Simon Lewis: Comrade Hack

In the early nineties I was in Hong Kong looking for a job. I already had part time work as a barman and a sandwich delivery boy, but I had got it into my head that I could find a job working in an art gallery, and I would find this job the way I had found the others, by walking into likely looking places and asking nicely.

I cannot remember where I had got hold of this namecard, but it said, among a lot of Chinese, ‘art gallery’ in English, and an address in Tsimshatsui. I had assumed a shiny mall, but no, the card directed me to a shabby office block, far from the commercial streets. I climbed stairs and found a metal door and a hand written sign. Well I was here, I might as well go through with it.

I knocked and was greeted by a couple of sharp looking gentlemen, who ushered me into a cluttered office lined with racks, and got their vampish girl to make me a cup of tea and we all had cigarettes.

Then they showed me the merchandise. One whole rack was Picasso – here was the Weeping Woman, rather larger than the real one, and Guernica, a whole lot smaller – that was just a sample. They were keen that I check out the Van Goghs and the Monets, and I had the impression that those were their most popular lines, which was confirmed when they showed me their catalogue, the first half was all your standard sub and post impressionisms. But they were versatile; the latter section was a lot of depositions and the like, from the Renaissance, and I think I remember rightly in saying that their most expensive piece was Leonardo’s Virgin on the Rocks.

These were not prints; they were very well made forgeries. The impasto on the Van Gogh’s was as thick as half an inch and you could feel the vigour behind every swirling sweep of paint, just like the real thing.

The sharp looking gentlemen spoke no English. The girl understood a little, but my request was too bizarre for her to take in for some time. But yes, we worked it out eventually, I was not a buyer, I was actually, of all things, looking for a job; bemused, they ushered me straight out.

That was my first brush with what you might politely call the Chinese aptitude for imitation. I was reminded of it yesterday because another sharp looking gentleman was pulling out racks of beautifully made fakes. This time they were watches, Rolex and Cartier and so on, and he was taking the backs off to show me the works. Anyone can print a logo on a t-shirt, but a watch, fake or not, is full of a great number of finely calibrated working parts, and these were something to admire. I’ve heard they’re made by prison labour in factory jails run by the army.

I was in a three storey mall and every shop sold fakes. Though it was all very blatant for some reason the watches could not be kept on obvious display, perhaps they were just too high value. I didn’t buy one. But I did get a pair of Converse trainers for about four quid, a Swiss Army bag for about the same, Guess sunglasses for a quid and a Mont Blanc pen for a bit less.

Mostly it was clothes, bags and shoes but there were also golf clubs and, of course, Cultural Revolution memorabilia. I always found that peculiar. I mean, a real cultural revolution alarm clock – the classic Mickey Mouse shape, but with a picture of a Red Guard on the face, his arm waving the little red book back and forth as it ticks – is a bizarre enough object, product of a sinister mania. But if you think about it, a fake one, battered and artificially aged, and designed for foreigners to take home, is an even stranger thing.

It’s easier to get fake DVDs than real ones. In the chemists, you have to watch out for fake drugs – look out for spelling mistakes in the instructions. Babies have died from drinking fake milk powder. They’re everywhere.

Over the road from that market is a vegetarian restaurant. The menu looks like a standard Chinese menu, with roast duck, chicken and cashews, three ways fried pork, and so on. But it’s all fake, the meat is artfully made from tofu and ginger and so on, from ancient Buddhist recipies, and designed to have the look, taste and texture of the real thing. I figured this might be my one chance to try – well, get near to trying – the prohibitively expensive shark fin soup and abalone. But no; annoyingly, they were the same price as the real thing, about twenty quid each. I can understand that, due to the relative scarcity of shark fins, shark’s fin soup is pricey, but why should a tofu concoction designed to taste just like it be twenty times more than a similar concoction made to taste like chicken?

I had fish maw. I don’t know why I had fish maw. If it had been real fish maw, I wouldn’t have ordered it; who wants to eat fish mouths? But I thought cause it was fake it might be ok. What I had tasted just like oily rubbery strings of tofu – which for all I know, could be what real fish maw tastes like.

On the other hand, the meatballs were excellent. They looked like meatballs, they had the texture of meatballs, they tasted like meatballs. But maybe I had spent too long at the market over the road. I couldn’t help a nagging suspicion that I had been passed more dodgy merchandise; fake fake meat – the genuine article.

I’m on the balcony of the Captain Bar. It’s on the Bund, which is the strip of fusty colonial architecture, the old headquarters of the great merchant houses and opium traders along the west bank of the Huangpu. And I’m looking across the river at the skyline of Pudong. A decade ago the area was mostly paddy fields and now it’s a parade ground of skyscrapers. They’re normally illuminated at night, and it’s an impressive slice of the urban sublime, but now, because it’s golden week, the stops have been pulled out and they’re lit up like pinball machines.

The giant puppy projected across the face of one of the taller buildings is replaced by a tropical fish, then Van Gogh’s sunflowers. Other buildings flash huge Chinese characters. In the river, pleasure boats are strung with neon.

Unlit, working barges sail past. With a bugle at the back and a long low profile in front, low in the water, they look like the heads of giant crocodiles.
K is telling me about her adventures in gay clubs. Apparently, gay guys go to Beijing, lesbians to Shanghai. Accordingly, the joke is that the women in Beijing and the men in Shanghai are rubbish.

She works from the five star Westin hotel and tells me about the Malaysian owner’s legendary namecard, which he only gives out to the especially favoured. It’s a full size card copy of an American dollar bill, but for a billion dollars, with his head at the centre.

I’ve been to the Westin, I took shelter from a rainstorm on one of their huge sofas. Two cellists were playing. Very posh Chinese hotels usually announce themselves with either a fountain or palm trees in the lobby. The Westin has both. It’s like the lightshow; in Shanghai, more is more.
M is annoyed. He has to go to home and has discovered that it will cost more to transport his cats than himself. Talk about animals inevitably leads in China to, what exotica/family pets have you eaten then? K is unrepentant about the dogs she has consumed – smelly but good. M was put off by a visit to a village where they breed them for the table.

I tell them about the dog I ate with some Koreans. They told me it was brown dog – better than black dog but not as good as yellow dog.

I can see into ‘M on the Bund’. Though I will write about what it is like to eat there, stating prices and specialities and waxing lyrical about the view and the tasteful décor, I know I will never eat there. And I will write about many such wonderful restaurants, for there are many such extravagant places here, run by celebrity chefs, and I will never eat in them either. I will press my nose against the glass, wondering what it would be like to toss a few hundred quid down on a bottle of wine, and people who do that will use my maps and helpful directions to help get there.

We go to a twenty four caff in a mall for crayfish, xiao long xia – little dragon shrimp. A craze for them is sweeping the city. The procedure begins looking off-puttingly medical. You put on plastic gloves and bib, and are given a shining metal bowl. And then the trays of crayfish arrive, like shrimps but bright red and bigger, and a lot harder to get into, you have to really pull and shred for the scrap of meat. You drop the eviscerated remains in the bowl and soon the gloves and bib are covered in sauce.

And when you’ve filled your bowl – and in my case, lap, and the floor and tabletop – you pick back through this massacre, pluck out the tail ends and suck on them, or break the hard claws open and pull out the shreds inside. M says you have to put out of your mind the rumours that these things live by sewage outlets.

He tells us that one of his Chinese colleagues went to a town famous for its vinegar and came back with souvenir test tubes of the stuff for everyone at work, and they were all drinking it neat and saying how nice it was, and he was expected to join in. He says it was gross, who wants to drink raw vinegar? So he covertly let it dribble out over his desk. But he was found out because of the swarm of flies drawn to the sticky patch.

My lips tingle. I don’t know what they put in the crayfish sauce but I’m definitely buzzing. It’s like the Limca highs I used to get in India, a fizzle of well being. Limca is a soft drink and I used to wake up in the middle of the night craving it. I stopped drinking four bottles a day when I discovered that because of its chemical content it was banned in every country except India.

And while this buzz lasts K challenges everyone to eat a chilli from the tray. They’re a good size, the size of a finger. Double dirty dog dare, she says. She’s from Zimbabwe via America and her accent is appealingly mid-Atlantic, but I don’t know which continent she picked that phrase up from. So we eat out chillis and then of course regret it, as the chilli tingle becomes a burn, and sweat is prickling on our foreheads and we have red faces and bulging eyes and none of us can speak for about a minute.

I try to walk home, get lost, and have to get a cab. And that’s a pretty typical Shanghai night out, I guess.

There is too much adultery on Chinese soaps. The China Daily reports the concerns of the broadcasting watchdog that seeing infidelity dramas ‘will cause young people to feel that society is too dark and dent their hopes concerning love and marriage’.

Last time I was here it was too many presenters with dyed hair. Such edicts give the impression -probably not far from the truth- of some grumpy old geezer flicking through the channels and mumbling at the screen, ‘not more adultery!’ ‘why do these young folk bleach their hair?’ -as grumpy old geezers do. The difference with this geezer, of course, is that what he grumbles goes, and goes for a billion people.

So, Chinese TV. The first thing to note is that there is a great deal of it, over fifty channels sometimes, and every city has a station or two that goes nationwide. There are a few constants: sift this technicolour mulch for long, and you are bound to find a dramatisation of ‘Journey to the West’; a historical drama set in the Qing dynasty, with all the men sporting shaved pates and pigtails; a man in a military uniform reading the news; and football.

A girl in hot pants and thigh length high heel boots walks on stage. Soap bubbles, disco lights. Everyone in the audience is waving a yellow foam hand. The girl begins to declaim, heaping praise upon her older sister. ‘My older sister is always there for me,’ and so on. A peak of sibling adoration is reached, and another girl comes on, similarly attired, perhaps her hot pants are even tighter. It’s the older sister in question. She takes the microphone, gazes into sister’s eyes, and begins, ‘My younger sister brings sunshine into my day.’
CLICK!
A singing contest! Exactly like ‘How do you Solve a Problem Like Maria’, ‘Pop Idol’ and the like. The viewers have voted, the girls wait to see who will be eliminated. There are a great deal of these at the moment, following the rip roaring success of ‘The Mongolian Yoghurt Super Girls’ last year, which transcended its medium and prosaic sponsor to become a social phenomenon. The audience of teenage girls is split into clans of supporters who hold up portraits of their favourite. It has been observed that the winner of these shows is generally the boyish, feisty, not so pretty one, rather than the doe eyed ideal of Chinese femininity. It’s impossible to watch this without reflecting, with a frisson of pathos, that it’s the only time Chinese people get to vote. The girl in a sari, who sang an Indian song, is for the chop – the others rush to embrace her –

CLICK!
An advert for skin lightening cream. This reminds me of my all time favourite dodgy cosmetic medical ad, in which a presenter interviews a short man, looking down at him and nodding sympathetically as he expresses his ardent desire to be taller. A device resembling a medieval rack is displayed and snazzy computer graphics show it in operation, elongating a human skeleton. Now another interview with the man, but what’s this – now she’s looking up at him! The machine has worked! Tellingly, they are only shown from the waist up. I remember shouting at the TV ‘He’s standing on a box!’ the first time I saw it.

CLICK!
A beauty contest. There are a lot of these. I haven’t seen it, but I am looking forward to catching the ‘artificial beauty’ contest, in which the contestants, each sponsored by a different cosmetic surgery parlour, talks about how much work they have had done. There is no stigma at all, they are seen as pioneers, trying to improve themselves like the short man on the rack, the Chinese dream. Cruelly, the old winner is made to take her crown off and put it on the head of the new season’s number one, which she is transparently not happy about.
CLICK!
I am being unfair, some stuff is worth it. Here is ‘Uproar in Heaven’, a feature length cartoon from the sixties, the story of Monkey and his fight with God, depicted as a staid Chinese Emperor. The powerful but troublesome Monkey King is given a job at the heavenly court in the hope that it will curb his anarchist tendencies. He wreaks havoc, God gets annoyed, there’s a massive fight. It’s a real classic, as visually rich and stylish as early Disney, it took ten years to make and they never finished it. And this is my favourite bit: Monkey versus the giant three headed baby. The soundtrack of relentless Beijing opera can get a bit much though.

CLICK!
Another gem; a documentary following the life of a school teacher in a remote village in Tibet. Slice-of-life stuff is generally the best thing on. They just artlessly show some guy going about his usual business, and there’s no attempt to squeeze a drama or a story out of it, the way they do similar shows back home. It’s quietly compelling, but it’s curtailed by an ad break. My patience wears thin, these can go on for twenty minutes -

CLICK!
Ah, that’ll do. Man U versus Charlton.

It’s golden week! In China October 1st is a national holiday – it’s the date the Commies officially took charge – but recently the holiday has been extended to a week, to ‘stimulate consumer spending’. Imagine if everyone in Britain took their annual holidays at the same time, think what chaos there would be; roads jammed, shops and holiday destinations swamped. Now reflect that China is three, four times more congested, and Shanghai is the most congested city in China.

I experienced it full face this morning, while trying to take my troublesome phone to China Mobile. I had taken it there before, two days ago. The ladies in blue had taken it away, and – so I thought – changed the battery, and what do you know, it had worked. It had worked for just long enough for me to take it to Starbucks and try to call someone and then it had jammed up again. No cow this time, just a blue screen. I’d tried charging it overnight and pressing all the buttons and so on, but nothing.

M suggested that the cow appeared because it’s a homonym. In the same way that bat and teapots are lucky because they both sound a bit like ‘prosperity’, perhaps cow – ‘niu’ – sounds a bit like some obscure Chinese word for ‘your battery’s fucked.’

It’s about a five minute walk from my hostel to China Mobile. Not today though. Just being on the pavement was like being right at the front at a rock concert. Or in a tube train at rush hour, if everyone in the train, rather then being stationary, were trying to get to one end of the carriage or the other. An American was filming a pedestrian crossing, whispering a commentary into his video camera’s microphone: ‘one billion people… a sea of humanity… crossing the road.’ There weren’t one billion people crossing the road, but there were certainly far more than could reasonably be expected.

So it took me quite some time to reach China Mobile. This time the lady in blue pressed the ‘end call’ button and what do you know, it started working. Well no one had told me, and the instruction were all in Chinese. I’m sure I pressed that button myself, many times. Why make the on switch the ‘end call’ button anyway? Could they not have explained how to do it the first time I went in? Or the second? I still don’t trust the thing… I went to Starbucks and as I geared myself up to squeezing through the masses for the return journey it started to rain.

So today this little Chinese guy in a God Bless America baseball cap came up to me and asked, in perfect American English, why I was taking a picture of a map printed on the side of a wall. I explained it’s because I’m researching a tourist book.

We were in Yuyuan, which is a kitsch and chintzy Chinatown full of shops selling teapots and brushes and fans and so on, and there’s a famous teahouse that you reach over a zig zagging bridge. I got talking to this guy and he agreed with me, it’s cute but fake and too crowded and too expensive. I complained about the price of tea in the teahouse and he said he’d show me something more authentic.

He seemed ok, stooped, with white hair, personable, eager to please. Said he was a Buddhist, and retired, and these days he had nothing to do but walk around and do good deeds.

He took me up three sets of stairs to some kind of shop display and there was a tea set laid out, a lot of vials and pots, like a chemistry set, on a table that looked like a gnarled tree root (they’re just laquered concrete but they look real).

This girl in traditional dress, demure, good English, started making tea in a round earthenware pot.

The paintings raised my suspicions, they made the place resemble those fake art galleries in Beijing, where tourists are lured to ‘art shows’ by ‘art students’ then talked into parting with cash for worthless prints.

The girl was sweetly giving me a tea lecture and preparing all these different teas, each in a different pot, and some had to be poured from one pot to another, and some had to be smelled, and the guy talked on and on about tea culture. Here was green tea, which had to be drunk from a glass vessel so that it’s colour could be appreciated, and it was good for the digestion, and this bitter tea I would need because I looked like a person with a lot of heat.

I sampled three teas, in cups the size of thimbles, then abruptly stood and said that I had to go and meet my friend. Sure enough, the shy girl and the old guy said together, as if I’d known this all along and was being a bit obtuse, that of course I would have to pay, and that would be fifty yuan for each cup.

I’d only had three but there were nine or ten pots lined up – so if I’d had them all, they’d have been asking for more than fifty quid.

As they continued speaking I turned and walked briskly out, and I heard the old guy bark something, but of course nothing happened, there was nothing they could do. It was a good move I think just to leave rather than try to remonstrate. Later, though, I wished I’d stayed and had a go at them for their dirty little scam. I could see a lot of foreigners – who didn’t know the price of tea, say – just paying up, feeling uneasy about it but not wanting to give offence or make a scene.

When I got back to the hostel I saw a sign on the noticeboard that says, ‘beware the tea scam: I lost 500 dollars and 320 yuan. They will take all the money you have on you. Violence is used.’ The scam must be being repeated all over the city. Lucky I only had an old man and a girl to deal with.

***

My phone is broken. When I opened it the display showed, not the date and time, but a cartoon of a cow. I pressed some buttons and it changed to a blue screen, and now it won’t do anything. Why a cow? What does it mean? I never even used it once.

My bike, so far anyway, is fab. It’s a yellow fold-up with little wheels, and apart from the handlebars feeling like they’re about to come off, especially at busy junctions, it does the job nicely. Riding in Shanghai can be hairy, there are more scooters than bikes in the bike lanes and taxis and buses are likely to veer suddenly in and brake. Three wheeled delivery bikes and oldster mobiles – something like a motorised chair that geriatics potter along in – are wide and slow. But probably the worst menace is people stepping off the pavement in front of you. On those occasions you have to shout at them, a tinkle of the bell just doesn’t cut it. I think I yelled ‘What are you doing?’ Three or four times today. In English, not Chinese, they pay more attention.

After the yu yuan I took the bike round the old city, a dingy network of alleyways where the poor people live, and it was much more interesting than that kitsch pastiche. The alleys were full of bric-a-brac, with each rickety house leaning into its neighbour and the odd stone art deco façade falling into disrepair. Old people sat in bamboo chairs playing mah jong and cards, a woman was gutting fish and another squatted to repair a door, chillis were hung up to dry among the washing and the jerry rigged electric cables, cats and dogs ran around, and it all adding to an atmosphere of genteel decay. And of course there was no traffic, only bicycles, which by then was a real respite.