Oh, and lots and lots of garlic. Wonderfully yummy. For dinner we went to an indifferent Sichuan place with some of the folks from the workshop. Nothing too exciting there, but we dig have frog, which everyone seemed to like, but didn't seem that special to me.

The workshop is trundling along nicely so far. We've had one Chinese-English meeting and two English-Chinese meetings. We foreigners sit on the outside and basically let the native Chinese speakers hash things out during the E-C sessions. It's very interesting to see the group dynamics in what is essentially a Chinese seminar. Let's just say that the interaction between people and between students and professors is very different from what goes on in the states.

I'm presenting my translation for the C-E session tomorrow. It's a bit unsettling to know that some of Fudan's finest (along with other folks from around the area on top of the actual C-E crew) will be sitting in, but hey, that's why I came here, right? Here's hoping I don't let the ol' alma mater down.

Don't want to make too long of a post, just a note to let everyone know that things are still going really well and I'm having a great time over here. Hopefully I'll have some more pictures to post next time around.

Nothing Really

Just a quick note:

Picked up N. at the airport. I rode the maglev in. It's fast, it's expensive, it's empty, it's the maglev.




Very cool, actually. I really like going places on trains, but it's a pity that this one is dying.

I'm out of the hotel and into the Fudan Guesthouse. It seems alright, but I'll miss the hotel. Oh, and we've already seen many mosquitoes. Please tell me that isn't going to be an issue here.

Opening banquet is tonight, so I get to meet all the folks involved with the translation seminar. Should be fun - we're going to get down to doing things!

Also entertaining: I took N. around to see some of the nearby sights. It poured. We got wet. Welcome to Shanghai.

I need sandals (NO CROCS Maura!)