Tag Archives: dialogue

more houhai

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today i started exploring the houhai land reclamation project further west, walking from shekou industrial road #8 toward dongjiaotou port.

at first, i had no specific goal other than getting onto reclaimed land and snapping a few photos. however, at the end of i.r. #8, i was stopped by a soldier, whose youth distressed me. i would say he was no older than 16, but when asked, he claimed to be 18 and meet all the requirements for joining the army and carrying a gun, which rested prominantly on his boney hip. he told me that access to the area was restricted because it was the new national border (边界). suddenly, i needed a reason to be on the reclaimed land. i pointed to the western corridor suspension bridge and said that i wanted to take some pictures of the bridge. he politely asked me to leave. i stared pointedly at the people walking on and off the area and he finally went over to a couple and asked to see their passes.

now determined to get onto the landfill, i walked to i.r. #7, where a brick wall blocked my way. i tried walking around it, but a deep gully prevented me from successfully getting on. however, neither soldiers nor security guards prevented access. at the yucai-schumann art school, which is located right at the boundary between public and filled land, i tried to talk the security guard into letting me walk to the back of their school to take a picture. he refused, but helpfully directed me back to the end of the road, when i said it was impossible to get onto the landfill, he seemed doubtful because, he saw workers (打工的) heading that way every day.

nevertheless, one of the parents from the school started talking with me and offered to take me into his new housing development to go to the top of a building to take pictures. it turns out, the gentleman from hebei works for the oil industry and had just completed overseeing the construction of a refinery in zhuhai. he mentioned that he had taken photographs of the entire construction process, “from nothing to a beautiful refinery.” he agreed that it was important to document this process, otherwise we would forget where we had come from. “where are the pictures now?” i asked. in zhuhai.

i then walked to the street immediately west of i.r. #7 and there was direct access onto the reclaimed area. i stepped onto the landfill and headed toward the bridge, my confidence growing with every step; no one here would stop me. i inhaled the fishy smell of rotting shells and stepped through air thick with flies. as i headed further out, i stumbled upon a shantytown and watched several children playing. i watched the dust a pair of once-red flip flops kicked up as a woman pushed an old bike past me. i looked again toward the bridge, but decided i had accomplished my task. i believe an old man watched me leave.

the tour ends with a view of new coastal real estate.

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.

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).

key players and their dependents/supporters

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a story that recontextualizes the question of charisma and the relationships between a key player and their dependents/supporters.

yesterday, i took a cab from tianmian to shuiwei new village. as usual i sat in the front seat and chatted with the driver, who had come from wuhan a little over a year ago.

i asked why he had come.

for the opportunities, he replied.

i commented that hankou had a long history of commerce. he agreed, but pointed out that was in the past. today, he finds wuhan to be dirty, crowded, and not improving as quickly as the rest of the country.

but isn’t wuhan reforming, i asked.

the cabbie then explained that the quality of reform depended on the abilities of a specific leader. so far i was following; i had heard this argument before. but then the conversation swerved.

what i hate most, he said, was when corrupt officials took money even when the people were poor.

i agreed they were lacking a conscious.

he continued, if everyone’s rich, then those officials should have something extra.

i laughed. he laughed with me and added, commoners aren’t going to quibble over a few bribes if everyone is living well. that’s what we want; a home, a job, a chance to send our kids to school. chinese people simply want to live their lives (过日子), but these officials, they only care about living well. it’s when the situation gets like that that i become angry.

by this time, we had arrived a my destination and i got out of the cab. i wished him a happy dragon boat day. he waved and drove off.

i am not sure if he was referring to any particular official, or if some recent incident had annoyed him because our conversation had remained at the level of generalities. what interested me was his conviction, shared with a group of beijing thespians, that for historic transformation to take place a synergy had to develop between a key player and their dependents/supporters. the difference between the two positions was how the relationship between the key player and the dependents/supports was to be cultivated. for the cabbie, this relationship went unquestioned. he did not seem to question the need for and existance of the government. the quality of the commoners’ everyday lives provided the standard for determining an official’s legitimacy. this begs the question, how much anger before an official falls? in contrast, the beijing thespians assumed that charisma determined pride of place in a group. when the ability to maintain an audience waned, so did the key player’s legitimacy; s/he had proven to be “incompetant”.

个人魅力：thoughts in progress

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it has been a weekend of meetings and rain, which means few pictures, but many words. it was also a time of unexpected insight into the importance of charisma. i’m not sure yet where this might lead me theoretically. nevertheless, it seems worth writing down how i came to this insight because that may allow me to track which of my assumptions are blinding me to something everyone around me is taking for granted.

the school i work for is changing its name and leadership. previously, the school was a branch of a famous beijing school. on sunday may 28, the school announced that it will be working with one of shenzhen’s most famous and successful principals to develop an elite program. throughout the speeches given both during the meeting and afterwards at lunch, it became clear that the school board understood previous failures to be failures of leadership. one of the board members summarized the situation as, “we didn’t have a shepherd, but we’ve always had high quality sheep. now that we’ve got a shepherd, everyone can relax” this sentence suddenly clarified for me what actually took place the day before, when yang qian and i met with tian qinxin, wang hanyi, and dai yu for lunch and three hours of conversation.

tian, wang, dai, yang, and i are not only involved in theatre production, but also friends of long standing. these friendships provide both companionship and the social matrix in which fat bird nests. this is important. the kind of charisma that seemed stressed this weekend was the ability to both nourish these relationships and use them to create theatre.

in the early 90s, tian qinxin worked in a shenzhen advertising agency and yang qian was a new functionary in the recently established nanshan district ministry of culture. both had escaped from beijing to shenzhen. yang qian had just given up on his first marriage and the possibility of doing journalism; he turned to playwriting to express through fiction truths that just-the-facts often missed. in 1994, tian qinxin’s ex directed yang qian’s play “intentional injury” for the chinese national experimental theatre. she was in shenzhen recovering from that break-up. for half a year, tian qinxin and yang qian got together to drink, smoke, and talk about theatre and lost opportunities. the two also worked with xiong yuanwei on one of shenzhen’s first theatrical productions, “i love mozart”. xiong yuanwei produced, tian qinxin directed, and yang qian played a “fat white hooligan”. (the expression “fat and white” refers to corrupt officials who do nothing but stay out of the sun and eat.) yang qian finally encouraged tian qinxin to quit her job and return to beijing. he decided to stay in shenzhen, however. tian qinxin is now the only woman director at the chinese national theatre and has won all of china’s top theatrical awards.

yang qian and i met dai yu in 1997, when zero sun moon produced “eternal return” as part of the hong kong handover celebrations organized by nanshan district. (i wrote about the szm years and “eternal return” in “Zero Sun Moon: The Cultural Politics of Seeing Performance,” Theatre InSight 10:1 (Spring 1999), 27-32.) that fall, dai yu left shenzhen to study playwriting at the chinese theatre academy, where tian qinxin has taught. today, dai yu is a functionary in the shenzhen ministry of culture. she was the one who helped yang qian register fat bird with the municipal government. most recently, she arranged for fat bird’s inclusion in the 2006 cultural industries fair.

wang hanyi is tian’s partner and collaborator. the two came to shenzhen because as part of the cultural industry fair, shenzhen municipality invited tian to stage her play 生死场 (place of life and death) at the shenzhen grand theatre.

so on the day that life and death premiered in shenzhen, the five of us gathered to discuss the possibility of making theatre in china. the conversation circled around the question of how to make theatre in an environment where “reforming” china’s main theatre troupes means “no longer providing financial support”. although she has not publically commented on the reforms, tian qinxin has an interesting position in this debate because her recent (very influential) kunqu production of “peach blossom fan (桃花扇) with the jiansu performance company (江苏省演艺集团) has been heralded as an examplar of why reform works. in this case, the head of the company invited her and other outside artists to nanjing to create a financially viable piece. and they did. so whatever she thinks about reform, her work is now offered as an example of the benefits of reforming state subsidized art institutions, specfically theatre troupes.

tian qinxin emphasized that by establishing fat bird, yang qian had opened a possible site for making theatre in this new environment. indeed, it was early in the reforms and so he had a chance to take advantage of new conditions in ways that other people didn’t. dai yu commented that for this to happen, yang qian would have to become more active. he couldn’t continue to keep himself aloof from society and pursue “pure art”. tian qinxin agreed, that in order to have the opportunity to do art, it was necessary for yang qian to pay his dues and create popular works.

just a few notes on what “paying one’s dues” might mean in practice. in part it means doing things you don’t want to do, like creating popular pieces that don’t actually inspire you. it means garnering awards so that you can convince officials you are in fact legitimate. it also means, going from friend to friend and asking them to contribute some money for the production. wining and dining all the folks that you need to in order to get it up. going door to door to door in order to sell tickets (and tickets must be sold so that you can pay back your friends, otherwise you’re incompetant). going university to university arranging to have the play performed for students, who are the biggest and most receptive audience to new works. implicit in all this is that one pays dues in order to become big because only these people have the influence to make the kinds of work they want to make.

wang hanyi then pointed to the traditional model of chinese opera troupes, where all the members supported one main performer. that main performer was the star of any production by the troupe. she pointed to mei lanfang as an important example of that kind of star. when it was time to stage a large production, which had several main roles, several troupes would collaborate and then break up afterwards. it was the 个人魅力 (charisma) of the central character that enabled a particular troupe to both attract an audience and to keep the troupe together. tian qinxin agreed that individual charisma was fundamental to accomplishing anything in china, not just theatre. “after all,” she said, “we have idolized emperors for 5,000 years. the point is to use this to make theatre.”

at first, i didn’t follow the logic that jumped from making theatre through a critique of yang qian, who was called a little master, aloof, and lazy to a discussion of traditional chinese opera troupes. no one else seem lost, however. indeed, yang qian thanked them for their advise. but in retrospect, it now seems that for tian, wang, and dai, yang qian had a responsibility not simply to lead the troupe, but to make it happen. they believed that the troupe was yang qian, and his decisions would shape whether or not all other fat bird members could make theatre. in this context, each of their comments became reminders that if yang qian was to make theatre, he needed to take charge of the troupe in a direct and personal way; he needed to become a shepherd, so to speak.

perhaps i am working with a different folk conception of “individual” than are my friends and husband. for me, the individual is expressed through doing what he or she wants; cooperation is the practice that links individuals in creative activity. however, at lunch yesterday, there were two understandings of cooperation in play–one between friends and one between leaders and troupe members. both forms of cooperation were important. my idea of the individual tends to preclude consideration of groups, but dai yu reiterated several times that yang qian needed others to accomplish his goals; he was too “independent” or perhaps too willing to maintain his independence vis-a-vis others. i also tend to downplay the importance of charisma in these forms of cooperation. yet, according to tian qinxin 个人魅力 (geren meili) was fundamental to the success or failure of theatre specifically, and social projects more generally.

it now occurs to me that “force of one’s personality” might be a more colloquial translation of what was at stake in her comments. she assumed that collective activity could only be achieved through the force of an individual’s personality, including the ability to pay dues, endure, and inspire others to follow one. she also assumed it was desirable to become this kind of a person. is that the difference between how i was hearing and they were speaking? not so much a cultural difference as individual preference? i don’t want all the responsibility that such a position would entail.

another discription of what makes a good core person/leader: 三个硬 (the three hards). a leader should have hard earlobes, so they know when to listen and when not to; a leader should have hard shoulders to shoulder responsibility; and a leader should have hard hands, so they can take charge and not let go.

yet another example: a friend told me that if there was a fire, leaders would leave first and then everyone else. if the leaders didn’t escape, no one else would. i asked if this was policy. no, my friend replied, it would just happen naturally. we chinese would wait for the leaders to go and then follow.

questions to think about: how might these descriptions fit into the category of “natural leader” that americans throw around? and should i go back to my weber?

an after-the-fact update. sunday night, tian, yang, and i had dinner with wei ping, a functionary still working in the nanshan district ministry of culture. wei ping lived in the same dormitory as yang qian in the early 1990s. she also participated in the “i love mozart” production. during dinner, tian qinxin reiterated many of the points she had made before. wei ping echoed these thoughts and than added it would be relatively easy for yang qian to make fat bird fly because he had “人缘 (renyuan)”. renyuan also belongs to the set of ideas/words/assumptions that make up a good leader. basically, i understand it to mean that if you have 人缘 your life is smoother because people like you and therefore are willing to help you. tian qinxin concurred and then told us about how many dinners she had to host in order to coax the jiangsu artists to work with her. yang qian, she concluded, shouldn’t be so aloof from other people. he wasn’t willing to pay his dues. if you did this work with sincerity, she emphasized, even relationships that start out with instrumental intentions might become happy collaborations. renyuan could transform awkward situations into opportunities; this capacity was in fact a pre-equisite for doing collaborative art like theatre.

feedback (houhai discovery)

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The other day I asked a friend to critique my photos. He didn’t like the “Found Objects” series because he understands photography to be a process of discovering what is there, rather than imposing myself onto the landscape. My husband countered that he liked “Found Objects” precisely because they constituted a moral evaluation of the landscape; for him, the point of photography was to insert the artist’s perspective into the work (rather than perspective as reflected through “discovery”).

Another friend has asked why my photographs of Shenzhen are primarily in black and white, and cold. She wondered how adding color to the images would change the feeling of Shenzhen. Her questions echo those of another friend who wondered why my pictures of Shenzhen weren’t pretty, while my photos of Berlin were.

On Saturday, September 17, 2005 I will be showing some of my work as part of “Language Materializes,” a workshop organized by Fat Bird Theatre and hosted by Raw Studio, a collective of architects interested in new ways of conceptualizing and building urban space(s). “Language Materializes” is the name of a series of writings by Yang Qian. The project, however, brings together independent works by Yang Qian, dancer Liu Hongming, architect Ma Yuan, composer Yang Jie, and myself. None of these works have been developed together. The point, in bringing them together, is to see the connections that juxtaposition inevitably brings, and stimulate discussion on how meaning is made through art and everyday life.

So I’ve been listening to all this feedback with a different ear. Sometime this week, I have to go print some photos and get them ready to hang. And I’m not sure of the kind of presentation I want. Do I go with discovery? Or judgment? Or perhaps color? I’ve been thinking of doing something highly anthropological and presenting a photo essay on the Houhai land reclamation project, which is visible from the Raw Studio windows. We could all look at the pictures, look out the window, and talk about what we remember of the older coastline…

In the meantime, I am posting some colorful discoveries of Houhai, which I took yesterday morning: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/0000cd53