Tag Archives: memory

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.

Back in Shenzhen

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After two and a half months in North Carolina, I’ve finally returned to Shenzhen. My first photo opportunity was, not unexpectedly at Shenzhen University, where I first came in 1995. At the time, University lands abutted the bay, and oyster fishing families lived on the strip of land between the University wall and coast. I remember walking along the path and looking out toward the horizon where dump trucks hauled earth to build what is now the Binhai Expressway. Later, I learned that the entire western coast was being transformed through the Houhai land reclamation project.

Today, I came upon Shenzhen University’s new South Gate, which connects the University to Houhai Road. Carved into the land, the gate formalizes this space, makes it part of a larger pattern, when before it had been a wild border, unkempt, untended, with tendrils of purple flowers bursting open. As I walked, I remembered this space ten years ago when fish gasped the last drops of water left. Five years ago, I crawled through a hole in the temporary fence that separated the Houhai Road construction site from the campus, clay oozing into my shoes. I also remembered walking past the frame of a demolished building and thinking I should get a camera and take a picture—document the transformation, not simply being a kind of anthropological imperative, but an attempt to inhabit this space.

Lately however I’ve been wondering about my fascination with Houhai. Indeed, Houhai has been one of my favorite haunts. I visit regularly to see what has changed and what I still am able to re-member as another housing development or shopping mall rises. Yet, I don’t spend any time systematically investigating the actual construction of Houhai. I haven’t tracked down the engineers who planned the project and don’t intend dig through the various urban plans to track the discrepancies between planned and actual land use. I’m not sure if I even want to theorize about the meaning of globalization or environmental reconstruction from what I’ve seen of Houhai.

Instead, I seem compelled to pick my way through the mud and take pictures of cranes and transported dirt, the remnants of squatter housing and the lush vegetation that flourishes whenever dust is allowed to settle. I am obsessed with how the Houhai land reclamation project continues to encroach on my cognitive maps of the world and my place in it. And perhaps there’s rub. I don’t know how much of myself I can hold onto as memories that were once constituted through another landscape have already been razed. Two new pictures from the transforming border between Shenzhen University and Houhai are up at: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/00010qpw. The picture in the corner is for reference; I took it over three years ago from more or less the same place.

You can also visit houhai ghosts, a previous entry that shows these changes even more clearly: http://pics.livejournal.com/maryannodonnell/gallery/00002c4h.

和谐深圳：building a harmonious society

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Yesterday, I was walking in one of the new sections of Houhai. On my left, behind the walls of an elite gated community, children frolicked in a recently completed swimming pool. On my right, migrant workers hung out at a corner kiosk of a construction site shantytown. The juxtaposition of these two spaces, common throughout Shenzhen, symbolizes the class structure that has enabled the construction of the city. On the one hand, urban residents (whether from other cities or long term Shenzhen residents) occupy the new buildings and spaces—upscale housing, high-rise offices, and shopping malls bulging with designer goods. On the other hand, rural migrants build these spaces, inhabiting temporary structures that vanish at the end of a project. Indeed, it is not uncommon to see children playing or women cooking in front of a row of construction site shanties. Unlike the enclosed lives of the gated community, shantytown lives spill into the street, disrupting the flow of traffic. Then, they vanish and the street takes on the “normal (正常)” appearence of a residential neighborhood.

When I first came to Shenzhen, well-meaning urbanites repeatedly warned me that life in Shenzhen was “disorderly (好乱)” and “complex (复杂)”. Moreover, they explicitly attributed urban crime to outsiders (外来人), who were ineligible for household residence in Shenzhen and therefore thought to lack “emotion (感情)” for the city. In fact, one of the more interesting themes running through conversations about Shenzhen has been whether or not a person can feel attached to a place that isn’t their hometown. Much is at stake in this question: how and when do residents self-identify as “Shenzheners” rather than as sojourners from other places? But back to questions about disorderly and complex living conditions. Ten years after my arrival, urbanites continue to issue warnings about walking in Shenzhen. And although I have never been robbed (I have “lost” several bicycles, but that’s another matter), my friends continue to worry for my safety. They are convinced that foreigners present a ready target to unscrupulous outsiders. When I ask if they feel safe in the city, they usually reply, “yes”, but then add, “you can’t be too careful”. And I wonder if this “you” means me-in-particular or one-in-general…

Signs of an underlying anxiety also permeate the built environment. In addition to taking precautions before going out, Shenzhen residents build gated communities, enforce community walls with barbed wire, and hire security guards. Security walls are also built around construction sites. Recently, I have noticed advertisements for private eyes (私人侦探) throughout the city. These advertisements are spray painted on walls throughout the city, as well as onto sidewalks and telephone booths. I’ve posed my found objects with these signs of anxiety–a first attempt at a dialogue with the built environment Shenzhen about terms of inhabitation. Some of these signs of anxiety are now online.

Officially, Shenzhen has not commented on the question of public safety. However, there have been indirect references to the matter; Shenzhen’s leaders are vigorously promoting the idea of “harmonious society (和谐社会)”. This slogan also links up with national concerns. Under Jiang Zemin, the Party emphasized a policy of “using morality to govern the country (以德治国)”. Hu Jintao’s administration has continued to deploy revamped Confucianism to exhort citizens to participate in capitalist reforms, offering the slogan “harmonious society (和谐社会)” as a collective goal. Given the class differences and concomitant social tensions that characterize even walking down the street in Shenzhen, “you” feel the importance and desirability of such a society.

the overlooked ubiquity of bicycles in shenzhen

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I have been collecting discarded objects and then photographing them in different sections of Shenzhen, the oldest and largest of China’s special economic zones. This process has (as yet) denied me photo-ops with a Guanyin statue, but helped me see things so common that they hadn’t previously registered as “Shenzhenese”. This bike tire examplifies how what gets overlooked is often the all-too-common (even by folks who define themselves through acts of documentation).

In the early eighties, just after the PRC had opened to the capitalist West, bicycles symbolized the differences between urban China and urban “us”. I remember magazine articles on Beijing and Shanghai that featured images of hundreds of Chinese citizens biking to (or from) work, school, the market. At the time, Shenzhen had just been established and rarely featured in these articles, except as an example of the extent to which China was changing. From its establishment, however, Shenzhen pursued modernization with an eye to non-Chinese cities. Accordingly, the Shenzhen urban plan deliberately excluded bicycle lanes; Shenzhen’s modernity would be defined by car ownership. I’ve heard that by the mid-1990s, per capita car ownership in Shenzhen had surpassed that of Hong Kong. Certainly, the total number of vehicles cruising Shenzhen streets has surpassed the number in Hong Kong. Nevertheless, bicycles remain a common mode of transportation in the city. Many workers still bike and many business depend upon bicycle delivery. Indeed, throughout the city, usually nestled under an overpass, individuals set up bicycle repair shops. For one or two renminbi, a tire puncture can be repaired, breaks tightened, or chains oiled.

Given their exclusion from the urban plan, bikers often compete with pedestrians for passageways through the city. I have often bumped into bikes or been bumped as bikers rush to their next destination. Nevertheless, I didn’t associate bikes with the city. If I’m any example of how folks have come to inhabit Shenzhen, then the municipality’s urban planners have successfully banished bikes and bikers from mental maps of the city. Or rather, bikes and bikers crash into our consciousness only to the extent that they interrupt normal traffic. All this to say that I have been in Shenzhen for ten years, and am just starting to realize how vast the overlooked landscape might be and how misleading these pictures probably are. Consider them evidence of an emerging awarenss of, rather than reliable data about Shenzhen. Pictures, here.