Tag Archives: shenzhen identity

设计之都： graffiti art, shenzhen

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the new look of tianmian–city of design

it’s the third annual industrial arts fair in shenzhen. last year this time, fat bird did a series of improvised performances at the fair. this year, the fair came to tianmian! specifically, city of design, the ongoing project to upgrade old urban village shenzhen hosted the first three-city (guangzhou, hong kong, shenzhen) graffiti competition. a few pics, here.

now, i don’t know where or how these artists actually applied to compete; i haven’t seen any of the shenzhen artists’ work around the city. not that means anything in and of itself, much happens that i miss because i’m busy elsewhere. but. i’ve taken pictures of graffiti in the past. i’ve taken pictures of overpainting. but in over five years of walking and photographing the shenzhen, i haven’t seen any graffiti approaching the quality on display. interesting questions: where do these graffiti artists actually work? where are their other projects? will the city actually heed shenzhen t.v.’s call for more graffiti art throughout the city?

all this to call attention to the ways in which shenzhen continues its pursuit of culture in government approved forms. more specifically, its pursuit of culture as a viable economic investment. the industrial arts fair is the most obvious example. government regulation, promotion, and investment is also making dafencun into something of a brandname. this year, in tianmian graffiti art is being promoted as a happy alternative to industrial manufacturing as the livelihood of urban villages.

that said, fat bird’s most “successful” projects have been in collaboration with government entities. indeed, our next performance installation is also made possible by a government agency. we’re just paid less.

upgrading the shenzhen environment

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shenzhen’s recent decision to neonize the city prompts today’s entry.

from 2006 through 2008, the city plans mto upgrade the investment environment, which includes upgrading the living environment: cleaning up rivers, planting more trees, building recreational bike trails (in overseas chinese town), giving old buildings a fresh paint job, and generally making shenzhen look better. the city’s decision to redefine the investment environment in terms of quality of life points to a shift in values that relative wealth has brought. it may also reflect shenzhen residents’ concern for their children, who will not be moving back to their parents’ hometowns. over the past few years, there people in government and society who want to do more than just make money in shenzhen seem to have been increasingly influential. they want to make shenzhen into a nice place to live and many of their projects reflect this goal, rather than bottom line economic thinking for which the city has been famous. as part of larger historical trends, the new ascendance of socially conscious may indicate a larger shift from viewing shenzhen as a place of transit to making shenzhen into a “hometown”.

nevertheless, being shenzhen, there is always an over-the-top moment. one of the more iconic decisions of upgrading the environments has been to encase old (read: too expensive to raze) buildings in neon tubes, so that at night, five story neon walls project computer generated images. some of these neon walls extend 12 stories into the nighttime sky. during the day, the buildings just look caged. unfortunately, my camera isn’t high-tech enough to take pictures of the new designs. however, the government assures us that all the lighting is environmentally friendly, again, in keeping with shenzhen’s drive to upgrade the investment environment.

福华路：manifest history

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generations: alley connecting shennan and fuhua roads

walking along fuhua road toward the shenzhen traditional chinese medicine hospital, i suddently realized that in shenzhen history appears as absurd and often surreal juxtapositions of architectural styles. almost thirty years (actually 27, and yes, in shenzhen we count) into reform, it is possible to identify “eras”, which often came and went in less than five years. architectural examples from every era still stand, although some are being spruced up, and others have been razed, to be replaced by bigger, taller, and always more expensive structures. rarely do any of the buildings, let alone a street or neighborhood, seem to have been designed according to a common plan. the disorientation i feel when walking along roads like fuhua, which were built in the 1980s and early 90s and no longer fit into shenzhen du jour echoes the abrupt sensation of entering another city i have when turning from an upscale boulevard into a new village. fuhua was paved at a time when streets comformed to the lay of the land. shops and lowrise buildings therefore stand both above and below street level, the hills that once defined futian’s lychee orchards still beneath our feet. in visceral contrast, after 1995 it’s all flat lines. manifestations of shenzhen history, here.

赤湾天后宫：vexed tradition

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tianhou brigade

In 2004, the Tianhou Museum and the Nanshan Mazu Culture Research Association edited a volume of couplets and poetry that had been written in honor of the Tianhou. There were two first place couplets:

赤湾伊始，敞帮门，发舟旅，西洋七下，铺开海上丝绸路；
天后岂终，携郑坚，邀邓公，南洋千寻，赢得人间锦锈春。（作者：种显泽）
(In the beginning, Chiwan opened its gates, sent out Zheng He’s ships to the four oceans, establishing the maritime Silk Road;
In the end, Tianhou lead Minister Zheng, greeted Lord Deng, a southern port of 1,000 miles, earning a brilliant spring.　by: Zhong Xianze)

赤湾旭日膦人精，
天后慈云笼海疆。（作者：吴北如）
(Chiwan dawns, looks toward humanity,
Tianhou’s benevolent clouds cover the seas.　by: Wu Rubei)

These two poems illustrate the contradiction between official culture and local belief that enables the Chiwan Tianhou Temple to operate. Legally, the Temple grounds constitute the Tianhou Museum, where the Nanshan Mazu Culture Research Association is based. Specifically, in Shenzhen, the largest and most public temples are officially museums and research centers. However, the contributions and activities of believers sustain the spaces as temples, especially on important holidays. Thus, in the first poem (and it was actually the gold first prize, the second poem was the silver first prize) emphasizes the Temple’s political importance, linking the voyages of the Ming eunich Zheng He to the open policies of Deng Xiaoping. In contrast, the second poem celebrates Tianhou’s divine benevolence.

Helen Hsu and others have written about the post-Mao resurgence of tradition throughout Guangdong. In Shenzhen, this resurgence has taken an interesting twist precisely because even though there are locals working to promote Tianhou, the museum and research association have been headed by immigrants from northern cities. Consequently, the two poems don’t only manifest a contradiction between “official” and “unofficial” culture—although many westerners like to paint Chinese public life in terms of an opposition between the Party and everybody else—but also between urban and rural belief systems, as well as northern and southern traditions. For most of the museum and research staff (and there are fewer then there were when I first went to the museum in 1997), allowing people to burn incense is a concession to local superstition. And yes, northern urban attitudes about Guangdong traditions can be as condescending as it sounds. Publicly, however, they take the route of the first poem, understanding Cantonese history and traditions within the scope of imperial China. At the same time, the few believers I’ve talked to, follow the route of the second poem, focusing on belief, and remaining quiet on the issue of national politics.

That said, there’s enough history at Chiwan’s Tianhou Temple to satisfy everyone, unless of course you don’t care about either imperial history or Tianhou’s benevolence. The temple was built at the end of the Song Dynasty, but achieved national prominence during the Ming Dynasty, when the Minister Zheng He led his famous maritime voyages to establish a maritime trade routes. During the second expedition, he and his crew ran into inclement weather of the coast of the Nantou Peninsula. Zheng He promised to restore the temple in return for Tianhou’s help in surviving the storm. She did help him and in the 8th year of the reign of the Yongle Emperor (1410), the Chiwan Tianhou Temple was restored.

The fame of the Chiwan Tianhou’s benevolence spread throughout the country and throughout the Ming and Qing Dynasties, believers—both official and unofficial, northern and southern, but all predominantly sailors or fishermen—continued to restore and add to the temple. At the beginning of the Nationalist era, Chiwan was the largest Tianhou temple in Guangdong with over one hundred and twenty buildings in the complex. Once the communists liberated Bao’an County (Shenzhen’s territorial precursor), the PLA moved into the facilities. In 1959-1960, many of the wood, tiles, and bricks from the temple were used to construct the Shenzhen Reservoir. It was only in 1992, that the recently established Nanshan District government began to restore the temple. The museum was officially opened in 1997 as part of efforts to prepare for the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty. It was, as many said at the time, recognition of the common cultural origins of Shenzhen and Hong Kong.

This weekend was the first time I had been back in a while. Not a believer, I chafe at paying the 15 rmb museum entrance fee, when the museum isn’t all that great. However, the changes suggest that elegant political poetry notwithstanding, the believers have slowly taken over and there may be times when visiting Tianhou is worth the price of admission. There are now monks on duty, telling fortunes and instructing people how to pray. There are rooms filled with multiple castings of the same god, where believers light incense. And one of the museum exhibition rooms has been turned over to photographs of important religious events at the temple, the largest being Tianhou’s birth on the 23 day of the third lunar month (this year, may 9). Indeed, the photography seems much in the spirit of the poetry competition: the museum staff’s attempt to get control of the space back, this time through public cultural events.

According to the Xin’an County Gazetteer, the Chiwan Tianhou Temple once held pride of place in the eight scenic areas of Xin’an (Bao’an County’s name during the Ming and Qing Dynasties). The other seven were: 梧岭天池，杯渡禅宗，参山乔木，卢山桃李，龙穴楼台，螯洋甘瀑，玉律汤湖. I don’t know what or where most of those sites are (although wuling must mean the wutong mountains in the east) and look forward to mapping them. However, what’s interesting here is the way historic records follow names rather than places. History as documentation and re-inscription with a vengence. In 1983, when the SEZ was established as administratively separate from New Bao’an County, all of the history from Bao’an county moved into Bao’an, even though most of that history had taken place in (what is now) Nanshan District. Chiwan, Shekou, and the County Seat at Nantou were the important historical sites. However, to find out pre-reform information on them, one must cross the second line into (what is now) Bao’an District and head to the Bao’an District Library. I remember talking with the editor of the last ever Bao’an Gazetteer. He did his research and oral history throughout the SEZ, but his office was in Bao’an County. At the time, I needed to carry my passport with me so that I could cross back into the SEZ after a visit. Of course, this is simply another variation on history in the Pearl River Delta, where scholars of Hong Kong history continue to refer to the SAR’s territorial precursor as Xin’an, without noting that the name changed in 1913. (Sometimes I suspect that Shenzheners’ attempts to annex Hong Kong by way of historical documentation is only matched by Hong Kong people’s efforts to write themselves as historically distinct from Shenzhen. Everyone sidesteps the issue by writing these historic trajectories from the Opium War on, where Hong Kong grows out of Xin’an, and then Shenzhen emerges out of Bao’an.)

This time, I kept noticing industrial parallels between the containers stacked up just outside the Temple Gate or loaded just beyond the Temple Walls and the brigades of god images. Little statues of Tianhou, Guanyin, and the God of Wealth were everywhere and never just one, instead in any room, there were shelves of the same statue, almost like a religious market, except they were all receiving incense. Brigades on view here. Questions about the vexed relationship between political-economy and faith, merely posed.

短信文化: text message culture

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dinner with beijing friends led, as it inevitably does, to conversation about why beijing and beijing people are the best. this time, text message culture (短信文化) was our point of departure.

according to wan ning and hu lin, all of a sudden people are text messaging their new year’s greetings to each other, rather than calling (as in years past) or sending cards through the mail (as in their childhood). moreover, the telephone companies, especially china mobile, encourage this behavior because every message sent is money earned. to that end, the said companies have allegedly hired couplet writers to come up with messages that will be mass forwarded to everyone on a particular calling list.

wan ning and hu lin also pointed out that beijing pizi write independent/non-corporate messages. (皮子: does anyone have a good translation for this term, which i understand as refering to rebels in the james dean way–young, disgruntled, hyper-individualistic men, who are also passionate, appealling to the rebelious heart beating beneath everyone else’s staid exteriors. yang qian adds that 皮子 are darker and more cynical than 愤青, angry young men, who grow up to be 大愤, big angries, which puns the express, big shits…) anyway, they said that if you’ve lived in beijing, you can always tell the difference between “factory eggs” and the “farm fresh”. i can’t so i’ve posted a few new year’s greetings in no particular order (again with the caveat, loosely translated and always in need of friendly correction):

友情提示未来社会：朋友比领导重要，能力比成绩重要，健康毕业绩重要，水平比文凭重要，情商比智商重要，交友比结婚重要，节日比上班重要。祝生蛋，新年快乐！ (friendly reminder, future society: friends are more important than leaders, skill is more important than grades, health is more important than outstanding achievement, talent is more important than a diploma, making friends is more important that marriage, holidays are more important than work days. wishing you a merry christmas and happy new year!)

2007年到了。别忘了给孩子们讲讲很久很久很久以前的事：那时候天还是蓝的，水也是绿的，肉是可以放心吃的，耗子还是怕猫的，法庭是讲理的，结婚是先谈恋爱的，理发店是只管理发的，药是可以治病的，医生是救死扶伤的，拍电影是不要培导演睡觉的，照相是要穿衣服的，欠钱是要还的，孩子的爸爸是明确的，学校是不图挣钱的，白痴是不能当教授的，卖狗肉是不能挂羊头的，结婚了是不能泡MM的。祝你新年快乐！（2007 has arrived. don’t forget to tell the children about how things were long, long, long ago: in those days, the sky was blue, the water was torquoise, you could eat meat without worrying, rats feared cats, the courts listened to reason, marriage came after courtship, hair salons only gave haircuts, medicine cured illness, doctors saved the dying and cared for the injured, you could make a movie without sleeping with the director, you had to keep your clothes on in a photograph, loans had to be repaid, a child’s paternity was clear, schools weren’t profit-oriented, idiots couldn’t become professors, you couldn’t pass off dog meat as mutton, after marriage you couldn’t play around with young women. happy new year!)

wan ning’s commentary: this message had changed since he first saw it. he believes that people are editing and adding to messages before forwarding them to their friends.

忍养安，乐养寿，爱养富，善养德，诚养誉，礼养谊，正养胆，廉养义，古养今，和谐养文明，时光养友情，睡眠养容颜，运动养健康！恭祝新年好！(endurance nourishes tranquility, happiness nourishes longevity, goodness nourishes virtue, sincerity nourishes reputation, courtesy nourishes friendship, uprightness nourishes courage, honesty nourishes righteousness, the past nourishes the present, sincerity nourishes reputation, time nourishes friendship, sleep nourishes beauty, exercise nourishes health! happy new year!)

translation note: 养 is one of those characters rich in cultural meaning. in addition to meaning “nourishes”, it can also mean “breeds” as in endurance breeds tranquility. the important point is that whatever or whoever does the 养ing takes pride of place in that the 养ee (so to speak) depends upon 养er for its existance.

什么是爱情？色呗。什么是温柔？面呗。什么是幽默？贫呗。什么是艺术？脱呗。什么是仗义？傻呗。什么是朋友？你呗。什么人最记得祝你元旦快乐？俺XXX呗。(what is love? sex. what is tenderness? being a wimp. what is art? stripping. what is having principles? stupidity. what is a friend? you. who is most likely to remember to wish you a happy new year? me, XXX.)

hu lin: you can tell this is fresh off the beijing farm. only beijing people use the expression “面” to mean wimp.

translation note: 呗 (bei) implies a cyncial finality–last word on the subject. 俺 (an3) is funny because it’s a northeastern expression for “I”. northeasterners remain a source of constant amusement for the rest of the country, but especially beijing. as soon as they hear 俺, beijingers start laughing because they know the non-northeastern speaker is cracking jokes (耍贫嘴), a form of verbal spoofing (恶搞). one of the funnier practitioners of this art is xue cun (雪村) from jilin. his website includes the wonderful flash version of his breakaway hit “northeasterners are all living leifengs (东北人都是活雷锋)” as well as recent songs. a fun aside and in the spirit of xue cun is cui jian’s flash version of “net virgin”.

快年底了，地下的先烈们纷纷打来电话询问。江姐问：国民党被推翻了么？答：被阿扁推翻了。董存端问：劳动人民还当牛做马么？答：不劳动了，都下岗了。吴琼花问：姐妹们都翻身得解放了吗？答：思想解放了，都当小姐了。杨子荣问：土匪都剿灭了么？答：都改当公安和城管了。杨白劳问：地主都打倒了吗？答：都入党了。雷锋问：那资本家呢？答：都进人大和政协了！刘胡兰问：同志们都藏好了吗？答：都隐身上网了。毛主席问：大家现在都在忙什么呢？答：都在斗地主。毛主席：那我就放心了！(the end of the year will soon be here, and so the martyres from below are calling to ask about the current situation.

sister jiang,”has the kmt been overthrown?”

answer: by a bian (陈水扁, chen shuibian).

dong cunduan, “have the workers ceased to work like oxen and horses?”

answer: they’ve all ceased working.

wu qionghua, “have my sisters been liberated.”

answer: their thinking has been liberated and know they’re all young ladies (小姐 also means escort).

yang zirong, “have the bandits been erradicated?”

answer: they’ve changed status and jointed the security forces and city police.

yang bailao, “have the landlords been over thrown?”

answer: they’ve joined the party.

lei feng, “what about the capitalists?”

answer: they’re now in the people’s congress and people’s political consultative committee.

liu hulan, “are our comrades safely hidden?”

answer: they’ve hidden their identity and gone online.

mao zedong, “what is everybody busy doing?”

answer: struggling with landlords.

mao zedong, “then i can rest easy!”)

i leave it to the reader to make the relevant political and gender analysis.

checked off

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yesterday, in my administrative capacity, i was filling out three forms that the shenzhen public security bureau, division of exit-entry (深圳市公安局出入境) requires requires employers to submit for their foreign employees. the one unexpected lining in this otherwise redundant raincloud (we have actually submitted all this information previously, albeit on different forms), was the drop down windows that required me to choose an answer because filling in the blanks was not part of the program. i hadn’t realized that human beings came in six possible “sex-genders (性别)” [female (女), male changed into a female (男性改为女性), unexplained sex (未说明的性别), male (男), female changed into a male (女性改为男性), and unknown sex (未知的性别)], but only four “skin colors (肤色)” [yellow (黄), white (白), black (黑), and brown (棕)]. the data form with the funky drop down windows (外国人居留情况记表 foreigners residence situation form) is available online.

updates, or, where fat bird fits in the commodification of shenzhen’s emergent cultural landscape

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the following two updates on godot and the nanfang daily’s cultural avant garde popularity contest give a sense of where fat bird fits into the commodification of shenzhen’s emergent cultural landscape. it also gives a sense of contradictions within this landscape and the various ways actors are positioning themselves to shape shenzhen’s cultural scene as well as to control the resources that have been both budgeted to and generated by that scene.


godot cast

update number one: godot, we performed on december 28 and 29. after both shows, members of the audience made comments about the play that point to diverse and sometimes contradictory assumptions about what shenzhen theatre should be. significantly, comments were grounded in the subjunctive (what theatre “should be”) rather than the declarative (what theatre “is”) because most of fat bird’s audience assume that shenzhen lacks culture and (therefore) fat bird is helping to establish the conditions for local arts. accordingly, most actively encourage fat bird, whether or not they personally like what we do.

from a professional director, trained in beijing and semi-retired to shenzhen, “not bad (还不错). godot leaves room for directorial interpretation so it was interesting to see what judi did with it.”

from an elementary school teacher, who hasn’t seen much theatre, “this was fun, but i didn’t understand what you were trying to do. maybe next time.”

from a foreign teacher, who doesn’t understand chinese, “now i think i’ll go home and read the script.”

how does this fit into the commodification of shenzhen’s cultural landscape? although fat bird began preparing godot outside official auspices, in september, cong rong (从容), secretary of the shenzhen theatre arts federation (深圳市戏剧家协会) approached us about participating in shenzhen’s creative creative december theatre (创意１２月剧场), program here. now, cong rong wasn’t given enough money to stage an entire festival, but in order to get funding next year she still had to produce a festival. this meant she had to come up with pieces that had been independently produced, but would nevertheless be part of creative december. she also decided to use most of the funding to produce two of her own plays, the language of flowers《有一种花的语言》and blue symphony 《蓝色交响曲》, hiring professional directors and actors at standard rates. this decision meant that she had to find collaborators who would work for a nominal stipend. her choices for collaborators included shenzhen university department of acting, the various cultural bureaus of the district governements, and fat bird. i’m not sure if she approached any of the district cultural bureaus, but she did approach shenzhen university and fat bird. shenzhen university had two plays that could go up in december, into the woods, and basement dwellers《坑人》, while fat bird was preparing godot. both the university directors and fat bird remain more interested in performance venues than revenue, consequently, the creative december theatre consisted of the aforementioned plays.

this is the second year that shenzhen has sponsored creative december (创意１２月), a program designed to encourage cultural development in the city, combatting or countering what has come to be ironically known as “desert theory (沙漠理论),” which refers to ideas about why shenzhen continues to lack world reknowned cultural institutions and artists. complete program and contacts, here. tellingly, one of the activities designed to encourage general citizen participation in creative december was an online competion to select the top ten shenzhen cultural activity brands (文化活动品牌), including: the much hyped annual china (shenzhen) international cultural industry fair (中国（深圳）国际文化产业博览交易会), the relatively obscure popularizing sociology week (社会科学普及周), and the provincially supported international tourism festival (深圳国际旅游文化节). all of the twenty candidates for best cultural activity brand have come into existence in the past few years. more interestingly, perhaps, is that efforts to create art and spaces for the arts in shenzhen are explicitly tied to developing cultural markets, even as shenzhen’s top cultural products (animation, computer games, advertizing) are dismissed as not being cultural precisely because these industries have been so commericially successful (see this entry for my take on fat bird’s participation in the 2006 cultural industry fair). at any rate, for the curious, the commplete cultural activities brand ballot is here although results have not yet been posted.

update number two: contest results, as you know, the nanfang daily nominated fat bird as one of shenzhen’s top ten cultural avant garde labels or tags (文化先锋标签), which i mistranslated as “postcard” in a previous post. thanks to a technological intervention, we placed second. it turns out that the voting was not limited by computer or site visits, so anyone who went to the site could vote for fat bird as often as they wanted. accordingly, i went the first night and happily voted one hundred times. however, by day two, we were already about 10,000 votes behind the leader and i gave up, realizing that i wouldn’t spend more time voting than i already had, the hard realities of clicking tempering what might have been my shameless pursuit of first place. on day three, one of our members downloaded an automatic clicker program, that hit the vote button once a second for as long as the program ran. given the final tallies, i suspect we weren’t the only candidate resorting to technology to buttress our populary. as qin wei said, “i’m not even computer literate and i found this program. of course the other candidates have already downloaded their own, if they haven’t already.” for those in need, an automatic clicker can be downloaded here.

this popularity contest was part of a two-day conference on the avant garde city (先锋城市). this conference ran both parallel to and within creative december, with a slightly different focus on cultural production, focusing on the socio-cultural meaning of the avant garde. this conference gained its political import from the fact that in 2005, the shenzhen bureau of urban planning published its 2030 urban development strategy (深圳２０３０城市发展策略), which called for shenzhen to become a pioneering global city with sustainable development (可持续发展的全球先锋城市). what’s interesting here, and the nanfang daily’s point of intervention is the word “xianfeng”, which is usually translated as “avant garde” and not “pioneering”, although both definitions appear in the dictionary. in previous development strategies, shenzhen’s pioneering function was described with the word “kaituo 开拓,” which originally meant (long, long ago) to remove rocks from a field but came to mean the emperor’s opening of new administrative territory. so in the eighties, for example, the first generation of shenzhen immigrants were called territory openers (开拓者: pioneers) and not the avant garde (先锋: pioneers). moreover, this is the first time shenzhen has explicitly called for efforts to strengthen its leadership position (vis a vis the rest of the country), which had previously been assumed, so that in the 1996-2010 shenzhen urban plan, for example, the city aimed to become an international modern city (国际现代化城市), which was, at the time, a pioneering position.

at the conference, expert guests produced two lists: one of china’s avant garde cities (shenzhen placed fifth overall) and one of shenzhen’s avant garde labels. alas, fat bird didn’t place in the top ten even though we performed “this body, this movements” at the conference and yang qian was one of the invited experts. neverthelesss, what was interesting here was that although the experts focused on creativity, they nevertheless designated the meaning of avant garde in political terms: “expermentation, investigation, tolerance, and freedom (实验、探索、包容、自由).” consequently, their list of cultural avant garde labels included, like the cultural brands of creative december, institutions rather than individuals.

the nanfang daily conference on the avant garde city was designed to provide a space for thinking critically about the position of creativity in shenzhen’s cultural development. in contrast, creative december was organized to promote city activities. consequently, this december fat bird participated in two very different versions of what shenzhen’s cultural landscape should look like. significantly, both these versions represent views held by shenzheners who are positioned differently with respect to the chinese state apparatus. the shenzhen theatre arts federation is connected to but not directly under the shenzhen bureau of culture, which makes them financially dependent on the city, unless they can come up with commercially viable theatre. the nanfang daily is connected to but not directly under the guangdong ministry of propaganda. this makes them answerable to guangdong, rather than any particular city. as such, the nanfang daily has actually created local markets for itself by being critical not only of shenzhen, but all of guangdong’s cities, except guangzhou, the provincial capital. when i asked several newspaper reporters why guangdong tolerated criticism of its second city,the response was usually a chuckle and then social analysis.

“guangdong doesn’t like shenzhen,” one explained, “because the city is too independent. it answers primarily to beijing rather than guangzhou.”

“it [the nanfang daily] is using media events to create a shenzhen market,” another reasoned. “the special economic zone daily and other papers still have to listen to the shenzhen government. the only way to compete is to create an alternative shenzhen voice.”

a more optimistic journalist suggested that there were a few officials who wanted to increase freedom of the press in china. “after all, if shenzhen succeeds in becoming an experimental, investigative, tolerant, and free avant garde city, it will be good for the country.”

synopsis: fat bird, like other shenzhen art groups and inviduals, survives by navigating these diverse political currents, which are shaping the city’s cultural landscape. sometimes, straddling the fence works. both the organizers of creative december and the avant garde city paid fat bird to participate in their events, making 2006 the first year we almost broke even! happy new year.

vote for fat bird!!!

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we’ve been nominated in the south china daily’s “shenzhen’s btop ten avant-garde culture postcard（深圳十大先锋文化标签评选）” competition. we’re not yet sure who nominated us, or how we got on the list but we’re up against a building and dafen oil painting village, among other examplars of the shenzhen avant-garde. this in itself is interesting; these postcard competitions seem to be about branding (shenzhen as a hotbed of art as known through its architecture, museums, classical pianists, and university?!) and also about turning these examplars into images that can be put on a postcard. in which case, fat bird can be made equivalent to an artist’s village that sells reproductions to wallmart. what’s more, the picture on the ballet isn’t of us, but from the theatre practice’s september visit. if none of this fazes you, and you if you find online popularity contests amusing, please go here to cast your vote for 深圳胖鸟剧团. we’re contestant number 27 . go here to read the southern daily’s take on our approach to performance.

mallratting

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are you a coco girl?

lately our eating habits have changed. we’re spending less time in small restaurants and more time in what might be provisionally called high-end chinese chains, which are located in new upscale malls. unlike upscale malls built in the late 90s, which emphasized designer shopping, but american fastfood dining (in diwang, for example, the chains include kfc and tgi fridays and there’ a taco bell in the mix), these new malls seem to have better teashops and restaurants. the food is better, the decor is nicer, and the spaces more relaxed; the emphasis is on pleasurable dining, but pleasure all around. indeed, these new malls offer some of the cleanest and aesthetically pleasing environments in shenzhen. my latest occassional hangout is coco park, or 购物公园 (shopping park), where super cow provides really tasty grilled meats and several japanese resturants tempt me. at the garden city mall (花园城), next to the shekou wallmart, another chain 6,000 restaurant (六千馆) serves a delicious twist on the hotpot. it is located next to a very popular dim sum restaurant, where on weekends families and friends wait as long as an hour for a table.

in jr high and high school, i spent an embarrassing amount of time at the rockaway mall, watching movies and eating junkfood. roughly 25 years later i find myself once again mallratting, but this time it really is for the food.

和平县阳明镇新塘村: field-tripping

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新塘村：new tang village, sunrise

the attitudes of young shenzhers, especially the children of the city’s upper classes, confound their elders, who really don’t know what to do about a generation that hasn’t experienced material poverty. almost thirty years into the shenzhen experiment, a certain material standard of living has become the norm among these children. they expect to have new clothes, pocket money for snacks, and the latest technological gadgets. indeed, if newspaper reports are to be believed, they are a wasteful and lazy group, who take long showers, play online games, and shirk homework responsibilities; in the language of american pop sociology, shenzhen’s young people think they’re entitled not only to what they have, but also to whatever they want.

to counteract their children’s sense of entitlement, wealthy shenzheners tell stories about impoverished childhoods and hungry farmers. these stories are as unsuccessful as those my parents told me: when i was a child, we walked four miles to school; eat all your food because there are starving children in africa. on the one hand, i think these stories fail because children don’t have the experience to imagine beyond their immediate lives. on the other hand, i think these stories fail because children know (even as i knew) that our parents aren’t going to radically restructure their lives to help either starving africans or farmers. instead, these stories aim to change the behavior of children, not to ameliorate social inequality.

nevertheless, adults still try and children still play along. on the 26th and 27th of october, our middle school went on a field trip to greater tang village, yangming township in heping county, in heyuan city (河源市和平县阳明镇大塘村) which is considered an impoverished area (贫困区). according to the heping township officials who hosted us, the official definition of “impoverished” earns less than the national average income but still has enough to eat. usually, families can afford school fees up through middle school, but often have difficulty meeting high school costs, let alone university expenses. according to a people’s daily report the 1,000 odd villagers that make up greater tang village (an administrative territory which is composed of 15 “natural” villages) demonstrate the fact that even if the richest villages are in guangdong province, their are villages that haven’t started getting rich, let alone keep up with the coastal villages. in chinese the expression for these poor cousins is “后无追兵” or “no following soldiers”.

the purpose of the trip was two-fold. our school wanted to give our students a new perspective on the privileges they enjoy as wealthy shenzheners as compared to impoverished students. our yangming middle school hosts wanted their students to be inspired to study even harder to break out of the cycle of poverty. as we discovered during the two-day fieldtrip, many of the yangming students had older brothers and sisters who had dropped out of middle school or not gone to high school in order to begin laboring in places like shenzhen. indeed, a fifteen year-old ninth grader told me she wouldn’t bother taking the high school entrance exam and go right to work after graduation from middle school next june.

the yangming high schools arranged host families for our students and teachers. two of us were assigned to a home, where we ate, slept and were shown the village. yang ming eigth grader, huang shanshan hosted me and my student nicole. shanshan and her family live in new tang village (新塘村), one of the 15 natural villages in the greater tang administrative village nestled between rocky slopes, rice paddies, chicken coops, and family gardens. xin tang village is a hakka (客家) settlement, where paths and shared walls connect the homes to each other, creating a densely populated space. there is a clear spacial division between the village and cultivated areas. indeed, the relative care given to the rice paddies and gardens was striking in comparison to the village proper, where it seemed people took care of inside their homes, but did not care for common areas, which were given over to garbage and scavanging chickens. people seemed to spend a great deal of time outside on paths, working and chatting.

nicole and i shared the only bed in the house; shanshan and her parents slept upstairs on mats. the house was made from local bricks covered by cement, wooden beams supported the ceiling. the first floor consisted of a main room and a kitchen. the main room was divided into two sections, a sleeping section, where the bed was and a social section, with a table, television, and several chairs, some plastic, two made of bamboo. the wash room was a concrete room built next to their pump. for our evening wash, shanshan heated water in the kitchen and then added pump water to adjust the temperature. the outhouse was a separate brick building with a trench dug into the earth. above the trench was a bamboo plank, where i squatted several times a day to relieve myself.

shanshan and her parents moved me with their generousity. they killed a chicken for us and prepared fresh vegetables, eggs, and homegrown rice. when we left, they gave us fresh eggs, homegrown peanuts, and special deep-fried potato cakes for the trip. yangming township gave us a box of kiwi fruits that were locally grown. indeed, their generousity eased the relationship, enabled it to move beyond a tour of poverty. i had feared that the trip would turn the villagers, especially our hosts, into exhibits in living museum and would turn us into tourists. the school had instructed students to give money to their host families as a token of their appreciation, and much thought had been given to what would be the correct amount: not too much so that the families were embarrassed but not so little that they lost materially by hosting us. although the act of hosting didn’t unmake our material inequality, it nevertheless did ameliorate some of the awkwardness of the visit. it certainly reminded me that each of us has something to give and that all of us have a responsibility to accept what is given graciously.

a native of longgang, shenzhen, nicole is also hakka. she enjoyed the trip because it brought back memories of her childhood before her family moved to downtown shenzhen. she grew up in a village like shanshan’s and used to sleep on the same kind of bed. more importangly, she remembered the beauty of the countryside and wondered about why modernization meant the destruction of beautiful places. specifically, as part of shenzhen’s ongoing expansion, her natal village will soon be razed and an upscale housing development built in its place. also, nicole said that she only understood about 70% of what shanshan and her parents said and preferred to speak with them in mandarin, reminding me again of how many variants of local languages (方言) there actually are. after all, heyuan is only a 3 hour drive away from shenzhen.

the belief that youth can be motivated by direct experience inspires this project. more specifically, adults in both places expressed that more communication (交流) between students from both areas would be beneficial. on the one hand, shenzhen youth might learn humility and social responsibility, while yangming youth might learn their are higher goals than working in a factory or restaurant. consequently, our schools hope to establish a hand-in-hand (手拉手) relationship with the yangming first and second middle schools, enabling students and teachers to visit each other.

i hope that this kind of experience might accomplish what exhortations rarely do–inspire us adults to help our children change the world. i know that this experience manifests one, more traditional (in the socialist sense of the word) meaning of the shenzhen experiment, which not only aimed to open china to the world, but also to improve the material wellbeing of all chinese people. in fact, at 63 our school principal is a child of the revolution and she still approaches education with an eye to socialist goals. as a friend of mine said, if china can improve the living standard of all chinese people, bringing stability to its internal affairs, it will have contributed to world peace. one could say the same for the united states and that we start one friendship at a time. i have posted some fieldtrip memories in my galleries.