philip tinari

Wang Xingwei, Untitled (Hostess and Luggage), 2001. Oil on canvas, 200 x 200 cm.

After a week of slow connections in Shanghai, I finally saw the first of the new season last night, 5 1/2 days late if you include the time difference. Though I haven’t read the chatter, it all seemed a bit clichéd–the boiling milk that segues to maternal flashback, the British boy secretary with an accent the girl secretaries love, the fire bell that reveals Sal’s darkest secret, and of course Don Draper with a flight attendant. Even astutely researching who flew 707s from LGA to BWI (if those are even historically accurate airport codes) in 1963 can’t do away with the basic triteness of the stewardess fantasy motif.

In Matthew Weiner’s defense, it transcends. Wong Kar-wai famously adapted it for ’90s Hong Kong. The day after the episode aired, I stumbled across the following, on the morning hop from PEK to SHA. (In a Shanghai Airlines 757–perhaps the very last of the 1050 that Boeing built between 1982 and 2005). It’s an article from The Beijing News about a national flight attendant search that sounds more meat market than Super Girl. Much has been made of the way in which Mad Men evokes the anxieties of a world on the brink of cataclysmic change that resonates with the American mindset in 2009. China, I guess, does cataclysmic change without the anxiety, at least when it comes to flight attendants. Just ask Mr. Liu, quoted in the story below.

584 GIRLS JUMP THE FIRST HURDLE; ENTER PROFESSIONAL EVALUATION

Yesterday the “2009 China Southern Stewardess Competition” concluded its Passenger Committee Evaluation phase for the Beijing selection area, as 584 girls were chosen from 6000 registrants, moving on to the expert evaluation phase.

Those With “O-Shaped Legs” or who “Can’t Laugh” Cannot Become Stewardesses

Sources say that the application process comprises the six phases of Gaze Evaluation, Written Test, Trials, Callbacks, Selection-Area-Specific Television Exposure, and Final Competition. Yesterday, at the site of the competition, all registrants were divided into groups of ten, then called one-by-one to the stage to introduce themselves. Next, according to the requests of the committee members, they were asked to turn around, put their feet together, then walk a loop across the stage and return to where they had begun.

Do not think these are such simple motions; indeed they encompass every sort of serious requirement used to select stewardesses. Passenger selection committee member Mr. Liu noted that competitors are asked to turn around so that the committee can see whether they have obvious O-Shaped or X-Shaped legs; putting their feet together allows for evaluation of whether their legs are symmetrical; and asking them to walk across stage is mainly to see whether their bearing is sufficiently elegant and magnanimous. Aside from this, judges also give marks on the important criteria of whether the competitor has a naturally radiant smile and a full set of glowing white teeth.

Mr Liu said, laughing, “I initially thought choosing stewardesses would be an enjoyable, relaxed affair. Who knew I would have to worry about the high standards of China Southern? It seems that being a judge is also a form of manual labor!”

Their Height Not Reaching 1.63 Meters, Nearly Half of Competitors Eliminated

As of 7:30 p.m. on Sunday, the China Southern Stewardess Competition official website had announced that 584 competitors from the Beijing Selection Region had passed the Passenger Committee Evaluation.

China Southern added that many contestants did not measure 1.63 meters, and that nearly half of all contestants were eliminated on this account. “If they are enrolled students, they must ensure that they will finish their studies before Sept. 1, 2010; those who do not meet this requirement will also be eliminated,” a China Southern spokesperson said.

The fatman came to our seminar. Since the two things he professes to hate the most (besides the thing he hates the most) are Shanghai and the academy, I didn’t think he’d make it, and that was even before what happened last week in Chengdu. I didn’t believe he’d come until I got the call to come to his suite late one night, where he sat in his bathrobe on a couch next to an old writer-friend, the poolside Mao incarnate. The next morning after a state-owned-hotel breakfast of gruel, broccoli, and a soy-sauce friend egg, he sat before the assembled audience of academics in a pink t-shirt, his blue linen worker pantlegs tucked into his socks. “Designing China could mean anything,” he opened. “Like Fucking China.”

Shanghai is a city of servants, began the diatribe, who traded the foreign occupiers for the fiction of the people’s democracy. From there he moved through the litany of cases that to him mark the increasing inhumanity of an irredeemably flawed system. The sterilized cop-killer executed. The earnest lawyer detained. The earthquake investigator on treason trial. No slides of dropping vases, dipping vases, grinding vases into powder. No gray brick buildings, no riffs on Ming chairs or Qing temples. No ceramic flower panels. No hundred-hour-long videos.

Someone asked: “Whither Chimerica?” He replied that the die were cast the day Pat Nixon got taken to see the pandas in the Beijing Zoo while the two boys struck a “deal among mobsters.” Two illicit lovers, unable to hop out of bed and into the shower. NBC was the only news outlet not to interview him last August, although they sent an invitation for him to come into the studio to demonstrate calligraphy. “Don’t think Western valuations of human life are absolute,” he chided, “particularly across cultures,” one eye to Abu Ghraib.

Someone asked: “Can’t we separate China as nation-state and China as civilization?” He replied that you can’t tell by looking at a girl whether she’s deep-down good; you can only say her skirt fits well or her shade of lipstick flatters.

Someone, a misguided old Shanghainese friend from the New York days, asked: “How do you keep up the opposition even as you design buildings for the government?” That he had so little idea about how things get built–that the fatman was on retainer to the Swiss boys, who were in turn at the hire of the state–is interesting, even if the answer, the old line about how the government would never pick him in a million years, was not.

Someone asked: “What can we do here as foreigners?” all stuck on the problems of presence as complicity to the bigbad state. “Foreigners in China are only ever here out of interest,” using in Chinese the two words that mark the two main valences of “interest,” “So you’re best off walking around, finding a nice restaurant, taking some pictures, and going home to tell your friends what a great time you had.”

After the talk, that’s just what he did. While the scholars kept behind closed doors–the Californians wondering if he was all for show, the Shanghainese taking offense on behalf of their city and country–the fatman was out taking pictures for his copkiller documentary, chauffered by an abstractionist-cum-art deco dealer in a five-series and a Patek Phillipe.

I met them for lunch in a little Huaiyang place around the corner from Xintiandi. We had a good, tight room on the second floor, just four of us. The walls were hung with line drawings of bygone local scenes–a barber drying a head with a coal-heated blower, picky ladies inspecting meat. Having eaten his lunchtime pills, he carefully filled the tiny Ziploc into which someone had sorted them with spoon after spoon of tea. He sealed the bag and set it at the center of the table, which at this point only held a few cold appetizers. He let three seconds go by, just long enough for the three of us to start wondering exactly what the teabag was doing on the table. And then suddenly, a fist fell from above, bursting the bag and soaking the abstractionist in tea. “You sure move quick!” came the gleeful punchline, as the abstractionist produced a napkin and began to wipe down his face. “Funny, no?” he asked. “I learned that one from Uli Sigg.”

Yang Fudong, The First Intellectual, 2000.

I spent last week in Shanghai for the first half of a theory workshop convened by a humanities center from the University of California system. The theme is “Designing China,” and the speakers are a lot of the people whose names circulate enough that I feel like I have longstanding intellectual relationships with them even though we’ve never really talked, or in some cases even met–Yung Ho Chang, Hung Huang, Liu Suola, Leo Ou-fan Lee. For those of us who exist in intellectual professions outside the academy proper, it’s a strange but joyous thing to be thrust back into the seminar room. You quickly catch up on the new words that weren’t yet in vogue while you were an undergrad: “haptic,” “conviviality,” “elsewheres.” You remember that every point made, every question raised (every speech-act, I should say), is to be called an “intervention,” a word that to me at least skews a bit fierce for what are ultimately civil interchanges among mutually respectful colleagues. (Then again, I used to find it annoying that people in the art world called every room a “space,” and I got used to that.) Ultimately you have to cherish the quaintness of a professional community whose comfort and status derives so transparently from its function of preparing the ninety-nine percent of undergraduates who don’t go on to further disciplinary study for “regular” careers staking so much self-worth on the possibility of envisioning itself as deeply critical.

That said, their conversations are to mass opinion as the haute couture shows are to Zara, and I know which I like better. People trade in smart, generally extemporaneous coinages that, while not suited for mass consumption, seem to explain everything for a second or two: “recombinant urbanism,” “every city needs its big idea,” “not deconstruction, reconstruction.” You sit there and listen to folks, your age or a bit older or younger, who have spent the last few years “avoiding the pitfalls of both localism and exceptionalism,” wondering “how to take the surface seriously as an analytical space.” As in any field, the best maxims are those that seem completely trite to the speaker but completely novel to the listener, as in, “Every anthropologist who’s sat in on or led brainstorming sessions knows that they’re closely related to ritual and magic.” I also still relish good post-structuralist wordplay, and am glad to note that the belabored multi-parenthetical zingers of the fin-de-siècle (”medi(t)ation,” “dissemi-nation,” “(gyn)ecology”) seem to have given way to a more brazen form of punning–searching for the “Dasein of design” and locating “the ‘decade’ in ‘decadence.’” Sometimes, people say things that are downright insightful, like Benjamin Lee’s extended analysis yesterday of the reflexivity of financial instruments like derivatives as rehashing the ethnographic conundrum of how to account for the observer’s always-already disturbing presence. (He somehow got from there to Frank Knight’s 1921 distinction between uncertainty and risk, and from there to Knight as Weber’s first translator, and from there to the Protestant Ethic as a response to the fundamental salvation uncertainty of Calvinism. Wow. PDF here.)

For all that smartness, though, people still make the same sorts of pedestrian observations (lane-house-next-to-the-Starbucks stuff) and traffic in the same vulgar pomo/poco contentions you get at most art world panels. The big question–Whither, China?–is still the big question. “Context” as concept looms large, but people don’t find the specific dynamics of how this or that text gets made very interesting, and they still fail to pick up the earnest treatises on Harmony placed at the seminar room entrance by the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences hosts. If the art world is, as Jonathan Napack once said, a parody of the real world, then the humanities are a really long conversation about it. Investments differ and affects fluctuate, but at the end of the day, the two are cousins, and we’re all clear on the fact that both beat actually having to “intervene” in anything so specific as, say, an assembly line, a construction site, or even a state-secrets trial in Chengdu.

As this seems to have become an even more regulated and regular subset of the cultural tourist itinerary than the 798 gallery prance, I think it’s time someone set out some standards to insure that every curious foreigner comes away with a similar understanding of Shanghai past and present. Below, some points that the responsible tour guide should cover:

1.) Start with the part about the fishing village and the Chinese walled city. Traders in the mud and such.

2.) Move straight on to the Opium Wars, making sure to conflate the two. Offer a cursory sketch of how settlements were granted, first to the Brits, then to everyone else. (Advanced practitioners only: insert line about how the Zhoushan archipelago, not Hong Kong, was the initial object of British desire.) If the audience is predominantly American, knowingly make the point that “the French like to do everything differently,” leading them not to join the International Settlement.

3.) Veering toward Fuxing Park, field intermittent questions about the trees and those who planted them. Explain that Huaihai Lu used to be called Avenue Joffre.

4.) You must, absolutely must, include the fact that only 2000 actual French people lived in the French concession at its height, and that most of the residents were, even then, wealthy Chinese.

5.) Make at least twice the point about the inexorably wartorn nature of China in the early twentieth century. Pepper with unsubstantiated references to internal demographics of the same period, saying things like, “The north was full of warlords and corrupt officials. Shanghai was for businessmen.”

6.) Walking into a typical neighborhood, (extra points for having your group stand in such a way that they completely obstruct the flow of residents in and out of their compound, and for each dirty look thus drawn) get to the part where refugees flood the villas and their gardens driving opportunistic developers to improvise a form of block housing that draws on Western forms and Chinese fengshui. All hail the lilong!

7.) Moving on to the present, tell at least one moving story about a family reclaiming its real-estate inheritance in the wake of the Cultural Revolution. From there, segue into a discussion of the well-intentioned but ultimately flawed nature of preservation efforts today. Point to, say, a Russian Orthodox church that became a winebar in the nineties before becoming a retirement center in the world-expo run-up, noting that the crosses on the architraves remain, while the icon of St. Nicolas has been removed.

8.) Drop everyone in Tianzifang to shop for “Chinese design,” contrasting the organic nature of this renovation with the situation in Xintiandi. Sniffing the cesspool, explain how one young designer inherited a cramped apartment here from her grandmother, turned it into a shop, and that within a year the whole thing had exploded, a testament to the new vitality of the creative industries. As the remaining locals shuffle by holding chamberpots, tripping over the workers installing sewer mains that will soon make these daily journeys obsolete, marvel at how far Shanghai has come, and how far it has to go.

By this point, everyone should be ready for lunch.

Zhang Enli, Trees IV, 2004. Oil on canvas, 146 x 114 cm.

Coastal City Mall, 2008, Shenzhen.

Yesterday was one of those magical Pearl River Delta days where the exigencies Koolhaas started proselytizing about a decade ago seemed to resonate even truer than I always imagine they must have at, say, the GSAPP or Documenta X. That old maxim about Shenzhen skyscrapers designed in three days? Sure seemed unchanged as I walked with a designer friend from his studio to a diner down a kilometer-long elevated walkway lined with every sort of retail operation and offering views on myriad foundation-pouring works in progress. This was Nanshan, the new CBD. The walkway and surrounding mixed-use had opened back in December. “They’re imitating Hong Kong,” he told me, which would have seemed less funny if we hadn’t been just a few kilometers over the “border.” We spent a long afternoon proofreading and then ate at the standby Hakka beef hotpot place in Xiasha, a VIC that emerged to service the truckies coming over through the Huanggang crossing, before they amped it up and opened it 24/7 to individual travelers in preparation for a coming subway and rail link.

If you’ve never crossed at Huanggang, you should, but only once. Where Lo Wu propagates this PRD urban fiction of a pleasantly connected stream of city centers, with the KCR light-rail running alongside the through-train to Guangzhou, Huanggang is all fuck-you elbow throws and spitting and plastic burlap sacks. You scale this baroque pedestrian overpass, negotiating poorly designed signage (all in Chinese of course) into the exit hall. After getting your stamp, you are dumped into a giant port-authority-style bus terminal where you must buy a ticket for one or another destination in Hong Kong. Wanchai is as close as it gets to Central, but fortunately I was staying on the Kowloon side, so Mongkok sufficed. Here’s the catch: If you have a suitcase, they’ll make you put it in the lower compartment, but absolutely do not slip into the Airport Express mentality of In-town check-in. After the bus has driven the five minutes through the no-man’s land between border terminals and deposits you in Hong Kong entry land, DO NOT NEGLECT (as I did) to take your suitcase from below and carry it with you through the second crossing. The irony was that the last time I crossed at Huanggang, which should have been the last time I crossed at Huanggang, the hassle of having to reclaim one’s bags multiple times was enough to drive a certain megacurator to cancel a talk and hitch a cab directly from the in side of the border to HKG, just in time to hop AF185 back to CDG.

So there I was, waiting behind ten other “visitors” (i.e. mainland Chinese, to whom Hong Kong belongs, but who are still extremely restricted in terms of entering it) as a very deliberate inspector actually read every line on every entry form (strangest question: place of passport issue), wondering why the e-channel barcodes that work so flawlessly for enrolled foreign-passport holders at the airport had not yet been installed here at Lok Ma Chau. It was at this point that I realized that there was no way I would be boarding the same bus I had been on before; all the Hong Kongers, who made up 80% of the bus population, had swiped their ID cards and cleared customs in seconds flat. Finally through, I could only attempt extreme politeness and precipitate a brief walkie-talkie exchange among the bus operators searching for my bag (I was fortunate to have remembered the exact departure time of the original bus) and then rode the 30 minutes into Kowloon trying not to think about exactly how one would go about trying to reclaim an item that had last been seen in the space between two borders. Miraculously, the bag was there on the curb in Mongkok. Some days, you just get lucky.