Shanghai Vixen

Okay. I’m actually inspired to start a category for Shabi Laowaiage. Some of the worst are at it again, although at least this time being stupid without culturally condescending.

I think Brilly, Ms. Piggy, me and other sinofied caucasian chicks need to form a viligante squad, whapping Laowai over the head with Anime mallets whenever they act Shabi. Those inflatable clubs sold on Huaihai and Nanjing Lus on Guoqingjie could do the trick.

I also think we should call the cops on these Bad Cat shabis (giving felines AND foreigners a bad rep) - although they would probably think it all “cool” and “alternative” to get arrested in China. Stupid cunts.

Hey ya’ll!

It’s BYO pillow! Seriously. Why not? We’re bringing on a whole new flavor
to Times Square on Wednesday, May 23, and Shanghai will never know what hit
them! (literally)

The Plan:

Show up at Times Square Plaza a bit before 7. Wait til it strikes 7 PM and
start whacking (your pillow, that is) Fun guaranteed to ensue. Thanks to
those that made the Pajama Jam a fun success, see you Wednesday!

Date: This Wednesday, May 23
Time: 7 pm Start, arrive early
Place: Times Square Plaza, outdoors

Please sync your watches to:
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/city.html?n=237

Rules Pillow Fight

Tell your friends about Pillow Fight.
Tell your friends about Pillow Fight!!
Wait til it strikes 19:00.
Don’t hit people without pillows.
Don’t hit people with cameras.

May 4. It was the last day of Midi, and my penultimate day in Beijing. I had made plans to have dinner with the Cute Korean. However, I wanted to introduce Unmilitary and Seafood to the Midi organizers - and they kept flaking out/getting lost.

Eventually I located them, while already late for dinner and frantically texting Cute Korean. But, my Shanghaining, after a week of nasty snubs from nasty Beijingning, wanted to dump, about myriad issues. And I can never refuse friend dumpage or music scene supportage.

But: CK didn’t want to head out so late, he was barreling toards graduation. He is from a small rural town in SoKo, has bad relations with his family, impoverished background, so studying Mandarin and getting his masters in the Mainland, was his escape valve. His chance.

I cried inside, missing him on the 4th. 

I am not in love with the Cute Korean. But I do really love him. He is a good friend. And so, so beautiful. He is a lovely man who will be a wonderful partner to the lucky woman patient enough to land him. But I doubt it will be me.

I pursued the  Calvin Klein assignment in Beijing, half because I’m already friends with several staffers there; half to see the Cute Korean. I emailed as soon as I knew I was going. No response. I emailed. texted, called repeatedly; I’d fear impressions of stalkerdome if our friendship was different.

Instead: nothing. He has already returned to Korea, I suppse.

I shall continue to email him, but am getting no response. If he is coerced by the family he hates into an arranged marriage while in rural Korea, I shall forever kick myself: I lost a great guy, who loved me and I loved him, because we were uptight dorks. And cos those family pressures are much harder for those of you lucky enough to have families you still speak too.

Ours is such a far-ranging connection, from Miami to Shanghai to Beijing, I doubt he has vanished forever. I hope not.

…well, mostly. Attempting to be a photographer is tough, yet fun.

Bands: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lisamovius/sets/72157600212981374/

People: http://www.flickr.com/photos/lisamovius/sets/72157600209359579/

Backstage pics, a mixure of arty/bored and LS and other friends, coming soon. Plus loads more crowd shots.

Midi was great fun. (Fourteen hour days aside…) Photographing rock fashion for the laoban while visiting my jiejie the head(y) sound engineer. Mmmm.

At what point does farce become tragedy?

Can they co-exist, coopt?

Guangguang over tonight for martinis. Informing I am the sanist person from the insanist family she knows. Chabuduo. I started showing her my photo albums and old diaries, could not resist the peekage in.

I try to forget how madly in love Jifu and I were, how giddy and delerious we once were together. He has settled for much less; I never will. But it is my fault, ultimately: I dumped him first.

Then we stayed together anyway, but he cheated right left center. But I drove him to that. I just wish he had held out, married someone he was in love with, rather than the warm body of the month. I wish he had gotten back with the woman he loved and dumped me for before.

I see my pictures of us young, in love, crazily happy: it breaks my heart.

Since this is a romance-themed post anyhow, I will start out with an “Ohmygod!” factor. Some of you will recall Cali Boy, the ABC in LA I had a big crush on early last year. We met and flirted a lot online, met up in person twice, then he vanished.  Too bad, he is very cute if totally dorky and with a squeaky voice, and I would have enjoyed keeping him as a friend. My impression is that he is the sort of banana cake who is more into the white bread than the egg tarts.

Just now, I was browsing this hilarious but disturbing website Aznlover.com, dedicated to Asian men and the non-Asian women who love them (or who they wished loved them). Theoretically, a demographic I belong to, but this site takes the dehumanizing/exoticizing mutual fetishization to a level I am very uncomfortable with, and find just as squicky as when the sexes are in the reverse equation. I rather wince at being associated with the fetishists. And, having once been alarmingly stalked by a Chinese guy with a white fetish, I generally try to avoid that dynamic. For me, it is a mixture of attraction to certain physical traits combined with positive associations derived from my guy friends and a cultural comfort zone. They seem to be good folk on the site, and I am totally in with the defensive/proud posturing from taking a socially shunned position - in Asian and white circles, it is the AF and WM who are iconized, AM and WFs are chopped liver - and trying to normalize and celebrate it. But something about the stance-y-ness makes me want to run, run away.

Still, I wander over to Aznlover once or twice a year to peruse the board postings, mostly AA guys boasting about their latest body count of white chicks bedded (wince) - or vice versa, equal wince. The forums have user pictuers, and as I was browsing, my jaw dropped as I saw a familiar face: Cali Boy! Hahahaha! He’s one of the more active posters there, too. Things like, “I want a woman to spread her milky white thighs apart for me so I can deposit my sticky rice pudding deep within her creamy depths.” Um.

Is it comforting, sad, or just funny that the reason the American guys I crush on reject me has gone from my being white to my not being white enough? Well, it still is better than the recent Beijing guy going from hitting on to hating at me when he discovered I’m from Shanghai. But even many a Shanghainese guy is disappointed that he can’t learn English and move back to the US with me. I’m just not as exotic as I look.

Anyhow. In Beijing with Little South, we talked boys a lot. Especially because her German boyfriend was visiting. He is a nice but flakily immature documentary filmmaker doing a yawn, yawn, shoot me please piece on “censorship in Chinese rock!” Foreigners are such morons. They met and hooked up during last year’s Midi, and have been ldr-ing since, only meeting up once when LS went to Germany.  The Germ’s really sweet, but he’s also really emotionally clueless, and equally clueless about China, it’s this wacky exotic place to him. And I feel that his attitude towards Little South is that he’s not so much in love with her as the idea of her, a famous Chinese rocker chick.

LS is such an awesome, amazing woman. She really just wants to find a nice guy to marry and have kids with before it’s too late - she’s 42 - but that’s hard to do working in the music industry. Especially as she’s fairly famous, and guys don’t want to live under her shadow. She previously dated for eight years the man-boy who runs Jifu’s old record company, and that was a disaster of a relationship. “The men in music are all bu kao pu, off tune - that’s what Beijingers call people who are a little off,” Little South remarked to me. Don’t I know it, sister! “But, hey, I’m bu kao pu too…”

It’s tough for her, and she dates laowai, because single Chinese men her age don’t want women their age. Even I, at 30, am having a hard time with. The 22-year-old men want 22-year-old women; so do the 32-year-old and the 42-year-old men. And, if the men have money and/or a foreign passport, the young women are happy to oblige.  Ick.

Little South thinks we should go for equal-opportunity in age inappropriateness, which I’m all for within limits: I have a +/-5 year rule, and I’d rather go younger than older. Older men can be annoyingly patronizing. But, limits. LS had an assistant at Midi, this very dorky-cool half-German half-Chinese guy I had lots of fun hanging out. But a “Oops!” moment came when I discovered that he…is in highschool, and is sixteen. Bad Vixen! I continued to enjoy his company, but was like, “Must. Not. Flirt.” I confessed my appreciation of the kid to Little South latter, and she was like, “You should date him!” Um, illegal much? “Okay, in two years!” It’s funny but just wrong that she was encourage me to skank on a kid she babysits.

I suppose that everyone, really, is off-tune to their own tune, just some in better or worse ways than others. The trick is to find someone whose off-tune can harmonize with your own.

Meanwhile, I have spent many hours perusing Aznlover reading Cali Boy’s posts and being very glad he wasn’t into me. The site’s not so bad as I had thought, it functions as a support group/online community for a fairly small and beleaguered minority in the US, and if I still lived there I’d probably need a place to vent too.

I confess. I am motherly. For all my efforts to escape or transcend sex, I have a very maternal sensibility. For all my desire to flee the sinking ships of my biological family members, I have an opposing drive to take care of people when needed, if and only if (unlike the biofam) I can make difference to them, set wounded wings a-flying. (But people like my mom who demand constant care are emotional leeches, and should be squished just as satisfyingly.)

Yesterday was the Guggenheim Art in America opening at MoCA, and protective Mama Fox kicked in at the party when my friend Yata got piss drunk off her ass. Yata’s cool, but she does toe the line between eccentric and nutty – although a lot of that is probably because she’s Dutch. The Dutch I know are all completely fucking bizarre; Yata’s the sanest of the batch. She is in her early sixties, divorced a couple of times, a photographer who has lived here a long time but speaks fairly insufficient Mandarin. She is a fabulously brash, unapologetic character with corresponding fashion sense.  

Last night she was so drunk she could barely stay on her chair. I held her up, force fed her water and tried to forcibly extricate her wine glass. That did not go well. Gave up and rationed it as negotiating for her drinking her water like a good girl. She was petulant. (Damn, am *I* this annoying when drunk? If so, apologies. I don’t think I’ve been that drunk for many years, and apologies and thanks to those of you who put up with me back when I was.)

I recruited some people to help me escort her to a taxi, and then was planning on seeing her home and tucking her in. Again, have myself been that drunk enough to not let friends in that condition alone, even when they insist the I’m fine! Um, no. Except: she managed to escape our clutches. As soon as I got home I called her mobile, didn’t have it in my phone, to make sure she was okay. She had managed to get home alright, and was a bit annoyed with me for waking her up.  

And then how to explain to my editor why I’m late in filing that article?

Yata was one of two inebriated older European women melodramatizing my evening. The other was this Viennese woman – let us call her Goth Gran – who left her European husband about five years back for her lover, a Chinese artist who lived in Vienna for years. He is a horrible artist, really really bad but so self- and her-promoting, and they are both a little strange in my book, but nice enough.  

I was in the bathroom about to go out, and the Viennese was coming in, and she pushed the door shut behind her with a rather worrisome thunking sound. I had seen as she hadn’t that the cleaning lady was about to come in behind her. “Oh, I think you hit the ayi,” I remarked upon the thunk. It was not accusatory, my meaning was that she may have accidentally hit the ayi with the slammed door, but the Viennese was very drunk, and her English is sketchy, so she thought I was accusing her of attacking the ayi.

She proceeded to scream at me, What sort of person do you think I am?! You think I am someone who hits ayis! Sigh. I should have been all, whatever bitch, but I patiently tried to explain what I had meant. I’m fine with people hating me, plenty do, but it should be for a valid reason, not because someone completely mistook the meaning of an offhand, innocent comment. But she would not listen and just continued screaming at me.

I went back outside, and a friend who had overheard the entire exchange reported to me that she was sobbing in the bathroom. When she came out, she proceeded to give the death glare, so I went over and talked to her and her boyfriend. Since her limited English had caused the misunderstanding, I started explaining to him in Chinese. That pissed her off even more. People who live in China for a long time without learning any Mandarin are very defensive about it. Eventually I just gave up, and will try to talk to her again sometime when she is sober.  

The thing about Yata and the Viennese is that I fear I will be like them someday: aging, eccentric, drunken foreign women washed up on China’s shores. Aging well is a challenge for all of us: physically, my genes have me fairly set. But, in terms of lifestyle, outlook and behavior, the bulk of my friends and acquaintances in their forties, fifties and sixties make me go a bit, holy shit. I don’t want to be partying like a twenty year old in my forties and fifties. There is a basic standard of age-appropriate decorum that so many expatriates discard, with no family or community to keep them grounded. I suspect it boils down to attitude, a practical positivity. Being realistic about who and what you are, and accepting and celebrating that; rather than insecurity, fear, trying to recover past glories or fix past mistakes. Like Mrs. Din in Florida, so gloriously full of life and energy, and so wise and loving. It is the way to be, at any age.