Shanghai Vixen

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.

…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.

I am comfortably ensconced at my friend Xiao Xu’s Brooklyn flat. It’s a great little neighborhood, and around the block from Tom’s Diner of musical fame. I went there yesterday on my own; today I met a friend there because it was a safe landmark, and they remembered me. I like that sort of neighborhood feel, although as a traveller I feel I ought to be more anonymous. It’s strange, when I’m a tourist random people ask me for directions, I must look like I know where I’m going, even when I’m totally lost. I must project confidence. The funniest is when people start asking me directions in Shanghai, then stop when they register belatedly that I’m white; they start to apologize, but I stop them and give them their directions.

This relates somehow to Sunday, when Happy took me to Flushing for dim sum. Chinese yelling “laowai!” at me in New York is equal parts disturbing, hilarious, and oddly comforting.

I left DC on Saturday for Long Island to visit Happy, one of my roommates and best friends from college. She’s doing an MD/PhD, living with her large German boyfriend who she met at her lab. (I’m amused that three of my closest friends in America are Taiwanese MD/PhDs. “Yeah, Taiwanese are just smart!” declares Happy in her cute Long Island lisp. “Or just particularly masochistic,” I suggest.)

I’ve seen Happy several times since graduation, but always really briefly. This 24 hours in Long Island was the longest I’ve spent with her these eight years, and it was really lovely. She’s wonderful fun: so energetic, enthusiastic, engaging.  She’s one of those people who just have a very sunny, positive disposition, but is also fabulously blunt, opinionated and unapologetic. She totally geeks out, and then laughs at herself for it.

It was Happy who first taught me to make dumplings, and I was happy to learn that she’s maintained dumpling making party tradition. (I tried, but Jifu early on declared it too much effort. Generally my Chinese cooking skills have declined as a result of living in China.) Interesting to revisit the trajectory of my gradual Asianification. We didn’t have time for a dumpling party this visit, which makes me a bit sad, but we instead stayed up half the night catching up, gossiping about our other friends, and generally blathering about everything. I’d say we’re both doing pretty darn well.

Many of my Taiwanese-American friends are quite aggressively biased against Mainland China and Mainland Chinese, and Happy used to be the worst of them, giving me grief for going to China instead of Taiwan and for dating Mainlanders. Happily, Happy has mellowed out a lot.

One college tale we revisited was that of The Suite, this group of really dweeby Asian-American guys who roomed together. I briefly dated one of them, a half-Chinese half-Filipino kid I dubbed Boy Toy; more precisely, I fooled around with him some once while bored then found him following me everywhere like a lost puppy. Happy dated another one of them, and then a third is King Yellow, one of my closest guy friends. All of them apart from King were lacking on the social skills factor, and their cleaving so tightly to each other created a rather unhealthy echo chamber. By their senior year, after I’d graduated, Happy recounts, they got so bad they had committee meetings to vet who the suitemates could date: acceptable candidates had to be at least half-Asian and speak Mandarin, no matter that none of them could do so. Fucking bananas. I remember Boy Toy sniping at me, “Why are you learning to speak Chinese when you’re not Chinese?” “Excuse me, are you English?” Yeah, he was just bitter ’cause he failed first-year Mandarin.

Ah, yes, the reasons most Asian-American guys have to go to poorer countries and flash that purty blue passport to get laid.

Starting with Happy, I’m staying all with Mandarin-speaking friends, which is nice as I was getting itchy having to remember to stick to English with Jersey Girl in DC. I am happiest operating in Chinglish. My current host is an extra bonus because she understands, if can’t speak, Shanghainese too. I met Xiao Xu in Shanghai - she lived there until age ten before emigrating to the US, and was back visiting her grandparents - but we also went to college together. She’s from a Shanghai literati family, and is far from the usual Chinese-American: majored in creative writing, works in the film industry, is outspokenly leftist, and can handle my martinis. We didn’t know each other all that well before this, and I am greatly enjoying getting to know her better. We talk about politics, art and literature, gender and race, and boys. After this, I’ll stay with an ex-Shanghailander in Boston and then my first year Chinese teacher in Providence. I think it’s cool that I’ve become good friends with some of my ex-professors; then again, most of my friends are pretty cool. I love my friends.

It’s my last day in San Diego before flying to the East Coast. It’s been a nice stint.

LA ended well with a night at Theramini’s place: she did a game night with the 1980s edition of Trivial Pursuit. Considering I spent the 1980s in elementary schools and a no-tv fundamentalist family, I expected to lose wildly, especially up against a bunch of hipsters in their late 30s. I was teamed with Theramini, up against pairs of her crush and a colleague and a gay couple. Trust the gay couple to know the random pop culture stuff, although I was horrified when they weren’t sure of the difference between Jesse Jackson and Pat Robertson. Team Mini lagged at first, but we made strides relying on the music and news categories, and ultimately we were beaten only marginally by Team Gay.

Afterwards, Theramini and I made our way to the nearby Tiki-Ti, a kischy LA institution. It was as delightfully bizarre as anticipated. On the walk back, there were about six young Latino kids loitering on the sidewalk, blocking our way and harassing us. “Hey there, fried rice!” We attempted to stride calmly through them, but shoved me, sending Theramini flying into the street. “Want me to beat him up for you?” one of them offered about the shover, which rather echoed my sentiments. “Why can’t you be nice and just leave us alone?!” Theramini reprimanded back, also echoing my sentiments. Then a cop car prowled by and our harassers melted away. The next day, we lunched with my Beijinger galleryist friend D to make up for her trying to join for trivia night and Tiki-Ti but being unable to find us due to my mobile not working. D and Theramini turned out to have some other mutual friends, typically enough. Our lunch was crashed by a goofy middle-aged white guy D knew, and he rambled at us about the book he was writing about Dharma. “Eastern stuff is, like, deep!” “Please tell me I’m not like that,” I pleaded to Theramini as we drove to Union Station for my southbound train. She reassured me that I am in little risk of becoming one of those.

San Diego’s highlight this time has been getting my childhood best friend Kaoru started at the gym. The La Jolla YMCA is sooooo nice, with a great gym, pool, and class schedule. The place is SO white, and it rather bruises my concept of San Diego as diverse and integrated; perhaps it was just my school crowd. Entertainingly, the Y is accross the street from Torrey Pines Elementary, where we first met over 21 years ago. We marvel, driving up, that we were once that tiny; in one’s mind, one has always been full-sized. Kaoru has always been chubby, her family are enthusiastic eaters, but she’s gotten particularly out of shape lately, and I worry about her. I’m really glad she’s confronting her hang-ups and taking care of herself.

And I enjoyed using that nice gym and pool, since I so jones for exercise when away from my Shanghai routine. There is no nicer high than the limp exhilaration after two hours of intense movement. Mmm.

I saw my mom, and she was annoying and insane but fairly well behaved. After telling everyone I’d sent her “nasty” emails (see post below), she seemed to have heeded my zero-tolerance of her bashing on poor Camus. I met her at her house and walked her over to a restaurant; her house is scarier than ever. I’ll post some of the photos I snapped. It’s painful watching her, she’s such a wreck, and couldn’t even order a sandwhich without it being a Big Dramatic Thing. Sigh. World’s most incompetent woman; she whined for assistance just getting dressed. What struck me during this lunch, apart from struggling not to wince at how pathetic she is, was how bitter she is, and how intensely she hates men. Hell, spoiled, rich La Jolla society princess devolves into a bitter basket case because she resents her 1950s doctor daddy being too distant. Priviledged, entitled, self-righteous; I suppress laughter when she rants about how hard her life has been. Wow, having family rent you a posh $1000+ a month apartment and otherwise subsidize you for 20 years, and never having to work or take care of yourself, rough life! Poor pet!

She remains adament in her belief that I was molested as a kid and that I need to be in intensive therapy until I remember it so I can wallow self-destructively in my victimization. Um, no thanks. True or false, my childhood sucked, and I’m over it. I am much more interested in my future than my past.

Camus is off in Hawaii, but we had a nice breakfast before she went. She had her flight and I a pool aerobics class to catch, so when we sat down at Harry’s we informed the waitress that we were ready to order already, and didn’t need to see a menu, since we both always get the bisquits and gravy plus coffee there. The waitress huffed off, and complained loudly to the cashier about our being pushy and we could bide our sweet time. Camus got up, marched over, and told the woman off: “I work in food service too, and treating the customer that way is unacceptable.” She explained the reasons behind our request, and then removed us to another waitress’s section. There we were served instantaneously, and she left a 50% tip. I was very proud of her cajones.

I saw lots of the same people as the prior stint, plus my high school friend Cantobabe, who I hadn’t seen in a decade. She’s a lawyer now, currently working in a firm but planning to move to a corporate position in a few months. She’s meh about lawyerdom, but enjoys the tech and scientific aspects of her assignments. Cantobabe is very mellow and wry, and despite not meeting up for so long we immediately hit our old stride over martinis at the Whaling Bar. I remember Cantobabe sending me postcards from her summers with grandma in Hong Kong during high school, one of many ways my friends planted the world travel bug in me back then.

The hardest thing about being in San Diego is that I’m staying at a suburban house with no car and slow to no internet, the former making everything a complicated logistical juggle and the latter making work difficult. Thank god for cafes with Wifi, but I am now way behind on some deadlines. So, so frustrating. Am looking forward to being with urban friends again. Next is Washington DC. I’m staying with Jersey Girl, who I haven’t seen for two years, plus my other first cousin and Dancing Emu, a long-lost recently-refound second cousin from Cairo, also back for a holiday visit. I have a lot of people to see in DC, lots of college and Shanghai friends who are lawyers (yes, more lawyers), and then New York/Long Island/Rhode Island/Boston. I have about 60 different friends and family to visit this trip: am I lucky or what?

“Palm trees are so SoCal,” remarked Peaceful Dragon during the morning ride to work. “They’re tall, too skinny, ludicrously overgroomed, useful only for aesthetic purposes, topple easily, and are shallow rooted.” Indeed.

Last night a whooping storm by LA standards must have knocked a palm tree onto power lines, and several blocks were wiped out. I am aghast that, in this “modern” age: 1. America still has power lines, and 2. that there is no emergency generator to at least keep the traffic lights operational.

The oddities of a “developed” society: America takes so much for granted, things usually work so smoothly that the slightest gliche causes a shutdown. This wouldn’t happen in China, where SNAFU is the default and so people are fairly good at adjusting and adapting. (Not that either government is terribly effective in its responses.) Traffic lights out in Shanghai? No one would notice…

So, I am now ensconced at my favorite Santa Monica cafe, availing myself of the power and wifi. Little neighborhoods like this are among the nicest things about SoCal, and I missed them as much in New England as I do in Shanghai. (The cafe culture there is improving a lot, but apart from Boona Starbucks remains the main game in town. ) Ginger has just emailed that she and the Silver Lining are faring splendidly, a big relief to finally hear since the internet has been down in Shanghai since the earthquake in Taiwan. (And perhaps this is also why Biteable hasn’t emailed me since Christmas; am trying not to be a chick and overanalyse.)

I highly enjoy just hanging out in Los Angeles, although I suspect I am starting to grate on Peaceful Dragon’s nerves, so just as well I’m off again tomorrow. The routine is that every morning I drive her to work and then take the car. I may proceed to a cafe and write in my diary, or lunch with friends, or go to a gallery or museum, or like yesterday all three; I may just go back home and spend all day there, working interspersed with an hour or two at the apartment complex gym. Oh man, it feels great to be exercising again! Two weeks without it, combined with rich American food, has made me disgustingly fat and, worse, sluggish and uncomfortable. Then, come evening, I pick Peaceful Dragon back up, and we go out for eat, home to cook, or I drop her off and head off to dine with other friends.

What’s great is that I get a nice mixture of social and solitary time. Obviously, I like people, but they were an acquired taste, and now as a writer I really require a certain daily quotient of time in my own head to recharge. Being around people, even people I love, all the time is exhausting. But then there are the oldest and best of friends, such as Peaceful Dragon, who are beyond old shoes and we are more like an old married couple. We can hang out without interacting, both doing our own thing, we can descend into giddy spasms of silly jokes, and we can finish each other’s sentences with alarming frequency.

She forms the core of a very good LA corps. She, Theramini, a colleague at the LA office of my fashion magazine employer and who I know via Peaceful Peasant in Hong Kong (the Vietnafia ;), and I form a pretty good trio. Small, medium, large; hyper, snarky, calm. Then there are my artist/professor friends Ms. and Mr. Green, who are well-tapped into LA creative society and have a lovely house with two dobermans and two parrots (and a nice guest room). There are also scattered others: a Shanghai friend’s cousin at MTV, Indonesian Dainty’s ex-boyfriend, a La Jolla friend’s two daughters, various arts people, all enjoyable.

New Year’s Eve I took the train up, always a pleasant ride, and spent the afternoon at Theramini’s flat. Peaceful Dragon met us, we had dinner, crossed town back to PD’s place, and then headed out to a gathering of PD’s software programming colleagues. The Nerd Party was a tough crowd. Theramini and I are journalists and fairly good at socializing, but it was hard to get programmers talking. We tried, we really did. Then we continued to a party held by Theramini’s friends, a designer/architect couple. It was a good, young professional, mostly Asian-American crowd, and in a very nice house. Joshua Xanadu and several of his high school friends joined us there briefly, although he spent most of the night hitting on some chick with a chihuahua, and then fled when the dancing started.

I was oddly exhausted that night, and struggled to keep up, but the girls and I danced the party into the dawn. On new year’s day, I slept well past noon before Peaceful Dragon and I headed to Ms. Green’s house party, where Theramini joined us. It was a fascinating crowd: artists, aging feminist scholars, a Ghanian filmmaker. Mostly older, very artsily eccentric - Theramini loved the wacky outfits - very Santa Monica. We were all exhausted, which was too bad as I would have liked to have met more of the people there. The three of us then returned to PD’s flat, where she worked and Theramini and I hung out, babbled, and watched the Edna portions of the “Incredibles” DVD before going to see “Pan’s Labyrinth”. It was compelling but disturbing, sort of “Dark Crystal” meets “Sophie’s Choice”, if you can imagine that.

Another year off to a good start; last year it was lying poolside in Jakarta interspersed with Nasi Udok from street stalls. 2005 sucked, with the year starting with news of my brother’s death, and not improving much from there. Last year was generally great, and I anticipate this year will be even better.

A Paki, a Mexican, a Sudanese and a Greek walk into a party, and…

…I fall asleep on the couch.

Yesterday, errands with Mama Buff followed with coffee with high school friend Vi. She was one of the two token Cantos of our old crowd, and significantly they are the only two of the ABCs who have resettled in La Jolla; all the beleaguered Taiwanese kids stayed on the East Coast after college to escape their parents. I barely knew Vi during school, but we’ve become friends since she moved. She’s confidently misanthropic, with incisive, missile-precise wit. She is well: working hard, taking lots of posh vacations, and happy with a boyfriend who seems to suit her.

In the evening Camus and I went to the Turf Supper Club, a fabulously retro bar in Golden Hills. It has, alas, become a bit too successful for its own good, going from a well-kept hipster secret to where dumb frat types go to feel hip. Ugh. Still, fun, and Camus and I blathered merrily; her current boyfriend, a homely, beefy, neckless chap with unfortunate spikey hair, was a very good sport about our giddy zinging.

Camus is now 23, and is becoming ever cooler, and her sense of humor is blossoming richly. She has to deal with so much shit from both my mom and her dad, who constantly fight and try to drag her into it. While my mom wins for the family nuts, her dad is a right wing wacko, and is mad at Camus because “women shouldn’t be doctors”. My mom has been down on Camus always because she is the Spawn of John, and now also because she is jealous of her friendship with me. She is definitely my favorite living relative, and it is lovely having one person in my gene pool that I don’t loath.

Over our martinis, I was bemoaning to Camus how much weight I’d acquired in a mere week. Ah, WASP food! (*Shudder.*) She consoled: “One looks at you and doesn’t register your physical condition, because you have such a sense of style.”

Aw. “Yeah, but now I’m too fat to even fit into most of my outfits,” I grumped.

“Even when you’re dressed in whatever, though, it doesn’t matter, because you’re you,” she rejoined, “and your energy and intelligence and cheerful humor is what people notice, not what you look like.” I wish but doubt it, but appreciated the sentiment.

Today, had an early breakfast with Benling, another high schoolie, now a mathematics professor somewhere in the South. He has been there a year, and is perplexed by the beer-and-TV culture there. Benling is an unapologetic nerd, complete with calculator watch, and is very cute. I do miss being told protein bonding jokes. We discussed American hyper-sensitivity and self-importance, traits I observe with shocked distaste, and particularly how they filter into romantic culture. “People prefer to be told ‘I need you’ to ‘I love you’, because love can go away, but dependence is dependable,” he remarked. I would be creeped out if a lover ‘needed’ me, but some exes have criticized me for being insufficiently dependent. Hmm. We agreed that many people are silly, and observed that both of us are sometimes considered cold for being very rational, as if rationality and passion were incompatible. In fact, both of us are rationally passionate and passionately rational. Which is a good way to be.

Lunch with Kaoru Buff, then coffee with MD and her boyfriend, now fiance. I am very happy for them, they are well-matched and I’ve liked him since they first got together. MD was in China for five years, Dalian and Shanghai, but it was never home to her. Repatriation was a good move, in no small part because she met the boy on Match.com (see, it does work…sometimes) immediately, and she loves her job as a political activist. Warm fuzzies to see a friend in a good place.

I spent the rest of the afternoon with Bubbles, a batty old British-American writer friend of my grandmother’s. She writes books on classical music, is fairly opinionated and negative, and occupies the narrow line between endearing and disturbing eccentricity. I am not quite sure why I am friends with her, but I find her very interesting, and enjoy the challenge of staying in the good graces of someone so easily offended.

My Mexicana friend Tia had a party tonight, and she came and picked me up ahead of time. She’s fun but a little “…whimsical” as Vi puts it. She did an IR masters with one of my Shanghai friends, has struggled to find a good job with it. In IT for a while, is now student-teaching high school and thus is broke. She is 36 and divorced, and her latest romantic misadventure was sleeping with her roommate, which: bad idea. So, her life is in a bad place at the moment, and she was depressed and ranting. I am very good for the “there, there, here’s a tissue” followed by the “so, let’s figure out how to solve this”, but pointless and repetitive ranting depresses and annoys me.

She’d turned on CNN while waiting for other people to arrive, and the Hussein execution was on. Such a macabre, gloating freak show, and then her gaggle of international grad student friends arrived, and they joined me in the “America is fucked up” wincing. Good times to be sitting between a Pakistani mathemetician and a Sudanese physicist. Then, a brassy ex-navy woman from Alabama arrived with a ditzy blonde friend. Tia introduced me as her friend from Shanghai; “You don’t look Chinese!” blondie giggled. Oh, fuck off. Navy started going on about how hard it was to get her ipod reconfigured. That was when I decided to fall asleep.

When I got back with Jifu after our first breakup, I came up with the analogy that he was to me like a pair of old shoes, comfortable and familiar, well broken in, so comfortable to slip back into. That easy intimacy where I forget the boundary between thee and me.

I am now back in LA, albeit about to go south, and have been seeing old friends who also have the appeal of old shoes. I have several Shanghai friends dating back the full eight years, but American friends are the oldest of shoes; with them I am a much fuller collection of the Russian nesting dolls of selves past and present. I’m staying at Peaceful Dragon’s place, my animator friend from my Beijing student days, with her for the first day before she headed off to visit her parents. We had a good catch-up babble; she’s about the same as when we last saw each other here in May, but a lot of things have come full-circle in both her work and personal lives. Particularly, a guy she long longed for became finally available and interested, and she decided against him for several very mature reasons.

Does the switch to our thirties make us somehow less silly, more practical and rational in matters of heart and hooch? For some, it seems so. Perhaps that’s why I’m so nonchalant about bedding Biteable my last night in Shanghai. It may end there, putting out so readily may sabotage, or it may blossom into warm fuzzy happies. Whatever. I got laid, after a dry spell of over two years, with a stunningly gorgeous man. Seriously, he has the nicest body I have ever set eyes (or hands) on. I get older, fatter and uglier, but my men just get hotter and hotter. Sweet.

OC native Dodo is back from University of Chicago biz school for a whirl, in between job interviews in Hong Kong and surf camp in Costa Rica. Dodo’s travel schedule makes even my head hurt. We trawled Santa Monica’s main strip looking for a place to have martinis, but this town is all about pubs and trendy ”Asian fusion” annoyances. We’re both total magpies, drawn easily to the *sparkly!*, and were entertained by the crap in the window of a novelty shop. Amongst the offerings was a cliched faux-Asian bag, complete with the requisite fake characters. “It’s so chinky!” Dodo exclaimed. The bag also declared “Miso Pretty”, which Dodo loved. I’m never gonna hear the end of this one. He observed that I always get a particular lilt to my voice right before I crack a particularly bad joke, which is true and no one has ever noticed before, myself including.

We had to settle on a nautical-themed steakhouse for watery martinis. At least there were blowfish dangling from the bar, which amused us somehow. As global gaddabouts and dedicated martini enthusiasts, we decided to launch the Worldwide Martini Safari. Alas, during his recent semester in Beijing Dodo did not make it down for the best martini in Shanghai, if not in Mainland or greater China. One more reason he needs to get a job in Hongkers.

Then last night I finally met the intrigueing and mysterious Joshua Xanadu. He didn’t drive me crazy, but he did drive me all over scenic Alhambra (or wherever it was). Suburban holiday lawn decor is so adoreable, and I really do mean that non-snarkily. Mostly he was trying to find another visiting friend who was just off the bus from Vegas. Instead of Martini Quest, it was lost Taiwanese tourist quest.

Apart from a few gradient variations, Joshua was pretty much as I expected, although much is added with the third dimension, from abstraction to actuality. The main divergence is that I anticipated he’d be a lot like the guys I grew up with, the NCB next door. He’s completely not, and it’s great.

Rather, he reminds me a bit of myself. I know, every person I like and care about I claim “is a lot like me”. In Joshua’s case, I think the comment is quite fair, though. We have a succession of amusing if slightly creepy parallels. Not so much fun house mirrors as overlapping film transparancies of shots taken a couple seconds apart. Line them up, they’re mostly similar, but the lines weave and blur, with a few dramatic disparities between shots.

He is pretty dorky, not in a bad way. He habitually rambles about how attractive he considers himself to be. I don’t know him well enough yet to be certain whether he’s joking or actually is narcissic and deluded. Habitual self-aggrandizing is a bit strange to this habitual self-effacer. Nonetheless, Joshua seems quitte a kindred spirit, and already feels old shoe-ish.

The night ended at my friends’ art event, with good wine and fun people. Amusingly, a friend of a friend of Joshua’s we encountered there turned out to be a friend of a friend of mine. The world is hilariously small.

Um? You know? Like? Sort of? Huh. Ohmygod! Huh? [Pause.] Totally! Like! Yeah! Um?

I remember a coffee fourteen years ago with my high school friend Itching, a tiny woman with a big brain and bigger heart, and who thankfully has now become too busy proving evolution in a petri dish to bludgeon me with physics books.  Over hammerheads at a place that now sells trashy beachware on Prospect, she argued I should abandon the silly “social sciences” for the real science I was once so good at if indifferent to. As I tried to get her to go more than 30 seconds without saying “like” as an adjective.

I won then, but hardly since: after twelve years in Boston her “like”s have receeded, but she’s cured multiple diseases and world hunger and how to manage the tab after dates while avoiding sexual politics. Her mother considers her a slacker. Okay, I exaggerate, excepting the last point.  I see Itching at most once a year now, sadly, but of all my old friends she has changed the least.

I can write Cali, but I am bad at talking it, for all my cultural adaptability. Took me a decade to drop “pop”.

Peaceful Peasant is Yay! here, and I have to negotiate work, her, other friends and Biteable tomorrow. (He’s SOOO cute and nice, dammit!) Then, back to the “like, um, you know” even from the elitest of the elitists. (And then I wonder why you email instead of posting comments. Like, huh.)

Eh? Eh! Eh. (Why Shanghainese are so at home in Canada.)

“You seem familiar, yet off somehow. Are you…Canadian?” 

I am off to the US in a few days. Yes, the country known as America by its ignorant citizens, who don’t realize that that’s the name of not one but two continents, and the rest of the people on these resent us for claiming to be the only actual Americans. It’s like if China renamed itself Asia. Or Taiwan called itself China. Oh, wait…

Visiting America - 回国了 - is always scary. Uprooting my life for weeks or months, coping with the psycho mom (no, I haven’t told her I’m coming yet) and the travails of travel are the main woes, and the anxiety nightmares continue to attack. But once I arrive, it’s culture shock time. Fun, fun, fun!

I have never faired well in mainstream/white American culture. There’s a line in the one episode of the new US show “Heroes” that I’ve watched so far in which the villian recalls growing up hoping someone coming to the door to tell him his family wasn’t his. That’s rather how I felt, except I was too young to formulate it, I just felt out of place, miserable, and constantly terrified. I had my cat, and I read several books per week starting at age two. My family was fundamentalist christian, domestic missionaries if you will (they were probably too frightened of the heathens to try to convert them), and I juggled between parochial and public schools. In both I was an outcast, sent to classes several grades above my peers for reading and math classes, and generally lost in my fantasy worlds. My only friends were teachers, impressed with my smarts and “inner strength” if worried about my nonexistant social skills, and FotB immigrant kids popularly considered as strange as me. (My brother was Mr. Popular, how now unfunnily ironic.)

Hence, in tenth grade when my Uncle Doctor ordered my mom to send me to move me from christian school, where I kept getting in trouble for confronting the Bible teacher about sexist theology, it was a huge trauma. The following year I moved again to the public school where I made real friends and belonged for the first time in my life. No matter that our Geek Brigade was mostly Jewish and Asian future doctors, they ushered me into a world of the Beatles, Simon & Garfunkel, Hitchcock, Richard Feynman, Miyazaki, Juzo Itami, Tom Lehrer and Monty Python. At least I resisted the AD&D and Star Trek pressures. Then I trundled off to the Ivy League.

Anyhow, I have never been the most savvy connoisseur of American culture, popular or not. I still have a strange accent in English, from learning the language mostly from reading. The most common references will draw a blank look from me, although at this point I can fake it, at least for brief periods.

So gals, what are los Estados Unidenses up to these days? I need forwarning. Yay Dems! But, boo to potential trade barriers and demonization of China, Mexico, India, the rest. I’m glad to see the Bush ship is finally sinking, but that it’s taken so long worries me about the future of the “American Experiment”. (What business have we trying to export a model that is working so badly at home? Just ensuring someone steals the patent and reimports it.) I’m nervous about 2008, Ms. Clinton seems the favorite but she’s about as charismatic as the bastard child of Jiang Zemin and John Kerry. We Dems need to learn: run governers, not senators! Senators are wonks, Governers are campaigners. Wonks are great, but they lose. If we must run a Senator, let’s make it Obama.  Since he grew up in Indonesia, he’d break an additional barrier: the first expat brat candidate. Cool.

TV: I’m still addicted to Veronica Mars, me and like five people. Good show. The absence of West Wing and Angel (yes, I’m slow) sadden me. I’ve gotten into Lost, with mixed feelings: fabulous supporting cast, included hot Korean and Indian men, paired against increasingly irritatingly silly plot and really annoying lead cast. Really, the doctor and the scruffy blonde guy are considered hot in the US? Ewwwww. Then, Daniel Dae Kim is written as an asshole, perpetrating the “huh?!” inducing stereotype of Asian male machismo. Really, what the fuck? Then, the hot Indian plays an Arab, because actual Arabs are way too white-looking to play Arabs on US tv. Sigh. Everytime a Sikh gets called a terrorist…(or worse.)

For further hunky Koreans on islands, I’ve gotten sucked into downloading the latest Survivor, despite my aversion to reality tv. Yul Kwon reminds me so much of my dear college friend King Yellow, in better shape if less smart and accomplished, down to mannerisms and accent. It freaked me out a bit to learn the went to the same highschool, it’s bad enough that I can place many mainlanders by their accents. Sheesh. Anyhow, great watching someone relatable on US tv. I’m sure, like King Yellow, Kwon has a lot of inner snark brewing that he’s too polite to publicize. There should be a sitcom of publically polite/privately snarky East Bay Asian-American guys, it would be so hilarious.

The other thing I’m downloading these days is Ugly Betty, about a sweet and sincere young Latina from Queens working at a Vogue imitation. Vastly better than Devil’s Prada, for its keeping the heroine as she started. As someone indifferent to fashion who works for a fashion magazine, I find it very engaging. Of course, it’s totally over the top, as befits a soap opera. Most off-putting, again, is the “let’s cast an Indian as a generic brown person” in the nephew role. Because, like Arabs, Latinos can be too white-looking, what with the sometimes blonde hair and blue eyes. Just start casting women in men’s roles, I’ll consider it all fair.

Anyhow, end/rant, what else should I be forewarned about the US these days?

Well, comfortably back in Shangers. If it weren’t for the jet lag, the work backlog, and the sunburn, it would feel like I’d never left. Wide awake at 4 am, doesn’t help that the Silver Lining, who is one needy little cat, was hopping on my face purring so hard I feared he’d break something. Yeah, you try and sleep with an overeager Persian on your face.

Had an interesting flight back. To my right was a Taiwanese woman who has lived in America for two decades, after growing up in Mauritious, and was heading to Shanghai to take a six week language and trade class. I spent several hours answering her questions about Shanghai, circling places on the map for her to check out. To my left was a guy who I guessed was like 15, who obsessively crouched over his Sony game thingy until its battery gave. Turned out he is a 24-year-old US soldier from Sichuan. So, the only way America let Chinese in easily is if they’re willing to be cannon fodder? How nice. He was flying to Shanghai to meet his online Shanghainese girlfriend, a bit sketchy but he showed me pictures and she looks like a nice girl, before going for a visit in Sichuan.

Ah, trust me to collect random people everywhere. A force of nature I am, especially after a few drinks!

Behind us were two ugly American guys. Big, loud, goateed, beer gutted, wearing “Hooters” t-shirts: *classy*. They were heading to China to do business, sourcing, in like Yiwu or somewhere, and were asking the Chinese guy next to them really stupid questions. “So, can we like hire a translater at the airport?” The thought of translaters being available for hire at the Pudong Airport is hilarious; yeah, go like that, be found days later tied and gagged in a public urinal, robbed of money, passport and clothing, “Idiot Monkey” written on your fat hairy chest. “So, China has, like, how many dialects? Two?” “No,” said dumb Chinese guy. “Only one, Mandarin, the national language.” Doh. Try 20-30 recognized dialects, and then probably 300 subdialects. And that’s not counting the separate languages, like Uigher, Mongolian, Tibetan, Korean, Chinglish, etc. “How many people are there in Shanghai? Like 2 or 3 million?” asked the ugly Americans. “No, 7 million,” said the dumb Chinese guy. Yeah, try 20 million. Geez.

Those guys are so gullible and clueless, I’m sure they will get completely ripped off in China, and not even realize it. Which: is funny, and deserved. On the other hand, morons like them give us monkeys a bad reputation. No, we’re not ALL idiot suckers, just MOST of us. And then people wonder why I avoid other foreigners in China…

Back to the random people front. I did meet a cute guy in Mi Ya Mi. A hot Korean who is there studying English (dubious choice to study English in a place where everyone speaks Spanish!), and who had previously studied Guoyu in Beijing. He was there as a translator for some Korean ad execs attending the event. We blathered away using his fairly decent Mandarin for a night, and he was totally crushing on me, and wants to come visit me when he’s back in Asia. Hmm. Dunno. He’s fairly handsome, but the thing with Koreans is the whole stick up the ass issue. Plus he smokes, dresses too conservatively, and is a 31-year-old career student, so really not interesting enough for a Vixen snack. Which is why I didn’t fling with him. But nice to have the option!

I also befriended an interesting ad girl, a Cuban-American now living in Guatemala. Sweet, lively and chatty, we had a good blather over dinner, and now I have Couch Karma in Guatemal. Sweet. I suspect she will prove a better contact than the uptight but cute Korean.

The Dins in Fort Lauderdale were great. Such a fun couple, with such joy de vivre. Their loft is great, crammed with treasures from their stints in Iran, Indonesia, Haiti and China. Cali was rushed but great. San Diego was mixed, as always. The mom is still a psycho bitch. I feel sorry for her, but cannot stand her. My cousin and I had a sleepover Martini Night at the family homestead Way of Gold, which is empty now. There has long been talk of selling it to pay for my Grandma’s upkeep, which has made me very sad as it is my childhood home, and have a lot of memories from and affection towards the place. Well, swell news: my uncle has decided to rent it out for the time being, which means someday it could pass to us three cousins, which would mean I’d have a home to go back to in La Jolla. The other nights, I stayed with the Buffs, my adopted family, who are always a pleasure.

I also had some neat nights in LA, or LAlaland as I like to call it. Having Peaceful Dragon, my old friend from my Beijing student days, there now gives a base, and I have already collected and condensed a few great friends of friends. Lu Se is a friend of a Taiwanese curator here in Shanghai, and met her in January when she participated in a big how here. She’s an artist and teacher, and very involved in the Santa Monica arts scene, so very interesting source of information on that world. Plus good invites. I stayed with her on a Saturday, and went along to openings at Angles, The Brewery, and LA MoCA, where we met up with other friends and went to a party by the magazine Beautiful Decay at Mountain Bar in Chinatown. That was on suggestion of Thera-Mini, a friend of Shanghailander Peaceful Peasant. Thera-Mini is a colleague at the fashion magazine, and also plays the theramin in a conceptual band. She’s rather amusingly giddy in much the same way I am, and like any good journo knows all the best spots, parties and people. Very fun to hang out with. So, even with the Cali Boy completely blowing me off (and I was just trying to be friends, too, not “busting a move”, as Thera-Mini puts it), I have a great and expanding LAlaland posse. I’ve long considered SoCal to be a complete cultural wasteland, and it’s very fun discovering that there are interesting people and places there afterall.