Author Archives: Mary Ann O'Donnell

The US and PRC are actually the same country. Except when they’re not.

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Seriously?

At (more or less) the same time that Hu Jintao announced that Wang Lijun was a traitor and Bo Xilai continued to advocate the Chongqing Model for the rest of China to follow, NASA was debunking claims that aliens had invaded earth, arriving inside trojan horses meteors.

I’ve often joked that the US and China are actually the same country, just with different protagonists, costumes, and stages. But today, I’m sure it’s true. How else to understand the convergence of recent events? Alien life has clearly taken over the two conferences (两会: the National People’s Congress and the Chinese Political Consultative Conference) and the US is covering for the Party through a sustained disinformation campaign.

Not your cup of tea?

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Ten of us were having dinner at a private style restaurant. Unlike mom and pop “family style” diners, which serve standardized fare at similar prices, a private style restaurant caters to the discerning rich, who have a good relationship with the owners. Trust and taste define this good relationship. Guests trust that the owner will provide quality tea, food, and service for a price that includes a “reasonable” profit. In turn, the owner trusts that these guests not only desire, but also can afford high quality teas, expertly brewed, seafood delicacies and soups adorned with beautifully shaped fungi. There is a menu, but it seems to be used for pedagogical purposes, including the health benefits of particular foods and herbs. Consequently, guests don’t order individual dishes, instead a meal’s host discusses a menu with the owner, who then plans the meal. The price of the meal is either set ahead of time (the host setting an upper limit, for example) or, if the guest returns regularly, the owner can plan a meal based on the number of guests. Special requests for imported seafood can be accommodated with 24-hour notice. Private style restaurants set the stage for intimate displays of taste and friendship. Sharing a meal of this quality, for example, enabled my friend both to demonstrate how much he cares for us (because the food is outstanding) and to show off how very good his good life is (because really, the food is that outstanding. And the tea. Wow.)

Bourdieu, of course, has reminded us that elites use aesthetic distinction or good taste to solidify class identity, arguing that cultivated predispositions to certain foods, music, and art enable us to recognize relative social status; we “like” that which is appropriate to our social position and “dislike” that which is not. Continue reading →

Apparently, no one is clean…

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Shenzhen seems engaged in a classical turn, not simply in terms of neo-confucian efforts to remake the citizenry into folks who know and are happy in their place, but also to shrug off the possibility that any official might be clean. “They’re all corrupt; it’s tradition [speaker’s emphasis],” I was told. The inevitability of official corruption was demonstrated with a phrase from the late Qing: 三年清知府，十万雪花银, which means “after three years in office, even a clean magistrate will have accumulated 100,000 taels of silver”.

mapping ignorance

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Was conversing friends about political succession since Mao and how to interpret reports coming out of Beijing and Guangzhou with respect to Shenzhen’s political status and symbolic valence within the national imaginary. Their 15 year old daughter was at the table, politely ignoring us, when someone mentioned Hua Guofeng (华国锋). She lifted her eyes and asked, “Who?”

Her father explained Mao’s appointed heir had been at the center of a political struggle with Deng Xiaoping to decide if China would continue Maoist policies or pursue reform. This struggle ended with a coup d’etat and the Sino-Vietnamese War as Deng Xiaoping gained political control by securing support of military leaders and high-ranking Party commissars. We then mused about the relationship between violence and political succession, even if indirectly, because Jiang Zemin (江泽民) only became Deng’s appointed successor in the aftermath of Tian’anmen and Zhao Ziyang‘s (赵紫阳) fall.

“Who?”

All this to say, that dinner I experienced a We Didn’t Start the Fire moment with post Cold War Chinese characteristics — recent history actually is this easily forgotten. Or more to the point, I realized (again!) the extent that what we know of recent history comes only as events disrupt our daily lives.  Continue reading →

of law and hope…

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The Chinese legal system and Rule of Law are emotional topics for both westerners and Chinese alike. I haven’t spoken enough with westerners to understand our emotional investment in the development of China’s legal system. However, that may be the point — we’re emotionally attached to our investments… Nevertheless, tempted though I am to pursue that line of thought, what I’m actually pondering is how the promulgation of specific laws might serve as symbols of hope. Continue reading →

rant on the state of shenzhen news

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A journalist approached me for an interview on the topic, “送你一个好男人 (We’ll give you a good man)”. His newspaper is currently preparing special articles for International Women’s Day, next Thursday, March 8. I replied that my ideal man would have been a better topic for Valentine’s Day, when fantasy is given free reign and chocolate assumes its rightful place in the food chain. He responded that the newspaper was aiming for a “light” approach to women’s issues by collecting and retelling love stories. I’m presuming that the editorial moment will be to abstract those characteristics shared by good men the world over; my love story would be cross-culturally inspirational. So to speak.

The fact that newspapers are generating content for International Women’s Day isn’t surprising. In fact, making the ideal man the subject of Women’s Day reportage is an accurate reflection of the status of women and the terms of gender debate in Shenzhen. What’s more, I’m not even surprised that their story is gossip — the semiotic daisy chain that strings women and love and sex and gossip is so overdetermined that I’m moderating a roundtable on the relationship between gossip and architecture as part of my Women’s Day celebration. But here’s what I don’t get — why call me? Continue reading →

new project — architectural worlds

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I am currently working as an editor at Architectural Worlds, the journal of the Shenzhen University School of Architecture. The Journal has a long history, in fact, when I first came to Shenzhen in 1995, I also worked there as a translator! Anyway, this year, the journal is shifting its focus from buildings to the social context of architecture and urban planning. The preface from the first edition of the renovated journal is:

Why Architectural Worlds?

“S” is a tricky letter, signaling more than fill-in-the-blank grammatical shifts from the singular to the plural. Instead, “s” indicates an emphasis on and recognition of lived diversity. We start from one – one world, for instance – and by adding an “s” we suddenly find ourselves amongst a plethora of worlds – the peoples, societies, and institutions of the earth.  In other words, the presence or absence of an “s” reveals both the topic of conversation and our level of analysis. Are we talking about the nature of the world in general, or are we talking about distinct cultural worlds?

Examples of how an “s” might bring us from abstract musing to actual experiences abound. Being means “existence”, but the word beings includes all life forms. Culture refers to our shared capacity to use symbols, while the word cultures reminds us that in practice we use different symbols in different and often incommensurable ways. Indeed, for many topics, speaking about a singular, essential nature indicates an epistemological shift. Thus, in everyday life, we talk about birds or a bird, but mentioning Bird raises the conversation either to the level of taxonomy (all birds are in the Animalia Kingdom, Phylum of Chordata, and Class Aves) or to the poetic (The free bird leaps on the back of the wind and floats downstream till the current ends and dips his wings in the orange sun rays and dares to claim the sky…)

By changing the journal’s name from World Architecture Review to Architectural Worlds, we at AW are announcing our commitment to and curiosity in human diversity. We still provide the informed, scholarly perspective on world architecture that defined our previous incarnation. However, by widening our editorial scope to include the cultural values and social institutions that distinguish one architectural world from another, we hope to open conversations about the place of architecture in constructing fully human lives.

The journal is bi-lingual, although we are still working out the ratio and format of translations. We are looking for critical essays on cities, urbanism, and/or buildings. If interested in writing for AW, please contact me.

5:34 this evening

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This afternoon on my way home, I noticed that a crowd had gathered at the entrance to my housing estate, where an old woman lay on the ground, her right ankle propped on her left knee as if she were relaxing on the beach. Her clothes were baggy, but not dirty as if she had just decided to lay down and take a rest. She wore one of the plastic gloves that restaurants provide for eating goat ribs or pig feet. She held a hand-rolled cigarette and was explaining that she wasn’t sick and in fact had never been sick. Occasionally she puffed on the cigarette. Two police officers stood near her, their hands clasped behind their backs, gazing away from her. Our estate guard chatted with several of the  regulars who hung out in the garden — all wondered where she had come from since she did not live here. As a heavy set man left the scene, he called out to his friend, “There’s actually nothing to see.” No one knew who she was, nor did they know how to call for someone to come for her since she didn’t have a cellphone.

dog (fucked) times

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Last night, our downstairs neighbors locked their pooch out on the balcony, where it cried until well after midnight. I have noticed more and more pet dogs in Shenzhen. Feral cats have occupied greenspace on the Shenzhen University campus and  young children continue to purchase goldfish, turtles and rabbits, however, high status, well-dressed dogs ride in large handbags and appear with their owners in parks and on street corners, often joining them in restaurants and boutiques. Indeed, a good friend has a fluffy and quite friendly, brown bichon frise that is groomed weekly, eats from the table, and sits on his master’s lap at private teahouses.

The original scratched graffiti in the above photograph notes, “People who raise pets are abnormal [could also translate as perverted].” Someone then came along and added “don’t”, asserting that non-pet owners were the truly perverted.  Continue reading →

old haunts

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In the mid-1990s, when Nanshan District launched “Cultural Nanshan” most events were held in or around the Nanshan Cultural-Sports Center (南山文体中心), which included a sculpture museum and the Red Earth Cafe and Bar, where Zero Sun Moon, an early incarnation of Fat Bird first performed. The design and scale of the Cultural-Sports Center reflected early Shenzhen values; it was three stories high, had an outdoor stage for Everybody Happy (大家乐，video) events, and small, cultural entrepreneurs rented rooms. I remember walking two-lane boulevards to use the computers at one of those shops, as well as playing go at the weiqi and western chess club.

Located diagonally across the street from the Cultural-Sports Center, the Nanshan Library was finished in time for the Handover and signaled the area’s future designs. Beijing sculptor, Bao Pao collected discarded metal and sutured it together to make the Library’s fence, which still stands. However, the Cultural Center crumbled where it stood until 2009, when Nanshan District approved an 800 million (8亿) budget to build a landmark building on the site. By this time, of course, the Coastal City mall was already open and the abutting Tianli and Poly Center Malls were nearing completion in anticipation of the Universiade. The point is that this area of upscale consumption is now called “the Nanshan Cultural Center” and the Nanshan Cultural Sports Center has been demoted to a bus station even though that’s where all the cultural infrastructure was / is being built.

Below, pictures from a walk around the Nanshan Cultural Sports Center block. Of note, Nanshan District’s neo-Confucian propaganda, the remnants of Old Nanshan, and the neoliberalization of the cityscape, including a high-concept Marriage Registration Bureau Hall and shopping plaza. Also, there will be a diamond market just around the corner.

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