Tag Archives: nanshan

jingjin flavors: authentic northern taste

Posted on by

京津风味 breakfast team

there is a sociological approach to food. i could tell you that what’s interesting about “flavors of beijing and tianjin (京津风味)” on nanhai road in shekou (just between industrial roads 7 and 8, or diagonally across the street from garden city, where the shekou wallmart is located) is that tianjian people living as far away as in luohu and longgang will make a 1 and 1/2 hour trip just to eat a real tianjin breakfast. i could mention that at these decidely un-cantonese breakfasts, diners sit around and talk in tianjin dialect, reminiscing about life up north. i could also mention that the restaurant provides an unofficial meeting place for the tianjin hometown club (not quite an association). but instead, i want to rave about the food.

jingjin flavors serves up the most authentic tianjin specialities in the city and is well known on the chinese internet. according to the owner zhang hong, the secret to her success is the quality of her wheat products. she has employed seven tianjin cooks to make noodles, flat breads, oil sticks, dumplings, pot stickers, and bread crisps just like they do in tianjin. zhang hong believes that many of the tianjin restaurants that opened and failed in shenzhen, failed because they skimped on the wheat. “you don’t make money on wheat products, so many restaurants just made noodles or a flat bread. but anybody can do that. my long-term customers return to enjoy the tastes the remember from childhood, and that’s wheat. of course, the other dishes have to be high quality, but the real secret to gaining customer loyalty is a fragrant flat bread that takes them back to tianjin in a bite.”

for breakfast, you can order jianbingguozi (煎饼果子), soy milk with old toufu（豆浆加老豆腐）, or soy milk in gravy (with a swirl of sesame paste)（豆腐垴）, tianjin wontons in a claypot（沙锅馄饨）, sesame flat bread（芝麻烧饼）, and oil sticks (油条). go to jingjin flavors to satisfy every carb and salt urge you’ve ever had. it’s a delicious way of starting the day. it’s also a great way of discovering how some northerners are inhabiting shenzhen.

in the interests of furthering cross culinary understanding, i end with a photo of shenzhen’s latest campaign: don’t eat cat or dog meet, boycott cruel killing. stewed cat and stewed dog (separate dishes, not stewed together) are hakka specialities available in longgang. and again, i know people who will drive over an hour to enjoy the flavor of hometown food. i’ve made the drive with them and, if asked, will probably do it again. really. joys of anthropology of food are not to be underestimated!

christmas 2007: garden city…and christmas-lit palms

Posted on by

merry christmas-new years

it’s another christmas. unlike previous years, when the great christmas pumpkin made its appearance, this year, it’s christmas qua new years, which fits. many of my friends think of christmas as american spring festival. i will be tracking the shenzhen christmas make-over, which began the day after thanksgiving. these first pics are from garden city in shekou.


inside garden city, a christmas palm tree

the palm trees and bright city lights (santa goes neon after dark) at garden city seem a high-end moment in a citywide trend to shine. low-end nanshan clubs, for example, also decorate plastic palm trees with christmas lights. these lights, however, flicker all year.


blue


yellow

Government Re-Contextualizations, or how the plan gets fixed

Posted on by

boxed methane pipe, part of the rennovations on dongbin road

Upgrading continues in Nanshan. This morning we received notice that the Nanshan Bureau of Public Works will begin the second part of its 6 + 1 street scenery renovation project (街景整治工程). All the neon is part of this project, which includes upgrading walls (remember the air-conditioner cages?), planting trees and flowers (have I posted pictures of the wooden pots for methane gas release on Dongbin Street yet?), and replacing old billboards, presumably with new billboards (I know I’ve taken pictures of World of War characters creeping across buildings…) Pictures here.

It’s a very Shenzhen approach to governance: build something. It’s as if the constant construction and reconstruction of space will keep people in their respective places. So, for those of you wondering how renovation functions as a means of governance (and I know you’re out there), I’ve translated part of the brochure we received. What I’d like to call attention to is the history captured in the street names. These street names chart the historic progression of development in Nanshan. Some streets are “old” from before reform, some are “new”, built in close proximity to old centers in the eighties. Some streets speak to reform dreams. Still other streets were laid on landfill more than twenty years after old and new was defined by governmental policy. The renovation project homogonizes all this history, as if the streets appeared together one day, already complete unto themselves, derived from some perfect, omnipotent plan.

街区再造 品质南山
6 + 1城市改造工程是南山区政府继去年对蛇口新街、海月路、学府路、沙河路口、留仙大道、朱光路等六条街道和南海大道（一期）、创业路、沙河西路、东滨路（一期）的景观整治改造之后，对南海大道（二期）、蛇口老街+海昌街、后海大道（南段）、南山大道、南新路、东滨路（二期）、居仙大厦进行改造整治，改造内容包括建筑里面、路面、人行道铺面、广告招牌等。

Street Reconstruction, Quality Nanshan
The 6 + 1 Urban Improvement Project is a continuation of the Nanshan District Government’s street renovation project. Last year, Nanshan renovated the appearences of Shekou New Street, Haiyue Road, Xuefu Road, Shahe Intersection, Liuxian Main Street, Zhuguang Road, Nanhai Main Street (part one), Construction Street, Shahe West Road, and Dongbin Street (part one). This year, Nanshan will renovate Nanhai Main Street (part two), Shekou Old Street + Nanchang Street, Houhai Main Street (southern portion), Nanshan Main Street, New Nan Road, Dongbin Road (part two), and Juxian Building. Renovations include: building interiors, street fronts, sidewalks and storefronts, and billboards.

鲤鱼门： more landfill

Posted on by

gateway to the coast that used to be, liyumen

school has been open almost four weeks and my life is finally settling down. this weekend, i was back on the nantou peninsula and instead of walking along houhai, i walked along the yuehai side. (facing guanzhou, right near the western railway station which connects shenzhen to hunan.)

in the early 1990s, liyumen was a beach front resort area, somewhat modeled after the hong kong fishing port of the same name, where good seafood might be eaten relatively cheaply. the shenzhen version included saunas, and massage parlors, and a very large badmitten court. over the past fifteen years,land reclamation has proceeded and liyumen is now a good half mile inland. however, the land has not yet been developed and is instead used to park and repair container trucks, which transfer goods from nanshan factories to chiwan port, just around what remains of nanshan mountain.

so liyumen constitutes a strange kind of timewarp, both as memorial to what used to be a shenzhen resort area and as a transition between industrial nantou and the new highrises that are being planned, please visit.

南山村：villages, villages everywhere except in view

Posted on by

dangerous housing notice

several days ago, yang qian and i walked from nanshan to beitou village by way of xiangnan village. together, the three villages are strung along a narrow alley that was once the main road connecting nantou county seat to shekou. the villages have been surrounded on all sides and are invisible from the main roads.

i keep photographing these villages because they remain, for me, what makes shenzhen unique. it is the tension between cosmopolitan versions of modernity and village versions of modernity that drives shenzhen development. it is the form of ghettoization here.

so, images from that walk.

珠光村: transformations

Posted on by

wall separating village from new housing development

this morning i walked through zhuguang village in xili, one of nanshan’s subdistricts. the further one gets from downtown and the nantou peninsula, the larger the villages and the less centralized the planning. in zhuguang, village industry abuts traditional housing abuts new village housing circa 1985 and 1995 abuts new upper middle class housing development… a wall separates village remnants from the new housing, segregating white collar families from migrant workers. in places like zhuguang, the process of partitioning off the remnants of older villages from the rest of the city is just starting and so easier to see. downtown, in contrast, the few remnant villages are completely walled in, except for a few doors. in shenzhen, this is the form of emergent ghettos: walled off villages, hidden from view behind high-rise complexes and rows of tiled new village housing. sense of layout, here.

oyster update

Posted on by

oyster coastline, july 2007

on june 4, 2007, in time for the opening of the western corridor bridge, the nanshan district argricultural bureau announced that it had successfully completed the “shekou dongjiaotou coastal fishing and oyster farmers cleanup (蛇口东角头海域渔蚝排的清理工作)”. in a city that otherwise presents itself as having no history, the cleanup heralds the end of an era. oysters have been farmed in nanshan for roughly 1,000 years. along with the nanshan sweet pear and lychees, oysters formed the “nanshan three treasures (南山三宝)”.

when i first came to shenzhen university, there were oyster farmers working the old houhai coastline. i walked out of the campus and looked to the horizon, where the binhai expressway was under construction. as the houhai land reclamation area grew, the oyster farmers were pushed further and further west. in july 2003, i photographed remnants of that community at dongjiaotou and seaworld. of course, the seaworld community followed the coastline further and further out, remaking the land (photographed in january 2007). now the few remaining oyster farmers live on boats, unable to set up homes and processing centers on land. inland, remnants of the former oyster coastline still lay at the feet of upscale shekou. so, pictures, again.

oct loft: enculturing shenzhen

Posted on by

remaking industrial shenzhen: pedestrian street, oct loft

space by space, shenzhen is transforming its industrial self. at the same time that tianmian is remaking its factories into design studios, overseas chinese town (oct) is transforming its factories into a more explicitly bohemian art space. those factories that aren’t being transformed, are being razed to make way for upscale residential areas. gentrification in a generation, before anyone had time to grow up in an industrial city and miss anything about it.

this weekend, i visited oct loft (one year anniversary web release here) this weekend. the area is still under construction, but tea houses, restaurants, studios, and the contemporary art center have opened. along with he xiangning museum of art, the art center is holdoing a month-long exhibit called “abstraction is an expression of freedom (抽象是一种关于自由的表达).” the exhibit will tour hong kong, beijing, and then new york.　art center’s director huang zhuan provides an explanation of their inspiration, here. as at the open ink painting, there’s an urge to make china’s past contemporary.

two details struck me about the space. first, like tianmian, oct loft’s industrial facelift entails replacing cement walls with glass. so the structure of the buildings remain, but now its all shiny and exposed. lots of black as well. second, the quality of the exhibition suggests an anti-dafen village moment. indeed, when i met several of the young men involved in getting this project up and going, one was vehement about separating what he was doing from dafen. such are the debates over “professional” versus “commercial” art in shenzhen, itself a telling distinction.

take a walk through OCT loft and compare with transformations in tianmian.

后海新村: more houhai, again

Posted on by

houhai tianhou

saturday morning, houhai new village, where the houhai tianhou once gazed out on houhai harbor and now sits back from houhai road, among shade trees and handshake buildings, her view blocked by cars and housing developments. those pictures, here.

also, at some point when i wasn’t paying attention, nanyou and chuangye roads became nanshan road. on my 2004 map, the road has the old names, which mark the border between nanyou and shekou neighborhoods. my 2006 map has the new names. i’m looking for a 2005 map to see when the change happened. interesting because it points to the continuing subordination of shekou to nanshan district. once, long ago, shekou was directly under the central government, and was only brought under district control in the early 1990s. but then again, the district system only came into play in the mid-1990s, but that’s not the story i’m telling here. nevertheless, i did wander past the old nanyou building and take a picture of it. again, interesting for its mid-1980s state of the art, both architecturally and in terms of landscape. (nanshan road runs parrallel to houhai road, and before the completion of the binhai expressway was the main road connecting the nantou peninsula to shenzhen by way of shennan road.)


nanyou building, shenzhen state-of-the-art, mid 1980s

second random thought of the houhai village walk. shenzhen is full of buildings from the late 1980s and early 1990s that have never used air-conditioner casings. the casings, attached to the buildings and located next to windows, were designed for small air-conditioners. presumably, once shenzheners could afford air-conditioners, they went for the bigger, better, colder variety. so empty casings and air-conditioners variously attached to the sides of buildings. as part of the beautify nanshan campaign, these randomly placed air-conditioners are now being caged.


never-used air-conditioner casings

stem cell therapy in nanshan

Posted on by

what we don’t know about where we live.

it turns out that nanshan hospital, yes the nanshan hospital where i went for chinese medical treatments in the late nineties, the same nanshan hospital located just up the street from shenzhen university, where i lived and taught for years, is a center of stem cell therapy. indeed, it seems they recruit patiants abroad for treatments that they can’t get in their own country. an articlein businessweek introduces the controversy surrounding the work. or you can check out the shenzhen beike biotechnology website.

i’m sitting here stunned. not by my own ignorance, which increasingly feels like my most loyal companion, nor even by this version of shenzhen’s rush to an international future, which has been the city’s raison d’tre for over 25 years now, nor even, truth be told, by the ways the beike company seems to be exploiting these stories; testimonial advertizing is one of the traditions of my native land. no, i’m simply stunned. i don’t know how to comment on these stories, their existance, they way they circulate, how they are used. i’m grasping for a theory to explain what seems to be happening and the theory isn’t coming, or isn’t there to call up.

perhaps i just don’t know where to draw the ethical line. i don’t know if i’m for or against untested therapy. if for it, i know i’d support universal access, rather than letting the market determine access. if there’s not enough money or stem cells for everyone who needs treatment to get it, does that mean the treatment should be stopped until equal access is possible?

in the meantime, i turn to the comforts of close reading. one of the more fascinating aspects of this whole process is the role of the internet. patients have blogged and blog about their experiences, including pre-treatment conditions, what the treatment is like, and post-treatment improvements/regressions. the stories themselves are moving–from hopelessness to hope, and the courage that moves them. and yet. i’m stunned.

you can find a blogroll of these testimonial blogs at the beike site. i first stumbled upon these blogs through richard’s venture, a new blog. many of the patients use blogspot, which is blocked in the mainland, but if you’re reading this and in the mainland, you know how to get around the firewall. if not, does anyone know of chinese-language sites about beike? or is it a company that is designed to bring foreigners to china, kinda of like the adoption centers in guangzhou? another international practice that leaves me stunned.