Shanghai Vixen

http://www.briomag.com/briomagazine/relationships/a0004406.html

this is more: girls need to keep it under wraps shit

Still more: the boys' section has costumes to dress up as George Washington, Ben Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, and Thomas Jefferson! Where's the Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton costumes? Hell, I think we'd even accept a "Sexy Susan B. Anthony Child" costume at this point.

I have noticed of late an odd proclivity amongst Chinese PR gals to be overly and rather inappropriately affectionate. "[Vixen] dearest, how are you sweetie? Can you come to our event dear?" Now, this is fine with people I know, and I am good friends with a lot of my PR contacts - we are rather mutually dependent, sucking at each others' teats, so it is good form to get along. What weirds me out is when flaks I don't or barely know adopt such intimate language. It makes me worry whether I drunkenly bonded with them at some point, hooked up even, and forgot, and it also makes me feel under quite a bit of pressure. How to act?! I don't know!! It's like when people I've only just met want to kiss me in greeting. Of course, I know it is a language issue, politese translates with difficulty, just as my American propensity to thank freely is rude in Chinese, whereas my relative scarcity in pleases and thanks makes me rude in American.

The air kisses are a whole 'nother issue. Shanghai is such a cultural collision: Chinese thump shoulders, and hold hands a lot if same sex; Europeans air kiss in varying amounts; Americans shake hands or hug depending on formality vs familiarity. I am never sure which is appropriate or expected, and usually follow the other person's lead. I have an ongoing accidental comedy with Fafa, my favorite gay Shanghainese fashion flak, as one of us always goes for a hug or air kiss or hand shake when the other does the reverse, and physically awkward hilarity ensues and personal space gets violated.

Far more awkward when this happens with people who are not really friends.

I was supposed to go to Beijing this past weekend for the Lane Crawford opening there. I had a lingerie fair to cover Friday, and went directly to the airport from that. I was and am sick. I was exhausted. I was informed that I faced an indefinite wait for my late night flight due to "weather". Usually, this means People's Air Force exercises, fuck the civilians.

As usual, I was planning to stay with Good Bug and Korean Ice in Beijing. They, however, have become obsessive early birds - admirably healthy - but had stayed up half the night on Thursday thinking mistakenly I was arriving then, and worried I had like crashed. Which meant by Friday night, they were cranky. As soon as I heard of the delay, I called them, and informed that Beijing was at its most polluted yet, with barely a few meters of visibility. Smog from hell. "You don't WANT to fly in this!" Good Bug advised. They also didn't want to wait up for me another night. Kat was also crashing early.

Mostly, I was sick, disoriented, and getting worse by the minute. After a couple of hours, I decided, "Fuck it, I'm going home." As I went to cancel my ticket, they informed that my flight was finally boarding - but would not be flying for several more hours. The only thing worse than being stuck in an airport is... I realized that after a night on the tarmac they'd need a spatula to scrape me back up. So, I shouldered my bag and plunged out of Hongqiao...

...and into another three-hour long taxi queue.

I couldn't deal. I tried to catch one up at arrivals, but they were scoundrals all. The sight of the trailing taxi line made me want to curl up and die, so I started to trudge out from the airport area. I started sobbing from sheer exhaustion and frustration. Two guys walking ahead of me scoped me and one quipped to another, "看, 连老外等不了了!" I bitched back at them "我已经飞机等了半天不飞, 再等车半天我受不了!" If ever there was a time when I would not tolerate the usual "poke the pink monkey" routine, that was it. Then it was still hard finding a taxi that didn't try to embezzle, but I got a good one before long. I send that driver good karma waves.

Last week, my friend K's cat was tragically injured, mistreated by an incompetent vet, and she ultimately had to put him down. So sad. It made me extra clingy towards Silver Lining - and that furblob and I are usually surgically attached anyhow. The attention made him suspicious, even before I started packing for Beijing. As soon as I did, Friday afternoon, he got pissed and petulant, hiding and hissing at me when I left that night. When I came back that same night, he was so giddily excited. "Mommy! I thought you were going away! But you're back already!" He was so happy, and so was I.

I love travel. The world is such a tasty, beautiful oyster. Places, people, food, stuff: endless and enticing. Simply: I love being places, I hate leaving them. Nowhere is this as true as my Home, Hui Long Hui and the Silver Lining and my friends and my routines. The Zhao Family Creek, once Shanghai's largest slum, now gurgles with cars and with early morning street cleaners tinkling 1980s soft rock muzak. This place is a bitch to live in, my Silver Lining bites inappropriately and farts rotten durians, my life is far from what I want it to be. But I love them: warts, shortcomings, durian butts and all. It remains my heaven, my Shangri-La, my Home.

There are few things comprable to watching the sun rise over the former Zhao Family Creek at 6am on a Saturday morning - after staying up all night not debauchering but rather meeting a big deadline New York time.

The sleepies came and went, eventually the serious writing commenced and I cranked out those 1400 words. I would have loved to have postponed until saner hours, but I had already gotten the deadline extended from Monday, and continued work on the project was seriously cutting into my sanity with all the other assignments a-pending right now. They shall descend as soon as I wake back up this morning, but for now, with the pale pink horizon and the happy bleating of early sparrows, I am feather-light.

I am not an effortless writer, for work at least. So I always feel quite a sense of accomplishment when something is completed. It is a really really nice feeling.

The yesterday that today still feels like was packed. Up, bath, breakfast, off to the eArts opening event at SAM - and so far the festival looks quite good despite being a government event. Damn, now I want to do an article about it! And further my spiral into pure insanity. During it, my Beijing classmate called up in tears. Her kitten, who has been sick for a while and nearly died from the indifferent neglect provided by the infamous Dr. James at Paw, had finally seen a more competent vet and she learned his rib was broken, it punctured his liver, he was facing imminent death without surgery and a blood transfusion. Only the blood has to be imported from Korea, China lacks a feline blood bank. (Just as well - would probably give them all feline AIDS...)

Standing on the steps of the Art Museum discussing imported Korean cat blood? Weird even for me.

Luckily, she found a donor through her vet, so I didn't have to shlepp the Silver Lining out to Pudong - and trying to take blood from him, hell, he'd need surgery too after; so would the vet.

Home, work, calls. In the evening I went to see the Hong Kong production "The Game" at SDAC. It is an existentialist Cantonese comedy, about an old couple killing time before they die, making great plans to organize a speech that will change the world and compensate for and validate all their shortcomings and indignities. Only, "I'm not good at oration, so I hired a professional orator to come speak for me" the husband declares. He places all his hopes, ambitions, frustrations upon the Orator, because he and the wife are too afraid to carry these themselves.

Thursday night after a phone interview to the US, I used up the rest of my phone cards calling my grandma. She is convinced that she will win the publishers family sweepstakes that she has been buying crappy magazines no one reads from for decades now. And when she has all that money, it will solve our family problems. Money, like alcohol, is the beginning and end of all problems. In our case, just one more thing for the 57 year old children to bitch and bicker about.

My grandma is awaiting the Orator.

We all do this some. Waiting for that big break, that white knight, that perfect moment - the person or thing that will save us, validate us, do for us the things we want but are too afraid or insecure or just damn lazy to do for ourselves. There is a certain safe comfort in being passive in life, if or more likely when you are bitterly disappointed with how reality stacks up to those fantasies, you can shake your bitter little fist at fate's viscitudes.

It is emotionally safer to get nowhere and blame fate and the cruel, cruel world than to get part of the way and blame yourself. But those flawed results of your own are yours, utterly and unabashedly, imperfect but perfectly - yours.

Await not the Orator. Be your own damn Orator, sink or swim, squeak or sing.

 and , and maybe  to go with my .

Meanwhile, I am disturbed by the following article:

Race to have an 'Olympic baby'

By Addie Chan (chinadaily.com.cn)
Updated: 2007-10-12 14:53

Which baby will be the one whose cry will herald the 2008 Beijing Olympics? Ask their prospective parents -- right now.

For many Chinese couples, October is the right season to conceive babies, as they hope to have an "Olympic baby" delivered at 8:08 p.m., on August 8, 2008, the time when the opening ceremony will begin.

"Hosting the Olympic Games is a once in a blue moon chance," says a father-to-be surnamed Li in Guangzhou, the capital of South China's Guangdong Province. "If my wife is lucky enough to deliver an 'Olympic baby,' the luck means something more than family joy."

Heh. Compliments of Kaoru. As is: 

I'm not pregnant.

Thank the goddesses. It took a week of being violently ill from the morning after pill fucking up its way through my system, but I remain ample but barren. Oh, the female body is a delicately calibrated instrument of species perpetuation. Disrupting that even when unfertilized, even when avoiding economic suicide, bad parenting, a rash of murder-suicides, the instrument accounts to imperatives more ancient than immediate. Same as explains my thick thighs.

Gym Boy is wonderful, but just as standard Chinese condoms are too small and fragile for cock, his attitudes and ambitions are too small for mine. He will be a wonderful father, and mentally I smack myself for not wanting to procreate with him. He has character, imagination, soul, but the fit is all wrong. He makes me itchy in all the wrong places. Perhaps, if I were the one who was 36, he at 31, I would feel more settleable. But I feel quite, quite young, even if my body and the dating pool and Shanghai social biases insist otherwise.

小意思. But the 大意思 I am completely unable to really process yet. My flat, the only real home I have ever known, the place I love most in the world, is scheduled for demolition. Not for another two or three years, but the death sentence now lurks over my dear friend. My landlord doesn't know what will inadequately take its place, probably parking for the asshole government hotel. My recurring nightmare - second only to being stranded with living with my mother.

I spent 国庆节 hunkering at home and at the gym. I intended to be productive, lots of writing and organizing and cleaning and exercising. Apart from a rather pathetic quantity of exercise, um, nah. I rested, I read, I wandered about the nongtang slurping up taitai gossip and nongming commentary like a too-frozen diet coke. The week before, amidst anti-fetal cramps, I had a delicious martini night, with Trixie and lots of the usuals, plus a Hairy American I had/ve a crush on. So cute, so shy, but in the conventional fluffy American Caucasian too-adult sort of way. Salt of Pepper informed that he is fresh from a bad breakup of six years, with a passive/dependent Taiwanese chick, because he wanted to be more of an artist and be with someone more passionate. But - only likes skinny Chinese women. Hey! A thing in common: I only like skinny Chinese people, he only likes skinny Chinese people! Um, sucks we're both white/mostly. After martini night, though, I think that I find him too reserved, hairy and American, he finds me a total freak. Which predicts we will become great friends, and fall madly in love with each other - with several years if not decades removed.

Hibernation aside, during Guoqing I had dinner with my favorite famous film director Little Face at her home with her sister. Her home is a room and a half, alotted to her mother in the 1980s as an office space, before her now-dead older brother and his wife (he a lawyer, she an accountant) stole the family home. LF's sister is almost a decade older, but seems much more, quite worn down by the cultural revolution and aftermath. It was quite the intimacy to be invited to LF's home, over their fireplace of portraits of her parents, for a homecooked Shanghainese dinner. Afterwards, she showed me the part of the rough edit of her unfinished documentary about the communist theological struggles for which her father was murdered (a la beaten to death by the red guards).

It remains such a disconnect in "modern" (it ceased to be Modern seventy years ago, becomes less so alarmingly fast) Shanghai, to think that one could live, kill or die or a mere word, phrase, or idea. Yet it is merely a breath away. I consider LF a mentor and a friend because we love the same history, the same tragedy, of Shanghai, but she is the real inheritor while I am the naguning interloper. I admire her so much, for sacrificing fame and fortune to tell the real stories of China and especially Shanghai; but I hope I will never eat the bitterness that she has.

Between film and massage, LF and I walked - "too fast!" - over to the latter, a beer in the park, a world of society and racisms and frustrations. My other de-hermitaging over Guoqing was to head to KYJ, my favorite restaurant in Shanghai. Normally the new rich make my skin crawl, but the KYJ boss well deserves it. There with Brilly and Suspended Bee, and Salt and Pepper.

The former couple I'd taken before, and had become regulars. The latter were xinfengs, but appreciatively into the chou doufu and huangjiu. That is my measure of Xiawuning: Westerners, non-WuYue Chinese, can they eat WuYueCai? The Beijinger Salty passed well. Afterwards, we all went for photo stickers, discovered that we females were easily, narcissicistically amused, but the boys were way not drunk enough. (This was never a problem with the photo-eager rocker Jifu...) A bit odd being the single, fifth wheeler; I remain used to being common law "married", no wonder I suck at dating.

Rest = inadequate. I suck at acceleration, and the next two months will require attaching my brain and body to the juggernaut, while trying to keep up on my own momentum means madness.

I thus apologize for the inevitable, impending absentia: blathering for the five of you who read this takes back seat to the fifty (okay, damn, less) editors who pay me.