Category Archives: shenzhen fieldnotes

Cruel/Loving Bodies

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This weekend (July 8 and 9), I had the pleasure of participating in a roundtable discussion of Cruel/Loving Bodies 2 project, which is on display at the Hong Kong Arts Centre from July 8 through July 28. The Pao Gallery on the fifth floor and the Goethe Gallery on the fourteenth floor are co-presenting the exhibition. Cruel/Loving Bodies 1 was exhibited at Shanghai’s Duolun Museum of Modern Art (June 2004) and Beijing’s 798 Space (July 2004).

This was the first time I have contributed to an art discussion and, not unsurprisingly, approached it as if it were an anthropology meeting, understanding my role to be that of discussant. I came to play a familiar head game, reading textualized bodies against themselves, against each other, and if time permitted, against other texts. My jaw clenched at the responsibilities that my imaginary job description intimated; what would I say if asked, “What influences do you see in the work of Mayling TO? (杜美玲)” However, the experiences of viewing “Here We Are” with artist Lesley SANDERSON, sucking an ice pop with HE Chengyao (何成瑶), and dubbing Deep Throat as part of ZHENG Bo’s (郑波)“Watch porn, learn English” movement jolted, if only momentarily, corporeal habits. And I expectedly found myself remembering to play hide and seek.

When playing hide and seek, children want to be found. If you don’t find them within what they think is a reasonable amount of time, they will call out to you. In turn, if they can’t find you, they become frustrated, expecting a return call. After all, the point is to find and be found; the seeking is simply a means of enhancing the pleasure, not an end in itself. I think this commonplace observation points to a practical understanding of the fine line between love and cruelty. In hide and seek, love is the effort to find the person, cruelty the refusal.

Most of the time, I don’t play. Instead, my shoulders tighten, my eyes squint, and my heart makes judgments about my interlocutor based on superficial signs—skin color, hair texture, body height and mass, the smell of sweat and light perfume, the drape of a skirt, the polish of leather shoes. Together, these signs suggest how the woman if front of me has treated herself and been treated by others; I too treat her like a lady should be treated. Grimy cheeks, missing teeth, crooked fingers, swollen ankles, rheumy eyes, and sweat-stained clothing also reveal past interactions; unthinkingly, I treat the old peasant like a beggar should be treated.

In presenting bodies in unexpected ways, however, the artists of the Cruel/Loving Bodies project pre-empt habitual interactions. How does one treat, for example, the virtuous women of BAI Chongmin (白崇民) and WU Weihe (吴玮和)? The form echoes that of the Terra-cotta soldiers, but unlike the first Qin Emperor’s guard, these figures have no clear features, except for a number, which corresponds to examples taken from LIU Xiang’s 烈女传. This difference invites the reader to seek: What history brought these signs together in this particular way? Or consider, susan pui san LOK’s (骆佩珊) “Notes on Return”, which skitters across the uneven, indeed flimsy, surface of plastic strips: How can a world become so unstable?

I assume that I know how to treat a lady or a beggar because I assume that their bodies reveal the history that made them who they are. In contrast, the Cruel/Loving bodies compel the viewer to reconsider how these bodies came to be; we don’t know how to treat them because we don’t recognize the processes that formed them. That moment jolts us out of habit as we lurch toward the child’s call: come and find me. Our lady and beggar abruptly seem otherwise as well: what if I have been misrecognizing the signs all along? What if this misrecognition has been a refusal to play? And what if an ability to read the signs has merely enabled me to be cruel?

If in Hong Kong this month, please visit the Cruel/Loving Bodies 2 exhibition at the Hong Kong Arts Centre. The curious can visit the artists’ sites: Leungpo　梁宝山, Zheng Bo, Conroy and Sanderson, susan pui san LOK, and Mayling TO. I have also uploaded some images of the opening weekend.

summer fun

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the other day, yang qian and i walked from tianmian to the zhongxin plaza. we covered roughly two kilometres in slightly over one hour, stopping along the way to look at the memorial to sars heroes (lots of high-tech medical research and caring nurses), pose in front of bus stop advertisements (in this sense, irresistable), and check out what was happening curbside (an octopus floated in a tank and a man repaired a bicycle). we then stepped quickly past the women, who were using peddle sewing machines, like my grandmother used to use and my mother inherited to alter clothing, right there in the middle of our playground. and there’s the rub. shenzhen hasn’t zoned inequalityout of sight and mind, except during politically sensitive moments, when the poor are swept away. normally, the poor push back, crowding even those of us who like to think ourselves concerned. and we are concerned. just not all the time. just not that hot saturday afternoon when we wanted to play. so we put the camera away and ducked into an air-conditioned coffee shop, where our summer fun ended with a math lesson: one cup of coffee = hemming five pairs of jeans; one smoothie = six; a piece of cheesecake and one of walnut = five again. priceless.

shadow people

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i’ve been thinking about shadow people.

when the sun shines in shenzhen, it blasts through the city, and those who can take refuge in air-conditioned offices, malls, teashops, houses. those who have no air-conditioned refuge, sit in the shadows of trees and buildings. as i walk through the city, my camera searching for symbols, i often overlook them. and yet. they nevertheless people my walks through shenzhen–looking at me, looking away, resting. when our eyes meet, i turn away, ashamed to take the picture. their skin is usually deeply tanned, black, too black, as a hua, the woman who gives me a weekly facial says.

i freckle in the sun. accordingly parts of my body that don’t get regular sun time, are pale, fishbelly white, as my brothers used to tease. a hua likes my fishbelly. she sighs and says wistfully how great i would look if i could just stay out of the sun. i remind her that after forty odd years of walking outside without an umbrella, odds are most of my freckles won’t fade. she sighs again. what a waste.

the shadow people work odds and ends jobs: collecting and sorting trash, pulling carts of discarded electronic products to the second hand market. i come across older women sitting against the wall of an underground passageway, waving a hat to cool themselves. many bike to and from these odd jobs, spending the day and much of the night in the streets, unprotected from the sun except for the shaded edges of the city. even wearing hats, long-sleeved shirts, and slacks they have been roasted dark, well done. ugly, a hua says, comparing her caramel colored arm to my fishbelly.

squint and you may see them.

华强北：constructing progress

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located in futian district, 华强路 (huaqiang road) is the name of the central axis of the area known as huaqiang north. the area itself is bordered by yannan road (east) to huafu road (west), and hongli road (north) to shennan road (south). importantly, the southern border of shennan road with its strip of postmodern glass and steel buildings is often included in the area. with dongmen, huaqiangbei is one of the two most important commercial areas in the city. it has an area of roughly 1.45 square kms and according to futian government online, as of april 25, 2006 boasts over 700 shops, averages 500,000 visiters per day, and generates 26 billion net sales rmb per year. catic, the chinese aviation bureau and major huaqiangbei investor has uploaded a flash picture of the huaqiangbei skyline (looking east) to celebrate the area’s economic vitality. and the commercial interests in huaqiangbei have opened their own webpage.

we have come to a reader be warned moment: telling this history frustrates me because i end up feeling like i understand the general process, but have missed all the details. the problem of course is that i suspect the story is to be found precisely in those lost details. indeed, i don’t know if the details can be known. in part, my doubt springs from the lack of reliable books and information on the web. the early years of shenzhen simply weren’t systematically documented. in 1995, i went to the city’s 15th anniversary exhibition at the shenzhen museum, but it was a celebration of the present, rather than an investigation into the past.

moreover, with all the different governments moving from one building to another (part of the huaqiangbei story below), stuff got misplaced. i once tried to gather pictures and documents from the 80s, but was told either the pictures weren’t taken or the papers lost in a move. the thing is, i don’t believe i was simply being kept at bay to protect state secrets. what got boxed and moved is around here somewhere, but… i understand. i too have lost papers and documents in moves from one office to the next. i also believe my interlocutors when the tell me that in the early 80s there wasn’t time to take pictures; they worked long hours and moved from one job to the next. also, its sometimes hard to remember that over 25 years ago, there weren’t all that many personal cameras in shenzhen, and so people tended to take pictures of people and places that mattered to them.

i doubt the availability of relevant details because (given the lack of documentation) they can only have been carried in the hearts and minds of the people who were actually there. even allowing for the instability of human consciousness, these events are scattered accross the population, rather than located in one neat spot. so, no matter how many people i talk to, i feel i’ve missed something.

i also feel outside the historical loop because the process itself remains counter-intuitive to me, in the way that football does. so even when i do meet up with someone who can tell the story, i’m not always sure what to ask or, more importantly, how to ask it. now, i have chinese friends who can memorize levels of government and rankings as easily as my brother remembers footbal statistics. in fact, not a few have patiently gone through the system with me, two of them several times. but still i need to lay things out and look at organizational charts before i understand what i’ve been told and then i find myself feeling about it the same way i feel about my brother’s statistics. i realize it matters to him, i appreciate the time and effort that went into cultivating that kind of knowledge, i even understand why someone would want to have that kind of knowledge easily available in any conversation. but, political ranking isn’t my game.

all this to say, i realize this history is important. i’m trying to figure out why the space itself fascinates me, but the history doesn’t. it may be that i’m interested in a different kind of history, smaller, more persoanl and intimate. it may also be that at the level of generalities, i’ve heard this story all too many times. i once heard a reknown sinologist say that research was boring because marx had already outlined the process; been here, done that. at the time, i was outraged. how can it be the same? how can people’s lives be boring? but i have come to hear that comment as a comment on the limits of knowledge. we do reduce everything to generalities, and then are surprised when we don’t find anything new. so if i could find another way to approach urban rankings it might fascinate me.

by shenzhen standards, huaqiang north is an old area. and, like most of the city did not start out as either a commercial area or an administrative unit within a district government. indeed, the history of huaqiang north not only anticipates many of the transformations happening in other parts of the city, but also illustrates the neo-liberal vision of progress: through hard work the people have moved from working in factories through owning commercial properties toward wheeling and deeling in international finance. what’s more, this vision is not simply futian district’s plan for the huaqiang north area, but rather a scaled-down version of the overall plan for shenzhen, which has called to transform the economic base manufacturing to higher value-added production in real estate and financial services. the critical point, which is glossed over in the neoliberal account, is that those working and those benefiting aren’t always the same people. economic growth and expansion hasn’t meant that every shenzhen immigrant has worked their way out and up of relative poverty; many factory workers are still factory workers; many factory owners are now stock brokers.

also, like other places in shenzhen, the history of the area has resulted from complex negotiations between different interests, none of which fall into neat categories. a brief history of those interests:

when the central government first elevated baoan county to shenzhen city in 1980, it did not immediately redristrict the lower levels of government. this meant that although shenzhen city now existed, it was placed on top of a rural administrative apparatus. in an ordinary chinese city, administrative levels are: city (市), district(区), street(街道办事处), and neighborhood(居委会).　at the time shenzhen replaced baoan county(县), but beneath it were communes (公社), large and small brigades　(大小队). the large and small brigades corresponded to administrative and natural villages (行政村、自然村), respectively.

crudely, one of the main purposes of the new city government was to transform rural administrative structures into urban structures. in previous entries, i have focused on the structural position of the new villages within shenzhen, in this entry, i want to look at the new urban structures which replaced the villages. what is interesting is to keep in mind the dissolving and restructuring of economic units within the government. specifically, although shenzhen has been heralded as a place where state-owned industries constitute a small percentage of actual businesses, it remains the case that the most lucrative businesses are linked to the government either directly or indirectly.

the earliest shenzhen plan was approved in 1982. in it, shekou was set up as an independent industrial zone (another fascinating history of 1980 experimentation). in what would become downtown, the plan identified about 50 square kms, stretching from the wenjindu border crossing in the east to huafu road in the west. within this area, land was appropriated by urban work units that were then responsible to develop the area according to the plan. the area that is now know as huaqiangbei was originally part of the shangbu industrial area.

the organizations that came included the former national electronics ministry (电子工业部), the weapons ministry (兵器部), the national bureau of aviation (航空局), and the guangdong provincial bureau of electronics (广东省电子局). each was given the authority to negotiate for a tract of land on which to construct electronics factories. of course, this included putting in the infrastructure necessary to run this factories. nevertheless, the project took off and by 1986, the shenzhen municipal and guangdong provincial governments brought these companies together to form the shenzhen electronics company, which was named saige electronics (赛格电子集团)in 1988.

a bird’s eye of huaqiang north bears traces of this history, where the tracts of factory buildings stretch across the landscape:

first attempt to restructure the area was in 1998, when the municipal government invested 45 million rmb in infrastructure for huaqiang road to build better sidewalks, install better street lighting, a large screen, more electrical wires, and benches for resting under imported palm trees. these investments transformed huaqiang road into a pedestrian friendly strip of large malls. according to the above mentioned futian government online statistics the government’s investment stimulated 1.2 billion rmb commercial investment in the larger area.

visit huaqiangbei.

positions article

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“Attracting the World’s Attention (举世瞩目): The Cultural Supplement in Shenzhen Municipality,” addresses the cultural politics of representing reform and opening through an ethnographic study of Shenzhen cultural workers. It has been published in the latest volume of positions: east asian cultures critique 14:1 (Spring 2006), 67-97. For those with time, interest and access to a university liberary, the paper can be downloaded through jstor.

团聚：out and up

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the u.p. went global and caught me unawares.

i open this story with a picture of me and my cousin david. this post resonates with a previous entry about tianmian. there i tracked the relationships that placed me in shenzhen in a particular way. here i sketch the geneology that specifies me as american. both entries share an impulse to transform discomfort about the relative privileges i enjoy into ethnographic knowledge. this discomfort, whether voiced or not vexes my work to date. i hope that narrating these awkward moments will illustrate the complexity of documenting shenzhen.

about a week ago, my uncle emailed me to say that my cousin david would be in china and wouldn’t it be great if the two of us could meet up. surprise. my mother is from iron mountain, in the u.p., where i used to spend summer vacations. my siblings and i swam, ran around, hung out with relatives, learned to play smear, argued with relatives, ate fresh vegetables from their gardens, had swordfights with sparklers on the fourth, and still had two more weeks to endure with relatives. i stopped going my sixteenth year because i was given the choice of going to michigan or staying home. so, my uncle’s email abruptly reminded me that not only do i have an extended family, but also that those folks are busy creating and participating in global networks. just like me. gulp.

david looks like my mother in ways that i don’t. surprise again. more importantly, his personal trajectory out of the u.p. makes him like my mother in ways that i am not. my mother and david embody connections between the rural midwest and upwardly mobile suburbanites. when we would go back to the u.p. all those summers, my mother was going home to people she recognized and who recognized her as being fundamentally the same: same small high school, same kinds of wage labor, same catholic church, same teachers, same cold winters, same rural environment. david went to that high school and church, his father and brother work(ed) those jobs, endured those winters… the difference from the u.p. relatives that my mother and david share is that they both got out by working their way up. and today’s story is in the prepositions. out and up: my mother through nursing and david by way of the marines.

in contrast, my siblings and i grew up in upper middle class suburbs, moving from house to more expensive house, with the expectation of a college education and yet bigger houses for our children. that all of us now live in smaller houses than when we were children is another story. at the moment, i’m thinking that when we went to the u.p. all those summers ago, my siblings and i embodied class and cultural differences that we weren’t capable of finessing, although there were times that affection and horseplay overcame the ruptures. it wasn’t simply that we symbolized my parents’ success (my father was also an out and up story from pittsburg), but also and more fundamentally it was that we lived in a world from which our cousins were excluded. we went to michigan; they didn’t come to new jersey. these differences became more painfully obvious with each passing year, until my simblings and i opted out of going back. and so, even if the reunion with david caught me offguard, that it would happen outside the u.p. might have been predicted.

we talked about what we and our immediate families have been up to these past twenty-odd years. most of his family remains in the u.p.; mine is scattered throughout different east coast suburbs. indeed, leaving jersey, especially for new york, is itself a fascinating story of the lived snobberies and upward mobilities of my siblings and friends. and yet… the snobberies and upward mobilities of my family and friends have been reproduced in shekou. local investors, travelling businessmen, and government officials bent on globalizing shenzhen have together reproduced places where middle class american suburbanites easily lunch and dine. david and i had dinner at gypsy’s one of the comfortable, seaworld (海上世界) restaurants that cater to displaced westerners in shekou. i like the food, which is fresh, eclectic, and yet so very, very familar; it tastes like good food from my hometown burb and provides the particular counterpoint to the generalized tastes of macdonald’s and papa john’s, which are also located in the seaworld plaza.

this meeting has started me re-thinking these fieldnotes.

on the question of a shenzhen identity: i am native to the idealized version of global culture that is being built in seaworld. this culture is not broadly u.s. american, but a vision of upper middle class suburban forms of consumption. developers and real estate agents market aspects of this vision to sell new houses (bigger and better, like the houses of my childhood); local officials judge the success of reform on the numbers of white collar workers who can afford to eat at restaurants like gypsy’s.

the different trajectories that brought my cousin and me to seaworld highlight the way that exporting this version of prosperity functions to restructure domestic american class relations in international terms. on the one hand, the seaworld version of prosperity has enabled me to find jobs and live comfortably in shenzhen. on the other hand, it has also provided opportunities for my cousin to move out of and up from the u.p. crudely but nevertheless provocatively seaworld helped ameliorate our previous antagonisms, which we still don’t talk about.

this leads to the question of who is excluded from this world; my relatives in the u.p. remain excluded from this world, although one or two may find a way in. david and my mother remain the embodied bridges between these worlds. at the same time, most of china’s rural poor are also excluded from this world. this is important, seaworld marks not an amelioration of the class differences that separated me from my u.p. relatives, but rather an extension of those differences into a new domain. i am not suggesting that chinese society wasn’t marked by class differences before reform. instead, i am reiterating a point long made by postcolonial marxists: displacing our class differences onto new societies has neither resolved class tensions in the u.s., nor improved class antagonisms in china. instead, class conflicts in both china and the u.s. have been amplified, even as the beneficiaries of this inequality justify their actions in terms of globalized meeting grounds, like seaworld, as places where cultural difference is overcome.

in local newspapers, the class difference manifest in the architecture and various uses of seaworld is glossed as “incentive”, presumably to move out of and up from the rural hinterland. formally, at least, the structure of the incentive reproduces the lived differences between rural and suburban americans. i am not sure whether or not my siblings and i inspired my cousin to join the marines and go to college; my gut reaction is that the comparison although annoying was less important than the physical and social unpleasantness of both manual labor and being denied what is considered valuable, including tasty food, an interesting education, and opportunities to travel. as chinese friends who are on their way out and up remind me: there really are better lives than they used to lead.

finally, i find myself wondering at the understandings, experiences, and practices that compel us individually to move out and up, rather than collectively forward.

name changing ceremony

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the school officially changed its name yesterday and marked the event with a ceremony. it was also the first clear day in about six weeks. i took out my mouldy camera and clicked happily. so, today pictures of some of my students.

刺激：craving stimulation

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today i went to hong kong to order books for the school, after which i met up with a friend for lunch. both of us are in our early forties and have established home lives and jobs, as do many of our friends. lately we end up talking about our desires for excitement or stimulation. she told me a story about female friends who go into shenzhen for an evening with male escorts, known as ducks (the complement to the female escorts known as chickens). others, it seems, are turning to recreational drug-use. certainly the popularity of night clubs speaks to a pulsating need for something…

my friend noted that when she was younger, her parents were too busy making ends meet to worry about whether or not the environment was stimulating them. she, however, often has time on her hands to think about how her life could be better, or more interesting, or more romantic, or more something… she says this is the biggest change of the past twenty-five years. a child of the cultural revolution, she grew up in a world defined by necessity, but now, she says, it’s about personality and taste.

what is this unidentified need? what are we craving? we talk about taking lovers, visiting exotic places, changing jobs, but end up spending, and spend is the operative word, a great deal of time shopping, dieting, skulpting our bodies, and then going to restaurants to talk about our purchases, our calorie intake, and our shape. in all honesty, i look better than i did five years ago. physically, i feel better. yet nonetheless part of me steps to the side to observe what we’re up to; i call this ethnography. i write about our various activities and how we talk about them in order to clarify my experience and what it might mean, but lately i’ve noticed that simply writing up after the fact doesn’t resolve the craving that sometimes rides me, rides us as we move through shenzhen and hong kong, going about business as usual.

i want something. i once thought i could find it by coming to china, but here too, this yearning burns, so at those moments when craving results in devestating loneliness, i think, i’ll go back to the states and that something will be there. or maybe i shouldn’t have come to shenzhen, maybe it’s waiting for me in thailand. maybe i shouldn’t be teaching, maybe i should be writing a book. something else… of course, in more lucid moments, i realize that desiring is a state of being, not a place. i also understand that the object of desire shifts as quickly as i find satisfaction. so i’ve come to take comfort in lunches with friends who like me are wanting; that moment of mutual recognition at least is something.

高考: gaokao blues

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the dreaded college entrance exam （高考）has just concluded. there are multiple sites dedicated to the exams, but for a sense of the complexity visit one of the many gaokao sites. china today has also published a brief introduction to system. unlike the sats, where students take the test and then apply to various colleges. in the gaokao, students sign up to compete for a limited number of positions in departments in particular universities and then hope that their scores are high enough for that department. how high you have to score depends on where you’re from, because each province is alloted a number of positions, as are the cities in which a given university is located. this means that beijing students need much lower scores to test into a university located in beijing, than do students from other cities and localities.

chinese parents start worrying about the gaokao even before the first day of elementary school. in fact, most of the elementary curriculum is oriented to teaching what students will need to know for the gaokao and how to take the tests. the focus on test-taking increases every year, so that graduating seniors (high school 3) are taking tests all the time. in places like shenzhen, where only two high schools have a reputation for getting students into good colleges, the high school entrance exam is said to be even more competative than the gaokao.

i’ve been earning my living teaching english in an elementary school. consequently, the gaokao impinges on my life because the english exam has become a kind of filter, where the otherwise equally qualified in mathematics and physics get distinguished. however, making standardized tests the goal of foreign language learning has predictable results–even after ten years of studying english, students can take tests, but have difficulty communicating, reading for comprehension, and using english in creative ways. i have been fighting for a chance to reform the curriculum and teach a more language arts based curriculum, including reading stories and experimenting with poetry and musical theatre as means for learning language.

chinese parents affirm the goal of making foreign language study about using the language to accomplish tasks (ranging from asking directions to writing a book report), but insist that these skills will not help their children compete on the gaokao. they consistantly point out that foreigners cannot compete with chinese on the standardized english tests. when i point to the problems of standardized tests for developing analytic skills (other than the skill of guessing what the test-writer meant) and self-expression, again, parents agree, but say these skills can be developed later, after the students have tested into a good college. the only time that they see a more comprehensive appraoch to learning english as being desirable is if the student is preparing to go abroad for college.

yesterday, i ended up in a quite heated argument with a very good friend about the gaokao. i expressed disgust at a system that requires memorization of thousands of words, but doesn’t actually introduce students to anything remotely interesting in english. students can study for years without reading a poem, a short-story, a comic book, let alone a report or textbook in english. instead, they are introduced into grammatical forms and then tested on those forms repeatedly, without ever seeing the forms used in context.

my friend said it couldn’t be helped; this was chinese reality.

i countered that chinese reality hadn’t produced a decent education system.

she agreed, but argued that the gaokao was the most egalitarian system in china.

no, i said, if you’re born in the countryside, odds are you won’t get into college. indeed, odds are you won’t finish high school and will end up working in shenzhen or dongguan.

but, she replied, it’s still more fair than any other system in china. she pointed to the arts system, where getting into the national conservatory or school of the arts requires students to accept someone as a teacher, even before they take the entrance exam. because it’s based on subjective criteria, there is no possibility for a fair competition. for example, she continued, shenzhen organized a national oboe competition. all the teachers came and brought their students. the teachers were also the judges. so the organizing committee asked that there be a curtain between the judges and the competators so that the judging could be unbiased. many of the teachers refused, and in the end, the judges were allowed to see who was competing. according to my friend, it was no surprise that every teacher gave his or her student the highest score.

by this time she was furious at the injustice of the system and angry at my lack of understanding of chinese reality.

so then why, i continued, also getting upset that everything was coming down to standardized test scores and competitions, should anyone want to teach in china? i really dislike the way parents drag their children over to talk to me and, when the child remains silent, scold them in front of me, saying, why aren’t you practicing english? this is a really good opportunity. and me standing there, thinking, i’m a person, not an opportunity, and if you left your child alone, maybe he would speak. more likely he’d be playing soccer, but children wasting their time playing is another issue, and i stopped talking after expressing my anger at being seen as just an opportunity.

she sighed. that’s the problem, chinese people are just too worried about the future. but once students get to college, they just want to relax and their teachers don’t really want to teach. so it’s a mess.

i’m still thinking, and why do i want to continue teaching in this system? but at this point, neither of us wanted to continue arguing because clearly we weren’t angry at each other, but rather frustrated by the inhumanity of the gaokao. me because it made parents and educators nervous about any kind of creative teaching, and her because her son will take the high school entrance exams in two years.

种菜游击队: veggie guerillas and other food frauds

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the rural make-over movement is the most obvious example of shenzhen’s efforts to eliminate the rural within. however, homeless, unemployed migrants also define this border as they relentlessly occupy and re-occupy urban spaces. notwithstanding, efforts to eliminate shanties, shenzhen remains a place where the three without people (三无人员：无户口，无工作，无房子; no household residency in shenzhen, no formal job, no home) live in the underground passages or build shanties in out of the way places, find day jobs (many hang out at intersections in the larger of the new villages, waiting for trucks to come pick them up), get married, have children, and cultivate gardens.

at the houhai land reclamation site, migrants identified in the press as the vegetable planting guerilla forces (种菜游击队) plant gardens of relatively quick growing green vegetables, which are hawked on sidewalks as well as markets throughout the city. recently, these gardeners and their gardens have become the target of a police action not simply because they are unsightly and illegal, but more importantly because the farmers do not have access to clean water. consequently, they plant their vegetable next to the rain and waste water channels that thread through the city, using the sewage system as an ad-hoc irrigation system.

now, a typical shenzhen meal includes one green vegetable dish, sometimes sauteed and other times blanched. this means that government officials and regular shenzheners alike all consider the quality and price of green vegetables to be quality of life issues, on which the legitimacy of the government hangs. however, given the numbers of gardens, legal and illegal, that supply shenzhen homes, markets, and restaurants with vegetables, the police have been unable to guarantee a minimum standard of contamination-free vegetable.

the fact that the police have acknowledged in the press that the veggie guerillas plant, harvest, and hawk faster than they can uproot contributes to an underlying if not always vocalized food anxiety. indeed, shenzheners seem less concerned about digital piracy than they are about food fraud, which includes selling contaminated food. i have heard stories about fake alcohal:

“the other night, i was so drunk i had to go to the hospital. i called my husband and he said, ‘how is it possible that you’re drunk’. and i thought that’s true. i drink white wine (白酒) all the time and i’ve never been drunk. but in the hospital they had to pump my stomach. i could feel my heart pounding and i was dizzy. it had to have been fake alcohal.” the others at the table agreed with both the husband’s assessment (how could she have been drunk? we’ve never seen it) and her analysis (it could have only been fake alcohal).

contaminated ice cream:

“they keep the bins of ice cream hidden in grimy warehouses and then transfer it to official containers. now if this famous namebrand can be faked, any brand can be faked.”

and, if possible, fake eggs:

me: how do they do it?

answer: they put the egglike stuff inside a fake shell.

me: this is cheaper than raising a chicken?

answer: labor is cheap, but keeping an environment sanitary is relatively expensive. so is uncontaminated chicken-feed.

me, still trying to figure out how you can fake an eggshell in a country of where most people either are farmers or have farm experience: have you seen a fake egg?

answer: no, but chinese people are really enterprising. we can fake anything.

me: if you do see one, please buy it for me.

then, there are simply low quality goods, prototypically from henan:

friend: in henan we don’t have the skills to fake high-quality brands, that’s what they do in guangdong and fujian. instead, our goods are the real thing, but they’re lower quality than high-end fakes. so its probably safer to eat a guangdong fake than a henan original.

these stories intertwine with and amplify anxieties about avian flu and sars, all of which are said to be caused by unsafe food practices; for many in shenzhen, eating has become problematic. indigestion looms. this brings the conversation back to shenzhen’s enterprising homeless gardeners. when i ask, the explanation given for unsafe food practices is the same as that of digital piracy: poor people have no other options. by extension this logic has it that once china gets rich, people’s natural goodness will resurface and they won’t need to practice food fraud.

in the meantime, my friends and i continue to discuss the importance of dieting because it’s too easy to put on pounds during business related banqueting (应酬).