Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

Went to a rifle range. I fired a 357 revolver and a 22 rifle with a telescopic sight. Shooting is addictive – the bang, the kick, the smell of cordite, the wisp of smoke, and the satisfactory clunk, familiar from so many films, of slamming home the bolt.

But I noted with disquiet that a lust descended to fire larger ammunition at more challenging targets – rabbits, enemies, presidents. The telescopic sight seemed to make the whole thing too easy, unsporting even. Now if they’d just drive a motorcade past…

Whereas archery (at a separate range that is also, dangerously, a bar) was much more calming, and I was quite happy to keep plugging away at the yellow circle. And at a quid for a quiver of arrows you could do it all afternoon and it wouldn’t cost much.

This is all stuff to put in the book – a section called ‘what to do in Shanghai if you’re bored of looking at things, eating and shopping’. So far I’ve got tango, learning magic, the above mentioned archery and shooting, karaoke, tandem cycling round Century Park and miniature golf. I’m not saying it doesn’t need work.

Something else I will write about is the rock scene, which I know a little bit about thanks to Y. She is a news photographer, supposedly, but she seems to spend most of her time following the band JOYSIDE around. She is going out with the drummer. With fingernails painted black and a choppy fringe and wearing Converse (the internationally recognised footwear of indiebandness) she is not very Shanghai. Indeed, her favourite topic of conversation is how much she would prefer to be in Bejing, which has a proper rock scene.

This takes me back – I’ve been to some great gigs in Beijing. The singer of Cold Blooded Animal stripped on stage. The guitarist of Brain Failure had a fight with someone in the audience. At another gig I went to the drummer’s face was black and blue – he had just got out of jail for fighting a policeman. A guitarist I met was put away for a year for taking heroin. He said it wasn’t so bad because they let him take his guitar into prison and playing it made him popular with the guards. So, the Chinese rock scene – it’s real, it’s a bit edgy, anyway it’s not Andy Lau or SHE.

I went with Y to see Joyside. The venue was proper – hard to find, covered in graffiti, dark, sweaty, smokey, with no ventilation or fire escape, no toilets – you had to piss in the alley – and obviously no license – a handwritten cardboard sign told you a can of beer was 10yuan and some girl handed you a tinny from a stack. (they have a website though).

I would love to be able to write about how the rock scene is quite like at home but differs in this or that finely observed respect – but it doesn’t; it really is exactly the same – piercings, tattoos, black leather, floppy fringes; the aforementioned black fingernails and Converse; crowd surfing, mosh pits, all that. Even the band names; I heard about a group called ‘China Subs’ who sound like UK Subs but sing in Chinese.

Joyside’s singer models himself on Mick Jagger and does a good job of being professionally thin and pouty. The Chinese do a good job of looking the part when they take up rock; they have a genetic advantage when it comes to being skinny, pale and dramatic.

Their songs were ok and the crowd loved it, though the fact that I was looking round thinking, this it’s all very well but where are the fire exits? probably indicates that I’m too old for it.

Afterwards Y was hanging out with the band, which she seemed to do a lot. I asked her what they did. She said every day is the same – get up late, practise, hang out with girls and do drugs – the schedule of any self respecting rock band. It sounded cool for them but I couldn’t help thinking it was a bit demoralising for her. No wonder her nails are so immaculately done, she doesn’t have anything else to do. I told her she ought to be documenting them, taking loads of pictures, but she said no, someone else is doing that. She’s taking me to another gig tomorrow; maybe I’ll suggest she take up painting black watercolours or knitting skulls or something.

I wander into a dense crowd of middle aged folk, hundreds of them, mostly women, and most are displaying a piece of paper with a set of vital statistics on it – height, date of birth, education, salary. Is it some kind of job market? No, the print outs remind me of classified ads. It takes me to a minute to realise what’s going on – it’s a marriage market; they’re arranging dates for their kids!

A couple of people carry folders of names, presumably they are middle men to the process. Very few of the ads have pictures attached. These people know what’s important, it’s all about getting your little emperor or empress married off to someone of suitable status who’s not too short, and they’re not going to let looks come into the equation. How very organised and rational. Because obviously people left to their own devices over these issues are apt to let such trivia sway them.

There’s a Chinese expression, ‘nan ren bu huai, nu ren bu ai‘ which means, if he’s not a bad boy, a girl won’t love him. I imagine these parents, after their daughter’s bought home a couple of outlaw bikers (or the Chinese equivalent), deciding to take things into their own hands. I wonder how much the kids are privy to the process? I can’t imagine anyone being particularly happy about the thought of their mother walking around a marriage market with their stats on a placard.

I’m in Renmin Park, which is two minutes walk from my hotel. It’s very attractive and I appreciate it a lot as the city has few green spaces. Rocky paths twist betwee shady groves, and above the tree tops you can see some of the more whimsical skyscrapers. Architects here try to make their tower block stand out by giving them decorative roofs. It’s like an accountant’s Christmas party – all po-faced corporate slickness then boff, a silly hat.

So there’s one building that has what looks like a UFO on its roof, another seems to have had a meteorite crash into it, and I have previously mentioned that the Marriot by my hotel looks like nothing so much as Saruman’s castle off Lord of the Rings.

And there are some bizarre structures inside the park too. Behind the meddling parents is a new art gallery with glass walls, then there’re a trendy bar/cafe on an island which is three storeys of Arabian fantasy, with Ali Baba windows (you can smoke a hookah pipe on the terrace) and next to that is the stolid old racecourse clubhouse, built by the British in the 19th century, and behind that is the aforementioned Saruman’s castle – so you can look out from a bamboo grove and see, in overlap, artsy post modernism, Arabian fantasy, old fashioned British stolidity, and corporate brutalism.

This is not uncommon. In architectural circles ‘Shanghai skyline’ means a dog dinner. And they just keep on building. High rises sprout like mushrooms, like nowhere else on the planet, the greatest spurt of construction in human history. Pudong, on the east side of the Huangpu, was all paddy fields a couple of decades ago. Now, it’s kilometre after kilometre of new build and boulevards.

This isn’t tourist Shanghai – there’s nothing to do here, I only went to get my visa renewed at the new police station – but it is quite an intense experience because so unreal. I got a cab back and we drove for ten, fifteen minutes along almost deserted streets lined by architectural statements and bloopers and Pudong seemed like a scale model of itself; I felt like one of those photoshopped people that architects put in their drawings to give a sense of scale.

K rings at 8am to say she’s drunk, she’s not been to bed yet, she’s been drinking free champagne, she’s quit her job, will we meet her for breakfast.

N is blurry after last night’s cocktails. We went to Cloud 9, the highest bar in the world, on the 87th floor of the Hyatt in Pudong (there are 88 floors in all, 8s being lucky). The view was, obviously, awesome. For once there was no cloud cover so you could see the city spread out and twinkling below like the mother of all Christmas light tangles. The only blackness was the strip of the Huangpu River. The TV Tower next door looked just as daft as in the daytime – the Thunderbirds ship that never got built, the Eiffel Tower on steroids.

But the bar had no atmosphere – hotel bars never do. Everyone who didn’t have a window seat (such as us) kept asking the black clad waiters if and when they could be moved. Some Koreans asked for their Martinis to be taken back because there weren’t enough olives on the stick. Four men lit huge cigars and stunk the place out. To keep the riff raff out there was a minimum spend of 120 yuan per person, that’s nearly a tenner, which, it turns out, gets you one and half weak cocktails.

I discover K was just around the corner, hosting a party called a champagne mixer, for ex-pat movers and shakers. She was doing it every month, she got around 400 people a time, and it was all paid for by the Hyatt. It sounds like more fun than Cloud 9. She is remarkably perky for someone who’s been up all night, talking about job offers and New Year plans.

The year of the pig is imminent. There are decorative pigs everyone and you can even buy a real, flat pig face, eyes and ears and squashed up snout and all, wrapped in plastic and tied with red ribbon, which looks like the kind of thing that gets found in the fridge of a serial killer.

It’s my year; I was born in a pig year. I assumed that this would be lucky for me but K tells me no; when it’s your year you have to be careful, it’s not an auspicious time at all. I ask how this bad luck can be negated. Turns out, it’s easy: red is powerful and lucky and when it’s next to your skin it neutralises ill energies nearby. So – you have to wear red underpants. All year long. It’s not a wind up either; now I realise why I keep seeing them in the shops. Sometimes they have the character for bliss or luck written on them in gold.

The ashtray has coffee grains in the bottom, so that when you grind out a cigarette you get a whiff, not of baccy, but of coffee. A simple idea, obvious when you think about it. I tell K how impressed I was with similar details in Japan.

For example, in H’s house, you could run the bath then just leave it – when the water reaches the desired level, the tap switches off automatically and, even better, a tune plays in the living room to alert you. Then of course you bathe Japanese style, which is to have a shower while standing next to the bath, and only when you are completely clean, get in for a soak.
Everyone shares the same water. When it gets cold there is a button to warm it up.

We go to Moganshan, a load of art galleries in an old factory.
Originally, a bunch of artists used the place as studios because the rent was so cheap. Eventually, as has happened with a similar space called 798 in Beijing, the shabby art galleries will give way to upscale clubs, restaurants and swankier galleries. This life cycle, which might take fifty years in the west, takes five over here; the boutiques are already taking shape.

There is a lot of McStruggle art – that is, images in the socialist realist Cultural Revolution style, of, say, Red Guards or lantern jawed peasants, only instead of little red books they’re waving I-pods or whatever. Foreign visitors love this stuff, ex-pats disdain it, every Chinese artist goes thorough a phase of doing it.

From a teahouse in the old water tower, you can see the area, and it is a typical China mash-up: next to the factory art complex is a real factory, then a half demolished building with an empty fountain out front where feral dogs roam, then a blasted wasteland, then a clutch of brand new high rises.

K bumps into a friend from Luxemburg who does reiki at a spa. I try not to hold this against her. I do not believe in Reiki (massaging the energies – yeah right) and I’m not sure I really believe in Luxemburg either. They whizz off to have lunch on the other side of town. Still, K has not been to bed. I assume that’s the last I’ll see of her today but no; she rings at seven to see if we want to go to a gig. Sure.

A trio of Chinese Ramones wannabes are squealing and thrashing guitars. They’re all got Beatles mop tops. One of K’s gay friends is telling me how he is going to dress as Barbarella for a drag performance. Last week the theme was cowgirls and Indians and he had a holster made and put a water pistol in it and filled the pistol with vodka and went round squirting his pistol in people’s mouths – can I imagine it? Yes I can.

K bounces up. It’s gone 10pm. I don’t want to ask her but by my calculation she hasn’t been to sleep now for 36 hours. She says that she’s going on to Attica, this fantastic new mega club where everyone is up for it. We, however, are not, and return to the hotel feeling old.

Everything for Du is niubi, ‘cow’s privates’ – a boss, a venue, a magazine – but the term is so fluid it is hard to say what, exactly, it means. Sometimes it is employed exactly like the English ‘dog’s bollocks’, to refer to something that is excellent, the best. But sometimes it is used in a pejorative sense, as in, that guy is so up himself, he’s the real cow’s privates.

We are in a Sichuan restaurant eating ‘saliva chicken’ and spicy fish. Du has come to Shanghai to direct a fashion shoot. The way he bitches about it, you’d think he was breaking rocks, not being paid a huge amount of money to tell a bunch of models what to do. Apparently a Cadillac has been hired for the occasion.

Du looks imposing, tall for a Chinese guy, with long hair and a red Indian-like face. He is from the northeast, up near Russia, and northeasterners are like the Scottish – they’re hearty and direct, big drinkers, bad at business; meat and potatoes people. He makes fun of the slim and artsy Shanghai men, with their interest in fashion and their reputation for being hen-pecked. He also makes fun of my phone; it would seem it’s the brand chosen by peasant entrepreneurs.

He is doing well. He has come from Guangzhou where he has an exhibition and his latest photos – portraits of kids – are selling at a gallery in Paris.

He misses London though and every time we meet he talks about it a lot.

I met Du in a council flat in a tower block off the Old Kent Road. A colleague at my Chinese course, B, took me round. We went to help Du and his flatmates decorate their new place. They rented it from punk R, and actually I don’t think it was R’s to rent out at all, I think he had squatted the flat and changed the lock. But Du and co did not care, R only asked them for forty quid a week.

B was artistic and insisted that we rag the walls. There was a pigeon’s nest on the balcony. The three Chinese guys had only one bed and they slept top to tail. They had all come on student visas and overstayed or just not turned up at college at all.

Du worked cash in hand washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant, putting minicab flyers into phone boxes, wearing a cheap suit and a red dickie bow and ladling soup at the buffet of another Chinese restaurant.

He was living on a grim council estate on the grimmest road in London and he was having the time of his life. He spent his money on cameras and film, and all his spare time he took pictures and he developed them in the bathroom at the flat. I took him on a protest march (I forget what we were protesting about) and to art exhibitions and B took him to gay pride and he took photos everywhere of everything. He was shameless, he would even take pictures of people on the tube.

Though he lived in fear of the immigration authorities ironically it was B, the French Canadian, who they came for. While they broke down the front door of his flat in Lewisham he escaped out of the back window. He went round to see his English girlfriend and they arranged to get married immediately. I think it was at B’s rushed wedding a week later that I saw Du in England for the last time. He was, of course, the official photographer.

Du went home. He wrote a book called ‘My Days in London’ – Lundun de rizi – half photos and half text, and it was published and did well and that was how he made his reputation.

He started working for Bejijng magazines and newspapers. He took celebrity portraits – he did Tony Blair – and he was sent to Indonesia to cover the aftermath of the Tsunami. I asked him about that, which I probably shouldn’t have done, and he said he spent a dark two weeks photographing corpses and changed the subject.

He moved in quite rarefied circles. A couple of years ago he took me to a posh Beijing do. His photographer mate was going out with a model, as photographers are wont to do, and it was her birthday party. It was in a swanky but ridiculous Egyptian themed bar. Du’s long haired artist mates sat around complaining that they had had more fun in airport lounges.

I was introduced to three models, amazing looking creatures. I think creatures is an appropriate term because they resembled aliens and they gave the impression that they were looking forward to returning to their rather superior planet. One had Lucy Liu style slanted eyes that were too far apart and white hair in a bob. She was the most famous person there because she had been on the cover of American Vogue and the Chinese bitched that she was a freak. They only looked animated when someone pointed a camera at them.

I had talked to them for about thirty seconds, trying and failing to think of clever things to say, when this loud and annoying beeping noise started up. It went on and on. The models checked their phones – not them. The artists checked theirs – not them. It couldn’t be me of course, as I didn’t have a phone. But the noise went on and on, and it was very irritating, then someone pointed at my jacket pocket. It was my travel clock, the alarm was going off. Going bright red, I fumbled it out and turned it off. The models tutted and drifted away and the artist’s laughed. Oh well.

Anyway, Du. What he considered his real work was photo journalism. That’s a dangerous job in a country that locks up journalists with depressing regularity. There are some things here that I would like to say that are interesting but I shouldn’t as I don’t want to get him in into trouble. I will mention Du’s series on Beijing garbage dumps – he documented the lives of the slum people who make their living scavenging for things that can be recycled.

X turns up at the restaurant. She wants to open a tango club in Shanghai so we go with her to check out the competition. It’s a bar/restaurant but it looks like a country mansion, with lots of dark wood, bar staff dressed like butlers and red armchairs. It’s full of well dressed people, a lot of them Taiwanese, tangoing not particularly well. A man in a suit and cowboy boots wearing a fur coat creates a scene – perhaps he felt that not enough people clocked him and his girlfriend coming in. Du’s verdict on the place is easily guessed – it’s all very, very cow’s privates.

I’d rather people did not know what I was doing. Not wishing, though, to actually lie to people who I might end up hanging out with, I have to construct a tower of evasions, which breaks under the mildest of inquisitions:
‘You’re a writer? What do you write?’
‘Travel stuff. Novels. Screenplays.’
‘You mean films? Have you written any films I’d have seen?’
‘No.’
‘Do you make a lot of money writing films?’
‘None at all.’
‘Well how do you make your living?’
‘Writing stuff for.. travel publications.’
And the amateur Poirot declares, ‘You work for Lonely Planet!’

At which point I sheepishly declare myself. And then they say, ‘I really like your books, the history is good, they’re well laid out, the maps are good, the level of writing is really high, but of course I use Lonely Planet’. I get asked a standard set of questions, including ‘Do you stay in all the hotels?’ ‘Do you get paid expenses?’ (No and no.)

I find myself saying, over and over again, ‘It’s not actually like being paid to be on holiday because, unlike you, I have a schedule’, ‘I just fell into it, I speak a bit of Chinese and I’m a writer.’ ‘It doesn’t actually pay very well.’ ‘I did a bit of India but it was horrible’, ‘The difference between my company and the Lonely Planet is that they employ researchers and my company employ writers.’

From then on, to those people, I feel that I have turned into a representative of my company, so ought to be seen to be looking busy and competent and up earlier in the morning and don’t want to be caught out sleeping in or skipping a bit.

I was sitting in a bar in Dali and a load of foreign residents were sitting around discussing the really interesting villages in the area when a certain ex Lonely Planet guidebook writer said, ‘Shh! There’s a guidebook writer here! We have a traitor in our midst!’

He was teasing of course, but yes, sometimes that is the attitude: Stealer of secrets, despoiler of the pristine, stormtrooper for the backpacker hordes. I understand; after all my job is to inform people about the places that the elitists want kept to themselves.

The really embedded travellers, of course, don’t need guidebooks. They buy a map and talk to locals. In another bar elsewhere, someone said: ‘don’t take this personally, but when me and my friends were in India, we built a fire in the middle of the road and ritually burnt our Lonely Planets.’ I was very amused. The ritual burning of the Lonely Planet – a necessary step, surely, on the road to travel enlightenment.

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I would love to be still in Yunnan being in the sunshine and meeting more interesting people. But feeling the pressure of deadlines, I returned to Shanghai. All it has done is rain. Rain rain rain, more rain, and then more rain and now some rain to rain rainily. Voluptuous Asian rain, wetter than English rain, more definitive, altogether rainier. Roofs leak, cars splash, gutters overflow. You can’t get a cab, everyone is miserable, wet, ill. This is how rainy it is – Shanghai girls, some of the most image conscious on the planet, are wearing plastic bags over their slinky shoes. Water drumming and dripping keeps me awake at night. I have caught a cold. I washed all my clothes when I got back and they just wouldn’t dry, so I had to go out and buy a whole new set. One morning I banged on my walls and shouted, Canute like, ‘stop raining, please just stop raining!’

While the patter and drip continues outside I sit and flick through the Tatler 120 best Shanghai restaurants. Some pages I could just lick. It’s a whole other world. The wine section begins: ‘the kind of wine a person chooses says a lot about the kind of person they are’ Does it? Gosh. What’s a lobster bisque and how can it be outré? It tells you if you can get your car valeted while you eat. How civilised and decadent and upper class the whole venture is. Now there’s a guidebook to work for.

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I’m going to Magic Shool. It’s this little Mister Ben type shop in the basement of a shopping mall. They teach eight tricks for twenty quid in all. I know from my mate D the magic man, you couldn’t get taught one trick for that in London.

I learn one every morning as it’s near where I eat breakfast. They’re good tricks too, or they are when my teacher M does them. Even when I know how she’s done it, I still can’t see how she’s done it, if you see what I mean. Every time it’s the same: I watch her do a trick over and over again until I have to say ‘Ok, stop, stop, how did you do that? Damn, it, how did you do that?’ And then she shows me, and I’m like, ‘why, is that all?’

She has a degree in physics but instead of being a small town physics teacher, as her family wanted, she ran away to Shanghai and became a magician. She lives with the other magicians from the shop, in some kind of magic commune, where they have a monkish routine of magic training and perfection.

The atmosphere in the shop is studious as when they are not teaching the teachers work over and over on their sleight of hand skills. There’s a polystyrene target that they skim cards into and Houdini posters on the wall. Their uniform is an ‘I love magic’ t-shirt. But a life dedicated to magic has its pressures, it would seem; M has trust issues, she worries about boyfriends trying to steal her secrets.